Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #64 Dr. Anthony Gustin

Episode Date: December 10, 2018

Functional Medicine Provider, Crossfit Coach and Founder of Perfect Keto, DR Anthony Gustin works to educate as many people as possible about the four pillars of health: Nutrition, Movement, Stress/Mental Health, and Sleep/Rest. He believes that without all of these in check, you’ll never fully optimize your health and have a full quality of life.  drops by to talk about what led him into the health and wellness field, the keto diet, carnivore diet, the gut microbiome, Insulin-like Growth Factors, how we produce Gabba, cellular levels of stress and how your diet needs to be matched to you. He lets us in on some of the best and worst foods that we’re eating and what we’re actually getting from theses foods and ways we can test what we’re eating to see what effects they’re actually having on us. You might be surprised at what he’s learned. Connect with Dr. Anthony Gustin: Perfect Keto | https://perfectketo.com/ Equip Foods | https://www.equipfoods.com/ Website | http://www.dranthonygustin.com/ Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/dranthonygustin/ Twitter | https://twitter.com/dranthonygustin/ Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/DrAnthonyGustin/ The Keto Answers Podcast | https://bit.ly/2Sw3iLR Show Notes: Primal Blueprint by Mark Sisson | https://bit.ly/2OchfuZ The Plant Paradox by Dr. Steven Gundry | https://amzn.to/2oBJgj4 Weston A Price | https://www.westonaprice.org/ Connect with Kyle Kingsbury on: Twitter | https://bit.ly/2DrhtKn Instagram | https://bit.ly/2DxeDrk Get 10% off at Onnit by going to https://www.onnit.com/podcast/ Connect with Onnit on: Twitter | https://twitter.com/Onnit        Instagram | https://bit.ly/2NUE7DW Subscribe to Human Optimization Hour   Itunes  | https://apple.co/2P0GEJu Stitcher  | https://bit.ly/2DzUSyp Spotify  | https://spoti.fi/2ybfVTY

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probably only second to creatine, taking together their science that shows they work wonders and they're an excellent addition to any pre-workout that we have. Make sure you check out beta-alanine at onnit.com slash podcast for another 10% off. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Dr. Anthony Gustin is in the house today, CEO of Perfect Keto, one of my absolute favorite keto brands. But that's not why I had him on. I had him on because he has a wealth of knowledge. He's incredibly dialed in to health and wellness, lifestyle choices, fitness, and multiple different types of crazy diets ranging from keto

to carnivore. He was a big reason I did a 17-day stint into carnivore. And I think you guys are going to dig it. Thanks for tuning in. All right, we're on. Thumbs up. Ready to roll. Dr. Anthony Gustin. Gustin?

Gustin? Gustin, yeah, that's right. There we go. CEO of Perfect Keto, a man who's traversed the keto planes as well as some carnivore dabbling. Yes. We got a lot to discuss here i've been a huge fan of your company and the products for some time just because the fact that not a lot of keto products uh either taste good or create like enough change for it to be worth it yeah you know and they're not cheap right i mean obviously you guys have an affordable product but a lot of

them especially when they're first coming out, Keto Kana from Patrick Arnold, different companies that were first moving the bar in that direction for exogenous ketones, pretty fucking expensive. Yeah. So it's nice.

I mean, I'm a fan, no doubt. Yeah, when we first launched, like one of the reasons why I wanted to fix this. So I had a private practice in San Francisco and Keto Giant Diet was a tool that I was using with a lot of my patients to make change with whatever they wanted. And it was just so impossible to actually stick to. And so I was dabbling with exogenous ketones. Keto Kana was really the only one out for like maybe a couple of months. And I had already had a supplement company and had these relationships with suppliers and was able to source an actual

ketone, beta hydroxybutyrate powder uh salt and at that time they tasted awful and were super expensive and look just really hard to get and so i totally appreciate what they did as far as like opening up that space and creating that demand like i wouldn't have been able to be like where we are without without them kind of being trailblazers but at that point like nobody was no one would buy it no one would drink it and so i knew like i needed to formulate something that was available to everybody that was as effective if not more effective than anything else and um was actually affordable and so we i mean that was two years ago now it's crazy to to think of like what's happened since then but yeah it was november 2016 wow so i met you guys not long after that it was april or yeah yeah april at paleo

effects in 2017 and i'd already i'd already had tried one of your like one of the i think it was the peaches and cream and uh connor moore a mutual friend of ours was like yo i gotta introduce you to my buddy ceo perfect keto and i was like get the fuck out of here i love their stuff and then yeah i had the salted caramel and all the other ones to go with that. But let's back up a little bit. You said you had a private practice in San Francisco. You're a doctor. I mean, break that down. Talk about your education coming up and what led you because most people in health and wellness are really averse to the ketogenic diet. So it takes some balls and a little bit of know-how to understand like the power and the benefits to that, but then also not only to recommend that

for yourself, but to your clients. Right. So to back up all the way, I think at an early age, I was super overweight and unhealthy. And I just saw transformations in my own health when I started to figure out nutrition. There was this light bulb moment, I think maybe like in not undergrad, but like high school where I realized that what I put in my mouth really affected my body. Well, that's like decreasing acne, losing weight, being more lean, more athletic, whatever. So I had control. And that was a, it was a big thing. Like I went to like this dermatologist to get rid of acne that like lasered my face and it was fucking painful and super expensive. If I just don't eat grains, wheat

especially, I don't have acne. And even now, like if I eat wheat, like two days later, I'll have pimples come to my face. It was as simple as that. And like figuring out that I was in control and I could do that was super motivating to me. I was also was into sports a lot. Not very good at them myself, but wanted to help other athletes become better. And so my dad also owned a business. And it's like these intersections of wanting to do my own business, but also to help other people. I was looking at, you know, what does that look like? Obviously, healthcare somewhere. Like I thought that was the only way to help people at the time. And so that's the route I went kind of fast tracked. And chiropractic was one of these things where it was kind of the best of all worlds where you could go super deep in nutrition,

that's acceptable. You could go into sports med, that's acceptable. You can own your own business, that's cool. Like you're not beholden to what a hospital thinks, like working for a big clinic system. So went fast track on that route, did undergrad three years, went to grad school, got my master's in sports rehab,

and then doctorate in chiropractic. Went through that in like three and a half years, it was super long program, was a zombie, essentially like three and a half years. It was super long program, was a zombie, essentially for three and a half years. It was terrible. I don't recommend anybody doing that. And got out and then went to San Francisco. Immediately started doing sports medicine.

