Mark Bell's Power Project - Power Project EP. 22 - Daniel Orrego

Episode Date: March 21, 2018

If you are looking for more Ketogenic information than your glucometer can handle, this episode is for you. Co-Founder and Ketogenic Diet expert, Daniel Orrego, returns to the Power Project Podcast. This time for a full length episode. He and Mark Bell discuss the Ketogenic diet in full detail and give you a ton of information. Grab your note pads and enjoy this episode. ➢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 ➢SHOP NOW: https://markbellslingshot.com/ FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell

And so, you know, I was just kind of, you know, mentioning off air a little bit. And sometimes we end up talking a ton off air before we get going. And then we're like, hey, what the fuck were we talking about? I was kidding. We're shot a lot. There's nothing left. Yeah, that's right. That's right.

But we're here today with Daniel Arrego. And we're going to talk to him. We're going to dive deep into the ketogenic style diet and nutrition in general. And just some of Daniel's background and some of his story. He was sharing a good story with us earlier about Robbie Robinson, who is now 74 years old. Yeah, I believe he's 74, 75. And still jacked as shit.

Yeah, his physique is still phenomenal in just about every respect. I mean, that's a guy who has not lost a lot, a lot off his fastball. That's for sure. That's awesome. You know, the ketogenic style diet gets to be so confusing for people. Um, you know, many people think that, you know, everything is wrapped around those ketones and that's a real crucial thing. And I got to pee on these sticks and it's got to be purple and I, I have to measure the ketones and I got to be above 0.5 millimeters and all these different things. And, you know, what I've learned is that the main thing with a diet is to be able to adhere to it.

The main thing with a diet is to be able to try to follow it. And then when we start to look into things like, you know, weighing your food and measuring this and measuring that, those things can be part of the plan, but they don't always necessarily have to be. And what I advise people, especially, you know, in my book, The War on Carbs, it's very simple. Like, let's get you on board with eliminating some carbohydrates from your lifestyle. It doesn't have to be forever, but for a period of time, if you want to lose weight because, and this is the only reason why I recommend this diet. The only reason I recommend this diet is because you're abstaining from eating carbohydrates, very black and white.

You're like, okay, I ain't doing this anymore. When you have enough fat in your diet, you can still eat foods that satisfy you. You can still have foods that are delicious. Like an omelet comes to mind. Like who doesn't like eating an omelet? Fantastic, right? And so because I have some of these foods, I'm able to actually follow the plan.

Yes. And that's what we talk about here on the podcast all the time is that if I can get you to adhere to something, you're going to get results. all the time is that if I can get you to adhere to something, you're going to get results. But if I don't have the ability to motivate you, inspire you, or the plan itself is too difficult and you're going to put your hands up and say, I don't know what's going on, then we don't have, we don't have much of a plan that's going to help you be successful. Yeah. Well, and actually I really like the psychology you're bringing to bear here, which is you're moving the needle from food being entertainment to food being fuel. That's a huge leap for most people.

And then introducing a structure. That's a hard one. Yeah, it's a hard one. Everybody wants to watch TV and eat. Or a big struggle for me is the movie theater. Right. But now I'm just like, you know what? I don't see that many movies. So why don't I fucking relax right and eat what i want yeah there's got to be

some of that too right indeed well and that's the other thing too is i think when you're moving somebody onto a structured meal program whether that's keto or any any style of of eating is to get folks to recognize that food is fuel, right? And additionally, that that structure is part of a self-accountability program, right? And that really speaks more to just teaching people how to have success generally, right? They're applying it to a meal program, but these are general principles for how to have success. Yeah. And that's, I mean, that's what I've been kind of teaching from day one is that,

uh, that's what we are trying to do. And then sometimes, uh, you know, through Instagram and some of the different messages I'm saying, Hey, look, you know, these, these disciplines that we have through our diet, they can manifest themselves in every aspect of our life. And, and, you know, this full well, uh, training with some of the guys down there in, uh, at Gold's Gym Venice, the Mecca of bodybuilding, uh, training with some of the guys down there in, uh, at Gold's gym, Venice, the Mecca bodybuilding, uh, training with guys like Michael Hearn, you know, Mike, Mike is an amazing athlete. He's incredibly strong. He's shredded all the time. I think he's gotta be late forties. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he's, I think he's almost,

maybe he's 49 or 50. He looks awesome. He's leaner now and in better shape than I've ever seen him. But look at that discipline, right? That discipline, it can't help it. You know, he's done it for so long, the 4 a.m. workouts and everything else. He's done all this stuff for so long. He's been bringing it so hard for so long that he just, success is going to happen in other aspects you're, when you're crushing things that well, you get to train with them sometimes, right? Indeed.

You know, in fact, it's, it's quite a privilege on, on several levels. Um, not the least of which is how careful, uh, and considerate he is, uh, particularly with me, but anyone that comes in to train with him to elucidate what he's actually doing. Because a lot of, sometimes that gets missed on camera. He's very smart. Yeah. He's very smart. A lot of people, you know, just from the looks and everything, they're going to think he's

just a meathead, you know? Right. And there's an intelligence there, but there's also this phenomenal intuition about what to do and why. And there's also, in fact, a lot of the things that he does is counterintuitive. Some of the movements that he performs are, quote unquote, bad form. But the way he's doing it, the reason he's doing it, and the manner in which he's executing those movements is one of the reasons why he's been injury free for so long. And maintain that. He never, I mean, at least doesn't share it, you know? is one of the reasons why he's been injury-free for so long and maintain.

He never, I mean, at least doesn't share, you know. Yeah, and maintain that beastly strength as well. So it's been a journey learning with him and, you know, obviously. Does he kick the shit out of you? There's no two ways about it. The workouts are tremendously brutal. Yeah. There's just no getting around that. He does, you know some

people say especially when it comes to strength training people say you know um you can't do high volume and heavy weight uh and have high frequency and you know michael hearn is the kind of guy is like you know what we're just gonna figure out a way to just you know grin and bear and we're gonna plow through all that shit and everything's going to be high as shit all the time. The weights are going to be high. The amount of reps are going to be high. The sets are going to be high.

Well, and it's possible provided that the recovery and the nutrition is commensurate with that style and that approach to training. If you have those other two pieces, it's actually possible to do it. Right. And well, and, and, you know, people lose sight of this too. And, and, you know, people can talk about steroids or whatever, you know, whatever they want to throw in there, whatever funny comments you want to make about my boy, Michael trend.

Hell, I always have a good time with too. Um, but I mean, you got to keep in mind a lot of these guys that you're looking at on Instagram, YouTube, a lot of these guys, this is their life. Sure. This is what they do. They chose to do things this way. And so while waking up at 4 a.m. might sound kind of crazy, keep in mind that he doesn't have to be somewhere at 730. Sure. And, you know, work a full schedule, the boss breathing down his neck.

So maybe that lifestyle wouldn't, maybe some of the things that some of these guys do would be asinine for you to even try to follow. Indeed. Yeah. You have to balance it out with, like I said, the nutrition and the recovery piece. If you, if you can't literally afford to do that, either because of time or resources, you'll have to scale your training appropriate to what you can accomplish. Yeah. What is a ketogenic diet? Well, that is the question.

And there's a lot of different ways to answer that. And I don't want to softball you or try to go around you here. I'll answer it in this way. A ketogenic diet or ketogenic eating is any style of eating that induces nutritional ketosis as validated by blood ketones and blood glucose, and specifically by lower blood glucose, somewhere, say, below 86 milligrams per deciliter, and modestly high ketones, somewhere above 0.5, 0.6 millimolar. So however you're eating, if you can achieve that as validated by frequent blood measures, then you did it. And there's a lot of ways to get there.

You know, ketogenic eating isn't formulaic. What do you mean by that? Well, in the sense that there's no standard, right? I understand. And what I mean by that is there's all kinds of different ratios. People talk about a four to one and a one to one and a 0.5 to one and a two to one. Yeah, I've heard 90%. Right. And what I mean by that is there's all kinds of different ratios. People talk about a four to one and a one to one and a 0.5 to one and a two to one. Yeah. I've heard 90%. I've heard some people go, you know, done some studies. Yeah. There's your four to one ratio.

With rats, 90% fat. Precisely. And, you know, at the end of the day, if you can induce and sustain nutritional ketosis and you're continuing to validate that through blood measures, then you've arrived. Right. And some people do that by using high ratios. Some people do that by controlling calories very rigorously. Some people do that by doing low ratio ketogenic meal programs,

but being very rigorous about ingredient selection. Right. So there's a lot of ways to arrive at that outcome. But ultimately, if you see it in your blood numbers, then you know, okay, we're there. If you don't see it in your blood numbers, then you say, I need to make adjustments. What does the science show? Is a ketogenic diet, is it in any way better than some other diets that are out there? Well, it depends on which disease model you're looking at. Probably,

you know, if you're applying the literature, the most papers have been written on pediatric epilepsy and the use of a ketogenic diet to mitigate or down-regulate the frequency and intensity and duration of seizure. I mean, there's a lot there. And in fact, for pediatric epilepsy, it's part of the standard of care now if you're looking at other models say you know you mentioned type 2 diabetes probably the best work that's been done on that is by dr sarah halberg uh out of iupui um they just published through uh their partner, Virta, a large cohort study. I think it's somewhere around 400 patients. Yeah. Where they basically use either a ketogenic diet or very, very low carbohydrate diet bordering on a ketogenic diet to get, I think it was something like 85% of that constituency off their insulin. That's insane. In a relatively short period of time, like within a 10 week window,

I think sometimes much less than that. So there's a good study that really puts a fine point on how a ketogenic diet can do two things. One, control metabolism and two, restore insulin sensitivity. And oftentimes that would be considered, I think, you know, even now with as much information, as much attention that's on a ketogenic diet, those are unusual outcomes when it comes to establishment medicine and standard clinical practice.

It's insane because when we talk about, you know, those that are listening and want to just hear about getting jacked, don't worry. We will fucking get there. Right. But we got to talk about some of this stuff because this stuff is really important. And it is where the research is going to be done. Sure. You know, there's not going to be a ton of research on, you know, how to just be more jacked.

You know, not necessarily going to be a lot of studies. And there are, but there's not a lot of studies, just, you know, uh, a regular diet versus a ketogenic diet, uh, as it pertains to lean body mass. And I know that there's, there's some out there and they've done them. Um, but they tell us what we already know is that all diets seem to work pretty good. You know what I mean? Um, and you know, you can kind of pick the one that fits your needs the best. But when it comes to a ketogenic diet, I mean, some of the things that it can do, you talk about type 2 diabetes.

Under normal circumstances, I believe type 2 diabetes is an accumulation. It's something that takes a long time to even have. Is that correct? It can. I mean, in some instances, the answer is no. For example, there's a lot of teenagers now, 13, 14, 15, 16 years old, that are being diagnosed with metabolic syndrome, which is a precursor to type 2 diabetes. It's metabolic syndrome.

