Mark Sisson joins Joe Rogan after five years, now living in Miami Beach where he thrives on tax-free life, open streets, and fat-adapted workouts like 1.5-hour e-foil rides. He debunks cholesterol myths—linking heart disease to inflammation, not fat—and criticizes lockdowns for ignoring immunity-boosting factors like diet and sunlight. His two-meal-a-day strategy achieves metabolic flexibility, reducing hunger and caloric intake by 25–30%, while Florida’s freedom contrasts California’s overregulation, which he blames for business struggles and wildfire mismanagement. Sisson warns against muscle loss post-50, dismisses wearable metrics, and fears CRISPR misuse in sports or eugenics, ending with a nod to Primal Kitchen’s sauces as key to healthy eating. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, you know, I grew up in Maine, and when I was in New England, Miami was sort of the place where, you know, only old people went, and it had all of the clichés behind it, and I never really thought much about living there.
And then when I lived in Malibu, I'm like, okay, this is a cat's ass.
This is the best place ever, Malibu.
Well, much like yourself, Joe, I got a little bit disillusioned with California over the years and thought that I would try a different location, particularly one that didn't have any personal taxes.
And, you know, we had gone to Miami Beach for a week every year for vacation, so we felt like we knew it.
And then we wound up saying, you know what, let's try for a year and see if we like it and we'll move out of California.
And if it doesn't work, we'll move back.
And I'm telling you, man, a year in, I'm like, this is like summer camp and a spa and a playground every single day.
I mean, look, the water's 20 degrees warmer on any given day.
The sand is nicer.
The women are a little bit, you know, dressed a little bit more provocatively.
I've got a great gym.
I do stand-up paddling.
I've got an e-foil, an electric foil that I use, a fat bike.
You know, they tried to enact some temporary ordinances that failed immediately, failed out of the gates, and I don't think they knew how to control the crowds at...
Yeah, it's a pain to try and get reservations at a restaurant or to navigate the streets because the You know, the streets are not built for that amount of traffic.
You know, the whole school strategy and the opening and reopening and not opening and having spring break and not having spring break.
And then COVID. Look, as I was saying to some friends literally a week ago, a month ago, two months ago, there's no better place in the world to be right now than Miami Beach.
The beaches are open.
People are having fun.
They're out in the sunshine.
They're getting vitamin D. You know, they're breathing fresh air.
The restaurants are not only open, they're probably exceeding their previous capacity because during COVID, The restaurants were allowed to spill out into the streets.
They closed some of the streets down in terms of traffic.
I hope I look half as good as you when I'm 67. You know, I don't want to piss anybody off, but I've looked at this from the beginning as a bad case of flu.
It's a virus.
There are millions of viruses that we encounter on a daily basis.
It's an issue of personal immunity.
I mean, if you have a strong immune system, I think you're going to do well during this, and that's been the biggest issue.
Instead of lockdowns, if the government had said, stop eating sugar, spend some time out in the sun, move around a lot, and maybe even—and this is, I think, one of the issues was this whole thing about viral load.
I don't know how much you know about that.
But people who got really sick had massive viral loads partly because of being locked inside with other people for long periods of time.
If you got exposed outside to a minimal viral load, there's a good chance that your body dealt with it already and managed it and got rid of it and set up whatever...
This is what I say about COVID. I've been training my whole life for this.
And, you know, I'm kind of glad I got it because I was talking shit about it for a long time.
Like, you know, don't...
It's not whatever.
And again, not to belittle the horrible experiences that some people have had, but this really gets old people for what I would say are obvious reasons, whether it's immune system, whether it's lack of vitamin D, whether it's being shut up, whether it's lowered cholesterol.
I mean, we haven't even talked about what happens with all of the statin drugs that people are taking to lower their cholesterol.
Well, high cholesterol is actually protective for something like this.
So you could predict that a lot of older people were going to die if they weren't well protected.
Because some people will argue that it's the balance of LDL and HDL and that cholesterol is actually essential for production of sex hormones and a lot of other things that the human body requires.
things, it's probably the most important, cholesterol is probably the most important molecule in the human body, if you really were to parse it.
Vitamin D, sex hormones, it's a working molecule on a lot of cell membranes.
And to think that we would, I mean, it's so important, the body makes like 1300 milligrams a day, regardless of what your cholesterol intake is from food.
So in my mind, the notion that we would take this amazing molecule that is basically life-giving in many regards and vilify it and then take drugs to lower it, which if you look at the research, and I wasn't planning on going down this path today, but if you look at the research on Cholesterol and heart disease over the past 20 years, it's shifted everything away from cholesterol being the proximate cause of heart disease.
Cholesterol and saturated fat are not the proximate cause of heart disease.
It's oxidation and inflammation.
Cholesterol is involved in the repair of damage to the tissue, and as a result, people get, because of the oxidation and inflammation, there's cholesterol that's in the plaques and things like that.
But I think many, many doctors, I'm going to say the preponderance of doctors, now agree that cholesterol isn't the bad guy.
That people made it out to be.
And if you look at other studies, cohorts of people who've had cholesterol of 130 and lower, or 200 and above, the all-cause mortality, you die of everything else at a much greater rate with low cholesterol than you do with high cholesterol, the only difference is the cardiac outcomes.
And it's not even deaths, it's just cardiac events is a little bit higher in the higher group.
You know, I'm not, I think most people at the top are too greedy and stupid to organize into a cabal, right?
So I'm thinking, how did this happen in terms of the collective conscious?
So mistakes were made early on, whether it's Ancel Keys, and I know you've had a lot of people on the show talking about Ancel Keys in the seven-country study.
Oh, just this scientist in the 60s, I guess, around then, Ancel Keys, had done a study looking at saturated fat intake correlated with heart disease in different countries and found, at the end of the day, he found that there was a correlation between high saturated fat intake and heart disease.
But then later on you find out that he looked at 32 countries, but picked the seven that fit his paradigm, mostly.
So that was, you know, I don't know if you've had Gary Taubes or Nina on the show, but everyone has sort of beaten this one to death.
The idea was that that was sort of the start of it.
And then McGovern and his committee, when he was overseeing the U.S. Department of Agriculture and trying to create the first food pyramids, was convinced by Pritikin that—because McGovern's wife had had a good experience at the Pritikin Longevity Center, which was a zero-fat sort of protocol— So that politicized that enough that they decided to vilify fat.
Cholesterol over the years has been more vilified because of studies done, again, correlating higher cholesterol with higher incidence of heart issues.
And the drug industry certainly got on that, and that's why statins came to the forefront.
I mean, I think until some of these other things have come down recently, I would say that statins are probably the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American public in terms of medicine.
But that's just me.
I'm not a doctor.
I just do a lot of research and reading.
So the idea that we would, yeah, so to your point, statins tend to, you know, there are brain fog issues, liver issues, muscle weakness issues.
One of the things that statins do is they decrease the amount of CoQ10 that your body produces because it's a similar pathway, and so you have to Should generally take supplemental CoQ10 with statins.
A friend of mine said that when he was researching statins, one of the original patents on statins, acknowledged this deficiency of CoQ10, and so it included CoQ10 in the drug, but CoQ10 was so expensive to make, they just cleaved off that part of the patent.
Anyway, I don't know where that was headed, but if we're talking about COVID, It appears that high cholesterol, higher cholesterol is protective for infections like COVID. But how is that the case?
But I would say that from what I've read, blood glucose, so diabetics are much more susceptible to COVID because this virus tends to like higher blood sugar.
If you have a pre-existing systemic inflammation...
Not a good sign.