And then after that, like we grew from, I think one to six locations in two years. So that was rather quick. And kind of created this system of training with movement. And I think that is fairly simple stuff when it comes down to how the body works. Getting somebody from, you know, being in pain, musculoskeletal way to be not in pain is like actually not that complicated. We just look at what the person is doing, if they have any micro or macro traumas, and then getting them back to

a normal state. What's not as easy is doing functional medicine stuff. So I went more that route. We work with people on metabolic problems, diabetes, cancer, stuff like that, reducing inflammation, looking at gut problems. So that was obviously much more intense and much more in depth. But as I went that route, I realized that both of these things,

both like sports medicine and functional medicine, like the foundational thing is nutrition. Like if you do not change and like have solid nutrition, you are never going to make progress in these ways. Like if you strain your hamstring, but you're eating like shit, like good luck healing that hamstring properly. Like you're gonna strain it again.

Same thing with your gut problems. Like if you're taking like rifaximin or one of these antimicrobials for your gut, like you're gonna clear stuff out temporarily, but it's gonna be where your health strain can come back if you're still eating the garbage that you're going to clear stuff out temporarily, but it's going to be where health strength can come back if you're still eating the garbage that you're eating before. And so nutrition was a huge pillar of my practice. But then I figured out that I didn't have to just be in my clinic working one-on-one with people. So I did these really big deep dives for a long period of time

where I'll go in the woods of the Marin and just do a lot of meditation, journaling, and figuring out what I wanted to do. And I did a calculation one day that showed me that I would affect roughly 12,000 people in my life going the rate I was going. I was like, that's just, that's not enough. One more, one more. I knew that like what I was doing with nutrition in this route, like so many people could be helped with it if they just fix these things. 80% of the problems that i saw were due to that and if people just fix the nutrition it was totally fine and i didn't need to see them on an ongoing basis so after that i made a the first company i had which was equipped foods and so that was like beef protein powder i think you've tried that sweet potato powder greens powder things like that just trying to get whole food ingredients into these packaged

foods forms so that people can take them notice the difference between awful products that were taken before and these type of products and go oh wait okay this doesn't have all the in it and it's made from real food products maybe i should be having more real foods and when people buy that stuff being able to educate them through content was a much more scalable way to get the message about eating real foods out there yeah and so that's what happened. Left my clinic in July of 2016. So before I started Perfect Keto. And that was just because that having equipped foods had been growing so much at that point that it just didn't make sense. I had more people online, like at a community online that I'd had in my private practice. And as that was growing,

I could see where that could lead to. And so as I said before, ketogenic diet was a huge tool that I was using in my clinic, but super hard for people to stay onto. And I think that there were two main problems with that. One was that people didn't have access to information. And so while it's a powerful tool, at that time, like mid-2016, essentially like 20 bloggers writing random articles about this stuff like nobody was taking the science and breaking it down into usable form and like in a solid resource and so if you want to learn one thing about how much protein to eat if you go to this source and like read these blogs how much fat to eat you have to go over here and then there's

always conflicting opinions or you could see how like one person writes one thing and then everybody else just parrots another blogger. You know what I mean? And so that type of trend, unfortunately, leads to a lot of parroting in online communities. And so I wanted to solve that problem and just make a one-stop shop for education on a ketogenic diet. Since it's so powerful, yet so complex.

Two was maintenance on a ketogenic diet. So yes, there's high- fat food and you can do it in a whole fat or a whole food nature. However, for a lot of people coming from a standard American diet, that's very, very challenging. You need to create this bridge. And so that's what we've been trying to do with products since then is create not only things that help you get into ketosis, but things that are compliant to help you stay into ketosis. And so that's critical for a lot of people. And they, like, it's not easy for a lot of people to understand really what affects them.

You and I, I mean, we're gonna be testing this shit all the time and like, we go really, really deep and like, still, I don't have it fine tuned for myself. And for me, it's been like six years of like going in and fine tuning this stuff. So I don't- Yeah, it's constant work in progress. It's never a finished deal.

So I don't expect somebody who like doesn't have the time that we have to focus on our bodies or like the knowledge and background that we have to even come nearly as close. Or the passion. Yeah, exactly. A lot of people don't give a fuck. They're just like people show up to the gym. Tell me what to do today, trainer. You know, like people that are just hanging out, you know, with a diet nutrition coach. Like just tell me what food to eat. Like give me a a recipe you know which which book should i read that has all

the recipes and i'll just follow that you know people don't often if they're not passionate about it or they have a lot of other stuff going on like families and a job and all the shit that everyone has on planet earth to deal with it's not it's not always convenient to try to take on a part-time job of making food and health and wellness your passion, but you still care because you understand on some level without that stuff, I don't enjoy life. Yeah. And it is a part-time job or a full-time job to put it in person. Yeah. And so also to be clear, yes, I've gone kind of off the deep end of the Keto Giant diet stuff, but it is a tool. I don't think it's a cure-all for everybody.