It's an assembly of comorbidities. So they look at a spectrum of, of, uh, different data. We just found out that Daniel's way smarter than all of us. Some of these words that are going to come flying out. Everybody hang in there. I think if you got like four or five of them, they say, okay, you have metabolic syndrome. And usually that's a, that's a preamble to type two diabetes in many instances. And what's a, like, what's a by-product of that? Like you just don't feel good. You're tired. Typically very high insulin, high A1C, high glucose. I mean, that's the big one. There's other just, you know, you can have pancreatic

compromise, a problem with beta cell production, things like that. But generally, whether it's metabolic syndrome or type two diabetes, you start to see that, wow, you know, okay. One, one solution set is to introduce insulin as a way to manage that. And perhaps another solution set, at least as elucidated by Dr. Hallberg and her colleagues, is to alter metabolism through a nutritional protocol. Right. dynamic around what constitutes long-term symptom management and what could potentially become a, and this is a scary word for a lot of physicians, cure for diabetes. And that's the line that her research is pushing up on. And it's actually rather exciting. Yeah. The fact that it could be a cure. So what I find interesting about getting into a diet like this is the rapid changes that can occur. I had blood work that

scared the shit out of some of my friends a while back. These are people highly respected in the strength and conditioning community, in the fitness community. Guys like Charles Poliquin, guys like Stan Efferding. Now, these are also people that have looked at blood work of people that use PEDs. Yeah. So, there's not, you know, it's not like they're not used to seeing elevated this, elevated that, right?

They're used to seeing those things. And they told me flat out, especially Charles Poloquin, he was like, dude, he's like, you gotta, you know, I know you really want to chase down a 600 pound bench, but you've gotten hurt multiple times. And he's like, this just not, just from a health standpoint, he's like, you're not going to make it. Like you're like, he's like, fuck tearing your pack. He's like, you could die. And I was like, fuck man. I didn't even know my shit was that bad. But at the time, um, you know, you get,

you get so immersed in what you're doing. This goes for making money. This goes for being in a relationship. This goes for anything. You can dive into something so hard that can end up being detrimental and affecting other parts of your life. You know, I have two kids and some of the stuff that I try to teach and preach and promote is that I do want to make a difference in people's lives. I do want to impact people. I do want to make a difference in people's lives. I, I do want to impact people. I do want to help people. I want to give people, uh, some of the experiences I've had and said, Hey, you know, Hey, this is dumb. Don't, don't, don't go some of this route. You could still be an animal and still be a beast and get things done in an efficient way,

uh, without, you know, going too far. But what I've always said is, uh, it's cool. If I impact somebody from New Jersey, like there was a guy in here today from New Jersey who's training, that's fucking cool. Like he, he made the trip out to super training and that's, that makes me feel awesome. That makes him feel awesome. Uh, there's nothing negative that comes from that. However, uh, if I'm not impacting the people that are closest to me, the people that love me, then I'm going about things the wrong way. And so I started thinking about that a little bit more and I was like, I have to make these changes now. And that's why you see me, uh, promoting the diet and stuff. I've used the diet

many times, uh, throughout my life. And, uh, it's, it's always helped me. But what I find fascinating is how quickly it can change your blood work. My blood work was really, really poor. And again, keep in mind, my situation is going to be different than most. I made a conscious decision as an adult to be heavy on purpose for a sport, almost like a sumo wrestler or something like that. I made an intentional decision to take a lot of shit, try to lift as much as I possibly could and maybe throw down some donuts along the way. But what I find crazy is that when it comes to something like type two diabetes, it seems under normal circumstances, it's somebody that is relying on sugar for many years and then they

get insulin resistant. Is that correct? Yeah. Can you explain insulin resistance a little bit? It's effectively a metabolic dysregulation, right? So your, your cells are no longer able to ingress energy, right? Because insulin is that hormone that pushes glucose into your cells, Choline is that hormone that pushes glucose into your cells, right? Right. In fact, what you're speaking to is now also inclusively known as type 3 diabetes, which is effectively what Alzheimer's or dementia is. It's a blood sugar disorder brain tissue. Yeah, I don't mean to be too silly and funny you know making fun of diseases is not a great thing right but uh here at super training i was filming a video a long time ago and i hit up a

big lift and i think it was eat a donut or something right and i'm like i just want everybody to know not only am i strong but i'm the first guy to be diagnosed with type 3 diabetes and i i like totally i totally made it up i'm like it's what happens when type 1 and type 2 meet together something like i don't know it's just me being like over the top you know silly but so now there is they well it's it's a recognition that cognitive decline is affected or or progressed or relational to uh energy dysregulation and brain tissue in words, a loss of insulin sensitivity in brain tissue. And so, you know, that really speaks to this whole landscape, right? In other words, if over time, the body can no longer endure the insult of high glycemic carbs and high quantities,

you start to have these problems. And with the degradation or loss of insulin sensitivity, you can be affected in your brain, your of insulin sensitivity you can affect be affected in your brain your pancreatic function begins to be affected so what does happen so let's say that you uh are insulin resistant um and you you have been uh not paying attention to your diet really well what happens when you ingest you know just in general what happens when you ingest you know 200 grams of sugar well your insulin skyrockets, as does your blood sugar. And the cumulative results, probably the most egregious forms of insult occur in what's called diabetic neuropathy, where you start to lose sensation in the extremities, your toes, your hands, things like that. And in the most extreme cases, amputation is the solution for that.

The great news is, is that there's all kinds of modalities to correct that, right? For example, changing your diet. There's some studies that demonstrate that the use of exogenous ketones can be very powerful in restoring insulin sensitivity. Additionally, hyperbaric oxygen, um, in other words, oxygen under pressure. Yeah.

Um, can help restore blood flow to the extremities. Interesting. Yeah. So there's a lot of ways to address that. It's like, uh, Dominic D'Agostino.

He was like underwater for 10 days or something. Right. Didn't he do something weird like that? Well, you're, you're, what you're speaking to is the Nemo mission. Um,

and that's it. Finding Nemo. He found Nemo. Well, it's, it's it's actually a simulation of uh what astronauts do in space that's why it takes place underwater um so he was he was a part of that talk about a war on carbs right yeah well and that's really where a lot of this research came from you have to remember you go back to the 70s and early 80s

um what what the navy sort of figured out is they saw that, hmm, these divers that are in nutritional ketosis can not only dive deeper, but stay at a, at a lower depth longer without seizure. That's when they first started figuring out, like, hold on, there's really something that is, now they were looking at it from the perspective of a neuroprotective effect. How did they even come to that? Did somebody, were they trying, were they trying to see different diets and stuff like that yeah they were trying to look at um the effects of different nutritional programs but it was one of those things that also started sort of was also discovered in reverse in the sense that they're like why can some guys dive so deep they started looking at their blood oh there's elevated ketones what does that mean right um and so they sort of in some ways they backed into it and then when formal testing started beginning they started seeing wow there's elevated ketones. What does that mean? Right. And so they sort of, in some ways they backed into it. And then when formal testing started beginning,

they started seeing, wow, there's really something to this. Additionally, that's why the use of exogenous ketones can be so powerful for divers because. Would that have anything to do in some sort of weird, similar way to being at like high altitude or something,

or is it totally opposite? This is this. And, and, you know, of course at some point, uh, and I think if I'm not mistaken, at some point in the very near future, you'll be visiting, uh, Dr. D'Agostino in his lab and you can really pin him down on this. Um, and he can, I don't want to steal his, I don't want to steal his thunder. So I'll only describe this in brief, but it's, it's one of the reasons why NASA is so interested in the use of exogenous ketones and additionally being in nutritional ketosis because of the neuroprotective effect can conceivably protect astronauts from cosmic rays, right?

Wow. From radiation. Right. Effectively. So they have, and they have another interest in it too, which is an engineering interest, right? If you're firing up into space fat instead of carbs and protein, you have higher caloric density in a smaller unit of weight. And so for one gram, you're getting nine calories instead of four.

You've just doubled your payload and become more efficient in terms of the thrust required to reach escape velocity. So there's an engineering component like, hey, maybe ketogenic diet is better for being able to send more nutrients in the space cheaper faster lighter etc that's interesting elon musk and jeff bezos are taking notes i think right now on some of this because they're sending people in the fucking outer space all the time oh man that's that's you know we'll talk about the uh androgynous ketones in just a second but as we as we're kind of working our way through some of this and we're talking about insulin and stuff like that, what are some things that you've seen rapidly change in people when they do follow a ketogenic diet?

People that are unhealthy. Sure. You know, people that maybe have high blood pressure and some things like that. Usually the near-term response is the mental acuity, right? Because if you think about how a lot of people eat, I would say they sort of eat spontaneously, right? I feel hungry or maybe I don't even feel hungry, but something looks good, right?

And there's lots of things in the food kingdom that are delicious. Like I don't think anybody would fight you on pizza being delicious or donuts being delicious. Right. So they reach when they eat it. And so what you're doing is you're inducing this cascade of high insulin, high glucose response, then a crash. Oh, now I'm down.

I need something to pick me up, et cetera, et cetera. So you're having these big, very acute peaks and valleys when it comes to metabolic response. And your brain is telling you how truly hungry you are. Your brain's like, dude, we're really, or your stomach, I'm not even sure where it's coming from, but there's a pulse, right? That's very strong. That gets a good grip on you. And it says, we are fucking hungry.

Yeah. And what I've noticed from eating those foods over the years is I tend to want to eat more of those same foods. Yes. That's a very common response. For me, it's almost an addiction in some weird way. So when you introduce a higher fat, very modest protein, low carbohydrate eating

in some form of a ketogenic diet, what you're basically doing is you're flatlining insulin and glucose response. So you never have these dips in energy, right? And for, for people, even like two or three days on a ketogenic diet, if, if it's executed properly, um, they usually see very, this very, uh, this uptick in mental clarity. I said, man, I feel so much sharper. Um, and, and I don't have these dips in the afternoon. I don't have that

two o'clock, three o'clock crash when I'm at the office type of thing. And that's usually the biggest near-term response. The long-term response generally comes with body composition change. And particularly for people who are obese or who are just what I like to call a little fluffy, right?

They start to see pretty dramatic changes in that regard. And usually that's a big incentive to continue on the diet. Additionally, because the consumption of higher fats is more satiating, people start to understand like, wow, I'm liberated now from this crave for, you know, just food. I just don't have that reflexive need to consume something because i actually don't feel hungry and that's like man that's like shackles coming off man yeah and so when people get that

and you know this is one of the things that we noticed with particularly with the breast cancer study that we did um a lot of these women responded so well that after the 120 day protocol they didn't want to stop and so they were were very anxious, like, Hey, are you going to continue to support us? Will you continue to help us? Because a, they, they had lost fat. Um, but B they sort of realize, Oh, this is kind of my secret. Now I don't have to be hungry. I can maintain and control what my body composition looks like to a significant degree. Um, and particularly the ones that were doing resistance training, their results were amplified. Right. Right.

And so that was one of the things that once people kind of get it, even if they don't eat ketogenically all the time, it's a tool in their toolbox. They always come back to it, even at interval, which probably makes the most sense. You know, I agree with that a hundred percent. I think everyone, I think everyone across the board should be utilizing a ketogenic diet, at least here and there, you know, just, even if it's just for a few days, I think it's a good idea. I think it's like even just maybe rolling into and coming out of the holidays, you know, everyone always tends to gain a little bit.

