Mark Bell's Power Project - EP. 474 - Robb Wolf

Episode Date: January 27, 2021

Robb Wolf is a former research biochemist is the 2X New York Times/WSJ Best Selling author of “The Paleo Solution” and “Wired To Eat”. Robb has transformed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around the world via his top ranked iTunes podcast, books and seminars. Subscribe to the NEW Power Project Newsletter! ➢ https://bit.ly/2JvmXMb Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Special perks for our listeners below! ➢LMNT Electrolytes FREE SAMPLE PACK until Jan. 31, 2021: http://bit.ly/3bxyMND ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $99 ➢Sling Shot: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ https://www.facebook.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell ➢Mark Bell's Daily Workouts, Nutrition and More: https://www.markbell.com/ Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/ Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell

Andrew, do you hear that? What is that? You hear that? You hear that beat? That sounds nice. That's the sound of three Element Electrolytes. Oh my gosh. Those are eight Electrolyte packets that Element is so graciously sending all of you guys for

free. But there's going to be some weird hoops, some stipulations. You gotta pay 50 bucks. 50? No, dude. Okay, no, no. It's five. Okay.

I was like, damn. Yeah. No. You literally just have to pay five dollars for element to send you eight different packets of their awesome electrolytes that you hear mark talk about i talk about you talk about these are so good for if you're dieting if you're not if you're trying to focus on performance they're just so amazing and they're going to send you eight of them for five bucks yeah and what i actually like i love about this whole recharge pack is you know

me i love orange salt That's my favorite flavor. They have tons of other great flavors, and now here's this opportunity to try all of them. Give me one reason why you wouldn't jump on this right now. Exactly. You guys need to go to drinklmnt.com slash powerproject. You can claim your free, free Element Recharge Pack right now. Just pay the $5 shipping, and you get to sample all of their flavors. Guys, we wouldn't steer you the wrong way. We love this stuff.

We've been talking about them since before they teamed up with us. They're homies now. And just seriously, drinklmnt.com slash powerproject. Again, absolutely free. Just pay for the $5 shipping and it's yours. Go there right now. Now. I'm ready.

We're rolling. I'm ready, Big Daddy. What's going on? You're popping out babies over there? Exactly. Yeah. It finally happened. Dude.

It was insane. It was bananas. How did all this happen? Can you explain in detail? From conception to. Yeah. From the, from the right,

from the jump. Yeah. Well, truth be told, there was a banana peel. You slipped. Okay. Yeah.

Your clothes are off. Pretty much. But when it, when it was, when he was conceived, we both kind of like that probably worked. Um, yeah,

we both kind of knew like it. You got it in there. Good. Huh? Yeah. It was, it was a good shot. Is that the night I gave you the advice on the twisty twist

right maybe could have been i think so yeah twister yeah i told him about something called the twist he's like wait what really and then he texted me the next day like dude i think we're pregnant yep shit just like that getting in there deep yeah the congolese is that one percent congo yeah i know right and your baby is 0.5 percent so i don't remember i think i'm i think i'm two percent so that would make him one percent he's one he's the true one hey yeah that's a good looking baby by the way thank you they don't always come out like that man like sometimes at first they're a little sketch well so like when i was i was like you know like they look a little weird when they're like even like a like a, like puppies are fucking amazing.

Yeah. Yeah. Their eyes are all closed and like, they're all like. Is that a guinea pig? What is that? It takes a little, takes like a, like three days and then they look super cute. Yeah. So I wanted to send you guys a picture like right away, but like when he came out, he's

got like stuff all over him. He's blue. And I'm just like, ah, we'll wait. And then he started to kind of like form and shape. And so I'm like, okay, cool. Let me send, let me send the crew some pictures. Did you guys save the placenta? No.

No? I took a picture of it though. You didn't just like class it back in? No, I mean, we could have. Put it in your pocket. Yeah, just fry it up. That's what I said. I'm like, man, we can make tacos.

And she was not into it. So I'm like, oh, okay. Should she was not into it so i'm like oh okay should save it for me so much for that like all right me and my bad me and my bad jokes i'll get out of here oh yeah so i mean one thing about like just just being like nice and fun to like you know staff or whatever like they would come in and be like thank goodness we're here we don't want to deal with the person next to you because and i knew who they were talking about which i won't discuss on air but they were just like like are you sure you're not going into labor because i don't want to have to go to the next person you guys are so much fun like you guys are funny and i'm like dude i've been holding back this whole time because it's

quite the experience when another woman is touching your woman and she said hey now oh wait maybe not like that because they were they were checking they were checking to see how far along she was i should have asked my wife if this was okay to say but she's like in there feeling and she's like oh my gosh i'm so impressed and i'm like so was i you know like that's how we got here because she was talking because she went from you know not being dilated to being a little You know, like that's how we got here. Cause she was talking, cause she went from, you know, not being dilated to being a little bit more dilated. And I just, I'm like in the back, just like cracking jokes left and right. And you know, meanwhile, Stephanie's starting to get more and more contractions and it just

was like, oh my gosh, it was fucking wild. And congratulations, man. Thank you. Yeah. Aure wild and congratulations man thank you yeah aurelius yeah yeah aurelius drew fucking dope really good for people with speech impediments aurelius no but that's first off that's a sick name i've never met an aurelius so he's gonna go through life being like yeah i'm that guy yeah aurelius big i love it yeah he's he's fun like he's it's it's it's crazy dude by the way listeners um i've told andrew this for the next month i'm gonna be calling andrew daddy that's just gonna be a thing and you guys are gonna have to get used to it just because he's daddy now so daddy what's up i'm glad you're doing well thank you yeah you're very welcome

thank you life's doing good she She's good. Yeah. Um, you know, you know what it's like, but like, you know, they call it cluster feeding. So the first, first couple of nights,

like every half an hour to 45 minutes, he's up eating. Oh God. Uh, last night was the first night where he kind of broke the hour mark of not being like awake, like a little savage. He's going to go after your,

your nipples too. So I did this that's what they do it's amazing skin on skin you know i'm doing that and i'm like hey dude i don't i don't have the equipment i'm sorry person man yeah yeah yeah he started kind of wiggling around you're like what the hell yeah yeah he does this thing when he's looking for that nipple he's just like like he shakes his head real quick like waiting to get knocked out by it just yeah it's crazy yeah and then we spend the rest of our lives trying to get back on that pretty much yeah pacify ourselves i guess you'd say yeah yeah yep but anyway we got an awesome

guest today though yeah we do we have a pioneer in a pioneer in the space of keto carnivore type stuff and paleo. We got Rob Wolf on the show today. So I couldn't be more fired up to have him on the show because there's, I mean, first of all, this guy is a guy who started a lot of this stuff, started a lot of the movement, especially with paleo. Rob starting out working with CrossFit years ago and writing the paleo solution. And that kicked off just, you know, the behavior of tons of CrossFitters actually paying more attention to their nutrition and to their diet. And for a while there, that's all you ever heard anybody talk about was the paleo diet, the paleo diet. And there's a lot of even within the paleo diet, there's a lot of misinterpretations of what the diet was.

Some people thought it was a no carb diet. And Rob had to kind of continuously say, look, we're trying not to eat a crazy amount of carbohydrates. We're trying to stay away from processed foods and things like that. But there is rooms for some carbohydrates. And he stayed with that the entire time, even though he's shifted his diet a little bit more to be like more keto ask more carnivore ish.

Nowadays, he still eats potatoes and still eat certain things. And, but he's also somebody that has overcome a disease. He's somebody that's fought through getting very, very sick. From what I remember, I want to say he was like 120 or 115

pounds or something wild like that he just was very very uh small and frail and not strong and now he does jiu-jitsu and he's jacked and he's lifting and he looks great he's probably like mid 40s or so and uh he's somebody i look up to so i'm excited to have him on the show today yeah i remember hearing about that paleo diet back in like 2011, somewhere around there. And the thing I was wondering with like the big difference is like, whenever I hear people talk about the paleo diet, it was just,

you couldn't, you just could not eat processed foods. Like it was low carb and no processed foods at all. You're focusing on eating purely whole foods. And I mean, it sounded just like a healthy diet. Like it didn't, I'm more so curious like what

was the big thing that made paleo so different because it caught fire and i just didn't understand necessarily why at the time what's interesting is that it caught fire but then there was also like a lot of uh like negativity surrounding it where um it, it's like, well, how could there be, I guess there could be negativity and skepticism around everything. Um, but it's like, well, we're just trying to get back to our roots, like the way that we ate originally. Yeah. Um, and it's like, what's wrong with that?

Like you're just basically trying to have a diet that's rich in meat and vegetables and fruit. Um, the thing with Rob though, and the thing with the paleo solution, I don't recall exactly which foods were off limits, but he had specific reasons for certain foods to not be part of it. If I remember correctly, like beans aren't part of it. And there's specific reasons why. And there's people just don't digest them that well.

And he had kind of all these reasons. So I think that's where people were like, eh, like, I don't know how much it really matters. kind of all these reasons. So I think that's where people were like, eh, like, I don't know how much it really matters, but you know, I I'm, I'm a huge proponent of the food choices that we make. I think the, I think when you make, when you select the right food choices, I think everything else follows from there. When you make incorrect food choices, that might be where you might meet where you may want to be more diligent with counting and tracking your calories. And you might, if you're trying to make room for eating like off plan and not eating meat

and things like that, then that would probably be a good strategy to employ. But much like lifting, I think the weights can dictate the reps or the reps can dictate the weight, right? But we don't, we don't really need to be concerned about the weights or the reps can dictate the weight, right? But we don't really need to be concerned about the weights or the reps. What we're looking for is like, what result are we after? So that's where I like to start. It's like, okay, well, I want to be leaner. Okay, well, I want to be leaner.

I'm going to mainly eat protein. And then I kind of follow everything up from there. Just like when I go to lift, the first exercise of the day is usually something I'll do a little heavier. Well, when I'm going to do something heavier, of the day is usually something I'll do a little heavier. Well, when I'm going to do something heavier, it's not really feasible to do a lot of reps with something that's heavy. Doesn't really make a lot of sense. Good way to probably hurt yourself is try, you know, too many reps of something that is just too heavy for you. So a lot of times I'll select a weight that's in like a four to six rep range.

Or I might make it a goal and say, I'm going to move this weight for like four to six reps. And then I might try an additional set with that, or I might work up and wait a little bit. But I'm not big into like counting stuff and writing stuff down. A lot of that has to do with just being at it for a long time. But I think Rob Wolf's paleo diet, and it'd be interesting to see if he tracks anything now and how deep he's gotten into

that because I know, I mean, this guy is done. That's why I'm so excited to talk to him because he's done it all. He's worn the glucose monitors. I'm sure he's tracked his calories. I'm sure that he's just so well-versed. He researches stuff. The thing that I love about him the most, though, he's probably the most rational person in the entire industry. Really?

He's somebody that he has his opinions. He has his beliefs. But he's not going to, from what I've seen from him, unless he's changed a little bit. But from what I've seen from him, he's always been somebody who's empathetic. He's somebody that is willing to listen to the other side. He's not going to Sean Baker it. You know, Sean Baker is not afraid, you know, if a vegan comes at him and says something, Sean Baker is not afraid to, you know, blast him as hard as he can. He's not afraid to like really, really jump on him. Or Paul Saladino

is not afraid to do. I love Paul, but he's not afraid to do some gimmicky stuff to get people to listen or watch some of his stuff. A little bit of a little bit of clickbait. Like we're, a lot of us are guilty of it, but I've seen Rob Wolf do a great job of like staying in his lane, sticking to the facts and being a really rational person and not falling for like,

Hey, I just want my name out there. He's just, he's delivering a message that he feels is coming from a place of like, Hey, I just want my name out there. He's just, he's delivering a message that he feels is coming from a place of like, from what I see, it seems like he just wants to help people. Yeah. And I haven't really seen him with a product or anything like that until more recently when he created this, uh, out this, these element packets that we have sitting here, which are absolutely amazing. But that filled a gap and filled a void for a lot of people because a lot of us would

switch to these low carb diets and we would feel like crap. We didn't realize we needed salt. We needed magnesium and stuff like that. You know, one thing that I don't know, and it's potentially maybe because I'm not in the know, I don't know where Rob Wolf was and what he was doing before the paleo diet. Like that's yeah, that's a great that'll be a great thing to ask him. I know he talked about it in his book. was just very sick he was very sick i believe a parent or something like that turned him on to like a vegan style diet oh yeah shit yeah and

the the sacred cow the movie i really highly recommend everybody to watch it but especially if you're vegan or vegetarian i think it would be really really wise for everybody to watch it, but especially if you're vegan or vegetarian, I think it would be really, really wise for you to watch the movie because it might just give you a different perspective. It might not change, you know, how you eat. I got it off of YouTube, but it's and I had to pay for it off of YouTube. It's like 16 bucks or whatever. You can rent it as well.

But I think it's also available on iTunes. I don't know about netflix or some of the other spots but uh he also wrote a book you know so if you're into reading books there's more information in the book than there is the movie but um he also wrote a book on it yeah it looks like just google plays 399 voodoo 399 also there you go yeah wow i'll have to check it out on youtube though i want to ask him about his jiu-jitsu too that's going to be really i know he's been pretty far along with it he's been doing it for yeah he's been doing it for a long time if you're a brown belt you can kick some fucking ass

he's all mobile and shit too i mean he looks like he'd be really explosive see that's the funny he's a little bit like our boy settle gate like he looks like he can jack somebody up pretty good yeah no but that's the thing about like when you start doing like a martial art or jiu-jitsu you actually don't want to use it like or you become very i don't know less confrontational in public just great how are y'all doing yeah buddy great buddy. Great. We're doing amazing. Hey, is this your first time on a podcast? Yes. Yes, it is.