I don't think everybody should be doing it for every reason. And I think that people should experiment a lot of stuff. That's why I try to convince you to do a carnivore diet for a while. It's not necessarily because I think that's what you should be doing

for the rest of your life. But I think that the more tools people can have in their toolbox for nutrition, I think is the most critical thing. So I think that with nutrition, there's a foundational layer. Like you just need to eat real food. Like that's, you can't argue with me about that. Like whether you're vegan or carnivore or keto or paleo or whatever, like you need to eat things that grow and spoil. Like there's no argument there. Like don't try to argue with

me on that point. But after that, like maybe vegan could be good for some people for some time. Maybe just general paleo and high carb would be as long as you're eating real foods and not gummy bears, right? Keto is also like a really great tool for certain things, but it's not like a blanket thing that everybody should be doing this. I think that's what people get confused right now is that when people get results from anything, I think carnivore diet is going through this a little too aggressively right now, where once you start seeing a little bit of results, people go off to the goddamn deep end on this stuff. And they think it's for everybody for every single reason, which I think that people need to be cautious on. So I'm not recommending that a ketogenic diet is going to save your life,

nor am I saying that about a carnivore diet, but I think that they can be tools used in a certain fashion to help you reach your goal if those things line up appropriately. Yeah. And I think a big issue too with the problem, like if you do something that changes your life and has a positive impact on you and you want to share, yeah, you're like, fuck man, I need to tell people about this. Right. But it can become dogmatic. It can, you can sound like the vegan that basically is saying, you know, you should die too. If you're going to kill an animal. I mean, like you can go to an extreme with anything and certainly there are people in the keto space that are beating the drum non-stop and i'll stay on this diet the rest of my life but i think there's there's been some trailblazers

along the way there's been some people that have really kind of painted a new outlook on this and one of the things that i like in mark sisson's book the keto reset diet is the fact, is the fact that he's talking like, look, it's not one's better than the other. It's about metabolic flexibility. And odds are, if you're 35 years old and you've eaten carbs at every meal your entire life, you're not able to burn fat well for fuel. So if you can spend some time in ketosis, doing different forms of fasting and incorporating that so you can increase ketones, you're going to see more benefit when you go back to eating carbs. Insulin resistance is down, carb sensitivity comes up, your body can utilize things better. And then from there, you start to see the results you want, lowered inflammation, better workouts,

better mental clarity, and all the things that come with it. And one of the things that people also don't realize is that health and internal health, especially gut metabolism, these things are subject to kind of the same recovery patterns as macro traumas to your physical body. So what I mean by that is I had an awful ankle injury like six, eight months ago. And again, I said very unathletic.

I was trying to play basketball for the first time in a few years and just completely tore my ankle up. Everything was like shredded. Size of like a, just just a soccer ball is insane. So as that heals, there's a good chance it's still messed up a little bit. My ankle will not function the same way. If I would have just rolled it walking off a curb, I probably would have been fine in two, three months max.

If it would have gotten run over by a bus, I maybe would never be able to bend this ankle in a certain way. So depending on the damage that you have to like a physical part of your body, you accept that like it may never heal the same way. So when people have, for instance, a lot of gut issues or a lot of metabolic damage, that may not heal to the baseline of like an optimal human ever again. And that's something that is never talked about. And people expect to always be able to put themselves in the benchmark of people who are insanely healthy. For instance, I said that before

I was super overweight and unhealthy for a long period of my life when I was younger. Even though I'm on a ketogenic diet and like my metabolism is kind of maxed out where it is right now, if I go back to eating carbs, I balloon up again. Like that's just the way my metabolism works. Some people have the same thing with gut issues. They can't eat certain things. Like they can make it optimal for them as an individual, but that gut will never heal the same way or like have the same microbiome representation as what is ideal. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, I love what you're saying there. And that's, I mean, I, I love what you're saying there and that's, I think that's a great segue into some microbiome topics because it comes up a lot in the ketogenic

diet and, and also in carnivore, right? Like people it's, it's, it's, it's been funny too, because, you know, Rogan's had on Sean, Dr. Sean Baker and different people. And then he gets a lot of shit from like not having any, any opposition there. So he's recently had on, I forget the name of the vegan he had on with Dr. Chris Kresser. And then he also, yep. And then he had, he had Dr. Ron and Patrick on and just different people and everyone's got a fucking opinion, right. As they should. But I don't often find in those scenarios that if people are taking a hard line stance that the listener gains much from it. What I liked from listening to all those, because I love Dr. Rhonda Patrick. I learned a lot from her.

But she missed the fucking boat on keto diet. She was way off on that. She didn't agree with it. She didn't know how it worked. She didn't understand it. Now, a lot of the people she's interviewed on her podcast are keto experts, Dr. Verdeen, Dr. Sachin Panda on intermittent fasting, Walter Longo on the fasting mimicking diet. Like there's a wealth of information. So she's on board with that. When she was talking about carnivore, she's basically saying like, oh, you're going to

get colon cancer and, and, you know, there's no science that proves that it's good, but that's not good enough for me. Right. Because just Because there's a lot of N equals one results from carnivore that show positive results like across the board, especially for those with autoimmune disease. And when you look at the microbiome and what that's supposed to look like by all general understandings,

a lot of the research is coming out. And I was talking with Dr. Michael Ruscio, also a Bay Area guy, about this. You can't look at a tribe in Africa that has an incredibly diverse microbiome and say, that's the way we should all look. They have really low cholesterol. They don't have cancer, blah, blah, blah, fill in the blank on how healthy they are. They live a completely different fucking lifestyle. They're outdoors, they use sponges, they don't have antibacterial soaps or hand sanitizers. There's all sorts of shit that factor into that, right? And I think, you know, sorry, I'm getting long winded here, but I think another key element to this is that now the research coming out on the keto diet is showing that we produce far more bacteria that create GABA, which is why there's an anti-anxiety