What if you just lost two or three pounds before November hits? And then you're kind of a little bit more prepared for Thanksgiving. You can enjoy it the way that you want. You can enjoy Christmas the way that you want. And then maybe in January, you kind of start it back up and just use it kind of periodically. Absolutely. And you know, there's actually quite a bit of good science on what I like to call intermittent eating. A lot of people call it intermittent fasting, but I like to call it intermittent eating with the emphasis on the eating because I still like to eat.

Yeah. Well, that's an interesting spin on it because the fasting is where everyone's always confused. And actually in my book, I have a page that's empty. Right. I said, here's my day of fasting. But then people are like, I can have a cup of coffee and it's like, well can have a cup of coffee or I can.

And it's like, well, if you're, you know, truly fasting, then you're really not taking in much of anything. But then you got to share with people, hey, like we still need to be hydrated. You're not taking in any nutrients. We don't have any sodium or magnesium or calcium. So it can be confusing. So I kind of like intermittent eating makes more sense. it can be confusing. So I kind of like intermittent eating makes more sense. And sometimes too,

like the words like fast or starvation can be very abrasive and disruptive and jarring to people. That's true. Whereas they, Hey, look, here's what I'm, here's what's actually going on.

I'm just extending slightly the period of time or the window without consumption of energy. You just don't eat for six hours. It sounds a lot better than fasting puts me in. Precisely. Yeah. Fasting is like, Oh, it's like something I have to do. I'm kidding. And what's interesting about this is even very modest windows without food, like right at the 14 hour mark, you start to see benefit. And this is fairly well understood in a breast cancer model with women who are past the five year survivorship mark.

who are past the five-year survivorship mark, the recurrence rate for women who extend the period of time without food to 14 hours is significantly less than women who eat within that period of time. So you start to see benefit. And you think about it, a 14-hour fast or a 14-hour period without eating, man, you can sleep, you know, nine hours of that. Yeah. And then basically you're not eating breakfast and then you start your day with with a lunch maybe your last meal is at nine and your

next meal sometime around lunch or whatever exactly exactly so these aren't like you know things are like oh god i've got to have you know be firing my prefrontal cortex and you know will power it's not like that you can do these things very simply yeah now i think intermittent intermittent fasting intermittent eating as you're calling it I think it makes a lot of sense. And again, I think that's something that people should be utilizing. When it comes to what I love about the ketogenic style diet is, and the reason why I always say style is because I don't, for me, I don't really care if you're producing a shit ton of ketones. I don't, for me, I don't really care if you're producing a shit ton of ketones. What I'm mainly after for people is I want to see people make some good changes in their life and be able to adhere to something the best that they can.

You know, just do the best fucking job that you can. And, you know, if we're having a potato here and there and having some rice here and there, having some fruit here and there, like those aren't things that I'm going to consider that are going to like make you fat. You know, you're, that's a way better choice than what you were doing before with pizza and whatever else was going on. But, you know, in, when you're doing a ketogenic style diet, what I noticed is I don't need to carry food around with me. I don't need Tupperware. I don't need. It's so liberating.

Yeah. Oh, it's amazing. I mean, I can go on a trip with my wife and I don't need to really pack anything. I mean, if I'm going away for a few days, maybe I make some arrangements. But, you know, normally I don't have, I can, I can go to the airport and I can get a couple of cheese sticks and cured meat or something like that. And I'm fine. I can have that on the plane. I can pull the bread off,

whatever sandwich they might serve or any of those things. And it actually, the diet becomes easy. And what I really liked about what you just said about the women wondering if they can continue on the diet. Whenever I helped anybody, even people that have what I always call a fat kid mindset, these people have this like, I'll tell people sometimes, I'm like, you're going to be fat the rest of your life no matter what you do.

And I don't mean look fat. They're just fat like from the inside because they just, they have always had these habits since the time they were a child, right? And you can't,

you can't break some of those. But, you know, it's, it's trying to figure out a way to get new habits. It's trying to figure out a way to, you know, continue to have momentum, you know, in the diet so you can have enough success.

Because success isn't going to happen in one day. It's going to take a long time for it to happen. And even the people that I have viewed as having this fat kid syndrome, they'll tell me, they'll say, you know what, man, can I just, I'll say, Hey, you know, you should probably have a cheat or something coming up or they'll be like, no, man, I don't want to do it. And I'll tell them, I'll say, remember in the beginning when we had that conversation, I said, you're going to get on this diet and you're going to end up on the other side at some point where you're like, yes, I don't even fucking care anymore. I feel good.

I want to stay here. Yeah. Well, and you keyed in on something that, that's actually worth considering more deeply, I don't fucking care anymore. I there's actually some evidence to indicate that that's the case. But for most people, if you really look at it, if utilization were completely efficient, ketones would be zero. In other words, every ketone that was hepatically produced or your liver kicked out would be used as fuel. So high circulating ketones can mean a couple of things. One, inefficient use of the energy source. Two, they could be expelled as fuel. So high circulating ketones can mean a couple of things. One, inefficient use of the energy source. Two, they could be expelled as waste. Three, they could be re-esterified and stored as fat.

So high ketones may not be something that is for most people of particular value or consequence. And in fact, and the reason I reflect on that is because when my colleagues and I first started, first started down this path, we would have like ketone contests or ketone battles. We try to outstart each other. Dude, I was a 2.0. Yeah.

If somebody was like a 2.4 and I was only like a point, I would have like, we would laugh and say, I have ketone envy. Right. As a result of that. You've got anxiety. Yeah, my ketones would be lower. But as we progress in our understanding, we begin to reevaluate whether having extremely high ketones is a particular value. In some instances, it may be. But if you have high utilization, then the question becomes, well, if they're being utilized in tissue and your ketones and serum are

consequentially low, that's probably a good thing. And the way you validate that is by checking glucose, right? If your glucose is in the 70s and your ketones are 0.3 or 0.4 that's some indication that utilization is fairly efficient right right um and that may be actually a much more desirable circumstance or you you have a a better understanding of what's going on physiologically than having super high ketones so that that's worth sort of chewing on, I think, and you keyed right in on that. Maybe I'll start measuring that just out of curiosity. Well, and it also brings up an important caveat too, because lots of people like to use exogenous ketones and say, okay, look, my ketones are high, but I can take exogenous ketones. I can

correspondingly eat a donut. Now what do I have? High ketones and high glucose. That is not nutritional ketosis. Nutritional ketosis is represented by lower glucose and modest to high ketones. So it's important to not conflate the transitory effect of high serum ketones as induced by an exogenous source with actually being in nutritional ketosis. And that's something that sometimes people, they'll miss that piece. Right. And they'll think, oh, instant ketosis, instant fat burning. Well, if you're just adding more energy on top of the donut that you ate, now you just

have more total calories, but you don't have ketosis. Right. And so that's something that can be important to sort of weigh out, if you will. It's probably not a quick answer to this one but when your brain has the opportunity between glucose and ketones what does it do?

Well in many instances it will preferentially burn ketones but not in all instances. Right. Dr. Kanani just gave a lecture on this

a week ago. So if you had the two foods you can't really I guess my main point is the ketone that you just ingested could literally do nothing.

It will always have a signaling effect. And that's why immaterial of its consumption as a fuel source, right? When people take Azaja's ketones, they typically get a good mental clarity. Sometimes they're sort of an energetic feeling. If they're taking a 1,3-butane dial, sometimes there's even like a little euphoria that goes with that depending on how much they've taken. So it also depends on the source. Most people are familiar with commercial versions that are typically beta-hydroxybutyrate bound to minerals like a calcium or a salt. But there are other forms like the ketone diester, like a 1,3-butaned dial, which I mentioned, which have very different

effects comparatively. Not dissimilar, but just different. It's kind of stronger, right? It's not so much that. It's more that depending on the isomers that are used and also depending on the ketones present, like in a diester, you have not just BHB, but also acetone and acetoacetate. So in one formulation. So you're getting a different effect because you don not just bhb but also acetone and acetoacetate so in one formulation so you're getting a different effect because you don't have to wait for the conversion it could

potentially be something absolutely fucking awesome about these ketones and it could potentially be something that's just it's a maybe a little stimulating effect on the brain indeed yeah yeah so that's where that's kind of where the science is now right like it's not now if you're fighting a disease potentially maybe it has more of an impact indeed because we can fend off seizures and that's a big deal it is it is yeah particularly i mean you mentioned the seizure model and it's also interesting question why a ketogenic diet isn't uh offered to adults typically typically they they get the phenobarbital and the kepra but it's only for the kids for some reason that the emphasis is on the diet and only in circumstances where the kids don't respond to the drug.

So it's still never like the first thing that's offered. But it is definitely the most sustainable because there's really very little side effect profile from a ketogenic diet. There are exceptions to that. For example, people who have familial hypercholesterolemia, okay, you got to be careful with your saturated fats. You may emphasize more monounsaturated fats if you have that genetic predisposition. So there are things like that to sort of look for, but those are definitely at the margins.

For most people, man, it's pretty powerful. It's amazing what the diet can do with so people, man, it's, it's, uh, it's pretty powerful. It's amazing what the, what the diet can do. And in so with so many, uh, in regards to disease, you know, um, the question I get asked the most is like, you know, people just make, they mainly just want to, you know, drop some weight. They just want to lose some weight. Do you feel like calories, uh, play into this in a, in a big way or, you know, each person kind of has their own take on calories.

I mean, gross calories, ultimately, you always have to quote unquote count them, not to abuse that word. And what I mean by that is if you go to the scientific literature, there's a well understood constant in science, which is this. It doesn't matter what the organism is. Flatworm, a bird, a rat, a human, a dog. If you restrict calories by 30% to that organism, over time, you will see two phenomena. One is that organism will look younger when it's older and also behave younger when it's older as validated by any number of biomarkers, tissue pathology, blood work, imaging, however you want to assess

that. So calories do matter, right? And I don't like to say caloric restriction. I like to say caloric control, right? Because you're the operator, you're the driver, right? Caloric control may constitute caloric restriction, but that is, you are empowered to make that decision. Yeah, for you it could be an extra 2,000 2000 calories you're chopping. You had really bad habits before.

And caloric control can also include increases in calories. And there's all kinds of reasons to do that, right? If we go back to our Michael Hearn model, there is a reason to increase calories. Why? Because the, the, the, the training, the adaptive response that you're inducing through resistance training is so massive that if you don't have those calories, there's a problem. Right. So, you know, it depends on the, on the circumstance. I've been talking to people lately about being, you know, when every, every diet that you get into or anything that you get into, you start to dive in and you start to get in like

kind of deeper into it, you know know and i've taken the ketogenic diet to many different levels before and i've noticed like uh i noticed you know kind of a point where you're not for me i'm just trying to be jacked i'm just trying to like trying to be in shape trying to be lean and the more restriction i got into uh it didn't lead to better results. Producing more ketones didn't lead to better results. So it got to the point where I was like, let me kind of look into this more. I started to research more. I started to communicate with more people, just started looking up more stuff.

And basically just found that, you know, a huge factor in this whole thing is making sure that you have enough fuel to be able to do what you want to do. You know, and so I've been using the term nutritionally charged, like making sure that your nutrition is strong enough to fuel whatever it is that you're doing. And if it's shy of that too much, then, we're, we're going to lose out on some energy. Yes. Uh, but also I think that we're probably going to start to have a negative impact on our hormones, which can probably be made. You can make the same argument with having too many calories. Right.