Hence the unprofessionalism. Yes. How are things going over there? Good. Good. Just motoring along in the hill country of Texas for about another month, and then we're moving to Montana. How about you guys? And you were in Nevada for a long time, right? We're in Nevada for almost 10 years. Yeah. Yeah. How's Texas treating you? It's really good,

but it's just all of my family. My wife's family is more in that like Montana, Idaho area, and we couldn't rope them into moving this way. So we're moving back that way. So yeah. Yeah. That's great. First, you know, first off i wanted to kick kick things off with congratulating you on making such a great product you know this podcast is also sponsored by element so we appreciate the sponsorship we appreciate that a ton but we also just appreciate the fact that you made an awesome product so many people jump into these keto diets or these low carb style diets carnivore diets and we end up feeling like shit sometimes. And we're like, why do I feel like crap?

And it's hard because it's a tough pill to swallow because you're like, no, it can't be the diet. Like it can't be this diet that I'm on. It can't this can't be doing it to me. But for many of us, we didn't know how important it was to have these electrolytes. Can you kind of talk about what led you to make the product and maybe even what led you down the road of discovering like, man, I need salt. I need magnesium. Yeah.

So I was one of those people, you know, and I'm a half decent biochemist. I've eaten a ketogenic diet for going on 23 years now. I just had my 49th birthday on Sunday. Congratulations. Thank you. Still, still. Still alive, not dead yet and all that stuff. But for a variety of reasons, mainly related to gut health and also kind of cognitive function, like a ketogenic diet, I just feel really good on that. And for a lot of my physical activity historically historically, it fueled it. Okay.

You know, more like short duration, power activities, Olympic lifting, power lifting, stuff like that. But I've, I've always, um, dabbled in Brazilian jujitsu the last eight years. I've, I've been really consistent with that. Just got my Brown belt recently. And I just, um, I just didn't really have like that, that low gear, like that grinding gear at jujitsu and i would feel kind of blown out and adrenalized and so i would i had all this kind of witchcraft of

like i i would do carbs before and carbs after and if i if i fueled enough carbs so that i felt okay at jujitsu then i kind of got back on a carb roller coaster and cognitively i didn't feel well and i just kind of thought that that's the way it was. And then I met these guys, Tyler Cartwright and Luis Villasenor. They founded an outfit called Keto Gains. I know you're pals with them. And I kind of stalked them and humped their knee and just basically said, Hey, would you guys look at what I'm doing here and give me some feedback on this stuff?

Because they work with just a ton of people and have a lot of success in this kind of appropriate protein, smartly constructed ketogenic diet. And they literally barely even opened an eye and they were like, you need more electrolytes, specifically sodium. And I was like, oh, no, no, man, I got this. I'm a biochemist. I know protein, carbs, fat. I got this. I'm a biochemist. I know protein, carbs, fat. I know redox reactions. I salt my food. I'm good. And that's what most people do whenever they have a good coach. They ignore the person for at least a year. And if the coach really is good, they write it out with them for a while and then finally one day these tyler and louise were like

listen man just do exactly this which was basically this protocol they had for like take this much table salt this much no salt this much um uh magnesium citrate put some lemon juice in it put some stevia with it mix it up and i mean it was just like a light switch was flipped. And it's not surprising because literally every nerve impulse we have, every thought we have, every muscle contraction that occurs in our body is a consequence of sodium potassium pumps. That is the basic currency of life. That's the way that ATP is produced and these electron ion gradients and all this stuff. And so it blew me away. It wasn't earthshaking for these guys because they had known about this for a long, long time

and had worked with lots of people. But what it really lit a fire under me was to help so many of the folks that were out there struggling. I want to say maybe like 5 years ago, I would have been much more conservative in the number of people that I thought a low carb diet would be appropriate for, you know, there's going to be some people for whom it's going to be bad for their adrenals. It's going to be bad for their HBTA axis. It may be, you know, kind of certainly potentially injurious to performance. And when I really gave this thing a hard look, I changed my position such that I think that maybe 2% of people would really, really be inappropriate on a diet like this. And that the bulk of folks that are struggling, it's due to electrolyte insufficiency, specifically sodium. So we we brewed up this this homebrew recipe again, you know, take much this much of this, this much of that 64 ounces, you know, mix it all together.

And we put this thing online. It was called Keto Aid. And we had like a half million downloads of this thing. And we started just getting inundated with folks like, man, I had always felt generally good on a low-carb diet, but I had these performance issues. Or maybe I had some things that people will call it adrenal fatigue, but it's more HPTA, axis dysregulation. And so we had this huge feedback from folks that this is really, really helping. And then the funny thing, the thing that really caused us to contemplate

launching Element was that we also started getting tagged on social media from folks. And they were like, hey, I was going through TSA and they didn't like my three bags of white powder, LOL. And after a few body cavity searches and stuff like that, you start wondering like, After a few body cavity searches and stuff like that, you start wondering like, okay, maybe a convenience play on this would be good. And the interesting thing with this is it wasn't just a couple of guys like, oh, maybe people need electrolytes. Like we knew that folks needed electrolytes. We kind of market tested this by doing a freemium deal. Like we gave away a how here's the formula, you know, do it. And we had a massive amount of people respond that it was really favorable. And then they kind of directed us towards this need for like a convenience play on this.

And so it's been really cool. And now we're, you know, we're the official hydration partner of Team USA Olympic weightlifting. We're doing some work with like different Navy seal teams. Um, we, we worked with a group of guys. It's really funny. They're, they're a bunch of athletes, but they're kind of finance geeks. Like they're from like Harvard and Yale and all these Ivy league places. And they work in finance, super high level. And they are rowing a boat across the atlantic trying to break a world record for for going across the atlantic it's called latitude 35 and so um we got to do a really deep dive with those guys because it's um it's a really interesting performance challenge

to deal with these guys because they've got seasickness they need to really optimize their their fuel to weight ratio on the boat. They need to buffer themselves against, you know, like hypoglycemic events. And so they went into this with the plan that they would be very well fat adapted because that that's kind of a great way to optimize things from from the amount of gear that they can carry on the boat. But they had all these other kind of crazy considerations but the the electrolytes were were a key thing like they they face um surface level temperatures uh some days as high as like 115 degrees on the water plus plus like humidity so it's uh it's a really remarkable physical challenge yeah it sounds like the worst fucking thing in the world like i could not have met like i get seasick i'm afraid of sharks um i don't particularly like that that degree of heat

and and so it sounds absolutely wretched to me but it's been really cool being able to work with people and in all these different arenas well we love your product my main question i have for you is um like should we be cautious with this at all because like i love drinking it so i'm drinking you know four or five of them every day but i don't know like you know if i can overdo it i do know that sometimes you can end up with a soft stool if you end up you know overdoing any uh electrolytes so i was gonna say disaster pants is the most um immediate uh negative side effect of this stuff. Disaster.

Disaster pants. Disaster pants. That might be a new product of yours. Disaster pants. Yeah. It would be kind of cool if we could bracket both ends of the market. Same thing. Cause you cause a problem and then you solve it.

So that it's some sort of a depends deal or something. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. I personally have like to give you the biggest thank you. We were just talking before you came on the podcast. My wife just gave birth to our son this past Thursday. And, you know, once once you be, well, you know, I haven't become pregnant before.

But when your wife becomes pregnant, you start looking at everything with like a bigger microscope. Like, can you have this? Can you have that? And, you know, some days she just wouldn't feel, you know, too awesome. You know, like pregnancy does it takes a toll on a woman. But Element was there like literally the entire step of the way. We got signed off by a couple of doctors, you know, our traditional like the doctor she would go see. And then our friend Gabrielle Lyon, we would just check everything with with our doctors.

And like, yeah, electrolytes are totally fine. Day of the delivery, same thing, you know, we're kind of running on little to no food, hospital foods, not that great for her. She has a gluten intolerance, so she could pick out a couple of things here and there. But the whole time, you know, we had sugar cups full of element electrolytes and we got through it. And even still now she's breastfeeding and, you know, pregnant mothers know like, hey, when you breastfeed, like the baby literally sucks the life out of you. So to replenish herself, she's still drinking the Element Electrolyte. So seriously, thank you for an amazing product, because it's like in my household, my daughter drinks it, my wife drinks it, you know, now technically through breastfeeding, my son drinks it. And then of course I drink it. Uh, so I just wanted to point that out that during this whole time, the element was there literally every single step of the way. That's so cool to hear.

You know, we, we, um, we didn't remotely anticipate getting this feedback, but it was a little over a year ago, I guess a little longer than that. But we started getting tagged again on social media within these breastfeeding moms groups. And there's all these different things like exclusive pumping and pump and feed. And there's all these kind of different tribes that people are in. But these women started posting that they were like, this is how much I pumped yesterday without element. And then my friend gave me some element and I did it today. And it was like four bottles full. Hell yeah.

And it just went like crazy. And when I started, I started researching about sustainable farming. It could be. It's like, what's going on here? But when you look at the physiology of this, it makes a lot of sense.

Sodium actually increases the fluid volume, which is what you need to get the throughput through the breast tissue to actually make breast milk. And just adding more water will lower the concentration of sodium and it will limit that throughput. Like it can actually curtail breast milk production. And this was interesting enough that

the professor of epidemiology, she's an MD PhD at Vanderbilt, put together a pilot study to look at element and breast milk production. And it was literally, it was getting populated, it was getting ready to be spun up, and then COVID kind of pumped the brakes on that. But we will end up with a pilot study looking at electrolyte consumption and breast milk production. So I mean, and again, this wasn't remotely like kind of our core demo that we were going for. But it's really cool that this is a thing. We've had two kids. And Nikki did pretty well on the breastfeeding thing. But production was very up and down.

And it just wasn't on my radar that we could have really goosed things. Even just having her do like a chicken bouillon cubes with her soups or something like that, like anything to increase that sodium and the fluid volume so that she would do better with that. Is there any concern with somebody that might have high blood pressure

taking a product that has so much sodium in it or salt? Yeah, yeah. And, you know, it's so like if somebody is hypertensive, if they're a sodium sensitive, hypertensive individual, I wouldn't recommend something like Element for these folks. But the interesting thing with that is that low sodium diets don't really show a whole heck of a lot of efficacy for these people either. Like the DASH diet and a number of other randomized control trials have looked at people on low sodium diets, and it doesn't really change things because the mechanism of causation isn't the sodium, it's chronically elevated insulin levels. And this is where if you get these folks, if you have high blood pressure, I could generally make a pretty strong case that you should find some glycemic load, some lower carbohydrate intake level such that you don't have hypertension.

And then once you hit that point, usually you're both safe for electrolyte supplementation, but you generally need more. but you generally need more. So yeah, that is one, one group that, um, they, you know, if you're already eating a super refined Western diet and you're hypertensive, you don't need to throw more sodium on top of that. Like you're usually getting a bunch of that from just your, your, your diet already. Yeah. I think it's really cool. Um, initially when you were talking about how, uh, you know, your performance was, your performance got better when you were talking about how, you know, your performance was your performance got better when you start focusing on using electrolytes, because I noticed actually the same thing. I used to eat like years ago. I used to eat like three hundred fifties of maybe five hundred grams of carbs a day and use the exclusive. I do jujitsu and I lift and this is what I need.

And then over here, I mean, we started implementing some fasting and low carb and I noticed that as I did that my body composition did get better but my performance wasn't that impaired but when I did start using it was before element but I started trying to use and implement electrolytes I noticed that wow my battery I can actually go for a long long time with jiu-jitsu with lifting it's not and fasting and fasting like I do a lot of my jiu-jitsu fasted and i don't cramp at all i don't feel tired by the end i can go round after round after round and i'm low carb some days no carb and i like years ago it's funny because i would have never first off prescribed this to any client of mine that's doing performance like that that's really high into performance but myself i would have been extremely scared to try this type of diet

but it like it's literally electrolytes are the missing link for a lot of athletes i forget who it was i i was talking to somebody and they made the case that um to some degree and i don't know is it 50 is 100 it probably varies from person person but they kind of made the case that electrolytes can kind of carry what carbohydrates used to provide. And it's not that we're using electrolytes as a fuel source, but I think there's something happening at that hormonal level where it's not as big of a stress on the body. Like there's this interesting stuff where they'll run people to exhaustion. And when they, they will then allow them to, to just rinse their mouth with like a flavored beverage. It has no calories in it and it'll give people five to seven percent more before they they ultimately fail. So there's a lot of what passes for endurance that's centrally governed in the brain.

electrolyte status. And so long as everything is okay with that, I think that the brain is more lenient in letting us have a high motor because once pH gets dysregulated, once electrolytes get dysregulated, once the brain really senses that we've depleted fuel stores overly, then people tend to bonk. So, I mean, that makes a ton of sense, but yeah, it's really hairball. Like you're working with some folks and you're wanting to do good by them and you're like hey we're gonna cut virtually all plant material out of your diet um you know you're gonna eat a bunch of saturated fat and oh by the way uh throw like a bunch of chicken bouillon cubes and and your your you know your your am mug of coffee and and swig that down and you'll be good to go. It sounds kind of crazy, but it makes a lot more sense now that we're kind of motoring through and you can look back and maybe look for some of the mechanisms of what's going

on there. I hope our listeners are ready because this is going to be an earth shattering podcast that goes on for 24 hours. We're going to be talking to you for a long time. We've got lots of questions. You started out as a power lifter many years ago. And and Seema and I were talking before the show and we were like, I don't wonder what Rob was doing, you know, before the paleo solution. And he maybe talk about some of your early beginnings with power lifting and where you were before you wrote the book. Yeah, I mean, so I won the California State Powerlifting Championship in the NASA Federation when I was 19. So I guess that would be 1991.