Vitamin D probably, you know, across the board, the greatest predictor of your survivability of COVID. So if people have been locked inside all year and haven't had any sun exposure, their vitamin D status has been compromised tremendously.
So if you look at those vitamin D status, cholesterol, blood sugar regulation, and then other things like obesity or pre-existing conditions like COPD or whatever, we're in a world of hurt, this country, in terms of our health.
So the idea that we would lock people up...
Inside, by the way, healthy ones, because that's typically you quarantine the unhealthy ones.
Yeah.
It just makes no sense.
I think this is the single biggest mismanaged event in human history.
I think there's also part of the problem is that people have a really hard time adjusting once they make an initial observation or initial plan of attack.
And the initial plan of attack was that COVID was going to be something that killed a massive amount of people, far more.
We thought it was going to kill like 10% of the people and it was going to be a bloodbath.
It was going to be...
Similar to the Spanish flu, we were terrified a year ago.
And once a lot of people got it, and then once really healthy people got it, and that's once we realized that.
How many asymptomatic?
I remember in the beginning, someone was telling me, well, they're asymptomatic initially, but they're going to get symptoms.
No.
My fucking real estate lady, she's 46 years old.
She's fit.
She works out.
She didn't even know she had it.
She was scheduled to go for a vacation in the Bahamas or something like that, and she had to take a test.
She took the test.
Turns out positive.
She couldn't believe it.
Took it again.
Turns out positive.
Couldn't believe it.
Took it again.
Turns out positive.
Okay, I've got COVID. So she sits home and watches movies for 10 days.
Never feels a goddamn thing.
Like this idea that your immune system is incapable of preventing a serious infection.
Incapable of protecting you.
That once you're exposed, it's like a demon and it's going to take you over.
Well, not only that, the data shows that it dies in contact with UV light.
I mean, if we're going to base this on science, and we're supposed to, there's virtually no evidence whatsoever for any spread of this disease with outdoor contact.
And so if you were outside digging in your garden, it would be like the prototypical best scenario for someone who wanted to avoid COVID would go outside in your garden, start gardening, get some vitamin D from the sun.
It's the most simplistic thing, but the first time you and I talked, and you talked about the issues that you had with inflammation of your joints, and that you were kind of told that this was going to be your situation from here on out.
And as you got older, it was going to get worse.
You changed your diet, eliminated all this processed sugar, eliminated all the bullshit, and...
Again, it's so simple and simplistic, it's almost like unbelievable.
And yet, my whole background is in evolutionary biology and genetic science and looking how our bodies respond to information from food, from sleep, from sun exposure, from play, from dirt exposure.
And when you realize that we evolved over, you know, Two and a half million years of human evolution and a hundred years of mammalian evolution and a billion years of multi-cell evolution.
A lot of these things are encoded in our DNA that expect us to act certain ways and eat certain things.
And when you bypass that with, you know, crunchy, salty, fatty, sweet, cheap stuff, you mess with the signaling and you wind up with genes getting turned on that might cause inflammation and turn off the genes that It would burn fat and turn on the genes that would store fat and turn off the genes that build muscle.
These are all just, it sounds really, if you look at the level of every study now that looks at what happens at the level of gene expression, you understand that so many of these things that we do on a daily basis affect how we rebuild, renew, regenerate, recreate ourselves.
Minute by minute, and food is still probably the most important aspect of that, if you had to pick one.
But people have this odd disconnect between what they put in their body and what kind of effect it has on them, because they seek out food pleasure, and they seek it out as a reward.
Oftentimes when you're working and you're bored, you go to the candy machine.
This is like a standard thing that people do.
They give themselves a reward for being in a shitty state of mind.
Guys who go to the gym every day and train two hours because they like to eat.
It's like, okay, wait a minute.
I get that you like to eat.
Everyone likes to eat.
You're wired to eat, but you're going to go struggle and suffer and sweat and strain so you can go home and have a few more bites of something you probably shouldn't eat in the first place?
I mean, I don't even partition my meals that way, so I'll eat a portion of a meal as a cheat every other meal sometimes.
I'll have a couple of bites of bread with some great butter on it, or I'll have a couple of bites of a dessert, or I'll have a couple of bites of pizza once in a while.
So, you know, my path has been from almost orthorexic, like really dialed into everything I was eating.
Or in many cases it comes from a seed, a seed oil.
So canola, soybean oil, corn oil.
And when people shift away from the sugar and they go toward even a low-carb diet and they start thinking, well, I'll have salads and I'll have salad dressing.
And then they don't realize that the great salad that they just made, which could be one of the healthiest things, They could eat.
They just ruined with a soy-based dressing or canola-based dressing.
So I got rid of the industrial seed oils, got rid of the sugar, got rid of the processed and whole grains in my case.
So we talked about this before.
The grains are like really a problem for not just me, but for a lot of people.
And that's what was causing my arthritis, for instance, and my IBS and my GERD and everything else.
That was what really put me on a path to change the way the world eats.
Because I thought to myself, you know, if I spent my whole life as an endurance athlete carb loading with healthy whole grains, because that was the moniker, right?
Heart healthy whole grains.
And, you know, that's how you got the predominance of carbohydrates.
And I would eat 5, 6, 7, 800 grams a day of carbs.
But I was miserable.
And I couldn't figure out what it was.
And even after I got rid of sugar and I started doing a lot of research, I still sort of kept the grains in my diet.
Because I'd been indoctrinated into this thought that, The U.S. Department of Agriculture pyramid says 6 to 11 servings of grains every day.
That's the base of the pyramid.
And then my wife at one point said, look, you're doing all this research on grains, and you're starting to uncover some pretty interesting facts that don't point toward health.
Why don't you give them up for 30 days and see what happens?
And that's what happened, and it changed my life.
So I thought...
If I'm a guy who used to eat a lot of grains, who then, even in the face of knowledge about them, defended my right to eat grains, and then I got rid of them, how many tens of millions of people are sort of thinking that grains are healthy and they're good for them, and even though they don't have celiac, they're still on a spectrum of being negatively impacted by grains.
It's so hard for people to swallow because of this thing that's been shoved into our face that grains, whole grains, like that term, whole grain.
If you had a box and you said whole grain and you had an option, healthy, non-healthy, the vast majority of the country would check healthy for whole grains.
I mean, I don't know if there's a correlation, but in his eyes, he wanted to curb sexual desire, so he prescribed some very bland grain cereals for people to eat.
And I don't know how many people were eating breakfast cereal before he came along.
I mean, he most certainly had a giant impact on the way people eat breakfast.
Well, they ate oatmeal or gruel or something that took long to prepare, but all of a sudden this guy comes along and he says, you open it up, you pour it in a bowl, you put some milk on it, you're good to go.
And through that, everyone ate cereal as a kid.
And I don't know if you did, but everyone where I grew up, that cereal that was breakfast, And you would eat Special K if you wanted to eat healthy.
Yeah, exactly.
If your mother wanted to lose weight, she would buy Special K. Yeah, with low-fat milk.
And once people are vested, they have a vested interest in regulating, and there's a bunch of people whose jobs is to regulate, that only expands and grows.
That's the thing about bureaucracy.
When you have the kind of government like California has that doesn't just...
Have an over bloated bureaucracy, but it encourages it to get more and more bloated.
And anytime there's a new problem, they create new committees and they want to pass new laws and new regulations and hire new people and hire a group to sit around and think about how to handle a situation.
Nothing ever gets done.
But when you have that sort of mindset, that mindset is never the mindset of trimming down and cutting away and, oh, this is what the problem is.
The mindset is just in regulation, and that's the California mindset.
And I wonder what it is, because it seems to cross all from local government to state government to even federal government.
