Mark Bell's Power Project - Power Project EP. 106 - Joel Greene

Episode Date: September 3, 2018

Joel Greene is the Founder and CEO of the VEEP Nutrition System, the world’s first commercially available program based on targeting gut communities to effect biomarkers. Joel is a featured author, speaker, and guest in Muscle and Fitness, 24 Hour Fitness Digital Magazine, CBS Online, and Superhuman Radio. His system has also been featured on Dr. Phil. Today, at 53, on 1 workout a week, eating whatever, whenever, with no drugs, sarms, prohormones, or ergogenic aids ever, he is the world leader in hacking the body. Rewatch the live stream: https://youtu.be/mntYIl-ofR4 ➢SHOP NOW: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots ➢Subscribe Rate & Review on iTunes at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/mark-bells-power-project/id1341346059?mt=2 ➢Listen on Stitcher Here: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/mark-bells-power-project?refid=stpr ➢Listen on Google Play here: https://play.google.com/music/m/Izf6a3gudzyn66kf364qx34cctq?t=Mark_Bells_Power_Project ➢Listen on SoundCloud Here: https://soundcloud.com/markbellspowerproject FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell Follow The Power Project Podcast ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/MarkBellsPowerProject Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz

Oatmeal this morning, had some eggs. And then just a couple seconds ago, I threw down some blueberries, threw down some strawberries. What are blueberries and strawberries good for? It seems like you got a fix on like every type of food that there is. So you kind of referring to them like, you know, in my text messages with you over the last couple of days, you're referring to a lot of these foods as functional foods. And there's just some words and terminology that I haven't really seen or heard many people talk about.

But you have like specific, there's specific things that like each particular food does in the body, right? Yeah. So there's a little bit different way of thinking about food apart from the sort of the macro kind of thinking, which is sort of this binary way that food is energy. That's how we're thinking about food apart from the sort of macro kind of thinking, which is sort of this binary way that food is energy. That's how we're thinking about food. But that's not how food really works.

So when you take a step back and you go, well, how does food really work? Food is energy. That's true. But food is also signal. Right. Food, different foods. In fact, there's really good research on this. Andrew, can you come adjust the microphone a little bit?

I think you need to put it a little lower. You can keep talking. Are we live? Yeah, we're live. We always just jump right in. Oh, okay. We're going live! Here we are. Yeah, so there's actually really good research on this that talks

about different foods, when the calories are equal, have different functional properties. So in the case of the blueberries and the strawberries, what's interesting about those is the color pigments in those. So the color pigments are the phenols. And the phenols are useful and interesting because they act as substrate for very specific species of bacteria. And that gets into this whole area, which really is substrate targeting to spin up very specific species of bacteria. And there's a lot to that. It's not just a case of like, oh, we'll just eat strawberries. There's quite a bit more to that.

The first thing to think about is that bacteria are diurnal in nature. So they have a diurnal schedule. And that diurnal schedule actually syncs with the human genome and syncs with gene activation. In fact, that's why one of the things that you see with jet lag is it's a disconnection between the gut biome and the rest of your body. So the clock of the gut biome is actually off. That's what you see. So what you see with those phenols, the substrates from the anthocyanins, Bifidobacteria loves those, loves those color pigments.

That's food for Bifidobacteria. Bifidobacteria loves those color pigments. That's food for bifidobacteria. Spinning up bifidobacteria is an overall health parameter that affects just about everything. There's really good research that shows when we're young, we have a majority of our bacteria in our gut is bifidobacteria. It gets really interesting. You see with kids, what are some of the commonalities? Well, they have tons of energy.

Well, it turns out that when you spin up Bifidobacteria, energy goes to the roof. It's because it's a major energy producer. So it's a B vitamin producer, does a lot of different things. And then as we get older, so most adults are walking around with about 5% Bifidobacteria in the gut. And what you see is really interesting. So as you get down to 4, 3, 2, 1, with every percent decrement, something goes on. So 4% you see obesity, 3% you see cancer, 2% you see inflammation, 1% you see death. And so there's pretty much a one-to-one link between overall health and bifidobacteria.

Wow. Yeah. pretty much a one-to-one link between overall health and bifidobacteria wow yeah uh and does this bacteria um is this bacteria kind of running our lives in some way like like is it is it making is it almost like it's making choices for us because maybe you developed some bad habits over the years and you accumulated some uh bad bacteria and so your brain even though even though we do have choices uh with the way that people eat and the way that people uh treat themselves it almost appears like they don't have a choice like they're reaching for the 7-eleven you know hot dog that's full of cheese and bacon yeah it's actually right on the money uh so so it's almost like the gut is

like overriding uh regular conscious thought of, like, I need something nutritious. Well, the first thing to think about is neurotransmitter chemicals. So when you think about different neurotransmitters, the chemicals themselves are actually the same, regardless of different species. The same chemical. So the first way that your behavior is profoundly influenced by these things is just sheer numbers. So think about something. Think about like if the neurotransmitter chemical that these things are making is identical to the one in your body, and let's say you have 10 trillion cells in your body and you have 10 trillion bacteria in your body,

which they're effectively just cells, and they're putting out the same number. Well, then you have sort of just a sheer numbers game. And so what you see, like the most tangible sort of outcome of that is cravings. We're sort of under this idea that cravings are just something you can't control, but they're actually 100% steerable, like 100% steerable. You can steer your cravings and you can steer them towards foods that are even healthy. One of the probably most interesting areas of this is transgenerational epigenetics. If my cravings were to drive a car, it would look like Toonsis the driving cat. Have you ever seen that on Siren Live?

See if you can pull that up, and we'll get an idea of... What was the name? Toonsis the Driving Cat. I think it's T-O-O-N-I-S. Toonsis the Driving Cat. You'll see how my brain is driven. Food-wise. But yeah, you're saying...

Oh, here we go. Toonsis the Driving Cat. Here he goes down the street. He ends up with the same result all the time it's actually really uh quite interesting those of you that are not watching the video of this you need to uh need to check it out on uh on youtube he's very focused you do have that look in your eyes that very focused look the. I don't think they showed the... He's like, this is a whole sketch, I guess. Normally, it's

a little shorter. Basically, what you're saying is you can kind of steer yourself away from some of these cravings. You can steer... And you don't have to end up like Toontz's driving cat. Off a cliff. So it's that same clip they show it every time. He always goes right off the cliff like that.

Yeah, you can. That's my gut microbiome right there, overriding my brain. This is the food hangover right there. Yeah, you can actually steer cravings by doing what's called substrate targeting. By targeting specific species of bacteria and giving them the foods they like,

you will begin to crave those foods because those bacteria want those foods. And it's exactly what's happening in most people right now. It's just the wrong direction. Okay. So we're starting to see that here at super training in a positive direction with a lot of the athletes, a lot of the people that train here, a lot of our athletes, a lot of the people are following advice of some of the people that are around us. Stan Efferding is one of them. He has a diet called the vertical diet. And, uh, in his vertical diet, he has, uh, listed out like a favorite recipe of his, and he's got this monster mash that he refers to, which is bison, um, rice and like chicken stock or bone broth. And it's

a combination tastes pretty good. It's convenient to heat up. It's not hard to cook. You don't need to be a chef to figure it out. And one of our athletes the other day was like, you know what I'm dying for? Like, I'm just completely craving, I'm craving monster mash.

And I thought to myself, kind of some of the things that you've been talking about and just in hearing, you know, people over the years saying the gut is the second brain. And there's other people that kind of some of the things that you've been talking about and just um in hearing you know people over the years saying the gut is the second brain and there's other people that kind of saying no it's not even the second brain it's it's the first brain you know and there's gut microbiome stuff coming out there's more information all the time about what this bacteria is doing and how this bacteria is driving us and i thought man how cool would it be if you could change some of the general population if we can get them you know steered that way where they're like you know what i'm dying for i'm dying for some blueberries you can and actually shockingly quick like like literally

within a week you can do it wow yeah and it's just it's just simply by uh targeting these uh substrates that you were talking about so so some of the ways of doing it is through phenols, which are typically in fruits? Yeah, so the dark fruits are probably your go-to source for that particular substrate. Your go-to is going to be cellulose and resistant starch. So like specific foods, I think we talked about green beans are really good. And then things that are like a really good resistant starch are your number one driver

of substrate for some of the species that we really want. Resistant starches could be things that are just simply heated and cooled. Is that correct? Like sushi rice has some in it, right? Yeah, rice and beans. So what happens is when you heat starches up, you basically break them down, turn them into sugar. And if you let them cool back down, then they congeal back into non-digestible fiber. Some of the mass, not all of it, but some of it.

And that non-digestible fiber is cheesecake to healthy bacteria. They love it. It's a different paradigm because it takes things that a lot of the community should be off track, and it puts them in the essential category. Very specific types of carbs become literally essential once you get that and start to apply it. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, so like, you know, human beings may not actually need a carbohydrate to continue to live,

but we could be making a big mistake if we're missing out on carbohydrates because we could be missing out on some of these bacteria that we need to be healthy and strong and to be heading in the right direction on many different fronts, right? Yeah, there's that layer, which is kind of a whole discussion, which gets to the gut mucus layer. That's sort of one aspect. But

there's this idea that's permeated that carbs are not essential. And I don't really have a dog in this fight per se. We'll talk about that later, I'm sure. But just in terms of like you touched on things you need to live, you actually need carbs to live. So when you start to look at what makes up the tissue layers, virtually every tissue you have, like the gut mucus layer or what makes up like very specific fibrins and collagens, they're made out of glycoproteins. And these are long chain carbohydrates bound to proteins. And you don't make them in your body. You get them from your diet. Right. But your body can make them in the absence of not having sugar your body can make

them but uh maybe that's not the best way to go about supplying your body with sugar yeah is to have your body stripping the muscle and turning into sugar i guess is kind of what happens right well in the case of like these these long, very long chain carbohydrates that bind to proteins, those, you know, there's lots of benefits to getting those from the diet. When it comes to these like non-digestible fibers. So we talk quite a bit on this podcast about poop. You know, we got poop stories. We got many poop stories from many different people that have come on the show because, uh, eating big as part of like lifting big. And we've had a lot of power lifters, a lot of bodybuilders on the show over the years. Um, one thing that, that has always been a question for me is, you know, when it comes to these types of fibers,

you know, fiber can be like very disruptive. I mean, it can hurt your stomach. It can give you a lot of gas. It can, uh, bloatat you, especially if you're not used to certain fibers. And, you know, some of these foods take an incredible amount of chewing. Certain vegetables, you got to chew the shit out of them to really break them down before you swallow them and before you end up with a bunch of gas. Is, you know, pooping a lot, is it healthy? Is even having certain amounts of gas. Is that even, is that healthy in some way? Because it seems to me like if these, uh, non-digestible fibers are important and it's important for the gut bacteria and stuff like that, that,

you know, maybe letting out a couple of farts here and there is actually not a bad thing. And, and pooping, uh, multiple times a day, maybe it's not the worst thing in the world. Yeah. So two separate things. One would be poop and the other's gas. We'll cover. We'll give each its due that it deserves. There we go. Yeah. So let's start with poop, kind of the bowl of the woods. So babies poop every time they eat. Every time a baby eats, he poops. Man, talk about efficiency. Yeah. And that's sort of ideal. Like you should be pooping multiple times a day.

And the last 10 years, I've been more sort of in the weight loss realm, dealing with people that are not so much interested in fitness. They're interested in weight loss. That's what everybody wants, right? Everybody wants to lose weight. Yeah. It's different, though, because, and it took me a long time to understand. I didn't get the difference. I was like, why don't you just go work out? A lot of people just can't. They just got issues. They can't move. They can't. And so weight loss becomes this sort of different industry. And I didn't start out to get into that. I just wound up in it. But one of the things that is consistently that I've seen in that, and this is across several, several thousand people, is that when, when people aren't pooping, they cannot lose weight. Cannot. Yeah. And you get them, you get them pooping, they can lose weight.

That's a, that's an interesting thing. Why do you think that is? So constipation gets to the way that you have a whole bunch of issues going on when you're constipated. A lot of those issues get to bacteria in the gut. And so like what you're seeing here right now, what you've been doing this past week is you're going to the bathroom a lot. Oh, yeah. And a driver of that is the bacteria that you're spinning up. That's what's driving it.

And so these bacteria exert almost de facto control over fat loss. Almost de facto. So there's a specialized protein, fasting-induced adipose factor. It's got another name now, ANGLP4. And that particular protein is produced by certain bacteria in response to starvation. And it controls fatty acid uptake into, um, uh, excuse me, controls fatty acids being liberated from the body and it's driven by bacteria. Well, that makes, that makes some sense.

And, you know, going into a bodybuilding show and a lot of, uh, fitness competitors and people have done bodybuilding before they've come on the show and said the last couple of days as they're prepping for the bodybuilding show, they can't, they can't take a shit. You know, they get very constipated and it's, uh, for the reasons that you just pointed out, they cannot lose any more weight. They, they, they have gotten themselves as lean as they could get. They dried their body out of, of everything that it has pretty much, uh, in multiple ways. And, uh, therefore they, they can't go to the bathroom very, uh, very efficiently at that point. How did you, how did you, um, you know,

get into all this? Like, this is, this is really heavy stuff. Are you a doctor? Did you go to school for medicine or like, how did you, you know, end up finding out a lot of this stuff? Yeah, I get asked that a lot. Um, so I, you know, I, I just really described myself as a, as a consumer, much, much like, uh, much like you and your brothers, you know, I was, I was a consumer, much like you and your brothers. I was a consumer, and I was just an early adopter in the whole birth of the fitness explosion. I was five years old, and I would get up every morning with Jack LaLanne, and I'd be there doing whatever Jack did. I thought it was cool, man. He had a little onesie. He had his dog. It was cool. Then I was just always into athletics. I grew up in San Jose and there were

all these Olympic lifters and power lifters there and sprinters and all this track and field athletes. So I was just kind of around that environment and started, you know, doing clean and jerks and Olympic lifting at like 13 and just really became like a consumer. Whenever something new would come out, like in 85, hot stuff came out and I was like, I got to try this stuff. Yeah. I think hot stuff came out and i was like i gotta try this stuff yeah i think hot stuff uh ended up having diana ball yeah what i remember yeah it wasn't the bulls balls yeah it had it had like um it had like ephedrine in it and caffeine and everything yeah it had amino acids and protein and fat and carbs and you guys had all the good stuff yeah everything yeah everything like like it was when stuff worked

and they just, they didn't, the science was not anywhere near, but they were like, let's just put everything in there. Everyone's like, man, this stuff works great,

but for some reason, my cheeks are really puffy. Oh no. Yeah. So, you know, I was just, I was on that train going through

the, the late, late, late eighties, nineties. And then. Metrex, Metrex broke so many of my blenders. When you try to blend that shit up from back in the day, it would just, your, late eighties, nineties. And then Metrex, Metrex broke so many of my blenders.

When you try to blend that shit up from back in the day, it would just see your blender like, it just could not handle how thick those Metrex shakes were. I was, I was a, I was a poster kid for like not being able to poop on Metrex. So I was, yeah, that actually Metrex I'm here today probably because of experimenting with meal replacements. And you call it intermittent fasting, whatever you want to call it.