factor associated with the ketogenic diet, also incredibly healing for the brain. They're thinking that may be one of the reasons that it works for child-resistant or drug-resistant epilepsy in children. So if it changes to where you have a less diverse microbiome, and in that you express some factors that create more GABA, which helps with anxiety and cognitive function and sleep, what then is more worth it? Is it more important to have this super diverse microbiome, or is it more important to have a really good select group that's producing extra GABA and doing different things for you. It's too early to fucking say it really is. And for those that are doing carnivore, if you can't, if you fucking eat, pick a cruciferous veggie and it fucks you up,

that's not a good fit. It doesn't matter how good fiber is for you on paper. If sauerkraut gives you the runs and you can't breathe out of your nose and your face starts to itch, that's an issue. That's a food intolerance, right? So people need to think about, you know, where they're coming from. What are the reasons to get into these diets and can it benefit me in some way? Then try the fucking thing, right? Because it's not enough to just look at shit on paper and be like, well, blah, blah, blah, and form an opinion on it. Give it a real go, right?

Yeah. And this is one of the things like about microbiome. I've had a lot of chats with Dr. Ruchi about this stuff too. And like, I love this guy's perspective on it, which is like, this is as good as we got right now, but we don't really know that much. Like we're still naming species in the gut. We have no idea what the hell we're talking about. Yeah. It's a new frontier. Yeah. It's a new frontier. Yeah.

It's so new. So like if anybody makes blanket statements or like any recommendations on health based upon gut microbiome, I would run from that person. Like not only that, but dualism and health is so true. Like sometimes stuff is good, but sometimes it's also bad. And to like take these, these stances that like, it's either one thing or the other is never going to be accurate ever. And so we need these evangelists that say like, it's only this way, period, like that they're going to be wrong. And they're gonna be proven wrong, like over and over and over again. And so with the carnivore diet, one of the things that I am worried about those like, yes, it can be good long term for people who respond to it, like, you know, Michaela Peterson. And, you know, I think

that there's a lot of other examples of people who have anti like, uh, antibodies in their body that are basically attacking themselves. If they eat things that are plants, right. These people need to eat something that's a very restricted diet for an indefinite amount of time. But then you have people like, or who are just a normal, normal dude who does this long-term and just buys into that because someone else like that had a response. So you, it needs to be matched to you as an individual and you like try it out and see how you feel. But if like having a more,

like having some vegetables or some things doesn't mess you up and you feel just as good, if not better, then like you should probably do that. Just because somebody else does it and has results, like doesn't mean that you should be doing it to get those same results. And that's what's happening a lot with carnivore diet which is like i like people to try it for sure but it's getting pretty dogmatic in the sense of like a like almost like a vegan like

it is it's the opposite of vegan but they're so the similarities are fucking laughable yeah you know like they truly are i think um for anybody i don't know i'm not sure if you've probably read this book but i like to throw this out there, just resources for people. For anybody who's wondering why that might be a benefit to them to do carnivore, if you read The Plant Paradox by Dr. Stephen Gundry, and he's not an advocate for carnivore by any means. But he will state that plants are conscious, which they are, and they don't want to be fucking eaten by anything unless it's fruit and it has hard seeds and the tree's giving you that fruit on purpose. So you'll shit it out a quarter mile away and plant a new tree for the tree. Like it's not, it does not want to be eaten by you. And there's all sorts of shit in plants from lectins to oxalates to you name it, where that plant is designing

itself to not be eaten by other animals or insects or anything predatory. Right. So for a lot of people, you know, in his theory, at first I was like, man, there's no way all these plants can have this much fucked up shit in them because half the world lives on corn. Half the world lives on beans. Half the world lives on fill in the blank. But if you understand that vaccines for better worse, affect the microbiome negatively, antibiotics affect the microbiome negatively over time, long course. They can save your life, yes. But if you grew up in the 80s and you were given rounds and rounds of full-length fucking antibiotics, yep, check. Odds are your microbiome will never look like that from the hunter-gatherer tribes in

africa right so with that maybe we don't break down lectins as well as a population living in the fucking woods you know and i think from there we can begin to understand okay maybe some different courses of action are necessary to create health and wellness and give a break to the gut on occasion. Yeah. So there's a lot of reasons why I think the carnivore diet works. And one of them that I haven't heard talked about anywhere else is the fact that the good stuff from plants generally are not micronutrients. Like, so this is again, why I think that carnivore diet, if you do it, like you have to eat high quality meat and you have to eat organ meats, like organ meats are a must. When you look at micronutrient density, they're up here at the top, then far below that are muscle meats. And then below that spices and herbs and then nuts and

nuts and seeds, but like vegetables and then nuts and seeds and fruits and then grains all the way at the bottom. And so I would prefer eating at the top of that spectrum as much as possible. And that looks like a lot of organ meat. Obviously, a lot of people don't like that, but having a micronutrient dense diet is great. However, plants, like you said, have all these compounds in them that when you eat them are not really additive to your body. They're more of a small stress response. However, on a small scale, that can be a really positive thing for your body to adapt to. So for instance, like everybody knows that turmeric is an anti-inflammatory compound. Well, it doesn't work in the sense that like it gives you resources to fight inflammation. It stimulates your body to upregulate things that are anti-inflammatory. So it's the plant causing

a stress response in your body to say, okay, I can be stronger than that. So it's just like if you were to go do some squats, right? You probably, what, 400 or 500 pounds? Not anymore. Maybe 400. And then your body goes, that was a severe stress. My muscles just ripped apart. And now I'm going to get stronger for that so I can adapt for next time. When you eat plants a lot of times, the benefit from plants is that type of stress response on the cellular level.

