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Jan. 26, 2016 - The Joe Rogan Experience

02:38:59

Joe Rogan Experience #752 - Mark Sisson

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mark sisson

01:58:03

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Speaker	Time	Text
unidentified		We're good already?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Damn!
		I didn't even see a countdown.
		Jamie, you're so fast.
		Thanks for doing this, Mark.
		Appreciate it, man.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Totally my pleasure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I've enjoyed your tweets.
		I've checked out your website and Mark's Daily Apple and all of the different rules for the primal blueprint.
		And I found this really fascinating because...
		It seems really straightforward.
		It seems like, oh, well, this makes like eat lots of animals, insects and plants, move around a lot at a slow pace, lift heavy things, run really fast.
		But what you've done essentially is created a guideline for optimizing your health and your body.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I've always wanted to be healthy from a really early age, like 12 or 13, and read a lot of books, wanted to do the right thing, tried to figure out the hacks before they were called hacks, and got to the point where I was...
		You know, I was doing a lot of running because aerobics was supposedly going to make you live longer.
		I was eating complex carbohydrates and a ton of them in order to fuel the aerobics.
		I became a pretty good endurance athlete, but I fell apart as a result of the training and the result, it turns out, of the diet.
		So the diet was very pro-inflammatory, as we say.
		So I started doing research into the ways in which I could re-access this health that I was seeking from the early age and not fall apart and not be decrepit and beat up.
		And this became my mantra, is how can I be strong, lean, fit, and healthy with the least amount of pain, suffering, sacrifice, Discipline, calorie counting, portion control, and everything else.
		And where it led me was down this path of looking at human evolution and how we got to where we are today, how we derived this genetic recipe that we all have that wants us to be strong and fit.
		Combining the research only in the last 10 or 15 years with the modern genome and sequencing the genome and figuring out the actual mechanism of how lifestyle behaviors and foods and sun exposure and sleep turn genes on or off.
		And they can turn on genes that make us strong and build muscle.
		They can turn on genes that burn fat more efficiently than, say, glucose.
		They can turn off genes that cause us to be moody and depressed.
		Turn off genes that might predispose us to To get cancer.
		And what I arrived at was a sort of a simple set of guidelines, these 10 primal blueprint laws that not ironically emulate human nature and human behavior for the first two and a half million years of our existence.
		So the genome was forged in this crucible of Eat plants and animals, avoid poisonous things, move around a lot at a low-level activity, sprint once in a while, lift heavy things.
		Every human that ever lived up until 10,000 years ago did that every single day, and that's how those genes got passed along to the next generation to become us.
		Where we've screwed up is in the last, certainly in the last couple of hundred years, but starting 10,000 years ago with agriculture, We went from being hunter-gatherers and moving around a lot to being sedentary and sitting in one place and eating processed foods.
		Not disposing of our waste.
		Lots of little things that sort of conspired to make us smaller and weaker and more susceptible to disease.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So you were involved in triathletes and endurance activities, which kind of break down your body.
		That's one of the big issues that a lot of people have with that kind of training.
		It's just constant and brutal.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's catabolic.
		It's a great pursuit.
		I wouldn't take back my years as an endurance athlete.
		I was a marathoner in the 70s, and then I was a triathlete in the early days of triathlon all throughout the 80s.
		But the training was, it's devastating.
		It really does tear you down.
		And the assumption was, at the time...
		That you had to put more miles in than anyone else to be one of the best.
		You had to dial everything down.
		You had to work harder.
		You had to suffer more.
		You had to struggle more to achieve greatness or to win races.
		What we've discovered in the last five years is that it doesn't have to be that way.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How crazy is that that it's only the last five years?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, we're talking 2010, 2011. Yeah.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		So, you know, a lot of this new paradigm is based on science.
		It's been brewing for 40 years, but it wasn't...
		The findings weren't...
		Palatable to most of the athletes who were training.
		They certainly weren't palatable to the coaches who had been invested in training a certain way, putting in a lot of miles, eating lots of carbohydrates, managing glycogen throughout an event, which meant not only carbohydrate loading the night before a race, but seeing how many gel packs you could slam down in an hour to keep the sugar burn throughput going.
		And that's certainly what My generation of athletes wound up depending on, and we all trained that way, and it was sort of counterintuitive to think that you could learn how to burn fats much more efficiently, that you could possibly go faster by going slower under certain circumstances, that you could spend time in the gym doing heavy weights And have that manifest itself in better endurance.
		So these later sort of developments that come out of the laboratory and come out of the clinical studies, you know, they were sort of interesting to the people who are reading them, who knew how to read the studies, but it didn't make it into the mainstream training mechanism.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What was the science based on where people had used carb loading and using all those gel packs and eating a lot of pastas and stuff?
		Where did that come from?
		What was the idea behind that?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		That came from studies that go back into the 30s and 40s, but it was basically this notion that the body needs to burn glucose to go fast, that it It was assumed that you couldn't burn fat at a high rate of throughput.
		And if you couldn't burn fat, then the only thing you could do was manage your glycogen.
		Those muscles can store 400 or 500 grams of glycogen max, which is only enough to run 20 miles, let's say.
		And if you couldn't, so you had to learn how to manage that glycogen so you didn't deplete it in a marathon, for instance, so you'd hit the wall at 20 miles.
		So how do you get through the wall?
		Well, you start to learn how to, I mean, Gatorade came out of this science.
		The Gatorade was the great first real performance enhancing substance.
		That athletes used.
		You could drink this sugary drink that had salt in it in a race and then stave off that wall a couple of more miles.
		So for years, for decades, the science revolved around continuing to try to figure out how to manage glycogen.
		So Tim Noakes, Professor Tim Noakes out of South Africa, was the go-to guy in this.
		He wrote a book called The Lore of Running.
		It's a 900-page tome.
		He was the source that everyone cited for decades when it came to carbohydrate intake and glycogen management and all of the things that had to do with fuel partitioning during an endurance event.
		And about five years ago, He looked at the research, partly because he'd been a runner himself.
		He'd been employing the same strategy of carbohydrate intake and carbohydrate management, but he was a type 2 diabetic.
		He had become, despite his training, a type 2 diabetic.
		I think his uncle and his father had died as type 2 diabetics.
		So he, you know, he got the fear of God put in him, and he started to reevaluate the research, and he literally had an epiphany.
		He goes, oh my God, I'm the guy that's been promoting this way of training for decades, and now I have to completely change my opinion on it and say, what I told you was wrong.
		The body is developed and was designed to be a great fat burning machine and not rely so much on carbohydrate and not rely so much on glycogen or glucose.
		And the guy is taking so much shit for it in South Africa.
		They're trying to run him out of the country.
		There's a trial going on right now.
		Really?
		Yeah.
		Here's Professor Tim Noakes, and in my mind, that's the epitome of a heroic man of science.
		He's gone down a path, he's dedicated his life to being the guy, and then he looks at the research and he goes, holy shit, I messed up.
		This is terrible.
		I've been telling you the wrong thing, and I'm willing to basically follow my sword and tell you that, because this new revelation is the truth.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's how it's supposed to be, right?
		I mean, that's what science is supposed to be.
		It's not supposed to be relying on this bad information just because you've taught it to people.
		It's supposed to be you find the new data.
		The new data doesn't correspond with the old data.
		You have to let everybody know.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I know, but it's like, you know, that's like unicorn farts.
		I mean, it's a really...
		Science is...
		Kind of dirty and messy.
		And there are no black and whites in science.
		There's no absolutes.
		There's no right or wrong answer.
		They're just theories and opinions going forward.
		And if you're a scientist who's had an investment in your life's work being one way, you're going to defend that position, even sometimes in the face of new information.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That really becomes a huge issue when they deny information just because it's bad for their ego or just because it's bad for their career.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And they could just, I mean, he can, I'm sure, have just kept his mouth shut and just coasted and everything would have been fine.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Well, it would have been fine for a while, but the corner had been rounded.
		I mean, enough other scientists had started to look at this, and he cited me as one of his influences in helping to turn that corner.
		But here's a guy, he was reading my blog posts and sort of I think we're good to go.
		The less sugar we burn in a lifetime, probably the better off we are.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So, for the longest time, when people were doing all this carbo-loading and when they were just following the old methods, They were creating extra inflammation because of this food.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, when you're talking about simple carbohydrates, pastas and bread and such, they cause inflammation, correct?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		So sugar is pro-inflammatory.
		If you have high blood sugar levels, that causes inflammation.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, when you say that to people, like, explain to me, what do you mean by inflammation?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You mean, like, joint inflammation?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so...
		Good question.
		So inflammation is a process in the body that's designed to deal with an insult.
		So you twist an ankle.
		An inflammatory process begins.
		The ankle swells up because water accumulates there.
		The cells are being partly protected by the water.
		White blood cells rush to it to try and...
		Assess the damage and repair some of the damage.
		There's a long process where the localized temperature of the air is raised.
		All of this is contemplated to deal with a short-term insult that hopefully, over time, it repairs.
		In many cases, it repairs even stronger than it was before.
		You know, you break a bone and sometimes where it broke is stronger.
		Or a callus is an example of a stronger skin from having been irritated.
		The same sort of process happens if you get a bacterial insult, if you get a microbial insult.
		You get infected with somebody, something, and maybe by somebody.
		And there's a reaction to that infection, and it may happen in the bloodstream.
		If the bacteria goes into the bloodstream, then there's a response to that, which is an inflammation, an inflammatory response.
		And by the way, a lot of this happens as a result of genes within cells being turned on or off based on signals they get from their immediate environment.
		So genes don't work in a vacuum.
		Something has to turn the gene on or off.
		Something has to give the gene reason to build a protein or have whatever action it's going to have.
		So when you've got So now let's go back to the food analogy.
		You've got certain foods that you can eat that cause the body to initiate an inflammatory, what we call a systemic inflammatory response.
		It just maybe emulates something that would have happened in an infection, but now it's caused by an overabundance of omega-6 fatty acids.
		So you're literally turning on genes that are causing a systemic inflammation.
		Now, over time, in the short term, not a big deal.
		One meal here, some temporary insult, not a big deal.
		But over time, if your diet is such that you're continuously presenting these sorts of foods, that would prompt...
		Inflammatory genes to turn on, you get what is known as an inflammatory response.
		Now, sugar has that response.
		Refined grains can have that response.
		Sometimes even whole grains because of the – there's portions of the grain that we say are natural, but they're actually – They're slightly toxic to the body.
		The industrial seed oils that are pervasive in our diet, that would be corn oil, soybean oil, canola oil, all of these can have the effect of causing a systemic inflammation or systemic inflammatory response in the body.
		And a lot of times, you'll look at the biggest loser, and you go, God, that dude lost 25 pounds the first week.
		That's unbelievable.
		How do you do that?
		How do you burn off that much fat?
		They don't burn off that much fat.
		They lose that much water.
		Because by eliminating the pro-inflammatory foods, the inflammation, the systemic inflammation that was causing them to carry literally 30 or 40 or 50 pounds of excess water...
		That cause of inflammation goes away and the water goes away.
		The swelling goes down.
		So you could look at the cause of heart disease.
		Heart disease isn't caused by cholesterol or saturated fat.
		The proximate cause of heart disease, as we know it today, is systemic inflammation.
		It's an inflammatory response in the blood vessels.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So when you say someone looks puffy...
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like people who drink a lot of alcohol, they start looking puffy.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's actually, literally water.
unidentified		They're inflamed.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They're inflamed with water.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		They're retaining water as a result of an inflammatory response the body is having.
		So, where we went to that from training, I don't know how we got down that road, but the idea of eliminating these pro-inflammatory foods...
		Oh, so I'll tell you where it went.
		I had...
		Arthritis in my feet at the age of 27, 28. Just from all this hard running and biking?
		And from the diet, because I had this systemic inflammation.
		I had this diet that was promoting an inflammatory response throughout my body, not just in the ankle that I might have just twisted or whatever.
		I had arthritis in my hands when I was...
		Even after I'd cleaned most of my diet up into my 40s, I had arthritis in my hands or my fingers that I thought was just a normal artifact of getting old.
		And the last thing that I eliminated from my diet was grains, which I found were a huge cause of issue for me.
		When I got rid of grains, the arthritis in my fingers went away.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		All grains.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Sprouted grains as well, Ezekiel bread?
unidentified		Yeah.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I mean, you know, yes, yes.
		For purposes of this conversation, let's say all grains, and then we'll talk about what that means over time.
		But getting rid of all grains...
		I got rid of—I had irritable bowel syndrome most of my life, and I thought it was because I was a type A, stress-laden individual that couldn't handle it well.
		And that—literally, that IBS had run my life.
		That went away.
		The upper respiratory tract infections I would get several times a year went away.
		I had lingering sinus infections after I'd have an upper respiratory tract infection.
		Those went away.
		And all these things I'd assumed were just a normal Artifact of being human and getting older and part of life.
		Doesn't everybody suffer these things?
		They went away.
		And that was a real epiphany for me to realize that if I had made—I'm basically a researcher, and if I had done all the research and still defended my right to eat grains in the face of the research I was doing, how many tens of millions of people You know, might be affected by this.
		And I don't want this to be an anti-grain crusade today, but I'm sort of suggesting that a lot of what happens to us in life, certainly a lot of the root cause of illness or the beginning etiology of disease, has deep roots in what we eat, or sometimes more importantly, what we don't eat.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		One of the things you said I think that's really fascinating is turning genes on and off.
		And for most people like me who don't have a background in medical science and don't necessarily understand genes, the idea of genes being turned on or off by lifestyle, by dietary choices, things along those lines, just doesn't make any sense to people.
		They go, well, no, no, no, you got your genes, so you don't got your genes.
		You either got red hair or you got big feet and that's genetic and that's it.
		No.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Exactly right.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		So, yeah, there is a huge assumption that the genes are finished when we're born.
unidentified		Right.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		You know, and then we just grow and we have our eyes and we're doomed to be 50 pounds overweight because our parents are or we're doomed to get breast cancer because our mother did.
		Yes.
		Genes are at work every second of every day, rebuilding, renewing, regenerating, recreating us based on the signals that they get.
		So genes are these little switches that cause the production of proteins that actually run our body.
		So it's the proteins they make that run our body, whether it's muscle protein being built or whether it's enzymes to cause certain reactions to take place.
		And the genes are basically not doing anything until they get a signal from the environment.
		Now, when I say the environment, it might start from what we perceive as the outside environment, but eventually it's a biochemical signal.
		Or some sensation, some transmission of information that gets through the cell to the genes themselves and causes a gene to turn on, the switch to turn on, the protein to be built, and that manifests itself in whatever that gene is assigned to do.
		So, the beauty of the Primal Blueprint and the lifestyle that I've been promoting for 10 or 15 years is this notion that we can discover these hidden genetic switches that we all have, and we can make choices in our lives that direct us in a direction of health versus down this slippery slope of illness and disease and falling apart.
		They're not right or wrong.
		They're not good or bad.
		They're not black or white.
		They're just choices.
		And I'm not going to criticize you for making whatever choices you make.
		My job as a blogger, and certainly running Mark's Daily Apple and writing the books that I write, It's to offer you some educated choices that you might elect to undertake based on what you tell me your goals are.
		So, you know, if you say, well, I want to lose weight and I want to get stronger and I want to, you know, maybe participate in a 5K... We can look at a number of different strategies, whether they're dietary.
		I mean, the more the better, because all of these strategies will have some impact.
		But there are certain foods you can eat that will cause you to become better at burning fat and will cause you to build muscle more effectively.
		There's an amount of sleep that you'll get that will reduce the amount of cortisol that you secrete.
		Cortisol is an adrenal hormone that we secrete in response to stress.
		Cortisol tends to make us carry a little bit of extra weight, some of us.
		So if I can increase my sleep and improve my sleep patterns and reduce cortisol, it all has an effect back at the gene level to get me closer to where I want to be.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How much do you sleep?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Probably eight and a half to nine hours a night.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		They say wow because that's a lot.
		That's a lot.
		Yeah.
		You know, I have friends who brag about getting 10 and make no apologies for it.
		And almost more...
		More importantly is the consistency of sleep.
		So I don't like to stay up late because I wake up early.
		I wake up the same time every day.
		What time do you wake up?
		6.30.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Are you one of those get out of the house and go run around?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		No, no, no.
		I sort of mosey on down to the coffee pot and make a pot of coffee and read the paper.