But I got ripped for like five years. And then I wound up parking myself at In-N-Out like about year number six. For the French fries or the burgers? The burgers. I didn't know what I'd done, but I knew that I had done something from the way that I'd been eating. And so I spent several years trying to figure out what I'd done and led to a lot of research. And then what happened to me was in the early 2000s, I got laid off from my dot-com job and I wanted to pursue something closer, what I'd always been interested in. So I started making

websites for fitness models and supplement companies. And I got ripped again. And I was in great shape. And I wasn't making a ton of money. So I went to work for this technology company. And I wound up becoming the CEO. And we did really well. And it was like revenue went like that. My weight went like that.

And so at the end of that road, I was like 260 pounds and fat. I was 212 when I started. I was 260 like within three years. And, you know, the thing was like, it was these 14 hour days and stress and fires. And, and I just, I got to the end of that and I was like, wow, man, I don't, I don't, I don't know what to do if you take time away. I mean, that really bugged me a lot because I'd always done it. And that, that led to what I'm doing now, which was really trying to figure out like, well, okay, if I took time away, completely took it away, how would I solve this problem? Because that's the same problem everybody has that is not in the ecosystem of

fitness. That's the problem they have. And so that created this kind of like 10 year kind of experiment, rumbling, stumbling, bumbling my way down to, you know, uh, where I'm at today with this stuff. So, yeah, you know, it's, um, it's like, what's a realistic amount of time to exercise, you know, um, an hour a day, 20 minutes, you know, three hours a day. I mean, when you look at a lot of the people that are on Instagram, a lot of people that are in shape and a lot of people that have, uh, a large following, uh, these are people who have kind of made it their job. You know, they, they lift and they, um, man, it's not like they don't have other responsibilities, but they carve their life out around fitness.

And so they have a six pack and they look, you know, relatively the way that they want to look because they set the rest of their lifestyle up around that. And other people don't have that convenience. So what do you think would be a reasonable amount of time for, let's just say your average person that wants to drop 20 pounds, what's a reasonable amount of time for them to be able to apply to exercise that can be effective? Yeah, you just asked the single most important question you could ask and it needs to be framed properly. So when you look over time, like not just a couple years, but 20, 30, 40 years, and you look at what happens for the bell curve, the vast majority of people,

and these are people that, you know, they want to solve this problem, and they routinely go to the well. What you see is this pattern, and it's really interesting. And it kind of looks like this, where what's going up is their weight, and so these incursions downward are these periods where they're like, I gotta get back into it, I gotta get on track, okay, I'm back on track, and they'll sometimes spend five, six years in that back on track period, but there's a thing called role dynamics theory, and role dynamics theory just basically says that your primary minutes in life are going to be always dictated

by your primary role, so if your primary role is looking good, that's where your primary minutes in life are going to be always dictated by your primary role. So if your primary role is looking good, that's where your primary minutes go. If that's not your primary role, then you have to make that work out of what's called leftover minutes. And leftover minutes in the real world ecosystem have periods where they go to zero routinely. And I've not just seen this in my own life, but I've seen it with thousands of people. Is this something you learned in business? Where did you come across this? In trying to quantify this problem, just a lot of research and trying to really understand what's the driver.

I was talking to Emilio a little earlier about this, but basically it's like this. Imagine a house built on sand. The sand is time. And inevitably what happens in the real world is the storms of life just come along and just wash that house right off the sand. That's what happens for most people. It's like it never existed. Yeah. And what it is, it's just constraint of time based on real world pressures.

So what the average person winds up doing over a period of decades is, it's like, oh, we had kids, and then I had to change jobs, and then, you know, blah. And there's just all these issues. And then they wind up going, oh, I got to get back into it. I just got to get back into it. And then they do, all right, for a while. And then something else happens again. And so the answer to your question is periodically zero.

And so that's the trick that's the that's the million dollar question is how do you make all this work with no time that's the million dollar question and so what that led to is is the stuff that i'm doing now which is which i just view it as a foundation that was missing you know like when time goes to zero how do you keep the house from getting washed off the off the thing so um, you have to make it work with zero time. That's the trick. And you mentioned also to me, uh, on the phone that, uh, human beings, uh, also occasionally just need to eat like whatever they want. And you said that just historically, that's what, that's what life has shown us.

That's what history has shown us is that sometimes people will eat blueberries and sometimes they'll eat rabbit, sometimes they'll eat squirrel, and in modern times, sometimes they'll eat a Snickers bar, sometimes they'll eat In-N-Out Burger, right? Yeah, it's kind of interesting. We have these sort of mythologies about, you know, ancient cultures and what they ate and all this stuff, but really the driver is just simply availability of food. And it's interesting, I went down to the mission in San Juan, Capistrano a little while ago and it showed the diet of the Indians up on a board.

And it was everything. It was just based on what you got. So like, hey, we got a whale this week. We're eating, you know? Okay, great. Next week, nothing but blueberries and blackbirds. Okay, fine. And then, oh, now it's a meal made from nuts this a meal made from nuts this week. Cause that's all there is. And so there was actually quite a bit of variability in the diet based on availability. So availability drives variability. Right. And then now, you know, you also have a kind of temptation as well, you know, and he got different, different, uh, time periods.

How does somebody like, you know, somebody that's struggling that has kind of gone in and out of it, right? How do they, how do they get back on their horse and how do they get going again? Because the, uh, reward, uh, it doesn't show up very quickly. And if you don't have the knowledge and you don't have, uh, a guru, you don't have somebody close by that really knows what's going on. If you just try to go to the gym and do some workout that you did 10 years ago, it could take a year or so before you really start to see some of the results that you may remember from when you're younger.

And you might start doing cardio every day, and you might start pouring your heart and soul into it. You might start making some better food choices. But sometimes without the correct knowledge, you could be sort of spinning your own wheels. How does somebody get started when they're, you know, kind of unsure? Like what's a good place for somebody to start?

You mean in terms of like where to digest knowledge? Yeah, I guess even just where to start in terms of like what kind of exercise would be good. Do we lift weights? Do we sprint? Do we just like walk? Or do we just go from zero to like one? Like, let's just find like a point that we can just,

this, this one, this thing that's on a level one, I can do that every day or I can do it every other day. Like I can actually get it done. So yeah. Where, where do you think somebody would start?

So the way, the way I would answer that is to say, so going back to that, that graph, it's going like this over time? So the way I would answer that is to say, so going back to that graph that's going like this over time, the way to solve that is in those incursions where there's no time, you've got to get the peak down. And one of the ways you can get the peak down, see what I mean? So instead of this over time where we're seeing this sort of stock market thing going like that, what we want is something that's a little more like this.

And so one of the primary ways we can get that back in is there's a thing called continuous exertion, and it's not the same as working out. Continuous exertion is just what people did before we were industrialized. And so you didn't necessarily work out, you churned butter. But like if you've ever churned butter, it's kind of working. Okay, I'm over this, man. Or like washing clothes, you know, washing clothes. It was like, I hate washing clothes. Washing clothes was a workout or just getting water was a workout. And so integrating exertion back into the day without time is the first thing that I would tell someone to do.

And so that, that's not a workout. In the modern world, one of the problems with going to the gym is going to the gym. So it's not the 30 minutes in the gym. For women, I know, it's the hour afterwards getting their hair back together and all this stuff. And so finding ways, exercise is a major gene activator, does a whole bunch of great stuff. So it's finding ways to put exertion back into your day in non-time intensive ways. That is really the first thing. So what you're doing with that is even in those seasons when there's no time, the peak isn't going up as much.

Yeah, there's a huge barrier of entry surrounding that gym. You know, there's emotional things going on. Oh man, I'm 40 pounds heavier than i was last time i used to train there and maybe they're going to remember me and you know then then there's all these things going on in your head that uh you don't look the way you used to or or maybe you think people are judging you when you're lifting and you don't know what you're doing there's a lot of these things that that happen so i agree with you 100 i actually think um there's a lot of problems with

a lot of the things that we go to there's even even like the very act of having a grocery store uh can be problematic because for the grocery store to stay open they have to sell a bunch of shit and literally they got to sell a bunch of shit they have food there they have they got their meat and they got their other things right and they have vegetables and fruit and they got things that are great for you, but they have to sell a bunch of crap to you as well to keep the lights on. And so we end up going into this, uh, building where we're kind of trapped and we got cereal and all these yummy foods around us to, uh, to pick up on.

And sometimes it ends up being a, an issue, but I agree a hundred percent on the workout because I think that a lot of times people think I'm just not even going to bother to, you know, as you know, I missed my window to go today. I'm not into it. I didn't have my pre-workout. I didn't get all fired up. I didn't. And it's like, well, it doesn't really need to look that way. You know, you could do something else, do something different, uh, where that's still going to be strenuous, um, even just going for a walk. But every time you work out, it doesn't mean that you have to change your shoes and you have to get on specific types of clothes, uh, to go smash the ever living shit out of yourself.

You know, and I think that's where people are kind of making the mistake of thinking like, if they don't, if they don't destroy themselves in a workout, then, then there, there's no point in working out at all. And it doesn't need to be like that at all. Yeah, it's actually the opposite. If we had time to do a podcast on just that topic, we could, which is just workout incursions and kind of everything that goes around that. Those are fantastic. And I'm totally for those things because I think it's, you know, very important to have goals and pursue them. And, you know, that's where that comes in.

But that's not the foundation. The foundation is that the body is encountering similar exertions to what people have always encountered every day. And there's a really interesting thing that happens when the body does that. The body adapts rapidly, rapidly to continual stress. So an experiment I like to have people do is just, hey, so do this. Just plot some intervals in your day where you take, you know, whatever, 30 seconds, whatever's good for you, and just start doing push-ups, you know, and just pack those in your day. And then then um you know someone who's ambitious might wind up doing two three hundred push-ups a day okay every day there's no rest there's no recovery well funny thing happens when you

start doing that the body recovers much much faster oh it's strong fast yeah and so that's sort of tapping into a lot of ancestral dna when we do stuff like that when we exert ourselves every day body gets strong really fast and it's a very different thing from going to do like a workout where you're you know concentrating on performance aspects that's actually really interesting i mean there's different things you could do um you could just squat onto a chair you know or if if you're not very strong and you haven't done anything in a long time uh maybe you're holding on to something and you're just bending the knees and getting whatever version of a squat and that you can but you do 10 reps while you're waiting for your eggs to cook, you know, things like that.

You could probably throughout the day, you could probably, uh, put some stuff in like that. And we talk a lot about walking just because it's such a simple thing. I talk all the time about 10 minute walks and I encourage people to try to do two or three every day when you get on a phone call or, um, you know, just any time that you feel you can be mobile, uh if you think about your day and think about when you go to lunch and when you go to these other places and spots and stuff, you're like, oh yeah, I could just park a little further away and I can get a little walk in or I could use the stairs. I mean, these things you've heard people talk about for a very long time, but over a period

of time, it will really add up to something. Let me ask you a question. Do you notice a difference in your mental performance and sort of emotional even keelness from the walks? Absolutely. Yeah. I love going for a walk. Sometimes I'll do it with headphones. Sometimes I'll do it with nothing.

And I'll just think. I also walk a lot with my dad and my son, which is just, you know, as men, it's kind of funny. Like sometimes we don't even say anything. But it's just us being together. It's good to be together. Yeah. It's kind of funny. Like sometimes we don't even say anything, but it's just us being good. It's just us being together. Yeah. It's kind of a funny, like dude, dude thing. I mean, sometimes we're chatty, but sometimes we, no one really says anything.

And it's not like nobody's mad. Nobody's sad. No one's happy. No one's anything. We're just like, we're just together and we're just walking. But, uh, we've been doing that for the last like year and a half. And it's, uh, it's just, it's just great time to be together. But anyone who's listening to this podcast and they struggle with mental health issues or, um, anxiety or depression, I really strongly advise you to take, I think walking, uh, can

be just a wonderful thing. Just get outside and just walk and try to 20, 30 minutes a day total. But if you can't even do that, just a, just 10 minutes would be a really good start. I think that's actually, maybe apart from one or two other things, almost like a perfect solution to a lot of different problems all at once. about that, I started really thinking about just not even so much the physical aspects of it, but just more the mental aspects of, you know, being outside and, you know, just being away from your smartphone and just having a bit of peace and slowing down and maybe having some company and some sun on your body. Yeah. And all these things that are missing. And that's really part of the big problem that we're up against here is we're in this bubble. This bubble is called

the modern ecosystem. And the bubble is incrementally subtractive across 50, 60 different things in little percentages. And restoring those things back in time-effective ways is really the key. And so just the act of taking a walk, what you're doing is, well, okay, so you're breaking the smartphone addiction for however long, 20 minutes. You're in the air, your brain's getting time to process at a different level. And there's all these things that go with that. I have a friend who, she's a PhD and she's also a fitness competitor and her practice centers around walking as a therapy. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. It's fantastic. I mean, the amount of things that it does for you, I mean, you can even just Google it and look up some research. I mean, it will show you that it can help with your blood pressure, can help with your, your blood sugar,

can help with a lot of things. Yeah. Yeah. No, just one thing. Um, it's really hard. And I think it's kind of like the task that Mark has kind of trying to take on is, um, these, a lot of people that could use a 10 minute walk, they don't have the energy to do so. So it's hard to tell somebody who already doesn't feel good to go do something that they're really uncomfortable with. But the task, again, is educating everyone to know that once you do start moving, you're actually going to feel better. It's crazy as that sounds. Once you get moving, then you're going to want to keep's crazy as that sounds yeah once you get moving then you're gonna want to keep doing it more and more and more yeah and it's just really hard to kind of

like when he was asking you to get that initial jump from like going from zero to step one you know i i know it's just a 10 minute walk and for some people that might not sound like anything but for others it sounds like a you know a huge wall to climb over but to let everyone know it's that that's it's going to feel better eventually you know yeah that's really interesting um i've been experimenting over the last dozen years with finding the smallest increment of a thing that has the biggest bang for the buck yeah and with regard to this thing that we're talking about you know i've been uh i do these seminars called body hack uh which there's one in oct. If you're in LA, you should go.

Where at? It's either going to be in Irvine or I might do it at Quest. I haven't locked it down yet. Okay, cool. I'm going to talk to Ron and see. Yeah, I'd love to come check it out. That'd be awesome.

You guys should come. Yeah, absolutely. I'd love to continue to learn more. I mean, there's just nutrition and exercise. What a loaded, right? I mean, you, you, you, you think you got a good handle on stuff. You're like, okay, I kind of understand what the proteins do. I kind of understand what the carbs do. I kind of understand what the fat does. And then you realize like, no, uh, you don't really understand any of it does. Oh yeah. I'll tell you what that, that, uh, man,

every day, every day, like, like, and it's funny's funny. I do some, you know, some high-level consulting for, you know, companies in nutrition that do some cool stuff and all that. And this industry kind of, it can breed an arrogance in people because you think you know a lot of stuff until you get around, like, every single day stuff you don't know. And you realize, like, oh, wow. You know, like nobody really knows this. It's been a fantastic thing to be part of like, uh, this lifting culture and to just, you know, I've,

I've done some things in power to think that have been fun, but I've also have been hammered and smashed by other, other competitors, you know, and I've, I, I know, I know there's,

there's other places to go. And so whenever it I've, I, I know, I know there's, there's other places to go. And so whenever it comes to, uh, nutrition or when it comes to exercise or talking about, uh, hypertrophy of a muscle or whatever it is, all I know is that I don't know everything. And I know that there's other people that, that know more than me and that I can obtain a lot of knowledge from them. And that has really helped me a lot because if I, if I want to learn more about bodybuilding, I will talk to somebody like Jay Cutler,

who's won four Mr. Olympia championships. If I want to know more about gut microbiome, I'll speak to somebody like yourself or our buddy, Daniel Orrego. And I'll talk to somebody that has actually studied some of these things. It actually reads up on it consistently, knows the stuff like they know the back of their hand. But I think a lot of times, you know, in the fitness industry,

we run into a lot of people that they feel like they've kind of learned all there is to know. And there they are passing out their advice, you know, through Instagram or whatever it is. Yeah. But, you know, I like what you said because that's a fascinating quality that I've seen with peak performers

is that they're all very humble. And I've seen this with a lot of fighters, but also, like you say, with powerlifting. Because when you're at the very pinnacle of something, you can get your ass handed to you any day of the week. You can either win or get your ass handed to you. And so the whole sort of like, it's just the, the, the ego thing goes out the window. Right.