You run for office, I guess presumably on a platform of you're going to do something.
You're going to accomplish something.
You're going to enact legislation.
And what if for a couple of years people got elected and all they were asked to do was pair back legislation and look at all the stuff that the previous administrations wrote that didn't work and unwind it?
But I wonder if in some places people recognize the errors of our ways over the last year.
Because it's one thing that has been exposed over the last year, more than anything in my lifetime, is how important it is to have a mayor that's not a moron.
How important it is to have a governor that's not a moron and a governor that understands that you have to give people freedom.
They have to maintain their freedom.
You cannot decide that someone's business is not essential because it's not essential for you.
Yeah, I mean, I don't see how there isn't yet another shoe to drop on the economic forecasting, because I think a lot of the businesses that were going to fail haven't yet really completed the failure cycle.
Because I know a lot of, like you do, I know a lot of people who...
Went out of business or just struggled, and the worst to me, the first lockdown, and you struggle through it, and you get into April or May, and it looks like there's light at the end of the tunnel, and you borrowed $300,000 to keep your restaurant open, and then all of a sudden, there's another lockdown, and now it's even more egregious.
And they didn't like the fact, and they were like, you're going to kill everyone.
But I love how he did it when he did a press conference with charts, and he said, we are going to protect our most vulnerable, and this is how we're going to do it.
But we think very strongly that children should be able to go back to school.
It poses little to no risk for children, especially in comparison to the flu, which actually kills kids.
And I read the other day, the average weight gain was like half a pound every 10 days during COVID? Yeah, they think they said the average, like 42% of the people gained weight and the average weight gain for millennials was 39 pounds.
Well, I think what they're saying is for the 42% that did gain weight...
It's not that everyone gained weight, most people didn't gain weight, but the 42% that did gain weight, the average weight gain was more than 30 pounds, which is a lot of, that's a big change in your body over 30 years that can also have a massive negative health impact for years to come.
When you put that kind of a burden on all of your, your endocrine system, all your body systems so rapidly.
This is the other thing that we have a real problem with in our culture today.
You can't say you need to lose weight.
Because even though it's true, we have this bizarre...
Like, participation trophy concept of how we treat people when it comes to real issues, like being obese, like being fat.
It's fucking terrible for you.
But if you say that, you're fat shaming, which is so nonsensical and it's just designed to protect lazy people or excuse me, maybe not even lazy people inflicted people that are inflicted with weight.
Maybe they're not lazy.
Maybe they're just they're mentally fucked up.
Like maybe they've got issues and they they can't seem to get it together and discipline themselves and lose the weight, whether it's because of their sugar levels or their addiction to food or whatever it is.
But my God, we're not helping anybody by protecting their feelings and letting their body get destroyed.
And all you other women out there that are getting angry and stuffing the incorrect food in your mouth, looking at that, you should approach this differently.
You should say, I want to do what she's doing.
But this idea of this plus model industry, and I'm not against plus models, man.
Look, if you're big and you want to wear hot clothes, you should be able to do whatever you want.
And I think my whole thing in life is I want to help people be happy.
At the end of the day, all the stuff we talk about, whether it's dialing your sleep in or getting the right body weight or being strong or fit or productive or whatever, it all trickles down to one thing.
Because you can be fit and ripped and productive and successful and unhappy.
Okay, that didn't work.
If happiness is really what we're seeking as individuals, and it could be I'm happy because I'm making a contribution to the world or whatever, then if you're a large person and even if your health isn't really dialed in, but you truly tell me you're healthy, I'm like, okay, that's fine.
But if you say, you know, I'm...
Typically, if you're obese, you're not healthy.
If you say, I'm happy, one thing.
But if you say, big can also be healthy.
And I'm thinking, no, 230 for a woman cannot be healthy.
You know, I've gone through, again, all these iterations of trying to...
Assist people with the information that I've come across in my research on how they can achieve an ideal body composition, have more energy, maintain or build muscle, improve their immune systems, have better sex, be more productive, whatever it is.
These are the hidden genetic switches that I'm trying to uncover for people.
And in so doing, you can choose to do it or not.
I'm not suggesting you have to do this to have a great life, but here are some of the ways that we do it.
And it started with a primal blueprint and then sort of morphed into, well, the primal blueprint works really well for a lot of people, and it even worked well for me, but is there something else?
Is there a new, like, level I could get to?
And that was the keto.
So I wrote a book called The Keto Reset Diet since I was on here.
And I was into keto for a while.
But then I sort of said, well, you know, ketosis is not a way to live your life.
It's a tool, a strategy that you can use to build metabolic flexibility.
And if you never go down the route of keto and all you do is eat carbs your whole life or have a carb-centric diet, you never get to the point where you're burning fat efficiently or effectively.
So you're really metabolically inflexible.
Your body is just demanding that it continuously run on carbs and never tap into your fat stores.
Typically, you get incrementally fatter and fatter.
And then if you skip a meal or skip two meals or try to go on some sort of a fast, The wheels fall off because you haven't built the metabolic machinery to burn fat, to burn ketones, and all the things that go along with metabolic flexibility.
So it turns out metabolic flexibility is the holy grail in how you get there, whether it's primal, paleo, vegetarian, vegan, fasting, IF, whatever.
It's almost like it doesn't matter What route you use, if you can get to the point where you're metabolically flexible, now you have this ability to extract energy from your own stored body fat whenever you don't eat.
The reason is you're trying to prompt the body into making changes that it doesn't want to make.
When you go to the gym and you lift weights, you're prompting the body to build muscle that it really doesn't want to build, but now you're giving it a reason to.
When you withhold carbohydrate from the diet, sugar in particular, but carbohydrate in general, And the body senses that it's not going to get glucose for a while.
It starts to go to a plan B, which is to build the metabolic machinery to start to extract energy from stored fat cells to burn that fat, to combust that fat in the muscle cells.
It takes some of the fat and sends it to the liver to convert into ketones because the brain works really well on ketones.
In fact, the brain works better on ketones than it does on glucose for most people.
So the body has this built-in plan, this diagram, this genetic program that you're born with to be metabolically flexible and to be able to extract energy from fat and from ketones and from glucose.
And it would normally go that route, but we never give it the reason to.
Now, how is that...
How has it evolved?
Well, for most of human history, we ate and we didn't eat.
It wasn't like, you know, breakfast was the most important meal of the day or make sure you keep, you know, little Tupperware things of a little bit of protein and some carbohydrate to eat every two or three hours or else your muscles will go into cannibal mode.
No, humans are wired to overeat.
And because food was so scarce, when we did come across food, we tended to eat more, and certainly sweet foods like fruits was even more palatable, so we probably tended to eat more of that.
So we're wired to overeat, and we have this amazing...
It's a design that allows us to take excess energy and convert it into fuel that we carry around with us all the time, conveniently located above the center of gravity.
So it's on the hips, on the butt, on the thighs, on the belly.
So we tend to carry this excess body fat as a survival mechanism from a million years ago.
But again, if you look at evolution and how things work, we're bipedals.
We have to stand upright.
So if we had fat accumulating on our upper back or whatever, we'd be tipping over.
So it's conveniently located over the center.
It's an elegant, elegant design.
The problem is it was designed so that when you didn't eat food, you could take that same fuel, take it out of storage, combust it, and not be any of the worst for wear.
Not think of anything other than, you know, I'm still going to hunt.
I'm still going to do all these things.
I haven't eaten for five days.
I'm not hungry.
I'm not pissed off at my mate.
I'm just going to keep going with a great attitude that I'm going to find something to eat.
So, you know, your brain is kind of frazzled because you haven't given it the opportunity to really thrive on ketones yet.
