Robb Wolf reveals his controversial pineal gland implant, blending humor with biohacking, while detailing his brutal BJJ training and gut-health-driven nutrition—like the 7-Day Carb Test—to optimize metabolism despite genetic predispositions. He critiques GMO crops and sugar’s role in fueling SIBO, linking inflammation to joint pain, and debates ibuprofen vs. Zyflamend for acute back issues, noting ketogenic diets may starve cancers like glioblastoma while enhancing chemo efficacy through hormetic stress. Wolf’s Wired to Eat approach highlights emotional barriers over physical ones in diet success, mirroring martial arts discipline, proving progress hinges on commitment despite perceived obstacles. [Automatically generated summary]
You know, when I was on here last time, I was at the end of a pretty big travel cycle, like doing military gigs and stuff like that, and I was pretty beat down.
And we've had...
Two kids since I think I was on the podcast.
And although that has beat me down, it's beat me down in a different way.
So I've just been at home and I can train, don't travel as much.
And so yeah, everything's been pretty good.
I do this gymnastics bodies programming a couple of days a week, a little bit of squatting, a little bit of deadlifting, pretty on point with the food, and then just getting the dog piss beat out of me at JITS like two to four days a week.
And, you know, like, I knew that Parker had some connections with, like, Bruce Lee and JKD, and I was always really interested in that.
So I went down to Long Beach, California and ended up tracking down some folks at the Inesano Academy and went and sparred with a kid that had been doing Thai boxing for like six months.
And he was 60 pounds lighter than I was, not particularly athletic, and he beat the crap out of me.
I mean, it was just like a man fighting a boy, only I was bigger and stronger and faster and he just destroyed me.
So I went back home, and I burned my brown belt, and I started studying some Thai boxing.
And it wasn't long after this that I encountered Brazilian jiu-jitsu for the first time.
And I had a little bit of a high school wrestling background, and I was a California state powerlifting champion, so I was a strong, athletic kid.
And again, like, this guy, like, submitted me 50 times in, like, two minutes.
And I was just kind of blown away.
But this was back in, like, 92. And unless you were in a major metropolitan area, you just couldn't find jiu-jitsu.
So I did a couple of weeks of it then, you know, around, like, 92, 93. And I didn't have a second jiu-jitsu session until, like, 2003. And again, it was, like, a month or something because...
At that point, the folks that were usually running these schools, like, they could barely keep them open.
They were at, like, 9 o'clock in the back of a karate school or something.
So it's only been the past couple of years that I've been able to be pretty consistent.
Like you think Nevada, you think desert, you think barren landscape, not very pretty, or pretty in sort of like a, hey, better bring water sort of a way.
It's still, you know, like tech in general, and this is maybe getting off in the weeds, but there's so much stuff that's just been built on speculation and eyeballs and nothing real that I'm still curious if like tech in general is going to make it.
You know, there was so much speculative money that went into that scene, and there's only a few entities like Facebook and Google and stuff that have really turned it into a money-making venture.
And a lot of these technology startups, there was a lot of money going into them, but it was just kind of predicated on growth or eyeballs, but they never really had a strategy towards profitability.
And so I'm just kind of curious how many of these things are really going to Yeah, I've always thought that was weird about Twitter.
So I've been following your Instagram feed, and you and your wife have been doing some crazy blood sugar tests after foods, post-carb meals, like beans and a bunch of other different high-carb foods.
I generally run really well keto or pretty close to it.
Fueling jujitsu is a little rough with that, so I maybe do about 75 to 100 grams of carbs on harder training days, and then other days it's pretty low carb.
My wife, though, is kind of like Wolverine.
Like, you just can't kill her.
And this is some of the stuff that I've learned in the past couple of years, this personalized nutrition, where there's a huge variation from person to person in how they respond to carbohydrates, foods in general, but in particular carbohydrates.
There was a study done at the Weizmann Institute in Israel a couple of years ago, and they basically put a continuous glucometer on folks.
It's a little disc that you pop on the back of your arm.
They did a full genetic screen on them, a gut microbiome test, and then they started feeding these folks different meals.
And the blood glucose responses were all over the place.
Like one person would eat rice and they would have a barely perceptible blood glucose increase.
Another person would be near diabetic from eating that rice.
Both genetics and gut microbiome seem to drive it.
And so if the gut is unhealthy, then that seems to make your blood sugar response worse.
And then conversely, if you eat in a way that makes your blood glucose response look pretty good, then the gut microbiome seems to shift towards what they consider to be a healthier profile.
Like, you know, some people can have a condition called small intestinal bacterial overgrowth where the bacteria are basically growing too far north in the gut, essentially.
And then whenever you eat something with carbs in it, it makes those bacteria grow in an inappropriate place and inappropriate way.
And it's kind of difficult to basically starve the bacteria in the foregut and then feed the bacteria in the hindgut.
And there are some...
Yeah, Chris Kresseron, he's one of the best people in the world probably in dealing with stuff like that.
But it's...
I'll put it like this.
In the last five years, we've learned more about the gut microbiome than we knew in the previous 50 years.
And like literally every month that goes by, we learn more and more and more.
But the clinical application of doing something to help somebody that's sick is not easy.
It's a pretty complex process.
A lot of people...
We'll experience a lot of improvement from just kind of a low-carb diet, but it doesn't work for everybody.
A lot of people may need some herbal interventions like garlic and different antimicrobial agents that help to knock that bacterial overgrowth back.
And it's a pretty challenging process, particularly if the person is really sick.
Just like reduced meal frequency seems to improve the gut microbiome and the overall gut health.
So this is some of the stuff that I think is going on with intermittent fasting, where instead of eating like six or seven meals a day and just constantly kind of keeping the gut inflamed, instead doing maybe one or two meals a day, pretty broad spacing, seems to have some great benefits for folks.
But I mean, the folks that really know a lot about it, like Rhonda Patrick, Walter Longo, they're really pretty adamant that in that fasting period, like you're doing nothing but water.
Again, this is just a really individualistic thing.
If somebody is a health coach or a doctor or healthcare provider and they see somebody that's struggling with something...
And then they're like, okay, so how are you eating?
They're like, oh, I'm kind of eating low carb.
Okay, so are you doing any artificial sweeteners or, you know, what have you?
And if they're doing something like this, then it could be something that is kind of kicking them out of the, you know, the insulin regulation that would work better for them.
A lot of people were talking about cleaning out their intestinal tract and, you know, you just got to get water up there, flush everything out, and people would, like, literally watch the tube and go, oh, I know what you're eating, and I'm like, what?
Certain drugs apparently are best when you stick them up your butt.
There's a girl named Neuro Soup.
I don't know if she's on YouTube anymore, but she had this whole detailed story about a DMT trip that she did where she took DMT up her butt and Went on like some five-hour journey into the netherworld because it goes directly in your bloodstream from there, right?
Yeah, it's that base and so you've got a non acidic deal like with your hand that base Kind of an asshole were we talking about you're making that hand signal, but I always wondered if it was good for you I'm like I just feel like you should leave that area like flood and water up there.
Yeah, I It seems like just skipping a meal here and there and just kind of letting it do its natural business seems like a pretty good thing.
The people that I encountered that did colonics, they seemed to be on kind of a merry-go-round with it, and they also were into some other really squirrely stuff.
Well, I know that people that have antibiotics, like people that are battling staph infection, have a horrendous time sort of reconstructing their gut biome.
And Rhonda Patrick detailed that on one of the podcasts that we did.
She had a tremendous staph infection, and it wouldn't go away.
And she actually wound up, one of the things that really helped it was the topical application of garlic.
And like the oregano oil and the garlic are really potent in general.
They kind of spare the healthy bacteria or what we would call the more beneficial bacteria.
But even that's not a universal story.
Like it can suppress some of the more beneficial bacteria in some situations.
So again, this is where...
If you think you've got something going on, it's probably smart to work with somebody that knows a little bit about what they're doing so that you've got a protocol, you can test it, see what the results are, and then we can make some decisions based off that.
If you're already in a compromised state and then you throw something like that in, you can end up worse.
Chris Kresser also has the Kresser Institute where he's certifying healthcare practitioners.
These are the folks that you want to check out.
Also, the Institute of Functional Medicine is a really good place.
Most of the doctors and healthcare providers that go through that functional medicine training are really well versed in looking at the This whole gut microbiome story.
But interestingly, they kind of pull it back and they've got this kind of evolutionary biology picture that they look at.
So they're thinking about sleep and your food and stress levels, social connectivity, and they really put all that stuff together in a pretty good way.
And they're not chasing symptoms or really trying to figure out root cause and then try to address that root cause and move forward.
And they're pretty good at figuring out, like, you've got 18 things going on.
Which is the one thing we need to address first?
And then we'll knock that out and go to the next one and the next one.
No, I mean, again, there's huge variability in that.
You have some people that when they add probiotics, like just like kimchi or sauerkraut, they improve immediately.
Like their clinical symptoms improve.
They feel better.
Maybe depressive symptoms improve.
They get leaner.
And then you have other people that everything they have going on gets worse.
And these are the folks that you start wondering if they have some small intestinal bacterial overgrowth.
Do they have some reactivity to these things called FODMAPs, which are fermentable carbohydrates that can, you know, make the gut microbiome kind of freak out.
And there's another layer to this, which is called small intestinal fungal overgrowth.
So there are people out there that have some sort of a persistent fungal infection, which doesn't get picked up on the general gut microbiome screening because they're looking at bacteria, not fungus.
So this is a whole other layer to the story that people may have had a years-long, decades-long fungal infection in the gut that is then disordering everything, causing inflammation.
And those are really, really difficult to deal with.
I mean, there's always an influence on the diet, but, you know, you could, you know, refined carbohydrates makes all this stuff grow better, and it disrupts the normal gut flora, it causes inflammation, but, you know, oftentimes people will go on a round of antibiotics,
the bacterial population gets pushed down, and then the fungal population, which is always there, but usually it's in some sort of a symbiotic balance with the other microbes, then the The fungal infection or fungal population can increase.