And you're just trying to improve at the end of that. Such a great quality. You sit there and scratch your head too. Cause you're really working really hard. You're like, man, I'm really, I really put a lot of time and effort into this. And it turns out it's not good enough. The other guy's better than you. And then you try again.

That's a humbling thing, huh? Try again. The guy kicks your ass again. And you're like, I don't, I don't understand. Like, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to keep trying here. I'm going to keep working towards it. And you try and you try and you try and you, you fix your sleep. You fix your food.

You, you think you got your training fixed. You go at it again with the same person and they kick your ass again. And you're like i just you know and it's just um you know my dad has always said you know part of knowing who you are is knowing who you're not and and that has always been something that has helped me to kind of decipher out uh different stuff that i come across and different people um i can say okay well i'm not the strongest guy ever i know my place in that, but I could still have a huge impact on the strength community. And I can still, uh, do a lot of fun and great

things. I don't have to be the strongest guy ever. You know, that's something that I was trying to do. I tried. And, uh, for whatever reason, my genetics, my body, it went a certain way. I pushed to where I could. And there was, at some point, there was negative feedback saying, hey, you ain't doing this anymore. And so that's sometimes just where you end up. But you've got to kind of realize that that potential for that to happen is there. By the way, you mentioned, I love your dad. Like when I've seen, a little bit I've seen. But there's this

and I'm just going to rabbit hole for a second on this but it's my dad passed away in 2011 and your dad reminded me of my dad where there's kind of

this ethos of that generation where these guys went to work every day at jobs that weren't glamorous that maybe they didn't like a lot

and then sometimes they just put up with a lot of crap a lot of people talking a lot of crap eating like a humble pie sandwich sometimes they never said sometimes they just put up with a lot of crap. A lot of people talking a lot of crap, eating like a humble pie sandwich. Sometimes they never said anything. They just went to work soldier, you know, and now that I'm, now that I'm older and I, and I look at the qualities that that builds in a man, um, it's, it's, uh, it's, it's interesting. I lived in, uh,

South Orange County for a number of years and, uh, I saw like a generation coming up where everybody wanted to either own a clothing company or being a band or you know something something glamorous and uh it's just that that the more i appreciate that in a man like a guy a guy who just he just shows up he gets it done he doesn't complain and yeah no it's a it's a it's a great thing and i've talked about that many times on the podcast is like uh you know because my dad doesn't have, you know, 500,000 followers on Instagram, does it mean that he's not great? You know, does it mean that like other people's mom or other people's dad, does it mean that they're not great? Um, you know, in my opinion, the definition of being great is just being good for a really long period of time,

you know, and trying to do the right thing, uh, over and over again, having, uh, some consistency and, uh, some commitment. I mean, that's what you're really looking for people to do is, is to have a strong, a strong commitment, a strong pull. When someone has a strong commitment towards something, uh, I think anybody can get on board with that. You're like, wow, that person really, they really like bought into that and they really tried to go, maybe they didn't make it where they wanted to make it to, but they really went all in on it.

Fuck, they tried, you know? Like shit, they really made the effort to commit to it. And I think that's what people end up admiring and they end up getting excited about. Yeah, and I think that type of, it doesn't get celebrated a lot, but I think it needs to be just sort of talked about more because it's, um, it's a great quality. Great quality. Yeah. And I think, you know,

back to kind of fitness and taking care of yourself just in general. Um, if you can try to make a commitment towards that in some fashion and just maybe be able to check that box at the end of every day. Um, did you try to eat better? Did you try to, did you try to get the proper amount of sleep? Um, did you go for a walk? I mean, you don't have to stress out about it and make it a whole nother thing that just makes you fatter. It makes you more unhealthy because you're so worried about it all the time. Um, but it can be something that you're just trying to think about in logical terms. You're trying to be reasonable with yourself. Am I making a little bit better of an effort towards this? This is something that I want to do and I agreed that I want to do it. Uh, am I taking the proper steps each day? And it doesn't have to

be, um, it doesn't always have to be subtraction. You know, I think addition is, is a nicer way of working things. So when I try to help somebody, I say, okay, well, it's, uh, with my dad, my dad's been working out for 16 days straight and he's asking more about like food and stuff like that. And I said, yeah, you know, I was, I was just waiting for you to come to me because I, I figured this is a good place to start. Let's get you exercising. Probably over a year ago, I got him walking. And then, uh, more recently he's actually like going to a local gym and he's been doing that for over two weeks. And now he's starting to ask some questions about food. And I was like, yeah, I was just waiting for you to, you know, check in with me about it

because I didn't want to say, Hey, like I'm going to force this diet on you. And now he came to me and we went over some stuff and it's simple strategies though. You know, I'm saying, Hey, you know, uh, you need to have some eggs, steak or fish, um, one or two times a day. I mean, we had some sort of protein a couple of times a day. Um, and, uh, you know, here's some carbohydrate sources and here's some vegetables that I think would be good for you. And here's some fruit. It's all just, I'm not subtracting. I didn't say, Hey, you can't do any of these things. Can't drink. Can't do this. Can't do that. I didn't say any of that. Cause I think that that, uh, is a recipe for disaster. A lot of times when you, when you

pull things away from people, then they get all stressed out. Yeah. I call that the avoid and never, sorry. I call that the avoid and never paradigm. And that's probably a hundred percent of what's out there right now. And it, it, it cannot work over time for the reason that, um, the million 80 million eating is hardwired. And in the science, they call it ad libitum. So they call it, and it's always the control mechanism. Whenever you do an experiment on food intake,'s what they call it. And it's always the control mechanism whenever you do an experiment on food intake. You go, okay, well, let's have the ad libitum control group. That's the group that just goes, yeah, cheesecake, great.

And then you have the control group, which is... Leave me alone, I'm ad-libbing. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, it means as you will, you know? So as I will eat this burger, as I will. So the avoid-ne paradigm is is avoid is your list you know everybody everybody's got their list of things they avoid and you know nowadays it's almost everything is how I avoid dairy I avoid carbs I avoid

just about anything other than you know refined right you know whatever and then never is your rules and so and so we're trying to put people into this thing of avoid and never and that's not how mammals eat so we're trying to put people into this thing of avoid and never. And that's not how mammals eat. So you're never going to overcome that long-term. Short-term, you can do it. But long-term, you can't overcome hardwiring. And humans are mammals. And from time to time, mammals, and parents know this, people just eat whatever the hell they want. Kids do that. They're going to eat whatever the hell they want unless some third party comes in and forces restriction on them. And so that's the issue you get into with really any form of dieting, any form of dieting,

is that you, it's actually the opposite. You have to allow people to eat anything, anytime and offset it. That's the only thing that works long-term. Right. As far as I'm concerned. Yeah, I agree. The willpower at some point will run out. Your willpower will start to kind of fade and it'll crack over a period of time. And I like some of the stuff I saw on your website and some of the stuff you mentioned to me about how you had this period of time where you're able to dump all this time into everything.

And this happens to a lot of people. And there's a lot of people in this position right now. They put a lot of time and effort into being fit. And for some people, and I've even said this, you know, being in shape and being in the condition that you want to be in is a full-time job. And what I mean by that, I don't mean that you have to work out all day long. I just mean that you've got to be conscious of, like, almost every move that you make. Um, because there's so many, there's so many convenient foods out there that taste so damn good, uh, that we have, we have shifted into, into a spot where if you're not thinking about it, you can end up in a rough spot really fast. But what I see from a lot of people is they used to play football.

They used to be a volleyball player. They used to have some sort of athletic, uh, background or some sort of background where they were just moving more or eating less or some combination of the two. And then something happens. They have a kid. They tear their ACL. They hurt their ankle. And then they get on crutches for a while and they kind of lose their momentum and they just stop working out. Or maybe their gym membership ran out.

I mean, there's a lot of things that happen. They start to have other obligations. Their job changed. Maybe they work nights now and just things have really shifted. Next thing you know, they gain five pounds, they gain 10, and they start kind of getting behind. And I think that that is, that's where a lot of people are. And that's a, that's a tough spot to try to pull yourself out of. But one of the things that you're known for and the people that have been staying with us this entire time, you're now about to get the real benefit of why we brought Joel on the podcast

is because Joel has become, I don't know if he wanted to become this, but this is his area of expertise. He's become a junk food expert in some ways. And I guess he has figured out ways around being able to eat junk food and being able to counteract it and kind of counterbalance it. So let's just dive right into some of this. So you and I were talking via text and you can imagine my face just like looking at some of this stuff when he's texting me. I was like, pizza, this sounds great. So yeah, let's just talk about some of these things. You've got some interesting ways of hacking things. We did talk about, you know, eating pizza. So what would somebody do

to counteract pizza? So the first thing to think about is that you're never actually eating a single meal. And the science is now pretty clear on this, that one meal influences the next in a number of different ways. So redefine your concept of a meal. In my Veep system, So redefine your concept of a meal. In my Veep system, we call it eating in threes. But it's the basic idea that whatever you're eating right now is not part. The problem with meal plans is the plan never actually survives the first meal. That's the problem with meal plans.

So redefining what a meal is, a meal is not one meal. A meal is what you ate last, what you ate next, and what you're eating right now. That's a meal. The first thing to understand is that what you're eating right now is entirely dictated by what you ate previously and what you're going to eat next. Once you really get this in your mind, a lot of this stuff is like jiu-jitsu in a way. It's like there's a counter move to everything. You just got to learn it. That's like the guard in jiu-jitsu. This is the basic guard. It's that this meal here is a function of that and it's a function of this. Now that's empirically true. There's all kinds

of evidence taking, for example, an egg. If you have an egg in the morning, 24-hour satiety is increased. Now when you add rye bread to that, 24-hour insulin sensitivity is increased. Now, when you add rye bread to that 24 hour, uh, insulin sensitivity is increased. And so we can start to really play with this and start to really affect the hormonal control points of food. So in the case of something, Oh, and by the way, once you get this, uh, it's complete freedom. It's complete freedom because you're now it's based on one, one foundational idea. And the foundational idea is that if you think about it, the body is actually storing and releasing fat multiple times in a day.

So when you wake up, typically we're all releasing a little bit of fat, burning a little bit of fat. After lunch, probably storing fat. If you don't eat until maybe 5, 6, the last hour or two, you start to maybe burn some fat again. That's the purpose of fat. It's to keep you alive in between meals. After dinner, you store some fat.

Deep stretch of the night, you burn some fat. So foundationally speaking, the core of everything here is there's these periods where you're storing fat, periods where you're burning fat. So the trick is to take these periods where you're storing and push that down and the periods where you're burning and accentuate that. And then that is actually quite doable, and there's a number of ways that we can affect that. So one of the ways that we can do that is we can make the body work better with blood sugar. And there's sort of a whole inventory of things we can do. One of the things that you started doing this week was just the simple act of having like a whey protein shake 30 minutes prior with some, maybe some olive oil and some cinnamon. That's what's called a preload meal. And again, this is solid science. So the science on preload meals really looks at how,

how we affect postprandial glycemia and how do we affect glucose area under the curve. And just, just that one little addition takes the glucose area under the curve and pushes it down. Okay, so we're getting better at using insulin. The next thing to think about is sequencing of meals. So if I wanted to have pizza, if I know... Here we go. Pizza. Which I do frequently.

By the way, this is like an ongoing joke in my circle of friends because they all know me as like, you know, the guy in the nutrition and fitness. And they just think you eat pizza all day long. It's like, you eat worse than anybody I know. How do you, you know, what's going on? I really don't. They just don't see when I'm offsetting stuff. Right, right. But so long story short, the meal prior to that, if I wanted to, if I knew I was going to eat pizza, I can sequence up a really aggressive fat burning meal.

And then coming into pizza, there's all kinds of things I can do to offset that. So we looked at whey protein, berberine is another simple, easy thing you can do prior to that. And you're dramatically affecting the way the body is using blood sugar. The problem with pizza is that you've got a massive amount of carbs with a massive amount of fat all at once. That's not necessarily a negative thing. The dairy has very unique properties in relation to angiotensin converting enzyme,

and dairy peptides actually help suppress that, which is very good in a lot of ways. So it's really just a matter of minimizing carb intake. And then at the next subsequent meal, we can eat more aggressively for fat loss. So if I look at one meal, the pizza meal, that's a weight gain meal, right? But that's going to happen anyway during the day. I'm going to gain weight anyway. The meal before and the meal after, those are aggressive fat loss meals. Well, that's going to happen anyway. I'm just making them more aggressive. So that's kind of like a foundational architecture for doing that.

And then the next step would be just diving into specifics of how to offset all the elements of that. So like really simple, like very simply put is kind of less calories surrounding the pizza, right? Yes and no. Very often you're adding calories. That's a very shocking thing a lot of people see, but very often you're actually increasing calories both before the pizza meal as a preload and at the meal, both meals. You're actually adding calories, but you're adding calories to get functional properties out of foods.

So it wouldn't have the same benefit if you tried to fast into the pizza. Like if you were like, oh, I know I'm going to eat pizza later today, so I'm just not going to eat that much food. You might get stronger, you might get more bang for your buck if you had like a whey protein shake or something like that, like you mentioned, or whatever you would consider a fat burning meal. Yeah, so if I knew in advance,

and you don't have to know in advance, by the way, you can just like, the whole power of this is just being able to just get hit with something and go ahead and eat that. Yeah, we're going for pizza. Oh, yeah. That's the whole thing is being able to do that. But if I knew in advance, then there's all kinds of ways to take food and combine food.

So a good example would be onions are really good at spinning up bifidobacteria. Really good. Onions are really good at spinning up bifidobacteria. Really good. And asparagus has quite a few different properties in it that relate to helping with blood sugar metabolism. And it affects the next subsequent meal. So if I take onions, asparagus, a little bit of cheese, combine that with egg whites, I take those things like my previous meal, then the egg white acts kind of like a break. And it parks it in gut lumen, um, keeps it in there and keeps it fermenting.

So it keeps butyrate concentrations in the gut, which is basically spinning up all these wondrous health promoting fat loss things. And then my pizza meal, I basically set up an environment to store less fat based on the meal to meal signaling that I'm doing. Have you, uh, utilize this with people and and have lost weight by utilizing a lot of these principles? Oh, yeah. Yeah, over 16,000 people. So my deep nutrition system was the world's first commercially available nutrition program based on the gut bacteria.

That came out in 2009. And we've had over 16,000 people since that time come through. We had a Dr. Phil storyline. It was amazing. Um, boy, uh, we had a lady go on Dr. Phil, she weighed 322 pounds and she was on 22 meds all at once. Wow. Like everything, like Diovan, like, you know, like your SSR, everything she was on, you know, um, I think her copay was like 1500 bucks a month. or everything. She was on, you know,

I think her copay was like $1,500 a month. So she goes on, they put her on my program and she hurts her leg in the first week so she can't even exercise. She can barely get out of bed. So I think it was about

month four, they blood test her and her blood work comes back 100% normal. So the doctor's like, oh, okay, this isn't right. So they sent her

to a specialist and then that comes back normal. And so they took her off all meds at four months. Now, the takeaway is there's no drug that could do that. That's just food. But that's the power of food when it's applied functionally. And that's what's possible with food. So what are we eating after pizza then?