I remember you had a pretty good deadlift, right? I had a 565 squat and deadlift. And don't laugh. I only had a 345 bench like I was. It's funny. I've never had a double bodyweight bench, but I've had a body weight plus myself in a chin up. I've actually been able to do double my body weight in a chin for a double, but I've never,

my pressing is comparatively weak, like both overhead pressing and bench pressing. I think if I could have gotten up to like one 98, like I would have had enough girth that I would have started getting some pretty good, you know, advantage on that. But I got squat and deadlift at one 81. Is that how would you wait?

Yep. And a 300 plus bench. That's awesome. It's not bad. It's not bad. Yeah. But I, I was really lucky early in that,

that development two guys, rich woods, and then also a guy, Danny Thurman. And I think Danny is still pretty active at least in the bench press scene but um also in power lifting in general they kind of took me under their wing and like i had just been kind of flailing and hashing around prior to that and these guys um basically at that point um i was riding my my prior to meeting those guys, I was riding a bike everywhere because I wanted to stay in shape.

And it made my life suck because my girlfriend lived like 20 miles away. So it was like 40 miles a day on the bicycle and everything. They're like, no, you're either getting a car or motorcycle. And so it was funny. They changed all this lifestyle stuff around that. And it was funny. Like they changed all this like lifestyle stuff around that. And it was interesting. I guess that their training would be somewhat similar to the way that egg cone had trained where the off season was very kind of a little bit power

bodybuilding centric. Like I squatted and deadlifted sumo in competition, but virtually the whole year I squatted and deadlifted a narrow stance high bar. I did my deadlifting off of a block. And so in my off-season stuff, I did everything as long a range of movement as I could. I benched very, very narrow and all this type of stuff. And then when we would start getting ready for a meet then we would widen everything out and

it felt like i was cheating like everything felt like it was cheating because i was used to normally training it like double the range of movement and i think orthopedically it was kind of cool because i i really um i was switching up the loading and even though i was i was young at that time like i i think that that was just an interesting kind of cool way of training. You're shortening the range of motion, uh, is actually decreasing some of the volume because you're not moving the same distance and then you're adding weight. So then you're kind of getting back to a similar volume where most people, when they

start to add, they are really just adding. And it's, it's like trying to make something out of nothing. In your case, you already built that foundation and that volume you were able to do, because you were doing it previously by moving the weight further. And now you're moving a heavier weight in a shorter distance. Yeah. And you know, it was interesting having good coaches there was critical because, um, I knew in any of these lifts, I could lift a lot more if I just widened everything out. If I widened my bench grip, if I widened my deadlift, but they were like, do you want to win in the gym or do you want to win at the competition?

I'm like, well, I kind of want to win in the competition. Although it would be really cool to look super strong and jacked in the gym, but they're like, you don't get both. You get to pick one or the other. And so it was cool that I had some mentors there that could kind of contain the youthful ignorance and kind of motor me forward. And then I would say another really big influence was Fred Hatfield's early work and all of his compensatory acceleration type stuff. acceleration type type stuff so like whatever time of the year it was the main thing that i tried to do was move the weight as quickly as i could always and you know other than like warm-up sets where you're just trying to get the synovial fluid moving and whatnot like i if i went up a set

of steps i like tried to explode up the steps you know i mean it was like everything i did was super explosive and it was interesting after i kind of got out of power lifting as a main gig i got into tie boxing and that first couple of years of once i learned a good technique of throwing a good tie kick or even an elbow or something like that like i could really smash people like i i won a couple of my early amateur fights just kicking people in the leg because it was it was horrible you had a guy that that you know was probably about 165 pounds then but probably still had like a high bar ass to grass like mid 400s back squat and could throw a really good technical tight kick and it was it was ugly like i i remember some of that stuff and i was like oh that was that was kind of gnarly but you know i've just always been interested in in human performance and and

improving health and whatnot so it it's uh it's been an easy gig to be excited about this because just always something to learn and something new to to discover with. And the paleo solution was a solution to some of your own problems, correct? Totally. Yeah. I did an undergrad in biochemistry and was experimenting with some diet stuff at that time. And I was a very low fat, low protein, vegan diet. And I know that that can work for some folks. But for me, it really, really didn't work. And I ended up with a condition called ulcerative colitis. And I was still trying to shovel as much food down as I could, but it was just coming out about the same way it went in. And I got down to about 125 pounds from malabsorption issues. My fingernails were falling out. My hair was falling out. I had really terrible depression. And it was a weird set of circumstances. But my mom had suffered

from similar problems as long as I could remember, like GI-related issues. We discovered that she had celiac disease. So there was this clear gluten reactivity that was going on. And her rheumatologist said that she seemed to be reactive to grains, legumes, and dairy. And when she told me that, at the time I was vegan. And so I'm like, okay, I get the dairy thing that in that world, it's poison. But I was like, grains and legumes, what do you eat if you don't eat that? And I was just thinking about that. And it was a free association type thing. But I was like, okay, grains and legumes.

That's agriculture. What did we eat before agriculture? Mind you, this was in 1998. So it was quite a ways back. And then this idea, I had heard this term, a paleolithic diet. So I went into the house, turned on the computer, waited for the computer to do its boot up deal. And then there was a new search engine called Google. And into Google, I put this term Paleolithic diet.

And I found a little bit of work from two main people, Arthur Devaney and then Lauren Cordain. And Lauren is the guy that really popularized the Paleo diet in the early 2000s. And I was so sick that I was kind of like, it seems like eating this way is going to kill me. But I mean, I knew I was facing a bowel resection at age 26, 27. So I knew that my situation was pretty dire. And I didn't really have a lot to lose. And my first iteration of kind of paleo eating was this essentially ketogenic version of the program. It was actually an Atkins book that I used as a main template because there were no paleo diet books available at that point. And I guess completing the story arc, around 2000, I was poking around online and

I found this wacky workout called CrossFit. And my friend Dave Warner and I started following that. And we really enjoyed it. It was fun. It was different. And Dave's a retired Navy SEAL. And before we knew it, we had 15 people that we were training out of his garage. And I reached out to the Glassmans. And I was like,

Hey, we want to open a gym. We want to call it CrossFit. Do we have permission to do that? And they're like, Yeah, we want to open a gym. We want to call it CrossFit. Do we have permission to do that? And they're like, yeah, go be Achieve. And that was the first CrossFit affiliate gym in the world, which was CrossFit North. And I think CrossFit North was open maybe 4 years before there was any type of a business or affiliate agreement or anything. It was just so completely Wild West, which is cool in a lot of ways. It was a really interesting opportunity.

But I had this template of ancestral health and this paleo diet idea, and then got plugged into the early CrossFit scene and just got to work with a ton of people and learned a lot. Circling this thing back around to the salt piece just really quickly. I remember it was around 2003. I was having a conversation with Greg Glassman, and he was a big fan of like the high fat zone diet, which is really not far off of ketogenic ratio. It's got a little bit more carbs, but he also had people that were performing at super high motor output. So I think it was probably still ketogenic for where they were. But, um, I remember him saying, he's like,

Robbie, like the, these guys have to supplement at least five grams of sodium a day, or they just crater. Like they, they, they get this kind of hypovolemic thing where they go from seated to standing and they get lightheaded and they almost pass out and they have terrible performance.

And so I, I gotta give a hat tip to Glassman, like, uh, whatever other kind of quirky elements he had, he was shockingly ahead of the curve and really, really well steeped in a lot of this stuff. And he had the right of it on the sodium topic, both with regards to that it's not a detriment to health

as a standalone item and that it is a critical component of elite athletic performance you know the funny thing is that um i still have people message me and like ask me and see what's the difference between like you know electrolytes or and gatorade right um and it's funny because gatorade's pretty much just like flavored sugar but when you look at when you look, you know, these electrolytes and how they affect performance, I think a lot of people are shocked about the amount of sodium that's in them. And that actually I've had people be like, is that good for me to do? Because there's still a negative stigma behind sodium intake or high sodium intake. Yeah. And it's a, it's a tough one to unpack because when we look at even the best performed studies out of epidemiology, it's still correlative versus causative.

So it's tough to, you know, tweeze those things apart. But we know it's so obvious that refined food is problematic for health i i'm of the opinion that it is largely driven from the the the potential that it causes you to overeat like the stuff tastes really good it's very calorically dense um i dug into that a lot in my second book wired to eat just talking about the neuroregulation of appetite and you think about the lays potato chip tagline like i bet you can't eat just one and it's like dude i'll take that that all day long like i you know they have some very smart food chemists tweaking like i i read a piece recently that even the

parabolic shape of of pringles has a a uh an effect on the brain and the way that it stimulates appetite like it's kind of crazy you know so i agree um but what do all these foods have in common typically they're high in sodium and so it's hard to separate out is it the sodium or is it the the you know the refined food because it refined food absent sodium really generally doesn't taste that good. You know, I mean, even things that are sweet, they will add sodium to it because a little bit of salt plus sweet, actually any bitter undertones there, you don't really taste them. So it's really a beautiful combination. It's a great way to gain weight, you know,

but a terrible thing for folks when you're more sedentary. So it's really hard to pull those things apart. I think that that's kind of one thing that we have to look at. And then if you have people shifting to any type of a largely whole unprocessed diet, whether it's Mediterranean or paleo or keto or what have you, unless you're eating some really specific things like olives or sardines or something like that, all of these foods are naturally low in sodium. So we go from a very highly refined, very sodium rich diet, which we know isn't particularly good for us.

When you shift over to a less processed diet, almost regardless of what the flavor of it is, there is inherently a lot less sodium. We tend to see health benefits generally with these unrefined foods. So then it's kind of like, well, sodium is here and that's bad. It's in the refined food camp. It's not so much over here in the unrefined food camp. So I don't know. Maybe sodium is bad for us. sodium is bad for us. But there've been some interesting studies, again, where they will look at reducing sodium intake in a given diet. And unless the glycemic load is really reduced in the diet, it doesn't improve blood pressure. The blood pressure still stays high because if insulin levels are high, the body will retain any sodium that's around. It will definitely

respond negatively if you dump a bunch more sodium in it. So a highly refined diet, hyperinsulinism, and a bunch of additional sodium, that's definitely not a good mix. But there was an interesting study that was performed in type 2 diabetic heart patients where they looked at what the renal excretion of sodium was. And so this gives us a sense of what they're consuming because it's basically tracking their urine output. So minus what they would lose from sweating and a few other sources, it's pretty comprehensive. What was interesting is a U-curve emerged from this. So at very low intakes of sodium, two grams or lower, it was almost a

vertical line with regards to morbidity and mortality. These already sick people, when they consume very low sodium, they were very high likelihood of having problems or experiencing death. And then as they consume more sodium, there was a low ebb of morbidity and mortality at about five grams per day. But then as they consume more sodium, morbidity and mortality increase, but the right-hand side was much flatter. You had to get out to about eight to 10 grams of sodium per day to be as at risk for morbidity and mortality as people at low consumption. And it's worth mentioning that the AMA, American Dietetics Association, they recommend 2000 milligrams or less per day of sodium. So they're recommending right in the ball, right into the strike zone for what appears to be the most dangerous levels of sodium intake.

And again, this is in a sick population where you would assume that if there was a benefit to a curtailing sodium intake, that you would really tend to see it there. But we didn't. We saw this kind of low ebb at around five grams. And then when you kind of look over in the performance athletics scene, very mainstream guidelines from the American Council of Sports Medicine, and this will depend on the size of the individual, the temperature that they're

performing in and whatnot. But for high motor athletes in warmer environments and whatnot, they recommend as a starting place, seven to 10 grams of sodium per day for the more athletic kind of deal. So that's where for me, I think that there's kind of a bracketing that exists here in otherwise healthy individuals, non-hypertensive. I think that there's kind of a bracketing that exists here in, in otherwise healthy individuals, non-hypertensive. I think that somewhere around five grams per day as a bottom is probably pretty reasonable. And then we see somewhere as a topping out somewhere around like seven to 10 grams per day. Although we see higher needs in, in very low carb people,

particularly if they're, they're high motor, hot, humid, or even cold environments. Like it's interesting, like mountaineering is very dehydrating and it's doubly challenging because when your body is cold, your desire to drink, your thirst mechanisms get really downregulated. So you could almost argue that cold exposure, cold, dry exposure is more dangerous than hot, moist exposure, because at least in that warm environment, the thirst mechanisms are actually stimulated properly. Why is nutrition science just so shitty? Part of it is that it's really hard. Like there's a lot of different moving parts to it. You know, I was having a conversation with someone the other day. And, you know, so like I'm a fan of the carnivore approach to eating. Like, I don't think it's the first whistle stop folks should do in dietary change. But because of my interest in autoimmune disease and gut research and whatnot, like I see a lot of people really benefit in that arena.