Uh, we're eating too much, eating too much sugar and so on. And it's causing, so I, I've always felt that the calories matter and it's been a hard thing to, um, to illustrate. It's been a hard thing to communicate with people sometimes because I don't like to actually count anything. I don't weigh anything. I don't, I don't do stuff like that. Uh, however, like you said, they still count, they still matter.

Yeah. And then also, you know, to make matters even more confusing, uh, nutritional facts that are on packaged foods and stuff like that. Yeah. You know, I've heard 50%, you know, they can be off by 50%. I've heard 30%. But then I would imagine, and I don't know for sure, but certain types of protein are going to react different in your body versus how they're going to, you know, maybe I can't

digest milk very well. Well, then, you know, the way that I'm consuming some of these calories, maybe 200 calories for me is a little bit different than 200 calories for you. And you start, end up with some inaccuracies, you know? And so I've always kind of just said, yeah, there's gotta be like a, there's gotta be some control. Yeah. We can't have you just eating, you know, four pounds of beef every day with bacon and

cheese on it. With, without that, like those calories still matter. There's still a factor, you know, four pounds of beef every day with bacon and cheese on it, um, with, without that, like those calories still matter. There's still a factor, you know? Absolutely. You know, and one of the things I think that's interesting about that landscape, particularly in, you know, how you can use ketogenics, uh, in a way that's, that's effective for, um, being able to adapt to whatever load you're putting on your body is cyclically. And what I mean by that is I found for myself that going through periods of ketosis, sometimes just two or three weeks, resensitizes me to protein. And so when I reintroduce a high protein meal program where maybe my protein is somewhere around 280 grams, close, maybe close

to 300 grams a day, which is a lot for me. That's multiple meals. Man, the change in my body is like within five or six days is noticeable in the mirror. Is there science to kind of back some of that up too? Not really. I mean, other than the general science of understanding that, hey, whatever you do, your body's going to attenuate it somewhat. Right. Right. But no one's, no one's really put a fine point on it in terms of actually designing a study and having a methodology that looks precisely at that. I'm just offering you the anecdotal evidence that comes from an N of one study. No, I know. I don't, for me, I don't care that much about the science of it, to tell you the truth, but it just, it just kind of rang into my head that there was a study where I think they restricted protein quite a bit and then went back to it.

Ah, yeah, that would produce a very similar effect. It did have a profound effect when they started. And I've heard sort of the opposite with carbs, but the whole thing gets more complicated. sit with carbs, but the whole thing gets more complicated. So I've heard that when it comes to carbohydrates, that when you restrict them for a long time, if you go back to eating them, that maybe some fat gain can occur because maybe you're not, maybe your body's not used to having them in your system. Now, when we say carbs, the problem is, is, is we're always talking about like donuts and pizza. We're not talking about real food and real carbohydrates.

We're talking about the junk stuff that we love. But I think what complicates some of that is my argument against some of that would be, hey, look, if we made ourselves leaner, we're more efficient at burning calories, period. So if we were able to get rid of some body fat and gain some muscle mass, then we're probably more productive anyway. Yeah, I mean, that's a fair point. And what you see too with people who are lean is that they have much more metabolic flexibility.

And what I mean by that is they can get away with what it seems like getting away with eating high glycemic carbs, right? And it doesn't seem to affect them. Now, if they did that for an extended period of time, it would affect them. But in the near term, because they've become so metabolically flexible in their ability to partition nutrients, having a high glycemic day here or there really doesn't move the needle.

And that's one of the big advantages of having more musculature and, and less fat. In other words, being, being leaner while carrying more muscle, um, is your ability, ability to more efficiently partition nutrients. Yeah. And, you know, you mentioned, uh, like cycling, uh, you know, and, and you're kind of referring, uh, basically to kind of coming off on and off a, a ketogenic style diet. Um, and for myself, I've noticed, you know, what you were saying earlier about the, about the blood sugar corresponding to the ketones.

Um, and then also kind of saying, Hey, look, if we have a ton of ketones roaming around, maybe that's not the best thing for us. Maybe we're not utilizing our, our energy efficiently. Um, I've noticed for myself that, you know, really just not worrying about the ketones, not trying to intentionally go after, you know, dumping oil and butters and stuff like in my coffee and things of that nature. I noticed that those things, they were effective and it kind of helped. It helped me get going.

Yeah. Websites like rule.me with all the recipes for all that stuff kind of helped me, especially in the beginning. But now, you know, I feel that just, you know, just the food alone seems to be covering most of my basis. I'm getting some blood work done coming up again to kind of monitor and make sure everything's looking, you know, heading in the right direction. monitor and make sure everything's looking, you know, heading in the right direction. But I just find it, I find it kind of fascinating the way that the body reacts to all these different things. And if somebody is just starting this diet and I see them start, you know, kind of making mistakes, like they just want to have so much fat.

They want to have like, you know, a 12 egg omelet with cheese on it and everything. And those things, like if it keeps you on the diet, but I would also just kind of realize that that's not really a sound diet. You know, you have people that ask right away too about like things like alcohol. And it's like, you can still be producing ketones and stuff, but alcohol is not really part of any sound nutrition. You know, and we can look at studies that show antioxidants of red wine, or you can pull whatever you want out of your ass, but it's just not, it's still not a great idea to, to be messing with stuff like that. Yeah. I mean, you're absolutely right. And, you know, of course, when it comes to alcohol,

people do experiment with alcohol while being in ketosis and there are ways to thread the needle. Interestingly enough, for example, small quantities of vodka won't dismantle nutritional ketosis. So there are some things like that, but at that point it seems like such an effort. It's like, you might as well just stay on the diet. Forget the vodka for the period of time that at least you're focusing on sustaining nutritional ketosis. What are your kind of thoughts in general about,

like your own opinion about, you know, having some sort of ice cream or snack that's quote unquote ketogenic versus just enjoying some ice cream? Well, I mean, I love your thinking there, right? You got to live life. Right. You got to live life. And once you gain the discipline of understanding that food is fuel, then by all means, return to food as entertainment. Because it really is entertaining. Pizza and ice cream are delicious. If you like beers, well, then beer is delicious for you.

So I think like- That makes a lot of sense. Becoming an ascetic and not having any of those things probably doesn't make sense for the vast majority of people. not having any of those things probably doesn't make sense for the vast majority of people. Um, and, and giving themselves space to enjoy those things in their life probably makes a lot of sense. Right. And as long as you have that discipline of understanding how to eat a structured meal plan, you know, understanding how to get yourself back into ketosis, as long as you're

returning to that at some interval, man, enjoy whatever, you know, life has to offer. Yeah. interval, man, enjoy whatever, you know, life has to offer. Yeah. We can lock ourselves in our house all day long and, uh, not eat anything that, uh, is wrapped in plastic and is, has no, the, the earth is polluted though, you know, and, and you're, um, I mean, you can even say like, uh, you know, frying up something in your cast iron pan is gonna, you know, put iron into your diet and maybe, maybe at an alarming rate, like, you know, or, or the barbecue you're using propane. I just,

you can get as crazy as you want with all this stuff. And then there's some people that will even, you know, go into like a raw food diet where they eat like raw meat. And I mean, shit, that's got its own set of dangers to it too. So, uh, I agree a hundred percent is that, uh, I really like what you just said. That makes the most sense that I've heard, uh, is that, you know, once you've kind of had the discipline and once you feel pretty good, then you're like, I'm going to eat some pancakes. Right. Cause they're fucking great. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, winter pancakes, like not fantastic. Right. Yeah. And I think it's important to to to allow yourself that flexibility. And there's actually some reasons to do it. Right. A couple of colleagues and myself always talk about leptin reuptake days, which is just a day where you have pancakes. Right. That's our fancy term for it. Um, but I'll tell you, man, the performance effect from that high bolus of, of, uh, high glycemic carbs, man, you go into the gym and you're monstrous because you have that high

octane fuel in your body. And yeah, even though it's transitory, man, you use it when you have it. Right. And doing that once a week is really, you know, what's, what's the big deal. Ensure that that happens, plan for it, you know? Uh, and I think that that's what also comes from that discipline is what I would call structured cheats where say, Hey man, Saturday is, Saturday is my day. I'm going to air it out on Saturday, but the other six days a week and I'm on my, whatever my program is, you know, there's,

there's a, there's a lot that makes sense about that. Yeah. From a mental standpoint, from a social standpoint, and then also, you know, um you know, to stay within the confines of a diet, nutrient wise, if you're pounding down some food or you go to a, you know, a buffet or fucking all you can eat, whatever, you know. Right. And you're just smashing food. Well, that's going to be way different than your, than what you're normally eating. Yeah. And you probably are getting a lot of salt. You probably are getting a lot of sugar. You probably are getting a lot of whatever vitamins might be in some of these weird about processed foods and stuff and people were fucking pissed, but he's like, it's not all bad. You know, it doesn't, it doesn't always have to be that a Twinkie and all these things are, are so damaging. Yes, they, they can be. And in abundance, they sure are.

Right. You know, Stan Efferding, we've had on this show many times over yeah you know his a lot of what he has said is like um you know basically let's get ourselves in shape let's try to like lose losing body fat a lot of times can help with our markers of health have you noticed that as well when you know in some of your research oh it's it's unequivocal i mean what you see is is massive correction of the lipid profile particularly if you're running advanced lipid profiles like nmr lipo profile where you're looking at particle size and plaque characteristics because you know

the cholesterol doesn't tell you all that much right but these other metrics when you talk about in terms like heart disease yeah it doesn't it doesn't really help you but these other metrics do additionally if you're looking at inflammatory markers like homocysteine high sensitivity c-reactive protein interleukin-6 uh and others like say galactin-3 or anagalase those galactin-3 that sounds like a movie um that that can give you insight into heart disease it can also tell you something about cancer very interestingly. But these markers really show you what's going on because when you see those inflammatory markers start to go down as a result of nutritional change, that's significantly longer. Um, sometimes you might see people on a ketogenic diet with high cholesterol for 12, 13, 14 months, then it corrects, but that might be because they've been, their body has been enduring insult from carbohydrate for 30 years.

Right. So a 14, 15 month correction actually comparatively is not that long. Um, so those are some of the things that things that you kind of have to look for. And that's why, you know, what you're doing and measuring your blood, man, it can't be overstated how important that is and how important it is to do it frequency, right? A CBC once a year or even twice a year is mainly useless other than flagging down egregious outliers from a reference range. Like, oh my God, there's a major problem. But it really doesn't tell you anything about what's going on systemically.

If you're not doing that snapshot as frequently as you can, you kind of don't know. And if you're not looking at these specialty markers, you kind of don't know. So measuring is a big deal. Sadly, it's expensive and cumbersome and not particularly convenient. Yeah. Why the fuck is all that? looking at these specialty markers you kind of don't know so measuring is a big deal um sadly it's expensive and cumbersome and not particularly convenient yeah why the fuck is all that it's just it you know collecting a lot of data points isn't really part of establishment change it's slowly turning the corner um but it hasn't reached escape velocity from the the tradition you've heard about this woman that

had uh she had this testing like you can basically prick your finger and you can get all your you can you can like you don't need to i don't know if you've heard about that at all but uh some woman on the east coast and she developed this technology and then uh it just turned into a big old mess somebody it ended up in like a lawsuit and all this stuff and so now the technology is not out there her dream her goal was that you would go into like walgreens or walmart you'd be able to just get your finger pricked and boom it would tell you your c-reactive proteins and all these different and now we gotta you know who knows how long we gotta wait for some of these things to happen it'll be a while it's tough because when you have a very small quantity of blood, it's very outside of specific tests that we have now. There's a while. And creating the sensors is very difficult.