And this is where some people will go on a round of antibiotics and then they end up with some sort of a legitimate fungal infection, you know, like they can see it on their skin and the doctor will prescribe some antifungals for that.
But you can also have this happening kind of a low-grade subacute level where it's not bad enough where they're getting rashes and hives, but it's bad enough that it's making them sick and not kind of optimized.
Wow, it's just so hard to figure out what's going on with you.
I mean, it seems like for the average person that has a full-time job and family and all that jazz, it's probably incredibly difficult to get to the bottom of what your health issue is.
You know, the average time for diagnosis of an autoimmune condition or something like celiac disease is like 12 to 15 years.
So people are suffering.
They're suffering for a long time, and it's not the easiest thing in the world to pin down because the symptoms are so variable from person to person.
Now, if you go to a good doc, particularly someone, again, kind of functional medicine training, or they've got a little bit of this evolutionary biology perspective, they usually ask a set of questions and more questions so that they can kind of narrow down what's going on.
But if you're Kind of doing the Doc in the Box deal and you've got five minutes with this person, like they're just trying to figure out what's the script I'm going to write so I can move this person out and get to the next person.
Yeah, it would seem that the amount of time required to figure out what's wrong with a person would also be very expensive and likely not covered by a whole lot of health care plans.
Like, some of these functional medicine docs do a lot with pretty little, you know, but...
Some of what they're doing is a time investment.
Like, they'll do a two-hour history.
And if they can get the information, they'll ask, so, you know, what was your in-utero environment like?
Like, did your mom eat well?
Did they smoke?
When you were born, was it a vaginal birth or C-section?
Were you breastfed or not?
When was the approximate age of your first round of antibiotics?
Did you ever go on tetracycline for extended period of time for acne?
So they'll build a really comprehensive early life history and then try to march this thing forward.
And they'll ask you questions like, did you ever travel out of country?
Did you get some sort of a gut bug while doing that?
So there are some really important pieces, but a well-trained practitioner will rely a lot on the intake and then that will kind of inform where they go with the testing and And so the testing might be a little bit expensive, but you're not just casting around blindly.
Like because of that really thorough intake and kind of understanding the early life history and trying to ferret out if there's ever been like a big event that could be linked back to this health crisis, then they can really dial in the testing.
Then depending on what they get from that, they can make a treatment protocol, try the treatment protocol.
We were in Prince of Wales Island once, about a year and a half ago, two years ago, and it's really high up, and it's above the line where beavers are, and so you could take a water bottle and dip it into a lake.
My professor, Loren Cordain, the guy who kind of founded this paleo diet concept, he used to be a lifeguard at Lake Tahoe, you know, 30 years ago, 35 years ago.
And they would jump off the pier, dive down where it was super deep, really cold, open up their water bottle, fill it up, swim back up, drink it.
And you can't do it now because the lake has Giardia in it and a bunch of other weird things.
A good friend of mine, John Durant, did a book called The Paleo Manifesto, and he actually has a really interesting background, has kind of a pretty deep kind of religious studies background.
And he would talk about some of these food prohibitions in different religions and then what we know about it today.
And so things like shellfish, every once in a while we get something like red tide or, you know, the diatom, you know, overgrowth and these filter feeders would pull all this stuff in and then get loaded up with a toxin and it would kill you if you ate it.
And so these food prohibitions really had some pretty good wisdom to them in general.
But then there's also some super goofy things.
But it's pretty common across all cultures.
Like people would, you know, kind of build into their systems these prohibitions against different foods.
And oftentimes because of this kind of bacterial or parasitic deal.
Yes, but again, like from person to person, it really varies a lot.
So for some people...
You know, if you did something like a white potato and you're going to have a certain blood glucose response from it and you put a good whack of butter or olive oil or something in it, for one group of people, it would actually reduce and spread out the total glucose load.
So your blood sugar wouldn't go as high.
Your total insulin load would be lesser as a consequence.
And then there are other groups of folks that they will see an increase in blood glucose response and a really pronounced increase in insulin response.
The studies that have been done, they're quite uniform.
Yeah, like they get in and do a pretty good job.
So they're, you know, person eats X amount of carbohydrate, they add X amount of fat, they're kind of standardized for body weight so that you're diluting the glucose about the same amount from person to person.
And so the The best understanding that I've seen out of this is just that there's a pretty good variability from person to person as to how they're going to respond to that.
So it's not always a case where adding fat to a decently dense carbohydrate source is going to buy you anything.
For some people it is an improvement and for other people it's actually more of a problem.
For the recommendation, it's called the 7-Day Carb Test.
You do 50 grams of carbs, and that's the net carbs.
So all the fiber is subtracted out.
And so if you're doing something like black beans, it's a huge pile of beans because they have a lot of protein and fiber.
So those things are hard to do.
something white rice or, you know, like gluten-free bread or something would be a lot easier to do.
But you consume that.
You set your timer for when you're done with the meal.
Two hours later, you check your blood glucose.
And for my methods, I'd like to see that two-hour mark probably under 150 milligrams per deciliter for folks, which is pretty conservative.
But when we look at, again, some pre-agricultural people, they tend to have some really, really nice blood glucose responses sometimes.
And again, from this Weitzman paper, what we saw from that is if people control their blood glucose effectively over time, their inflammation drops, their gut microbiome improves.
And so you could have two people that have a very different response to, say, like rice or potatoes or something.
And one person, like my wife, it's kind of crazy.
She can just crush this stuff, and she does great.
And interestingly, she can eat a ketogenic diet and do great.
She can switch whatever fuel she wants to eat, and she does fine with that.
But if we keep that gut microbiome or the blood glucose response I don't know exactly what is wrong with me, but I don't handle carbs that well.
If I eat in a way that my blood glucose response looks like my wife, then my blood lipids look good.
My gut is healthier.
Everything else pulls into a good spot.
So even if you're not You know, from that genetically talented side of things, if you can make your blood glucose response look like that genetically talented person, then you should get most of the metabolic benefits.
You don't have as much latitude in your day-to-day eating, but I mean, you know, not everybody can flat-foot dunk a basketball or something, so you just have to take what you get, yeah.
And, you know, it's a tough thing for someone like me who, you know, like, I love the paleo diet.
I love that basic concept.
And I don't, in general, if you throw out the following, you say, most people should eat whole, unprocessed foods.
Not a lot of contention there.
But when you get a little bit granular with that, whole unprocessed foods could be beans, it could be potatoes, it could be sweet potatoes.
And for me, it's interesting.
Lentils, I do great with.
I can do a lot of lentils, do a decent amount of carbohydrate from lentils.
My blood glucose response is great.
If I do rice, white potatoes, sweet potatoes are better, but the rice and white potatoes, I look like a diabetic after eating that stuff.
So...
Even though that general recommendation of eat whole, unprocessed foods is generally spot on, there's still a lot of details and granularity in that.
You could be following a whole food diet, and for you, because of your genetics or the epigenetics, like your gut or maybe taking antibiotics in the past, you still may need to be really careful about the amounts and types of carbohydrates that you eat.
Well, so there's two levels to this, in my opinion.
The one level is the gut microbiome.
There's another level to it.
Certain antibiotics, the way that they work, they interrupt the transcription and activity of the ribosomes in Bacteria.
But our mitochondria are effectively a bacteria, like they have bacterial DNA and ribosomes.
And even though in general, like mainstream medicine says that antibiotics don't affect mitochondrial function, there's some pretty good papers that suggest that antibiotics can disrupt and damage mitochondrial function.
And when your mitochondria get sick, you die.
Like this is so much of what Rhonda Patrick Talks about with, you know, the benefits of fasting and having really good micronutrient density and whatnot.
And, you know, Tim Ferriss pinged me a question about why has Lyme disease gotten so much worse for people?
You know, used to it was kind of like catching a cold.
You know, he lived in upstate New York.
Everybody seemed to get it.
It wasn't something that would cripple people over the long haul.
And now you're seeing a lot of long-term problems, but my question was, is it really the Lyme disease or is it the damage to the mitochondria from being on antibiotics long-term?
Because the Lyme disease requires a really long treatment protocol with antibiotics.
NPR just had a piece on this, and it was some of the modern farming practices has killed off the predators that would normally knock the tick population down.
I forget, you know, I literally just kind of scanned it, but somebody that commented on there like, oh yeah, this is why we have free-range chickens on our property to basically keep the tick population down.
But part of what is suppressing that is that the free-range chickens are eating mice and stuff.
So the mice are a vector that allows the ticks to grow and populate.
Right.
You know, I just scanned this thing, but it was interesting, but it was suggesting that the kind of monocropping process of what we've done with modern agriculture has created this gap where we now have pests, like mammalian pests, like mice and moles, that are a vector for the ticks, and so they've just got more surface area, more real estate that they can live on, and so their population has grown.
I think I'd rather have a few coyotes every now and then, an occasional lost cat than fucking Black Plague running through your neighborhood in the suburbs.
There's quite a few of them, but one of the things that's important is that coyotes, when a coyote and a wolf breed, they're basically the same animal.
So even though there's variations in the way they behave, particularly in that coyotes can hunt alone and they can hunt in packs, whereas wolves almost exclusively hunt in packs.
I was going to figure out a way to kill her, but then I thought, well, if I kill her, Part of it, I don't want the babies to grow up and kill my chickens more, but then the other thing is I don't want to stop a mother from feeding their babies.
I felt like I fucked up.
I didn't secure the yard enough.
It was my fault.
There's a game being played, and the game is stay alive, and the chickens are playing a way easier version of stay alive than the coyote is.
So I felt like I had to give her that point.
Like, alright, you got that one.
It's on the board.
Don't eat my fucking dog.
I'll kill you all.
That's where it crosses the line.