		I ease into the day and I typically hit the gym around 9.30 or go paddle or whatever it is I'm going to do for the day.
		I don't do it first thing in the morning.
		I want to be kind of refreshed for it and ready for it.
		But then we can talk about sun exposure, and we can say, well, you know, so many people are vitamin D deficient, and they've been that way because conventional wisdom has suggested that they stay out of the sun, that the sun is bad for you, that any amount of sun exposure is, you know, is going to cause you to get or predispose you to getting cancer.
		Well, what we say in the paleo community is there are probably more people who have gotten cancer from having avoided the sun than ever got cancer from too much sun.
		And the reason I say that is because sun exposure, UVB light, That's the stimulus that causes cholesterol in the skin to convert to vitamin D. And vitamin D is one of the most important vitamins.
		It actually should be a hormone.
		But one of the implications is that vitamin D is strongly involved in cancer prevention.
		So the more vitamin D you have, the less risk, the lower risk you have for most cancers.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Isn't the issue with people sun damaged, though?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		The issue is sunburns.
		So if you go out and get sunburned, and I've never advocated that, but there's a difference between spending a little bit of time in the sun, unprotected, and going in and putting on a shirt, or even if you want to stay out, putting on some sunscreen at that point, versus just rubbing baby oil and iodine we used to put in the sun.
		Back in New England, when there was very little sun, so you had to cram for that suntan.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Iodine, huh?
		You didn't do that?
		I didn't know about that.
		No, I did baby oil.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Oh, baby oil with iodine was even, it was like, it turbocharged.
unidentified		Does it?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		It was like the buttered coffee of suntan lotion.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's what that stuff is.
		What's the mechanism behind iodine?
		How does that accelerate?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I don't even know.
		I don't even know.
		But that was the, again, that was the old wives' tale, conventional.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, okay.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I went, I was, worst burn I ever got, it was winter break or spring break, I went to Williams College in Western Mass.
		We drove from Williamstown to Fort Lauderdale straight through in a BMW 2002. Those are great little cars.
		It was a great car.
		Four of us.
		Smelled like a goat farm by the time we got down there.
		And fell asleep on the beach at 9 o'clock in the morning and then just burned to a crisp.
unidentified		Oh, God.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		So from zero sun exposure, you know, all winter.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		All the way down to Florida.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		All the way down to Florida.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right to the beach.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Barbecue.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		There you go.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that doesn't sound like it's recommended.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		No.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Now, just to clarify, inflammatory response.
		So when you're eating grains, like say if you're eating a lot of pastas and things along those lines, what exactly is happening that's causing an inflammatory response?
		Your body's processing the grains and...
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so pasta, bread, a lot of cereals, especially the processed cereals.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Sugars.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Well, so those grains turn into sugar.
		I mean, they turn to glucose, like, really rapidly as soon as they hit your gut.
		And the body doesn't really know.
		It's glucose.
		It doesn't know the difference between a bowl of Skittles producing the glucose and a loaf of bread.
		It's just glucose to the body.
		So if you raise that level high enough, You will have some issues.
		Now, if you introduce high fructose corn syrup, which is a frankenfood created in the 70s to provide sweetness at a lower cost, typically coming from corn, now you're introducing yet another variable, another agent, because a fructose in and of itself is somewhat inflammatory.
		That's the glucose portion of what we're talking about here.
		But then some of the grains have what we call these anti-nutrients in them that may cause issues with some people in their gut, may open the gut wall and cause it to literally leak fecal matter into the bloodstream.
unidentified		Whoa.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		So if you've heard of leaky gut syndrome, that's probably a reason why a lot of people have autoimmune diseases, or at the very least, a systemic inflammation.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's fascinating.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And that's caused by your body processing too much glucose.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's not caused by your body processing too much glucose as it is a side effect of it.
		Yeah, because it's not the glucose that's causing that.
		In that case, we've moved on from sugar and glucose being a cause of inflammation to certain elements in, let's say, whole grains.
		That turn on certain genes that cause certain responses, one of which may be in some people to open the junction between the cells lining the gut and allow undigested food particles, shall we say, to enter the bloodstream.
		Now the body sees those undigested food particles, which...
		The gut is only supposed to really allow in free fatty acids, simple sugars, and amino acids, single peptides, dipeptides maybe.
		But if you get a large undigested food particle in the bloodstream, sometimes the body goes, hey, that looks like a bacteria.
		We better go get that thing and set up an immune response to it.
		So you get an initial form of inflammation where the body's just saying, look, there's some foreign matter in the bloodstream.
		We don't recognize it.
		We're going to kill it.
		And that's sort of bad enough in and of itself.
		But if that continues long enough for some people, sometimes...
		That inflammatory response, that immune response, now it goes to look for similar molecules, and it might see a beta cell in the pancreas and go, that looks just like that other thing I just set up a response for.
		Let's go kill this.
		Or it might do it with the cells in the joint, the chondrocytes in the joint, and you may get rheumatoid arthritis as a result of a—that's an autoimmune response, the body setting up an immune response to itself.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So when you hear people talk about gluten sensitivity and people are trying to go gluten-free, do you think that a lot of what that is is the body responding to an excess of this glucose in the body?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Excess of glucose in the diet?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		No, so two different things.
		So the glucose is one thing.
		The sugar is what it is.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		From breaking down breads and pastas.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Or candy or cakes or pies or...
		Snickers, whatever it is.
		Or soft drinks, which is a huge issue, because soft drinks are a large part of the problem.
		But gluten is an entirely different mechanism.
		Now we're talking about a protein.
		It's a plant protein that's folded so densely that the theory is that most humans haven't had enough time to adapt to the digestion of that type of a molecule.
		And as a result, it causes problems within the lining of the gut.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But what I was getting at was people always talk about having gluten sensitivity, but really what you're saying is that a lot of what people are having issues with is these simple carbohydrates.
unidentified		It's like breads and pastas and inflammatory responses.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Sorry to be...
		There's like two parts to this equation, and either part is kind of Bad.
		And together they're kind of like, why would you do that?
		So on the glucose side, and it's just unfortunate that gluten and glucose have the first GLU, but they're not related.
		So on the glucose side, that's the sugar, that's the thing you want to avoid.
		Partly because one of the other things that happens is, even if you don't have an inflammatory response, it raises insulin.
		Insulin is a storage hormone that tends to take every calorie you ate at the last meal in excess of what you needed and store it as fat.
		Now if you're a If you're a skinny East African marathoner, then you're going to burn it off.
		But if you're a typical American eating a couple hundred extra calories a day in the form of this sugar, you tend to store it as body fat.
		And if you haven't built a mechanism to burn off the body fat, that causes problems over time.
		That increases your risk for cancer.
		That increases your risk for heart disease.
		That increases your risk for type 2 diabetes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I don't think I have gluten sensitivity, but I do know that when I decided to go gluten-free, I kind of quit it after a while, but I did it for about six months.
		My face got thinner.
		I lost body fat.
		I had more energy.
		I felt better.
		I was trying to figure out what it was, but I don't think I have a gluten sensitivity.
		I just attribute it to the fact that eating all that pasta and breads and all those things was just giving me all this extra sugar.
		Eliminating that from my diet made a difference.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		So that is sort of the first line of defense for a lot of people who want to lose weight.
		Just by getting rid of those foods, and I won't say limiting yourself, but including meat, fish, fowl, eggs, nuts, seeds, all the vegetables, a little bit of fruit, healthy fats from oils and nuts...
		You know, that's a pretty nice plate of food that you can offer yourself up.
		As long as you get rid of the carbohydrates, the simple carbohydrates, you're well on your way to reducing the excess body weight, which includes the excess retained water and the fullness in the face and all the things that we talk about.
		Now, if you give those up and you find that your joints work better or that you have, you know, That your immune system works better.
		You don't get sick as often, which is what a lot of people notice.
		Now we probably are looking at the fact that you might have some level of sensitivity to gluten.
		And gluten sensitivity exists on a spectrum of no problem at all to I'll die if I eat it.
		And you could be anywhere in the middle, anywhere on that spectrum.
		I mean, this, again, sort of the operative mantra here, no right or wrong, no black or white, no good or bad, just choices.
		But if you're a person who really wants to dig deep and kind of make those changes that are going to get you closer to your goal quicker, that might be a choice you might look into.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So there's no right or wrong, but there is a spectrum in terms of tolerance.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like, your tolerance might be much better than mine, and some people just really shouldn't have it in their diet at all, whether some people can have a fairly good amount of it and really not have too many issues.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, we say, you know, what can I get away with?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		And that's sort of an interesting concept in and of itself, because humans, you know, we tend to see what we can get away with.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		You know, you might say, this is really good for me, or this is really bad for me, I'm never going to do it again.
		But if I don't die from it, and there's no consequences, then I'm going to take it right up to the edge, sometimes a little bit past the edge.
		So there are a lot of people who can get away with eating a lot more carbohydrate than others, even though they don't train hard.
		And maybe not gain that much weight.
		There are a lot of people who can get away with consuming omega-6 oils and not get into that pro-inflammatory state as readily or as quickly.
		As Ronald Reagan said, man's got to know his limitations.
		Or was that Dirty Harry?
		Well, it was both.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I think it was Dirty Harry.
unidentified		Yeah.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I think Reagan restated it later on.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Perhaps.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So, I was reading this article yesterday, and I talked about this yesterday in the podcast, about this woman who, she wrote this article about she's in her 70s, and how her whole life people have been shaming her for being fat.
		And she was sort of like...
		Trying to promote fat acceptance.
		When I see articles like that, there's two reactions.
		One reaction is as a human being, I look at her and I say, that's a poor lady.
		What a fucking shitty roll of the dice she's got in life.
		She's been overweight her whole life, feeling fat and gross, and she's trying to get people to lay off her.
		Leave me alone.
		And she sort of...
		It's a very biased account and not science or exercise physiology based where she's sort of describing all the various times in her life where people have said she's unhealthy but meanwhile she's been very active and she like lists all the different things she did tree climbing and hiking all this different stuff right Which, obviously, to a guy like you or someone like me who knows a lot about competitive athletics and the amount of calories she's actually burning out versus putting in, it's probably skewed.
		It's probably fucked up.
		And she didn't really discuss what she was actually eating.
		She was talking about very bland foods and a thousand calories a day that doctors are trying to put her on, which is the wrong approach, right?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, absolutely.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And it's really...
		When I see things like that, I don't see a woman who's like 70 years old who's coming to accept the fact that she's overweight and it's no big deal and everybody's got these ideas about body image that are based on skinny supermodels that are actually anorexic.
		You should just leave me alone and I'm plump and I'm healthy and everything's fine.
		I don't buy it.
		I look at that and I say this poor lady has been given a bad set of directives.
		She's been given bad information as far as her diet and you don't have to be fat.
		You can eat healthy foods and live a healthy life and your body would lose a lot of weight just eating healthy foods.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		That's absolutely true.
		And so that brings us back to this...
		You know, this idea of good or bad and judgment.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Because, you know, people self-judge, people judge other people.
		I have to be very careful when I look at people not to make that judgment.
		I mean, my tendency is to say to myself, holy shit, I could fix that person or I could help that person, you know what I mean?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And people resist that, too.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Well, and I don't do it.
		I mean, I say it to myself because it's pretty clear that, you know, you have to want to change.
		We talked about what can I get away with.
		Well, if I can get away with being fat and people still reasonably like me, then I don't have to do the work and therefore I'm not motivated to do what it's going to take to get to that point.
		But it's a slippery slope with talking with people about, you know, like what's the ideal body composition, right?
		It's...
		The ideal body composition is where your body says back to you, Joe, man, I love what you've done with the place.
		This is phenomenal.
		You know, you've lost 50 pounds, not you, but you don't get sick as often, you've got all the energy you want, you maintain it without a lot of dieting or anything like that.
		You eat pretty much how you know you're supposed to eat, but you're never hungry.
		That's your ideal body composition, man.
		And if it doesn't look like the cover of Muscle& Fitness or Shape magazine, so be it.
		By the way, I can get you to that point for a lot of people where you are on the cover of Shape Magazine or Muscle& Fitness, but it's going to cost.
		And it's going to cost not money, but it's going to cost in sacrifice and discipline and pain and hating life.
		So, you know, the science can get us there, but is it worth the life?
		The main thing we do at the Primal Blueprint is we try to live an awesome life.
		So, in fact, my tagline is Primal Blueprint Live Awesome.
		Living awesome means enjoying as much of every moment, every day as you can, extracting the greatest amount of pleasure, whether it's movement, whether it's with friends, whether it's food.
		Again, with the least amount of pain, but in a way that's sustainable.
		So it not only benefits you right now and today, but over the long haul, you're going to live longer, you're going to be happier, you won't get sick, you won't tap into your 401k to pay for a $200,000 whatever operation.
		It's about how can I enjoy life right now today.
		Now, back to the overweight person who's trying to Trying to get to that point.
		And I see a lot of, you know, overweight people who are quite happy, I guess.
		But I see a lot of others who are maybe hiding it and going, you know, I'm the jolly, you know, fat person, but inside I'm, you know, I'm the sad whatever, the sad clown.
		You've got to deal with that.
		And there's a lot of baggage.
		So some of this stuff comes from the changes you make in your diet.
		So there's a lot of easy things that we can do.
		I can write anybody a program that they'll love that says, you know, we're going to have buttered coffee for breakfast.
		We're going to have two eggs and a little bit of bacon.
		We'll have a salad with some salmon on it for lunch.
		We'll have whatever.
		And they'll never be hungry, and they'll start to burn fat, and life will be wonderful.
		And sometimes they'll get to a plateau and they'll go, what happened, Mark?
		I did everything right.
		Well, you know, you're a woman.
		You went from 225 to 175. You know, you still have some work to do.
		But for right now, you're at your ideal body composition.
		Because in terms of your body, the body, it's a survival mechanism.
		You know, if we get to this, you know, this sort of...
		Secular or, you know, discussion about life and what we're after.
		The human body is a vessel designed to carry two strands of RNA, DNA, into the future.
		And it's a bizarre permutation of several hundred million years of evolution, but the bottom line is the body is designed to survive long enough to procreate.
		And that's the reality of humans and evolution.
		And the fact that we live longer and we enjoy life, this is all wonderful and icing on the cake.
		But from the body's perspective, Your ideal body composition is that composition at which, again, you don't get sick.
		You move around great.
		You can meet a mate.
		You have all the energy you want.
		You're not hungry.
		If you're a woman and that's 175, for now, you've got to go, this is fabulous.
		I embrace this.
		I feel good.
		Whatever.
		Now, if you want to drop the next 25 pounds, okay, now we've got to look at...
		Refiguring the diet out and adding some sprints in there and doing some little tweaks in there and we'll get down there.
		But it requires, number one, Identifying an appreciation for what you've done so far to get to where you are.
		Number two, it requires acknowledging any past insults in your life.
		And there's a lot of stuff going on in the mind, in the brain, that wants to keep people protected with armor.
		Whether it's sexual abuse, whether it's verbal abuse, some scenario that happened in childhood.
		There are a lot of people carrying a lot of Emotional baggage around with them that, in some cases, if you dealt with it in an inappropriate manner, that might free you up to lose a little bit more weight.
		And I've seen this happen.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So when you're saying armor, do you mean in terms of like emotional armor?
		Or is it the body fat that they keep on top of them?
		Is it almost like a distraction?
		Or is it the food that distracts them?
		The over-consuming of food to sort of nullify the effects of the abuse or whatever trauma?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		It could be any of those and all of those.
		But I see it Fairly frequently where people will do everything right and then hit a plateau and wonder what I need to get to the next level.
		Sometimes you need to really do the deep work.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, why I try to explain to someone when they try to gain weight, when people are like, hey, I want to put some muscle on, I try to explain to people that that is not an easy thing to do.
		And a matter of fact, your body doesn't want to do that.
		Your body has a limited amount of resources and it does not want to spend resources created on this extra muscle.
		And in order to do that, you have to be uncomfortable.
		That's the only way.
		And people say, oh, I've been doing all this lifting, I'm not gaining any weight.
		Well, you're probably lifting not enough weight.
		You're not putting in enough intensity.
		You're not eating enough.
		I mean, you have to get your body to say, all right, this asshole wants to do deadlifts four days a week now or squats or, you know, he's doing all this heavy stuff.
		We have to adjust accordingly because the environment in which we're existing in obviously changed.