I'll give you a great example. Like there's a phenomenal tool out there called a Dexcom, which you basically put a little patch on your body. There's a needle that goes right under your skin and it will measure your glucose every five minutes. How wonderful would it be to have a sensor that does insulin, that does leptin and ghrelin, that does glucagon it does ketones right now you have a map of what's transpiring moment to moment with incredible number of snapshots right that's

an engineering challenge um you know we talk we talk to uh uh the guys at daxcom about that and you know that would require some pretty significant funding to go through but something like that could totally alter medicine because now you're not guessing yeah and you have continuous monitoring and what's great is you can share with your doctor your friends your family so everyone knows moment to moment what's going on with you metabolically picture like a construction worker or something like that somebody who's you know they're in their late 30s and they they've been getting this checked out you know every other, let's just say. Yeah.

It's still way better than anything anybody's doing now. Mm-hmm. They notice progressively their blood sugar has kind of gotten worse. Yeah. Well, now they can start to make some decisions. Yes. You know, it's like, it gets to be hard as you get older to get into some like full bore, full blast diet regimen. If you know these things early on, I would even go as far to say is you probably don't really need a diet.

You probably need some nutritional intervention in your life. There may be some habits that you got to kick and you might have to kind of, you know, things like you're, you know, taking your sleep very seriously and stuff. Those things can be hard to do. But in general, things will be pretty easy. It's like just in the morning, instead of having your donut from Starbucks, maybe you just get the protein box. Right. That ain't that hard. You can still enjoy everything else.

You know, you find one thing to to unplug from you find one thing to get some distance from and um my daughter is 10 years old and probably at around eight you know she was just sitting there one day and she was like uh she's like dad i'm getting chubby and uh you know i'm thinking like oh my god how how adorable right and then i'm thinking fuck kind of sad too because she's now viewing herself probably versus other people. Not a great spot to be in. But at the same time, I've been teaching my children about nutrition since the time they

were born. I've been, you know, trying to just get them to understand the value of whole foods and fruits, vegetables, meats, things of that nature, and not a lot of packaged foods and stuff. Right. I'm not all crazy about what they eat and what they, you know, what they can eat and what they can't eat. None of that going on. But there are certain things that I kind of will put my foot. I don't really like soda.

You know, I'm like, here we go. Here's 35 grams of sugar for just kind of for no reason. If we're going to enjoy sugar, then let's have it come from like ice cream or cookies or something. That's something that's got a little something more to it. I don't know. Just that's kind of my, my own little hang up there. But so yeah, she, she kind of was mentioning that. And I was, I just thought like, what a great opportunity to communicate with her that if she can just have like a lifestyle, she won't have to be on some crazy diet.

She doesn't need to be on the war on carbs. She's not trying to do anything like that. And so I started talking to, I said, Hey, we can make some changes. It'd actually be really easy. Let's go over what you like. Right. You know, let's start there. And I said, you know, I go on those 10 minute walks all the time.

I always encourage you to come with me and you want to go on those here and there. And I was like, that'll have a drastic change. She lost like, well, this is a, that was when she was about eight. She kind of been paying attention to it ever since. And basically she just hasn't gained a lot of weight. Right. You know, she's 10 now. So, but yeah, she was like, you know, I, I feel better.

I feel, you know, I feel good. And, and then all her friends, all her teachers are like, what is she doing? She looks great. She like, you know, exercising a lot or she on some sort of special plan. I'm like, no. Instead of taking a bunch of stuff away from her, we just added stuff. Yeah. We're like, oh, you like celery.

You like, she loves fruit yeah you like fruit like here we go let's add more fruit in there you know so you know a lot of times people have this this concept of uh you're gonna go on a diet and you gotta pull stuff away yeah and then that's when people want to hold on to it you're not taking that away from me you know yeah well and there you've tapped into i think uh a piece of psychology that is very much attendant to people who are challenged by dramatic levels of obesity to say, hey, look, actually food is all I have. So if you take that away from me, you're sort of taking away the last thing where I derive pleasure. And your approach makes a lot of sense, right? Whereby if you're saying, look, this isn't a restrictive process, it's an additive process, and it's a process of alteration, right?

We may alter some of the things that you're eating in place of other things, right? And that, I think, can build a bridge for a lot of people who would otherwise be reticent to pursue that. It's like, okay, maybe I can do this. Maybe I can, we can give this a try. Pursue that. I'd say, okay, maybe I can do this. Maybe I can, we can give this a try. And additionally, you know, teaching people how to be successful with nutrition, I think is, is, goes back to what we were talking about earlier, which is there are analogs to other aspects of life, right? If you can acquire some discipline to control what you effectively stuff in your pile, right?

You can apply that discipline to other aspects of life. And that's the real gem, right? That you've given that person. You know, sometimes in my message, when I say the war on carbs, people kind of, you know, they get all pissy, like carbs aren't bad and this and that. What is your take on it? You know, what is your take on it? I tell you, there's no, you know, if you or I never ate another carb in our life, we'd be just fine. In other words, there's no biological mandate to consume high glycemic carbs. And the reason being is because through gluconeogenesis, the tissues in our bodies that can only utilize glucose will receive it from fats and proteins that are, you know, ostensibly inefficiently converted into glucose, but converted nonetheless. So I really look at carbohydrates like a supplement. They're extremely useful, right?

And titrating in carbs, you know, sort of classically, if you will, around training can make a lot of sense. Right. And even for people who want to sustain nutritional ketosis, there are unique substrates carbohydrate substrates like cluster dextrin they can allow them to remain in ketosis while receiving a bolus of carbohydrate because it's a highly branch resistant carb right so you know i don't think that the carb there's something evil about carbs but i think is it it makes a lot of sense in the modern epic to have a war on carbs if for no other reason to bring attention to the idea that look sustained consumption of high glycemic carb will move

you backwards let's let's talk about that let's address that comprehensively and then once we got a handle on that let's talk about the most interesting part of this was how you use them right when you use them under what conditions and circumstances, what forms, right? You know, one of the most powerful concepts that you can give somebody is, uh,

how to calculate net carbs, right? By subtracting a fiber from total carbohydrate or rare sugars from total carbohydrate, you have an understanding now of what the net metabolic impact of that carb load is. That's huge. That's transformative for people, right?

Because that sort of kicks you over the line to start understanding that fiber can be an extremely powerful substrate, particularly for humans, right? Because we have sacculated colons, that means that we can ferment. What does that mean, sacculated? So, like, for example, like, if you or i weren't herbivores if we were true carnivores our digestive tract our colons would it's almost like a straight shot right i've had that happen you're right it's almost like a straight shot whereas humans or or uh or rather not herbivores but omnivores uh Us being omnivores. Herbivores even more so. They have multiple stomachs and intestines.

Like a cow or something like that? Yeah, like a cow. So this means that when we put a fiber in there, we have this capacity to ferment that resistant carbohydrate, right? That's butyrate producing. Butyrate is insulin mediating. This is very important. So there's a whole world of fiber that can be very powerful for mitigating disease long term because you're controlling insulin additionally it allows you to consume carbohydrate but at a very low net

metabolic impact in other words fibers as a carbohydrate really don't move insulin right because they are low or non-glycemic in some instances. Right. So just that concept is huge. It can be transformative for people. Now, some people sort of get this intuitively if they eat a lot of salad, right? Right. They eat a lot of roughage. And there's also that dividing line between,

people say fruits and vegetables. Well, it's actually just the vegetables. Right. Because while fruit does contain fiber, it also contains a ton of fructose, right? And while fructose doesn't raise blood sugar, it still has a high glycemic impact. Not in the sense of in terms of inducing a blood sugar response, but in terms of a concepts into your toolbox, man, that can really change how you administrate a meal program. Yeah. You know?

Yeah, fiber, you know, it definitely seems like, it seems like it makes sense. I mean, at least my understanding is that it can just kind of help, quote unquote, kind of scrape out food from your intestines. Yeah, there's a roughage effect. Yeah, literally, they're like little brooms that sweep out your colon. Come in there and clean you out, so to speak. Yeah, they're like the janitor of the, yeah, absolutely. So, you know, with like the diet that I've been following more recently, I've been doing a carnivore diet.

I've made some small alterations to it in having conversations with my buddy, Stan Efferding. Yeah. And in just looking at what you just said was it's clear that we're not, we probably possess the ability to be carnivorous for a long period of time without any real crazy thing happening to us. But at the same time, I think it is clear that we were designed to eat vegetables. We were designed to eat some fruits and things like that. And so I do follow the carnivore diet, but I have like a carrot every day.

I'll talk about the carrot in a second. And I have, you know, a piece of fruit on a daily basis. And what I think the fruit does for me is it actually, I haven't even, I haven't really measured this, but it, uh, it keeps me from being like too keto, if that makes any sense. Sure. No, I understand. You know, it helps raise the blood sugar just a little bit. Um, it does provide fiber, obviously, you know, I'm eating oranges. So, uh, oranges are providing other nutrients as well. Um, but I, I really liked the way I feel.

I like the way that it's been working. I did do the carnivore diet for about two weeks straight, uh, without really anything other than just red meat, uh, some bone broth here and there. And I have some supplements. I'm not really diligent on my supplementation, but I'll take some B vitamins and some omega threes and a little bit of stuff like that, but I'm not like, you know, crazy about it. Uh, but as I started to think about it more, I'm like, maybe it's possible that our body is smart enough to, you know, regulate stuff and maybe, but at the same time, like, where's all this meat going? You know, I, you know, I don't, I don't want to have any, you know, setbacks from it and

stuff. And so as I was just looking into it more, I'm like, let me add in a little bit of this, a little bit of that. I eat spinach here and there and stuff like that, but it's not, I do think that we relied to about how much fiber we need. I think that the amount of fiber that's recommended, I think, uh, is perhaps, uh, related to, uh, wanting to sell more grains and boxes of Wheaties and oatmeal and things like that. Uh, I definitely think that that's a possibility, but in just adding

a small amount of fiber, I noticed a big difference, uh, obviously with bowel movements in particular, but it's made me feel better. Yeah. No, I mean, what you're describing makes a lot of sense and is, is in accordance with, with what I think most people that we've worked with on the patient side have reported, which is having fiber in there as part of their meal program is,

you know, instrumental and just, you know, overall. Shit. It gives you more options too in just, you know, overall comfort. It gives you more options too. Yeah. It gives you more options. Just eating, just meat.

And this is something that I heard from Paul Cech, who I admire quite a bit. But Paul Cech basically was saying, you know, you get yourself in a position where you're eating these enormous amounts of meat. Our meat has antibiotics in it, our meat has this and that. Even if you try to go hormone-free, there's still environmental pollution in almost everything that we eat. And so therefore,

if you're eating four pounds of meat a day, it's still probably not the greatest idea in the world. And one of the ways to sort of, sort of the litmus test on this is to look at how people ate you know 10 000 years ago in other words before agriculture right you go out you throw the spear you miss okay well i'm in ketosis because no energy is going in yeah i go out i throw the spear the next day i get something i eat everything in sight i mean i stop okay so i'm now i'm out of ketosis. Well, now I got to go get something again. So there's this interval between high caloric density, mainly in the form of protein and caloric absence.