My appreciation and love for my chickens is a one-thousandth of my cat.
Well, my wife convinced me to get a Rhodesian Ridgeback for a dog.
And he's a great dog.
He's about 105 pounds and like 2% body fat and I wouldn't want him getting mixed up in a pack of coyotes, but I think he could probably hold his own for a good bit if something went down.
Or if the female coyote is fertile at that point, and they're pumping out the pheromones, it'll lure the dog away, and they're like, yeah, you didn't get any action, and we're going to eat you.
They say that the thing about the pit bull is that it's not worried about dying the way a coyote is.
Like coyotes, because no one's feeding them, their whole thing is like stay alive, survive, you know, attack and kill something, but don't fight to the death.
Is like that Michael Vick story where the ones that would quit or the ones that would turn, that wouldn't engage in the fight, they would kill them and torture them.
It was horrible, horrible, horrible stuff.
But because of that really nasty, cruel, vicious way of approaching the dog breeding, what they get is this bloodline of ferocious warriors that just have no fear of death.
And when you get one that's 120 pounds like that, like, fuck, man.
These guys have done that with pit bulls, where it's just like, it looks like they're breeding it with, like, something else, but it's really just taking the biggest one.
The way I tried to explain it to someone was that it's it's kind of like people because people you know you have like Bridget the Midget and then you get Shaquille O'Neal.
But it is interesting, like, the wolf, coyotes, I guess, like, dingoes, like, there's a real uniformity there.
Like, nature ended up pushing some things where they've got this kind of snoutiness and they've got good hearing and good smell, but not like a hound dog, which has better smell, you know, it's interesting.
Whereas polar bears are some of the largest bears.
Sure.
Or Kodiak, Alaska bears, which is sort of a perfect example.
Because in Kodiak Island, those brown bears have access to massive amounts of protein in salmon and beached whales and deer and fawns and things like that.
Because they're just such a genetic...
They're such a genetically powerful creature as is, a brown bear, but then you give them all this massive amounts of protein and incredible food, and then on top of that, it's freezing fucking cold.
He did like three years of research on himself or on his own.
He said he went into museums and was studying the bone fragments and he put all of his information into a computer program and after five minutes it spit out something that said that like All of the two major dinosaur family trees are different.
This little sum is up here.
This is something like telling you that neither cats nor dogs are what you thought they were, and some of the animals you call cats are actually dogs.
This is one guy, and this news hit the waves today.
It's making big headlines all over about what does this information mean.
I was just thinking, as you guys were saying that about wolves, what if they find out next week that all dogs didn't come from wolves and they came from cats or something?
They had some real small ones that had different kinds of teeth that proved that they were omnivores and not necessarily like carnivores or herbivores or whatever.
Yeah, there was an article that I tweeted, and then a follow-up article earlier today, or last night rather, about scientific journals, about some scandals that are emerging from scientific journals, where scientific journals are essentially operating on a pay-to-play basis, and some of them, they're publishing these things without really vetting the information that's inside the papers.
And it just seems like any time money gets involved in stuff, people become assholes.
It's so anti-intellectual, you know, like fake news.
It's fake.
Like when Donald Trump says that you are fake news, like how are you allowed, like there should be like a list of things that would disqualify you from being the president.
Like as soon as you say that, you're like, okay, did you say that?
You're fucking with the entire information process.
Because of your own power and the inconvenience of someone telling you challenging things, you're fucking with the entire process of getting information to people.
It would be, I think, kind of cool to be 50 years down the road and look back at how all this plays out.
I don't know that it's going to be great living through it.
I have these thoughts that there's going to be the great North American states at some point.
The U.S. is like five different sub-countries after some horrific thing goes down.
But people are so...
entrenched in their ideology.
And it's just, it's virtually impossible to get somebody on the opposite side of a fence to have a discussion about anything and any meeting of the minds.
And it's interesting to me, I really think social media has kind of facilitated this.
Historically, you had like print paper for, you know, maybe a couple of hundred years and people would have, you know, community gatherings and they would talk about different topics.
But that meeting in person and the potential of pissing somebody off and having them like try to beat you to death or vice versa, there's a certain civility that occurs with that.
And within social media, you get those same deep held beliefs, but then you don't have the ramification of somebody wanting to kick the shit out of you if you, you know, start upping the ante on something.
And so like the discourse is just crazy.
Like, Like, there's just no discussion.
There's no middle ground.
There's no understanding.
And this last election cycle was really crazy.
And, like, it kind of broke me in some ways.
Like, I am way less inclined to invest in much of anything now.
Whereas before, I would kind of bleed a little bit for some social causes and trying to put some thoughts out about something.
Well, there are a lot of people that invest tremendous amount of time, a tremendous amount of time just engaging with people and fighting and arguing and insulting and attacking people online.
And I have gone to a bunch of different Twitter pages where I go, how many hours is this guy on?
And then I like check to see like, when does he start his tweets?
Like some mentally ill person has a computer and nothing's preventing them from just going after people and trolling people and attacking people.
What disturbs me is not just that, but also this natural human tendency that we seem to have where you have an idea in your head and then that idea is not just an idea, but it's your idea.
And you have to defend that idea, even if it's a preposterous idea like the Earth is flat.
And what you find out is that these people form groups, and other people who have also sort of adopted this preposterous idea and refuse to look at all at any evidence that points that that's a silly idea, and instead they dig their heels in and get confirmation bias from all these other people, and then they form these social media groups, Facebook groups, they go to websites, they get on web forums, and they start interacting with each other, and exclusively interacting with each other, and then Also, enforcing each other's beliefs.
Great job, man!
Good job attacking those shills!
Do you know if you think the Earth is round, you are a globetard?
That's the newest.
Jamie literally cringed.
Took him.
He had to step back, blink his eyes.
Yeah, you're a globetard.
That whole thing is because these people, someone said something that someone went...
People love to find secrets.
They love, like, this dinosaur thing is cool because it seems to be real.
The composition and what they end up being when everything is said and done.
So a fossil is not actually a piece of bone.
A fossil is actually a bone that was once in the ground that has been then filled with Limestone, calcium, and other kind of stone-like deposits over the course of many, many years.
The problem is some fucking idiot like this gets to talk about a subject that she's not educated in and no one is over her shoulder going, eh, that's not true.
Eh, that's not true.
And here's the thing to people that, you know, someone out there who buys into a lot of this stupid shit, you must be an expert in something.
You know, think about what you do for a living.
You know, like, think...
Here's a perfect example.
Like, if someone tried to tell me that...
Like, a lot of these chi-touch martial arts guys are too deadly to fight in the UFC. And if they make a video, they make a video about this, and I'm not there while they're making this video, so I can't talk to them, like, and stop them and pause them and go, nope, that's not true.
Nope, that's not, nope, that's not correct.
Nope, no, here's actually what happens when you get knocked out.
No, it is not a fucking chi-dispersion or dispersion technique.
You're not really interrupting the chakras flow.
No, it's a fucking concussion, stupid, and we can measure concussions.
We know about all the different variables in the blood when you can prove.
There's some new tests that I wanted to get into as well.
There's an institute now that's checking concussions, and they're doing blood tests on people to find out about concussions that they've had in the past and how those concussions have healed.
Obviously, I'm deviating from the path, but the point is, I know a lot about martial arts.
So if someone wants to do a video about martial arts, well, I am an actual martial arts expert, and I can talk to you about what you're saying that's incorrect.
I know about the history of it.
I know what works and why it works.
I know about torque and leverage and all these different variables.
But you could make a video without me being there, and you could ramble on, or not even me, any martial arts expert, and you could ramble on, and if someone doesn't know, they watch that, and they go, wow, that guy's dropping some truth bombs.
You know, I don't know if you saw this, but Matt Thornton, he's the Straight Blast GM founder, really brilliant guy, and they put together this...
I forget who it was, but it's kind of a philosophy department, and they put together this kind of white sheet on using Brazilian Jiu Jitsu in particular as a means of teaching critical thinking to students.
Because there's this really testable, verifiable process.
Does it work or does it not work?
And you can define what working means versus this kind of like, you know, chi, dim, mock, death, touch type stuff.
And so they've actually developed this curriculum around using this physical process of Brazilian jiu-jitsu and I think also mixed martial arts in general, but specifically jiu-jitsu as a means of teaching critical thinking skills.
And it's a...
I'll noodle on what the search terms for it would be, but it's really interesting.
It's something that I think helps pull this stuff together because you've got that kinesthetic element of people being able to feel.
Okay, you know, somebody gets mounted onto you.
Can you get them off?
No.
Well, look at this 110-pound chick.
She can dismount this person because she's using these techniques of leverage and balance and timing and all that stuff.
And so then you can throw these things out about, is this a verifiable process?
Yes or no?
And it is.
And so then you start laying the foundation of being able to create a good critical thinking process.
One of the things that I really love about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in particular is that it seems to be a study in variable absolutes.
Meaning that there's so many variables involved in like two people engaging with each other.
Say if two people are blue belts and they engage with each other and one person dominates that person with superior technique and knowledge and gets the tap over and over again.
You could take that same person who dominated that person and then put him in there with a guy like Jacare.
And he would just get manhandled, and it would look like he knows virtually nothing about Jiu Jitsu.
Because one person's, the variables, the understanding of all the complexities of the techniques, they have mastered them, and they have also built their body to a much stronger physical unit.
So all these are variables, but the absolute is getting the arm bar, getting the choke, putting someone to sleep with the choke.
Like those things are absolutes.
Like when you tap out, If you're not just like a person who gets scared really quick and taps out for no reason, which does happen, but you're thinking about someone who has some experience.
When you're tapping out, you're essentially saying, you've got me into this absolute position.
I'm at the point of death or massive injury, knees tearing apart, arms breaking.
So...
In doing those you encounter these variable absolutes in a way that is really kind of uncommon in our world outside of fucking car accidents and someone hitting you over the head with a baseball bat.