		And now we're going to need a lot more muscle.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		I mean, again, the nature of the human body is to preserve itself, to pass the genetic material along to the next generation.
		Part of that preservation is, I don't want to waste precious resources building something that I won't need.
unidentified		Right.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		So, in a lot of people, how that manifests itself is, if you don't lift weights, you don't have any muscle.
		So you have this lack of muscle, this lack of muscle mass.
		And, you know, we say, well, what's wrong with that?
		I'm skinny.
		Well, you know, you could be skinny, but you could be what we call skinny fat.
		No muscle.
		You got a little bit of excess fat.
		You're maybe more prone to getting type 2 diabetes.
		But almost more importantly, if you don't train, and as you get older, it becomes more and more important to maintain muscle mass.
		People don't die of old age.
		They die of organ failure because they just, you know, something wasn't keeping up with the body.
		But the concept of dying of, quote, old age is kind of ridiculous when you think about it.
		So the typical old age scenario is you got a 75, 85 year old man or woman, hasn't done anything active for years, so there's no muscle mass.
		And because there's no muscle mass and they haven't done anything active, the bones, there's no bone density.
		So the bones go, hey, I don't need to build a structure because this clown isn't going to the gym and doing anything to require it.
		So I'm going to save resources, not build bone density.
		The muscles are not building bone mass.
		Now the heart's going, this is easy.
		I can pump blood all day at 5% of my volume or maybe 15% of my volume.
		The lungs go, hey, you know, there's no requirement for excess oxygen.
		This clown's just sitting around in a chair all day or, you know, watching TV or doing minimal activity.
		So the lungs, they sort of cease to function at full capacity.
		Same with the liver, same with the kidneys.
		And as you Go down this path, then one night you get up to take a leak and you trip over the cat and you fall and you break your hip because the bone density sucks and now you wind up in the hospital and you get pneumonia and you die because the lungs can't expel the sputum for the pneumonia and the heart can't keep up so maybe you die of congestive heart failure.
		I mean this is a very typical scenario for a lot of people and it all goes back to creating a need for the body to want to change.
		That great Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston movie where...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How dare you say that?
		How dare you say that great Vince Vaughn, Jennifer Aniston movie?
		No such thing has ever occurred.
unidentified		Oh, I'm sorry.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		There was a great line in a mediocre Vince Vaughn.
		But the one I'm talking about where they're having a fight and she says, Honey, come help me do the dishes.
		He goes, No, that's all right.
		I'm going to watch the game.
		And she goes, No, help me do the dishes.
		He goes, no, that's all right.
		I'm going to be over here watching the game.
		I'll just watch the game.
		She goes, come help me do the dishes.
		He goes, all right, all right, all right, all right.
		I'll come help you do the dishes.
		She goes, never mind.
		I don't want you.
		He says, why?
		He says, I don't want you to help me do the dishes.
		I want you to want to help me do the dishes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, Christ.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Get a new chick.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		So the body...
		Sorry about that.
		That was an arcane movie reference.
		But you've got to give the body.
		The body needs to want to change.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		And you do that by using your brain to elect to go to the gym and lift weights or to embark on a more rigorous and strenuous regimen than you had previously encountered.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, changing patterns is very difficult for people.
		That's why New Year's resolutions are always such a joke.
		Because everybody, I mean, the amount of people that stick to those things that they prescribe on January 1st, like, this is it.
		I'm going to write it down.
		I'm going to, January 1st, from here on out, it's all salads and salmon and running up hills.
		And then come February 13th, it's fucking over.
		It's over.
		You're right back to the same thing.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		So sustainability is a huge part of a program like that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Changing patterns.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		And that's what we like about the Primal Blueprint is that the foods are sustainable.
		So, I mean, literally and figuratively, the diet, the eating strategy is a sustainable strategy.
		Rule number one is you never let yourself go hungry.
		You just, instead of eating a bagel in the middle of the afternoon, you know, you eat a spoonful of coconut butter or something that's got fat in it that satisfies.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You scoop coconut butter for a snack?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Coconut butter.
		You know, like the peanut butter.
		Oh, hell yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You just take a scoop of that for a snack?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		But not coconut...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		People just checked out.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They're like, this fucking guy's nuts.
unidentified		Whoa, whoa, whoa.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Are we talking about the same thing?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Coconut butter.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, like peanut butter.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's the meat of a coconut.
		It's like...
		Yeah, most people are like, I want a cookie.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I want a fucking cookie, man.
		I don't want a candy bar.
		I don't want a goddamn coconut butter spoonful.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I'm telling you, man.
		Okay, so you gotta suspend disbelief a little bit here and humor me.
		Go buy a jar of coconut butter and try it instead of a cookie or whatever.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Do you participate in any sort of intermittent fasting?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Not really.
		And I'll tell you why.
		This is, again, about seeing what we can get away with.
		And I'm pretty lucky that I can get away eating what I eat.
		Now, I have, on the other hand, a compressed eating window.
		So you could argue that I intermittently fast every day.
		So I eat from 12.30, 1 o'clock...
		To 7 o'clock p.m.
		And then I don't eat again.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So you don't eat it all in the morning?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		There's no concept of the word breakfast for me.
		I have a cup of coffee and that's it.
		So I'll go to the gym fasted.
		I'll do whatever workout I'm doing, whether it's a heavyweight workout or whether it's, I mean, it could be a leg day, could be, you know, intervals on a bike, could be a two-hour paddle, fasted.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Can you do that, that you have less energy than if you have like some fruit?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		The difference here is I'm really good at burning fat.
		So I derive my energy from stored body fat better than a lot of people, not because I'm genetically gifted in that way, but because that's how I've lived my life.
		That's how I've orchestrated my eating strategy over the past 15 or 20 years.
		So I wake up.
		I don't need to tap into the stored glucose in the form of glycogen in my liver or in my muscles.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So you essentially follow a ketogenic diet.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but it's not ketogenic.
		So it's a high-fat A moderate-protein, moderate-carb diet, but I have enough carbs.
		I have maybe 100 to 130 grams of carbs a day, which in no one's estimation would that be ketogenic.
		But I'm good at burning fat because I've spent enough time in that sort of low-carb area.
		I've built the metabolic machinery to burn fats really effectively.
		So I'm just going to suggest that I have a lot more mitochondria in my muscle cells than other people do.
		Because of the restricting the carbs and restricting the sugars and forcing my body to become good at burning fat.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How does that work?
		Genes, baby.
		Please tell me.
		How does it promote more mitochondria?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's called mitochondrial biogenesis.
		So when you're born, you're born again with this recipe that wants you to become really good at burning fat and very quickly you change the script.
		So the parents feed you The gruel and oatmeal and Zweibach and toast and whatever, and pureed vegetables.
		And you become very dependent on carbohydrate.
		And the body says, I don't need to burn fat because I'm getting fed carbohydrate all the time.
		And a couple of responses are, I've got to get rid of this excess glucose because if I don't, it's toxic.
		The body shouldn't have more than 90 to 100 calories.
		Your blood sugar count should stay between, say, 85 and 70 and 100 max.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What is the number of...
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		You know, milliliters per deciliter.
		I forget what the exact number is.
		They're all over the place with cholesterol and blood sugar.
		But the point is that the entire amount of sugar in your bloodstream right now is probably a tablespoon.
		You know, five grams of sugar.
		So it's not copious amounts.
		And if it rises above that, you start to get into problems.
		That sugar can interact with protein molecules and cause reactions that lead to clogging of arteries, destruction of nerve tissue.
		That's where the diabetic damage comes from, just excessive amounts of sugar.
		That are in the bloodstream.
		So the body wants to kind of keep that level low.
		And if you continuously feed it carbohydrate all day long, if you're not burning it off, if you're not running 20 miles a week, there's a tendency for the body to store the excess as body fat.
		And over time, for some people, that's a real problem.
		For others, who can get away with it?
		Not so much a problem.
		So many of us grow up depending on this carbohydrate as a main source of fuel.
		And, you know, you eat a carbohydrate meal, a high carbohydrate meal causes a surge of insulin because the insulin is there to take the glucose out of the bloodstream and store it because, again, it's dangerous to have too much.
		But sometimes the insulin surge is so great that it drops the blood sugar and then you get hungry again a couple of hours later.
		That's why you have these swings throughout the day if you're what we call a sugar burner.
		If you try and look at a different way to configure your energy sources, if you restrict Sugar and restrict carbohydrate a little bit.
		You don't have to, you know, be draconian about it.
		But you start to create the need for the body to start to burn some of its stored body fat.
		You say, well, the body goes, well, if I've got to save some of my glucose for my brain, because the brain runs on glucose and ketones, and I'm going to learn how to burn fat more efficiently.
		And in order to do that...
		I've got to build more mitochondria because that's where the fat burns, inside the mitochondria.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Explain to people what mitochondria is.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell.
		Most cells have mitochondria in them.
		Muscle cells have...
		Lots of mitochondria that are creating ATP, which is the energy currency the body uses to move, to live, to exist.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What does ATP sound for?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Denosine triphosphate.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		We're not going to get a biochem lesson right now.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's okay.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		But ATP is this currency of the body, and it can be recycled using different pathways, a glycolytic pathway, which doesn't require oxygen.
		And one of the pathways is using oxygen in the mitochondria.
		So that's a very important place to not only build more mitochondria, but improve the efficiency of the mitochondria.
		And how that happens, and this is the elegance of this again, is that certain signals that you give the body by cutting back on the amount of exogenous carbohydrate you take in, those signals go directly to the cells that say, I've got to make more mitochondria.
		And then, unique to every other organelle in the body, mitochondria have their own DNA. No other organelle within a cell has that, but mitochondria have their own DNA, and the DNA and the mitochondria go, well, we better...
		Be more efficient at what we do.
		So you upregulate the mitochondrial biogenesis, the creation of more mitochondria, and you upregulate the efficiency of the mitochondria, all done at the level of gene, all done through a signal that you gave by, in this case, restricting carbohydrate.
		And it could be increasing the amount of low-level aerobic activity you do, and it can be both.
		And we talk about that in my new book.
		Primal endurance.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, I want to read your new book and I want you to mark down the moment what he just said, like the time on the podcast.
		What time is it here?
		Like an hour and 10 minutes in or something like that?
unidentified		53 minutes in.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		53, that's it?
		Okay.
		That's very important.
		I'd never heard that before.
		I did not know that your body can change the amount of mitochondria.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's incredible.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And that's just from restricting carbohydrates.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Well, there are a lot of things you can do.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		There are certain forms of weightlifting you can do.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like what?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		You know, you can do sustained maximum power output stuff.
		So, you know, you've got a deadlift.
		What do you got?
		A deadlift max of 500?
		What's your deadlift max, Joe?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Somewhere around there.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Probably a little heavier than that.
unidentified		Okay.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I'm kind of yoked.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I'm kind of yoked, yeah.
		So you'd...
		You'd do a workout in the gym where you'd do 80% of your max, so you'd do 400 pounds, and you might do it four or five times, and then rest a few minutes, and then do it again four or five times, and rest a few minutes, and do it again.
		Instead of doing three sets of ten of whatever it is you're going to do, you load this up.
		You load deeper and deeper into the fibers to the extent that the workout's over when you can only do one.
		And you know you can only do one.
		You don't even try to get the next one.
		The workout's over.
		And maybe that winds up being 15 sets by the time you're done.
		But you've maximally overloaded so much at a high, not 100% max, because now we're talking about danger.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Tissue breakdown.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		But you know you can do 80% max and do it at three or four.
		So that's one example of how we can...
		And that'll prompt those muscle tissues to want to build more mitochondria.
		Because as you probably heard, a truly...
		Effective weight session causes you to burn fat throughout the day, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Well, it's one of the best ways to get lean, and it's one thing that people sometimes aren't aware of.
		Most people, when they want to get lean, they think about cardio.
		They start doing a lot of extra cardio.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's weightlifting that really makes you lean.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		No, I mean, weightlifting and sprints.
		As I say, nothing cuts you up like sprints.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Hills.
		Yeah.
		Hills really do it.
		When you're talking about increasing mitochondria, how much of an increase are we talking about?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Double?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Double?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I mean, up to double.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And what are the other effects of having double the amount of mitochondria?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What are the other positive benefits?
unidentified		Yeah.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		You know, more energy throughout the day because now you're so good at burning fat and you have all this machinery to burn the fat that you're hungry less often.
		And, you know, it's interesting when we look back at how hunger runs our lives.
		And again, if you look at the carbohydrate sugar burning paradigm, You get up in the morning, have the most important meal of the day.
		It might be a bagel, some toast, whatever.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Special K. Yeah, yeah.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Special K. A glass of juice.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Don't forget the juice.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You've got to have that instant sugar water.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		150 grams of sugar before you head out the door.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And you're not even supposed to have 150 grams of sugar in a day.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		That's what I'm saying, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's what most people say, right?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'm saying you're not supposed to have more than...
		Like, 150 is a max amount of total carbohydrates that I have in a day.
		So sugar is a minor, minor subset of that.
		But then, you know, you get to work and 10.30 rolls around and it's time for a break in the break room.
unidentified		Donuts.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Donuts.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Somebody brought donuts today!
unidentified		Woo!
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Jelly!
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		All right.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		And then, you know, where are we going for lunch?
		Ah, let's go to, you know, get a pizza or whatever.
		And again, another break in the afternoon, then you get home and...
		You have dinner and maybe you have some ice cream or something watching TV. And the next thing you know, you've taken in 600-700 grams of carbs in that day.
		Well, if you're good at burning fat, the first thing that happens is you wake up in the morning and go, I don't need to eat, really.
		I don't feel like I need to eat.
		I'm not hungry.
		And one of the things we talk about in the Paranormal Blueprint, if you're not hungry, then don't eat.
		That's...
		These are the signals your body is giving you.
		And if you can get away with not eating, and when I say don't eat, it's important that we have to say, because I'm not hungry.
		If you're hungry, eat.
		But if you're not hungry, then move on.
		I did a thought experiment a while back, and I thought, you know, it's interesting, because when I was in college, Every one of my college buddies know me as Arnold.
		They don't even know me as Mark.
		They call me Arnold.
		Because when we were in college, there was a TV show called Green Acres, and there was a pig on the show called Arnold Ziffel.
		And I could eat more than anybody in the college I went to, including the football team.
		And so people would call me Arnold Ziffel.
		And so I became Arns, Arnie, Arnold, for most of my life.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Just because of the amount of food you ate?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Just because of the amount of food I could eat.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Did you have the contests?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		No, but everybody knew.
		It's like, you're going to eat that dessert?
		You're going to eat that steak?
		You know, I'll have that.
		But I was running 100 miles a week.
		I was a skinny shit.
		I weighed 30 pounds less than I weigh now.
		But the throughput was where it was.
		And because I had a leaky gut, probably a lot of it just passed me.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Went right out your butt.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Went right out the butt.
		Out the butt, Bob.
		So the thought experiment was that my whole life, I sort of was guilty of this.
		Like, how much food can I eat?
		And not gain weight and not be uncomfortable.
		And I think a lot of people look that way.
		It's like, all right, we're going to go eat lunch.
		How much food can I eat and not gain weight?
		Or how much of that cake or that pie can I eat?
		Or whatever.
		People, I think, tend to...
		This is the what can I get away with part of it.
		Well, what if you shifted that around and you said, what's the least amount of food I can eat?
		And maintain muscle mass, and maintain energy, and not get sick, and most importantly, not be hungry.
		And you find if you do this experiment, it's pretty interesting.
		If you become good at burning fat, your appetite so self-regulates and so mitigates that you find yourself pushing a plate of food away after a couple of bites, or not being hungry, or eating just the right amount of food.
		To get you through the day.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What do you keep your body fat at?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		You know, so I'm 62 now.
		You look great.
		Well, thank you.
		I mean, people would look at me and go, oh, you must be 6%, 7%.
		No, probably 9%, maybe 9.5%, maybe 10%.
		A lot of people lie about their body fat.
		You know, you hear these stories of the wide receiver that's, you know, 2.5%, 3% body fat.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's not even possible.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		It's impossible, yeah.
		And even with the bodybuilders, the ones that get down that lean are so close to death.
		That's dieting down the day before the contest to get there, and they pack it right on afterwards.