Not necessarily that it adds micronutrients to your body. So yes, there are some micronutrients that are found in plants. None that you can really get without eating organ meats at a high amount. But they're generally not in the form where your body can use them appropriately. So a lot of plant forms of nutrients cannot really be available for your body.

It's like beta carotene in carrots is like zero to 4% to vitamin A. My wife and I did our genetic testing through 23andMe and then outsourced that to Dr. Arnold Patrick for like a $10 donation. And she breaks down a number of things she finds to be really important factors that 23andMe won't tell you. For both of us, we cannot take beta carotene and turn it into vitamin A at any rate. Yeah, zero. It's zero, right? We cannot take beta carotene and turn it into vitamin a at any rate zero so there's zero yeah we cannot we cannot take ala alpha linoleic acid from chia seeds or flax seeds and convert that into dha and epa usable bioavailable forms of omega-3 fatty acids which are critical for brain health and inflammation right not a fucking single amount not one percent of chia seeds or flax. So the idea that I could get those things

from plants is bullshit, right? And that's not, again, this isn't me. I get a little worked up when I say this, but it's not me saying that there aren't certain people who can get that. Certainly, if you've been doing a vegan diet for a long time and you feel good from it, you're probably converting a lot from the plants, right? But for something like me, it's not. I mean, and I'm with you on that. Like maybe, maybe not. Converting more than you do maybe,

but like- Converting more than me, right? Maybe not 0%, maybe 4 or 5, 6, 7%. Still not the same as eating egg yolk or organ meat where you're going to get tons of vitamin A, tons of heme iron, tons of all sorts of really bioavailable nutrients that your body can just take in and it's effortless. It truly is effortless for the body to utilize those compounds. And I think that, so to generalize, again, this is not black and white, but if you want to look at what you're getting from food, look at

micronutrients in general from animal products. So must have high quality, like diverse animal products. Stressors and things that are positive stressors from plant products, like split those into and then look at it from that way. And if we continue to break that down, we think, okay, where else are like positive stressors in our life? Working out, right? Sauna, stuff like that, you know, going for a long run. Like ultimately those things are stressors that your body adapts to. So it's a positive response to keep your body resilient to whatever is going to be coming at it next. Just like if you were to, for instance, work like, okay, so we know from a nutrient perspective, like a lot of nutrients are really

good for you. We also know from like a working out perspective, like, okay, squats are good. Pull-ups are good. Running is good. Rowing is good. All this stuff's good. Would we do all of those things all day, every day, every day for like a long period of time? Then it's chronic. It's not acute. Yeah. A chronic stress then just wears you down from a physical level that you will get kind of this overtraining effect that will just completely destroy your body. Again, complete hypothesis on my end here, but why would that not apply from a cellular standpoint from stress levels from plants like so we know like okay this this plant compound this plant compound that plant compound are all amazing for you so we're going to stack them all in super

smoothies every single day and have all of those things every single day so i think there might be something to say here about like a kind of a cellular level of stress that we can't adapt to. That's important to have. So like this is why I think super long term carnivore diets, maybe not that great because it's kind of analogous to never like if you're sore from working out from doing squats, it's not a good intervention. Right. And so I think that if you were to look at it from that perspective of like, okay, maybe then I'm going to have a little, like you said, before we started recording, like you're going to start doing some, some kind of more self-care doing lighter movements, doing some aerobic stuff. Okay. I'm not going to do carnivore, but maybe I'll eat like micro greens, avocado, some nuts, but not go crazy salads or some of these, right.

Not eat tons of fibrous vegetables yeah things that have a lot of these plant compounds in them that can be stressful so like oscillating between that instead of looking at this long term is like a plants are good plants are bad yeah yeah it's not it's usually not one or the other and with that too like that's the same thought process that goes with carbohydrates right we can argue all day long on what paleo man ate but there was no refrigeration and there was no fucking shipping. So nobody's getting bananas from Panama in December.

Like that shit didn't exist. So when you consider those facts, unless you have a lot of ancestry from close to the equator, odds are you went a period of time each year without carbohydrates or with a much lower amount, right? So rotating those kinds of things for a good period of time each year without carbohydrates or with a much lower amount. So rotating those kind of things for a good block of time, like eight to 12 weeks. Rotating different things in terms of fiber content, how many cruciferous veggies you're

eating. Because it's pretty rare to see. Are you familiar with Weston A. Price and some of his work? So for those that don't know, Dennis that traveled the globe, looked at indigenous tribes, saw a wide variety in what they ate. And had they not been introduced to a Western-style diet, they had perfect health, often perfect teeth without toothbrushes, no terms for cancer or heart disease. They just didn't exist. And that, when I say it varied, it varied incredibly. Like you had Inuit tribes that hadn't been introduced to Western style eating that were in perfect health on 90% fat.

And you had pygmy tribes in Africa that sustained themselves 100% on yams and sweet potatoes, also in perfect health, right? So it's not to say that one's better than the other. It's simply to say that A, when it comes from nature, you're going to do better. And B, eating in tune with your ancestry also helps. The issue with us now in America is we are fucking mutts. So we've got parents from here, parents from there. And if I have five siblings, every single one of us is going to tolerate carbohydrates differently. Every single one of us is going to have a different microbiome based on external stressors, how many times we ran antibiotics growing up, all that shit is a factor.