Right. That model is probably the one that we should be following today in the modern epic. Because we have the capability to sit on the couch and eat Hot Pockets and Netflix and chill, right? Means that a lot of times we're not moving towards that. But that interval of feast or famine gave people this metabolic flexibility. When you didn't have energy, you were using ketone metabolism, right?

And there's some studies that show with elevated ketone metabolism, right? And there's some studies that show with elevated ketone metabolism, not only do you have greater mental acuity, you start to get greater visual acuity, greater sensory acuity when it comes to smell. Well, all of these things, what are they helping you do 10,000 years ago? Hunt better, right?

And there's anecdotal evidence there. And there's some studies that sort of allude to that. So there's probably something really important about going through those intervals. of that right if you go through these periods of of you know low energy input right there's no food going in man everything sharpens up yeah you know why because that is that is you you're sort of your your instinctual physiology for lack of a better term yeah kicking in and going oh man you better get something otherwise you won't last yeah you better you better figure this shit out you better go out and get some when it comes comes to cholesterol, that's something I get asked a lot about. And when you go on a ketogenic diet, that's always people like, man, what a, or even with the red meat, they're like, you know, blood, they're thinking blood pressure, cholesterol, you know, whole eggs, bacon, those kinds of things. What's some of the stuff that you've seen?

Well, one of the most important things to consider is that there's just a difference between cholesterol in your body and dietary cholesterol. So this idea that consuming foods with high cholesterol will somehow contribute to that, it's not quite the whole picture. You really have to run the advanced lipid profiles to understand. You got to break down triglycerides. You got to look at plaque and particle characteristics to really understand what's transpiring. The guy who really put a fine point on this for us was Dr. Peter Atiyah. He is a master lipidologist. I believe we're talking to him for the movie as well. The other guy that really just is a domain master in this regard is Dr. David Diamond out of University of Southern Florida.

I mean, you talk to that guy, he can really explain this landscape in detail. But just looking at cholesterol as a barometer to response to a ketogenic diet doesn't tell you much because there's a lot of people whose cholesterols will rise. But the question is, is that pathological?

And if they stay on it long enough, what invariably happens? It goes down again. so these these transitory effects really don't inform you of much and one of the problems with that is people go on a ketogenic diet they go to their doctor they run the cbc oh my god your lipids are through the roof here here's a statin all right and it's it's like hold on you didn't you got to go in a few more layers to truly understand what's transpiring. So a deeper look is required to truly grasp the totality of what these metric means. And, you know, having help with that, you know, like I said, the best guy is probably Dr. Peter Attia as well, Dr. David Diamond. Those two guys really have a handle on this. And in context to a ketogenic diet they're both very familiar with oh cool yeah i made a post a while back on twitter and had the most like retweets and likes and i basically just said anything uh that you can solve with a dietary intervention uh is going to be superior to anything you can ever take you know like basically don't don't it's not correct it

with now when it comes to a statin or things like that. I mean, I'm sure there's, you know, there's always room for medicine and there's always like, you know, sometimes it's just, somebody who's got weird genetics or whatever it might be. But what are the dangers of some of those things? Like, you know, people listening to the show right now, there's probably some people that are on medications for high blood pressure and for cholesterol yeah i mean with beta blockers right and and with statins you know particularly for guys the side effects are well known and sustained use of them yeah

can lead to some very very unfavorable uh result and the other thing about statins too is that um their long-term use does not increase survivorship, nor does it have very much of an impact on preventing cardiac events. And this is very well understood in the literature. And so it brings up the question, well, why are these things being prescribed? Now, that doesn't mean they shouldn't be. But again, a deeper look is required. Now, all that said, right, let me throw in the caveat. There may be some reasons for low dosing statins. And the reason I say that is because something came out, I think this was like maybe five or six years ago, maybe seven years ago now, a very successful chemotherapeutic for blood cancers is Glevic.

successful chemotherapeutic for blood cancers is Glevic. And six or seven years ago, it came off of patent, so it became a generic drug. When that happened, the chemical structure of Glevic was revealed. And it was basically a combination of two things, a statin like Crestor, Lipitor, and fenformin, which is an analog of metformin yeah right so it was it wasn't attacking somatic pathways it was actually attacking metabolic pathways it was inhibiting glycolysis uh and managing uh lipids right so there there may be a reason to low dose statins there's not a lot of research in that area so it's very speculative but i only bring it up as sort of the exception set um to to understanding and contextualizing the use of statins yeah it's um a kind of mind-boggling when you get into all that because like you said like everyone just thinks you know cholesterol

is elevated yeah we got you got to crush it down we got a major problem yeah what is what what's really sitting underneath that right right and and that And, and that's why, um, you know, going back to what we were discussing before running advanced blood profiles, uh, looking at not just lipids, looking at immune markers, looking at inflammatory markers, looking at endocrine markers, right?

What, what's happening with IGF one, what's happening, uh, with insulin and testosterone and estradiol, uh, and thyroid function. Let's,

let's add that into the mix so that we have a fuller picture of what's transpiring with somebody. People talk a lot about inflammation. And so what's the deal with inflammation? I will hear the term thrown around so much. Well, it means a lot of different things. And the way that I like to approach inflammation is to look at energy production right in other words mitochondrial uh phosphoryl oxidative oxidation why well

disease presents when energy production um becomes dysregulated so when your mitochondria cannot normatively produce energy that's when you start to get uh in trouble right and typically that is that has a high correlation to inflammation right and if you think about it in very simple terms the power plant of your cell right if it can't do what it's supposed to do uh if it starts running into problems, then you start to see disease present, right? And that's really what the metabolic theory of cancer is all about, right? You switch from aerobic respiration to anaerobic respiration. You go from normal respiration of the cell with oxygen to respiration of the cell very

inefficiently without it, right? And if you look at all of the inflammatory cofactors that go with that, you see, oh, they're all elevated when that's going on. There's something interesting about, about the carnivore diet that my brother and I have been, you know, experimenting with. We got, you know, some information and some inspiration from Sean, Sean Baker, who's been following the diet quite a bit. He's in his fifties and he's able to do all these crazy explosive movements in the gym.

Yeah. Looks like he's in good shape and stuff like that, but I don't think he has any blood work results yet. Sure. There are a lot of people that have thrived on mainly a meat based diet. What's your concern when it comes to something like a carnivore style diet? Because, you know, when I was mentioning it, you and I were going back and forth a little bit and you're like, ah, you know,

I got some concerns. You might want to check this. I want to check that. Yeah. I mean, you really want to see what the response is. Right. And sometimes what,

what's challenging is, is when people go into a diet, they'll just, they'll literally crash and say, okay, today now I'm doing this whole other thing. Yeah. Right.

Rather than just slowly backing into it, maybe taking four or five days to transition from what they're doing today to the next thing. There are always consequences for that. Like the classic situation you see is when somebody does a ketogenic diet, two days later, they're like, why did I ever choose to do this?

I'm miserable, I have headaches, I'm lethargic, right? Why, what happened? They cut their calories, They dropped their carbs. They lost electrolyte balance. They just feel like hell. Keto flu, everyone says. And there's a man, I am never doing that again. That was a terrible recommendation.

That diet's not for me. Yeah. So part of, I think, the concern is whether you're doing carnivore or whether you're doing high protein or whether you're doing some sort of high carb diet is to plan a transition, right? A great example is- Are you guys listening to this? Plan a transition. Yeah, plan a transition. right? A great example is- Are you guys listening to this plan a transition? Yeah, plan a transition.

I think that's really useful. The folks who kind of have a very sophisticated handle on this are the physique athletes, and particularly the women when they say, when they plan their quote unquote reverse diet. So as soon as I step off stage at night, it's not go eat every burger and fry and milkshake. It's, okay. I have my

transitional diet for the next two to three days. That will may include the reintroduction of some carbs, but very modest, right? I may increase calories slightly, not too much because I still need to look good for my photo shoot and all those things. You may eat a Snickers bar, but not all the Snickers bars. You might have half, you might have half of one, right? And then over the next two or three weeks, you're, you're reverse dieting out of your contest prep diet, which is very taxing, right? Slowly reintroducing other foods. And then at that three, four week period, you still look phenomenal. You feel great. You're not all bloated and carrying water and, you know, hating yourself because you ate everything in sight. This is very important. Depression sinks in. Yeah. The

depression, exactly. All those things. So I think, I think those folks who are doing that, uh, have a very good handle on what it means to move from one modality of consumption to another. And that's really my, my greatest concern. You know, people say, Oh, I'm going to do carnivore diet. And then they just like, they start today. Uh, and they eat, you know, two, three pounds of meat. And then the next day they're like, boy, I don't, I don't feel well. I think this diet's not for me.

That actually makes a lot of sense because you can get yourself in a lot of trouble. Precisely. I mean, you can, you can really, really not feel well. You can feel like you're going to pass out or there's a lot of different things that can happen if you're going to jump into any style of diet. But I see that all the time with the keto diet and it's advised in my book and I've been preaching it a lot. Uh, it's just, nobody wants to take their time you know everybody wants to kind of dive into stuff and uh they kind of feel that that's the best way to especially men i think it's just kind

of like that's fair intuitively like in our system yeah we're gonna it's like not asking for directions i know where we're going yeah clearly he's lost yeah like we're gonna we're gonna really change shit you know we're gonna do it. Clearly he's lost. Yeah. Like we're going to, we're going to really change shit, you know, we're going to do it now. And, uh, but you know, I hear people, you know, they say keto flu, keto flu, you know, I got this. And a lot of times I just think, and maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong here. I don't know how much research there is to show that a keto flu is a thing. Uh, I always just think it's people being a bunch of pussies because they are, again, they're restricting their calories. They're trying to exercise a ton at a number.

And then they're blaming it on the keto diet. And they may not even be producing that many ketones at the moment. Well, keto flu is real and it's actually articulated in the literature. And specifically what it is, is it's protein malnutrition. And so if you're on like a four to one ketogenic ratio, where 90% of calories come from fat, you may get these rashes or bumps or red marks on your skin. I've heard about rashes before. Yeah. As a result of being in a, you know, if you're, if you're using four to one for say like 40 days, right. You may get keto flu because you've now restricted. But you're not going to get keto flu in the first day and a half probably. What you get in the first day and a half is you, because you

drop carbs, you drop calories and maybe you're training, what happens? You've lost electrolyte balance. So a good buddy of mine, Jamie Caporoso, who you may know, he schooled me on how to completely obviate that, which is in the morning when you get up take a this is iodized salt take about a quarter teaspoon up to a teaspoon of it right down the hatch chase of a coffee or water i actually bought iodine yeah it's the old school just regular salt right not like himalayan pink sea salt none of that just regular iodized salt you take that what happens as you're losing a little bit of water right as your body's responding to the lower calories you're propping up electrolyte balance

yeah so you don't get the headache you don't get the lethargy you don't get that the distracted feeling of having calories too low that that single trick has served me not only in that area but i also do that, on leg day and back day before I go to the gym because salt also has a signaling effect. And when you dump in a pretty good bolus like that, man, it changes your strength. Yeah. It's huge. It's huge.