I really got to know this. Everybody's like, hey, man, just get to the pizza, all right? Part of it depends on the timing. So a lot of it depends on the timing. So usually you're going to have pizza in the evening. You just have a guess if you were. So you're going to go to bed. You're going to store a bunch of fat while you're sleeping.

So you really want to be very aggressive with fat loss the next morning. And so there's a lot of different meal combinations you could do. One of the things that I like to do is just a whey protein shake with a little bit of omega-3 oil in it and add some cinnamon. And you can add a few other things around that, like a naringin would be really good. And you're not only going to burn fat, you're going to initiate uncoupling, uncoupling protein 3 in the muscle by doing that. And you're going to burn fat for quite a while doing that. When you have some of these people do these diets, is there any regard to caloric intake at all? Not really. Not really.

In the real world, so tracking and counting calories is very good for performance and physique attainment. It's really, really effective for that. It's not so effective in the real world. The problem you get into with tracking and counting is that it's not sustainable long-term for most people. Yeah. So you have to give them... Doing it consistently is going to be hard. Yeah. So you've got to give them a way to just kind of eat ad-lib and do it without those things.

What about just amounts of food? Do you try to teach people, like, you're the X size and you should have six ounces of protein? Do you teach them how to eyeball it, or is there not much regard to that? Yeah, well, the Veep system was designed to solve that problem. The one question people always ask is, all right, Mark, you're really smart. Just show me what you eat, dude. Shut up. Just show me.

That's what they want to know. So that's what it does, is it just visually shows them the amounts. And the interesting thing about that is there's been all this science on visual cues during eating, and it's actually how we're wired. We're actually wired to go, oh, that's enough, you know, just by looking at it. But the problem is we actually don't know until you see it. And it's pretty shocking. You know, example is corn, a really good example. So corn is actually really

good for fat loss. And the way you can prove it is measure out like 150 calories of that and put it next to a Clif Bar. Right. Like corn, the energy density is so low because of all the resistance starch. You'll get like a pile like this

and then your Clif Bar is like this little, just this little thing. And what that shows you is like, wow, the ratio of energy to volume. Right. Wow.

And whenever you get that big volume, small energy, it's always fat loss. That's why a lot of people like popcorn. A lot of people that like utilize like flexible dieting and stuff, they like popcorn because it will help kind of fill you up. And it's something to chew on, but it's not real dense calorically. Yeah. Right. So popcorn or corn itself is okay to have like an abundance of in our system.

popcorn or corn itself is okay to have like an abundance of in our system because i know i've i don't remember the documentary but somebody like they went in and seen like all like the corn syrup and everything has corn and how it could mess up your microbiome or something i don't remember exactly what happened but you're saying that it's okay and you know to take it in well first of all organic corn uh definitely not a fan of the GMO corn. But yeah, the actual, like real corn, and especially if you let it cool, it's loaded with resistant starch. And the thing to really look at is the ratio of volume to energy, because it's always a really good indicator. You'll see that like with orange roughy, like that's why it's so good for fat loss. Take orange roughy and just lay out like 180 calories it's like it's like massive yeah right there's there's no there actually orange roughy is interesting it has what are called wax esters in it which are specialized fats the body can't digest so it comes out like elestra it's kind of like the lb of food what is that leaks out yeah but uh so volume to energy is always a big driver. But part of the problem, though, is when I get asked these kinds of questions, the mindset is just, it's the what.

It's like, ah, what's the thing? And it's never just that. It's always in sequence and according to time and with other things. Those are all factors that matter. But just in general, the mythology that corn makes you fat, well, it's actually pretty good with resistant starch. And if you cool it at the right time and all that, it's actually not bad. Cool. What about some of the other things that we run into in modern times? Just kind of like junk food in general. Like a Snickers bar, like some of these things, it's got artificial flavors and colors.

Are all these things bad or do they still play a role? Like, do you think that they maybe have some value? Uh, well, so energy density, um, absolutely plays a role in dysregulating eating behavior. So we are able to manufacture foods nowadays that have energy densities that are outside of the realm of nature. And by that, I mean like the ratio of how much energy is in the food, the way that fats and carbs are combined, and then the flavor yield of those things. And as you know, a lot of these things are actually engineered by super smart guys with propellers on their heads going, hey, if we just add a little bit more sodium, they'll never stop buying it. Right. So, uh, there's been some interesting research on this stuff that really talks about how, um, energy dense food breaks the body's controls over eating behavior. And it basically, it's like a car where you cut the brake line and you jam the accelerator

down. So it's a very real problem, um, to, uh, overcome that. Um, but it is overcomable. The other thing with that is that with respect to artificial sweeteners, there's utility to them. Actually, I credit Ron at Quest with this, and it's that particularly during dieting, these things can be really helpful during dieting because they're really knocking out all the hunger response, and they're very useful for that. dieting because they're really knocking out all the hunger response.

Right. And they're very useful for that. Yeah. And they are, I guess, in a sense, touching upon a little bit of the reward system. You get a little bit of flavor and you're not getting the extra calories, right? So in something like a Quest Bar, which I think has like a soluble corn fiber in it or something like that, right? Yeah. You're getting a good flavor.

You're getting some protein, and it can help. They use the slogan of cheat clean, and now there's sugar alcohols, and there's all kinds of different things you can get into, but there's a lot of different options nowadays. In my opinion, if it keeps you within the realm of your goals, then I think you should go for it. You know, whether it's like super healthy for you or not, I think is kind of another topic, but I think it's more unhealthy to be fat. What are some of

your thoughts on that? That's very much a mixed bag. I have an entire chapter in my book that's coming out dedicated to that. So there's a thing called the obesity paradox, which really speaks to that there's people who are fat that are extremely healthy, much healthier than a lot of lean people. And the reason is, well, look at the reason, but they don't get cancer, they don't get diabetes, they don't get any of this stuff, they don't get heart attacks. So the reason has to do with the health of their fat itself. And so there's really a sea change idea that's coming up. And like I said, I hit on this quite a bit in my book that's coming out. But it really gets to do with the composition of your fat.

And that fat is not what we think it is, not by any stretch. We know a lot more about fat now than we used to. And what it really gets to is there is a mix of things, which has to do with very specific types of collagen fibers, the types of immune cells, macrophages, Tregs, and a number of other things that are sort of very similar to the gut biome. There's kind of a healthy mix to the gut biome, very similar with your fat. And so what we're finding now is a lot of counterintuitive stuff. So there are, in general, generally speaking, yeah, it's not good to be fat. But there are people who are

fat that are extremely healthy. And conversely, there are people who are incredibly lean that are on death's door. And it gets to the health of their fat. And the health of their fat is the crux variable. It's like the crossroads of health. Like the whole body comes to the intersection of health with adipose mass. And it dictates the health of everything else up to including cancer. In fact, in breast cancer cells, there's a phenomenon called a cancer-adjacent adipocyte. And this is a fat cell that the progenitor cells within the fat have essentially been sort of pushed a little bit different direction. And it has to do with how the extracellular matrix remodels in response to stressors. And so it spins up very specific types of collagen.

One of them is called collagen 6A23. And this specific fiber correlates with cancer. So what you find is that when you remodel collagen, you get these very specific fibers coming up in your fat mass. And these fibers dictate progenitor cells the direction that they're going to go. And so what you'll find is that your fat mass can drive cancer. In the breast tissue, we see it with cancer-adjacent adipocytes, and these are fat cells that have been mutated a little bit. Now they feed cancer. How would we alter some of this? How would you work on becoming healthier? Would it be as simple as dropping out some omega-6s and having omega-3s, or is it a lot more complicated than that? It's a little of both. And again, in my book that's coming out, I have a

couple chapters dedicated to this because it's so important. But you've actually been doing some of the stuff this week. So you just came off your show. Congratulations, by the way. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, you look good. Yeah, I appreciate it. I'm eating baby food and we're doing all kinds of weird things. We're doing all kinds of weird crap. But one example. Not even baby food, baby formula. Yeah, there you go. I was going to ask. I saw that on your Instagram. Then, you know, Joel being here, I'm like, okay, I get it now. Well, what we're doing, for example, with that is called a post-dieting flavonoid intervention. And there was a scientist in 2015 that discovered that many of the characteristics of obese adipose mass were induced by fat loss.

Identical, same characteristics. And so one of the elements that happens with that is that we see a difference in the signal states of immune cells in our fat. So you have what's called a macrophage. A macrophage is kind of a housekeeping immune cell in your fat cell. And macrophages basically dictate your overall health for your adipose mass by flipping between phenotypes. They can flip from what's called an M1 or an M2. One of the drivers of that is the M2 type macrophage makes arginase. And then arginase inhibits inducible nitric oxide synthase. And so what happens is it spins down inflammatory responses, where the opposite happens with the M1 macrophage. So what happens post-dieting is you get kind of this inflamed fat mass. And so what we've been doing with you is hitting a bunch of control points to spin all that stuff down. Right. Yeah. One of the ways that we're doing that is through reloading phenols in

the gut. So that's one thing that you've been doing and really using kind of the gut as a sort of a rudder to kind of steer these things. Right. So, and you kind of talked about like one phase building upon another, which is similar to your theory of, you know, eating in threes. You know, you're not just in the meal, that one meal, you got the meal behind you and the meal after. It seems like you have that approach just in general, too. And that's that's what we see here with the when we program for people for lifting. It's not necessarily about, you know, what you're doing at the moment. It's, you know, what you did to get there is very important. And, and what are

you going to do next? And how do you go from where you're at currently to what you're about to do is really, really important. Otherwise you can get hurt. You can tear a pack or tear a hamstring. If you're not, you're not not paying attention you're not building you don't have the building block going into that next training cycle then you can't handle what it is you're about to do and it seems like you're doing something similar with the food like hey we can't handle all these different weird crazy things until we can correct some of this over here we'll do this and then we can move into that and we can move into that. Yeah, I think you just actually hit on probably one of the most important concepts that like anybody who does this kind of stuff would want to grab onto. And it's a major correction that needs to happen, which is we kind of live in this universe where we get in shape.

We take selfies, put them on social media. You're like, I solved solved it i'm awesome yeah i heard you refer to it uh in the past as uh taking a social media victory lap right yeah yeah we do the social media victory lap and all that uh but that's so good that's so funny uh it's anybody who's who's been at this a while knows that that doesn't mean anything. Like, you can be in astounding shape, like astounding shape. And then we check back in 10 years and it's like, whoa, bro, what happened, man? I mean, we see this with everyone. We see it with athletes.

We see it with regular people. We see it. So what you hit on is this really important thing. And it's that you're not in this isolated sort of thing when you do things to your body. It's like a row of dominoes. And what you're doing now plays out down the line. I mean, athletes know this. If you're lifting wrong and you're mechanically doing things wrong, eventually you're going to get injured.

That injury is going to plague you the rest of your life. And it's the same thing. Yeah, and I think I've heard you refer to some stuff about of your life. And it's the same thing. So, yeah. And I think I've heard you refer to some stuff about, uh, fixing your average, you know, what, what does your average look like? Like, it's cool if you, uh, you know, are able to do something on a given day or look a certain way on a certain day, but then, you know, did you, did you fix, did you fix where you, uh, are like on, like almost more permanent basis? You know, are you going to, if let's say you lost 50 pounds, are you going to be, you know, give or take 10 pounds? Are you

going to be at that body weight for a long time? Because if you are that, that's a success. That's great. You know, you lost 50 and every once in a while, you know, you feel like eating some of grandma's food and you feel like having Thanksgiving dinner and so on. You might gain a couple pounds back. Not a huge deal, but you go right back on the plan and you maintain this lifestyle. But another interesting thing that I thought you, I think that's a great thing for people to really grab a hold of is that you should kind of have a baseline, an average, maybe even have like a, uh, a lower level and a higher level. Like I never want to, uh, you know, say like, I never want to bench press less than this weight. I never want to, uh, you know, be above this, uh, body

weight, you know, and just certain things that you, you get some dialogue in your head. So you got some goals set so you can keep everything on par. But the other thing I liked that you said is like, you know, what happens with some of these fitness people, if we were to take away, uh, you know, uh, eight hours in the gym, or let's just say three hours in the gym, there's let's, let's see what happened to some of these people who were to take away three hours in the gym, uh, perfect eating, uh, anabolic steroids, cardio training, like, like what would happen? And a lot of these people, a lot of them would fall apart because they don't really know. They don't have maybe have the knowledge necessary, uh, to be able to

stay in good shape with a limited clock, right? Yeah. It's Amelia and I were talking about this on the way over here. And, um, it's an interesting here. And it's an interesting challenge that I like to kind of throw out, which is, like, if you're into this stuff, you like challenges. So if we were to assign, like, a level of difficulty to something, okay, so mostly what the world I came from was really, like, most people are at a difficulty level of about a 2. And they think they're at a ten. So the two is like you're juiced, you spend a lot of time working out, and, you know, you're kind of in that ecosystem that provides you the ability to do that, you know, all those things. And that's historically like in terms of the ecosystem of fitness,

you know, that's driven towards performance goals. So I want to do a bodybuilding show. I want to, you know, do a contest. I want to do X, Y, Z. But then there's this trickle down into the mainstream of that where you have kind of this world of, like, what the average person is going through is they're not on anything and they're never going to be. They have no time. And they're not on anything and they're never going to be, they have no time. Um, and they're getting older. And so that becomes a tent. So when you go, Hey, um, do this with one workout a week, no meal prep, no time, uh, no nothing. Now you've replicated what the average

person's doing. That's really, really hard. Right. That's really hard. That's like a tent, um, to, to, to like maintain that. But that's really, really hard. That's really hard. That's like a 10 to maintain that. But that's actually what most people are up against. They're actually up against that. And it's very difficult for them long-term to get change. So it's an interesting challenge to just do. And the people that are in my circle know that that's been my thing for about 10 years, just trying to replicate that

and just see how far I can take that thing. And I'm not against any of those other things. Like people that are in my circle know that, you know, that's, I've been, that's been my thing for about 10 years. Just trying to replicate that. Um, and just see how far I can take that thing. And I'm not against any of those other things. Like, I think, I think they're great, you know, like in the right time and the right place. But it's just really looking at what's the average person up against their difficulty levels, like a 10. It's really hard. Do you think that is, uh, you know, uh, part of the reason why, you know, America has gotten to be so fat? You think that's just because the difficulty level is high?

There's a lot of great foods out there. People are sleeping a lot less. I mean, there's a lot of issues that we're starting to get hit really hard with. The phones are becoming a huge issue. I think the phones are impeding our sleep. The food is impeding our sleep. And there's just, there's a ton of issues going on. But you think because people are against that level 10, that's what they're up against kind of on a daily basis. You think that's part of the reason why we've gotten so heavy?

Yeah, it's a bunch of things that sum up to one thing, which is everybody wants a simple solution. Right. They want, you know, they just want a pill. everybody wants a simple solution. They just want a pill. They want a simple solution. And so my answer to that always was, well, okay, move to Tasmania and become a hunter-gatherer. Guaranteed. Guaranteed. Solves the problem every time.

I don't care. You got a thyroid issue. You got whatever your problem. Solve. Every time. Get a spear. Yeah. It solves the problem. Learn how to make a a spear. Yeah. It solves the problem.