And you encounter the consequences of actions and movements in a way that sort of makes you really appreciate The overall variables of life and how important it is to take care of your health.
How important it is to know what you're talking about.
You know, if fighting, I always try to talk about fighting as if it's a language.
And if one person has like one word they yell at you, and they're like really good at going, shut the fuck up!
Like one expression.
Like that might work with some people.
It's not going to work with someone who's got a really good grasp of the English language.
Shut the fuck up.
And why should I shut the fuck up?
Because you would like that?
Why would you like that?
Because you're too stupid to have a conversation about something you don't know what you're talking about?
And that person's like...
It's really like drowning, which is the same way you would feel if Damien Maia was on top of you trying to choke you.
And I think the environment that it establishes, that it creates, and the way that effect that it has on your mind, where it's forcing you into these extreme problem situations and solving those problems, then understanding, where did that go wrong?
What can I do to my body to maybe strengthen myself so that I can stop that from happening?
Or maybe understand the position.
So two steps ahead, I recognize that if I go left, I run into that.
And if I go right, I run into this.
What I need to do is be patient, use my hips, hip escape, do this, do that.
And those variables and understanding those variables and having that database in your mind and recognizing that there's analogies that you could make in all sorts of avenues in life that where that would be greatly beneficial.
Well, and again, just another hat tip to Matt Thornton.
Like, he's just made this point that these alive arts, whether it's wrestling or boxing or Thai boxing, jujitsu, judo, there's kind of an authenticity with that.
You really can't bullshit.
It's kind of like, can you speak Spanish?
Okay, well, let's have a conversation in Spanish.
Let's read a Spanish newspaper and tell me what was going on with it.
Can you swim?
You know, Sam Harris, I think he wrote that piece, you know, Jiu-Jitsu was like drowning.
For a non-swimmer looking at someone treading water, it looks inconsequential, and you throw them in the water and they're going to die.
And so there's a real authenticity there that when you get in and do that, compared to some of the fantasy martial arts where there's an assumption that just going through some sort of paces is going to get you somewhere.
And it doesn't necessarily mean that it does.
And so there's this whole great feedback loop, and it crushes your ego.
And you have to really stay grounded if you're going to maintain through that process.
But it has so much value with every other facet of your life.
And I think one of the things that really helps to keep from being injured is I think it's very critical to strengthen the body.
And I think there's a lot of people that don't like to do that.
They just like to train.
And I was guilty of that for quite a while until I just mounted up a series of injuries that I almost couldn't deny anymore.
Particularly back injuries, but strengthening the body and sort of strengthening the overall structure in which you engage in these sort of things, meaning not just like strengthening the body by lifting weights and doing squats, but also by yoga, also by...
Doing really unusual exercises like kettlebell windmills and stuff like that really puts a very bizarre load on the spine in weird ways and it really strengthens the core in a substantial manner that allows you to deal with the pressure of certain positions without succumbing to the attempt by your opponent.
Like, I've been a big fan, again, of kind of this straight blast gym stuff of, you know, like, non-attribute-based training.
Like, how do you break that up?
So, like, if you're flexible or you're explosive or what have you, how much of that do you rely on versus trying to develop this stuff where you've got a game that you could do whether you're 40 years old or 80 years old?
Like, how do you play back and forth with that to, you know, optimize that process?
That's a real good question, and I think a good study is Roy Jones Jr. And Roy Jones Jr., in his prime, was probably the most attribute-based fighter of all time, with substantial attributes.
His speed and his style, the movement in which he used inside the ring, was really very difficult for people to handle.
But as soon as that went away, his physical attributes sort of started to deteriorate.
His career declined substantially.
He went from being the best in the world to two years later people wanted him to retire.
And there's a bunch of variables that could have happened in that effect.
I think some manipulation of hormones.
I'm just speculating, but I believe steroids are probably involved in him moving up from light heavyweight to heavyweight, where he beat John Ruiz for the heavyweight title and was jacked at 200 pounds, shredded.
And then went down and fought Antonio Tarver and looked listless and soft and didn't look as fast.
And I think a lot of that was his body responding to the fact that his hormone levels were off.
And I don't know if he was checking that stuff and I bet he probably wasn't.
I bet he just had lost too much weight and dehydrated himself too much getting down to that 175 pound limit again.
So Tarver knocked him out and then Glenn Johnson knocked him out after the Tarver fight and it was bad.
You know, he would just leap in on you and plop, and you'd see guys get hit, and then boom, the right hand would be behind it.
He was so fucking fast.
So when he was young, he beat Bernard Hopkins, and he beat him pretty handily.
When he was older, Bernard Hopkins beat him, and beat him pretty handily.
And Bernard Hopkins was always older than him.
So when he was young, Bernard Hopkins, who had that very defensive-based style, keeps his hands up very high, very technical, couldn't deal with the speed of Roy Jones Jr. He just was ridiculous.
But as soon as Roy lost a step in his speed, then his style's not really the best style.
The best style is the most technical style.
And you can do that most technical style with extreme attributes.
So I would agree with them that the best thing to learn is the proper way.
Learning all the techniques, like learning good defensive posture, good hands up when you're throwing strikes, good movement and footwork, and not just relying on freak athleticism.
What do you think about the really grip-dependent games, you know, like all the Spider Guard and all that stuff?
Like, I see these guys doing really amazing stuff, but it seems like their hands are broken in a pretty young age.
And, I mean, maybe that's something that you burn just because you've got a competitive career and then you've got to kind of shift games.
But then you have someone like Kron who really...
He has an interesting open guard game where it's a lot of collar control and stuff like that, and he's not getting in and doing spider guard and inversions and whatnot.
And you could argue he's maybe not as successful as a lot of other people in that really competitive circuit, but he also seems to be motoring along pretty well, reasonably injury-free and still has a very powerful game.
You also have to think, well, his dad is the greatest jiu-jitsu player of all time that had to play a factor.
Although he didn't really train much with his dad, which is kind of unusual.
He doesn't have that...
He doesn't...
His dad, and when I say the basics, when I mean the basics, I don't mean like it's a simple game.
His game's very complex.
But he doesn't do any weird sort of De La Riva stuff or weird spider guard stuff.
His game is basically the same kind of jiu-jitsu you used to see in 1994 when Hickson was the king.
But...
It's just super tuned in and high level and razor sharp.
One of his best submissions is the guillotine.
Another best submission is the rear naked choke.
And if he gets you in those positions, you're fucksville.
And it's really just that his technique is so fucking sharp, and there's levels to that sharpness of technique.
There's some guys that just have a technique that is so goddamn sharp it's impossible to avoid.
Like on a lower level, but there's a guy named Paul Sass who used to compete in the UFC who used to fucking triangle everybody.
He won something like nine or ten matches by triangle.
It was ridiculous.
He just would pull guard and then you'd be fucked.
He would just figure out a way to wrap your neck and arm around his legs, squeeze the shit out of you, and next thing you know you're tapping or you're blacked out.
They knew that that was his game, and they would still get caught in a triangle.
It's like, what the fuck?
It's because his technique was so razor sharp.
So I think there's a lot of people that get caught up in those grabbing games, those grip-dependent games.
And maybe they would go, well, let me try it on you.
I'll fuck you up with it.
And maybe they would fuck me up with it.
But I honestly believe that...
The best jujitsu is jujitsu that you can do with a gi or without a gi.
And a lot of those guys, where they get into MMA, they don't have any handles to grab.
And so no-gi jujitsu is much more like Greco-Roman wrestling, whereas Eddie Bravo and his Tenth Planet jujitsu system, what he's done is sort of incorporate much more no-gi, like Greco-Roman control.
And you can do that.
I still roll with the gi, but when I do gi I very rarely grab the gi.
You know, some guy, some drunk wants to kick your ass, and you just get your hand inside his collar, and they're like, oh, look at you, you're a dead man.
You don't even know you're dead.
Like, if you get a guy who's, like, got a good Ezekiel choke or something like that, and he gets a hold of you, and he's on top of you, and he gets his own collar and wraps around, chokes you to death with his own arms, you know, it's...
And the main deal with that is just keeping a really good eye on my sleep, my nutrition, my recovery.
I do some HRV monitoring.
What is HRV? The heart rate variability.
So you check that in the morning.
And basically, HRV was studied, developed, discovered by the Eastern Bloc countries.
And it was part of the space program.
And it's looking at the total allostatic load or the stress load on an individual.
So the heart, if you have 60 beats a minute, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's beating once a second.
You may have three beats that go really fast, and then there may be a long pause, and then two beats, and so there's variability to it.
It's basically chaos mathematics that describes this stuff, but if you are not under significant stress, if your parasympathetic nervous system, the rest and restore part, I've found that if I keep an eye on my heart rate variability in conjunction with my
food and my sleep and all the rest of that stuff, then the hormones tend to stay pretty good in line.
But if they start pushing anything, if I start compromising sleep, For me, if I go too low carb, too long, particularly with some really hard training, then I will kind of get adrenalized and I get all the signs and symptoms of testosterone kind of dropping down and whatnot, which is interesting because I know you've played around with that and seemed to have some pretty good success at keto-fueled rolling.
Yeah, well, what fascinated me is I'm on testosterone replacement therapy, and when I took my diet away from a high-carbohydrate diet to a much more high-fat diet, ketogenic diet, my testosterone levels went way up.
But what it is apparently is, and please correct me if I'm wrong, the precursors For testosterone are the saturated fats and cholesterol and your body produces testosterone from them.
When you have an abundance of them and you're in a healthy balance, it's not like you're consuming unhealthy foods.
When you get a healthy balance of those, your body produces more testosterone naturally.
Well, and it's interesting, and this is where this stuff gets really complex, but usually when people are on a lower carb diet than this hormone called sex hormone binding protein or sex hormone binding globulin, that increases.
And what that can do, it can reduce the level of free testosterone.
So your total testosterone may look good.
The free testosterone may look great.