Your body's making ketones, but you haven't, again, you haven't built that metabolic machinery to use them efficiently and effectively.
And so the brain's still looking for glucose.
And as a result, what happens is the brain will send a signal to the adrenals to secrete cortisol.
Cortisol then, you know, goes throughout the body and strips amino acids from muscle tissue to send them to the liver to become glucose so you can feed the brain.
So it's counterproductive over time.
And it's also, you know, one of the reasons why back in the old bodybuilding days, in the old training days in any gym...
This mantra about don't go more than three or four hours without eating or you'll cannibalize your muscle tissue.
If you haven't become fat adapted and keto adapted, that does happen.
You do cannibalize muscle tissue when you go long periods of time without eating.
When I say standard American diet, I don't mean junk food, but if you're a person who eats normal, you eat a little bit of pasta, a little bit of bread, but you eat mostly healthy.
If you decide that you're going to fast, Your body's going to cannibalize some muscle.
One of the many things that happens when you fast is that your body goes into a different mode and it starts to realize that there's not going to be a lot of fuel around for a while, and so in addition to burning stored body fat, in addition to making ketones, and by the way, ketones come from fat, so some of the fat that you combust is also just converted into ketones that your brain can use.
It also, the body also says, like if you were to be a, if you had a brain, if you were a cell and you had a brain and you thought, well, generally there's a lot of fuel around, so my job is to pass the genetic material along to the next generation, so there's plenty for two of us, so I'll just divide and there'll be two of us, and that'll be great.
That same cell, in the absence of this sort of bathing in nutrition, goes, wow, this...
Not even enough for one of me, let alone two of me, so I'm not going to divide.
I'm going to repair what I have.
And so the cell goes into a repair process where it starts to consume damaged proteins and damaged fats within itself.
It actually gets energy from that.
It starts to repair broken strands of DNA or whatever little things are going on.
It actually kills off senescent cells at that time.
So it's an anti-aging strategy that a lot of people use.
No, but—and I used it in a book, but all of a sudden, in the context of what's going on in the world and the Great Reset, like, I never want to hear that term again.
I read the New York Times to see what the other side's doing.
The Great Reset.
Yeah.
So she will do these fast, but she's metabolically flexible, so it's easy for her to do.
But if you're not metabolically flexible and you take on a fast of three days, you can get through it and it's probably good for you.
My whole thing is I want this to be, if you chose to do something like that, I want it to be pleasurable and easy and graceful and something you look forward to doing, not something you dread doing.
So the premise of the book is once you've developed metabolic flexibility to engage in as much time as you can of not eating throughout the day to maximize all of these Benefits that we just described that come from not eating.
One of the things we say is most of the good things happen to us when we're not eating.
Most of the repair, most of the recovery, most of the rebuilding happen when we're not eating.
When we're eating, which we have to do, it comes with inflammation and it's a necessary thing, but the good stuff all happens when we're not eating.
So to the extent that we can...
We can expand that window of not eating.
And with the two meals a day program, which pretty much anybody who's keto now does, you just have an evening meal, and then you don't eat until 1 o'clock, 1.30, 2 o'clock the next day.
So you have two meals a day, and you have that 18-hour window.
I mean, you can do 16. I mean, anything less than 14 is back to sort of where you were before.
It's a little bit better, but it's not as...
Like I say, the more time that you can go between eating, the better.
And it isn't about so much a routine on a daily basis.
It's basically, I certainly use that as a template, but once in a while I eat one meal a day.
I'll go, you know, dinner to dinner to dinner.
And the beauty here is because I'm metabolically flexible, I have the confidence that I'm not tearing down muscle tissue.
I have that my immune system is probably benefiting from it as opposed to being somehow hurt by it.
I maintain muscle mass.
Again, I have all this energy.
And most importantly, I'm not hungry.
I mean, hunger is the killer.
Hunger ruins everything.
So anytime we talk about these strategies, you have to address hunger first and foremost.
Because if you ask people, well, one of the things that's going to happen is you're going to get hungry and you're going to get...
And it's going to be, you're going to have to fight your way through it.
No, that's not how we do this.
So with two meals a day, we build a strategy where, you know, we eliminate the big three, the sugar, processed grains, and the industrial seed oils.
And then we, you know, start to cut back a little bit on the starchy carbs for a while, because once you develop the flexibility, you can introduce the starchy carbs again.
And then we basically say, look, let's see how long you can go without feeling bad when you wake up in the morning, you know, and see if you can go till 10 o'clock or 10.30 before you have to eat.
And if you can go longer, that's great.
And if you go that long and do a workout and feel good, that's even better.
So the end result is, well, this all came from a...
A thought experiment I did a while back where I looked at, first of all, how much food we eat as humans.
And we eat a shitload of food.
All of us, pretty much, eat way too much food.
More food than we need, for sure.
And most of us use as a metric, like, what can I get away with?
Like, what's the most amount of this food I can eat and not get fat?
Or what's the most amount of this dessert I can have and not feel like a glutton or not feel guilty later on or not look like I'm whatever?
So we try to get away with As much as we can.
And a lot of guys in the gym, that's their thing.
I love to eat, and I'm going to eat as much as I can.
And if I can get away with more, I'm going to work out more, and I'm going to balance it out.
But it's kind of a ridiculous way of looking at life, like how much of a glutton can I be every day, every meal?
So I did the reverse of that, and I thought, what's the least amount of food we can eat?
And maintain muscle mass or build muscle mass.
What's the least amount of food we can eat and have all the energy we need throughout the day?
Not get sick.
And most importantly, not be hungry.
And if you can look at that in terms of like the minimum effective dose of food, what's the least amount of food I can eat and enjoy every freaking bite with gusto and delight...
And then be okay with saying, you know what?
I think I've had enough.
I'm good.
And typically you find if you've developed this metabolic flexibility that you can eliminate 25 or 30% of the calories you used to eat with zero adverse effect and probably entirely to your benefit.
Because in the 16 to 18 hours a day, that's where your energy is coming from.
And so we look at, you know, you look at some of the top endurance athletes now, Zach Bitter, good example, guy derives 97% of his energy when he's running a 100-mile race, doing 6-minute, 45-second miles, derives 90% from fat.
That was almost unheard of.
Like the science community could not get their head around that for a long time.
So then a couple years later, I'm like, I think I've already hit that number with books and seminars and blog posts and stuff like that.
Let's make it 100. So I boosted it up to 100. One of the Best things I did with the food company was I brought new people into understanding how the body works and how eating real food with healthy sauces and marinades and toppings and things that made that healthy food taste that much better.
Again, I probably expanded the universe of people that now begin to really appreciate the effects of food on the body.
But I still have like a book a year in me, and I'm still doing books on how we can achieve greatness.
I don't often use that term, but how we can...
You know, achieve this level of health and satisfaction and enjoyment of life.
I mean, the tagline of my company is Live Awesome.
And as I said, I want everybody to, at the end of the day, all I want is to be happy.
You know, and if I can help you do that through my methods, and then the rest of what you do, whether it's financial or with your family, that's up to you.
No, this is really the synthesis of 30 years of doing this.
And it's almost like, you know, this book was rewriting stuff that it had already written, but in a way that's more user-friendly to the average person.
So nothing in my framework has changed scientifically, but I'm always trying to figure out how can I say this in a way that will appeal to the most people.
So, I think everyone realizes they probably eat too much food, but how can I find a way to not only convince them to do it, but make it easier and make it not just easier, but pleasurable in a way that enhances their lives?
It's because it's frozen, it's too logistically complicated to do individual shipments.
They have to stay frozen.