Learn how to make a fire. Every time. Solves the problem. Outside of that, you're in an ecosystem where the probability over time is massively stacked against you from a bunch of different things. And all those things form one thing. And so it's not any one thing. It's all those things. It's, you know it's not any one thing, it's all those things. Time constraints play a big issue in that,

but it's the net of all of those things. And the foundational element really gets back to the Industrial Revolution. At the turn of the century, there was no factory workers or no farm workers were heading to the gym after a 16-hour shift to rep it out. They weren't going to do that. They were like, no, I'm going to go sleep. But the Industrial Revolution changed the coefficient of energy. So in that world, the slope of being lean was like this.

In fact, it used to be like a sign of wealth if you were heavy. It was like nobody could be fat. Nobody had enough food. Everybody worked too hard. What happened once the Industrial Revolution hit is the slope turned to this. And so what happens in the real world is for the slope turned to this and so what what happens in the real world is for a lot of people they're slopes like this and so there's a point where they can't even get traction right you know and it's it's just a bunch of things combined

um sugars apart but um that's the confounding thing in the science is like we kind of know it's just sugar right but in the science it's like no no it's this it's that it's this it's a bunch of things right so yeah i think at this point if you were just to pull sugar from people's diets it might have some impact but i don't think it would have a lasting impact uh that would really make a difference even if we even if we really restricted people's sugar i think they're just going to find other things you know there's not a lot of sugar in in uh in doritos you know you're going to find other things that still taste really good Doritos, you know, you're going to find other things that still taste really good.

And that's still, uh, you're going to still going to over consume, you know? Yeah. Um, there's so much to be made nowadays about the gut microbiome and you kind of hear people throwing, uh, some of the, some of this terminology around. Um, do you think that some of the, if there are any like secrets, do you think some of the secrets are in your gut? Do you think that your average person could make some simple changes to help kind of heal their stomach that would maybe really benefit them health-wise and perhaps aesthetically as well? Oh yeah, profound. Absolutely profound. Maybe probably the single

biggest nutritional sort of revelation of the last 10 years is that the gut biome drives things that are sort of crux variables with respect to health and the gut biome is highly modifiable by substrate inputs of food rapidly. And so, yeah, there's, there are just basic things that can be done immediately. Um, but it's not, it's not regardless of your health though, right? I mean, you, you still have to play the game to some respect. You're still going to have to exercise. You're still going to have to have a fit mindset and some at some capacity, right? You can't just can't, can't, or can you? Can you just like completely hack the shit out of all this stuff and have the body that you want or be healthy?

A little bit of both. You'd have to change the sort of the definition of what success is. So the world that I'm in is all about focused on, uh, uh, slowing the rate of aging, preserving the body's window of youth. It's not the same as a bodybuilding goal, although it's very similar, but there's some key differences, but you couldn't look at it as,

as just like a pure bodybuilding goal. Cause then otherwise you're, you're just in a completely like, Hey, you're looking kind of flat, dude. You know what I mean? And I've been out,

I've been in the off track period for like 10 years now. Um, so, uh, you know, I, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna stand next to a guy like you and he looks awesome. Yeah. I'm going to go have pizza. So, well, you got me by, uh, over a decade. You're 53 years old, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Um, but so yes, it's possible to literally hack the shit out of it. It really is. Um, you gotta be realistic about that. Um, exercise is, uh, just an incredibly powerful gene activator. And, um, the, the idea would be if you could just do one thing and you only had 10 minutes for the whole week, what would be the most powerful thing you could do? That's kind of the realm we step into is that.

So what that leaves out is, well, I can't kind of train for bodybuilding or physique enhancement, but I can really get a lot of bang for the buck out of very little time. That's quite doable. I can really get a lot of bang for the buck out of very little time. That's quite doable. And I would argue that you have to create a system where that's absolutely essential because that's what happens to people. But you never want to get away from the core of what you're talking about. You never want to get away from trying to eat healthy and trying to exercise more. You never want to get away from that.

We just have to take those periods where the role dynamics is constricting your time constraints and we want to have a solution for that. That's all. But in terms of, you know, we always want to come back to the well and, and, you know, right. Yeah. Uh, what do you mean by gene activators? So that, uh, exercise is a powerful gene activator. What does that mean? So it's kind of the old way of thinking about the body. And I say old, it's new to most people, but it's already old, is the idea that the human genome runs the show. And that's not really true. Really, a better way of thinking of it is that you kind of have what amounts to an active operating system. And that's the merger of three genomes. It's the merger and the crosstalk between your microbiome genome, your mitochondrial genome, and the human genome. And those three genomes

talk to each other, and they do a lot of things to activate each other. And so one of the big discoveries of the last decade is that we can externally activate human genes with different stimuli. The gut bacteria is one, exercise is another, and chewing is another. Like when you're chewing all these fibers and you said, yeah, I'm going to chew the hell out of these things. It's actually a major gene activator.

So what you're doing is you're actually activating the bones of the face to grow. I have it on my Facebook page. There's a guy who's like 70 years old and grew a 30-year-old face from just chewing really hard. And it's because we chew soft foods now. So there's lots of different gene activators and understanding what they are and when to apply them

is part of this whole thing. Do you think that lifting is important for everybody, like some sort of resistance training? Yeah, absolutely. It's, it's very difficult to replicate, uh, some of the bang for the buck things that you get, uh, out of resistance training, notably the deadlift. So, um, everybody's got a deadlift. You guys hear that? Yeah. Well, it's, it gets back to like, whenever, whenever we push into survival, uh, we tap into the most powerful programming the body has. Anything that pushes you into the realm of dying, that's where all the bang for the buck is. So when you look at, for example, what exercises...

Nothing pushes you into the realm of dying quite like a deadlift. That would be true. What exercises, if there are any, relate to surviving? There's really one primarily that's sprinting because all mammals have to sprint while they die. It just does. So there's a lot of reward based around sprinting. In terms of what keeps the body young, it's a key differentiator. Like old people can't sprint. Young people can. So the longer you can sprint, it's like, hey, you're keeping your body young. It's a key differentiator. Old people can't sprint. Young people can't. The longer you can sprint, it's like, hey, you're keeping your pod young. It's amazing.

Sprinting has a lot of reward in terms of gene activation. So does deadlifting. If you think about it, it makes sense. 10,000 years ago, we were starving. We had to go get something. We had to sprint at the end to kill the darn thing. Then we had to do what? We had to deadlift the stupid thing and carry it back to camp.

Sprinting and deadlifting are at the top of the food chain. Sounds like a CrossFit workout. What type of sprinting do you recommend? Because I know that there's some cardiovascular aspects to some of the training that you do. And it seems like you utilize sprints over maybe perhaps over steady state stuff just because the steady state stuff just takes long but uh you're probably a fan of both i'm not sure uh i hate the steady state stuff um but it's so effective everybody does yeah i just loathe it but but it's when it's done right it's so effective at burning fat work yeah it works

uh the sprints are are done primarily uh as as part of my whole thing to work out very little amount of time in the gym and get the maximum bang for the buck. And so those typically what I'll do is I'll crank the treadmill to its max. I'll crank the speed to its max. And then I'll do intervals of 20 seconds on that in a starved state. And that has a very big impact on the body. Fasted state or starved state? What is it? What's starved mean? Yeah, what's the difference? Yeah, good question. I just, I picture you like on the treadmill and someone's like dangling meat in front of you.

I might try that. It's terrifying. It's terrifying. I might try that. I'm going to get it. The answer to that is that this thing we call fasting, it's just starvation by another name. And one of my early projects actually at Quest was creating foods that replicate fasting or starvation. So when you look at starvation and you look at, well, what's it actually doing? There's actually only three or four things that's activating and you don't need to starve to activate those things. So we get into this whole area of signal amplification where we can take the same things that happen over prolonged fast and we can amplify all of those signal pathways prior to fasting so that we don't have to fast as long. And so a lot of what I do involves

amplifying all those signals prior to. So one really good example is in the keto movement, people take exogenous ketones, they take beta-hydroxybutyrate. There's really good research now that shows that you get a much better effect by combining butyrate with beta-hydroxybutyrate in vivo. Meaning that if you can get the body to spin up butyrate and make it abundantly, body to spin up butyrate and make it abundantly, then on top of that, if there's beta-hydroxybutyrate, then all the signal pathway activation and all of the DNA transcription that we want to happen is just better. And so I don't have to be as starved, but I can get the same benefits. When you're in this quote-unquote starved state, it's my understanding that there are certain things you can still eat, right? Without getting, I guess you'd say, kicked out of it.

What does that look like? So you can actually mimic, long before there was a fasting mimic diet, this was stuff that actually over at Quest that we were looking at. You can actually mimic all the control points that drive the benefits of fasting without having to fast. So a good example is what's called HDAC inhibition. And so basically, long story short, your body has to make proteins. Proteins are molecular machines. They are literal machines. And the way your body makes those machines is just makes them when it needs them, just makes them. And so the way it does that, it goes into your DNA, copies the DNA, runs that over to the ribosome, punches out proteins that it needs and then uses them.

Well, what happens is the way that DNA... DNA has to serve two purposes. It has to serve the purpose of data. It has to provide data and instructions. But it's also got to serve the purpose of structure. Because DNA is just computing in real space. So we're in computers, we use binary. DNA uses quaternary. It's just computing.

That's what it is. But if we brought computer programs into real space, you'd have to shrink them down because it's huge. DNA molecules are huge. So one of the considerations for DNA is the way that it's wrapped and packaged in bundles. And at the smallest level, the way that DNA is packaged is it's a little ball of beads, and the beads are called histones. And what happens is the DNA wraps twice around each bead. And so when it's serving the purpose of structure,

the DNA is wrapped tight to the histone bead. And so what happens as you get older is more and more of these little segments of code wrapped to the bead stay locked, and they don't get read. And so what happens is as we're making copies, if that's not available to be read, it just skips it. So one of the ways you can retard

the aging process is to flip the switch on the bead to get the DNA to unlock so it can be read. And butyrate does that. Butyrate acts as what's called a class 3 HDAC inhibitor. It's called histone deacetylation and activates that. So by activating histone deacetylation, butyrate works in conjunction with beta-hydroxybutyrate. They both do the same thing, and boom, you get a better effect. How do we end up getting butyrate? In this case, you would take it as a supplement or through food? Yeah, no, I would never take butyrate as a supplement, primarily because butyrate is made in the body. There's four different pathways butyrate can be made. The one that we want is what's called the pyruvate pathway. The problem you get into is there's other pathways by which butyrate can be synthesized. That's an old supplement I haven't heard about

in a long time. Butyrate? Pyruvate. Pyruvate. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's old. That's really old. That's like 20, 30 years old. Yeah. Yeah. It's gaining traction again. A friend of mine used to make

a cardio supplement. I don't know. Back in the day when there was like chromium picolinate and vanadyl sulfate. Oh, my gosh. Wow.

It was in hot stuff, probably. Yeah. It was all thrown in the hot stuff. Yeah. Everything. Where the heck were we on? Oh, Everything. Where the heck were we on? Oh, so, where the heck were we on? We're talking about fasting and...

And butyrate. Yeah, and if there's any actual eating going on, like you're taking supplements. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, the best way to make butyrate is to get your body to make it by the foods that you're eating. And so, the way to make butyrate is you eat very specific substrates that spin up the bacteria that make the butyrate producing species.

And so most of those things are in the family of fibrous carbs, long chain oligosaccharides, inulins, cellulose, hemicellulose. Those are things that feed butyrate-producing species. And then what they do is they make butyrate in the gut, and that makes you optimally healthy, as healthy as you can get. Right. Yeah. That's fascinating. What about fats? I've heard before from some people that you can eat fats and your body doesn't really detect it as a meal, but I don't even really know what that means. Is there any truth to that, or is that just some weird thing I heard? It doesn't detect it as a meal, but I don't even really know what that means. Is that, is there any truth to that? Or is that just some weird thing I heard?

Ah, it doesn't detect it as a meal. Well, it's like, it doesn't really cause like an insulin response and things like that. So I don't really know. Like if you were just to have like, let's just say like coconut oil or even just like heavy cream, um, it would provide you, I guess with some calories, but it doesn't really mess with your insulin, your it doesn't really mess with your insulin, your glucose. So yeah. Well, so one of the benefits of the keto diet, there's a couple benefits to the keto diet. One is that you're limiting protein intake. And as a result,

you're accidentally limiting the amino acid methionine, which is needed to go, needed to grow, need methionine. Methionine is the stop codon when you're making proteins. It's the word stop. The other is that you're not making insulin. And the number one thing that ages you after 45 is insulin, because insulin is hitting the IIS, IGF pathway, the mTOR pathway. And so that's really what's promoting aging. So fats don't do that in general, but when you get into specific types of fats, then that's a whole discussion in terms of like, you know, like what they do and what's optimal and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. My own preference is I use keto-like patterns. I don't do keto diets, but I use things from keto. And so I only have so much room for fats in my diet.

And I prefer the omega-3 fats because they really, the long chain fats are not burned off in the mitochondria. Usually the very long chain fats, they have to go into the peroxisomes. The peroxisomes are just kind of the house cleaners of the cell. And so aging is related to peroxisome density as much or more than mitochondrial density drives aging. So the way that you can drive peroxome proliferation is through those types of fats. Are the omega-3s in some fashion maybe just easier to burn? They burn off a little quicker? No, they're actually harder to burn.

They're actually harder to burn because they require all kinds of transporters and all this stuff, where the MCTs don't require transporters. But the difference is where they're burned off and what they touch on when they're burned off. So the omega-3s are sort of unique in that they affect carnitine transporters. And you have some very specialized carnitine transporters. And you have some very specialized carnitine transporters in the brain that basically only work with the long chain fats. And the presence of those in the brain is extremely important. The other thing is that, again, they touch on

peroxisome proliferation. The other thing is they drive, uh, uncoupling protein three, which is the uncoupling protein found in muscle. And so one of the things we look at now to, um, kind of hack fat is to induce fat browning and fat browning is a very real thing. And, uh, one of the adjuncts that we can use to drive that are omega threes. Um, will carnitine help your body release fat? Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I know there's a lot of debate on that out there. It's just, I'm just weighing in my opinion, 100%. Right. But again, like kind of back to what this whole discussion is about, like taking a carnitine supplement potentially could help, but probably just going the omega-3 route would produce a better result?

I would take both. Okay. Me? Yeah. Cover all your bases? Well, there's a doctor out there. Forget his name, but he's like the world's authority on carnitine. And this guy's brilliant. He really makes a great case for carnitine being essential as a supplement.

How important is our sleep? Put it this way. So intermittent fasting is a big thing. It's something everybody's jumped onto. The reason they've jumped onto that is because there's all these great benefits from it. It prolongs lifespan and all these great things. Every single thing spun up during intermittent fasting is actually activated during sleep, but it's better. So autophagy is an example. So autophagy is house cleaning. It's just, it's the trash truck comes along, takes all the cellular junk and dumps it out. So autophagy is initiated during sleep and

the regular presence of autophagy during sleep keeps you young. So when you see rock stars that look like rock stars, it's because they're drinking alcohol, disrupting sleep, and they're not getting into autophagy during sleep. So before I would do anything, hacking peak human sleep is the first thing I would do. It's everything. What are maybe two or three things that somebody who's listening right now could do

to help improve their sleep? A lot of people have a really, really hard time. What are some things you three things that somebody who's listening right now could do to help improve their sleep? A lot of people have a really, really hard time. What are some things you think that would really help? The number one thing is to eliminate hypoxia during sleep. And this probably affects 70% to 80% of the population, even affects kids. And it's just really getting your airway open while you're sleeping. And it's something as simple as a breathe right to do that. But when you look at what accelerates age.