		So the body fat thing is, I've stayed at this same visible, I should say, body fat level since I was in my 20s.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So this is a result of a lot of strenuous exercise, a lot of long distance running, a lot of the different things that you participate in, as well as this body burning fat primarily.
		Because you're talking about if you've been in this same body fat percentage most of your life, you haven't adjusted.
		How old are you?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so here's what happens now.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You were in your 40s when you adjusted your diet?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I was in my 40s.
		So what happens now is I don't run at all.
		I was a career runner for the first part of my life, and I have not run a mile in like 13 years.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What do you do now for exercise?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		So I lift twice a week.
		I do an upper body sort of full routine.
		I don't separate, you know, chest and tris and back and bides and all that stuff.
		I just do a full routine.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's a smart way to do it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That separating stuff is kind of malarkey.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's separating stuff as if you don't have a job.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's good for a bodybuilder, too.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		You're going to go to the gym every day and do two hours and whatever.
		But I try to get some long, either a paddle or a hike in once a week.
		I do a pretty focused interval ride on a bike, but half an hour once a week.
		And then my big thing is...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You mean like a stationary bike?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah, stationary bike.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		And then I... I go to the gym not to ride the bike, but to catch up on our reading.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, okay.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		So I read while I'm on the bike and whatever.
		Right.
		But then the big workout for me is my Sunday Ultimate Frisbee game.
		So you laugh.
		You get to some image of some pastoral hipsters, barefoot.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I don't even know exactly what Ultimate Frisbee is.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		It's the greatest game I've ever invented.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		We've got to get you out, Joe.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Your whole demeanor changed.
		Your smile widened.
		Your eyes lit up.
		What are you doing?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Ultimate is just a very fast-paced game.
		It's played on a field like a football field or a soccer field.
		Two teams trying to advance the Frisbee down the field by making completed passes to their teammates.
		When you're a passer, you can't run.
		But everybody else on your team is trying to get open.
		So they're running, trying to get away from their defenders.
		You complete a pass, and eventually if you complete a pass over the end zone...
		Or the goal line adds a point.
		But if at any point in time...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, Jamie just put something on the board here.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Oh, there you go.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Look at these guys.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, check that out.
		So watch.
		Here you go.
		Yeah, so at any point in time...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, they need some black people in this sport.
unidentified		Because first of all, that white guy was running slow as shit.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The other guy would have definitely got to that.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Anyway, it's a pretty athletic game.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I don't know who this is.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I'll tell you what they're not.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Black.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		There's a good layout right there, okay.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That was a good catch, actually.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		But we have those every week that we play, a bunch of those.
		So it's a very fast-paced game.
		And if you lose the Frisbee, if it's turned over by your teammate, you either drop it or something, it becomes the other team's We have Frisbee going in the opposite direction, and now you've got to get back on defense and defend the same guy that was defending you in most cases.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so if you throw the Frisbee and the other guy doesn't catch it, then the other team gets it?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Correct.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		And they've got to try and do the same thing.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Interesting.
unidentified		Okay.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So you're sprinting a lot on Sunday.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		A lot.
		I mean, we have soccer players come out and basketball players come out and they go, dude, I couldn't walk on Monday after that game.
		That's just ridiculous.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So no running except during ultimate...
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Except sprinting, except 8 to 10 second bursts.
		And how that plays out for me is some of the recent research is you go, instead of doing intervals like the old days where you do 60 seconds or a minute and a half interval as a marathoner, I used to go to the track and do 16 times one half mile at race pace.
		So now we're doing all-out sprints, 10 seconds, 15 seconds, maybe 20 seconds, but you're max, max, max the whole way, and then a sufficient enough rest, and come back and do it again, and do it six, seven, eight, five, six, seven times, and you're done.
		That workout is over, and you have accrued the benefits probably at a greater rate than you would have had you done the old method of training, which was to do, you know, again, repeat quarters or 200s or whatever.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So do you think that a lot of what the old methods were doing was just people getting through with mental toughness and you're getting some benefit of it, but you're also kind of breaking yourself down too much?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		You know, it's...
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so most of endurance athletics is pain management.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And overtraining.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's like...
		Half the races that I thought I was most prepared for, I sucked in because I was over-trained.
		I left everything on the training field.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's a big problem with fighters as well.
		With UFC fighters, it's a gigantic issue trying to figure out what is the right amount of work you should do.
		And especially with fighters because...
		In mixed martial arts, they're dealing with different disciplines.
		You have your grappling, you have your striking, you have putting them all together, you have submissions, you have takedowns, you have a bunch of different things you have to train, as well as rigorous strength and conditioning programs, and there's a lot of debate as far as...
		What should you put most time and effort into?
		And some of the more successful people, it's really kind of interesting, have been going away from skill training during camps when they prepare for a fight and going almost exclusively to strength and conditioning programs with very minimal skill training where the strength and conditioning program takes precedent over everything else, which I find very fascinating.
		The idea behind that being you already know how to fight.
		So what they're going to do is get your body to a place where it can function at the highest work rate.
		And a big factor in that is maintaining a healthy heart rate and making sure that you don't overtrain, making sure that you have enough recovery time.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		100% agree.
		We say that in training triathletes and runners.
		The amount of time you spend on the bike after you've been doing it for a couple of years, you know how to ride.
		So let's train the component.
		Let's break the race down into its component parts.
		How can you...
		How could you sustain your power over the next three hills to where your output on the third hill is essentially the same as it was on the first hill versus in the old days where you were 100% going over the first hill and then 90% over the second hill and 77% going over the third hill because you hadn't trained that part in your regimen.
		One of the things we say to endurance athletes is, how many races have you finished where you were out of breath?
		And maybe you had to sprint, you know, because you were neck and neck with some guy.
		But most endurance athletes don't finish a marathon out of breath because long ago their form fell apart.
		Their muscle tissue started to break down because they hadn't trained for sustained power.
		And so the aerobic part of it was like, we could do this all day long.
		You're just going slow because you didn't train appropriately.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So there's some strength training components, like even to something like marathon running.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
		Yeah.
		So now we're saying that the next breakthroughs in marathon running will come from somebody who has trained ketogenically, and we didn't talk about that yet, but has restricted carbs to the extent that they...
		Cyclically, they know how to access ketones, which are a byproduct of fat metabolism, and they can use the ketones in place of glucose or glycogen.
		They can use the ketones to fuel the brain, to will them to continue the pace.
		They've done the work in the gym where they can maintain sustained power output over 26 miles and not have it fall apart and not have form break down 22 miles into the race.
		And if you put all of these different component parts together, and do it with an elite, a world-class athlete, now you look at the next level of records being broken.
		It's so antithetical to the way we've trained for the last 40 years that you take an elite professional runner who's already had some amount of success and you go, dude, we want to shift everything around.
		It's going to cost you the next 18 months to adapt, but there's a good chance that you'll be better.
		The guy's going to go, you know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So hard for people to change.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and it's so hard.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's so hard to give up something that's working.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		To get to that, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I want to go back to something you said while you were just explaining that, that you get someone to train ketogenic.
unidentified		Yep.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And what do you mean by that?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		So now there are periods of time when you're restricting carbs so much...
		That you're creating more ketones, which are this byproduct of fat metabolism.
		So you've already become fat-adapted, as we say.
		You've become good at burning fat.
		And now you're building further metabolic machinery that accesses ketones better.
		So now ketones, which we refer to as the fourth fuel.
		So you'd have proteins, fats, carbohydrates.
		Ketones are the fourth fuel.
		The body...
		We evolved to use ketones very efficiently.
		There were times throughout millions of years of human evolution where it wasn't like you skipped lunch.
		It's like you skipped last week eating, right?
		And you had to maintain muscle mass and maintain thought capability and maintain speed and health despite not eating anything.
		And the only way to do that was to access the stored body fat that you'd stored from overeating Or eating slightly more than you needed.
		The last time there was actually food present, which is why we're all wired to overeat.
		And this ability to use the byproduct of the fat metabolism to fuel the brain.
		So ketones, actually, the brain loves to run on ketones.
		One of the things that happens, particularly in endurance contests, and I suspect it happens in MMA fights toward the end of the fight, is, you know, you feel gassed, and you run out, you're starting to run low on glycogen, and you're starting to really feel like the wheels are coming off.
		More often than not, it's the brain It's a lack of glucose to the brain.
		The brain isn't being powered enough, and the brain goes, time out.
		We got to pull over the side of the road and take a nap.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So it'll make you mentally exhausted because your body's running on glycogen and glucose rather than fats.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
		Exactly.
		So when you run out of glycogen and glucose...
		The old theory was, well, the reason that you hit the wall in any of these events, or you bonk, as they say, is because you've depleted glycogen so much the muscles can't function anymore.
		Well, the research now shows that you never really deplete the glycogen in the muscles.
		If you go from 500 or 600 grams total in the body, you never get lower than 150. So there's always some glycogen left.
		So what's going on?
		Well, it's the brain and its lack of access to glucose.
		That is shutting you down.
		And Tim Noakes, the guy we talked about, Professor Tim Noakes, at the beginning of the show here, he coined a phrase, the central governor theory of the brain.
		And he said the reason a lot of people hit the wall isn't because they're out of glycogen, but it's because the brain, as an override mechanism, says in order to prevent further damage, we have to stop.
		And it manifests itself as a sensation of tiredness and whatever.
		Now, if you could find a way to bypass that and keep the brain going, because remember, it's the brain running on glucose that once it runs out of that fuel says, I'm sensing there's no fuel, so we're going to pull over.
		So that's what ketones do.
		So when you become good at accessing stored body fat and producing ketones and you've built the metabolic machinery, particularly in the brain, to use those ketones...
		And we know from history and from genetics and from modern science that the brain runs really well on ketones.
		Now you've found a substitute fuel for glucose, so you can run out of glucose.
		And yet the ketones will keep the brain, you know, revving and guiding you at the same pace.
		Again, provided you've done the work in the gym to maintain the form and the power.
		And so, you know, this is all...
		I'm going to say kind of theoretical now because the real world records haven't been broken yet.
		Some are being broken in the ultra events, the 100-mile run.
		There are a number of guys doing ketogenic and low-carb training who are breaking records like crazy.
		Zach Bitter is a guy who in the lab has shown that he could derive 96% of his total energy running 7-minute miles from fat.
		So in other words...
		It's seven minute miles, which is like sprint pace for most people.
		It's not that fast for a marathoner or even an elite runner, but it's a substantial pace.
		And for a guy running 100 miles, it's a pretty good clip.
		And to derive 95 to 96% of all energy from your stored body fat or from exogenous fat that you're eating, And just a tiny bit required from glycogen or glucose.
		I mean, I think 30 or 40 years ago, we would have said, not only was that impossible, that was like twice times impossible.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, the benefit of that for athletes has got to be incredible in terms of motivation, in terms of enthusiasm towards the end of the race or an end of a fight or something along those lines where your body would run out of the glycogen and the glucose and instead you have fat to burn so your mind doesn't drop off as much.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Your mind doesn't hit that wall.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That should be huge.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, that alone should be motivation for people to at least attempt to pursue that.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yep.
		Now, when it comes to highly glycolytic experiences like MMA, you can't derive a substantial part of your energy from fat.
		That still has to come from glycogen.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Why is that?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Well, because there's a point at which your throughput of oxygen...
		When I'm talking about endurance athletes, they're measuring their output over two, three, seven hours.
		Now you're talking five, five, five minute...
		That same output is concentrated now, and you're going at a fairly high rate.
		Although, you see them, they're jumping around and dancing around and moving back and forth, so there's recovery periods in there, but you still have to have that 100% intense glycolytic output.
		So when you're in a hold and trying to escape, or when you're trying to defend or trying to come in for a barrage, you have to be at 100% of output.
		But it's brief periods of time, so...
		Conceivably, you could train in the gym to access That part of your body that burns fats, that burns ketones, you know, almost the most important part would be making weight.
		You know, if you're...
		Look, especially in MMA, it's about power-to-weight ratios to a certain extent.
		I mean, there's a lot of, obviously, skill, but a power-to-weight ratio.
		If I'm, you know, 142 pounds, I don't know what the weight, what the divisions are, but if I'm carrying around, I'm at 165 and I have to cut down to 142 to get to my...
		I'm going to lose power, but if I maintain that power and I never even get up to 165 anymore because I'm not gaining fat, because I've learned how to burn fat and I can stay effective and functional at the weight that I'm at, that has benefit.
		You know, and it's a power to weight ratio concept.
		So you would have to have some sort of a hybrid diet then in something like MMA. Yeah, so once you've built the metabolic machinery to burn fat and to burn ketones, It doesn't go away when you start eating carbohydrates.
		So you can do what we call the cyclical approach where you spend, in the early phases of your training, you become really good at burning fat and you do stuff that's contemplated to make you the best possible fat burner you can be.
		Then you might introduce some carbohydrates the day before a really hard glycolytic workout.
		That doesn't turn off your fat burning.
		That doesn't even really negatively impact your ability to handle ketones.
		If you do it for six weeks and you do nothing but carbs for six weeks, then it all shifts back.
		Again, upregulation and downregulation of enzymes based on gene input.
		Gene expression.
		But if you built the metabolic machinery and you keep coming back to it, then you can craft a strategy where you say, well, tomorrow we're just going to do 100% glycolytic stuff.
		Be prepared to puke all afternoon or whatever.
		You have 150 grams of carbs and a sweet potato for dinner that night.
		You topped off your glycogen stores.
		You're still good at burning fat.
		You have all the glycogen that you even could possibly have loaded if you'd just been a carbohydrate-based athlete ever since.
		You just pick the times when you're going to up the ante with extra carb intake.
		And you make sure it's not sugar, but it's, you know, a good, you know, a starchy carb in this case, something like a sweet potato or, you know, ham or something like that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So how do you regulate the amount of sugars that are in your body?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Do you limit the amount of fruit that you eat?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		How do I, personally?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Can you eat as much fruit as you like?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Or is that not a good idea?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		It's just not a good idea.
		Some amount of fruit is good, but I think what cracks me up is the number of people who say, I'm on a very healthy diet.
		I'm eating 12 servings of fruit a day, and I go to Jamba Juice, and I get a big fruit smoothie, and I go, dude, you're taking in more sugar than a guy who's drinking two six-packs of Coke.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So even sugar that comes from fruit is not necessarily healthy?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Correct.
		Wow, that's crazy.
		Again, all these things exist on a spectrum.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I might have blueberries every day because I love blueberries.
		Grew up in Maine, you know, picking them wild, so I love blueberries.
		But they're low in sugar, they're tart, they've got antioxidants in them, and I don't overdo them.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Do you limit yourself to like a cup or something like that?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I don't even limit...
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Look, at $4.99 a pack for organic blueberries, I limit myself based on budget, not on any other metric.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How many servings of fruit will you allow yourself in a day?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Oh, just because I don't feel the need to eat fruit.
		I don't have a craving for it.
		Maybe two servings is the most I'll eat in a day.
		Some days, none.
		But bananas, some of the citrus fruits, some of these things can be way overdone pretty quickly.
		And I'm not necessarily saying don't eat fruit.
		I'm just saying don't consider fruit the healthiest possible alternative to You know, bread and pasta and then replace all of the calories you got from bread and pasta and cereal and whatever.
		Don't replace that with fruit, but figure out a way.
		Like, vegetables, for the most part, are the ideal source of carbohydrate in our diet.
		They're locked in this fibrous matrix.
		It's, you know, they're basically low glycemic index, so they kind of drip into the bloodstream at a reasonable pace, don't cause a huge surge in glucose.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So celery with coconut butter would be a much healthier alternative than a banana.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Again, healthier is the wrong term.
		I mean, we're making choices here based on what we're trying to accomplish.
		No good or bad, no right or wrong.
		But in a perfect world, celery with coconut butter is a great choice, and a banana at the right time is maybe a better choice.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like post-workout, a banana's a good choice, right?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, it depends on who you are.
		I fast after the workout, too, because that's kind of interesting.
		There's so much of these little nuanced science bits that you pick up.
		And I've been in the supplement business for 30 years, designing supplements for other companies.
		And one of the supplements I made a bunch of years ago for a very large company today...
		It was a post-workout drink, and everybody loved it, and everybody thought it was the greatest thing they'd ever tasted, and it had, you know, it had carbohydrates, and it had some protein, it had some creatine, and it was a great drink.
		But the purpose of the drink was to recover from the hard workout you did today so you could do the bitch again tomorrow.