So you have people that will will say things like kale and spinach are poison because they carry oxalates and oxalates are absolutely a problem in modern humans. They can contribute to kidney stones and a host of other kind of systemic inflammatory problems. But something that gets missed in this story, when you look at some currently still living hunter-gatherers like the Hadza, the Hadza consume absolutely enormous amounts of oxalate-containing vegetables. But the thing is, the Hadza also have a gut microbiome that degrades oxalates in their gut. So physiologically, they never even get the oxalates into their circulation. But modern humans don't have that gut microbiota. So, so, you know, you end up in this thing where would kale and spinach potentially be beneficial?

Probably in a scenario where you've got the gut microbiome that can deal with the other problematic stuff in it. But if you don't have that problematic stuff, or you don't have that gut microbiome to deal with the problematic stuff, then you're going to have health problems consuming it. And fuck, how complex is that? When are we going to have a randomized control trial that looks at that? Like it's very observational. You know, there's some proposed mechanisms there. There is not a randomized control trial. There will never be a randomized control trial around that.

But it makes sense. But that's a remarkable amount of stuff to unpack to just kind of go from like, well, in this situation, lots of green leafy vegetables may be fantastic. And in this situation, they could legitimately be a really negative part of health. So the complexity of human physiology and human digestion, I think, is part of the problem here. I think we would do really well to shift all of this stuff into outcome oriented interventions and provide some benchmarks. You know, if the claim is that increasing saturated fat intake, you know, will unequivocally increase cardiovascular disease or whatnot. Let's get some people eating these diets.

Let's try to run them as long as we can. We can't run them for a lifetime. But let's agree on what the parameters of, say, like cardiovascular diseases or cancer potential and whatnot. And let's mainly focus on kind of outcome-based medicine around that. And that's still not going to be perfect because people will say, well, maybe it looks okay for a year, but this is maybe a case that could be leveled at veganism. If you've eaten a mixed diet throughout your life, you could probably eat a vegan diet without supplementation for the better part of a year before you started noticing folate and B vitamin deficiencies. So there is there are potential limitations to this. But the story is just so damn complex.

Like, I think that there's a lot of tomfoolery and I think that there's a lot of really dubious economic interests in this stuff. Like, it's really weird. The associations between the Food and Drug Administration and drug administration and, and, uh, you know, the, the six companies on the planet that produce 95% of the food that is consumed. Like there's some really weird relationships that go on with, with all that stuff. So I think there's some really, uh, dubious things there, but I think also legitimately, it's just a really complex topic. topic and and so it's difficult to get in and do a good job on that um you know for a whole host of reasons you know how do you double blind

a scenario in which this person eats beef and that person eats chicken even like you know what you're eating that you know so it a lot of the basic um principles of like the scientific method really become difficult to implement in anything that's like a reasonable circumstance, you know, nutritionally. You know, what I'm about to ask you may sound it's going to be extremely general, but I'm curious about your thoughts on this, especially just because you've done so many different diets. Like you've obviously started the paleo diet. You've done vegan before that you've done carnivore, you've done keto. Um, and looking at all of these different diets, it doesn't seem that you, even though you kind of, you didn't like, you kind of invented the whole like paleo thing. Um, you don't seem zealous about it, meaning you're not like, this is the right way and this is the only diet that you need to eat, which is amazing.

But when you look at dieting principles or eating principles, what do you think when individuals look at how they should eat and what they should eat, what are some principles that you think people should just follow? Potentially not eating excessive amounts of processed carbohydrates i think is a principle so yeah with that being said like what are some dieting principles that you think people in general a majority of the population should follow so i love ted naman's pe approach it's protein to energy approach uh he he was a an engineer before becoming a doctor and um i think that the analytical skills one you have to be pretty fucking smart to be a engineer like they're that i started off in engineering and i wasn't smart

enough to really feel comfortable with it so i went the chemistry route so there's kind of this there's this pecking order within all of that stuff. And Ted's real smart. He's very analytical. And really what the PE, the protein to energy ratio gets down to is there's a lot... What's cool about it is a very simple recommendation that then you can get out into the mechanistic weeds and find lots and lots of support for it. So protein generally is the most nutrient-dense item that we can eat. And this is true whether you're a grazing animal or a carnivore. Protein-rich foods tend to carry more nutrition with them calorie per calorie.

So there's a process in biology called optimum foraging strategy where organisms will tend to seek out the most nutrition with the least amount of effort possible, which is why our modern environment is horrible. You can get an infinite variety of food delivered at your door and never get off your couch. Like it's a disaster compared to the way that we're kind of wired up biologically. But if people just focus on protein, and then in my opinion, they determine whether they run better on carbs or fat or a combo, and then the rest of the stuff just sorts itself out. I would add a little caveat in there that being aware of immunogenic foods,

like some people do great with dairy, some people don't do well with dairy, some people are very reactive to gluten, other people are not. And those things can change with time. Bacterial or viral infections can change how one reacts to different foods. So today I may not be reactive to almonds. I catch COVID, my gut microbiome gets changed. And then all of a sudden I'm reacting negatively to almonds. Like that's a real thing. And it's just, but I would put that in 5%. It's down the list, but it's something to be aware of.

But really focus on protein and whole unprocessed foods. Figure out if you run better on fat or carbs and make that the preponderance of the calories that you need in addition to the protein or, you know, a combination of that. And then have a little bit of a thought towards immunogenic potential of foods. Like, do you, have you ever tried totally pulling grains, legumes, and dairy out of your diet for 30 days, reintroduce and see how you do? For a ton of people, it's going to be a non-issue. They're just going to move, remove some foods and reintroduce them. Occasionally people discover they're just going to move remove some foods and reintroduce them occasionally people discover they're like oh man i really do uh react negatively to to this food or that food but i love ted's approach like it is so elegant and simple and and uh also i i think it's the most factually

accurate prescription around nutrition with the least setup you You don't have to be a caveman. Like it's just like protein, nutrient density, you get the most protein per calorie that you consume, figure out whether you run better on carbs or fat, and then you're done. You know, like it is really, it's so simple that then people have to get back in and start making it complex again. But I really like that that so the other day i was thinking about you know foods that are excessively high in protein um and i couldn't come up with a food that was uh unhealthy you know anything that's really high in protein um just is is pretty darn good for you and it's probably not going to lead to a lot of the diseases that we see a lot of people suffering from.

Do you think that protein, there's a lot of people that still track their calories, count their calories, things like that. Do you think that protein should even count as a calorie or should it be more like fiber where it's just like a zero? I kind of, my theory on it is that protein is such a strange thing, but I think that if you train, I actually think that protein might not only be a zero, it might even be net negative because it's an insurance policy for the future

to ensure that you burn more calories because you're going to gain more muscle. I mean, there's no it's not a surefire thing that you're going to gain more muscle. I mean, there's no, it's not a surefire thing that you're going to gain more muscle, but by having more muscle, you do burn more calories and having that protein and exercising and all that. So what are some of your thoughts on that? That's a really interesting angle. I had never really thought about that. I would need to noodle on that. I don't know if I could go.

You know what's funny about that? Let's go. I love confirmation bias. So either we just stumbled onto something that's genius or we're both idiots and we're in good company with each other on it. So either way, I guess it's good. But we do a three times a year reset within our community, the healthy rebellion. And we've kind of made protein a free food. Like so long, it, it can't necessarily be ribeye. It can't necessarily be like pork.

Like these things that are like 50, 50 protein fat, like you can't quite pull that off, but, um, reasonably lean protein sources. Uh, we've pretty much, you know, if people are like, well, I'm still hungry, then eat more of that protein, eat more of that protein. Well, I ate more. Okay, eat more. And what we find is that everything works out great if they do that. And we never, ever, ever have people enter the reset who've had body composition issues that were eating adequate protein. Never. Not a single person. A couple of thousand people going through it. And there's never been one person that was really on point with protein and still had significant body composition issues. What about, I think that's a really interesting. Yeah. I,

yeah, I just kind of have in my own, just, uh, I guess researching myself, you know, when I've leaned towards eating leaner sources of protein and eating a lot of it. It just didn't seem like it just seems like human beings are inefficient at turning protein into energy, I guess, is my main thing. We have carbs and fat. Those both work pretty good when it comes to that. Today's episode of the podcast is brought to you by Piedmontese beef. Dude. OK, Piedmontese is awesome because I've been seeing a lot of people comment of like how I want fat in my steak.

I need more fat in my steak. I don't like these lean steaks. Those people sound funny. They sound funny, but that's the thing. When you go on Piedmontese's website and you look at the macros on a lot of their steaks, they have a lot of steaks that are low on fat, right? Which is great that if you're trying to get leaner, if you're trying to cut, you can get these steaks that are amazing. They're tender and they're low on fat, so you Which is great that if you're trying to get leaner, if you're trying to cut, you can get these steaks that are amazing. They're tender, um, and they're low on fat. So

you're not intaking hella calories, but then they also have steaks that have a good amount of fat, nothing insane. That's going to just make you fat, just a good amount of fat. Um, so if you're not dieting, it's easier. Like Andrew yourself, didn't you, you just use lower fat steaks, uh, or cuts of steak when you were dieting? Yeah. So like instead of like taking something out of my diet, all I did was went from like a ribeye to like a bovet steak. So just, I have some notes down here just that way. I'm not like totally BS and you guys,

but like a ribeye has 10 grams of fat and 24 grams of protein per serving. A bovet has four grams of fat and 25 grams of protein. And of course you guys know that I absolutely love the flat iron steak. Sorry, let me change the camera. Do that again. You guys know, I love the flat iron steaks. That's to me, like hands down second to none, uh, the flavor of it. And of course the, uh, the fat to protein ratio is, I mean, it's just insane because that one is only two grams of fat to 23 grams of

protein. I mean, you're not going to that one is only 2 grams of fat to 23 grams of protein. Oh, my God. I mean, you're not going to find that anywhere else, you know, in any other meat companies. It just, I mean, good luck trying, but... And it doesn't taste like sand. Oh, no. It tastes f***ing amazing. I can't believe that there's sandy meats out there.

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at checkout, enter promo code POWERPROJECT for 25% off your order. And if your order is $99 or more, you get free two-day shipping. What do you think the KetoGains people are doing well? These guys have taken kind of a keto diet and jacked up the protein on it. And I think that I love their message, and I love some of the stuff that they've been saying. And I love a lot of the stuff that you've been saying over the years, because you, from what I've seen, I never really saw you really, uh, be so crazy about like keto.

You were, you were like, yeah, you know, good to produce ketones and there's some good benefit here, but you are also somebody who was adding in a little bit of carbohydrates kind of as needed, it seemed like. And here, you know, we got keto gains guys utilizing protein sparing, modified fast and using protein as a lever, using it as leverage and having way more protein than a standard ketogenic diet. What do you think that they have right? You know, because I know they've had great results with a lot of people yeah it's interesting when you look at um again like i

don't know if it i don't know if this is searching out confirmation bias or if it's it's kind of like finding it sure is this is my show but but um but i think that uh type 1 diabetes is arguably one of the most difficult to manage metabolic conditions that there is like it is such a bastard to manage um when you think about where um insulin is produced in the body it's released out of the beta cells of the pancreas. And the first job that that insulin has is to suppress glucagon release out of the alpha cells of the pancreas that are right next door. And this is part of the reason why type 1 diabetes is so difficult to manage because these cells are supposed to be at a microscopic level side by side and one suppresses the other. And this is where the main area of high blood sugar comes from in a type one diabetic is from out of control glucagon release. And the best management tool that I've ever seen for type one diabetes is the Bernstein diabetes solution, which is a high protein, low carb, moderate-fat diet. And they don't like super high-fat because the really high-fat consumption

makes the individual physiologically insulin-resistant, which then makes the insulin dosing more difficult. So Bernstein isn't shooting for ketosis. If you get some ketones, that's great. But what they're doing is really trying to have just rock-stable, What they're doing is really trying to have just rock stable, flat blood sugar and getting the blood sugar to come out of the liver in a very graded fashion. And so that Bernstein approach looks virtually identical to the KetoGains approach. And they evolved in completely different settings, trying to address completely different problems. And that's where you arrive. And then when you look at the modified Atkins approach,

which was developed quite a long time ago to try to bridge the gap between the performance needs of athletes primarily. And again, when you look at how much better people perform, the improved body composition, and so long as you don't need really remarkably high blood ketone levels to manage something like epilepsy or as adjunctive therapy for cancer or something like that, you get a benefit from the degree of ketosis you have there. But the main focus again, is this kind of protein centric diet and that modified Atkins approach. Again, it kind of grew up in its own silo, but it looks almost identical to what the Keto Games recommendations are. So I kind of... Again, I don't know if it's confirmation bias, but I see these very different needs getting addressed

in the same way. And they evolved in completely separate, kind of isolated quadrants. And so I think that the keto gains guys are really spot on. And it's interesting too. I want to say maybe 30-40% of their folks end up graduating into more of a paleo type template where they may be consuming 100 130 grams of of carbs a day and these are like smallish women with a real high motor you know and they they just once they get metabolically flexible once they get lean then they they play with how much carbohydrate they can put in the mix and and see if they still maintain um appetite control but also get get as good or better body composition and whatnot so

part of those guys success is just that they've got a really solid um beginning point like if they were playing darts they're throwing darts gets them 85 there every time and then they're flexible enough to be able to like move it that remaining 10 or 15 percent to get get the person where they need to go you know rob i'm i'm curious about this because you know you've done carnivore you've done keto and something that i was looking into a little bit recently was like when you look at i think sean bakers put his blood work out there uh paul saladino has also um this guy named carnivore carnivore kurt that put his blood work out, too. And something that you tend to see with individuals that there were those guys that did carnivore for quite a long time is that their SHBG levels went high, like abnormally high for men. And their free and total testosterone came down, like was oddly low.