Like a nose strip? Yeah. And that's a whole universe you get into. There's appliances. There's all kinds of things that you can look at. I tape my mouth shut. Do you think that's effective? Yeah, what happens.

Yeah, it is effective. What do you notice when you mouth tape? I just sleep through the night a little bit better. Um, I tend to wake up and pee 5,000 times a night. Um, but I haven't tried to breathe right strips. Somebody recommended that to me too. Um, the combination might be really good, but I, I just, I ended up drooling a lot and my mouth is open and I, I'm sure at some point I, I, when I was heavier, I think I had sleep apnea and I, I think a lot of that has a lot and my mouth is open and I'm sure at some point I, when I was heavier, I think I had sleep apnea and I, I think a lot of that has a lot of my sleep quality has improved. I think I'm getting into deeper sleep, but, uh, you know, for a while I was waking up

kind of fatigued and, uh, I was like, uh, you know, and I talked to Ron and Ron was actually the one who kind of pointed me in that direction. So you think, uh, a, a breathe right strip though, just on someone's nose can be, be something that can help quite a bit. Oh yeah. Again, you know, we're just, we're, we're not looking to, you know, split the atom here. We're just, we're just looking for incremental percent improvements wherever we can get them, but we want them in the areas that give bang for the buck. So sleep is a huge one. And, and on that, so there's a whole school of thought on this. It gets to, um, it gets to the parasy It gets to the parasympathetic nervous system activation during sleep and hypoxia.

Basically, long story short, when you have very high sort of chronic nitric oxide levels and hypoxia going on during sleep, you're going to wake up and pee a lot. And so, yeah, getting that under control is probably control, like is like probably the number one thing. And the, the fact that you just started sleeping a little better by just taping the mouth. Yeah. You're right in the neighborhood. So you just keep incrementally adding onto that. Yeah.

That's something I need to work on. Cause I still wake up a lot and, uh. Same here. You know, I, I don't know. My sleep is so strange. I, you know, I know everyone's got the eight hour magic thing going on but like for some reason uh eight hours makes me feel more fatigued and that that could be just i'm not that used to it but for some reason the six hour mark is like a magic thing for me you know when i wake up

between a six and seven hour uh of sleep i i wake up and i feel like ready to go and i don't really notice any any problems with it. Occasionally, I'll need to get a little bit more sleep. Like every once in a while, I'll just, you know, sit down and take a nap. But that happens like maybe once a week, every other week, something like that. What is your thoughts on how long people should be sleeping approximately? I'm sure everybody's a little different. Yeah, well, actually, I wanted to ask you.

So that's interesting with, you know the the intensity that you train with um just just training as hard as you train that you're you're you're just your money with six hours so you don't feel when you up your intensity you don't feel the need to sleep more up your intensity you don't feel the need to sleep more no i i uh and i i very rarely feel fatigued like i i feel i feel pretty good most of the time um there's something there's something like that that has always been kind of in me till i i always i always want to get up i don't know you know i even when i was a kid it's almost like uh i remember and maybe it's like part of the upbringing or something but i remember like because i was the youngest i always had to go to bed earlier and i always felt like i was missing out on everything so i had like you know severe fomo going on i could

hear my brother's still up and i could hear everybody else was still up i hated that yeah and i had to go to bed and i'm like i just want to be up i want to be up i'm wondering if uh for whatever reason at that eight hour mark um you're hitting your like second cycle of REM sleep and you're trying to snap out of it and you feel like shit right that could be like a weird time and that actually i think that actually is part of the case i think that uh i'm probably starting starting to get into like really truly a proper amount of sleep and it's making me feel drowsy. It's almost like a drug. So one school of thought on that,

and it might be something you can just play with and see, is that you're, particularly because of the way you're training, you have very high serum cortisol levels. Normally what happens during sleep is you go to sleep, and then the body eventually gets into burning fat, spins glucogen up,

and you burn some fat while you're sleeping. But when you have really high serum cortisol, you go to sleep and then you dump all this cortisol in the blood, which is essentially adrenic in nature. And so that happens right about the time where you should have been getting into like autophagy and all this sort of deep sleep. And then boom, you're up. You're like, ah, hit it, train again. Hit it.

Train again. So there are people who've had really good success with T3, endogenous T3, around solving that problem. So that'd be something to look at. Yeah. Yeah. But I've also, you know, came from a long period of time of really not sleeping. So I also wonder if that's, you know, part of it. When I was heavier, I just, you know, sleeping was just not in the cards for me. I'd sleep two hours at a time if I was lucky.

What are you taking at bedtime? Nothing, usually. I have magnesium. I got some zinc. I've been playing around with that for a while, but I haven't really messed with anything else. I would try oleamide and GABA together, those two. There's this internet mythology out there that GABA doesn't pass the brain blood barrier, and you hear it a lot. So

I actually went and researched it, and that's not true at all. So there were a number of studies done on GABA. Half of them showed that it didn't pass the blood brain barrier. Half of them showed that it did. The seminal study that's most quoted actually used rats, and the way that the experiment was constructed wasn't really necessarily very good. So there's actually research that does support the fact that it does cross the blood-brain barrier. And I just noticed when I take it, I definitely feel it.

When I take GABA, it's hard to breathe. I almost start sneezing or yawning because I'm gasping for air. It's weird. Yeah. I don't know. Oh, really? Yeah. It's, it's really uncomfortable. Maybe you got like a little allergic reaction. I think so. Yeah. Really? It's really weird. Yeah. But what I was going to ask you is I think Ron Penna was the first one that brought it up, but he was talking about sleep debt. Are we able to pay off our sleep debt from? I'm going to pass on that one. I, you know. I've seen a little bit of research that we can't, and I just haven't studied it enough to be able to answer it one way or the other. It's really odd. Yeah. I mean, the way that I would probably conceptualize that would get to sort of a damage accrual at a cellular level,

senescent cells, and can we flush senescent cells? Can we flush glycated proteins and all these things? Those are things we can do, and those are things that shouldn't have been there if we'd been sleeping anyway, so I might approach it from that angle. In terms of sleep debt and all that, it's one of those things where, I don't know. Cool. His name is Matthew Walker. He has that awesome book, Why We Sleep.

And this is why I was thinking about Mark. But it doesn't really make sense for him. But saying that in the last two hours of our sleep is usually when we get our last two cycles of non-REM and REM sleep. And that can account for up to 60% to 90% of our rest from one night of sleep. So that's why it's interesting that Mark said he can get through with six and feel great, but then the last two makes him feel like shit. Yeah, what I would add on to that, the really critical thing is gene activation and when it's occurring. So the clock runs everything.

The body's diurnal in nature nature and things happen at very specific times. So the most important genes involved in keeping the body young activate in that window of time. And if you're missing that, then they're not going off on a regular basis. So that's the really critical thing. AMPK, the AMPK signal pathway

should be going off around that time. Which, by the way, with AMPK activation, I should probably define that. Yeah. You're really smart. No, no. It's more autism and Tourette's.

By the way, I haven't gone, shit! But, don't ask me to mail a letter. You'd be waiting forever. I'd be like, I got a stamp? How do I even get a stamp?

I don't know. I can't do this. How do people mail stuff? I don't know. Do I get a post office? I'd be sitting in the corner with my hands out of my pockets, kind of like this, going on. So our body has a couple of very, very, very, very important signal pathways.

The one that regulates growth, the growth-centric pathways, are what's called the mTOR pathway, the IIS, IGF pathway. And really the way to conceptualize all these things is we use these fancy words, but really all you're talking about here is energy. That's what you're talking about. And so all of these things are just kinases. That's what they are. And they phosphloriate. So you're talking about energy being blown off. And so it's very similar to the idea of a car. Like the more that you burn off hot gas in your car, high octane gas, the shorter the engine life. That's the way to think of it. And then when your car, if you have a flex fuel system and your car runs on the electric part of the car, then you preserve the life of the battery. So AMPK is kind of like the life, AMPK is like your flex fuel system. It's kind of like when the car is not running on the engine,

it's running on the battery power instead. But so AMPK is a protein. It's an energy sensor that sits in your cell. It's what's called a heterotrimeric protein. It sits in the cell membrane, has these little three prongs like this. And the bottom one is sensitive to adenosine monophosphate. And so as your levels spool down of ATP, ADP, and then you get to ATP, this thing fires. And when this thing fires, it activates entire sets of genes that are involved in keeping the body young. The principal ones are what are called the sirtuin genes. And these activate all these other cool things like autophagy that keep our bodies young.

So the thing about AMPK activation is that it seems to be a master regulator of lifespan and youth. You don't want it going off in a state of hypoxia because then it's a cancer promoter. So if you're in sleep and you're in a state of chronic hypoxia and the AMPK pathway is firing, now it's oncogenic. Now you're promoting cancer. So that's why it's so important to get hypoxia during sleep fixed. And then when you do, you get 180 degree effect. Now what happens is you're promoting lifespan in you. Are there some good tools out there to help, you know, kind of track your sleep or to know more about like, you know, like, cause you're talking about improving your sleep. Ron has suggested to me the aura ring, I think it's called.

And so I ordered one. I haven't tried it yet. Aura Ring, I think it's called. And so I ordered one. I haven't tried it yet. But are you familiar with some different ways of whether it's testing your blood or what are some ways that people can learn more about how they are sleeping? Yeah. So first of all, there's some interesting apps out there.

There's like some snoring apps that are, you can just put them on your iPhone. That's probably the first thing I would do. And you got to plug your battery in. It's going to suck your juice dry. You snore really loud. Just plays it back for you, but amplified, right? Yeah. And it posts it online, marks it up with tags.

Yeah. Well, there's an app like that because for some weird reason, my brother and I both do it, but we talk in our sleep a lot. It's kind of creepy. Yeah. So there's an app. What do you say? Talking trash? My girlfriend says I'm very positive and like super motivating.

In your sleep? Really? I don't know where it comes from. You're very beautiful. You're very beautiful. Yeah. Uh, but there's like apps where like you can, you know, set phone by your bedside and as soon as it hears your voice, it starts recording,

so that way you can play back what the hell you just said in the morning. I was going to do it, but I freaked out because what if it's someone else's voice or it's like, move or you're going to die. You sound like a demon or something. Yeah, exactly. So I would imagine the snoring ones may be something like that and will equally scare me as bad. It's just getting weird.

Yeah. It sounds terrifying. Yeah. This is SnoringApp. SnoringApp's pretty cool. It's actually pretty cool because it sort of extrapolates and tells you when you're in hypoxia and all this other cool stuff. So I'd say get the data first.

That's a pretty cool thing. That sounds interesting, though. Yeah. And then, actually, at my body hack seminar that's coming up in October that you guys are going to, there's going to be a guy that has, did Daniel tell you about the suit? No. There's a pretty cool, it's like a wetsuit or some weird thing you wear. I don't know. It's cool stuff.

There's going to be some sleep guys there. It's like a CO2 thing. Yeah. He talked to me about it at Gold's one morning. Okay. Yeah. that and some other cool cool kind of sleep stuff this area packing sleep put on a suit and just pass out that's what i want to do yeah yeah that's just a sleeping bag that would be cool

that would be actually really portable sleep suit yeah put it on anywhere i always thought that your your bed i mean first of, I think your bed should like rock back and forth, like a baby's crib, you know? Yeah. And then secondly, I always thought that your bed should like, you know, because it's always trying to get like the whole room dark and that's always a giant pain in the ass, but it's like, why doesn't your room just have like this, like a fuck, or your bed just have a big old tent around it?

Okay. So I'm building. Zip that bitch up. Yeah. No, I'm building a Faraday cage for my bed. Oh, there we go. Yeah. So actually this is kind of, so it's like weird stuff, right? But it's not, it's so there are, why is there handcuffs in each corner? I don't understand what the hell that is. It's weird. There's a swing on here too. Chain, swing. Furry padded swing.

Swing. Furry, padded swing. You can get sheets now that have copper fiber woven into the sheets. And so what you can do essentially is just create a little cage around your bed where our EM doesn't get in at all. And I've been tracking on some people who have done this and they say they have the most vivid dreams they've ever had in their life. That's awesome. Yeah. Being completely isolated from all EM. So very interesting very interesting stuff i'm putting this together for myself like blocks out like uh

cell phone stuff everything all that stuff everything yeah everything and where i live in irvine um good grief it's uh you know i mean i must be it's like sitting in the middle of a microwave what about those uh heavy blankets have you seen some stuff on that? Like, they're heavy blankets. They're weighted. 10, 20 pounds. Have you ever seen that? What is this? For, like, people that have, like, I forgot what it's called, but, like, shaky leg syndrome or whatever. Oh, restless leg syndrome. There you go.

Restlessness or whatever. And it's just the extra added weight makes them feel better and you supposedly pass out right away. That's actually most likely a gut biome issue. Most likely. Everything probably is, huh? Not everything, a lot of things.

Like, for example, autism, Huntington's, well, gluten-sensitive. But a lot of these things can't, autism and some of these diseases, they can't really be reversed, can they? Or in some cases. I think that you can ameliorate some of the symptoms, but you're getting into an area that is kind of brand new. And, you know, I don't know that there are necessarily practitioners or, you know, tests that have been designed to do it. But when you, the research is now that it substantiates, well, okay, so this bacteria

is missing in, you know, kids with autism. And so, and, and there is, I think there is some stuff with, uh, different types of, uh, uh, bacterial therapy that actually works. Yeah. Yeah. Um, what, what about, uh, something like acne? Does that have some, you know, something to do with the gut microbiome maybe, or bacteria? Yeah, quite a bit.