		And that's not how I train anymore.
		So I don't do two hard days in a row.
		So for that particular purpose, if you're going to train hard every day and you want to replace glycogen, Then that's a strategy and that's a choice.
		If you say, well, we're going to do some hard glycolytic work today, we're going to, for whatever reason, going to do some hard glycolytic work tomorrow, then let's have a post-workout high-carb, relatively high-carb supplement because there's this window in which the body manufactures glycogen.
		Refills glycogen stores at a higher rate just post-workout.
		That was the whole reason for the post-workout meal.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's why people like to drink chocolate milk, right?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Exactly, exactly.
		So if you're going to go from day to day, then that's probably a good thing.
		Another strategy would be to go really, really hard today, do a deep leg day, and then fast.
		Well, what happens when you fast is you don't replenish the glycogen, but you preserve the pulse of growth hormone and testosterone that happens as a result of the leg day, which you would otherwise blunt by taking in a sugary drink.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Whoa, okay.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		So again, it's complex, and yet it's pretty cool.
		The science is pretty cool.
		Insulin has an effect on growth hormone and testosterone.
		It actually lowers it.
		So if you are eating a post-workout meal that's high in carbs, because you want to refill the glycogen stores so that you can do it again tomorrow, then the post-workout meal will cause a rise in insulin, which will blunt the growth hormone and testosterone pulse that you got from that workout.
		But you'll have glycogen stores slightly more ready for the hard workout again tomorrow.
		Now, what are you trying to accomplish here?
		What I'm saying is I'd rather just do the workout really hard, get all of the benefits, the growth benefits that I'm looking for, and not have to do it again tomorrow.
		I want to work as little as possible.
		If I'm going to do a leg day and puke, you know, for...
		Because of it, today, I don't want to do it again tomorrow.
		I'm only working out to get the benefits.
		I'm not working out for the sake of working out.
		I'm not working out every single day because I just love to go to the gym, and some people do, by the way, and I'm not going to judge that.
		But I'm working out to get the most amount of benefits I can from the work that I've chosen to do.
		And in this case, that includes my strategy post-workout.
		That makes sense?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It does, but it's fascinating because I've never heard that before.
		There's a catch-22, so refueling the glycogen levels actually depletes.
		It blunts.
		Blunts is the best word?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Deplenishes?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's not even a word.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I like it.
		Make it up.
		Let's trademark it right now.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Deplenishes.
unidentified		Deplenishes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I just said it like it was real, too.
		But I've never heard that before.
		So there's got to be a catch-22 in there, then.
		It seems like...
		So, is there a negative effect of having those hard workouts more than one day in a row, and would you be better off and would you gain more if you went the way you're doing it by not replenishing?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I'm saying you do.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Now, it's...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Even for an elite athlete that's competing in a sport, like say, mixed martial arts or something along those lines?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		You know, it depends on what the game plan is for the week.
		And what the game plan is to get you into the ring or to get you to the starting line.
		And in this case, if we say, you know, you're doing...
		Let's just use a leg day again.
		You know, you're doing hard legs.
		You don't want to do it again tomorrow.
		So there's no need to take the post-workout drink.
		Because here's what else...
		The other thing that happens is if you have...
		If you wait...
		Maybe in an hour or two, you have a meal, but it's not even a high-carb meal.
		It's just a regular meal.
		It's not high-carb.
		It's not contemplated to increase glycogen stores.
		But within that meal, and within the next meal, and within the next meal, your body will replenish glycogen.
		Eventually, it wants to do that.
		You're not preventing it from replenishing glycogen.
		So there's no immediate urgency to do it with a post-workout drink.
		The meals planned for the rest of the day or the next morning have some amount of carbohydrate, some of which will go to replenishing glycogen.
		So you might wind up, instead of having restored, you know, 275 grams of glycogen, you've restored 230. Big deal.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What about the benefits of forcing your body to do more work to up your conditioning level?
		And would that be mitigated or would some...
		What your strategy being to not replenish the stores after the workout and to not have those hard workouts two days in a row, if you instead I had the hard workout, went through your idea of allowing your body to have its natural uptake of testosterone and growth hormone because of that hard workout,
		then giving yourself adequate time to recover before engaging in the next hard workout, would you in fact have more progress than slamming your head up against the wall, which is at least with like...
		For wrestlers and for mixed martial artists a lot of the time, that's the standard operational approach is to beat your body down, to be absolutely exhausted.
		And do you think that's, in fact, maybe counterintuitive?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I totally think that is.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I mean, the notion that...
		And again, this is...
		Endurance sports and mixed martial arts are very similar in it's about pain management.
		It's about managing literally pain and perceived pain.
		and exertion over time.
		So, you know, to the extent that you can train in the gym in selective areas that all come together in the fight, that's a legitimate choice.
		But another choice, and the one for the last 30 years is sort of the Rocky Balboa choice, which is just go hard every single day and build up the...
		Because maybe when it comes...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Mental toughness.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Maybe it's the, you know, the fifth round and mental toughness really comes to play there and you're able to dig deeper just because you know how to beat yourself up.
		So it's not to say that one's better than the other.
		They're just alternative strategies.
		One of the greatest runners in the country ever produced, Steve Prefontaine, was fairly talented.
		He was not the most talented runner in the world.
		And he would go to the starting line, and he'd look at some guy who was clearly more talented, but they'd run at similar times.
		And Prefontaine would look him in the face and go, dude, he said, you may be more fit and more talented than me, but I'm willing to die for this.
		I'm willing to hurt more.
		And he was.
		And he could dig, dig deep.
		And maybe it was a result of his 120-mile weeks of training and beating himself up every day.
		I suppose there's value in that, in a sport where...
		You know, from the time the gun goes off till the time you cross the finish line, you're never saying to yourself in a marathon, fuck, this is fun.
		Let's do this again.
		You know, at the elite level, you never say that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		So it's about pain management, and there's a legitimate...
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Strategy in maybe having some days where you do what I outlined and some days or some weeks where you do what you outlined.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Are they mutually exclusive, though?
		Like, here's the question, like, do you have to beat yourself up in order to be mentally tough?
		Can't you be mentally tough just through meditation or visualization?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I agree.
		I don't think you have to beat yourself up to be mentally tough.
		And the danger there is you literally beat yourself up.
		The danger is you overtrain.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Maybe doing that and trying to force yourself into these mentally tough exercises is actually a form of weakness because you're not able to look at your body objectively.
		You're not able to assess it in more of a scientific fashion.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I mean, I'm telling you, back in the day when I was doing training for marathons and triathlons, Define my self-worth based on the previous workout I'd done.
		And you skip a day and you feel like a slacker and a poser and a loser.
		And yet, I was chronically overtrained all the time.
		I wish I had those days back because...
		My career would have been extended.
		On the other hand, if I had him back, I probably wouldn't have arrived where I am today through the pain and the suffering and the sacrifice.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And trying to figure out how to fix that.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		My friend Steve Maxwell, who's a strength and conditioning coach, says that you should monitor your heart rate every morning.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And if your heart rate is over a certain beats per minute, it's over what it's naturally, normal five plus beats per minute, you should take the day off.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		That's one modality.
		That's one protocol.
		There's now heart rate variability, which looks beyond what the heart rate is and looks at the time between the beats and suggests that...
		If there's greater variability, if there's more time or there's, you know, 0.8 seconds here and 1.1 second here and 0.7 and 1.1, that that's better than having 0.9, 0.9, 0.9, 0.9.
		It's sort of counterintuitive because you'd want the heart to beat metronomically.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		But if it's beating metronomically, it's a sign of overtraining.
		Really?
		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Overtraining?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's a sign of...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Even if it's a low heartbeat.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Correct.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So if you wake up and you've got 40 beats per minute, but they're all the same equal beats.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, that's not going to happen.
		It's typically going to be higher if you've overtrained, as well as having a metronomic interval to it.
		But there are programs you can get.
		So you can wear your heart monitor and get these HRV, heart rate variability programs, and they'll literally tell you, they'll score you for the day.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Do you use those?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		No.
		I don't, primarily because I have premature ventricular contractions.
		So I'm now at 62. I've been doing this for 40 years.
		Actually, 50. I started running when I was 12. Jesus.
		To and from school, just like that nut brown African lad, you know, with my Converse, you know, sneakers on.
		So I've been doing this a long time, and I spent so much of my career, stupidly, foolishly, maxing my heart rate out every day.
		So I've written about this for the last two decades, about how training for endurance competition is somewhat antithetical to health, and certainly training the way we used to, which is accumulating miles and miles and miles at a heart rate that we call the black hole, which is...
		Too high to benefit on a regular basis, but too low to create sort of the interval training deal.
		Again, explain it in the book, but we spent...
		Years and years and years, decades, training a lot of athletes at, say, anywhere from 75 to 85% of their max heart rate for an hour, two hours, three hours at a time.
		Well, over time, the heart responds to that and it gets thicker.
		The heart muscle gets thicker and thicker.
		Partly, it's like the heart doesn't have a say in it.
		So your brain tells your legs to run, right?
		And the heart goes, shit, I got to keep up with this cat.
		So the heart's pumping away and pumping away and pumping away.
		And if you do this enough...
		Day in, day out, over years, the heart starts to get damaged a little bit.
		And in some cases, it gets thicker.
		The ventricle gets thicker.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Is it thicker because it's growing muscle?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but it's not necessarily a good kind of thicker.
		So it may be stretched too much.
		It may not recover.
		When you go to the gym and you say, we're going to do 200 preacher curls of 75 pounds, You know, you're going to say, well, maybe your biceps can handle that, Joe, but mine can't.
		So, you know, because they'll fry.
		They'll shred.
		But you feel it.
		The pain is there.
		Well, the heart doesn't feel that kind of pain.
		So if you force the heart to have to keep up, and it's a demand organ.
		It just feeds whatever the demand is from the body.
		And if that's held at too high a heart rate for too long over decades, it can manifest itself in problems.
		There's, I don't know.
		There's an epidemic of AFib, atrial fibrillation, in my generation of runners from that very problem.
		So anyway, having said that, so I have the occasional premature ventricular contraction, which is just a couple of cells in the heart, maybe a thickness in the ventricle, that misfire every once in a while.
		It's not life-threatening.
		It's just annoying.
		But it makes my HRV look really good, because I have this big interval between beats sometimes, you know?
		But it's a false positive.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Wow, that's fascinating.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So you don't necessarily monitor your heart rate because of that?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		No.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So you kind of more go on the way you feel?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and again, at my age, I just want to have fun.
		I just want to play.
		I'm not seeking to win any age group competitions anymore.
		Those days are long behind me.
		It hurts too much.
		I'm trying to extract the greatest amount of pleasure out of my life.
		So when I go to the gym...
		It's pretty much contemplated to do as little as possible that keeps me looking good naked, but also keeps me somewhat immune from injury.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They're very honest of you, by the way.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Whatever, you know?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I don't even care about that anymore.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah.
		No, I'm going to care about that until the day I die.
		But for the most part, it's about avoiding injury when I'm playing.
		So if I'm playing Frisbee, you know, I'm sprinting.
		I'm keeping up with 20-somethings on a long bomb run to the end zone and then have to turn around and come back and get them on defense.
		That...
		It has some cost attached to it, some metabolic costs for an old guy like me.
		So the stuff I do in the gym is trying to keep me from getting injured, knock wood.
		And then I spend time on the, you know, I'll paddle for two hours.
		And it's the best upper body workout you'll ever get.
		Paddling?
		Yeah.
		Really?
		Stand-up paddling, yeah.
		And, you know, it's fun and I don't think, oh God, when's it going to be over?
		I'd think, oh shit, I've got to get back because I've got a meeting.
		You know, I'm out hanging out with dolphins and whales and looking down at fish and catching a wave once in a while.
		I'm trying to have fun when I move, when I work out.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I did some paddling a few years back.
		I did a canoe trip down the Missouri River, and I was shocked at how tired my arms got.
		I'm like, this is like a legit workout.
		I thought I was in pretty good shape.
		I'm like...
		It's going to be nothing.
		Paddling.
		It's ain't shit.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		No, no, no.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's hard.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Take some good shots after paddling.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And that's how I treated it as a workout, too.
		I just decided, like, okay, we're doing this for a couple hours a day.
		I'm going to go hard.
		I'm going to leave it all out there on the river.
		And we were with some other guys.
		We were in another boat.
		I was trying to kick their ass.
		So I was just trying to stay ahead of them the entire way and calling them pussies and yelling at them.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but it's great.
unidentified		It's lat workout, it's serratus, it's deltoids, it's everything.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		One of the big issues with jujitsu competitors and people just practice even as a hobby is joint injuries, inflammation of the joints and also spine injuries, a lot of bulging discs, a lot of things along those lines.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Do you think that some of that could be mitigated by reducing the amount of inflammatory foods?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		You know, you've got such a trauma-based sport.
		Maybe a little, you know, if you're 10% less prone to getting the disc issue or the joint pain as a result.
		But a lot of that is just the brute force of the impact.
		And, you know, that's a choice that you make to be in those sports.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, not even impact, like with grappling, a lot of it is just twisting and constant pressure and just the day-to-day grind.
		I think jujitsu is one of those sports where a lot of recreational practitioners, they get really addicted to it because it's really fun.
		You know, you're essentially...
		You're having a life or death struggle with someone, and you can tap out and then go right back at it.
		And it's very different than a lot of other martial arts in that way, that you can kind of do it full blast.
		Whereas sparring, like kickboxing and things, you really can't do it full blast for very long, because the body just can't take it, the head can't take it, especially.
		Yeah.
		With jujitsu, a lot of guys are injured.
		They just wrap themselves up and kind of go back in.
		Or they say, oh, I'm just going to roll light.
		And my neck's bothering me.
		Just lay off my neck.
		And I always wonder, is there maybe a dietary choice that could perhaps limit the amount of inflammation that you're experiencing after these brutal workouts?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Depends.
		I mean, if the diet is currently horrendous, then there's probably some amount of management of that that could be increased, and pain management could be a little bit better and less inflammation, for sure.
		But if the diet's already good, then you're still putting the body through some unnatural torsions.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I'm just amazed that when you were talking about your hands and arthritis deep into your 40s, that you were able to mitigate that just by changing your diet.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		It was so powerful.
		Actually, the most powerful thing for me was the IBS because it literally ruined my life or ruled my life.
		But the arthritis thing was like, I mean, I'd play golf with friends, and I was like, I can't even grip the friggin' club the way I need to.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And now you have no problems.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		You know, I'd meet you, and I'd go, shit, is Joe gonna try to out-bro-shake me, you know, and take me to the ground with a firm grip?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How about when they get the tips of your fingers?
unidentified		Oh, Jesus.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Those assholes.
unidentified		It's over.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Those tips of the fingers, guys.
unidentified		It's over.
unidentified		Shit.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I hate those fucks.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I'm very careful shaking hands, too, because I know a lot of people with broken hands.
		Fighters, especially after fights, you have to be real careful.
		I give them the most gentle handshake possible.
		What other ways do you think there are dietary ways to reduce inflammation other than reduction of grains or elimination of grains?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		You know, I say if you get rid of the industrial seed oils, so you replace the soybean oil, the canola oil, The corn oil.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		And look at the labels of the ingredients because they're all over the place.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What's the different mechanism in the body as far as the way your body processes soy or corn oil versus coconut oil?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		It's just the profile of the fatty acids.
		These are polyunsaturated fatty acids.
		Sometimes they're partially hydrogenated.
		Sometimes they've been processed with sort of nasty processing agents like nickel.
		And they've been...
		They've undergone enough alteration that maybe they contain some trans fats.
		Trans fats are known to be pro-inflammatory.
		By the way, omega-6 in and of themselves are not bad.
		There's omega-3, there's omega-6, there's 9, there's 7, there's 12, there's all these, but the 3 to 6 ratio is the one that's gotten the most press over the last decade.
		Omega-3 fatty acids are found in fish, krill oil or fish oil, things like that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Do you supplement with fish oil?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		A little bit, yeah.
		Not a lot, but a little bit.
		How much?
		A couple of capsules every other day.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, really?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Every other day?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		And I manufacture them, too.
		I mean, it's part of my line of products.
unidentified		But...
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Because my diet is pretty much based on an otherwise healthy intake of omega-3s, and more importantly, a reduction of omega-6.
		So it's not that omega-3s are by themselves anti-inflammatory, they are, and omega-6s are pro-inflammatory, but it's this ratio.