You know? And knowing that, I think that there's another point of this dualism in health where, like you said, sometimes eating no carbs is probably really great for you. Sometimes eating high carbs is probably really great for you. Like look at seasonality, and that's probably one of the things

you're getting at here too, is like as we're going into this, like in Austin here we have, things can grow somewhat, but still like it gets pretty cold here in the wintertime. Like you can't have a ridiculous amount of fresh fruit, for example, and things are, should be, you know, pretty high in fat. When you go into spring and summer, look at what's around and what actually grows, right? Things that are, you know, peaches and pears and stuff like that. I mean, I can go on and on about like how this stuff isn't even real food. And like you said, bananas, like the banana used

to be almost inedible until we made this big juicy flesh thing. Yeah. It's like we took it out of 118 strains and now there's basically one. Cabin dish, right? Yep. Yep. And so this is one of those things where like looking at it from a dualistic perspective is probably a smart way to do it. It seems like everything that I've noticed about health where people take a strong stance on something ends up being that it's, that's one side of the coin. And so, for instance, IGF, everyone thought IGF is the devil forever. And now it's like, oh, actually, it probably makes sense to go in a time where like you have low IGF, then you have high IGF, then you have low IGF, then you have high IGF. It's like oscillating.

Both are actually good. Yeah. OK. Dr. Peter was talking about that. Sorry to jump in. He was talking about that, how for the longest time he was anti IGIGF. And in fucking college, that was the thing. You wanted higher growth hormone. You wanted higher IGF-1. They were selling the deer antler sprays and all that bullshit that didn't work. But it was about increasing that. And then now for longevity, oh no, we want that lower, so we live longer. And then he was talking about this bell curve where really if it's really low or really high, that's when you run into issues. But anywhere in between that,

that's where you have the sweet spot. And you can even have periods on the lower end or periods on the higher end, as long as they're not at the extreme outside the range, you're doing pretty good. Yeah, I mean, the same thing with eating food and fasting. Sometimes you eat food, sometimes you don't eat food. Not like Americans now where we are born

and then haven't gone a day without eating or most people their entire life. Like I've asked people this, like my patients when I asked them about fasting, in 95% of them, I would say, like maybe had one day where they're in a scenario where they could not eat. Other than that, it wasn't by choice.

Damn. Which is like, again, again dualism like this and that you know eating and not eating fasting like we have a lot of benefits with that you know working out hard for a time and taking some nice rest time and working on more mobility and movement work that probably is a good compliment and so looking at nutrition from that lens i think provides you like when you have this super strong side of like keep IGF as low as possible, like the last 10, 15 years. Okay. So you have to eat really, really low protein. Then your lean mass is low. And then actually longevity wise may look good in a worm or a rat, but for a human lean mass is one of the best predictors for, for decreasing all cause mortality so if you're going to decrease your lean muscle mass to nothing because you're not eating any protein but your igf

is low like where are you actually winning here yeah it's an issue like if you can't stand up from the toilet when you're 85 years old because you have no lean mass in your quads like that's probably like great your igf is low yeah yeah you'd live in a wheelchair until you're 200. Yeah. I don't want that life. Yeah. You know? I mean, this is where we look at healthspan versus lifespan.

I would rather keep my health this high and then drop off a goddamn cliff instead of having it decrease like this in a linear fashion. Yeah, just stringing it out. I think about that with smokers. Is it just going out with a bang? Just kill yourself. Fucking what are you doing? Why the slow, painful route? Why die of cancer? Why select that? I mean, there's enough ways to that. Talk a bit about where you see Perfect Keto going. Because you guys are talking about releasing some new products. And I don't know if you want to mention it here.

But where do you see that going in the future? How do you see Carnivore, if it fits in with people that are doing keto and weaving that back and forth, things like that? Unbreak some of the future here. Yeah, I think that a lot of it is to really create, again, still working on the two things I was saying before and making education effortless. So we're doing a lot of work there. So we have like just building a crazy team about people just trying to make it as easy as humanly possible for people to jump on boards. Like this is exactly

what works and what works for me. And so making it more individualized and making that easy to work on is like a huge focus of our company. The next one is, like I said, bridging that gap from people at a standard American diet to people who I think should be eating a hundred percent real food. And so as that goes, like we have had like, I think we're at like 78 or 80 SKUs right now. Like a lot of those are supplement products that help get into ketosis or maintain ketosis, which are great because they're easy for us to produce. They're easy for us to distribute as that has been the us to distribute. As that has been the case, like we have a pretty good lineup there

that I don't think there needs to be really anything else. And now we want to go more to food products. And so for instance, launched a nut butter, launched this week, we're launching a bar, for example, and going more into this avenue of like things that people can actually eat, not just supplement products. And so like that's kind of the next phase that we're doing

is this kind of tandem coaching and courses that, that are, I want how to be a hundred percent free. I think education and information should be free. I don't think that people should ever have to pay for that stuff because once you make it once, it's like, there's no overhead to it. So I don't want to charge people for that. Like people should have information when they have that information, they can do whatever they want. Products, obviously fixed costs. Like I can't manufacture limitless products and give them away for free. I need a business to run on that end.

And so that's why I like going into food products and making it as accessible as possible. I want people to go into a grocery store or an airport or an airplane or something like this or a convenience store and be able to have options. I don't have options now. I get maybe nuts because they're generally cooked in some crazy vegetable oil and maybe beef jerky.

Usually it's a bunch of sugary stuff. I usually just fast at, if I am in a point of an airport or a convenience store. Like there's no options there. It blows my mind. And so like to put more real food options there instead of just things you have to like mix up with water, I think is one of our big goals moving forward

and just basically blanketing every aisle of grocery store with a healthy fat option and like not compromised ingredients and not compromised. Like we're not going to say this is a keto friendly product like a lot of other companies do and have it actually spike your blood sugar 80 points. That's right. I want you to talk about a bit about that. So I read, you know, wired to eat with Rob Wolf, uh, didn't get the, the really good, um, what was it called? A con the con, the internal glucose monitor, uh, Dexcom G6 didn't get the Dexcom cause it needs a prescription and it's not cheap. Uh, but I did, I did finger pricks, you know, he, he wants you to do that every morning for seven days in a row. I ended up doing