Right. Something that you wouldn't necessarily expect um and i think i heard sean mentioned once that he you know when he was talking about it because i think his his total test was like 237 or something yeah and he was like well my androgen receptors are more uh like they're they're they're more sensitive so i'm able to do more with what i've got but can you explain those mechanisms to us because those like that doesn't necessarily seem like it'd be ideal for testosterone to be that low but maybe are we looking at it the wrong way is that as big of a problem as people may think it is or is it normal and my most honest

answer is i don't know okay um the the the more speculative answer like backing out a little bit we know that if somebody's on a higher carb diet that their their um their need for thyroid is definitely greater you know so that that t4 t3 conversion the the need for thyroid in the metabolism of carbohydrates is more important. And it's a little bit more defensible to say, well, if you eat a lower carb diet, you don't necessarily need as much T3. And so long as we don't have folks that are symptomatic towards hypothyroid, like being cold and things like that. And ironically, adequate sodium is probably the big driver there. Like if somebody's suffering kind of hypothyroid like being cold and things like that and ironically adequate sodium is

probably the big driver there like if somebody's suffering kind of hypothyroid symptoms so electrolyte and sodium intake just just like resolves the virtually all of that like i'm really hard-pressed to see it not address most situations the testosterone is a more perplexing one that i have to admit that like There is research that suggests that in the low carbohydrate environment, when insulin is low, then there's an upregulation of sex hormone and binding protein. But you could make the case that that's kind of more for like a scarcity period of time. You know, like if resources are real scarce, like if you're either when do you get into ketosis in kind of a natural environment, if you're fasting or if you've really had extended periods of time, a very low carbohydrate or high physical activity and reasonably low carbohydrate. But you can still make the case that it's kind of a scarcity environment potentially. So it's tough.

impairment potentially. So it's tough. I guess that this is, is still something that just from a, uh, a clinical perspective, like does the individual wake up with an erection each day? If they're a male, do they, whether male or female, do they, do they have decent libido, you know, and, and all that type of stuff. And so I think that that is where you kind of have to back it up a little bit and take more of what's going on clinically. I will say that whether people are well supplemented on sodium or not, there have been a lot of people I've worked with where they've been in that 30 grams of carbs per day level. And they felt kind of sluggish, like an erection was only a memory that they had in the morning and stuff like that. an erection was only a memory that they had you know in the morning and stuff like that and then you bump them up to 75 grams a day maybe even cycle it a little bit like hard training day at 75 and other days a little lower and then they start waking up with morning wood and they get a

little bit leaner and you you know just a little bit more focused and and and all the things that kind of go along with i i think a goodrogen profile. But a ton of that was super speculative. Like the thyroid picture, I think, is a more defensible piece of that high carb versus low carb thing. But again, I think that we really have to take it kind of at the clinical level, like these relative numbers. I don't know here's a thing that's interesting too and it actually drives this point home even further away from where sean baker would really make this case the the testosterone levels of like our generation's grandparents in their 60s and 70s was like three times what it is now.

Whoa. And there's something crazy going on, whether it's xenoestrogens or the Hallmark Channel, or, you know, I don't know what thing it is, but there's something going on there. And it actually makes the case that kind of like normal biological functioning may have been consistent with much higher androgen levels so that kind of i don't know like that that's a tough one for me like that one really is a tough one for me has has like has your blood work reflected that in terms of low carb too like i mean have you noticed that with your testosterone or whatever or not really thus far it hasn't been so like i'm

i'm like uh i'll bounce anywhere from like the sixes to the eights on the total level. I do use a little bit of Clomid and have used it for about six years. That's kind of the only foray into the HRT scene that I've done thus far. And it really works well for me. It really pops stuff up. And I think that Clomid has some effect on sex hormone binding protein also and so i don't know if i'm uh suppressing that via the clomid and so i'm getting both a testosterone boost and modulating the sex hormone binding protein because of that so like i i may have

kind of a special circumstance there but i also um in the summer i eat more fruit you know like uh berries and melons and stuff like that like uh depending on my activity one day i might get 150 grams of carbs the next day it might be zero like i go what i notice is i can do a decent amount of carbs one day and then when i try to do it the second day and the third day that's where like that stuff just falls apart and so um even though i've eaten a ketogenic diet for like 22 23 years like i i i do have forays into you know these these other areas and i just kind of when i feel like i need some or i want some then i have it and then i'm kind of done so i i think also just that somewhat random carb exposure that i get uh probably helps in that regard, too.

So we're introducing so many different variables there. It's kind of hard to pin it all down, like what you know, why my situation is working. It's really wacky stuff with blood work. It's very confusing sometimes. You know, you can go super low carb and your fasted glucose could be higher than if you had just a little bit of carbohydrate, which you're like, how does that make any sense? What has been your own experience with that? Mine has still remained pretty low. So I haven't experienced much of the dawn phenomenon and whatnot. But the flip side of that is that I am not one of the like,

But the flip side of that is that I am not one of the... Whether I eat very low protein or very high protein, my ketones never get much higher than about 0.4 to 0.6. I have to do some really crazy heroic stuff to get my ketones much higher than that. Taking some MCT oil and whatnot. And I think that that's because I've eaten low carb for so long. Like I think I directly access fats pretty efficiently. I think I use ketones as a primary fuel pretty efficiently. But I haven't seen much of that Don phenomena effect with me. In the in your movie that you had Sacred Cow, you made a statement and said something the effect of the effect of that. If you're not fat, sick, diabetic, broken in today's modern food era, you're probably screwing things up. And I just that really stuck out to me because I was like, wow, like you're probably not really, I guess, like enjoying yourself. It's like you're almost un-American because you're not enjoying

apple pie and cheeseburgers and chocolate shakes and McDonald's and so forth. Can you elaborate on that a little bit further? You know, today's the food era that we're in, these modern foods that are surrounding us, it's very, very difficult to stay healthy. And then our technology pieces and stuff that we have are keeping us pretty inactive and so forth yeah you that idea struck me when i was i was reading a paper and i'm forgetting the guy's name and it kills me but it was uh title the paper was determinants of human brain evolution the omnivore's real dilemma And it really got into these things about like optimum foraging strategy and palate fatigue, which are these kind of dueling banjos in evolutionary biology. Optimum foraging strategy tells us to go out and eat as many things as we possibly can, expending as little energy as we can. And then palate fatigue is the flip side of that is you

could have a bunch of something that's really amazing, but you will get bored of it. And this is the danger that we're in now. Like a buffet is like the... It's like a landmine with kittens with laser eyes pointing at you and stuff. It's so dangerous because you get bored of one thing, then you've got something just a little bit different or a lot different. And you can just keep eating and eating and eating. And so the point that I was trying to make with that is I'm not in the,

God, we're going to get cancel culture to here, but I don't think it's okay for folks to, if the planet isn't healthy at any temperature, then a human being cannot be healthy at any weight. And I'll point out the flip side of this. Today, there's going to be some number of kids who die from anorexia-related complications from a body weight that is too low. Also today, there will be people who will amputate limbs and will die at young ages due to a body weight, the complications of a body weight that is too high. And there's some middle ground there that I think that we need to try to get to. But even though I don't think we should just kind of roll over and accept our situation,

if people want to change what's going on, I think also that people don't think we should just kind of roll over and accept our situation if people want to change what's going on. I think also that people don't realize how the cards are stacked against them. And a big part of my goal with Wired2Eat and statements like that is that if you find it difficult to lose weight in the modern food environment, like if you've had a lifetime of difficulty around this, it should not be surprising. It should not be shocking. You should not be sad or frustrated by it. It's a legitimately challenging problem. Now, let's not give up.

Let's not just accept that. Let's also not be dicks and like shame people for for a situation that's legitimately difficult so i'm in the spot where i piss literally everybody off like everybody is mad at me about this type of stuff but um i really feel like and i've had feedback like people who had had lifelong disordered eating read the book and check out some of the videos that I've done around this, where it's not your fault, but we still need to do something. We're still in the fight. We still need to do this. And folks that have said they're like nothing else worked. But when I understood this, like it resonated on an emotional level, it's cognitive, but it's also very emotional

when you realize you're like, fuck, this isn't my fault. Like I'm, I'm not broken because I don't want to eat the whole bag of potato chips. It's like, no, you're not. That is good evolutionary wiring that is bad in this modern context, you know, and that that's the only thing. And we need to change our perspective around that context to be able to, to do something. So that was really my, my goal was stuff like that to help people understand that it's a legitimately tough gig. Like this is a hard gig to unpack some people. It comes pretty easy and other people, it's a, it's a, a constant like trench warfare. And, and we just kind of, again, we need to take each person as an individual and just meet them where they are and do the best job we can to help them. You rob i'm really actually curious about the idea of like evolutionary action versus

modern context because like you know the whole the essence of the paleo diet was and if i'm wrong please correct me but like eating like our ancestors ate right um now nowadays in the past few years i guess guess, intermittent fasting has cotton has caught like fire again. It was popular, I don't know, or like late 2010 or whatever, but now it's popular again. And it's interesting because I, I, I fast like almost every day. There are some days that I just choose not to, but a lot of days that I do, it's totally changed the way that like, I look at food.

I used to be a voracious eater, not anymore. I have much, much, much more control over my appetite, something I never used to think I would have. And that's because of the built habit of fasting. You know, you have a lot of health, like people in the health space that are like, oh, that's so bad for you. That's going to cause disordered eating. You know, you shouldn't be skipping breakfast. It's the most, it's the best meal of the day. There's nothing really special about fasting just have your calories throughout the day and you'll be perfectly fine and they think that like it's just like a gimmick etc um but i'm curious on on your take on it and how you feel it may be beneficial because like we didn't evolve eating all day long like right we didn't hundreds of

years ago we didn't have a breakfast a snack a lunch a snack and snack a snack and then a dinner like right we didn't have food all the time and i feel like that is causing a lot of people to have less control over their eating habits so like what are your thoughts on that really good question your question is going to be 10 times better than my answer my my answer is going to be a hot mess i i guarantee you but um i'm again kind of in um i have a little toe in all of these camps i do think that people are chronically over eating like we're just eating too often and our physiology entrains to the frequency of our eating. You can entrain your body to eat one meal a day. Whether or not that's optimum for your

situation is a different story. A really hard-charging athlete, I think it's hard to get enough nutrition in that circumstance. Just the protein alone, just opening it up to two meals really makes it a lot easier. The flip side of this is that we now have people like in kind of the keto space that are parroting very much the same story that you see coming out of vegan land, which is that protein will kill you. It's going to give you cancer. We need to suppress mTOR and insulin like growth factor at at every turn and they're recommending like one meal a day uh seven day a month fast and when you look at these people I can't they don't look any different than like a really worn out raw vegan to me like they've got dark circles under their eyes they don't carry an ounce of extra muscle

and they look frail. And I don't think that they... And when you really dig into the research around calorie restriction and some of the benefits that have been extrapolated from that... I did my talk in 2020. The title was Longevity or Retrying Too Hard. And I really made the case that I think that all of the benefits that we see from calorie restriction, particularly in animal models, is the difference between overeating versus not overeating. We know that overeating is bad. but once you hit appropriate protein intake, have resistance training, get some sun on your skin, do a little meditation, I don't know that there's any benefit to fasting above and beyond that. Now, that said, I do think that somewhere

around like two meals and a snack is probably a pretty good metabolic place to be most days on average. I think that there does appear to be some benefit from early time restricted feeding. We seem to be a little bit more metabolically efficient from an insulin perspective to eat more of our calories earlier. The bummer about that is that it's both easier physically and socially to skip breakfast and eat later. But I think that that ends up being a little bit of a wash. I'm a big fan of autophagy. I think that human beings are typically chronically overfed. But coffee stimulates autophagy. Being in the sun stimulates autophagy lifting weight stimulates autophagy and all of this this stuff that is speculating around like reducing how do i want to say this it is entirely speculative

that tons of fasting will save you from cancer cardiovascular disease or neurodegenerative disease particularly relative to just eating a reasonable appropriate carbohydrate diet. Like it's purely speculative, but there is a guarantee. Every single one of us will face sarcopenia, the loss of muscle mass with aging. That is a fucking guarantee. It is. And the only thing, the things that you have at your disposal to fight that is smart resistance training and adequate protein intake. And that doesn't mean that you need to eat 10 meals a day. Again, two, two and a half

meals a day and smart nutrient timing and all that is probably plenty to both gain and or maintain muscle mass. But I see people gambling on this notion that they're going to extend their life or avoid cancer and all these other things that are really speculative. Like all of us have some sort of a background potential of cardiovascular disease, cancer, neurodegenerative disease. All of us have a very similar risk profile with regards to loss of muscle mass as we age. And the interesting thing is everything that goes into maintaining lean body composition,ates your risk of cancer, diabetes, neurodegenerative disease, and all this other stuff. So if you focus on the muscle mass side of this, you, by extension, take care of all the rest of this stuff. And you have a life that's more worth living today, you know, and you're not like some, some you know 10 gallons of shit poured into a five

gallon bag so it's um i i like that so i wrote my first article on intermittent fasting in 2005 and then by 2006 i i regretted releasing it because it went out into the crossfit world and these people are just so extreme and over the top and like you know and i wasn't i wasn't as dialed into the sodium pieces i i really should have been that that could have helped that but i would get emails from folks and it's like hey i'm a female haven't had a menstrual cycle in nine months my hair is falling out uh i intermittent fast 22 hours a day uh i had five grams of carbs last month. What do you think's going on?