		There's some requirement for omega-6 in the body, but when the ratio gets way thrown off, it tends to be a pro-inflammatory reaction.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And where do omega-6s come from?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Those are the industrial seed oils that we talked about.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And so there's a slight benefit to having some industrial seed oils?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Well, no, no.
		There's a slight benefit to having omega-6 from other sources.
		What are the other sources?
		Most fish will also have O6. They're everywhere.
		They're in any kind of fatty food.
		Nuts will have them.
		That's probably the source that most people on the paleo movement get the omega-6 from.
		But yeah, it's about sort of the totality of the diet, and it's largely a result, again, of what you're not eating, what you eliminate from the diet that has the greatest effect, not what you're eating.
		So when people say, well, paleo diet, I mean, I've had such great results on the vegan diet, or I've had great results on some vegetarian diet.
		I go, well, you're not eating the same shit we're not eating.
		So...
		The fact that you get your protein from plant sources, I'm maybe going to suggest you could have more protein, but it's not that big a deal.
		It's really about what you've eliminated that has the greatest impact on your health.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I have conversations like that often with people that are vegan, where they start talking about all the different things they eat, how much better they feel, and I tell them, listen, I eat all the same things you eat.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like, my diet is pretty vegan other than meat.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, most of what, like this morning, what I had, I drank a kale shake, so I blend kale with cucumbers, and I know it's gross, but it makes me feel amazing.
		I blend kale with cucumbers, garlic, Celery, ginger, and a pear.
		I throw a pear in, and I blend that up in a half a beet.
		I blend that all up, and I ate an elk steak.
		So the two things together, that's what I eat.
		That's my lunch.
		That's what I had.
		I didn't eat breakfast.
		I just ate lunch today.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		How does the kale shake taste?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's like shit.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		It doesn't taste good.
		One of my rules is...
		I don't put anything in my mouth that doesn't taste awesome.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But it feels good, man.
		I'm telling you.
		I eat that.
		I get this burst of nutrients.
		I'm going to keep doing it.
		It's not too terrible with a full pear in.
		Because the full pear, it's a big Bartlett pear.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		It blunts a little bit of the garlic.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's very sweet.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But is that too much sugar, that one pear?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		It depends on what your sugar load is over the course of a day.
		If that's the only sugar you get.
		Pears are pretty high in sugar, but if it's a whole pear, I don't think it's...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I eat a pear before a yoga class, too.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That gets me through a yoga class.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Is pears your favorite fruit or something?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I like pears.
unidentified		Wow, good for you.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		It's totally good.
unidentified		You're the first guy I've known that's favorite fruit is a pear.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Really?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I mean, I like a pear, but I say...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I like mangoes.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Mangoes are my also favorite.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Mangoes are awesome, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I take sliced mangoes.
		I'll do that.
		What would be better, pears or mangoes?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		No, no, no.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No difference?
		No difference.
		But fruit is what I usually choose before I work out, but now I'm thinking that maybe fruit is a little too high in sugar listening to you, or I should limit the amount of it I have in a day.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		And again, if you like where you're at and everything's good and life is wonderful and you enjoy it, then I'm not going to tell you to stop doing it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'm all about optimizing.
		I mean, if I can chuck down those kale shakes, I'm obviously willing to eat some horrible shit to feel better.
		It's not that horrible.
		I kind of exaggerate a little bit.
		My tolerance for gross food is pretty high.
		I can eat it.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Did you ever eat any of that shit on Fear Factor?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I ate a bunch of shit.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Oh, good, good.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I ate eyeballs, sheep's eyeballs.
		I ate super worms.
		Those worms they use on cadavers to clean up bones.
		I ate tomato hornworm.
		That was pretty gross.
		I ate Madagascar hissing cockroach.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		That's the one I think I would have drawn the line.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That one was the easiest to do.
unidentified		Really?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yep.
		It's all psychological.
		It's chewy, but it's very mild.
		It has almost no flavor.
		It was all just in your head.
		That was no big deal at all.
		The really hard things to eat.
		It's really interesting.
		The smells were probably the hardest part.
		And a big factor in the smell was they would add this really expensive cheese.
		They would go to this Beverly Hills...
		What is a formagerie?
		What is one of those fucking places called where they sell the cheese?
		Formagerie?
		Anyway, it was a very expensive type of French cheese that just smells like fucking death.
		Because cheese...
		A big part of what makes a cheese fragrant or interesting is the culture, which is actually bacteria.
		Yeah.
		So we would buy this bacteria-laden cheese that smelled so fucking bad.
		They would take it and they would open the little plastic tub in front of me and stick it in front of me.
		I would be like, oh!
		And they'd be like, dude, that shit is expensive.
		Really expensive.
		And we would throw that into a blender full of maggots, and that's what would make it disgusting.
		The maggots on their own really didn't have that much of a smell or taste.
		It's more psychological than it is anything.
		A lot of the stuff on Fear Factor.
		And then there was, a lot of it was just the sheer volume.
		Like they would have to drink, you know, a gigantic blender filled with this horrible shit.
		And just the amount of mass that you're putting in your body and you have like three minutes to do it or whatever.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		And keep it down.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And keep it down.
		Yeah.
		I think we gave them like, they had to keep it down for like 30 seconds or something like that.
		So then at the end of that 30 seconds, they would sprint towards a...
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Would everybody hurl?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh yeah.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I saw more people.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I've probably seen more people throw up than a very small percentage of the population.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Than most ERs, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, maybe ERs would have me.
		Like, nightclub bouncers might have me.
		If you put in 20 years as a nightclub bouncer, you'd probably see more people puke than me.
		Because you're seeing it every night.
		To me, it was only one day a week.
		But one day a week, I'd watch at least two people just fucking hurl.
		Projectile vomit.
		Yeah.
		But, again, more psychological than anything.
		The actual taste of those things, especially the roach, was nothing.
		It's really no big deal.
		If I was starving somewhere and I found a big batch of hissing cockroaches, those Madagascar ones, I would definitely scoop those up and eat them.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		A bar company called Exo that makes their bars out of cricket protein.
		And I'm an investor in their company there.
		And I'm fascinated by the concept that a billion and a half, two billion people around the world eat insects all the time and think nothing of it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's what a lobster is.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		One of the things that we found out when we did Fear Factor was if you have an allergy to shellfish, you also have an allergy to roaches.
		We found that out the hard way because a guy who listed shellfish as an allergy ate a roach and got really sick.
		We had to take them to the ER, they had to give them an adrenaline shot, the whole deal.
		So the enzymes apparently are very similar.
		But you could eat those bugs and they're very high in protein and very good for you.
		And they could also be an excellent source of protein, an inexpensive source of protein for a lot of people.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		The cricket thing is very sustainable.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		It's like 20 times fewer resources than an equivalent amount of steak.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And also, equivalent amount of amino acids.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Oh, very good profile.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's really fascinating to me, that you could get really high quality protein from bugs.
unidentified		Huh.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		We're prejudiced against bugs.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I guess.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I mean, I'm trying not to be anymore.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Do you eat your bars?
unidentified		Oh, yeah.
unidentified		Do you?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Do you eat them all the time?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		All the time.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Do people like them?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I shouldn't say all the time just because I don't use those kind of snacks.
		I make my own bar.
		But because the guys who started EXO are really on to something and they're trying to change the way the world thinks about sourcing protein.
		So the first hurdle they have to overcome is making a bar taste great and not turn people off because...
		It's crickets.
		Because it's crickets.
		And there's not like heads and antenna sticking out of these bars.
		It's powder.
		It's been ground down to a fine powder.
		And it basically looks and probably tastes the same as whey protein isolate does.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Once it's ground down, right?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Once it's ground down.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Do you lose any of it when you're dehydrating it or grinding it down or turning it into a powder?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		It retains its properties pretty nicely.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So there's no benefit whatsoever to eating it fresh?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Not necessarily, no.
		I mean, if you can compact more into a...
		I mean, that's the beauty of, I think, insect protein powder is to be able to fortify foods that otherwise, you know, rather than having 40 crickets on a stick, you know, to have the powder equivalent in a bar is kind of a neat way of doing it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I've eaten crickets like that, too, like roasted crickets.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They don't taste bad at all.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		No, they're not bad.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's all in the head.
		It really is.
		It's all in your mind.
		You chew them, they're crunchy, and they're roasted over a fire.
		They're actually not bad at all.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I mean, they're sold as delicacy in the streets of Bangkok and most of Asia.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Especially if you put some spices on them or something like that.
		They can actually be quite tasty.
		Like maybe some butter, some oil, and some spices on them.
		Yeah, we have these ideas about...
		Different things that are good to eat and not good to eat.
		It's more based on custom than anything in a lot of ways.
		I wonder how many people that are vegan would be willing to eat bugs.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		You know, vegan, as far as I know, it goes against their...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, they don't even want to use honey.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		No, it's crazy.
		No, that's funny you say that because we've got a bar that we just introduced with grass-fed whey protein isolate and it's got collagen and it's a great bar.
		And we tried to make one for the vegan community and because it has...
		Honey in it as a sweetener.
		The vegans said, we can't eat because it has honey.
		It's bees.
unidentified		Those bees are slaves, man.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Whatever.
		It's okay.
		Whatever they want.
		You want to go that way.
		Honey is awesome.
		You fucks.
		Is there any nutritional benefit to being a vegan?
		Or is there deficits involved in it?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I think that's probably some foods that you're not getting that would provide micronutrients, micronutrition that would be beneficial to you in the long run.
		And yet the human body is so friggin' adaptable to any sort of dietary strategy.
		I mean, you know, you see eight-foot-tall Africans, you know, they go play in the NBA that grew up on, you know, 500 calories a day in cow patties.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		You know, during the Irish potato famine, people live for six weeks on shoe leather and seaweed.
		I mean, the human body is pretty adaptable.
		So on that one hand, you can't describe the perfect diet.
		So if you're choosing to be vegan and that's what you want to do and you're mindful about it, And you're not militant about it and not trying to convince everybody else that that's what they ought to do, then go for it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, that doesn't exist.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There's so few people.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		That's almost a requirement.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's the unicorn fart.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		A requirement of membership.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		There's a few plants that do have a full, complete amino acid profile, right?
		Like quinoa is one of them.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, there's great plants.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I wouldn't say they have a full amino acid profile.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What's lacking?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Well, if there's nothing lacking, it's the relative amounts that make the difference.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		So it's a protein efficiency ratio.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		The protein amino acid score that really determines whether a protein is exceptional.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		And that's where the meat and eggs and that dairy and things.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, someone was trying to describe that to me, the amount of broccoli you would need to get the same amount of protein and amino acids as an eight ounce steak.
		It's something insane.
		It's like 2 pounds of broccoli.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I don't think it's insane.
		I just think it's...
		Because those same people will argue that there's...
		I think it's on a per pound base.
		It's almost like it has the same amount of amino acids.
		I forget where I heard that.
		Some vegan cited that to me.
		And I know that broccoli does have some amino acids in it.
		You just have to eat a big bowl of it.
		And if you're a vegan, that's what you do anyway.
		So I'm not going to criticize that choice.
		I just think that...
		If you're missing certain amino acids, you better balance it with something coming from legumes or some other source.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You have to figure out what amino acids are lacking based on what plant protein you're taking in.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		The human diet was always based on a wide variety of things you were taking in.
		Not just one kind of thing, but something off of this shrub, off of this bush, out of this ground, and a tuber here, and some quail eggs here.
		It was always 200 different choices within a five-mile radius.
		Whatever you get your hands on.
		And that's where the insects came in.
		We don't talk about amphibians, but imagine living on frogs and snakes and eggs and wheatgrass.
		It's pretty amazing the variety of foods that we can eat.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So typically you start your morning off with butter coffee, with MCT oil?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Is that what you put in it?
unidentified		I don't.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I just eat regular coffee.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Just regular coffee?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I don't...
		I'll have buttered coffee every once in a while, but I don't feel like I need the calories to get my day going.
		I just want the cup of coffee.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You just want the caffeine.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I just want the caffeine, and I actually don't want to interfere with burning off my own body fat.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Not that it interferes with it, but that's 500 calories or 250 calories coming out of the coffee that otherwise is coming off my gut.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Interesting.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So, when you wake up in the morning, it's all dependent upon how hungry you are.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So, if you're hungry, maybe then you'll have some butter coffee.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yep.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And if you're not hungry, you'll just have regular coffee.
		Black.
		Black.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		No, a little bit of cream, but just enough to color it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And your first meal of the day is probably lunch?
unidentified		Yep.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And what is that?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Usually a salad.
		I have a big ass salad, I call it.
		And it's lots of greens and some form of protein.
		Might be salmon, might be chicken from last night's dinner.
		Might be tuna.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And what size?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like an 8-ounce portion?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		No, no, it's a bit.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No, I mean protein.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		No, not much protein.
		That's the other thing that I've realized over the years is that we don't need that much protein.
		And even if you're doing work in the gym, you know, you don't need 200 grams of protein a day.
		That's bullshit.
		You just can't process that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, what is that from?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's from the bodybuilder powerlifting mentality?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so that's from the muscle and fitness days, and that's from Dave Draper and his Freaking, you know, blender full of stuff.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Who's Dave Draper?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Oh my god, you don't...
		So Dave Draper is before your time, man.
		So he was one of the original...
		Southern California Blonde Bodybuilders.
		He was in every ad for shakes and mass gainers and things like that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Mass gain.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's all sugar, right?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		A lot of those things.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Oh, that's nasty stuff.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		That's just like cheap-ass protein and high fructose corn syrup.
unidentified		There he is.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, stay busy.
unidentified		Swole.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		On the beach.
		Hello, ladies.
		So that guy would advocate massive amounts?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but I mean, that guy, you know, when you can process, when you're taking in, you know, superhuman levels of steroids, you can process all kinds of protein.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Look at him today.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Is that today, Jamie?
unidentified		More recent, 2005. Still looking pretty good.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He's probably about 70 there.
		60 what?
		63. 63 right there.
		He's your age.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yolked as fuck.
		Look at him.
		Maybe he does a little steroids, too.
		What do you think?
		Could be, huh?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		So people needing protein, it's maybe women probably need 50 to 75, maybe 80 grams a day.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Even guys training fairly hard, no more than 130, 140 grams a day.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Now, what's the muscle and fitness mentality or the powerlifting mentality?
		It's like there's a certain amount of grams per pound of body weight that they describe.
		Yeah.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, that's all over the place.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		So it might have been one gram per pound of body weight or 1.5 grams per pound of body weight.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's like 200 grams a day for me.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Or, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		A gram, I'm 200 pounds, so I would have to have 200 grams of protein.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		That's a shitload of protein.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How much is a steak?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like a 12-ounce steak?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		50, 60. Jesus Christ.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So I'd have to eat four fucking steaks in a day?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		I mean, by the time you cook that down...
		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Might be less, right?
		What about eggs?
		How much is an egg?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Seven or eight per egg.
unidentified		That's it?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's why these guys would do a whole dozen eggs in their shake.
		You know, that'd be 70 or 80 or 90 or whatever grams of protein plus some powder in there.
		But, you know, what we learned a long time ago is the body really can't handle more than 30, 35 grams of protein at a sitting.
unidentified		Oh.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		So the rest of it turns into, you know...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Farts.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So if you're eating, that's one thing, if you've ever been around people who drink a lot of protein shakes and eat protein bars, their farts are brutal.
		Like bodybuilder type dudes.
		And that's just, they just, they have too much protein, right?
unidentified		Yeah.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Among other things, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		A lot of that is, you know, they haven't, who knows what's going on with their gut bacteria, too.
unidentified		Yeah.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		That's a lot of protein to put in there.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		They're probably, if they're eating that much protein, they're not eating Much in the way of vegetables.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And those muscle milk type supplements, although they are delicious, there's a lot of sugar in those damn things.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		All those bars, a lot of bars have a lot of sugar in them.
		It's a giant issue.
		Yeah.
		So you think that these guys, these bodybuilder guys or powerlifter guys that are operating on that inefficient method of one gram per one pound, if they had reduced it, they would still have the same amount of gains and maybe their body would operate more efficiently?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Are we talking on the juice or off the juice?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, okay.
		That's a good point.
		So if they're on steroids, they can process it.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Back to your point about I'm a hard gainer and putting on muscle is difficult.