that for like six months to a year. And just, it was not just morning, but, you know, after every single meal, just so I could really fine tune and see like, all right, not only is, am I going to see this on 50 grams of carbs, but let me see this on what a plate of rice looks like with fatty food that I'm going to have when I go to a Thai restaurant and just all the different ways there. Talk a bit about wearing the Dexcom and what you figured out when you were testing your protein bars versus other or keto bars rather versus some of these other bars that are popular on the market. Yeah. This is something that I've been interested in the Dexcom for a long period of time as well. It's like super hard to get. So I had to get a prescription when my friend's MD,

you got it for me. It's then $3,000 absolutely absurd damn like right off though right yeah research uh-huh and so the finally finally pull the trigger and started testing and stuff because like just like you that the finger pricks are just annoying and like if i wanted to go about my day i can do something eat something and then like do normal tasks for the next three hours and then look at the curve. So when you look at blood sugar, it's not only how much it spikes, but how fast and how long it takes to get back to baseline. So let's say I test and I'm at 80, kind of stable. You want to see that, like you're going to have usually some rise from some foods, and then you want to see that be gradual and you want to go down gradually and have it, especially like within about two hours, go back to baseline.

So that's ideal. And if it spikes up super quick and then takes four hours, you should probably not be eating that food. Like that is just a metabolic destruction for you specifically as an individual. And so it's curious. So when we were developing this bar, it took, like it was the most grueling thing

that I probably have ever done in my life and the most challenging thing just because every time I thought we had nailed it so not only with the bar do you need the consistency to be right like you need to hold up as a shape and using high fat not a lot of carbs or sticky stuff is nearly impossible so we were tweaking around and finally got that nailed and then it tasted like shit and i'm like oh fuck and so then we did a bunch of iterations trying to figure out like okay how do we make this thing actually taste amazing and better than any other bar out there?

Because like, I don't think that if people, like if they're motivated by a ketogenic diet, like maybe should they have it, but like just like a Tesla, right? It's the best car, period, that you can buy. And so if you're going to like electric car or not, like you're going to get that car because it's the best car ever.

And so if we can make the bar taste better than any other bar, and we make it healthier than any other bar, people are going to make that decision and choose that bar and be healthier. That's kind of the mentality. Whether they're keto or not, that's still a good choice, right? So that's what I wanted to do as far as designing the bar, like best consistency, best taste. But also the standard that I have is like it cannot affect blood sugar like other bars do. So that was the most challenging thing. So like those three things in mind of trying to think

about like from ground up like this defies all bar logic like you how are you supposed to bind stuff together and get to this point like not raise blood sugar so we went 18 iterations over like 16 months and every time like we got closer and closer and closer like i thought this was never going to be achievable and this is what makes it so hard to do food products and so like if we would have started with a bar instead of having all these other products that we have that like we can have a lot of quality control on and have be very consistent.

Like food products are so, so hard in a ketogenic space. Like there's some cookies. I don't think that are that great. But like there's some cookies, like some nut butters. And like that's pretty much it right now. There's not a lot of good options unless you go fully real foods. And so we got it.

We finally tested it. So we tested with all the team and complete flat line on a blood glucose response. And like, I almost like broke down in tears. Like my baby is ready. I don't want to like offend any women, but like this is probably the closest I will ever feel to pregnancy and then

like the pain of birthing a child and then like the joy of having that child be in the world well it took long enough yeah i think you can draw that comparison just from the fucking timeline right yeah um so a little late a little late on delivery but yeah and so i i was like okay i want to make sure 100%, like I've tested it multiple times. We got the final production run. So I put in this Dexcom G6, the continuous blood glucose monitor and tested it.

And it went from like 80 to 84 to 83 to 82 to 80 within like 30 minutes. It's like jackpot, did it. Had another guy on the team test it, same thing. So super happy with that. I'm like, okay, I know I've tested other bars and they've raised my blood sugar, but I've never gotten this like complete curve on it.

So I tested Bulletproof. I tested Quest. I tested another keto bar that is getting National Whole Foods roll up. And it was disappointing. Like it was very, very disappointing, but also like frightening. So Bulletproof,

for example, like I actually love that company. I have a lot of good friends there. Like they make a lot of really awesome products. The ingredients super clean. So they use like all organic stuff and like as close to whole food, real products as possible. And I know they're not marketing as a,

as a keto bar, but people are generally like getting, cause it's a low carb, like good ingredient bar. It spiked my blood sugar from 80 to 140 for five hours damn for five hours five hours and i reproduced it so like i did that twice it's the same thing same response um which for something like that response may be different for other people so these results take them as an individual thing test them on yourselves they might be completely different um but that for a lot of

people could be the difference between losing fat and not yeah and or even like inflammation inflammation who are thin and they're not worried about that kind of stuff like i don't have to worry about gaining fat yeah whatever i want it's like well you're destroying yourself from the inside out even if you stay thin because you're young maybe stay away from mcdonald's yeah right yeah pretty intelligent metabolic damage or not. Like, that's that difference. It's like having blood sugar. Like, if somebody eats a couple bars twice a day,

that's like 10 hours of increased blood sugar on top of all the other things you're eating. Quest bar was a very similar thing. The other keto bar was kind of the same. I don't think they were as long. I'm going to have a video come out about it because I just recorded all of it. But yeah, it was actually shocking to me, like how long it took and how much they spiked.

But this is the thing. It's so important that we look at these variables. And actually, people don't realize that you don't have to do these things to market your food a certain way or market your products a certain way. You guys probably know full well about all the bullshit other people say. They don't put ingredients in their products. It's a little tighter on food. But even still, food stuff, you can say keto-friendly, low-carb. I tested these gummies the other day. These Smart Sweets.