So it's in the frozen section of a lot of stores now.
And that was one of the things that was curtailed from COVID. So we were going to launch last year in April, and then a lot of the stores said, look, there's going to be nobody coming into our stores, and we're not going to make any big shifts until we know how this sorts out.
But it's taking off.
One of the programs we have right now, and I think we told your team this, is we're...
We're going to donate 50,000 of these meals to needy families through a program.
I hope it's in the show notes, but if not, you can Google Primal Kitchen and check it out there.
By purchasing Primal Kitchen products and showing a proof of purchase, we'll donate one of these meals to families in need.
So I sold the company to Kraft Heinz two years ago now.
And I've been intimately involved ever since, and mostly on the R&D side.
So the amount of R&D that's gone into creating these has been amazing.
And, you know, so we will have Zoom calls.
To cook in real time whatever, you know, we're working on, whatever the latest iteration is, and then there'll be, you know, eight of us on a call, and then we'll have to fill out forms about, you know, spiciness and sweetness and all that.
It's really, I think, well done.
And so by consensus, we come down to the final iteration.
I mean, it's designed for moms who are in a hurry and don't want to fix dinner for their kids or whatever or want to spend less time fixing dinner for their kids and want to serve them up something healthy.
So it really fills a need.
On occasion, like I love to cook steak at my house, so I mostly have steak, but if I'm out of steak or whatever, then I'm going to pull it back up.
I pan-fry it with butter, salt and pepper, pan-fry on one side, flip it over, get a lot of the gooey butter and stuff in there, pan-fry on the other side, let it stand for 10 minutes.
A lot of people screw up on keto or screw up on some of these, even IF, intermittent fasting, because...
If you're metabolically flexible, then you can derive a lot of this energy from the fats in your meal and from the protein, and you've cut the carbs down.
But if you then finish it off with a dessert, now you're raising your insulin.
The insulin is—well, you're raising your blood sugar, first of all.
And then you're raising your insulin, so the insulin is trying to get rid of the glucose in your bloodstream, and it's also locking the fat into the fat cells so you can't burn it off.
It's a bit of a...
It's sort of the worst...
The thing you could do would be to combine a standard American diet with parts of a keto or a primal diet.
I mean, the mechanism, as I say, if you're eating otherwise healthy food, even if you've got some starchy carbs in there or some vegetables that are providing carbohydrate, you know, they're slow-burn carbohydrates.
They don't go directly into your bloodstream.
They sort of leak into your bloodstream over time.
Many of these are locked in a fibrous matrix, so it takes a while for your body to digest them.
But then when you consume the sugar, the sugar goes straight into the bloodstream, so the blood sugar goes sky high, and now it sets up this whole reaction where, again, your pancreas is secreting insulin, the insulin is trying to get rid of all the sugar that's in your bloodstream.
The paleo treats and the keto desserts and all these things are like trying to come up with a version.
It's almost like Beyond Meat trying to come up with a piece of steak that's made out of vegetables.
And here we are trying to create a sugary dessert that looks like a dessert and tastes like a dessert, but is made with erythritol and allulose and all this other stuff.
Well, Rob Wolf has a new book out and he was supposed to be on right around April, but a bunch of shit went down and we're going to have him on again.
But his book is about that.
His book is all about...
The benefits of regenerative agriculture.
Yeah, the people that are skeptical, though, don't think that we could do it at a scale that's necessary to provide as many people with meat as eat meat in this country because of fast food production.
Fast food production, the way they believe, the way I've heard it argued, and it makes a lot of sense, is that the scale in which we're consuming meat in this country because of fast food requires factory farming to keep up with it.
Well, for now it does, but, you know, there's got to be a tipping point.
There's got to be a point at which we have to recognize that by concentrating everything in our world, not just food, but all of these different concentrations, that there is a point at which we can't satisfy people's needs and needs.
And so I see us sort of going back to the cottage industry farm, the local grown, you know, the local farmers.
I mean, I would love to see if there's going to be any subsidies in agriculture, it should be for local small farms that are trying to do regenerative agriculture and reclaim the topsoil and, you know, build back instead of continuously depleting it.
And I think one of the interesting things is that one of the big arguments against everyone eating vegetables is monocrop agriculture, which is essentially what you would need.
This is the real problem.
It becomes a conundrum.
Because everyone, I think everyone, with a heart and a soul, agrees that factory farming in terms of animals is disgusting.
It's horrible.
But I don't think they understand the horrors of monocrop agriculture and how bad it is.
It's so bad for the environment.
It's so bad for the soil.
It's bad for the animals.
It's terrible for all the wildlife that gets moved and displaced because of the fact that you have 4,000 acres of corn or some crazy shit like that.
And when they...
Churn that corn up with a combine, a lot of shit dies.
There is no way you're going to go out there and handpick 4,000 acres of corn.
You're not going to do it.
You use machinery.
And during that machinery, it's indiscriminate.
It chews up everything.
Not only that...
You have to use some sort of pesticides.
You have to use something that discourages predation.
You have to use all these different methods to keep animals.
If you have 4,000 acres of corn, you're going to have a food source where animals are going to swarm in and eat all of your crops.
That's what they would do.
If that was a normal thing that occurred in the wild, if in the wild, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, there was 4,000 acres of naturally growing vegetables, that would be one of the most wildlife-rich areas.
I'll be 113 hooked up to an IV NAD machine, and Jamie will be out there trucking, eating lab-grown carrots.
I just don't understand why people don't recognize that both these things are terrible.
Factory farming is terrible, and this monocrop agriculture.
And this is the argument they always use.
We need these monocrop agriculture things to feed animals.
Well, no, we don't.
What you need is natural grasslands.
When the settlers saw millions of bison running across the plains, what were they eating?
Were they eating monocrop, GMO, soy?
No, they weren't.
They were eating grass.
That's what they're supposed to eat.
And when they do that, they shit on the ground.
That shit fertilizes the grasses and fertilizes all the other plants.
And then you have this whole ecosystem of animals that exist within these fields.
And it's supposed to be that way.
They're supposed to coexist together.
And they work together symbiotically to make sure that...
You can do that, at least we've demonstrated on small scale, and this is what Rob's book is about, and a lot of other people have talked about this as well, that when it's done correctly, it actually produces a carbon neutral effect.
No, prioritization and responsibility, you know, taking responsibility, those are kind of a key ingredient in getting your life back together again, I think.
And with regard to, you know, eating...
One of the issues that I saw people have is, you know, well, noon, it's lunchtime, right?
It's like, whether I'm hungry or not, it's noon, we should have lunch.
Well, what if you, you know, prioritize something else at noon, to your point, and be okay with the fact that you don't have to have something to eat just because it's 12 p.m.?
Like, breakfast is the most important meal of the day.
It's not.
A morning meal from 8 to 9 is not the most important meal of the day.
And for people who are metabolically flexible, it's a waste of time.
It's like, what?
I've got to start my day by sitting down and doing something else instead of going off and being productive and going to the gym and going to work and doing all the stuff I'm doing?
So, you know, this frees up a lot of time as well, this compressed eating window is one of the terms we use for it.
It's so much so that there's times where you, you know, and the sand is so fluffy from the wheels going through, people walking through, that you, like, have to focus on going two miles an hour just to stay upright to get through it.
Yeah, well at least the first UFC in the United States.
They did a live audience in Abu Dhabi fairly recently where they, I think they had to have a COVID test, a negative COVID test within 24 to 48 hours or something like that.
Some reasonable amount of time.
But they're going to do one in Jacksonville, just buck wild, 15,000 people, jam them in there.
Because one of the things is, by now, most people who are going to get it have gotten it.