And it's like, well, shit, you took a bunch of good things in single doses, stacked them on top of each other, and then multiplied the dose by like double or triple. So I think all of these things, like some intermittency in protein intake, even though I'm a big fan of protein intake, I think that there's great literature that suggests that a couple of days, maybe even a week of relatively low protein intake, then you ramp it back up again. Your body is much more efficient at using the protein then in a more efficient way. So a little bit of protein cycling, I think that's great. But I think folks then they're like, well, if three days of protein cycling is good then 30 days is even better you know and and i think that that's where it becomes really really really dangerous just as an aside

like um getting adequate sun exposure for people reduces our likelihood of morbidity and mortality as much as the difference between a smoker or a non-smoker like and and it's like and this doesn't mean go out and become a leather handbag and and just like you know age yourself horrifically but it means get out in the sun and get some sun on on your person and and all not only will you be happier, not only will you feel better, but, and your performance will be better, but your likelihood of death from all causes is as big a difference. If you, if you do or don't sunbathe appropriately as what, if you are a smoker or not a smoker, I mean, that's like, Holy smokes. And it's such low hanging fruit. Like it's so easy. So easy.

I think, you know, a lot of stuff that we do is to, you know, make us stronger and allow us to fight things off better. And hopefully we have an opportunity to live a stronger life for a longer period of time. You know, I see people kind of dying longer than they are really living longer because they end up in such bad shape a lot of times at the end of their days. And hopefully for some of us that engage in fitness, but there's still no there's still no guarantee. You know, Dave Asprey thinks he's going to live to 147. And, you know, I won't be around to be able to tell him he's wrong, I guess. But, you know, I think that you can you can do all these things, but you can't really trick the human body, you know, too much. We can, you can do all these things, but you can't really trick the human body, uh, you know, too, too much.

We don't get the ability to do that. Um, I loved, I loved your movie. I checked it out. The sacred cow. Um, congratulations on that. What, thank you. What spawned that? Like, cause you seem like, um, it seems like it seemed like every about three years or

so you get super passionate about a particular thing uh that is still somewhat related to uh exactly where you started and uh you know being someone that uh you know wrote the paleo solution you're kind of famous for the paleo solution uh it's interesting that the sacred cow kind of takes us back to our roots of of how we used to eat how we used to farm and um can you talk about some of the dangers and some of the issues of uh like monocropping and and those kinds of things yeah you know very early in um thinking about the paleo diet stuff like and again this was like early 2000s you know like 2001 2002 uh i was having a discussion with a person who is vegan. And they were talking about the sustainability features of our food system.

And I started really thinking about that. And I was like, man, grass-fed meat is kind of free money. Because you want the sun to fall on the earth. And you want that sun to grow vegetation. And you want herbivores to consume at least some of that vegetation because that's part of the evolutionary dynamic of our planet. You know, since some sort of like vertebrate land animals have been here. So I started thinking about that. And it's a lot to unpack.

Like they call processes like this a life cycle analysis. Is this thing as a drinking receptacle better than a bunch of plastic bottles? And it's not entirely obvious. plastic, the steel you need to mine, and then you need to refine it and process it and ship it here and do it there. And then you get a plastic gizmo and there's all the energy that goes into that. But it's funny when you do a life cycle analysis on something, there's a lot of plastic bottles that get represented by this one thing. So people will say, well, you know, do, do a more permanent bottle because it's better for the environment. It's, it's tough because what none of us want, like plastic bottles all over our beaches or in the water, you know, just strewn around the street. I hear that glass is actually the most efficient. Say that again.

Glass is the most efficient, I believe. Glass is kind of the most efficient. Kind of a pain in the ass to utilize and it's yeah you know the stuff breaks and and all that stuff and so it's um it this topic around food and sustainability i've known would be a thing for a long time like like 15 20 years but i also um for good or ill I tend to be really early with stuff. And I knew I was early on the sustainability topic. My friend Diana Rogers, who really spearheaded both the book and the film, she wanted to do this thing 10 years ago. And I'm like, there's no audience.

Nobody's interested. Nobody even knows about this. They're just worried about abs and skinny jeans and losing some weight. That's it. And we've got to wait for this market to kind of grow. And as the potential interest grew, also the flip side of this grew. This tying of animal husbandry to climate change has grown and grown and grown. and grown and grown. And now it's really easy to find rhetoric from seemingly credible sources like the World Health Organization, the World Economic Forum that say that the singular greatest input

to climate change like greenhouse gas emissions is animal husbandry. And it looks very august and legit. And it is a lie. I mean, it is a bald face lie. Transportation is the greatest contributor in this story. And even in that situation, like there's a lot of detail and nuance to all this stuff. But both COVID is interesting in that it too has been woven into the climate change narrative, and it's been wed to the animal husbandry piece. So now consuming animals is somehow a causative factor in the coronavirus being released, even though it looks very much like the even though this was very controversial a year ago. Even though this was very controversial a year ago, now it appears to almost certainly be of lab origin. But somehow animal husbandry is the cause of all pandemics now.

And it is labeled as being the cause of all greenhouse gas emissions. And Diane and I got in to write this book to address the environmental, ethical, and health considerations of meat-inclusive food system. ethical and health considerations of meat inclusive food system. And so there's a, you know, specifically on that environmental topic, there are claims about how much greenhouse gas emissions are caused by grazing animals. And there's a claim and then there's the reality and the difference is enormous. And there's also a deeper story there, which biological systems, the fact that we are all still alive and breathing, we are greenhouse gas emitters. Every time we exhale, we release carbon dioxide. I kind of think that's a good thing. And as part of a global carbon cycle, it's kind of a non-issue. Where this has gotten really dangerous is demonizing all

greenhouse gas emissions has painted us into a really dangerous spot. Termites release enormous amounts of greenhouse gas. Shellfish on the ocean floor release enormous amounts of greenhouse gas. That is good. It is not part of the climate change story. These are parts of natural systems that release greenhouse gases, resequester greenhouse gases, and it's a lot to unpack it. It's far more complex than even telling the story about a multi-use bottle versus a plain plastic bottle, but it's just as important. But the narrative is very stilted

against animal husbandry. And we actually make the case in there that there's research that suggests, and maybe it's wrong, maybe it's wrong, but this is what we really need to get in and have some discussions about it. There's research that suggests that properly utilized grazing animals could remove far more carbon dioxide and more carbon equivalents from the atmosphere than what is being put into it. That's a little bit speculative. We need to do more work on that front. There is one thing that is absolutely certain, which is that properly utilized grazing animals can reverse desertified areas. We documented like the guy down in the Chihuahuan Desert that has reversed a million acres of the Chihuahuan Desert has been converted back into

grassland. This is productive area that now produces food. It retains water instead of just getting washed into the ocean, all the topsoil getting washed away. And that itself has a remarkable, favorable impact on climate change. And it is literally the only tool that we have to affect this type of change. There's other pieces to this, which is really kind of crazy. But the current row crop system has an expiration date on it because it's destroying our topsoil. And nobody knows exactly how long that thing is going to go on. But once the topsoil is gone, that's it. And surprisingly, a way that you can regrow crop topsoil is by using grazing animals properly,

like that whole process grows topsoil. So there's some interesting synergy that could happen there. And Alan Savory made the case that we think that properly used grazing animals can remove more carbon equivalents than what they release. But even if they don't, and even if they release 10 times, 100 times more greenhouse gases than what we think they do, the fact that it can reverse desertification and the fact that this is the only tool we have to reverse the loss of topsoil, you still have to use animals in a food system. So I don't know, probably half of your listeners have committed suicide with this because this shit gets complex and boring for a lot of people and everything, but it's, it's a, it's a big gnarly topic, you know? And

I wouldn't say it's been career suicide for us, but my time and effort would have been better spent. Like I should have gone on a gram of testosterone a week, got real jacked, got real lean, jammed out a couple of books and some online courses and it would have been way better for me financially, you know, like it would have been a way better gig but i've got two kids and i want them to have a good world that they they inherit and uh i think that the narrative around this stuff is is inaccurate um there's tons of censorship around it so it's hard to even get a discuss it's hard to even get a discussion around this stuff because anything animal husbandry or protein-centric diet has a tendency at this point to get suppressed, censored, shadow banned and stuff like that.

So being able to go on podcasts like this, having a movie where we can distribute it via multiple venues at least for now is is really valuable to at least get the conversation going around the the potential here what would you hope um that a group of vegans to that checked out your movie uh what would you hope that they gain from your film you know there was there was a line in there that and I'm not sure if it made it in the film, it may have been separate, but Joel Salatin was giving a talk publicly and there were some vegan folks there and they said, well, you mainly raise animals. What about us? We don't eat animals. And Joel was like, no, I raise food. I raise both animal and plant food.

I raised both animal and plant food. And he said, if you let me raise the food to feed my family the way I want to, I promise you I will raise enough food for you to feed your family the way you want to. And that's the thing that I would want vegan folks and really everybody at this point to take away. And it goes a big step above and beyond what we're doing with our food systems, but to allow people to be the human beings that they, they, they want to be. And if somebody is being a horrible bastard,

then okay, we need to address that. But we're in this time where if the Venn diagram that is you and the Venn diagram is me, if they don't perfectly overlap, whatever my, my overlaps are like, those things need to be destroyed or trimmed away or attacked. And I, um,

I think that that could unravel civilization as we know it. Like I, I, I have legitimate anxiety around that. And I've been early enough and right enough with sufficient things that I put possibly undue stock in my opinion in this, but it's really scary. And so that would be the thing that I would want, like some conscientious vegans who are concerned about animals, concerned about the environment,

give this notion that there are other ways of doing things a shot and maybe also leave some space for people to live that isn't in 100% synergy with the way that you're living, you know, because you would want that type of reciprocity in your own life. We would all like that type of opportunity to just kind of, you know, live the lives that we basically want to live and not have this kind of Orwellian oversight in every element of our lives, because at Brass Tacks, we're all far more similar than we are different,

but there are differences. And, you know, I think that it's good to honor those things. And, you know, maybe it was a naive perception of the world, but I remember like the late 90s, early 2000s, like the Berlin Wall came down,viet union collapsed and it but it collapsed in a way that wasn't complete anarchy and chaos i i didn't live for a long time under the threat of say like nuclear war but i remember some movies like the uh the the day after and threads and some things like that and it was fucking scary you know it was like thermonuclear annihilation you know

and there seemed to be this window of time where we were making tons of advancements. People were living better, longer lives. This threat of a global annihilation scenario seemed to have declined. And now we're in this spot. And I think social media has kind of catalyzed this where I feel like almost everybody is like at each other's throats. And I just find that really dangerous. So I know totally drove the boat off of like kind of a social political platform. But I'm really legitimately concerned about stuff like that.

And I think that, you know, from seeing the film and my understanding of you is that you probably have a lot of similarities with people that are vegan and even the people that they show protesting in the movie. Like, I don't think anyone, well, maybe there's some sickos out there, but I don't think anybody's into, you know,

harming animals and, and, and doing things that are, I just, unethical, you know, but I think there's people that are like, well,

how do we, if you're going to kill them like that alone is unethical. What is your stance on, you know, but I think there's people that are like, well, how do we if you're going to kill them like that alone is unethical. What is your stance on, you know, somebody that's that's going vegan for health purposes and or environmental purposes? And then in addition to that would be, I guess, that ethical side. Yeah. What are some of your thoughts on that? The health piece is is tough like you you can

navigate a vegan diet effectively but you you have to be in a position where you can supplement vigorously like you're going to need some most people are going to need some uh epa dha either from like marine source or something like that some folks have genetics that allow them to convert the short chain omega-3 fats into the elongated forms, but not everybody does. And those things tend to decrease with age within, and we detail this in the book, within vegan and vegetarian populations, iron, zinc, and vitamin deficiencies are pretty endemic. And there was just a study that came out of Finland looking at, um,

families raising their children vegan and the children are failing to thrive. They, they had failure to thrive in multiple different arenas. Uh, and this is in a wealthy, well-educated, um, Western, you know, society in, in Finland where these people are, they were incredibly, uh, easy to work with because what's that kind of joke? Who's going to tell you what they do? A vegan or a crossfitter? And if it's a vegan crossfitter, they'll tell you.

These folks were really committed to working with these scientists because they really believe in their way of life. And it's not going well for these kids. So if you are an adult and you want to eat this way, fine. Just really pay, pay attention to your, your supplementations. I, and, and clinically pay attention to what's going on, you know, and if you start having some problems, maybe,

maybe ask some questions around what you want to do with that. I think it's incredibly unethical to feed children a vegan diet, different iterations of vegetarian diet. You might be able to get away with a little bit better, but there's still great research that suggests that the kids from vegetarian families have less, they fail to thrive less or more frequently than mixed diet folks. When you get into the ethical side of this story,

nothing in biology exists without death. Life cannot exist without death. If everything just continued living, we would just pile up with bodies, I guess, until they ran out of food or what have you in the book. I don't think we really cover this in the film, but we have this story called Grass World, where you look at what would happen if you only had grass. Well, grass can't exist just by itself. It needs something to interact with, specifically grazing animals. Well, could you have a planet that is just grass and cows?