These are like 15 gummy bears. I'm like, okay. I still have the blood glucose monitor and I saw them in a store. A lot of people tag me in them and say, are these keto or not? And it says it's soluble tapioca fiber chicory root fiber a couple other things and like overall looks pretty decent stuff you know sweetened with I think stevia monk fruit and like no no overall weird ingredients like no weird sugars or anything like that it says only three grams of sugar on the packet and the rest is like it's like then it's like four or

five not carbs but it's like 40 grams of fiber carbs sounds like a fart gummy so within within i think 15 or 20 minutes my blood sugar went from 80 to over 200 it broke the meter it wouldn't read anymore fuck yeah it just it stopped reading keto gummies yeah so no bueno and this is the thing like they say like kick sugar only three grams of sugar like you can say these things in a package but what does that actually mean metabolically people don't look at this stuff and like that's what we're trying to solve it's like not only like yes i think that products should be available i think we're leading into the way of low sugar and like people understand that sugar is bad for you and so overall manufacturers and

companies want to reduce that and they want to pull sugar out of the product but then they put stuff like this in there that they can kind of sneak around it and you can still have the same effect as a blood sugar like i don't assume that if i had any haribo gummy bears that they would react any differently in my body from a blood sugar perspective and at that volume like meaning 15 gummy bears it's really it's not like that much like artificial weird shit is really going to matter in my body like it's a blood sugar impact that's the unhealthy thing at that to that degree like that's the metabolic damage that you want to avoid like i don't like i would care less about that amount of artificial food coloring or flavoring that's not

the thing to worry about it's how is your body responding internally like how is your metabolism responding to that food and it's something like we're like we're going to continue to be that strict on our products moving forward and it's not something like i'm trying to sell stuff i'm just like people need to know this information and test for themselves like what works for you like you need to you need to know this stuff like this this information about blood glucose is so so important like this is basically the proxy to looking at it's tied to all three things. Like you're talking about Peter Atiyah, for example, basically puts longevity into three buckets. Like what are you going to die of? Like stats look like either heart disease,

neurodegenerative disease, or cancer, right? The fundamental thing to all three of those is insulin resistance. What happens like when you eat tons of glucose over and over and over again, you get insulin resistance. Like the easiest thing you can do to prevent all causes of death and delay that is to basically reduce this area in the curve of glucose. I mean, that's, that's the biggest thing that I found. Obviously you can do that through whole foods in a lot of different ways, but like that whole foods, fasting, periods of ketosis, lifting weights. And it's not just, yeah, there's a lot of things for sure. Sleep, sauna, all these other things. But like even you said, like you've tested your glucose

with a giant plate of yams and honey and stuff like that. It's not just carbohydrates. So you can't just look at carbohydrates. Like that's a lot of fucking carbohydrates. But you have no response to that. And so feel free to eat that stuff. That's a lot of great whole food. But you can't eat rice, for example, right?

And so these are the things like people need to know on an individual level how it affects them like you need to know this information i may differ from everybody i ate a fourth of an apple like i'm not trying to like talk shit about other brands like i ate a fourth of an apple and i spiked my blood sugar like 180 damn a fourth of an apple which is ridiculous coincidentally coincidentally one of my friends just he's making this software called Trish.io. It's basically a master database of all nutrition and food that's able to rank everything as far as how it assimilates in your body,

how it's absorbed, all this different stuff. This guy is the most intense person about nutrition that I know. So he was in Thailand with us. So he just joined Perfect Keto. And I was asking him and just grilling him about like, okay, what about fruits? What's the best fruit? He's like, kiwi kiwi has like more potassium than a banana more magnesium

than this and he's like per gram of sugar of like per fructose and glucose sugar kiwi is the most nutrient dense and like least carb heavy fruit you can get was a shock to me i was like okay what are the worst fruits it's like apples and pears they're basically like candy it's kind of weird like i don't feel bad after eating i'm like i never thought about testing it yeah and then my girlfriend brings up some snacks the other day i eat a fourth of an apple and my alarm goes off on my dexcom like like like mystical man like there's a nuclear warhead heading my way i was like what is this i looked at it the first time the alarm went off it's from an apple damn so I'm not eating apples anymore obviously like and this is the thing like I would have never

thought that and people are so removed from their bodies let alone like what real food is I think that if we were to bring some of this information back to people and like put it in their hands of like I need to look at my blood glucose these are things that are important like that people wouldn't have to choose really what they can eat or not. Like their body will tell them. I think that tighten that feedback loop where people eat something and something happens is one of the most important things in nutrition. That is why like a ketogenic diet works really, really well because people are tracking their ketone levels and they're more into this stuff. They feel really good. So people can take exogenous ketones and feel an energy boost

right away. So they go, oh, ketones equal energy, ketosis equals good for me, right? It's when I eat wheat and two days later, three days later, I get acne. If I eat nine to 12, 15 meals in that time, I'm never gonna be able to tie those things together. If I was eating wheat and as I was eating it, bread or something like that, I had acne popping up,

well, I'm never gonna eat that again, right? And so I think that you tighten that feedback leave as much as possible by getting a continuous blood glucose monitor or just testing your blood glucose it's one of the most important things in my opinion fuck yeah brother well you guys are blogging now you guys are pumping out information you have your own podcast tell people where they can find you online and get this info yeah my own podcast is keto answers podcast perfect keto.com is everything there and then my own instagram is just where Iwers Podcast. Perfectketo.com is everything there. And then my own Instagram is just where I do all my social media stuff.

So if you want to reach out to me there, I answer every question. So send me a DM. That's DRAnthonyGustin. Awesome, brother. It's been excellent having you. Appreciate you. Thank you guys for listening to the podcast.

Hope you enjoyed it with Dr. Anthony Gustin. Make sure you check out the show notes for all the goodies of where you can look him up and leave us a five-star review that helps people find out about the show. And also 10% off all supplements and food products can be found at on it.com slash podcast.