That's a not uncommon thing to happen on low carb diets.
But then the interesting side to that is that the receptor sites, which are really what matters in this whole story, the receptor site density for testosterone increases.
So you may not need as much to get the same effect that you would otherwise have.
Or if you have a little bit more testosterone, then you're going to get an even greater effect.
But when people are on a lower-carb diet, it does appear that anabolic hormones have a more pronounced effect than what they would have during a higher-carb period.
And I don't really know the mechanism behind how that works.
Definitely, if you have 100 units of testosterone or estrogen in one person and they have a certain number of receptor sites and then another person, same hormonal level but more receptor sites, then they are going to get a more potent anabolic response out of that.
And then when you take into account what we've discussed already about genetic variables, different people respond differently to carbohydrates and fats and proteins, it is so difficult for people to find the thing that works best for them.
But in the meantime, his interview with Tim Ferriss is amazing.
I think he's done twice, maybe more, on Tim's show.
But when he discusses it, you kind of understand what the benefits of being on this high-fat diet are.
And then you also realize...
What the compromises that your body has to make when you change it to a high carbohydrate, high sugar diet.
And one of the things that is a new study that Dr. Rhonda Patrick sent me recently was the dangers of Saturated fats have been sort of overstated, and a lot of it because of that.
I'm sure you're aware of that New York Times article about the sugar industry literally bribing scientists to lie in the 1950s and say that heart disease is being caused by saturated fats and taking the blame off of sugar.
And they altered data and really fucked with generations of people's ideas to change the information that we receive and fucked with people's heads.
Processed sugar mixed with saturated fat is actually not healthy at all.
And it really makes sense because if we over consume carbohydrates in general, then we fill up the liver glycogen and then the liver starts converting this into palmitic acid, which is a saturated fat.
And that palmitic acid tends to make us insulin resistant.
And there's good mechanisms behind that.
Like there's good kind of engineering there if we're eating a little bit more of an ancestral type diet.
But when you throw a modern processed diet and sedentism and messed up circadian rhythm, you know, not going to bed on time, not getting enough daylight sun, then the whole mess ends up being really pro-inflammatory and very much moving you towards this insulin resistant profile.
Now what is it about sugar where when you are not consuming it on a regular basis and then you take some time like I've gone like really strict ketogenic for four or five months and then I'll go off and have like a milkshake and fries and I can't fucking believe how bad I feel.
During the state of ketosis, so, you know, and you say normal, it's like normally the brain runs off glucose, but what's really normal?
Like for me, normal is trying to look at this from this ancestral template, you know, and so for eons, humans and every other organism on the planet didn't have consistent food.
And because our brain is so big and it's so metabolically active, even though I think it's like 2% of our body weight, but 20% of the energy use, it's really important that we protect that.
And so the process of ketosis is a workaround so that we don't have to break down protein to convert it into glucose to feed the brain.
We can break down body fats.
The body fat gets turned into ketone bodies, which are water soluble and can go through the blood brain barrier and it can fuel the brain in a really effective way.
But when you do that, what you are trying to do is spare glucose just for the brain, just for the red blood cells, the few tissues that have to run on glucose, like they have no other workarounds.
But what the body does is it creates what's called metabolic insulin resistance where the muscles become insulin resistant so that we don't use glucose in the muscles.
We're using free fatty acids and we're using ketone bodies.
So then you go and you've been ketotic for a while.
You have physiological insulin resistance to support and maintain that ketotic state.
That's totally fine.
But then your first meal out of that is like the milkshake, you know, fries, you know, 200 grams of carbohydrate.
And because you're physiologically insulin resistant, it takes a massive amount of insulin to be able to push that stuff into storage.
It's an interesting trade-off because you could make an argument that we should be able to live like a cockroach.
You bounce back and forth.
Under ideal circumstances, we would be resilient and we could be able to shift these fuel substrates.
And this is some of the argument for intermittent fasting, where you force your body to run off of fats and maybe you do...
carbohydrates every couple of days or maybe earlier in the day.
And then later in the day, it's just fat and protein.
And then you fast through part of the next day so that you're forcing your body to run off fats, produce some ketones, maybe not at a level of full nutritional ketosis.
But then also when you do drop in some carbs, your body can handle that.
And it doesn't put you into that kind of like diabetic blood sugar levels.
And it's all really speculative.
I don't really know what the right answer is with any of that stuff, but it is interesting, and it does kind of call into question how useful is chronic ketosis relative to being able to cycle in and out of it.
I don't have a good answer, but I definitely feel best when I'm ketotic.
And so when I do that 75 to 120 grams of carbs to fuel the jujitsu, I can't do that as easy.
Like, 10 hours in, 12 hours in of, you know, so I sleep through the night, so I've got a 12-hour fast, then I get up, and if I tried to go to 6 p.m.
that day, I'd be hungry.
I wouldn't be totally broken down, dysfunctional, like I was when I was You know, insulin-resistant sugar burner, but it's not the same as being keto-adapted.
I do a lot of the caveman coffee and then their MCT oil, and I'll actually mix that up with peanut butter and then either soy lecithin or sunflower lecithin because it kind of emulsifies all that stuff, so I'll mix it up.
And then I'll eat that.
And I get a decent, like a 0.5 millimolar blood ketone level off of that, even though I'm eating some carbs with it.
Well, and then in Paleo land, peanuts are legumes, and so there's a bunch of super hardcore Paleo folks that are freaking out and dying right now that I'm eating peanut butter.
So legumes do have some what we call immunogenic properties.
They can irritate the immune system.
And if you improperly prepare them, then they can make you really sick.
Like if you cooked some black beans or kidney beans or something, you didn't cook them enough and you ate them.
It can give you gastritis, like where you're shitting blood, essentially.
It's pretty nasty stuff.
And these are the anti-predation chemicals that are in grains and legumes.
But if you soak them overnight, you pull off the rinse water, maybe sprout them for a day, and you don't even have to do that involved.
Or if you cook them in a medium that has a little bit of acid in it, then it tends to break down these anti-nutrients and they're not nearly as immunogenic.
But somebody who has serious GI problems, and this circles back again to that small intestinal bacterial overgrowth.
Somebody who has SIBO, somebody who has some other GI problems, if they have an autoimmune condition, grains and legumes may be something that you want to minimize because it is immunogenic for a lot of people.
And this is the success that we've seen with this autoimmune paleo approach.
So I think that the unfortunate thing is, on the one hand, there are a lot of people who dismiss the power of limiting these foods in people that it would benefit.
They're like, there's no science to support it.
And they've never invested a minute towards researching it.
So they're ignorant about that.
But then on the other side, there's a whole group of people that maybe they had success with this autoimmune paleo protocol.
They had ulcerative colitis, they had multiple sclerosis, they had success for it.
Now they say that nobody can or should eat these foods.
And I've gotta throw myself under the bus.
I've probably been that person for a decade or longer, you know, but over the course of time, just life, it's that jujitsu thing again, you know, where it's like the truth will pound you and at some point you either get it or you just become this like calcified old turd and you can't learn or grow.
And over the course of time, it just became obvious that if your gut's healthy, if all the cylinders are firing, doing some grains and legumes is probably not going to be a negative problem for you.
But if you are a cop or a firefighter in the military and you've historically been able to eat these foods and then you go to a shift work schedule and you're under a massive amount of stress because of an altered sleep-wake cycle, those foods that may have been okay may no longer now be okay.
And so that's another piece that people just need to remain open that something that's working for you today may not work for you tomorrow.
And then, you know, something that worked for me may not work for this other person.
It's kind of common sense, but people just desperately in this health, wellness, nutrition realm, they want black or white, yes or no, binary stuff.
This is good.
That's bad.
And as much as I would...
It would make my life way simpler if that was the case, but it's just not.
As the lake of knowledge increases, the shoreline of ignorance grows as well.
I think Dennis McKenna had a take on it too, that as you increase the bonfire of knowledge, it exposes the greater level of ignorance, as the light does.
It definitely is a defensive mechanism and it's just so appealing to basically put a fence around what your current knowledge state is and be like, there it is, we're good, you know?
And it's a really tough deal to just kind of dangle in the breeze and to hang that sign, you know, good until further notice, yeah.
And that's why today it's so weird, because you can find other people that agree with you on that, and they pump you up, and they give you that confirmation bias, and they support each other, and they get together and make fun of everybody who's not in the know, who's not hashtag woke.
And, you know, I had a lot of that, like running a CrossFit-type gym.
I would recommend this low-carb, paleo type of approach.
And for people that were insulin resistant, overweight, it worked amazingly well.
And then when I started working with more MMA-oriented folks and CrossFitters, It took a long time in breaking a lot of people to figure out, okay, these people need some more carbs.
They may not need as much as what they've historically done, but this fully keto-fueled process is probably not going to work with them.
Yeah, it's tiny and it's all seeds and there's hardly any edible structure to it.
And so if you look at most of the fruit that was available kind of pre-agriculture and that selective breeding of fruit, like it was much smaller, wasn't as sweet.
And again, it's not to say that you shouldn't have any of that stuff, but it's just, there was an interesting piece that came out of the UK where it was looking at feeding kids fruit.
They were like, let's recommend that these kids eat fruit.
And the kids already had a hypercaloric diet.
They were eating too much.
They were eating too many carbs.
And then they threw fruit on top of it.
And they're like, wow, adding fruit to this already shitty overeating program made it worse.
And it was like there was going to be some sort of magic that came out of adding some fruit to this story.
Whereas the kids just needed to pull more of the junk out and get some sort of both caloric control and some carbohydrate control.
That GMO story, I'm in a spot where I usually piss everybody off about it because I am way less concerned about genetic modification of these things and more concerned about some of the business practices that happen.
Like, we've been doing selective breeding for thousands of years, and that has modified the genetics.
And the thing about GMO, too, is the apologist for it, like, when you look at the results that you get with the GMO, the genetic modification, it's really unimpressive.