Yeah, quite a bit. So, uh, a couple of things that drive it. One is just simply that you don't have the bacteria to digest dairy in your gut. I had that for years. Like for years, I'd get this horrible acne, like whenever I had dairy. And then once I figured out how to tune the gut, it just completely went away. And now I can drink milk. It wouldn't bother me a bit. Yeah. You and I were talking about, I've been lactose intolerant. I can handle, I guess I have some tolerance for it. I can handle cheese. Um, but milk, you know, it would be a no go for sure. Every once in a while, pizza will get the better of me. Uh,

ice cream, you know, it's not, not a great idea. Um, how, how, uh, how are we going to work on this? What are we going to do to this, uh, nonstop flatulence that I get from I get from drinking milk? Yeah. I have a chapter of this in my book and really it gets to the idea that we've been looking at the problem in reverse. We thought the problem was the foods and then the problem is actually the bacteria. It's easy to kind of verify. So when you see babies, they get their first dose of bacteria from mom. It's the bifidobacteria that makes all the enzymes that break the milk down. When you sterilize the milk, kill the bacteria, give the milk to the baby, baby gets gassy, gets indigestion. So it's the bacteria that digests the milk. And when you have issues with things like glutens or milk or these things, one of the culprits is that you're missing very

specific strains in the gut and you can spin those strains up. And there's a small but very promising area of research that looks at really training the ability to handle different types of carbs into the body. And it's a big thing I do in the book, and I think it's... I personally have benefited from it, and I used to just couldn't handle dairy, and now no problem. So if someone has a gluten intolerance or uh yeah I guess celiac disease I don't know exactly what the difference is is there anything they can do to reverse that uh yeah so there's there's uh there's data in the research that shows now that the symptoms of uh for sure gluten intolerance I'm not don't

quite remember if celiac disease would be included in that. But yeah, there's research that shows that the symptoms are almost completely reversed through gut bacteria therapy. And really, again, it gets down to that the bacteria were not present that you needed to digest and break down certain foods. Which gets into, again, coming back to the idea of the genomes, digestion of a lot of different kinds of carbs. It's not even in the human genome to begin with. It's the bacteria that code the enzymes to break those things down. So when you have the right bacteria, the issues with certain foods seem to go away. And how long do you think something like that

would take? Almost immediately. Oh, shit. Yeah. Very rapidly, like usually a week. Wow. Yeah. In fact, you guys are familiar with this, I'm sure. You've seen people that started eating healthy, and they got healthy, and they ate good, and they got lean, and then all of a sudden they ate some crap and they felt nauseated. You know that feeling? Yeah, it happened Sunday. That's a gut bacteria response. So what's going on is you colonized your gut, you colonized it the right direction, you ate a bunch of crap, you spun up the wrong species, crowd out the good guys good guys die off

break open they spill endotoxins which is like a polysaccharide which is a bacterial cell wall fragment spill it into the gut LPS is a signal opens the gut up gets into the bloodstream and you feel nauseated it's the exact same thing that happens when you have a fever so what happens your body heats up kills bacteria off you feel kind of nauseated, then you're better. So that's a gut bacteria thing. Wow. Yeah. Are there some things we can do, uh, to kind of prepare us for sleep, uh, via food? You know, it can obviously like all the things you're talking about would probably help in general. Yeah. Uh, but is there something, um, that you've seen people eat before bed or don't eat before bed or anything

that can kind of help people sleep? Yeah, there's a few things. One thing is you once you get how to do this and how to sort of you know target bacteria, you learn to be really careful about certain foods that spin up different species because as they proliferate while you're sleeping they're making B vitamins. And it happened to me the other night. I did it on an accident. I had a Cobb salad and I woke up at two in the morning like,

ah, I know better. Son of a bitch. Yeah. So once you get this, and everybody's different, you have to experiment with the fibers that do it. But one of the things is once you figure out the fibers that are highly energetic in you, it's stay away from them around bedtime because they're really powerful. And the way we discovered this was anecdotally in my Veep system, we would do these engagements with like cities and we'd have a thousand people at once doing the program. And then we'd get these emails like, hey, your

program's keeping me up. What are you talking about? Over the years, we kind of figured out, oh, wow. It's the gut bacteria spinning up at night from substrates. Then once we made the change, that started to happen. There's that. The other thing around bedtime is whey protein. Whey protein's going to drive what's called the

large neutral amino acids and all the things that help promote tryptophan and it's going to help you sleep. So whey protein is really good. And I don't know, you know, that gets into kind of the different, you know, your kung fu sucks, mine's good kind of school of like, you know, plant proteins, whey proteins. Whey protein is highly functional.

It's highly useful as a functional tool. How do we counteract ice cream? What would be the counterbalance for ice cream? The good thing about ice cream is there's actually some positives in it and they have to do with some of the inherent properties of dairy. The first thing I would say with ice cream is that it's a really functional tool during fat loss. As crazy as that sounds. So increasing dairy... I'm listening.

So it gets into when. Increasing dairy during active fat loss actually spins down weight regain from that. And one of the reasons is that you're inhibiting angiotensin, which later on down the road... Does calcium play a role in the... Calcium plays a huge role. But it's just there's really good research here showing that aggressive fat loss diets, when you put dairy in them, the rebound is much less. So during active fat loss, you can just kind of set up like a cheat meal that includes ice cream. And it's going to do a lot of beneficial things.

It's going to actually give you reward signals while you're doing that. So the first thing is just the way you time it and all those types of things. That's sort of setting up as a cheat meal. So the reward signal, sometimes we've, more recently we've heard people talk about it

being like a bad thing. You hear people saying like, it's kind of done too much. But in this case, we're utilizing it to our advantage. Yeah, you have to. During active aggressive fat loss, you have to spin down several parameters that activate post-fat loss. The more you spin them down, once you get to where you want to be, the less of a problem you have later.

There's some fascinating research now with regard to sets of genes that are activated from fat loss. So you have this kind of polar opposite problem. During active fat loss, all these genes get activated that are highly beneficial, really healthy, great stuff. And then what happens in the maintenance phase is the exact opposite happens. So entire sets of genes get activated that are pro-inflammatory, pro-weight gain, and the opposite thing happens. So you have to turn those genes down. And they're sex-specific. And those genes have to do with things like collagen remodeling and a whole bunch of other things.

So being conscious of like, okay, getting to your peak is hard, very hard, but much harder is spinning down the response that comes in that four weeks after active fat loss. And that's kind of, we talked a little bit about that. It's a critical period. Right. And what you see with people over time is they can't get lean. So people who have been really lean in the past as they keep going to the fat loss, where you really see this as an MMA. MMA is an accelerated petri dish for this. So you'll see people that that you know uh can't make weight all of a sudden right you know and it's because you've been through 30 weight cuts by the time you're 35 and what you've

done is the body has built up an adaptive defense to fat loss and this is what most people in the real world experience over time and so what you get into is this thing where they get down the road they can't get lean anymore and it's from all these sort of cumulative effects of going to the fat loss fall. Their metabolism is like no longer efficient enough to handle what they're trying to do. Is that kind of what's happening? It's more actively genetic remodeling of the mechanisms that will allow you to drop fat in the first place. And so fat loss is just starvation by another name. And the body has a,

the body's response to chronic starvation is to make it more difficult to lose fat. That's the body's response. And so, yeah, but it's a survival thing. Yeah. What about,

you know, we've had many people and I've dealt with many people and I just, I love the ability to help people and educate them more. But, you know, how do we help people that have just kind of chronic stomach issues? They got like IBS or, you know, they try to eat something just a little different than normal and their stomach is getting messed up. I'm sure it highly depends on exactly what they have diagnosis-wise and everything, but what are some things that you've seen be effective to kind of help people that really have some stomach issues? Well, the first thing is don't take probiotics because what you see a lot of is SIBO. You see people with good

bacteria in the wrong place. And so what's going on is we cannot 100% control where those things open up in the gut. You can have very beneficial bacteria, but it's just in the wrong place in the gut. Now you've got chronic gut issues that are very difficult to deal with. I've seen a lot of that. I think we're actually in the middle of an epidemic of that because probiotics have spun up over the last few years. You see commercials for it all the time for the yogurts and the different things. Yeah, so that's number one.

Number two is you've got to take an active period of restoring the gut lining, the gut mucus layer. And that's really endemic to total body health. Like a healthy gut mucus layer is found, it's your skin. You know, like if I took my skin off, right, and then I put a piece of steak on top of it, I'd have problems. Inside your body,

I've got 2 meters of surface area here. I've got 30 meters inside my skin. If you wear down that, the gut mucus lining, it's not solid. It's a gel. If you wear that down, you've got food right next to it. You've got every kind of problem imaginable. And so fixing the gut mucus layer is kind of like a first

priority thing. And it's kind of a complex question. What you'll see is what are called FODMAP diets, where you're staying away from the foods that really trigger the bacteria that are causing the issue. My own personal theory with that is that's the problem in reverse. You actually need hormetic amounts of those foods to build it back up. Kind of like with lactose, I'm sure in the absence of milk, in the absence of lactose, we're probably going to have a lactose problem because that's what happened to me. I wasn't,

I wasn't born with this intolerance. I stopped drinking milk at a certain point when I was like a teenager, I started kind of learning more about bodybuilding style diets. And I was like, I don't really need milk. It doesn't really fit into some of the things I'm doing. And so I got rid of it. And then when I went to go back to it,

like a year later, that's when everything, you know, kind of got triggered. So having small doses of some of these things to maybe like inoculate yourself would be probably a good idea. Absolutely. It's like a vaccine. Yeah.

What it is is it's hormetic doses. So when you start with very, very little small doses and then you build up. The key is what's called fermentation. And so for every hundred grams of carbs you take in, you'll ferment 30 grams of bacteria. So it's a question of what? So you can actually steer that the direction you want to go. But the trick is to start small. There's a couple of bacteria that are critical to the gut mucus layer. One is thecobacteria prosonica and the other is acromantia mucinilfa. And those bacteria create a healthy gut mucus layer. So one of the ways you can drive those is food substrates. Acromantia, things like apple skins work really well, inulins, things like bananas, that's why we do in my Transcend thing, we do semi-green bananas just to spin those back up, but you have to start very small,

very small amounts. Andrew, you've had a lot of gut issues and stuff, and he was just kind of mentioning that he thinks people should stay away from probiotics. And this was the other part that he kind of mentioned there. Why don't you kind of describe to him some of the things that have kind of gone on over the years? Well, it was funny because when we first started, we were talking about like how Mark's pooping a bunch and, you know, how it's like a baby or whatever. or whatever. Um, you also had mentioned that for fat loss, you know, it tends to happen a lot cause you're, you're, you know, a lot of fats exiting your body and it's going any which way it can. Um, for me, I have a really hard time maintaining weight. And, uh, my buddy, Chris, that just walked out right now, um, we were on the road and, you know, in hotels and stuff. And he just looks over at me and he's like, do you just shit five times a day every day i was like pretty much you know sometimes i'll poop two three times before i even get here

since i was a kid i just like i've always had a hard time with my stomach this or that would always irritate my stomach and i'd be running to the bathroom a doctor said i had ibs but he just wanted to give me anti-depression pills and stuff. And I'm like, no, like I'm fine. I just, I go to the bathroom a lot. A lot of stuff irritates my stomach. We can start there. What kind of stuff? Just, I mean, for sure milk will destroy me. If I try something new, it will annihilate me something new like what um uh shoot put me on the spot uh i have a really hard time with vegetables i'll just start there sure um broccolis and stuff i'm bloated gassy um really uncomfortable yeah so i kind of stay away from that stuff and i just

right now i'm eating a lot of chicken and rice but so right now i'm eating a lot of chicken and rice if i switch to uh like monster mash and eat bison and rice my stomach will go through like two weeks of like straight diarrhea it's weird and then uh this past sunday mark said i can have two cheat meals and i ended up losing weight like i was trying to pack on as many calories as i could and i ended up losing weight. I was trying to pack on as many calories as I could, and I ended up losing weight. So people listening are probably thinking I'm an asshole because I ate ice cream, I ate pizza, hamburgers, fries, everything I can get, and I still just shit it all out. It seems like...

What a great problem. Right? I know, but I'm trying to get bigger, so it's a problem for me. Shoot, I just lost my train of thought. Um, yeah, my, my problem is I feel like I can't hang on to nutrients long enough. Um, you're saying like a baby, as soon as they eat, they poop. I almost feel like that. Like every morning is an emergency. I have to get to the bathroom. Um,

and then sometime throughout the day it comes out again while I'm here. And then when I get home it's another explosion this is going to be a real problem when you get old I know it's not like we've got to get it under control it just depends so a couple things with that there's a thing called energy harvest and are you familiar with it?

no but we just said energy coffee will kill me too it irritates you? Yeah, yeah. I have to go to the bathroom really quickly. Oh, interesting. When's the last time you had your inflammatory markers looked at? I'm just curious.

The next time will probably be the first time. Oh, okay. All right, yeah. So just getting some blood work done would be good? Well, yeah. I think in your case, you get with a good doctor and just take a look at some of your inflammatory markers because I was pretty good with what you were saying right up until what you just said. And now I'm a little curious if you have some IBS going on

and you definitely want to get with a doctor over that. So really, what we're talking about here is an inflammatory condition and it's in the gut lining, in the gut layer. So the enterocytes, colonocytes, you know, all those cells in there. And so there's a few things that can be going on there. But if it's sort of inflammatory driven, IBS driven, yeah, then you're kind of in that needing to restore the gut lining thing. The problem people have when they try to do that is they eat way too much. Yeah.

Can you get on mic a little bit? Oh, sorry. Yeah. Sorry. You're good. Because the bacteria aren't there to digest those things. Yeah. And the gut lining's not there.

So again, it just comes back to the, I'm putting salami on my skin that I've fileted off. You know, doesn't feel great. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so the, so the trick is just start with little pinches of things and see how you do and then build up to two and then three and then four. I mean, that's, that's my advice, but I wouldn't, you know, I'd give it to the doctor first before you do anything on that.

That is something that we have kind of messed with a little bit where, you know, we, we, we cut your food down a little bit like the amounts the frequency was still pretty good yeah and that seemed to help a little bit yeah no it absolutely did um i was just going back thinking when i was a kid my parents you know you know uh typical mexican parents big old plate of food and i just i wouldn't want to eat it because like it would gross me out and like no you gotta eat your food so after my dad got pissed off um he just sent me to the doctor and the doctor was like yeah just let him eat whatever he wants whenever he wants and that oh my god yeah that that wrinkles that well it it turned into me

just wanting to eat like hamburgers pizza and like cereal and that's kind of like what my diet was for a majority of my youth unfortunately but i still didn't gain any weight like i've been skinny my whole life interesting thing is i've run into a lot of people that are like andrew that have had kind of a and i i ate a lot of junk when i was a kid too but i got into lifting when i was young and so it changed everything but i know a lot of people that when they switch over to healthy foods they really have a hard time they try to switch over to healthy foods, they really have a hard time. They try to switch over to eating more protein. They try to switch over to a bodybuilding diet or a diet that's more conducive towards gaining muscle

and keeping the fat off. But their body's used to frosted flakes and French fries and stuff like that. So he's not the first person I've come across. I've come across a lot of people that are like that. It's Really weird. It's really kind of a strange thing. On the one hand, I'm thinking this is kind of fantastic.

But then on the other hand, obviously, yeah, no fun. But yeah, that's kind of what it sounds like. And I'm just, look, I'm not a doctor, so I don't take it as that. But it kind of sounds like a chronic inflammatory issue. The other thing that I was thinking was it could also get to what's called a specific enterotype. A enterotype is just your unique gut bacteria profile. But there are certain types of bacteria that affect your harvest of energy from food where you just pass more through the gut. And so there's experiments where animals, they take

bacteria out of the gut and they're germ-free versus animals that aren't germ-free. They have to eat 30% more just to maintain weight. Yeah. So that kind of is sort of a secondary thing that it might think. But the fact that you can't handle large classes of different types of carbohydrates like milk carbohydrates and fruit carbohydrates probably says that, that yeah you've got kind of a chronic inflammatory issue going on there you look really healthy though um you don't look unhealthy and so that's what i would do is just i'd start with um maybe like some phenol powder and just just start with that and just see how you do on that red powder you suggested to me yeah start with some phenol powder and just start with that and just see, just see how you do

on that and see, you know, it might even upset you a little bit, but just keep going until you don't feel any upset and then double it. Is that like a, I'm sorry if this is way off, but is that like a digestive enzyme? No, no, no. It's just phenols. So would something like that be beneficial for me? Like a digestive enzyme? Yeah.

It may possibly, you could try a broad swath enzyme you know you could you could certainly try it um and see if it works uh there's actually you might even try also with that uh there's an enzyme called serrapeptase and in europe i believe it's sold as a drug it's a really powerful anti-inflammatory what it does is um it's it's it's just really. What it does is it's just really good at spinning down inflammation. It's not that expensive. I would try that.