No, because the cows overpopulate the planet and destroy the grass and the whole thing, craters. So you at least need grass, cows, and wolves or something. And even that is a very unstable ecosystem. It would be easy to break that thing. But when you look at the food that is produced from industrial row crop methods, which is still the way that the bulk of the food is raised for veganism. And when we're talking about being able to feed a global population, people will say, well, you can't

feed a global population with animal products. And my point is that you can include animal products. It doesn't need to be the backbone of the whole thing, but surely it can play a role in it, just like it has throughout all of our history thus far. But you certainly can't feed a global population with a no-till permaculture farm. It has no animal inputs in it, like a vegan farm. And lots and lots and lots of animals

and other organisms die in the process of of doing something like that i i don't i don't know how you make equivalent like one life versus another a cow and a mouse they're they're actually genetically remarkably similar they're both mammals uh One is much larger than the other one, but their intelligence is similar. Their reproductive capacity is similar. Which one is more valuable? I don't know. But lots of rodents are killed in the industrial row crop food system. The grain silos where this stuff is stored is fumigated to kill huge amounts of

rodents because otherwise, you know, rats and mice and similar critters would eat most of this stuff. And there have been analysis around this. And there's an argument to be made that more animals are killed in the industrial row crop food system than would be killed in a system that is based on grass, large grazing animals, fruits, vegetables, roots, tubers, and nuts, which sounds a whole lot like a paleo diet, surprisingly. So there was a professor out of Oregon State University that did this piece. It's called the Least Harm Principle. And nobody has really refuted this. Like it's a very solid work. And, and so people will say, well, if you eat a steak, then you're, you, you killed it with intention and I didn't have the intention. So I'm not, I shouldn't be blamed for any animals that are killed in the making of

my tofu or my corn tortilla or whatever. And I find that even less ethical. You know, it's like at least own the fact that you are part of the death of these organisms. And I could make the case that at least eating the animals directly versus just, you know, exterminating them and plowing them under underground or something is maybe a more ethical thing. But those things get kind of dodgy. And then the environmental piece, I mean, I touched on a little bit of that. There's just a lot of dubious claims around land use, water use, the amount of food that goes into producing, say, like grazing animals,

like cattle in particular. Even conventionally raised cows spend 70% of their life on grass. And it wouldn't be that hard to shift most of that process over to mainly grass. And even in that story, to the degree that our row crop systems still function as well as it does, usually what happens is like a field of corn or a field of wheat will be harvested and then cattle are allowed to go through and graze on the residues left over there. And they pee and poo and re-nutrify the soil and break up the soil. And this is actually a really important feature of even the conventional

model that we have going on right now. And so you can't just remove those cows. You shouldn't really remove those cows. Some people will say, well, just let them live and then let them die a natural life. But when they get old, it's kind of like looking at old people in a rest home. They have health problems and orthopedic issues? And is it more ethical to let them die in a ditch after they've broken a leg? Or, you know, it just like raises all these kind of crazy ethical considerations. So I don't know if I did a great job answering your question. You had a really good question, but it's a, it's a massive amount of material. When we turned in the book, sacred cow, it was 600 pages long and the editors whittled

it down to about 300 pages. And they actually did a really good job. I was very happy with what they had left. But these three topics, the environmental, ethical, and health considerations of a meat-inclusive food system, there are hundreds of books written on each one of these subcategories, you know, but nobody has really gotten in and done a synthesis project trying to tie all that stuff together. And I do feel like we make a very compelling case that they're at a minimum that there's a lot more to the story than what we're being told. And I, you know, encourage people to, if they like my work, that's great. Don't believe me just because you might previously like my work. that's great. Don't believe me just because

you might previously like my work, really get in and read this stuff and think about it. And I guess the flip side of that is if somebody doesn't like me or doesn't like my work, don't necessarily dismiss this stuff out of hand, because if climate change really is as important as, as people make it out to be, then we really need to have a good discussion around it because we have limited resources, limited time to do something about it. And so if we dump all of our resources in a direction that is dumb, that doesn't make sense, that is politically motivated to perpetuate, then we have no resources to address anything else. So I would just throw it out there that even as like a, you know, like a high school debate class exercise,

get in and try to argue the other side for a little bit just so that you've done your own diligence. And you're like, OK, yeah, I feel about where this thing is. You know, I'm really curious back to, you know, what you were mentioning about cows and greenhouse gases and how the statistics for that are actually just horribly wrong. How is that lie continuing to be so permanent? Like, like it's believed, like even, even I was like, oh damn, that's crazy. And I've, I thought that for years until we've talked to a few guests that kind of told us, no, that's not, that's actually not true.

talked to a few guests that kind of told us no that's not that's actually not true how is that continuing to be echoed by people in power so much even though it is literally false it's it's interesting and really when you get down to brass tacks what what what happened specifically in this situation is that you had people in authority the uh it wasn't the eat lancet piece but it was um oh gosh i'm blanking on the the group that did this but they they made a claim that was dubious it was wrong really wouldn't get right down to brass tacks it was wrong they were um challenged on that it was it was amended within the scientific process but it's kind of like peeing in a pool like it was out there it was gone you're never getting it back out again you know and so it's interesting that it's almost like a strategy we'll release bullshit

we'll get called out on our bullshit we'll update the bullshit but then once it gets out there both the media social media and and the what did Stalin call them? The the the useful idiots get in and sell this message. So it's not the World Health Organization selling this now, but it's millions of kind of vegan advocates that take this now outdated, rebuked information and just keep breathing life into it so it uh uh it was richard dawkins i i think came up with the term meme and it it meant something other than like cat cat photos like it's a it's a cognitive it's a cognitive virus it's an idea that has self replicative um elements to it it can spread from one person to the next and it can evolve and grow but like this this meme idea around different quasi-factual topics and i mean

it runs the gamut like there's a remarkable number of people out there that actually think there are are people with you know human skin with lizard bodies running some part of the the world and they really fucking believe it you know and and uh i guess you could flay every human being open in front of them like no lizard people here you know they still might not believe it so it it's um it's crazy with easy and also a lot of this stuff falls right in the wheelhouse of kind of like classic disinformation processes where you release enough quasi information and some of it gets rebuked, some of it gets supported. And at the end of the day, what happens is people are just exhausted. How many people have the time to really sit down and think about this stuff? You know, I mean, people barely it's a big it's a big lift to get people to just eat

better and you could argue that there's some deep self um interest in that like people want to look better they want to be healthier they want to feel better and then when you get to this whole thing of like maybe oh a bunch of people are saying that veganism is going to save the planet. Okay, that seems reasonable. Okay, I'm good. Because you got kids to raise, you're battling to keep your work relevant and all that type of stuff. It's just a big lift to really dig in that. And the kind of vegan worldview is it's soup to nuts perfect. Like you're morally superior.

You will live forever. You're going to be skinnier and look better. You're saving the planet. Like it's a really sexy, simple story that is mean worthy. It's beautiful for social media. That's beautiful for social media. It's great for like a roving bands of of, you know, kind of religious converts who want to spread that message. Like it's really, really compelling. And the unfortunate it would be great on the one hand, if all the stuff was right, because then we would be moving social political stuff in the right direction and we would be doing things that are good for both humans and the environment but forbes did a really fascinating piece on this and it made the case that um veganism and this push towards like lab-grown meat and all this stuff is good for one thing and one thing only and it's it's big business big pharma like that and it was interesting like forbes was really accurate and also scathing in their their takedown of of this misinformation around this stuff.

So it's super, you know, super interesting. And you can see how easy it could happen because there could be a conversation at home where, you know, one person says, hey, well, you know, your cholesterol is kind of high. Maybe you should look at that impossible burger that you can get from Burger King. And, you know, you're not only helping your health, but you're helping the planet and you're part of a movement. And it's easy to see how quickly that can happen. What are, I know this is very controversial, but what are some of your thoughts, you know, surrounding COVID-19 and just, I guess, in general, how we can fend ourselves off from

really any virus? How can we keep ourselves healthy? How can fend ourselves off uh from really any virus how can we keep ourselves healthy how can we keep ourselves strong i i would imagine it's all the stuff you've been talking about for the last 20 some odd years yeah you know it's it's interesting and we we can take a step back and go to a a less politically charged thing just influenza you know, that passe, you know, the common flu. Is that still a thing? Yeah. It's crystal clear that good metabolic health leads to improved outcomes. You have lower morbidity, lower mortality.

The one interesting possible benefit of COVID is that this long haul syndrome, the people that end up with problems for weeks, months or years, possible benefit of COVID is it this long haul syndrome, the people that end up with problems for weeks, months, or years. This has been in medicine forever. People who get the Epstein-Barr virus, people who chicken pox, you know, long-term knock-on effects. For ages, doctors have kind of relegated these things like chronic fatigue syndrome and some of these long haul symptoms to psychiatric problems. And they're absolutely not. They're basically autoimmune type conditions that have emerged as a consequence of something that goes wrong in fighting off some sort of an infectious agent.

And it's super well documented in a bunch of other infectious diseases. Nobody has given two shits about anything around long haul syndrome until COVID. And so I think something good has come out of that. But, you know, it was I want to say it was about eight years ago, six years ago that there was a report that suggested fewer than 12 percent of Americans are metabolically healthy. And this was the thing early in the COVID pandemic wrapping up. Like last March, we had information coming out of China even then that suggested that metabolically unhealthy people fare far worse. Like they don't do as well. They're more likely to die. They're more likely to get hospitalized and all this stuff. When I thought about the fact that hardly anybody in the US is healthy,

I was like, okay, fuck, this could be a big deal. This could be a really big deal. In the first couple of months, it's like pump the brakes. Let's really look close at what's going on. I will say that immediately, one thing stuck out at me that was super fishy, and that was that there was a singular focus on a vaccine. That struck me as so odd because with SARS-1 and MERS, they've attempted to do vaccines on these viruses for years and it failed. Now, granted, we have far, far, far more people and far more resources focused on this. So there was the potential that this would work. But in the beginning stages of spinning this up, the two examples that we had for coronavirus vaccines, they had all failed. To date, they had all failed. And if this thing was as dangerous as what it was being portrayed,

I couldn't believe that there wasn't a huge emphasis on improved public health, on vitamin D status. I mean, do we know for sure that these things improve things? Maybe not 100%. It's not a randomized control trial. But every other disease that we've generally seen for the most part, like the 1918 H1N1 influenza, maybe being the exception, that killed healthy people more than it did unhealthy people. That was a really weird deviation from this general trend. But there was no emphasis placed on looking at currently existing pharmaceuticals like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin and a whole host of other things using anti-inflammatory cocktails and whatnot um discussion around that was was openly assailed and i i found that so perplexing that if this

thing was so dangerous that we had to lock down the global economy because otherwise, you know, the death and destruction would be so enormous that we justified tanking the global economy. But yet we are banking on a singular solution and nothing else. And then now, as of January 20th, I've seen articles on Ivermectin. I've seen articles on six different over-the-counter pharmaceuticals that were openly, hostily suppressed the discussion that they may be beneficial for COVID over the past year. And now, in the past two weeks, discussion and optimism and hope is being sold around that. And I don't even know what to say about that. It makes me so angry that it's hard to really articulate in words. We don't know anybody.

And we're very grateful for this. We're very lucky. We don't know anybody first person who has died from COVID. We know two people first person that have committed suicide because their business is being destroyed. We know first person of children who've been abandoned because their parents lost their shit and couldn't handle it anymore and literally just abandoned their children. So we've seen a lot of collateral damage

with this. And I've seen people, I'm concerned about this. I, and you know, I've spent 20 years in the health industry trying to help people. I don't actually want grandma to die, but I also am really, um, super annoyed at the childish, simplistic, you know, like calculus that isn't occurring in this whole discussion around what are the knock on consequences here? What are the things that aren't being discussed? Yes, we want to mitigate death and suffering from coronavirus infection. But what are the other things that are going on and why are we not allowed to even have a discussion around that? So again, I don't know if that answers your question super well, but it's a, let me use one thing as an example to kind of put, put like a, maybe a good point on this. People will be like, well, what does it matter if they didn't focus on the vaccine or not? When the United

States and the allies were fighting Germany in World War II, we knew that we were in a race for survival to develop an atomic bomb. We knew that the Germans were working on it. We were working on it. There was not consensus about what the best route was to develop the atomic bomb because nobody had ever done one before it's being developed and so the manhattan project it wasn't just one team doing one thing it was multiple subgroups heading in multiple directions basically doing multiple experiments at the same time because this was life or death if germany at that point had developed the atomic bomb, life as we know it ends. A comparatively free, liberal Western society is done, and history would be entirely different.

So when the Manhattan Project was spun up, it was an existential threat. And as such, they diversified the routes of investigation so that we could better improve our likelihood of success. And so if COVID was nearly as dangerous as what they had claimed on day one, then I cannot conceiveabel pharmaceuticals that could have mitigated morbidity and mortality along the way. And now we are seeing that, but it's been massively suppressed the last year. I would love to see maybe in the future they get some people that are really creative. Get Elon Musk, get him in a room with, you know, whoever some of the best doctors are. And, you know, we have some great resources.