I mean, it's not, like, dramatically increasing yields.
What it inevitably is doing is creating something that's usually more resistant to Roundup than what the last thing was.
Yeah, which is legitimately some pretty nasty stuff.
And so it doesn't really seem to be working any type of magic as far as feeding the world or anything like that.
It is creating a funnel where in order to grow this thing, you need more chemical fertilizer input.
You need more pesticide input.
And it just seems to be this feed-forward mechanism on that.
And so I'm really, from a health standpoint, I'm not that freaked out about GMOs just as a baseline.
But from a really shady business practice, I'm not a big fan from actually moving the needle on food production.
It's really unimpressive to me.
So my position on GMOs usually just makes everybody mad because I'm not really jumping into either one of these camps whole hog.
Well, food production in general, when you look at these gigantic large-scale farms, that is one of the most unnatural things you're ever going to see in life.
And not only the monocrop, but those are genetically modified monocrops, and you want to kill off all the weeds.
Right.
So you're spraying your genetically modified monocrops with some shit that kills off everything but your genetically modified monocrops, and who knows what that consequence is on the human body.
Well, you know, so Roundup is now being suggested or has been suggested for a long time as a mitochondrial disruptor, similar to that antibiotic story.
So this is where people, you know, the last questions about like, well, what about this gluten intolerance thing?
Like people didn't have it 50 years ago.
Why is it going on now?
And we really don't know, but maybe it's antibiotics.
Maybe it's changes in the gut microbiome.
But a lot of this stuff seems to have a mitochondrial dysfunction piece to it.
Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, type 2 diabetes, they all seem to have mitochondrial dysfunction elements to them.
The mitochondria is not producing energy the way that it should.
And back again to that point about being flexible with our fuel systems, people seem to be becoming inflexible in their fuel systems.
And this ketotic state may be the default that we're able to go back to to be able to maintain some degree of health.
And it also seems to press a reset button in the mitochondria where we get apoptosis and cell death.
And abnormal cells, but the need for people to shift towards a lower-carb diet may be reflective of some changes in the environment where we're being made sick by things like glyphosate or maybe over-aggressive antibiotic use, and then the thing that we need to default back to to be able to be healthy is some sort of a low-carb or ketogenic diet.
So with an Ezekiel bread, they soak these grains, pour off the water, let them sprout.
And in that sprouting process, the enzymes that are released tend to break up the gluten and gliadin proteins.
And for a lot of people who are gluten intolerant with like a piece of Wonder Bread or, you know, standard French bread, they could eat something like the Ezekiel bread.
But if I get some sort of a wheat exposure, and it's to the degree that, like, if a steak is grilled on a grill and somebody grilled French toast on the grill the day before, I'm going to be sick from it.
That's fascinating, but does it have any effect on nutrient absorption?
Because of celiacs, a big part of it is when you're exposed to that bread, it's not just that you go to get diarrhea, but the nutrients are not getting into your system.
And for me at that point, it was a high, it was a grain and legume based kind of vegan diet, which for me was just not working for that point in my life.
Living in Seattle, not having any sun, that was a really, really bad move for me.
But I will say this, this was also on the heels of getting and resolving, at least to some degree, Giardia.
So I think that parasitic infection, low vitamin D levels, bad sleep, bad circadian rhythm, all that stuff fed into it.
Usually it's some sort of an emulsification with fat and, you know, litholized.
And so it's quite fat soluble.
So if you can get it mixed into a fatty matrix, then it enhances the absorption.
But it does seem to...
And, you know, most of this data is Petri dish type data.
So we really don't know if it's having great effect in...
And then there's another layer to this.
A ton of these polyphenolics don't really enter the body or they don't enter the body as the original chemical.
They get modified by the gut bacteria and then either the gut bacteria manufacture a completely different chemical or some sort of downstream chemical is what enters the body or it may just interface with the gut lining and then the gut sends out different signaling molecules that then affects the rest of the body.
Like when you look at people going on a heart med or, you know, different things.
Like, something that they're understanding is not only do we have genetic differences, but the differences in the gut microbiome may have a really profound influence in the way that people respond to supplements, pharmaceuticals.
He ended up getting a really nasty gut bug traveling in, I think, the Philippines.
And pictures of him before, he was, like, jacked.
Super thick legs, like thick neck, Thai boxer.
And now he's pretty weighty, and he's never really been able to put all the weight back on and kind of get back to as robust as what he was before that.
But it was another situation where maybe some irritation to the gut because of the diet.
And then definitely this infectious agent, whatever the bug was that he caught, just crushed him.
There should be some sort of a place that you could go, like a string of places, you know, where you can open them up in major cities, in metropolitan areas, where someone can go and find out, like, what is the right stuff to do.
I went to this one, they did some blood work on me, and the lady told me, avocados just don't agree with you.
I'm like, fuck off.
That is so dumb.
I eat avocados all the time.
They're great.
She's trying to come up with some sort of ridiculous blood test that shows that avocados...
Because that is a big factor with people that have injuries.
Even if it's not injuries, if they have...
Joint pain, like knee pains, back pains.
I've had this conversation with people and I got it from a chiropractor.
She said, believe it or not, like gluten insensitivity, just reducing gluten and becoming gluten-free will change the way injuries hurt, like back injuries.
And I thought, well, that sounds like some hippie bullshit.
And so this was many years ago when I started getting into this idea of inflammatory foods affecting the way your body and your joints particularly feel.
So a couple of different mechanisms that can happen here.
We definitely understand that the sugar can feed bacteria, both good and bad bacteria.
Most of the bacterial mass, though, should be occurring in the colon, like pretty far south.
And if we eat a diet that's really deficient in fiber, high in refined carbohydrates, All of carbohydrates get absorbed early, and so there's not actually any food for the bacteria that should be living in the colon.
So these bacteria tend to move more upward in the GI tract, and this is where we get small intestinal bacterial overgrowth.
SIBO is a pro-inflammatory process, so that's one way that we can get inflammation out of that.
Another way is just when we get really wild swings in blood sugar, That tends to be a pro-inflammatory process.
So just the upregulation of insulin, particularly if it's over a chronic process, that can be a pro-inflammatory experience.
And then the other piece is, you know, if you start getting cortisol released in response to blood sugar crashes because you get hypoglycemic and you're trying to ping the liver to release some more glucose, that can be a pro-inflammatory process.
So you've got different cytokines, these chemicals like interleukin-1, interleukin-6, that are turning on typically immune cells, and then other cells in the body are being affected as well.
But it's usually some sort of immune cell response, which then they, in their process in doing what they do, they tend to release chemicals, cytokines and similar chemicals, It can turn into a feed-forward mechanism.
So, you know, it's ultimately chemical messaging that can turn on other inflammatory processes in cells that are nearby and also the immune cells themselves.
So whenever we do anything, any type of workout, even just exercise.
So this is an important point to make too.
Inflammation in and of itself isn't necessarily bad.
It's the amount and type and placement and all that type of stuff.
So exercise is a pro-inflammatory process.
It's what we call a hormetic stress.
So we get a little bit of this stress, ideally an appropriate dose, and the body senses this stress, and then it makes us stronger so that we can cope with a subsequent exposure to this.
But if our system is already pro-inflamed from poor diet, inadequate sleep, gut permeability, what have you, Then these little, you know, tears and bumps and bruises and adhesions that we get from physical activity, they never really heal because our body is allocating resources to deal with the inflammation in the gut and our kind of over-hyped up inflammatory response, and it doesn't have the resources to deal with the inflammation in our joints and our muscle and whatnot.
And what's fascinating was I did a podcast with Rhonda Patrick where she talked about the dangers of it and talked about how horrible it is for your gut bacteria.
When a person does have some sort of an issue, like a headache or some sort of a swollen joint or some pain, is there anything that you can take that has anti-inflammatory properties that doesn't have the negative health consequences?
So, the first workout was 75 glute ham sit-ups, which, you know, you're on like a glute ham developer and you're doing this super long range of movement sit-up.
And I ended up with abdo.
Like, basically, my stomach was inflamed.
It was inflamed for like 12 days.
It was about 13 days later, we're pulling abdo instead of rhabdo, like the rhabdomyolysis that people get.
I mean, when I stay on my mobility maintenance cycle, I am good to go.
But when I get super busy, when I'm traveling, you know, if I have to sleep in a weird bed or something, like, it tends to be a cumulative thing that adds up over like two weeks, and then I can get kind of a backfire.
For people who, someone just asked about this on Twitter yesterday, the Reverse Hyper is a machine created by a guy named Louie Simmons, who is a really famous powerlifter and a completely insane person.
If you want to listen to the podcast Jamie and I did with him at his place, West Side Barbell, he's a fucking nut.
But genius in making this machine that allows active decompression of the spine.
I'm a big fan of it.
Do you do any sort of spinal decompression exercises?
Well, in some of the gravity boots, they were finding that people were getting laxity in their knees, like the knees were giving way before you really decompress the back.
But also some of that laxity in the knees probably relieves some knee pressure on some folks as well, sort of like how shoulder hangs releases a lot of shoulder pain in some people.
But, you know, back to your question about the anti-inflammatories, like, if I get a really spicy backflour, I will do 800 milligrams of ibuprofen, but I'll hit it once, and then I'm good.
I don't, but I mean, one of the primary health consequences is keeling over from a heart attack or stroke.
So it's, you know, but it's one of those things where I've played with it.
And once it gets in that, you know, I can ice it and I can do stem and all that stuff helps.
But it's just like, man, if I can get one targeted bolus of ibuprofen, 800 milligrams, I hit it once.
And it just drops it down.
And then, you know, it changes the whole thing from being a two-day issue to like a 12-day issue.
Because otherwise, it'll just kind of drag on.
And I've just gotten to a point where if I really get myself into a bad spot with my mobility or just getting this thing pissed off, then it's like, okay, I've just got to do this.