Or gotten exposed to it, I think.
Most people who are going to die have died.
I mean, it's a horrible thing to say, but I think it took a lot of elderly people who only had a few months left anyway.
And so now, if you get exposed, and again, the viral load is minimal because you're out and about and you get a couple of little virons instead of You know, a massive dose that the healthcare workers got, for instance, in the first days or first weeks of the pandemic in New York, when the healthcare workers were getting sick, they were getting incredible viral loads.
Well, you can't, you know, there is a difference between a small viral load and body handling.
You know, so I think we've gotten to the point where every state ought to be considering opening back up fully.
There's a sickness in being able to tell people that they can't work, and once you have done that, I think it's just human nature.
I think people are very reluctant to release that, because if they were basing it entirely on the science, they would have to take Florida into account.
They really would.
You'd also have to take into account the evidence that shows that it spreads indoors, and that you might be by...
Continuing the lockdown, you might be encouraging the spread of the virus.
It's weird to see, and it's going to be really weird in four or five years when Los Angeles hasn't recovered, because they think California's going to bounce back real quick.
One of the reasons I left California was I saw it on a slippery slope going downhill, even way before COVID. And whether it's the taxes or whether it's the way it's governed or whether it's the...
Their prohibitions on businesses are unbelievable.
And I've had several businesses in California.
How so?
Oh, for example, the Alcoholic Beverage Commission.
I opened a restaurant a couple years ago.
It failed.
But we applied a year in advance for our beer and wine license.
A year in advance.
And over the time, as we were building the restaurant out, We kept checking in.
How's it going?
Yeah, it's great.
Everything's on track.
And then as we got a month away from opening, we lost your application.
You're going to have to start over again.
Get to the back of the line.
So we had to refile and lost like two months.
We were open for two months without a beer and wine license.
Title 24, which is a good idea, energy conservation, had to build a switch that would dim the lights or turn the lights off whenever there was ambient daylight outside.
It would recognize the amount of light inside and save energy by turning lights off.
Well, at some part of every morning when people were eating breakfast at 10.30 when the sun was up here, if a cloud came by, the lights would go on.
They'd flicker on and off for an hour every day, and you couldn't bypass the switch.
But this was a regulation.
Then when I went to sell the business, it went into escrow, and then the escrow money stayed there for a year because the state wouldn't release it partly because of COVID and partly because they couldn't find a tax return that had been filed a year earlier.
And it goes on and on.
I mean, I could literally write a book about how egregious the regulations are for businesses in California.
So many other friendly states that believe in personal freedom.
That sounds like such a crazy thing to say.
Believe in freedom.
When you say believe in freedom, automatically people have images of American flags and right-wing ideology and eagles and shit.
But freedom is so critical for people trying to figure out who they are and what they are.
Who they are and what they want to do and how they want to live their life.
It is the most open-minded principle that we have.
It's crazy that it's been demonized.
The concept of wanting to pursue freedom has been demonized.
It's like, oh, you just want a gun and you want to be able to light things on fire and fireworks every day.
That's not what freedom is.
But this concept, the way it's been applied to California, that this insanely inept government is supposed to be able to take care of you and tell you what you can and can't do.
My house burned in the Malibu fires, in the Woolsey fires in 2018. I still had a house in Malibu.
We had been trying to sell it, but it burned in the fires.
And the mismanagement of that whole Malibu fire thing was...
Somebody's, I think, writing a book about it, but it was horrible.
And so there'd be fire trucks from neighboring states, not just neighboring communities, but neighboring states, positioned on PCH, and people could ask...
Dude, my house is on fire just up the street.
I'm an aisle and a half.
And they said, well, we have to stay here and wait to be dispatched to go.
So my daughter was living in the house, and I was literally watching it live-streamed on local CBS 2 in L.A., And my daughter's in the house, and I got pictures I could show you, though.
There's the fire line coming toward our house.
And I'm like, get the dogs and get out.
And she's like, no, I think we've got time.
And then when I see one of the reporters on PCH with the flames already down to PCH, I'm like, get out of the house now.
As her husband was unloading, you know, there were boats that were bringing supplies in because no supplies could come in through PCH. Yeah, I was in Bell Canyon, and when the firefighters in Bell Canyon, my friend Bud, I told him where I have all my elk stored.
And so I let him into my house, and then we took all the elk meat and fed the firefighters.
So he kept a grill running while all these guys were trying to...
This was such an inferno and the winds were 50 miles an hour.
Insane.
And with a water hose, which, by the way, was down to a trickle because the firefighters were using all of the major hydrant, all the pressure had dropped.
You couldn't even douse yourself to keep yourself from catching fire yourself.
It was weird to see because I was at home.
I had actually done a set at the Comedy Store, and I came home, and it was about 12.30 at night, and my wife and I were looking out the window, and she was like, I think we should get the fuck out of here.
And it was getting close.
And as the fire was getting close, it just started erupting in all these different spots.
It wasn't just one spot.
And it was pretty obvious it was headed our way.
So we wound up staying in Beverly Hills at a hotel for like a week or so with a couple of our other friends from the neighborhood.
So it was not too bad.
We all got together and we're like, hey, I wonder if we have a house.
We got lucky.
But I had been evacuated three times in California.
My first event ever, my first triathlon ever was Ironman Hawaii.
So I did triathlon for a couple of years.
Wound up finishing fourth in Hawaii, but was not into swimming that much.
But in those days, I was riding 200 miles a week.
I was running 40, 50 miles a week as a triathlete, swimming a little bit, spending some time in the gym.
It was an inordinate amount of time working.
And as I retired, if you're that sort of an athlete and you think about endorphins and the rush that you get from training, you literally do seek it on a daily basis.
And so I couldn't just go cold turkey, so I wound up coaching elite triathletes and riding with them and doing their workouts with them and lifting with them.
I stayed very fit in my 40s.
But there was a point at which I realized I don't need to do this much stuff to look fit.
And I thought, well, it's better to look fit than to be fit.
So now, for the last 20 or 30 years, I mean, I haven't run a mile in 20 years.
I haven't put on shoes to go out and run a mile in 20 years.
Now I can play Ultimate Frisbee or do sprints on the beach and still crush it sprinting.
It's not like I don't run, but I just have no interest in running long distance stuff.
And the bike riding on the sand, it's interesting, it's challenging to me.
It's not like I'm just going for three hours into the hills on a road bike.
A lot of fighters love long-distance running, maybe not heavy distance, but like six miles, seven miles, because they think that it provides you with a cardio base that allows you to recover and keep going.
I'm thinking that a lot of the stuff you're doing with the jiu-jitsu, probably if they just orchestrated it a little bit differently, it would have as much benefit.
That's one of the things I've learned about myself in the past.
As you get older...
You know, your loss of aerobic capacity doesn't drop off as much as your loss of strength and muscle and power.
So you have to work on the strength, muscle, and power.
You have to work on the lean mass a lot more as you get older.
And that's like the number one thing I tell people over 50. Like, stop the running.
You know, you can run once in a while, but don't run 50 miles or 40 miles a week or 30 miles a week.
You know, spend more time in the gym and spend more time doing, you know, hex bar deadlifts or squats or lunges or, you know, and upper body stuff because that's where the real benefit comes to your metabolic flexibility, for one thing, and your organ reserve, right?
I can do, you know, I'll do, I'll work lower with a lot of reps and work up to about that.
I mean, I've done 330 recently, and I'm, again, at my age, and I'm a skinny former runner, so my joints are not really designed to handle that kind of stuff, and that's The one thing I don't want to do is get injured, you know, working out.
I want to prevent injuries.