Yeah. So I owe a lot to Jamie for that. Yeah. Um, and it was one of those little like gems, uh, that he brought to my attention. And it's the same thing. Like if, uh, you'll see this, you know, if, if, uh, people are feeding their dogs a ketogenic diet, sometimes they'll report that, man, my dog just on the couch, not really moving is something wrong. Pour a little broth into the bowl and have them drink that broth.

Why? Cause there's high sodium. Right. Right. You'll obviate that effect as you're transitioning them over and of course you can you can you can uh administrate that by a slow transition into a ketogenic diet and then you don't get that big electrolyte loss but when people jump into it invariably that's what occurs i always advise people too that when you whenever you do a diet uh don't go into a caloric deficit right you know let's not try to, let's not try to do too many things at one time.

Let's just get used to, how about we get used to the food? Right. Let's start there. And, and also too, like if you, let's, let's say you had a day and you did great throughout the day. Didn't you eat any excess carbohydrates? Maybe there's trace carbs and some fibers and some vegetables and stuff that you ate, but you did really well.

And you break and you eat two bowls of cereal. Right. It's still probably better than you did the day before. Don't sweat it. Just use that next morning as a reset. Try not to, and this gets to be really hard once you're in a frenzy, you know, try not to take that any further. Try to have that be the end of it and just start the next day. None of this has to happen. It's not going to happen overnight.

It's going to take a long time for you to be able to really start heading in the right direction. No, that's a great point. And that's especially true, you know, when it comes to performance, right? So if you're working now with, say, an elite athlete, man, administrating that cutover is even more important because if they start to lose performance, guess what? They're not going to, they're going to lose confidence in that meal program. Right. So transitioning that particularly for athletes who want to do keto, particularly for resistance train athletes or powerlifting athletes, uh,

to do keto, you, you, you have to make some adjustments to that so they can maintain their strength. And there's all kinds of little tricks to do that in fact the guys that have probably looked at this the most are uh dr jacob wilson and ryan lowry over at aspi or the advanced uh science and performance institute in tampa they've worked with a ton of athletes on keto and really have seen a, that you can maintain strength on keto and when properly administrated, even gain a little bit, not much. It's not the same as eating high carb and high protein. It's not the same, but there are ways to kind of thread the needle.

And, uh, that's where the story gets really interesting because now you're incurring the tremendous anti-inflammatory effect while still being able to progress forward on the performance side. Yeah. I, uh, for myself, you know, with the, with the carnivore diet in particular, there's something unique about it to where, and I don't know if it has to do with just, uh, minimizing food ingredients period. Uh, but I mean, there's small amounts of like stuff in like bone broth, like there might be like onion powder and gar like there's this so but the the ingredient list that i'm doing currently is is really really small it's

really narrow yeah and my brother's kind of noticed the same thing we're both noticing we're we're getting leaner than we've ever been before you've seen the changes in my brother how fucking crazy is that it's dramatic and because of my travels i haven't seen him in a while and i had breakfast with him the other day before i came up here jacked and tan dude that's son of a bitch the other thing that i noticed too his skin is starting to look phenomenal yeah and that's that big anti-inflammatory effect that you get it really you're anti-aging yeah you literally it's like almost like a benjamin button effect and when you don't see somebody i didn't i hadn't seen him for like maybe three and a half weeks. And I, and I was like startled.

I was like, wow, man, you're going backwards, dude. You're, you're, you're literally anti-aging. Um, and that's something that I think is, is sometimes lost. You know, everyone's doing this for a cosmetic effect for their physique. Um, but the anti-aging component to it is profound. He's gained four pounds of muscle in the last, in the last month. Now, you know, this, this is a, you know, electronic, you know, I don't know how accurate the, the, the thing is, but whatever the case is, he feels better.

Yeah. He looks better. And I think what the carnivore diet did for him, it just, and it, and it got me on board with the same thing. Again, going back to being nutritionally charged, I was like, you know, I'm not going to eat. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that. And if you're eating, excuse the expression, if you're eating like a bitch, then you're not going to be very successful in the gym.

And you mentioned just a second ago, you mentioned performance. performance. And I think that a lot of times for people that are not professional athletes, they don't understand that the performance is huge. The performance is a huge factor. If you're bonking in the gym, you might want to say, okay, this is going to be a phase I'm going to do for two weeks. And the performance is going to take a little bit of backseat because I'm going to do for two weeks and the performance can take a little bit of backseat because I'm trying this new thing or you can do some of that, but your performance should be strong and your performance should feel really good when it starts to not feel good and you start to not have enough energy to get through the workout and you and you're feeling weaker. Yeah, that's not good. No, it's it's not only not good. I mean for professional athletes, that's that could dramatically impact dramatically impact huge yeah the ability to continue in their profession but even for us in terms of body

composition and be able to make some real changes if you can't go in the gym and get after with with o'hearn then you know first of all he's gonna laugh at you yes there is that he's gonna he's gonna talk a lot of trash i'm sure but that's that's a huge thing and then also from a mental standpoint you know you mentioned me earlier that you uh you were into sports and stuff at a really young age and so you're associated with when you go in the gym and you have these workouts you have a certain level that you want to reach yes and you don't reach that it's it's taken too lightly by us i think sometimes it's taken too lightly it sounds like such a meathead thing to say

but this stuff really matters to us i've told people before i've cried on my way home from the gym because i was so i wanted those fucking numbers so bad i felt like i did every and anything and yeah of course you have a pity party for yourself here and there, but, um, I mean, I've cried from pain too, from tearing stuff and different things like that. But, you know, I I've cried because the loss is hurt and I don't want to, I don't want to lose. Yeah. But I do think even your average person that just wants to, you know, gain more muscle

and they want to look better and be in better shape. That performance in the gym is really important. Yeah. And I know that, you know, people can point to science and say, your exercise might only make up 10% or 15% of your total caloric expenditure or whatever. Sure. That's possible. But if we're able to build three pounds of muscle over the course of a year, and then

next year we're able to gain another two, We have an extra five pounds of muscle on us. That requires energy. Yeah. And you're literally changing yourself forever. And I don't think that can ever be taken too lightly. No, I couldn't agree more. And the long-term health implications are huge because when you have more muscle,

your ability to endure illness, particularly illnesses like say cancer, where cachexia and sarcopenia or wasting of the body can occur, the more muscle you have. In other words, the more mitochondria you have, the greater your ability to endure insult from disease. So if you run into trouble, man, having more muscle can be a game changer, particularly if that muscle is a part of a lean body composition overall. Yeah.

So, you know, a lot, a lot of people don't, they don't put that into their calculus when it comes to long-term health, right? Being more muscular and leaner is, uh, not only in and of itself disease preventing, right? But it allows you to endure disease better should it occur. Strength is never a weakness as they say very speaking of cancer we got a couple things to get into with uh this keto pet sanctuary and stuff uh but before we do that i just want to give a shout out to my buddy uh jason kalipa his daughter ava was diagnosed with cancer at a very young age, at the age of five.

I think it was in about 2000. Maybe she was four. But in 2016, she was diagnosed with cancer. She's starting to finish up a lot of her treatment, a lot of her therapy. I think she's only got a couple more to go. Her health is outstanding at the moment. She's doing really, really well. outstanding at the moment. She's doing really, really well. And, you know, luckily for all of us involved, she has a type of leukemia that is treatable and they were able to, it looks like

she's coming out the other end doing really well. But last night we raised $400,000 for pediatric cancer. And I'm really proud of that. And that was really fun to be a part of. And also just incredibly sad. And, you know, I mean, my wife kept looking at each other, like, this is killing us. You know, how do we, how do we get out of here? We can't, you can't leave, we're locked in, you know, but it was a beautiful thing. And it was, you know, for a really, really good cause. The research that you've been a part of with Quest Nutrition. Yeah. cause the research that you've uh been a part of with uh quest nutrition yeah uh let's get let's get a little background story on before we dive into this let's get a little background story on your involvement with crest nutrition now you're not a um you're not a doctor right you're not

right yeah no no one at quest nutrition is um literally to to uh to explain it in the most unvarnished terms you, a bunch of protein guys. Yeah. And two people actually who we've already mentioned on the podcast, Dr. Peter Attia and Dr. Dominic D'Agostino, came to the offices and spoke to my colleague Ron Penna, who's the CEO, and myself. And they were the guys that really schooled us on ketone metabolism uh and ampk pathways as as opposed to mtor pathways and this whole landscape of metabolism that at best we had peripheral awareness of but they were the guys that look you aren't focusing in a place where you should be and so as a result of those discussions and as a result

of sort of guinea pigging ourselves, um, you know, we came up with this idea of Keto Pet Sanctuary and really specifically it was Ron Panna who, who had this idea. And I recall this as clear to his day because it was myself, Ron Panna, another colleague, we're sitting in a conference room and Ron goes to me, he says, Hey, here's what we're going to do. We're going to go and we're going to rescue dogs from kill shelters who would otherwise be euthanized as a result of having cancer. We're going to create this amazing Disneyland for dogs. We're going to assemble a team of veterinarians, researchers, oncologists to take care of these dogs, afford them the highest standard of veterinary care.

And we're going to figure out if this whole ketogenic approach to addressing disease has any merit, right? And so I heard this idea and said, okay, give me that one. I'll do it. And what ensued from there was one of the strangest assembly of a working group that included immunologists, included pediatric physicians, oncologists, research scientists, veterinary pathologists, veterinary surgeons, veterinary oncologists. And we assembled Keto Pet Sanctuary to essentially validate whether or not a ketogenic diet in combination with standard of care could impact disease progression in these dogs. And, you know, one of the ways that we did that was to, um, use the same gold standard that, um, you use, this is mind boggling by the way. I'm not saying anything cause I'm just listening to you.

You're watching the, uh, the sizzle reel there. Yeah. Yeah. I'm watching a little bit of this footage, but I'm, I'm just listening to what you're saying. I'm just saying, oh, like this is a really, uh, just a cool story. And I knew a little bit about it, obviously. That's how I was able to bring it up in the first place.

Sure. Sure. Um, and that's unbelievable. Yeah. This really put us on the path because we were using pet ct positron emission tomography and computerized tomography to assess and look at these tumors across various tumor models right and and as you pointed out you know uh ron penn and i aren't scientists we really don't have formal training but we understood what we wanted to try and and most importantly you know this was also an occasion just fundamentally just to help dogs, right? We're both dog guys, dog people.

So that was sort of a gimme. And then to bring in all these veterinary specialists and all these research specialists to really look at- I mean, it can have such a positive impact on humanity. I mean, you guys could literally be saving the world with research like this if if it turned you know yeah and that and turns out to be effective i mean to jump to the punch line what we saw in short order is that these dogs were doing uh much better on the kaplan-meier curves in other words the survivorship curves um than what would be indicated by the literature so you know this was you know we're not researchers there was no placebo there's no double blind no multi-centercenter, right? This was just real world, rescue the dog, apply basically the same protocols that Dr.