You know, we have some great people. What always baffled me about the whole thing is how we just followed every other country. Like that's that's really, really rare for the United States to ever do that. And so that was really strange. Are your children in school? We've been homeschooling for two years now. So we actually homeschooled pre-COVID. And that was rough the first three months,

but we're really stoked that we did it now. And it's actually really good. It's a ton of fun. Yeah. Yeah. My son goes to a school out here called Acton Academy, and they still have an in-person school type thing because it's it's unconventional is that why you moved your kids out of school was

it was it that kind of decision or was something different yeah I mean it was it was several things we we one thing is that pre-covid like we had a pretty cool opportunity to travel and do things with the kids and that was part of our move to central Texas. Like we're 35 minutes from two major airports, 40 minutes. So, um, we thought that it would be cool to wrap some travel into the kids homeschooling experience and all that type of stuff. And that's part of our, our now shift towards, uh, Montana. Like we don't know if we're going to travel at all. And I don't know if I'm ever going to do speaking gigs again. And if I have to, uh, if my audience is forced to wear a mask and I have to wear a mask on a plane for 12 hours, I'm not doing any of it. You know, it's just not, it's just not worth it to me. So we're actually moving towards

Montana, the Kalispell area to be closer to family. And just my kids growing up in Reno, people don't realize it, but it's high desert and you get a lot of snow in the winter and everything. And my kids were pissed at me that, that, uh, uh, Texas doesn't have snow. So, um, so I'm pacifying them to, to some degree, moving back that direction. Yeah. I'm, I'm curious, you know, since we're on this topic, uh, personally, you know, the vaccine is out. I'm just going to wait a little bit since I'm healthy. I'm young. I just want to see how things go for a while before I personally do it. I mean, I have nothing against it. It's just, that's I'm healthy. So, uh, I'm going to wait. What are you,

what for you and yourself, how, how are you looking at that vaccine? Is it something that you're going to do immediately? Do you feel comfortable talking about that? Yeah. So I had covid and I was sick for about a day. And I mean, I was I felt like shit for a day. Like I couldn't get off the couch. I was laid out the three days leading up to it. Each day before I went to bed, I was just like, oh, my God, I'm exhausted. Like I did a normal day. But then when I hit bed, I was like exhausted. And then the night of the third day, um,

I woke up in the middle of the night with a bad sore throat. And I was like, Oh dude, I, I, I think it's on. And then the next day I got up and Nikki looked at me and she's like, you look horrible. I'm like, I think I got it. And, uh, I, I literally couldn't get off the couch, just smashed. The next day, I was probably 85%. The day after that, I actually did a little bit of mobility and everything. And for probably a week after that, if I did a little bit of more vigorous stuff,

like some cardio or something, I could feel it in my lungs. I could feel it there. I'm like, I'm not turning air over quite the way I should. But that was my experience on that. I definitely... The day that I was sick, I was like, if I was metabolically unhealthy, I could see how this would kill you. I got it. If you felt like this for 3 weeks or something, I get it. I totally get it. But I have autoimmune diseases on both sides of my family. My youngest daughter had a vaccine reaction to her MMR vaccine, and she actually has some scarring on her leg from a dermal reaction that she had.

My wife's mother died from autoimmune disease. But it's tough. One of the main complications of COVID exposure long haul is autoimmune complications. One of the greatest things that seems to pop up within the known people who have had problems with the vaccines thus far are anaphylaxis and autoimmune complications. So it's kind of like you've got potential autoimmune complications from the virus. You've got some potential autoimmune complications from the vaccine. I think that the potential danger would be less from the vaccine than from the virus, but that's a guess. And I would also wager that within a population distribution, there are some people that the virus is going to be easier for them to deal with than the vaccine. And there will be other people that are vice versa on that.

I would be shocked if that's not the case. So then it starts becoming dodgy where it's like, and then it's even, I think we're getting more information that's suggesting that the vaccines may in fact provide sterilizing immunity that once i'm fully vaccinated i can't catch it and give it to somebody else there was a period of time there where it was being suggested that it did not provide sterilizing immunity which was kind of like well then why are we doing any of this stuff like if i can still transmit it this is ridiculous you know it so i'm brett Brett Weinstein made a really good observation, and this is a very fact-based observation. We know almost infinitely more about how the viral

process plays out than we do the vaccine process. Just because we have one year of looking back, we have many more millions of people within that timeframe to look at and look at data and whatnot. And so I think it's a reasonable proposition to just say, hey, I'm pretty healthy. I want to pump the brakes for a little bit. And it cuts two ways. It's like, I'm pretty healthy. So if somebody is more at need, let them take this thing right now.

And then the other thing is also, I wouldn't mind getting a little bit further, you know, some more perspective on this. Australia and New Zealand have frozen their vaccine rollout until mid-February because their cases are dropping dramatically and they want a little bit more time to pick and choose how or if they roll this thing out. And the irony is that within the lunatic, you know, online perspective, you could make the case that the case would be made that Australia and New Zealand are now covid deniers because they don't want to do the vaccine immediately. So this is the dangerous circle that people get themselves into being lunatics about this stuff. It's a complex system. There's a lot of individual and societal level, you know, considerations to be made. And, and again, I don't know if I did a good job answering it,

but I'm going to kind of pump the brakes and just kind of watch and observe and see how this stuff rolls out. It didn't appear that either, neither my wife nor my kids appeared to have caught it from me, which is interesting, or maybe they did and they just it was a non-issue for them. Some people can get exposed to it and remove it, beat it with the innate immune response and they never really get sick from it. So I don't know. Can you give us a, uh, an idea of, uh, what you personally do, uh,

on a daily basis from a food perspective, uh, when it comes to, let's say you have a day where you're doing jujitsu versus maybe a day where you have some lifting going on. Yeah. And, and I'm going to have to wrap up here in a minute.

Like I, uh, I'm super sorry. I, uh, but, um, I'm carnivore ish.

Like I tend to do more, more, more um kind of beef and lamb um i'm about a 160 to 200 grams of protein a day um i i uh depending on the day i will get some fruit like i do more fruit in the summer than i i do currently but it's uh i don't know i'll go from kind of similar to you guys like one day i'll have no carbs and another day i may have 100 grams of carbs one thing i have been doing is putting some honey in pre pre-workout and i kind of like that like i'll do about a tablespoon of honey pre-workout and that that seems to give me a little bit more piss and vinegar um i definitely do a uh an element before training and like if i do a

jiu-jitsu day i'll do an element like i'll shotgun one in about 24 ounces of water before the main class and then i will mix i have another one mixed up and then when we start doing live rolling about every 10 minutes i'll go over and kind of have have a sip on it and um i think total calories are probably around like 2200 2400 calories a day that kind of varies like some days it'll be a lot less like if i'm just sitting on my butt all day long then uh uh i it may be like 1700 like i just mainly protein and i feel good with that and then on a day where i i get you know two or three training sessions i lift some weights do some jujitsu and then on a day where i i get you know two or three training sessions i lift some weights do some jujitsu and then maybe even do a little conditioning like it'll be a lot more

and uh usually usually three meals a day sometimes it's two but like the just hanging out with my girls and eating with them like i like doing that and i i'm already such a weirdo that i don't want to be like sitting there like chatting with them and not eating also so like one of the meals might just be like a a thing of greek yogurt you know so it's pretty light overall but you know like a full fat greek yogurt and i'll just kind of hammer that down yeah let people know where they can get uh sacred cow and where they can see the movie it's sacred cow dot info is the website and i really recommend folks kick the tires on that. Like I said,

I'm the most proud of that book of anything that I've done. And the film is really good. Like it's very accessible. I helped as much as I could on it, but to the degree it is good, it had nothing to do with me and everything to do with my, my coauthor, Diana Rogers.

Like she really bled to make that thing work. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you so much for your time today. Thank you guys. Really, really bled to make that thing work yeah awesome thank you so much for your time today thank you guys really really look forward to seeing you in real life have a great rest of your day okay bye you guys thank you yeah i'm pretty sure he said take more element everybody i think that's what he's gonna say yeah i wanted to add uh with I, something I've kind of forgotten about since it's been a long time, but I used to get like leg cramps every once in a while in the middle of

the night, especially like on a day where I trained my legs really hard. Really? Um, uh, I haven't woken up with that in a long time. It's just an unbearable, like cramp in my hamstring or,

you know, groin or calf. One of those ones that you can't figure out like how to get it to calm down it's the worst um but yeah i don't get those anymore yeah for myself um it was kind of like a comical thing you know after a leg day like we'd podcast and i'd be like if i stand up right now my legs will 100 like that's the worst after you've been sitting down for a while you go to get up and like yeah yeah wobbly ground absolutely i'm not gonna say it's completely gone because you know i'm setting myself up right after a training session in the morning and then sitting for a

couple hours it's gonna happen but it happens significantly less like to the point where i can't even remember the last time it happened so that's what i just don't want to say like oh guaranteed because it it has happened but i just it's been so long and it's gotten so much better now because of, uh, taking these element electrolytes. Yeah. That's no, it makes, it makes a very big difference. Like the amount that I sweat and everything I've just, it's really surprised me how like big of a difference getting adequate electrolytes can make.

And it's, it's awesome. Yeah. It's, it's, it's necessary. I wasn't expecting him to have such an opinion on COVID. That was interesting. That was cool. Yeah. That that was really cool because a lot of people don't like to touch the subject but he didn't he didn't mind uh diving into it and he had it like i didn't know he had it that's pretty crazy yeah but um man that was a great podcast rob like we have to do a part two at some point because there's a lot of one i was really curious about like also was just what got, what got him into jujitsu and just like, you know, doing all

the things that he does, uh, how he's found that, um, for himself. I was really curious about that, but hopefully next time. Yeah. And I know some of the stuff that we talked about, it gets a little thick here and there, but, uh, you know, stick with the information cause it's, uh, it's really useful. You know, I think sometimes people are thinking about doing these certain diets and they think, you know, it's going to yield a certain result. Why not just continue to learn a little bit more about it before you, um, you know, make statements

or before you think something in particular, uh, when it comes to like morals and ethics, I mean, your morals or your morals and mine are mine. So, uh, I got no problem with people doing whatever they want to do, you know, but I would just say like, you know, just have a more when you speak, make sure that what you say is as educated as you can, you know, as as I'm going to do my style of diet instead, you might be, you might be missing some information, you know, you might need to look that up more. You might need to look into it more. And I'm, I've been guilty of it plenty of times saying certain things that I will sometimes speak in terms of absolutes or, or, or a fact like, Hey, a low carb diet works for everybody, you know? And then I got to go back and say, Hey, shit, I got to change my answer. I didn't really mean that in particular. I just meant that I'm pumped and fired up that it works so well for me.

And I'm thinking that it might work well for you since it worked well for me, my friends, a bunch of people I recommended it to that sort of thing. So I just try to make sure that, you know, when we are speaking, that we open things up to have conversation rather than trying to just nail things down as a pure fact. Yeah. I think his dieting protocols are also like really, really cool because like it's kind of like us. Like, you know, I'm not fasting every day. I'm not carnivore keto every day. I add in carbs some days that I feel like I want to take out, take it out on other days. And, you know, he speaks in a way that even though he kind of like brought the paleo diet to the population, he's not married to that diet.

He changes things up because he's done so many different things. And I think in essence, when you get to that certain point where you are fit, you're healthy and you're, you know, you're eating like you're not eating, you're probably not eating the same thing every single day. And you're not fasting every single day of your life. You're mixing these things up because now you know kind of how to go about it for yourself. Take us on out of here, Andrew. I will

drink l m n t dot com slash power project. If you're listening to this, there you go. Sounds like maracas. Yeah, we need an element maracas, man. When are you guys going to make it for us? Bring it to like send it to us. It's not a bad idea. If you're listening to this day of release you still have time but you don't have very much

time uh you have to go to drink lmnt.com slash power project and claim your free element recharge pack but you have to just till the end of january so again it's absolutely free just pay for shipping it's only five bucks you get eight samples. I think it's every flavor. Hopefully it is because I think I've been saying that, but it's eight flavor or eight samples. You get to try the best electrolytes that we've come across. I mean, we talk about them all the time. We've been talking about them before they were a part of the podcast.

And then just listening to Rob Wolf today was freaking incredible. And especially when he's talking about breastfeeding moms, that's like, holy. Yeah, that's crazy. Didn't even consider that. Just really appreciated that my wife was getting electrolytes in her diet. But anyway, yeah, drinklmnt.com slash powerproject. Go there right now. Claim a recharge pack for absolutely nothing.

$5 shipping. But yeah, you guys can try out new flavors. Try all the flavors, whatever the heck it is. Just go there right now. Please make sure you find the podcast at Mark Biles Power Project on Instagram at MB Power Project on Twitter. My Instagram and Twitter is at I am Andrew Z. Oh, and the newsletter that thing's about to pop off.

So make sure you guys check out the link down in the description because it's going to be awesome. And we got a lot more exclusive content for you guys. And Seema, where are you at? Thanks, Daddy. Drink. Find me at Seema Inyang on Instagram and YouTube and add SEMA in Yang on Twitter.

Mark. I'm at Mark smelly bell. Strength is never weakness. Weakness, never strength. Catch you guys later.