But beyond that, there's this product from a new chapter called Zyflamend.
And it's really, really pretty slick as far as an anti-inflammatory.
It pulls some ginger extracts, curcumin.
They do a supercritical extract on it.
And that stuff is pretty legit.
And that can, for a lot of people, like I haven't found that it works as well on that.
Pain and inflammation reduction when my back gets really spicy, but it's pretty darn good.
And everything that's in it, you can make some arguments it would be pretty beneficial over the long haul, like it's these COX-2 pathways modifiers, but it does it in a different way than what the ibuprofen does.
Aspirin has some benefit, but it's kind of an interesting mixed bag, too, to take enough of it to get a really potent effect like you would if somebody had a back spasm or something like that.
You're looking at the potential of GI bleeding.
You have a really potent blood thinning effect.
So, I mean, aspirin's a little bit dodgy in that regard.
If you have that really acute deal that you're...
You're trying to manage.
But it is a possibly interesting side note.
Aspirin, like a baby aspirin a day, there's some studies that have suggested that women taking that baby aspirin a day, it could reduce breast cancer potentiality by like 70% because of the anti-angiogenic effects of the aspirin.
Now, I've read some things about the ketogenic diet and cancer, and that is very fascinating to me, about having these high fat, low complex carbohydrates, low simple carbohydrate diets can have a great benefit on reducing the fuel that cancer needs to stay alive.
So on the one hand, certain types of cancer tend to preferentially run on glucose.
And so if you can limit the glucose, they don't really do well with fats or proteins as a fuel source.
So you can limit that.
Not all cancers fall into this category, though.
Some cancers are super metabolically flexible and they can use just about anything as a fuel source.
So there's a benefit for potentially breast, colon, prostate, glioblastoma, a couple of other endothelial-derived cancers that just directly that reduction in glucose level may be really beneficial.
There's another layer to it, though, that that low glucose environment and that shift towards ketosis tends to set up this kind of stress response.
So we actually have a little bit of oxidative stress occurring in the mitochondria and normal tissue do great with that, but canterous tissue does not.
So it's a little bit of an irritant.
And what they're doing right now, what they're studying is getting folks ramped up on a ketogenic diet so that you get that hormetic stress response.
You're limiting glucose and then they will have people fast immediately before chemo or radiation.
So this is still doing some conventional therapies.
But that fasting state that while you're also in ketosis, it reduces your pool of this substance called glutathione, which is our normal antioxidant defense network.
So interestingly, and maybe counterintuitively, they're trying to reduce your antioxidant pool and get it down to a bare minimum.
Then when they whack you and the cancer with the chemo and the radiation, the cancer is more prone to die because it doesn't have antioxidant defense mechanisms to keep it going.
So it's an interesting thing because a lot of...
People in the kind of alternative cancer treatment scene, you know, they'll start dosing people on super high antioxidants with the thought that some of the etiology of cancer may be driven by free radicals, by oxidative damage.
And there may be some truth to that, but it's kind of like the horse is out of the barn at this point.
They're kind of tackling it in the wrong way.
When they're using high dose vitamin C, they're using it intravenously, and even though vitamin C is touted as an antioxidant, it can be a pro-oxidant at high concentrations.
So it may be a situation where you get the glutathione pool depleted, you hit these people with high dose vitamin C, and then they maybe do hyperbaric oxygen.
Where they go into a pressurized canister and they do pure O2, and that increases the oxidative stress, and that may be another adjunctive treatment to this.
But that's all of these different mechanisms that are kind of an outgrowth of the ketogenic diet going on in the background.
I mean, I live on a little three-acre farm in Reno, and so it's cold frequently, and I have like a tub of water, and every once in a while when I stack up, I'll go out there and sit in it, but it's rough, man.
So they have the strength work as part of this whole thing, pressing and pulling and all kinds of trunk work and everything, but each strength movement has a mobility movement paired with it.
So it's really interesting because as you get stronger doing this stuff, there's a tendency to get tighter.
So they just kind of bake the mobility movement into the cake with that.
But then they also have a three-day-a-week stretching sequence.
One's the front splits, one's the side splits, and then the other one is thoracic mobility for like a backbend.
And so I just kind of...
Punch the time clock on that.
Like each day I have some strength and mobility work that I do with that three days a week.
I do the dedicated stretching sequence.
I tend to do it with my daughters.
They're like three and five.
And so we just get in the floor and, you know, it's just a shit show in there with them also.
But it's a ton of fun.
And I'll hit that like three days a week.
And that's been really good.
A meditation app, like doing something like Brainwave, like the binaural beats.
I'm so wound tight and kind of type A that if I can just like sit down, go outside, look at the trees, do five minutes on that thing, do some kind of cyclic breathing, that's amazing for me.
Like that is a really, really good system reset for me.
It's an interesting environment, because you have brothels around there, you have the gambling, but then there was this pretty draconian approach to really minor drug offenses, that they should be offenses at all.
What's interesting about CBD is that everything that you would think is good about a paleo, ketogenic diet, sleeping well, exercising right, CBD does it effectively.
Now, it doesn't work the same in every single person, and you need to kind of play around with that.
So there's some caveats with it.
But when you just look at the pharmacology, you look at the research on it, and you look at all this other cool stuff that's been done by dietary interventions elsewhere and lifestyle interventions, then the CBD oil hits all of those pieces.
Well, you could have something like CBD oil where you put it in a little bite of chocolate and the person has it one or two times a day or whatever the dosing regimen is.
And maybe it puts their ulcerative colitis into remission.
Maybe their depression is gone.
And then maybe if we get them moving in a good direction, they don't feel like shit.
Maybe we can say, okay, let's now get some diet changes in there.
Let's get you going to bed earlier.
If you are going to stay up and work, put on some blue blockers so it doesn't mess with your sleep patterns as much.
But it's a really accessible, inexpensive, no-risk proposition that could add some really huge benefits for people.
Yeah, I think what you said, too, that this system is sort of set up to get people to eat these crappy foods and make them incredibly available and very difficult to pass up.
And once you start eating them, you consume them on a daily basis, your body starts craving them, you get addicted to them.
I was at the supermarket the other day, and I was under the influence, and I was always wandering through the aisles.
It was one of those weird moments where I went, has this always been like this?
I was just looking at these cans of food.
Everything's canned.
And I was thinking, this is all food, but it can last forever.
And food's not supposed to last forever.
The whole idea is you're supposed to grow it.
You take it out of the ground, it's alive.
You eat it, and then you're healthy.
And then I was looking at this food that was just filled with preservatives and canned.
These packages and plastic bags of it.
And I was like, it's so strange that this is the prevalent food because it's so easy to store.
It's so easy to ship.
It's so easy to have for sale.
You put a barcode on the package and you're good to go.
But this is not really...
I mean, you can eat it.
It's food, kinda.
But it's not really food.
The real food is on the edges.
The real food is where the vegetables are, where the meats are, where the eggs are.
That stuff in the middle in those aisles where you just see these bright colored cans, it was so weird.
The folks that make these foods, they study neurophysiology, they study evolutionary biology, they study how to make things addictive.
So it's kind of funny on the one hand where the gatekeepers, the medical establishment, a lot of the media, if you talk about this ancestral health template or what have you, there's still a bunch of pissing match and contention around that.
Whereas the people who are making these foods addictive, they fully get it, but they're using it in such a way that they're like, okay, here's our predilection to eat more and move less.
Here's how we're going to make that happen.
And we have these really interesting flavor combinations and different experiences.
Do you want to run that video?
So here's a really interesting example of this.
Where, you know, you could get bored of even a really tasty food, but then you can figure out a way to bypass this whole process.
Okay, so what's going on there is Andrew Zimmerman, or no, Adam Rickman, Man vs.
Food, he does these eating challenges.
And he's in this thing called the Kitchen Sink Challenge.
It's an eight-pound ice cream sundae.
And I think anybody would say that...
An ice cream sundae is pretty tasty, you know, and it's hyper palatable.
Like, it would make you want to eat it.
But what happens to him is he gets completely bogged down in this process and can't go on until he orders a plate of extra salty, extra crunchy french fries.
So he's actually gagging on the ice cream.
Can't go on.
He's not going to win this thing.
And the way that he gets out of this situation is by eating more food.
He would not have finished the sundae were it not for eating the french fries.
And so you have this situation where woven into our genetics is this process called palate fatigue, where even if we have a really tasty food in front of us, we will get bored of it and then we'll want something else.
And if you have that other thing, that something else immediately available, and it's different enough from the thing that you just got bored with, You can eat more in total, and it's just so interesting.
He would have failed eating this ice cream sundae were it just the sundae.
But not only did he eat the sundae, he ate probably about 1,500 calories of extra salty, extra crunchy french fries.
Like, if we just understand this is your basic biological wiring.
And if you understand that, and it's not your fault, but let's do something, then we can at least decouple ourselves from the emotionality and the drama and the guilt that we've had around this, and we can start making some changes.
But so many times, the reason why I've heard from people that they peel out of some sort of a new way of eating or lifestyle is Is it they're motoring along, they seem to be doing well, and then they're like, they're just gone.
And then you talk to them and they're like, oh, it was just hard.
It's like, yeah, it is hard.
But it wasn't just that it was hard.
They usually start getting some sort of internal dialogue where, well, I suck.
I must be weak.
I can't do it.
It's easier for that guy than it is for me.
So they bail on it.
And when I started putting this kind of...
Spin of this evolutionary biology and this neuroregulation of appetite into working with people, particularly people who had had difficulties with eating over the long haul and maybe like some, you know, weird relationships with food or what have you.
There was like this light that went on.
They're like, okay, so it's not my fault.
I'm like, no, man, it's not your fault.
We still need to do something.
And it's not necessarily going to be easy, but we can do this.
And if you aren't beating yourself up about the fact that this thing is a difficult process, then we're going to be able to get a lot further down the road.