The powder that he suggested to me, I can show it to you. It's on Amazon. It actually tastes pretty good too. It's not bad. It's basically just berries. It's a bunch of fruits and berries and everything all combined together. yeah it's like it's basically just berries it's a bunch of okay cool yeah it's a shit ton of fruits

and berries and everything all all kind of combined yeah together it sounds good yeah i'm down to try anything at this point uh the questions popping in or has there been some questions yeah i had a question because um we talked about stan's diet the vertical diet so a lot of us are i mean we salt everything to the max. Is salt okay in like heavy doses of salt okay in our diets? So the thing with salt, so the thing to understand about salt is that salt directly affects angiotensin, angiotensin converting enzyme, or excuse me, angiotensin itself. And angiotensin is one of the principal ways that you can activate the transforming growth factor, beta pathway, family of proteins, which gets to inhibition of myostatin. And so you see this sort of thing bubbling up around the internet,

guys taking salt, you know, and it works because it does work. And so there's kind of just a general health question. And then there's sort of a functional performance question. The functional performance question is, yeah, absolutely. One of the easy ways to activate the body's muscle growth pathways is with salt, because salt basically hits angiotensin and turns that up, and that's how you spin up growth. So there's that. On the other side of the equation, in terms of just sort of a general health issue, that would be an entire podcast, but I'm of the opinion that you're probably actually not getting enough

salt in. Right. Yeah, I mean, I think I might have been, my bodybuilding coach was asking me because we were going to bring the salt levels down a little bit as the contest got closer, just to kind of draw out some water. We didn't do anything too crazy, but he asked me, like, you know, how much salt am I taking in, how much sodium? And when I was looking at it, I was trying to add it up. I was somewhere in the neighborhood of like eight to ten grams a day. He was like, holy shit, I haven't really run into people that have, you know, on that amount. And, uh, I said, well, I get my blood work back and, um, my, uh, electrolyte balance is always, you know, intact

and my blood pressure is never high. And he's like, well, he, you know, cause a lot of times for me, I was utilizing a lot of lower carbohydrate diets. And so, um, it's almost like your body needs something to kind of hold onto, on to when it comes to taking in the liquids. Otherwise, without the salt, I just, you know, the water was actually almost like diluting me more. So, and all your blood work was normal? Yeah, it was great. Yeah, it all came back, you know, looking good. So, there was a lot of training going on though, too. It was just a fuck ton of training. So, I think, and that was just an estimate cause I don't really know. I, you know, I could be off a little bit. Um, but just in looking at what I had in front of me and,

and, uh, you know, the amount, the amount I was using, I was trying to estimate it, but, uh, yeah, you know, for years, you know, you've heard people say that, you know, salt, you know, don't salt your foods or, you know, just, uh people say like, you know, salt, you know, don't salt your foods or, you know, just the cholesterol and let people talk about being careful with it. But that's what we found with you, you know, going through this podcast, there's been so many things that we talked about, uh, that are quite the opposite of things that we've heard over the years. Yeah. It's, uh, there's actually a big shift coming here where, um, there's going to be a huge inversion of everything we thought we were, everything we thought was true is going to turn out not to be true. And then, and in a lot of cases, you're going to see that a lot of what we thought wasn't even how the body actually works.

And in the book I'm doing, that's kind of the horsepower of the book is getting down to how the body works and, you know, and what happens over time. But yeah, salt is definitely one of those things. Kind of coming back to this thing of the sort of the whole family of growth proteins, which is transforming growth factor beta. And it's kind of like this master class of proteins that control muscle growth. There's a very few sort of easy, simple things that are switchable that you can put your finger on to actually spin that up. And salt's one of them. And when you get into like, well, why is that the case?

If you think about it like a cell, a cell is basically seawater. That's what it is. You know, it's essentially salt water. It's mineral water that conducts a bunch of electrical transactions and energy transactions. that conducts a bunch of electrical transactions and energy transactions. So the substrate that you need to do all of this electrical signaling, you need these minerals for. And so what a lot of people report when they get these minerals,

particularly sodium, is they feel kind of really like, they feel like alert. Yeah. Yeah, a lot of times I would take some salt, like, before a training session. I would just, I had these little packets of pink Himalayan sea salt. I just put it underneath my tongue, and it's a crazy thing to do because it's just weird, but. And you felt really switched on, right? I felt fucking awesome. Yeah.

Yeah, I felt really strong. Yeah. You know, immediately, probably within,, probably within two or three minutes. It improves contractile power almost immediately. I think magnesium might do something similar as well. I'm not sure. You need calcium to pull glucose into the cell. You need sodium for the reasons we talked about.

You spoke a little earlier about berberine, and there's a lot of supplements, I think, that are at least similar, kind of fall in a similar category. The terminology I heard over the years is glucose disposal agent. These are things that can, I guess, assist in perhaps shuttling the glucose, shuttling the excess carbohydrates or sugars into your muscle cells rather than into the liver or fat cells, my understanding of it. Can you talk a little bit about how you can utilize some of these things

and are there other forms of it as well as just berberine? Yeah, so the first thing to kind of understand about this glucose disposal is that it's not just about insulin and it's not just necessarily about glucose. So you have entire... It's also important to understand too, like I think sometimes people,

when they hear about these supplements, they get their brain wrapped around like the wrong thing. They might think that this is going to somehow cause you to like burn extra fat or something like that. And maybe perhaps over the long run it could, but that's not really exactly what it's doing. Yeah. So the first thing to understand about insulin is that insulin is, the action of insulin is potentiated by a lot of other proteins,

a lot of other things. So you have what are called the incretin proteins, that's GIP, GLP-1. And the action of the incretin proteins is tied to glucogen, which is sort of the opposing hormone for insulin. And so when we're looking at like, you know, at the end of the day, like not taking carbs and storing them as fat, there's a couple components to the equation. They're certainly clearing the blood. They're certainly clearing glucose from the blood, postprandial glycemia, helping to keep the glucose area into the curve lower. There's that piece of the equation. of proteins that are around that, particularly the incretin proteins, adiponectin, and all these other sort of classes of like insetizing, sensitizing proteins.

And they kind of all work together. So we can hit this from a number of angles. Sort of in the fitness world, the thing that's classically talked about a lot is what's called glucose disposal. And so the kind of the go-to bang for the buck is alpha lipoic acid which you know is you can get it at trader joe's i think it's like five bucks and i mean in terms of bang for the buck it's amazing i mean stuff works helps helps lower blood sugar it's cheap and it's a really good tool it's not like you don't want to live

on the stuff but you know as a tool when you're going to have like some carbs or stuff it's just another little tool that can get you another percentage point, maybe another two, couple. Would it be something that, say it's post-workout, and you have your post-workout shake, you had a shake and some carbs, if that's what you're doing to gain muscle, would it be appropriate to take berberine or alpha-lipoic acid with that to help shuttle those carbs in the right spot? Yeah, I think so. It just depends on when. Berberine, I would not take post-workout. So berberine is far more than just a glucose

disposal agent. It does a lot of things. Principally, berberine, we want to use that for what's called AMPK activation. And so limited to specific times. I would take it before a meal, but after a workout, there's other things. There's other hormonal pathways that we want to kick in, other signal pathways. Alpha-lipoic acid is great. There's a bunch of them on the market now, like glucomannan and all kinds of things that help shuttle, basically just help clear insulin, help clear sugar from the blood. All those things are good.

They're just useful tool sets, I think, to use. What's your favorite hack? What's your favorite hack? What's your favorite thing that you've been kind of working on lately? Or discovered in the last year or so. Something that you're pretty excited about. So I think, oh, thank you so much. Thanks, Emilia.

So what I do in the Body Hack seminars is we create a foundational sort of pool for for health and it's it's by using a keto like pattern three days a week um it's not a pure keto pattern in the sense that like you know a lot of things you think of on a keto diet uh being there aren't there so it's very specific types of fats and the size and the sequence and all these things. It's a little bit more of like low carb, low protein eating, right? It's fat. It's definitely fat meals. But it's the choice of specific. We're adding in a specific function of different foods with that to do certain things. So example is like I would not do...

Did you ask me this the other day about bacon? Yeah. So I wouldn't do bacon with that on those days just for different reasons I wouldn't do that but I do other types of fats. I would lean on the omega-3 fats a little bit more. But along with that, there's an entire sequence of things

that happened prior to that which fall into the universe of really kind of killing cancer multiple times a week. And so there's a whole sort of family of protocols that you can initiate and do. It's super stupid simple that basically just are taking the body into a cancer killing state. And that's kind of a piece of the equation that I think has been left out a lot. cancer killing state. And that's kind of a piece of the equation that I think has been left out a lot. And, you know, I've seen a, I've seen a lot of people the last few years who, you know, got cancer and, you know, a couple of people have been by their bed as the whole thing went down. And I mean, it's not pretty, it's, it's, yeah, it's, it's awful. And, um, you know, that's something

Ron at Quest is very focused on as well. And so what's been exciting to me is kind of working through creating like the very the very optimal level of human health by the way that things are sequenced and taking into account for example there's a supplement on the market that replete that repletes nad nad is a coenzyme it's in the family of b vitamins and it's it's necessary for all types of reactions. It's involved in basically the production of energy and there's sort of a linear correspondence of aging and depletion of NAD levels. So the idea that's out there is that, well, I got to just take a pill. And that's not true. It's never true.

But along with that, there are other sort of groups of opposing either proteins or immune cells. One example is called CD38, and it sort of works in conjunction with NAD. And it's at the same time we can replete NAD levels, we can actually activate CD38, which you see this inverse relationship over time with NAD and CD38. And the net of these things is that you're really kind of going at cancer at a multiple number of levels. And so to be able to do these things sort of in a simple, easy-to-do way you don't even think about, it's just part of what you do, and your long-term risk, I believe for, you know, uh, many types, if not all types of cancers, you're just, you're just crushing it and you're doing it because the base alloy that

cancers need to grow, you're depriving them of, you're depriving them of cell adhesion. Uh, you're taking things that directly go after cancer cells and killing them. And so that as a hack to me has been, has been a missing component that I think is critical. Why wouldn't it be done every day? Yeah, so that's a fantastic question. And the answer is that you don't want to do anything all the time. Anything. There's a really good case for seasonality with everything.

Everything. Supplements, fasting, eating a lot more. I think that's been a take home that I'm getting from everything that you're saying. Like, uh, there's probably some times where you should, uh, you know, uh, work on eating more protein. There's probably times where you should eat less. Yeah. There's probably periods of time where you should work on trying to gain some muscles, probably periods of time where you should work on your sprints. There's periods of time you should go through some different things, experiment with different foods, try some different things. Yeah. Timing is kind of everything. And the other side is that balance is everything.

Balance is really everything. There was a number of years where I was really into, you know, what I called CERT training or AMPK training started in 2011. And, you know, I was really like in this fasted and blasted kind of thing. And then what I noticed over time with that was I was just chronically sore, chronically sore. And long story short, over time, you know, really what I figured out was that you really need balance. You need all the growth pathways clobbered every now and then, you know, so it's, it's extremely vital to go through periods where you, you put muscle on and it makes a lot of sense if you just think about like a lion. So a lion, you know, kills once, maybe every 20 tries. So right around, you know, hunt number 20, you know, he's going, I'm going

to get something to eat or die. He needs something. So, you know, what's he do? He, you know, he's going i'm gonna get something to eat or die he needs something so you know what's he do he you know he's desperate body puts it all in that last sprint gets an elk what does he do he eats the whole damn thing right and then what's he do he sleeps and what happens to his depleted muscle while he's sleeping explodes right right yeah so there's, nature kind of shows this balance that happens in terms of, uh, you know, starvation plays a role, but muscle growth plays a huge role and it's chronically stimulating both that really results sort of in the optimal. And I've noticed that when I focus too much on the one or the other, um, I don't get sort of the sweet spot. Um, and so the muscle growth piece is, is hugely important because it just blows inflammation out of the body and does all these really beneficial things.

Very cool. You got any other questions over there, Andrew? Yeah. I was just looking at like your bio basically. Why do you only work out once a week? So it came out of, initially it just came out of necessity. Uh, I, I was, uh, I think it was 2005. I was running this, you know, I was running this company and we were growing like crazy. Um, had 25 employees and I got fat. I went from like two 12 to two 60 and I just didn't

have any time. And then, uh, I left that and I was doing this other company and it was going really well. And so I started this whole project out of that, but I was working my ass off. And I mean, my life was, I would wake up, I'd roll over, I'd open a computer screen, start working, and then at midnight, shut it back, go back to sleep.

Oh man. That was my day. So I just didn't have any time. And then as this thing started progressing um building us so my software is what's called a software as a service don't ever build one i was i was just like you know i had these these programmers overseas and so i was up till one in the morning up at five and pulling my hair out you know and so i just i was just on this road of just trying to keep my head above water and just having to work around the clock to do this.

I just didn't have the time. And then as things really started to progress, what started happening was I realized there's a couple of factors that played in. One was that if you want to solve a problem, you've got to recreate the problem. You got to recreate the problem. So you don't, you don't solve the problem with zero gravity unless you put people in airplanes and replicate zero gravity. And I had to replicate what was, what everybody in the real world was going through. And for me, my interest from that came from just having, you know, like you guys, you and your brother, I was, I was just like you, you know, I was like, okay,

Arnold, whatever you say, I'll, you know, and, um, And then when I got to the end of that road where it required time I didn't have, that really bugged me. I was like, wow, man, what do real people do? They're accountants. My brother's an accountant. What do you do? So solving that problem became sort of the focus. And so it's taken me to this place now where I've been what you would call off track for probably 10 years.

But what I've done is taken the average and improved it significantly. So most people think I work out more than I do, but I really don't. I'm actually about to jump into like getting, you know, really focusing on things now for the first time in a while. That's one reason. The other is what I've noticed with time is that muscles are not tires with infinite tread. I have a lot of muscle damage just from crazy-ass workouts over the years. You probably remember this one. I think it was in, I don't know, one of the magazines.

And it was like, put an inch on your arms in a day. Hell, yeah. Just work out 12 hours. And I was like, I'm in. That's all it takes. Not a problem. I did it, man. I grabbed like two stacks of bananas.

Yeah, you got to bring food with you to the gym. 12 hours later, still doing curls. And all that happened was like, I'm still sore to this day. Yeah. It's permanent damage. Permanent inflammation is all you did. So anyways, I just, me personally,

I definitely have a lot of accrued muscle damage from things. And there's reasons why guys like Jay Cutler have those guys that break those adhesions apart. Yeah, you need someone to work on you and fix all that shit. Long-winded answer, sorry. That's great. Yeah, that's all I got, Mark. What do you have coming up?

You got the seminar, which is October 6th and 7th. Yes. Body Hack Los Angeles. It's going to be a day and a half. We're going to hack alcohol. Oh, there we go. So night one, we're going to hack drinking alcohol. We might even hack pizza in person. And then

it's all the really cool stuff, like brown fat activation and all this really, really super cool stuff that is kind of the next level of things. The foundational layer that we can use. It doesn't take time. And that's going to be a blast. So if you're in L.A. and you're seeing this, I'd go get your tickets because the space is limited. And then I've got a book that I'm finishing up.

I don't have the title yet, but everything I talked about today is sort of, you know, the gist of that. So that's going to be hopefully done by January. And then I've got a product that I've been testing and rolling out called Amp Keto along with that, which is a little bit different take. It primarily focuses on using the signal pathways

and amplifying all the signal pathways around fasting so that you don't have to do it as long and you get more of the things we talked about going on. Cool. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you for having me. Yeah, it's been great.

Your website, is it veep.com? I've got two. I've got transcend transcend outfit and then I've got beep calm there you go and your Instagram you have an Instagram no I I'm a ghost in the world yeah I'm a total ghost yeah I love it yeah alright guys that's all the time we got this is Joel green strength is never a weakness weakness never strength see you later