		Most people who are overweight don't want to hear this, but putting on muscle is much more difficult than losing body fat.
		If you take a 165-pound guy and he says, I want to put on 20 pounds of muscle, ain't going to happen.
		You know, might put on 10 pounds of muscle, might put on 7 over a very focused period of time.
		It might have to work hard to keep it on.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Because that's the body also going, if you don't create on a daily basis my requirement to continue to maintain this muscle mass, I'm going back down to where I was.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		It seems to me that there's like a number of days or years or whatever it is that you maintain that body mass where it starts to become normal.
		Then your body says, well, this is what we weigh now.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And then you maintain it.
		But there's this touch and go period.
		Say if you weigh 165 and you put on that 10 pounds, like, boy, you got to keep pushing for a long time for your body to say, listen, this is what we weigh.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		We need all this power.
		We need all this horsepower.
		And we're going to be able to carry a lot of heavy shit all the time.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Did you bring your own honey?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Is that what's going on over there?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		No, no, no.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What is that?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		That's your honey.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I'm having some tea here.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		This guy's serious.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Brings his own honey.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		No, no, no.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But honey's good for you, isn't it?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		No.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Raw honey?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		No.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How dare you?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Who are you?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		It's not good for you.
		It's not going to kill you.
		That's one of those moderation foods.
		In this case, I put a couple of drops in the tea.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But I always hear it's really good, like raw honey.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Who do you hear it from?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Not the vegans, we know that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		People make honey?
		I don't know.
		It's something that I've always heard.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		It's not bad.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		High in sugar.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		It's a form of sugar, and if you overdo it, then it's probably not as wise a decision as to cut it back.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So we got to your lunch, your lunch with a big ass out with a small amount of protein, so maybe like four ounces of protein or something along those lines?
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Okay, with a piece of chicken or a piece of fish or something like that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And then what about dinner?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Dinner, I like to have a steak.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I got this wagyu short rib that I get.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You like that stuff, huh?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		It is so good.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But it's all fatty.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's the point.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You like that?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		That's the point.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Man.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Because you like fat.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		No, my diet is probably 55% of my calories come from fat.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But Wagyu is a lot of corn-fed animal.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		All right, so I make a little bit of an exception there.
		I can get grass-fed when I look for it at PC Greens, where I shop in Malibu.
		Or at Whole Foods or whatever.
		But this Wagyu is just so delicious.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You like a nice, tender, juicy, fatty steak.
		Is there any benefit?
		What are the health benefits of eating grass-fed meat and using grass-fed cow's butter?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's really interesting because one of the things I just kind of have to raise my eyebrows at is I hear about grass-fed whey protein isolate.
		So you have grass-fed whey protein.
		It's whatever they put in the drink.
		The reason you eat grass-fed cows is because the fatty acid profile is a more desirable fatty acid profile.
		The protein complement is the exact same in a corn-fed steak or a grass-fed steak.
		You just can't tell the difference in the protein.
		It's the fatty acid profile that's different.
		The other difference might be the residual hormones and antibiotics.
		So when they raise corn-fed beef and they start from an early age, That's not the cow's native diet, so the cow tends to get sick, get infected, and so they have to use antibiotics, and sometimes they use growth hormone just to get them off the lot quicker.
		So, but the reason to have grass-fed beef is the fatty acid profile is much more desirable, and yet it's still fat, so it's just a couple of different versions of stearic acid and different versions of the saturated fat that you're talking about.
		So it's not even...
		Like this life-or-death decision that you make, like if I have a wonderful cut of corn-fed steak, I'm going to die.
		If I have grass-fed, I'll live forever.
		These are just choices, and if you can find a great-tasting grass-fed steak, by all means have it.
		If you can find a relatively inexpensive, you know, line-caught wild salmon, that's probably a better choice for your stated goals than some farm-raised salmon.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So, yeah, the farm-raised salmon, it's problematic because of their diet, right?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		But just back to the grass-fed thing.
		So when you get to grass-fed whey protein isolate, whey protein isolate is 90% to 95% protein.
		They took all the fat out of it, so it doesn't matter.
		All the good fatty acid profile that was in it because it was grass-fed is now gone.
		So it's like a marketing strategy to call it grass-fed whey protein isolate.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So it's not bad, but it's not any better?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		No, it's definitely not bad.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		It's not demonstrably better to have grass-fed whey protein isolate versus just regular.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What about grass-fed butter?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There's fat in that, right?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, absolutely.
		That's all fat.
		And there's an example of, that's the exact opposite.
		Now they took all the protein out of it, and now they're just giving you fat.
		So grass-fed butter is a great choice.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And what is the difference in the profile, the fatty profile of grass-fed butter versus...
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Same as it is with the meat.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		When is that difference?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I can't cite the research and I can't cite the breakdown of the fatty acids.
		It's just that they're more appropriate for...
		A cow that was raised on its native diet, glazing grass.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Jamie, you pull it up.
		What is the difference between the fat?
		Because I've heard it, but I can't cite it when somebody wants to bring it up.
		I prefer the taste of grass-fed meat because it's a leaner, more dense meat.
		It's more like a wild game than a ribeye from a cow that's fed corn.
		But you're saying that health-wise...
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Grass-fed ribeye is pretty good.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Pretty good, yeah.
		It's more of a fatty cut.
		But you're saying there's not that much of a difference in terms of the health benefits.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		If you can get, again, a humanely raised cow that was not given antibiotics or hormones, you're pretty close to where you want to be.
		And so I'm suggesting that the fatty acid profile isn't going to be...
		It's hugely different.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Isn't the issue with cows that when you give a cow grains, their body isn't designed to process it, so they develop a lot of infections?
unidentified		Correct.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		And that's why they use the antibiotics.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So isn't that, I mean, just automatically problematic if you have a grain-fed cow?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Not necessarily.
		So a lot of times you'll have a cow that was raised on grass and then finished with grain.
		And there's different types of grain.
		So it's not automatically problematic.
		It could be.
		But if you look for the cows that were pastured up until a certain point, and again, they might have been grass-finished.
		Sometimes they'll say grass-fed, and they won't tell you it was grain-finished.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And when they say green finished, how much time do they spend feeding them green?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Just a couple weeks.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's it?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So they just fatten up for the last couple weeks before the end.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yep.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And so they don't have enough time to develop a lot of the massive issues that they might have if they were corn fed their whole life.
unidentified		In theory.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		In theory.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So you'll eat a little bit of steak.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Steamed vegetables.
		That's when I have my big plate of broccoli or...
		Broccolini or partial spouts or whatever.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And what about drinks?
		What do you drink?
		Mostly just water?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I used to drink wine at meals.
		I don't drink a lot of water.
		I'm soothing a throat today with this, but normally I wouldn't drink much water.
		Much water during the course of the day.
		I let my thirst mechanism, you know, just sort of tell me what to do.
		And I don't get thirsty that often.
		I mean, I used to go on 50-mile bike rides and not get thirsty.
		Really?
		Yeah, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Is that just weird?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Just you?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I know other people like that, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		A lot of people are of the belief that you should drink water all the day, so you have to pee all the time because you're flushing your body.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I don't buy that at all.
unidentified		No?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I think it's unnecessary.
		It's probably, yeah, it's a...
		I definitely don't agree with that concept.
		You might want to do it once in a while just to do your own little cleanse or whatever, but I don't think as a rule of thumb that there's any particular health benefit to that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What about the toxins, man?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		What about the toxins, man?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Dude, fleshing the toxins out, man.
unidentified		I didn't pee clear.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I need to drink more.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's bullshit.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I think so, yeah.
		I know a lot of people who still do it.
		I know a lot of people at the gym bring their gallon jug of distilled water in or whatever the hell it is.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, distilled water is real bad, right?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		ROS water, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, because when you drink distilled water, there's no minerals in it.
		It actually robs your body of minerals because it takes the minerals out, right?
		So don't drink unless you're thirsty.
unidentified		No, no, no.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I mean, that's my rule of thumb, and I don't.
		So what do I drink with meals?
		Until recently, I was drinking wine with meals.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How come you stopped?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		So I've written a lot about wines over the years and how the research shows that wine drinkers live longer than teetotalers.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Resveratrol.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		All that stuff.
		And there's a lot of good, compelling evidence to drink wine.
		And yet, at the root of the matter, wine is still a source of ethanol.
		Ethanol is toxic to the body.
		So you're putting a toxin in your body every time you drink wine.
		Started to look at that in my own case and realized that I wasn't sleeping as well as I wanted to.
		And sleep's a big thing for me.
		But I was a two-glass-a-night wine drinker for 30 years.
		It wasn't dinner if I didn't have wine.
		And...
		So I went on a 30-day, which I do often.
		I went on a 30-day experiment of one, see what happened.
		Cut out the wine.
		Felt great.
		Slept better.
		And I was never really...
		I never woke up hungover.
		I mean, I've never...
		My kids have never seen me...
		My kids are 22 and 25. They've never seen me drunk.
		My wife has never seen me drunk.
		It's not like I was abusing anything.
		But I had this regular pattern of drinking wine.
		So I went off it, and I realized that I was...
		Benefiting from it.
		So for the last year and a half, I really cut back on the wine.
		I still have a glass or two.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What was the benefit that you watched?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I didn't wake up at three o'clock in the morning and then not be able to get back to sleep for an hour.
		That was the big thing that I noticed for myself.
		I would fall asleep really easily, and then I would wake up two or three in the morning and have a tough time getting back to sleep.
		And that sort of subsided when I went off the wine.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So that's the result of the effect of alcohol.
		Your body processes the alcohol.
		The alcohol is a depressant.
		It knocks you out.
		Your body processes it.
		And then once it's done processing it, then your sleep cycle is disturbed, so you wake up.
		Is that what happens?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Chinese medicine says that that's when your liver is working at 3 o'clock in the morning.
		So maybe that's when the real processing is starting to take place.
		I'm not a huge adherent of Chinese medicine.
		I'm not suggesting that it's not an important thing to look at.
		But in my case...
		The sleep benefited tremendously.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Did you feel any better other than the sleep?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, I think so.
		I mean, I didn't really notice.
		Like I say, I never woke up hungover.
		I always felt refreshed waking up.
		But I didn't like not getting that sleep and having to...
		I'm managing stress and I have a fair amount of stress.
		Just business stuff in my life.
		When you can't sleep at 3 o'clock in the morning, that's when all the business shit starts to circulate in the brain.
		How's this going to happen?
		How are we going to do that?
		I didn't like that part of it.
		So a year and a half, I went without drinking wine, and I replaced it with...
		I used to be a prodigious beer drinker before I gave up the grains.
		And I found a couple of non-alcoholic beers that I like.
		And so, again, for me, it was about the habit, the ritual of dinner.
		So I couldn't just drink water.
		I hate drinking water with dinner.
		So...
		I wanted to find something to replace the ritual part of the wine, and I found these non-alcoholic beers I drink.
		So I have one with dinner at night, maybe one and a half.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Are these non-grain made?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		No, they're made with grains, but they don't affect me to any extent.
		And so that's what I've been doing for the last year and a half.
		And then recently, I came across a guy who was looking at paleo wines.
		And I said, I'm going, dude, have you coined a new phrase?
		This is a marketing ploy?
		No, there's these wines.
		There are 300 wineries in the world among the tens of thousands.
		That don't use additives or sulfites or colorants or formaldehyde or any of the shit that we put in wine in this country.
		So if you look at how wines are made in the US, some of the more desirable wines from a nose perspective have all kinds of crap in them.
		And there's like 87 approved additives that the government allows US winemakers to put in their wines.
		And that's the shit that causes you to get to hangover and feel bad from drinking the wine, particularly the red wines, and wake up in the middle of the night and not be able to sleep.
		So this guy approaches me one day.
		Actually, I met him at a conference.
		And he started to tell me a story.
		I'm not buying it.
		You know, you've got these wines that won't cause you to fall asleep or won't cause you to wake up in the middle of the night.
		He goes, I was like you, Mark.
		I gave up drinking wine.
		And I love wines, but I gave them up because I didn't like what it was doing to me.
		And I found these new wines.
		So he sources wines from around the world.
		That are made in wineries that don't use any of these additives.
		And he gave me a case of them to try different brands and different things.
		And none of them from the US. They're all from Europe or South America or whatever.
		And these are wineries that have been around for 300 years.
		They just never bought into the concept of adding shit to wines.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		And, you know, I've realized some of these wines I can drink and enjoy and feel a little bit of taking the edge off and then go to bed and have no ill effects at all.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		So I'm sort of opening my mind to the fact that there's some paleo-type wines out there that don't have the additives in them that, consumed in moderation, are probably enjoyable and potentially healthful.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That term paleo seems to be a loaded term because people connect it with the idea of the Paleolithic era and what people ate at that time, but we're not talking about that when you're talking about paleo wines.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I know, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You know what I mean?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's a weird term.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and he doesn't really use the term.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		He uses...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Natural?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		But the market to which he was catering at the time...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The paleo community.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		It fits the paleo community, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		It's almost like they need a better word than paleo because it's not necessarily even what people ate during the Paleolithic era.
		You're just reducing grains or eliminating them and concentrating on fats.
		That's not necessarily what people ate during the Paleolithic era.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I mean, that's one of the great misnomers the general public has about the paleo diet, is that If a caveman didn't eat it, then we shouldn't eat it.
		Well, none of this stuff existed in caveman's time.
		Nothing that we eat, even the stuff we get out of the ground or off the trees, didn't exist then.
		It's all been manipulated by farming and whether it was inserting genes.
		It wasn't inserting genes, but we still did genetic manipulation of foods to get them sweeter and more protein or whatever.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Maybe it's a loaded term.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Maybe we need a new term.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Something like primal, maybe?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, Primal Blueprint.
unidentified		Whoa!
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Hey!
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		That's a good one.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Maybe you should run with that.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I'll try it.
unidentified		I'll see.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Primal's probably better than Paleo, right?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I thought from the beginning.
		I started my project writing the blog in 2006, and I knew early on I wanted a brand that was sort of unique and separate from Paleo.
		I thought Paleo had too much baggage from Caveman on it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		And Primal sort of has a primary, you know, first importance kind of thing as well as...
		As well as going back to primal times and primal urge or whatever.
		So hence the term primal blueprint and my primal fuel and my food products, primal kitchen.
		They're all kind of based around that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So these additives that they're putting in wine, it's just from an economic standpoint?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It allows them to process the wine?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		No, no, no.
		It's from a consumer demand point of view.
		So, you know, when you get some of these...
		I don't want to name names, but some of my favorite, really expensive California wines that I used to love because of the way they tasted.
		They were thick and rich looking and, you know, oaky and all this.
		It's just all additives, all crap they're putting in there because that's what the consumer thinks is going to make for a sophisticated wine.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And all that is chemical additives that fuck with your body.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
unidentified		Not all.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I mean, enough that they all do.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Wow, that's bizarre.
		I never would have thought that.
		When I think of wine, I thought wine is just fermented grapes, and they go through a process, and they store it.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		My friend Maynard makes wine.
		I need to contact him.
		You know the band Tool?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Maynard, the lead singer of Tool, he has an awesome wine company, Caduceus Wine.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Do they make their own wine, or do they sub it out to somebody else?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He makes his own wine.
		He grows his own wine.
		He's fucking crazy, though.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		I mean, I know a lot of people that grow grapes in Malibu, but none of them make their own wine.
		They truck it out to some distillery.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And when they truck it out, this guy takes it and throws a bunch of shit.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Well, whatever.
		The grower of the grapes who's got his own label will say, I want it to have these properties.
		It's got to be this color and this thick.
		And sometimes if the grapes don't...
		I mean, a lot of the stuff comes from the—a lot of the tannins in wine come from the grape skin.
		And to get the deep, deep, deep, deep, rich color, you have to mash the grapes up and the skin up even more and more and more.
		So more of that tannin.
		To get the red— The deep red colors in the wine, they have to provide more of the skin, and that's what's causing a lot of the tannin.
		So for some people who have issues that you hear about the histamines in wine, again, that's the marketplace demanding a deep red wine.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So it's the color issue.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		It's part of a color.
		It could be color, could be, again, some of the, you know, adding sugar to the wines.
		A lot of the U.S. wines have a lot of sugar in them, like a fairly high sugar content.
		The guy I'm talking about here who led me down this road and sort of opened my eyes to this, he's been in ketosis for two years, and he couldn't drink wine because the sugar would take him out of ketosis.