So the concept of the one rep max no longer works for me because a one rep max is kind of dangerous.
dangerous is like you can either do it in which case it's not maybe not your max or you can't do it in which case you get screwed up i was watching a video of a guy uh the other day where he was doing an incline press and his check his peck tour and it's you see he has a tank top on yeah and as he's in the middle of it you see it goes it just raises up and pulls away and he screams and lowers the weight and drops it and you're like oh no yeah yeah it's it's horrific yeah Yeah.
I had a friend who did that who was on the juice, and that's one of the problems, is that if you're doing steroids and you're doing heavy weights, the tendons can't keep up with the muscle tissue.
And so at the division, the line there between the tendon and the muscle, it starts to separate.
I found out, to me at least, what I like to do, martial arts, kettlebells are the most beneficial.
When I use them, for whatever I do, whether I do lunges or split squats or regular squats or overhead squats or cleans and presses and windmills, all those different things, the fact that I'm forced to use the whole body with those, like I'm not trying to get any bigger.
I'm just trying to maintain my muscle mass and keep my cardio.
But after all, I look at the strain, I look at my recovery in the morning, that's big, and I'll see what my actual sleep was, what my actual number of hours sleep, and what my recovery score is based on heart rate variability.
That's why I like the whoop strap, because it gives me a good understanding of how I'm recovering.
At some point, I wonder how much of that you already know.
Like, you shouldn't have the wine and whatever.
So I'm like the anti-wearable guy.
I gave up on them a long time.
I think the data is sometimes suspect and...
And when I ask people, like, okay, so how did you adjust your behavior?
They go down the list of all the things they probably knew they should have done anyway, and they just proved that it wasn't working for them, so they have to...
I have a picture of me in 1980 wearing one of the first heart rate monitors.
It was a chest belt with three electrode leads that went from the chest down to a cigarette pack.
I've been into this thing for a long time, way before Polar Electro came out with their stuff.
But after a while, it's like, what do you do with the data if at the end of the day, if you're training, you're going to get in a race, and it's just going to come down to how you feel.
That's the problem with it as well, because some people think that, whether it's an Apple Watch or any of these Fitbits, that they can become addictive.
And, in fact, that was one of...
Who was it?
Irresistible?
What was the gentleman's name that was...
He wrote that book about the addiction to technology.
Jamie, he was on the podcast.
Nick, Australian guy.
Good book.
I disagreed with some of his points when it came to fitness wearables, but he felt like they'd become addictive the same way phones are addictive.
But I'm like, yeah, but you're addicted to working out, which is a good thing.
If you're addicted to getting in the work, I would say that is one of the most beneficial addictions that you can get.
If anything can get you away from heroin, heroin's the bad thing, right?
If you're addicted to booze, you're drinking all day, and then you become addicted to running, for sure you're going to have a better resting heart rate, you're going to have a healthier lower body mass, you're going to look better.
I had an amazing pasta at Carbone, which just opened in South Beach the other day.
Because my friend said, you should try it.
And I didn't just have a couple of bites.
I had a fair amount of it.
That's the metabolic flexibility part.
That's also the part that says...
So let's not be draconian about this.
Let's set the body up in terms of metabolic flexibility so you can do some of these things.
And I wouldn't call it a cheat day.
I wouldn't call it a cheat meal.
I would just say, you know, now where I draw the line is if at the end of that meal, if I'd had You know, a complete dessert, it would have screwed everything up.
And it's like, you know, it's easier with a couple of beers or a glass of wine or whatever.
It's softening you up a little bit.
I realized a while back that I'm not willing to sacrifice five hours of discomfort trying to go to sleep with a high heart rate for what amounts to four minutes of gustatory pleasure.
Oh, I mean, that's the part about the body fat thing that people don't get when they say, because I say, well, I live on my own stored body fat for, you know, most of my day.
And, well, you don't have any body fat, Mark.
Well, I got 20,000 calories worth of fat, disposable fat on me.
That doesn't even include the stuff that's protecting the organs.
So if we go back to the concept behind metabolic flexibility and how many calories do we burn in a day, it's a big variability.
Because some people burn a lot of calories because they can get away with it.
And so in my training days, I might eat 4,000, 5,000 calories in a day.
I weighed 138 to 145 pounds.
And I wasn't burning at all.
I wasn't running.
I mean, you run 15 miles, that's 1,500 calories.
Where'd the other 3,000 calories go?
Well, my body was finding ways to dispose of it.
I was running hot.
I was, you know, I would sleep in a sweat.
My body tries to find a way to dispose of those calories.
So those are calories that I did not need, were probably compromising my health.
So we don't need that much food.
And if you break down, you know, the macros, protein, carbohydrate, and fat, protein is largely, shouldn't even have a caloric number attached to it.
It's a building block, right?
You're not supposed to combust protein, except in an emergency.
So if you get 40, 50 grams of protein, the first 40 or 50, I don't care how many you're getting in a day, but the first 40 or 50 probably go to rebuilding and repair.
But when you're eating a lot of protein and you're not taking a lot of carbs, like when you're on a carnivore diet, then you have gluconeogenesis, right?
But as you become keto-adapted, as you become fat-adapted and keto-adapted, the muscles burn the fat primarily.
And they don't even need the ketones.
They're like, liver, you just reserve the ketones for the brain.
We're good.
We'll do it with stored glycogen and with fat.
So, the liver makes ketones for the brain primarily.
Now, when you first get into ketosis, people say, oh, my keto numbers are huge.
I'm like 6 millimolar.
I'm in ketosis.
Well, what that means is your body's making more ketones than it needs and it's spilling them out into the urine and the breath and they're in the bloodstream, but you're not using them.
When you become good at ketosis, like these carnivore guys are, most of the ketones are going to the brain, and the liver doesn't overproduce the ketones.
So does that mean when you use, whether it's a urine strip or whatever method of measuring ketones, you wouldn't necessarily show that you're in ketosis?
Quite often, won't even show that he's in ketosis, but he's making ketones.
It's just that his body is not overproduced.
Like the term osis connotes a, has a connotation of a disease state.
So ketosis means you have too many ketones.
But guys who have been, like Darth Luigi, one of my friends at LMNT, I see you get the element stuff out there in your thing, Rob's partner in LMNT, Todd White owns Dry Farm Wines.
These guys have been keto-ish for 10 years.
They almost never show much more than 0.5, 0.6, 0.4 millimolar.
Over 0.5, you're in ketosis, according to the medical literature.
But again, the idea is not to chase the numbers.
The idea is to become metabolically flexible and metabolically efficient.
So when you...
Like Dom is getting most of his energy from fat, some from ketones, and then whatever glucose his body requires comes from gluconeogenesis, which is sometimes converting the excess protein that he takes in into glucose.
Some of it comes from the glycerol part of the triglyceride molecule, which is combusted.
The three fatty acids are combusted for fat, but the glycerol becomes the backbone of glucose.
It's such an elegant system.
I talked about it as a closed loop in the book.
So imagine you're metabolically flexible.
You're on this program where you've built a metabolic machinery.
You've increased your mitochondria at least two-fold with this process, and your mitochondria are actually much more efficient.
And then you go on a seven-day fast.
And you think, oh, God, I'm going to fall apart.
I'm going to tear up muscle tissue.
What's going to happen to me?
Well...
If you envision the closed loop, what happens is you have no incoming food, so your body takes its stored body fat, it uses the fat that it combusts in the muscles to do the work, to walk around, to be active all day long.
It takes some of the fat and converts it into ketones to fuel the brain, which the brain, again, loves ketones.
And then it takes some of the glycerol and whatever needs there are for glucose, certain red blood cells, certain brain cells, it can easily accommodate that.