Are there any foods that when you do go off the rails, like say if you have a cheat day and you have a, oh my god, I'm going to eat a whole pizza and a bowl of spaghetti and some fucking ice cream, is there any foods that can counterbalance the damaging effects or the addictive properties?
Because the worst thing you want to do is have a cheat day and go, oh fuck it, I'm just going to be a slob.
They shouldn't have done it, and that's why they stopped doing that commercial, because people said, fuck Reese's, I'm just going to buy a chocolate bar and a big-ass tub of peanut butter and have a party.
And it's, you know, for me, I'm not trying to moralize it or say this is right or that's wrong, but just being aware that, like, stacking those flavor combinations, like, in general, if you can make your meals enjoyable but not over the top to the To the point that you're overdoing it.
I was using one of those ketone monitors where you have to cut yourself, but it doesn't make me bleed, because I have too many calluses in my hand, so I'd stick it in the fingers, and my fingertip skin is too thick, so I'd have to go to the side of my hand, and it's fucking gross to jab myself in the side of my fingers.
In part, it's just partially digested, so it's easier to digest and absorb.
To the degree that there's some problems with like gliadin, wheat germ, gluten, and those proteins get broken down.
So I would say that there's a lower likelihood of those foods being pro-inflammatory.
So if somebody's like, dude, I want a sandwich, then doing the Ezekiel bread and doing it on that, to me, would be a pretty good wing compared to doing like Wonder Bread.
The fact that it's a whole grain and it hasn't been super denuded and processed, you're going to have more B vitamins, you could have more minerals.
So in general, like if we were to weigh out, you know, say 100 grams of this, 100 grams of that, there's going to be more vitamins, minerals, antioxidants in the Ezekiel bread than in the white bread.
Even though the white bread gets enriched, With iron and some B vitamins, I would say that the Ezekiel bread is still probably a win.
Yeah, because there were nutrient deficiency diseases like, you know, 1920s, 1930s, as we really started industrializing the food system.
And, you know, there's a good argument for changing wheat flour to white flour when you remove that protein and fatty element.
That's in the whole wheat flour, it goes rancid much faster.
So white flour is much more shelf-stable.
It lasts a lot longer, and also it has a different flavor profile and everything.
It's a little more mild.
But there's a good argument again, but, you know, it's like that shelf-stability thing.
This is part of the hallmark of something that's maybe not a great option, other than chicharrones.
Chicharrones could last a million years, and they're still amazing, but...
There's an exception to everything, but there was economic and pallet incentives for why you would want to make this white flour, but also people started getting more nutrient deficiencies because the amount of B vitamins and whatnot that usually come in that whole grain were gone.
Like, again, so if we did a nutrient density kind of story, and we looked at that Ezekiel Bragg compared to...
Good types of fruit, vegetables, squash.
I think that the Ezekiel bread would look pretty skinny.
Like if you had 100 calories of this versus 100 calories of these.
But again, we looked at the vitamins, minerals, antioxidants that both of them had.
I don't think the Ezekiel bread would be a real rock star, but I bet it would be better than white rice.
It would probably be as good or on par with something like lentils or something like that, again, as far as vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, all that stuff.
Well, it's interesting, again, like the only thing...
So you could eat like a cockroach.
Like you could walk into a work environment or, you know, like post your photos on Instagram about eating, having a big gulp and donuts and all this other fucked up stuff.
And most dieticians won't really bat an eye at that.
They're like, yeah, you should eat better, but they're not going to say anything.
But if you post some stuff about a low-carb, paleo kind of looking deal, then you're a disordered eater.
Or if you eat gluten-free, then they call it disordered eating.
Intermittent fasting is being called disordered eating.
Generally, like the dietetics, healthcare, you know, kind of mainstream.
Like, I get assailed by these people all the time.
And the intermittent fasting thing is really fascinating because...
Again, just a very brief historical step back.
It's like, have humans always had three meals a day?
And most people don't even eat just three meals a day.
They just eat all day long, you know?
And there's some clear problems with that from an inflammation standpoint.
They've done some studies where they had people eat a caloric-restricted diet, which should be anti-inflammatory, but the one group of calorie-restricted folks eat consistently throughout the day, Yeah.
So, you know, there's some really, really strong evidence and suggestion that some sort of punctuated eating pattern would be really healthy.
But it's interesting on the one hand, just being really aggressively researched in the kind of cutting edge communities like Rhonda Patrick, Walter Longo, Dom talks about this stuff a lot.
But then when you get into kind of this mainstream dietetics, Story.
They're just freaked out by this stuff.
Like they really can't wrap their heads around it.
So the interesting thing is, almost immediately when people undergo these procedures, if they were a type 2 diabetic, they come out of it and they're no longer a type 2 diabetic.
Almost immediately.
It's really, really interesting.
So there's that upside.
But then also the long-term, you know, two years, three years, four years, almost inevitably they get themselves back into the situation they were in.
And part of what's interesting is because they have such a small stomach, they can't hardly eat anything.
So there's a tendency towards eating more refined food because that's, you know, they just can't eat that much.
I just get infuriated when someone says that that's the only option for some people.
That is not true.
That is just absolutely not true.
There are always options.
If you have willpower, if you have a mind, if you have a support system, if you have people that can coach you, if you're willing to listen, if you're willing to understand and believe the consequences of your actions, you can change your diet and your behavior.
You can.
And it doesn't matter if you're 600 pounds or 60 pounds overweight or 6 pounds overweight.
It's interesting because insurance will reimburse for these, like, lap band and gastric bypass surgeries, and they're $30,000, $40,000 to pump people through it, but it's really difficult to get them to reimburse, like, a gym membership, a health coach, you know, that type of stuff, which...
It's just very, very frustrating for me when you tell people that they don't have any other options and that this is the best option to cut you open and cut your stomach and stitch it back to a smaller version of what it is.
This is something that I've gone into in great detail, and I went to the Colosseum in Rome, and they were explaining the vomitorium, and it's just a misnomer.
Joe, you're crushing my whole- Yeah, you shouldn't be saying that.
The stairways come down, and then that opening at the bottom of the stairway, that is a vomitorium.
What is the origin of the word?
No, they threw up.
They threw up.
A few of them did really rich people.
They wanted to eat and keep eating.
They threw up.
But that's not what it is.
Like, go larger, please, so I can see that.
A series of entrances or exit passages in ancient Roman amphitheater or theater, a place where which, according to popular misconception, the ancient Romans were supposed to have vomited during feasts to make room for more food.
And one of the most powerful benefits of the ketogenic diet is appetite suppression.
And that appetite suppression is fantastic.
It's amazing.
Even for a person like me who's never really struggled with their weight, I find that going without food is not only is it easy, but it's really inconsequential.
Some people that seem to never really be able to get anything else to work, it's possible they may have some damage to the hypothalamus, the energy regulating centers of the brain.
It's unclear what's going on, but we know that a ketogenic diet has some really great benefits for neurological conditions in general, like epilepsy, there's some Parkinson's, Alzheimer's research that's going on.
But it's possible that these ketones may be altering the physiology of the hypothalamus in such a way that we get normal energy regulation of metabolism and appetite, more importantly.
So his blood glucose, that second from the top line, the triangles, it dropped and then was just rock solid.
Beta-hydroxybutyrate, which is the main ketone body that gets used as a fuel substrate.
That goes up to a pretty high level, higher than what you would get under a nutritional ketosis typically, because this is a starvation deal.
Free fatty acids elevate, acetoacetate elevates, acetoacetate kind of interconverts with the beta-hydroxybutyrate.
But what's interesting to your point about the mental state If we were graphing someone's blood glucose over time for this period of 40 days and they were eating normal mixed meals, that thing would be seesawing all over the place.
Which they probably did to some degree, but this is part of the benefit of ketosis is that it really reduces the breakdown of lean body mass.
But if you think about it, like there are people who end up with these huge...
Mm-hmm.
that need to get surgically removed, there's a pretty good argument that had they used a fasting protocol instead of like a low fat, higher protein protocol, if that protein is still being supplied in the diet, then even though the fat goes away, you still have the protein matrix of the skin and the interstitial connective you still have the protein matrix of the skin and the interstitial connective tissue that isn't going But when we're in that fasted state or intermittent fasting or maybe ketosis, the body is turning over that protein base.
And that's really important.
That's this apoptotic process.
But you could potentially have a scenario where people who are losing a lot of weight, if they use these fasting protocols, aren't going to need that cosmetic surgery at the end to get rid of these sales of skin.
Whereas, like, a lot of the people that you saw in, like, The Biggest Loser, like, they had that stuff, and they were using a higher carb, moderate protein kind of calorie-restricted deal.
What about people that have lost all the weight in another fashion, and now they've gotten themselves into this really thin body with all this extra skin, could they go on a fasting protocol then, and would the body absorb that skin tissue first before it started eating up the muscle tissue?
I... Possibly, but the challenge with that is that because they've already decreased their fat mass, like are they now leading this into an unhealthy state?
So I mean a bunch of the stuff like the ice cream deal, like I talk about that stuff in the book.
It's, you know, it's steeped in this evolutionary medicine perspective, but I'm really, if I'm effective with this, I'm really trying to decouple people or like unpack all the emotionality that they've got around food.
Like if they've found challenges around changing their diet and lifestyle, It shouldn't be a surprise, and it's not their fault.
But at the same time, I don't want them to just roll over and give up.
Like, we've got ways to move them through a process of discovering what works for them, what doesn't work for them, and we can motor forward.
But I would say, like, 50-60% of the people that end up failing in this process, it's kind of emotional baggage type stuff.
And also, there's this sense...
So when people are at jujitsu and they're like, man, this shit's really hard, it's like...
And similarly, doing diet and lifestyle changes frequently is pretty difficult.
And so if you can just understand that and understand that that's normal and you're not beating yourself up about that process, then we really stand a much better chance of turning that corner and making these effective longstanding changes.