		The sugar and wine.
		So that's sort of one of the reasons he got started on it.
		He was a lifetime wine drinker, grew up in wine country up in Sonoma, and had dealt in the business and sort of left it because he got disenchanted and then came back when he discovered that there are these wines that have no sugar, that have no, you know, minimal sulfites.
		I mean, all natural fruits and vegetables have some amount of sulfites, but not added, no added sulfites.
		And none of these 80 or so approved added ingredients that can affect the color and the smell and the thickness.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That is really interesting.
		That's something I never even considered.
		I never even thought there was additives in wine.
		I just thought it was just grapes.
		I thought it was pretty simple.
		Is there American companies that do this?
		Is there anything local?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I don't know.
		The things that he's given me are...
		All from other countries.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That sounds so counterintuitive that we grow so much wine in California, but to get wine without any shit in it, you'd have to get it from Europe because we're so concentrated right now, at least this part of the country is, on natural foods and grass-fed beef and organic vegetables.
		The fact that we would have wines that almost primarily...
		That's nuts.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Oh, it is.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		And it may be that he hasn't sent me any that are from the U.S., but most of these are from other...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Where would you order something like that?
		I want to try that now because I like wine.
		I love red wine.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Dry Wine Farms is the name of the company.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's dry wine.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Dry Wine Farms.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		All right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Dry.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I always think of dry as like...
		That's like the kind of white wine that people like.
		Dry white wine, right?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Hmm.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I just never would have believed that it was the additives that are causing all those issues.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Well, so now we're back to that initial discussion we had about it's what you don't eat that really affects you more than what you do eat.
unidentified		Yeah.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		You're eating appropriately grown cuts of meat and organic vegetables and you're cutting out the industrial seed oils, cutting out the sugar, cutting out the processed grains and some of the other grains.
		And in their place, you're cutting out, in this case, crappy wine and substituting...
		Fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, fowl, eggs, nuts, seeds.
		And now we have, you know, again, if we want to enjoy life, and that's one of the things that we might consider an enjoyable part of life is partaking of a glass of red or white wine with dinner.
		Now it's kind of back on the menu for some people.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's interesting.
		That's really interesting.
		But it's not necessarily on the menu for you.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		No, so, and having said that, I'm not finding myself back in that situation where I'm drinking wine with dinner again, because I still recognize for myself that it's the ethanol.
		Intuitively, I don't like putting that amount of ethanol in my body on a regular basis.
		So once in a while, as a hormetic insult, if you will, it's fine.
		The body will adapt to it and use it to its benefit, but on a regular basis, probably.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So just the sheer alcohol content of wine was causing an issue.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It wasn't just the additives.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		No, so the additives were probably causing the issue because with these wines, I wasn't waking up in the middle of the night.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		So I felt as if I hadn't had the wine.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So what's the ethanol?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Ethanol, that's the alcohol.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		That's the form of alcohol in the wines.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right, but it's not the additives.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		No, no, no.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		That's what you're trying to get at, is ethanol is the alcohol in the wine.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's what gives you lip.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Right, that's not what's being added.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But you had decided that it wasn't the ethanol that was giving you the issues.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		No, it wasn't the ethanol, but I still didn't like the idea.
		It's not about the issues as much as it's just...
		It's like I can consume a fair amount of sugar over the course of a day and not gain weight and not have it affect my blood sugar.
		I just choose not to because I know it's bad for me.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So even like a glass of wine...
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Once in a while is fine.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, once in a while is fine.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But hasn't it shown that there's some longevity benefits to it?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Do you think that's the resveratrol, which is an antioxidant?
unidentified		No, I don't.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I think...
		I think I could be wrong, but my interpretation of some of these studies is that you take two cohorts of people, each of whom have a shitty diet and are going to die of heart disease in large numbers.
		And you give one of the cohorts two glasses of wine a night, and you give the other cohort none.
		And over time, you look at the two groups, and you realize that the group that had two glasses of wine a night didn't have as many cardiac events.
		Probably because their blood was thinned from the wine or something, you know.
		It's not that it's bestowing longevity on these people.
		It's that they're not dying at the same rate from their shitty diet.
		Because my guess is it's probably some artificial blood thinning that's happening or something like that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Huh.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But why is it sort of conventional wisdom that it's resveratrol?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Well, resveratrol is one of the components of wine.
		But you would have to drink...
		You know, 750 glasses of wine to get the amount of resveratrol that you can get in a resveratrol capsule.
		There's not a lot of resveratrol in wine.
		There is some, and it's a well-studied, you know, component of wine.
		In fact, there have been companies founded on just providing resveratrol as an anti-aging nutrient.
		But there's not a lot of resveratrol in wine, and I don't think any of these studies have ever pointed to the fact that it's the resveratrol in the wine that you're drinking that's conferring longevity on this group versus that group.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Do you think there's any benefit in consuming exogenous ketones?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Uh...
		No, not on balance.
		I think if you're an athlete and you're looking to maximize performance, there might be places in which you could consume exogenous ketones.
		First of all, if you're not keto adapted, it's a joke.
		There's no reason to take exogenous ketones.
		If you're fat adapted and keto adapted...
		There may be a reason to take exogenous ketones in an event instead of sugar.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like, say, if you're going to run, do something, some sort of endurance event?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		To my knowledge, there aren't many great tasting ketone salts.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		So now you've got a palatability issue as well with a lot of these things.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Have you tried them?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No, I haven't.
		But I've been fascinated by ketogenic diets over the last couple of months.
		I've been really considering trying to...
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I mean, there's some potentially good science there, but I can't give you a practical application right now where it would...
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Where it would work, other than in some elite event where somebody was, you know, racing all out for hours and was completely keto-adapted prior to the event and, you know, was so good at using ketones in the brain that they could hold off bunking for another hour or two.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So they would take some sort of a ketogenic supplement in their water or something along those lines?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Would probably be the easiest way to do it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So if you were going to recommend to someone to try to make your body more fat-adaptive, what would be the first step?
		Just to radically cut back on sugar?
		Should you do it slowly?
		Should you taper off?
		Or should you just give them up?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Either way, I mean, it's easier, I think, if you just give it up, you just go all in.
		If somebody's been depending on sugar your whole life and you're doing 400, 500, 600 grams a day of carbohydrate, And then, you know, going down to 100 or 120 is going to be painful for the first couple of weeks.
		And when I say painful, we have this thing called the low-carb flu.
		So you go from your body, your brain, expecting to have you refuel every meal for, you know, every couple of hours every day with carbohydrate to then...
		We're reducing it down to 120, 150 grams a day.
		The brain starts to go, what's going on here?
		I mean, the muscles haven't yet built the metabolic machinery to burn fat.
		They're working on it, and they're upregulating.
		The genes are turning on to create the enzymes, but they're not there yet.
		It takes about 21 days to do this.
		So in the process, the body's expecting sugar.
		And if you're trying to work out at the same time, you're going to be screwed because now you have your sugar depleted and you haven't learned how to burn fat yet.
		And the brain is depleted.
		And so the brain goes, I'm foggy.
		I can't think.
		I've got a headache.
		I'm dizzy.
		This sucks.
		I'm going to eat a bagel.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's what happened to me when I did the Atkins diet for a while, many, many years ago.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		A lot of people get derailed the first or second week.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		So you have to not train during that time.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Not train?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Cut it way back.
		Don't do any glycolytic training.
		So just ride the bike easy, go for a hike, or do some stuff like that.
		But you can't really train hard when you're doing that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And how long does it take to adapt?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		So one or two weeks, people get through that fog, and then they'll be good.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I have a book called The 21 Day Total Body Transformation, and the 21 days is about how long it takes To get 80% of the benefits of becoming a fat-burning beast, is what we call it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		A fat-burning beast.
		I like that.
		So you've got to commit to it, and you've got to assume there's going to be an adjustment period.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah.
		And in that adjustment period, it's not going to be...
		I mean, for some people, it's minimal.
		They just feel a little bit low energy or whatever.
		Other people get headaches and woozy because that's the brain, again, recognizing that there's no glucose, and it hasn't yet built the metabolic machinery to burn ketones, even though the body may be producing ketones.
		And when the body produces ketones, you can either burn them as fuel or you can spill them out in the urine and the breath.
		So a lot of people who have not yet become keto adapted, like a sugar burner, a carbohydrate dependent person, will still produce ketones if you skip two meals.
		You know, you wake up in the morning, you're basically fasted if you're a sugar burner, and you wake up, and if you don't eat breakfast, you might smell ketones on that person's breath, or they might, you know, pee on a strip and it shows a certain amount of ketones in the urine because the body's just getting rid of the ketones because it can't burn them.
		It doesn't have to burn them yet.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So consuming exogenous ketones doesn't accentuate a ketogenic diet or doesn't accelerate it?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I don't know enough about the clinical trials that are going on right now, but my assumption would be that if you take exogenous ketones and you're not fat-adapted and keto-adapted, it's not going to necessarily prompt you to become that unless you've...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so there's no shortcuts to that transitionary period between a glucose-based diet and a fat-based diet.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There's just going to have to be a transitionary period.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I think so, because like I say, I think if you skip a meal, you're producing ketones.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		And you're pissing them out, so adding more ketones is just going to piss out more ketones.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		By the way, you're going to be a superstar when you piss on the strip, because you've got your ketones plus the exogenous ketones.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		But this all starts in great.
		Yeah.
		But I feel like shit.
		But the strip says I'm doing great.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		Yeah.
		Okay, so the strip's not nearly as important as the actual physical performance and the way you feel.
		So no matter what, you're going to have to go through a trip.
		So if you, like, say, look, just me, a guy like me, if I had a shitty diet, I'm eating spaghetti all day, you would recommend that for a couple of weeks, I just take it real light and make this adjustment.
		Make a commitment to making the adjustment in the diet.
		Doing a fat-based diet with very low sugar, very low carbohydrates, cut out the grains entirely.
		You get all your carbohydrates from celery and lettuce and vegetables and some fruits and just make a commitment to it.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		And part of that commitment is I'm not going to train like a banshee for the first two weeks.
		I'll train, but I'll do easy stuff.
		The first chapter in our book, which should be about diet, It's about training and about low-level training.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And which book?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		The Primal Endurance book that just came out a few weeks ago.
		The first chapter should be about diet because that's clearly one of the most important parts.
		But we talk about training first because we figured enough endurance athletes would read the book that if they read the diet part first, they would continue training at the high level and embrace the diet and then fall apart.
		So we've got to get the training dialed in first for those people and say, here's why you have to cut back.
		Here's why you can't exceed a heart rate of 180 minus your age for the first couple of weeks training when you're doing long-distance stuff.
		And at that rate, you'll be burning mostly fat.
		So you'll be accentuating what's going on on the dietary side, which is restricting carbohydrates, and providing more fat, more healthy fats for your body, and creating more mitochondrial biogenesis and upregulating those mitochondria to become efficient at burning fat.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How long does it take before your body reaches the optimum level of mitochondria?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I mean, we see athletes who get 80% of their benefit the first three weeks and then another 10% over the next six months.
		And then the final benefits kick in the last six months because sometimes your top-end power diminishes as you become fat-adapted.
		You've got to get that top-end power back, but that's what we build in the gym.
		So it's a longer process.
		So it's like 80%, and then six weeks later, another 10%, and then six months later, another 10%.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So in the course of a full year, you're still slowly adapting.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I think within a year, maybe a little bit more than a year, if you do everything right, you can be this completely rebuilt engine.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's amazing.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And then there's got to be some benefits in terms of longevity, in terms of your ability to do work over long periods of time.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Well, one of the things that's most compelling is, again, coming from an endurance community where marriages fall apart because the guy would rather go for a 100-mile ride on Sunday morning than stay in bed and cuddle with the wife.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		life?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's why marriages fall apart?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		That's one of the reasons.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I thought it was money.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Well, it is money.
		The $8,000 bike to go on the ride.
		So...
		Where are we going with that?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Longevity.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Marriage is fall apart.
unidentified		Yeah, yeah.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		So the longevity part, one of the things that happens is you train less.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		There's less total training time to get the results that you wanted because you're doing it methodically and you're not just putting it all out there every day and crossing your fingers and saying, well, I'm training as much as this guy, so I better be as fast or faster than he is.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		You're doing an approach that's very...
		It's scripted and detailed and methodical on one end of the spectrum.
		On the other end, it's also sporadic and fractal.
		It's like, I wake up today and I don't feel like doing what I had in my plan.
		Take the day off.
		Because if today's the day you're going to go hard and you feel like shit, do not go hard.
		There's no magic.
		There's no benefit.
		There's no points that you gain from doing it.
		In fact, it'll take you down the toilet.
		So...
		You learn to become intuitive about your training, and periodicity is one of the words we talk about, where you periodize.
		There's times when you're going very...
		Make your longer workouts longer and slower, and your hard workouts shorter and harder.
		And in the middle of these, be intuitive about how you feel.
		How much sleep did you get?
		Are you fueled appropriately for today's event?
		Do you have a...
		Is there a purpose to today's workout other than just go accumulate miles because I'll feel like shit.
		I'll feel like a slob if I don't.
		And if you could get around all that, you can start to see some amazing benefits with less pain and suffering and sacrifice, less being beat up, less burnout, less time.
		And presumably, if you do it right, better results anyway than the old paradigm.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So that's going to cause a real dilemma with people that are obsessed with the work rate, obsessed with just doing more than anybody else, obsessed with proving to themselves that they push themselves, they put in all those hours, and looking at it, they look at their, you know, a lot of people have apps on their phone that measure how many...
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I know.
		Oh, shit.
		It's 9 o'clock at night.
		We just finished dinner.
		Honey, I only have 16,000 steps.
		I'm going to walk back to the hotel or the house.
unidentified		Right, right, right.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Because I've got to get to 20. It's bullshit.
		That stuff is so ridiculous.
		And yet, I was there.
		I was one of those people who lived my life based on the amount of miles I accumulated and measured my self-worth on whether or not I could hang with everybody I ever raced with in a workout.
		I never let anybody...
		Half-wheel me on a bike ride in any workout.
		And it was fun, I guess, and it was part of my lifestyle, but you've got to go back to the essence of why are you doing this?
		If you're doing it just to hang out, people used to say, hey, Mark, you're so disciplined, man.
		You're out there and you're riding 60 miles, 100 miles some days.
		You're running 10. You are so disciplined.
		And the joke is, I'm thinking to myself, are you fucking kidding me?
		I'm not disciplined.
		Discipline is going to work.
		And, you know, putting in a full productive eight hours and then finding a little bit of time to work out or maybe hang out with a family.
		It was so easy for me to get on the bike and go put some miles in or go for a run and shrug every other duty off.
		You know, and that's one of the dangers of being an endurance athlete.
		It's addictive.
		It's a very addictive pursuit.
		You are creating, especially if you're beating yourself up every day, you're creating endorphins, endogenous morphine-like substances that That sit on those same receptor sites, the pain-killing sites and the pleasure-giving sites, that you would inject heroin to achieve.
		Now you're just doing it naturally.
		And you're doing it every single day.
		And you crave it every day.
		And if you take five days off, you feel like shit.
		You go through withdrawal.
		So there's that part of it as well that we have to look at.
		Why do people do this?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, the obsessive aspect of it.
		The obsessive aspect of it and the addictive aspect of it.
		That's interesting, man.
		Well, listen, man, this has been probably one of the most informative and interesting podcasts I've ever done.
		I really, really appreciate you taking your time and coming here and sharing all this information.
		I'm going to have to listen to this fucking thing three or four times to get all of it and your book.
		So please tell us the book again, the name, and how we get it.
		Is it Amazon?
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's on Amazon.
		It's Primal Endurance.
		It's on Amazon.
		My website is MarksDailyApple.com.
		So a lot of the stuff we talk about here has been broken down into blogs.
		It's 4,000 posts over the last 10 years.
		Yeah, and encourage anybody to give it a go.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'm giving it a go, man.
		You've really convinced me.
		I'm sold.
		I'm going to radically reduce sugar.
		I'm going to cut out all my grains, and I'll keep everybody posted.
unidentified		Cool.
mark sisson ▲ ● ▼		I'll hold you to it, man.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Please do.
		Please do.
		I really, really appreciate it.
		Thank you very much, Mark.
		All right, folks.
		We'll be back tomorrow with Hannibal Buress.
		See you then.

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