And then an amazing thing happens where one of the reactions to the body's upregulation of enzyme systems and genes is a protein sparing effect kicks in.
And all the protein that you used to deaminate and piss out on a day-to-day basis because of the amount of protein you're taking in, this all becomes recycled in a protein sink, and so you don't even lose that much protein.
So whatever repair is going on in the body, you have enough protein to do that without taking protein in because of the sparing effect of this.
And it's just so elegant, and you can see how our ancestors could survive for long periods of time without eating food, And without getting hangry and without getting depressed and curling up on a ball and beating their feet on the ground or stomping in anger or whatever, they just, yeah, we'll keep hunting.
It's all there, ready to be tapped into if we figure out the ways to turn on these hidden genetic switches that we have.
And that's been my life work for that matter.
One little thing about ketones also.
Is that the brain, if most of the ketones are going to the brain, the brain doesn't have this wild swing in energy demands.
You know, you go into the weight room and you do a heavy leg day, you know, your thighs and your glutes are going to be using 30, 40, 50 times as much energy to do the heavy weights as they would at rest.
While you're doing that, the brain's just cruising along at one, one and a half, two times normal output.
So the brain does not have a lot of energy requirements, chess masters included, by the way.
Typically, the brain uses about 500 calories a day.
I can't imagine a situation where it's going to use a lot, unless you've got some organic condition that's wrong with you, where it's going to use three times that.
Probably not use twice that.
Yeah, the brain is pretty steady-state in its energy requirements.
It comes from an article that Robert Sapolsky wrote about, and from explanations I'm reading through on multiple websites, it's sort of saying that the brain causes other body things to happen.
So because you're thinking so much, it'll cause an increased heart rate, which then causes the body to do other things.
Well, his work on baboons and alpha males and baboons.
Here it goes.
Drawing on research from Sapolsky, who studies stress primates at Stanford University.
The reason for the high caloric burn is due to breathing rates, which tripled during competition, blood pressure, which also elevates during competition, and muscle contractions.
Before, during, and after major tournaments.
Wow!
So that's how elite chess players can burn 6,000 calories a day and lose one kilogram a day.
So it's because of the significance of the tournament to them, that it's big time and they're making a lot of money, so it's stress and they're thinking about it a lot.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Yeah, I wonder...
I wonder how much an intense conversation, like a three-hour conversation like this, where you're spouting off all these facts and all these different things.
It's got to burn off quite a few.
After I get done with a heavy podcast, I'm always hungry.
Yeah, so, you know, clearly the brain is not burning more calories.
We've figured that out.
But the effects of epinephrine, the effects of all of the stress hormones and all the things that are going on and the high heart rate, although I don't, you know, I don't feel like my heart rate's high.
And, you know, there's a theory that each of us has sort of a point at which our body knows to shut down from having...
The couch potato syndrome, which is well known among elite athletes, is you train your ass off all day, then you spend the rest of the day recovering, resting on the couch, and your body just goes into a hibernation.
And so at the end of the day, you don't burn any more calories than your neighbor down the street did gardening and walking around and shopping and doing all these other things.
You know, I was involved in doping for triathlon for 15 years.
I basically wrote the anti-doping rules for triathlon and then administered them, every positive test I heard around the world for triathlon.
It's an interesting arena because most of these things that they take are actually medicines that they give to other people without any problem at all, and yet they deny That is funny, right?
Cross-country skiers have exercise-induced asthma because they're on the dry thing.
And for a long time, they weren't even allowed to use inhalers, even though they had asthma.
The IOC eventually created a TUE, a therapeutic use exemption for those guys.
Of course, then what they would do is, even if you didn't have asthma, you would apply for a TUE. That's what they did with mixed martial arts and testosterone.
The TUEs for testosterone, guys would just do steroids, and then they would get their testosterone checked, and their testosterone would be very low, because they just got off of steroids.
The thing about any of the anabolic steroids is the benefits stay with you.
So some guys who used, especially in track and field, who used for a while, even if you got caught and you spent two years on the sidelines, you didn't lose what you got.
But when people can actually get into the wiring under the board and monkey with who you are and make you a super genius that's 350 pounds of solid muscle and can run through walls, we're going to have a bunch of genius Hulk babies out there.
End, because there'll be no— Well, I think that's the real concern, is that other—you know, one of the things that people think of when they think of gene doping is, what's China doing?
It's the weirdest movie because he completely stepped in shit.
He did not mean to catch the greatest doping scandal in the history of the Olympics.
But he just was at the right place at the right time conducting an experiment on himself.
An open experiment where he did this...
This cycling race, completely clean, and then he was going to return the next year doping and film a documentary about it.
In the middle of all this, Gregory Rychenkov, that's how you say his name?
Yeah.
Gets caught up in this whole thing where they bust these people that are cheating in the Sochi Olympics, and he has to escape, and he comes to America, and he testifies, and then now he's on the run, fearful, fearing for his life.
But I do wonder about that stuff because on one hand, listen, I think we should pursue it because no one wants their child to have some sort of an incurable disease or some sort of a horrible, you know, handicap.
No one wants that, right?
So on one hand, we should pursue it.
But on another hand, like we literally might be reengineering the species.
That's the real problem, the haves and the have-nots.
The gap will be so wide, because initially it would be really expensive.
So the people that get on it initially are going to be the really wealthy people, and they're going to have this massive advantage, and their children will have this massive advantage, and then that gap will be even wider by the time it trickles down to regular folks.
And that's, you know, that's overdoing the therapeutic, you know, hormetic effect, which is intended to do a small stress to your body and you recover by, you know, by upregulating a bunch of immune things.
But you can, if you overdo it, it's not good.
It's, you know, it's gonna suppress your immune system.
Or you can die.
I mean, that happened to me.
I came back from a very hard day of playing Ultimate for two hours, and no one was home.
Ultimate Frisbee, right?
Yeah, and I go in my backyard pool, and it was in Malibu.
And believe it or not, Malibu gets down into the 40s in the wintertime, and when the Santa Ana's blow, the pool heat comes up, and then the wind blows the heat off, and so it super cools.
Anything that's at the bottom rises, the wind blows it off, so it can get down way below the ambient air temperature and even below the ground temperature around it if a cold sand is blowing.
And that was the case this time.
And again, I'm in for a couple of minutes, and I'm like, I can't walk, I can't move.
Well, I was going to create this wonderful, low-cost housing for people who had lost their last paycheck and give them an opportunity to get back on their feet and let them self-govern these little villages.
And it was going to be a utopian thing.
And as I got deeply into it, I'm like, well, that's not going to happen.
Yeah, he said these, there's, and then there's also, there's a despair.
There's a thing where you're not taking care of yourself.
They think that one of the ways if you're going to rehabilitate homeless people is to give them some sort of sense of self-worth and allow them some method where they work towards recovery.
$50,000 an inch to widen the 405. That seems like a lot.
It seems like a lot.
You know, it used to cost $50 million to build a bridge.
Even as recently as the 70s and 80s, now it's a billion dollars to build a bridge, and 200 million of it is the environmental impact statement that takes five years to do, right?
So I just don't see who is out there in the wings that can turn this around.
Again, when you clean up your diet and you get rid of all the sugar and the bad carbs and the processed carbs and the industrial seed oils, you come down to a fairly short list of actual real food, and what makes the difference are the sauces, the dressings, the toppings, and the methods of preparation, the way you make these exciting to eat and give variety on every meal.
And so that's what we do at Primal Kitchen.
We create these Amazing pasta sauces and salad dressings and condiments and things like that to make real food eating exciting.