D'Agostino had developed in rat studies and the same protocols that Dr. Thomas Seyfried had developed in a brain cancer model for human patients and apply those to dogs in real world terms. And then use the same standard of assessment that you would use in a hospital for a human cancer patient to look at the tumors and say, hey, are they getting worse? Are they getting better? Are they staying the same? And that very quickly informed us that there was merit to this approach, that it did have value and that these dogs were not only living longer, but most importantly, that their quality of life was very high. Even the ones that were receiving standard of care radiation or chemotherapy. And that informed us and gave us enough confidence then to go look at this same model in humans. And that's when we did a small pilot study with diabetics. It was really a safety study to look at the effects of the foods.

We looked at early breast cancer in a small cohort of women. And we also did a pilot study at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles to look at brain cancer patients. Wow. So the dogs really, you know, we started out wanting to help dogs. It really was the dogs that ended up helping us because they gave us the confidence and informed us. Yeah. There,

there is something valuable to this approach. It really can help in real world terms, uh, and is worth exploring further with people. Such a crazy thing. I mean, the fucking guy that makes protein bars and his buddy starts researching fucking cancer.

That's exactly it. It was basically Ron and myself sort of running around trying to collect up all these experts and saying, hey, help us do this. And it was one of those things where the effort was so compelling that it actually wasn't hard to get people intrigued, you know? And so even the veterinarians- Their curiosity was probably there as well. Even the veterinarians that kind curiosity was probably there as well. Even the veterinarians that kind of took a dim view of like, ah, what's this weird diet? You know, what is, how's this going to affect the dogs?

Once they started to see the data and once they could interact with the dogs directly, they realized, man, these dogs are doing very well. Yeah. And so that gave them the confidence then to, to, to continue to participate. Yeah. It's a, it's just a crazy thing. Where did you guys start? Because you mentioned when Dominic D'Agostino came in, he was kind of saying you guys were looking in the wrong spots. Were you guys just like doing keto

just to kind of like bodybuild type thing? No, it was really to see if the principles that Dr. Atiyah and Dr. D'Agostino had explained to us were real. So we would put ourselves into ketosis, not in a very sophisticated way. We'd just starve ourselves, right? And then measure ketones furiously throughout the day and call each other or text each other,

ha-ha, my ketones are higher than yours. So we weren't super sophisticated in the beginning, but as we progressed in our understanding and as we began to- You know, we can eat food and be ketosis. Yeah, we can eat food and do this too. We saw very quickly that there were advantages to being in ketosis. The biggest of which is this incredible mental clarity.

Additionally, the changes in body composition. And then not just the glucose and ketone values, but the other blood values that we're talking about when you do a full phlebotomy draw and look at all these other markers, we could start to see like, okay, this is real. And once we realized that and we had a good grasp on that, that's when we, you know, basically Ron's idea of saying, hey, let's see if we can help these dogs, that's when we pushed for it. Yeah.

How long did it take for it to go from him talking about it to you guys off and running? I want to say it was like inside of 15, 16 months. It went very quickly. It went very quickly, partly because we had such great partners. Yeah. And partly because,

you know, Ron and I were in a position to really give this a lot of energy and attention. You know, that was, that was one of the things that was great about a quest is the success of quest allowed us to pursue these interests that at the end of the day, we're not part of the core competency of the company, like at all, right. The core competency of the company is, you know, make another protein bar, right. And here we are, you know, rescuing dogs, looking at the cancer, right. Um, but, but the success of the institution

allowed us to pursue these things and and ultimately that led to the found the founding of epigenetics foundation which is essentially the organization that pursues these things philanthropically and quest underwrote that effort and that's how we're able to to do everything what were some of the results you got with some of these dogs, what we saw was a couple of things. One, we saw a degradation or slowing down, if you will, of disease progression, not in every case. And so, you know, that's the one thing that's important to sort of annotate. There's nothing magical about a ketogenic diet. It's not going to, you know, rescue a dog from passing away from disease, particularly if you're introducing it at the later stage, stage three, stage four cancer,

you got a steep hill to climb. And it's important to just be real about that. At the same time, if you're catching the cancers early, stage one, stage two, man, it can have a huge impact. And there are many dogs that are still alive today at Keto Pet Sanctuary that continue to thrive, right? The other thing that's interesting is a ketogenic diet does not bulletproof you from acquiring cancer or reacquiring it. Even dogs on a sustained ketogenic diet over time can still see a reoccurrence of cancer.

So what's interesting is that that tells you that cancers perhaps can adapt over time to that intervention, or it may be the case that certain cancers, a spectrum of response, right? Some cancers may have more ketolytic enzymes than others. So the ones that have less, maybe they respond a lot better to a ketogenic diet. The ones that have more, maybe less so. Additionally, combining a ketogenic diet with other modalities of intervention, like say chemotherapy or radiation or IB vitamin C

therapy or metformin or any number of other, or xyloacetate, any number of other metabolic interventions, those combined effects or adjuvant effects aren't well understood in the literature because no one's really looked at that. But on a case-by-case basis, you may be affording yourself better health outcomes as a result of combining those things. So those are some of the things that, you know, people, you know, not just with our group, but outside of our group are exploring. Um, and you know, the, the future is very promising in that regard. And when you look at the human model, there's any number of very, very compelling case

studies, uh, that show that with just ketogenic diet, you can control a brain tumor progression pretty significantly. Doesn't bulletproof you, doesn't insulate you from a disease necessarily, but the tumor response is fairly spectacular. You know, uh, a kid from the UK named Andrew Scarborough is probably, um, uh, a great example of that. Uh, Max from the Max Love Foundation is a kid who's controlled his brain cancer, uh, with ketogenic diet. Those are sort of the superstars. Um, and you know, invariably what you see is that the people. I know Furious Pete has used a ketogenic style diet as well to help. He's a great example of that.

Um, and invariably what you see is the people who apply the nutrition most rigorously tend to get the best results. Right. But that's true on the performance side of the equation, right? The people who can really stick to their diets, man, they achieve things that other people who are a little bit more loosey-goosey don't, right? So there is that spectrum of response. And there's still a lot to learn about this, because again, you don't have a lot of controlled trials, which are tough to do, but you don't even have large cohort anecdotal trials that have some controls in them.

And so that's the next stage. And, you know, it's encouraging to see like 10 years ago, if you went to clinicaltrials.gov and typed in ketogenic, you'd see like 13 studies. Today, there's like 1300. So there's been a change in the, not just the popular consciousness, but in the scientific community that, hey, there's something important to understand here. Right. And people are going after it. Does cancer exist more readily here in the United States than it does in other countries? Do you know that?

You know, I don't know that. There's a great book. We're just so unhealthy. It seems like everything exists here more. It's probably the case that in developed countries, there's a higher preponderance of cancer. But then part of that is that, you know, it's also more study. You know, it's like now we know that there's more autism cases because we look at it more carefully. There's a great book by Clifton Leaf called The Truth in Small Doses that really taxonomizes the raw metrics in cancer,

not just in the United States, but also globally. And I can't remember what the metric is for the question you're asking, but if you go to that book, it will be in there. When it comes to dogs, maybe we need to back up and maybe think about what kind of lifestyle are they living to where they have, it seems like like what kind of lifestyle are they living to where

they have, like, it seems like cancer and tumors and stuff are pretty big in our pets. Correct? That's accurate. I mean. Like what are we feeding these guys? Right. The average lifespan of a dog from like the seventies has gone from about, I think 17 years to, I think like it's less than 11.

I think it's nine or 10 now. Now you could attribute some of that to breeding, right? You could attribute that, some of that to environmental cofactors, sure. But if you're not looking at the food, you're avoiding something. That's extremely important. And if you look at, you know, there's not a lot of good data on this. There's some, but you know, probably the best work on this actually is Dr. Anna Bjorkman from University of Helsinki. She did a comparative cohort study where she looked at kibble fed dogs versus raw keto fed dogs. And what she saw, even with age stratification, is that within a 30 dayday window, the inflammatory markers on those kibble-fed dogs are through the roof. And comparatively, the raw keto-fed dogs are nowhere.

Right. Right? Now, that doesn't tell you everything that you may want to know. But it's a pretty good point of departure to say, hey, look, you know, hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary biology, these animals are carnivores. And even the last hundred years of breeding doesn't really change that. There are some people who, who offer the argument that the dogs are omnivores. It's tough to sustain that argument because if you look at a dog's mouth, right, their molars are scissor molars. They're not flat molars for grinding, right? Additionally, as we talked about before,

their physiology is such that their colon is short. So they don't have really a sacculated colon. We can tell some of this by, you know, somebody saying, hey, that was my dog. Right. When your dog has gas, right? And it like kills the whole room. Everyone's like, oh my God. You know, additionally, even though, you know, in the last 80 to a hundred years, dogs do produce a little bit more amylase than they used to comparatively. It's not even close to what humans produce. So this idea that a dog should be eating a rendered or a high heat process, uh, extruded, re-fortified piece of sugar. extruded, re-fortified piece of sugar.

It's, it's a tough argument to maintain because there, there's no precedent for that. All you have is the last 80 years in developed countries having an industry around that. Right. Right. If you, if you go to other countries, there's no, there's no pet food dog just scavenges or gets what it can, it can catch.

And what you see is very different longevity, very different body composition, and very different disease presentation between those two models. What should people be feeding their dogs from just the research that you've seen? Yeah, I mean, if you let, you know... There's a documentary on it.

Somebody was mentioning it to me a few weeks ago. There is. Yeah, it's called The Dog Cancer Series Dr. Karen Becker and Rodney Habib Produced that It's something you don't think about You know you're just like

I guess you know it could be similar to like Baby food or something like that Where you're just That's not where your Your thought is like Somebody provides this for us It's for a baby So I assume it'd be safe

And kind of same thing with your dog. You're like, well, who doesn't love dogs? I'm going to buy my dog the highest price thing at Costco or whatever. And you could be, you know, maybe not doing the best thing for them. There's very little difference in macronutrient composition between a very high premium kibble, like an expensive kibble and a cheap kibble. They're both about 40 to 60% carbohydrate. if you say well what should you feed your dog well if you let the last several hundred thousand years of evolutionary biology inform you it's going to be some kind of raw meats and fats maybe a little fiber right maybe some vitamins

and minerals if you want to cover that base. Right, right. But it will be something along those lines. It probably wouldn't be a manufactured product, right? Because there's no evolutionary precedent for that. You only have the last 70 or 80 years to compare to. Right. Right. And when you look at the down regulation of average lifespan across all breeds and the now very, very high prevalence of cancer and diabetes in dogs, you know, you can start to sort of distill what the

decision might be. Additionally, you know, one of the things that's just very recently transpired is Gus Ray of Baycom Diagnostics has come out with an HA1C test for dogs. This was something that only a few academic institutions could even run prior to and he uh spent the last 10 years developing it this is huge because now you can at you know twice two three times a year you can check that a1c and if you start to see your dogs at five or six or okay, that's a pretty good indication that they are starting to go in the direction of trouble. And you may want to make some adjustments to how food is impacting their metabolism

and correct that just in the same way humans, right? If you're anywhere above 5.5 or a six, like if you're a seven or an eight, okay, there's probably time to make some changes because you are on your way to metabolic syndrome and type two diabetes. And when we talk about, you know, the difference between testing dogs versus humans, I mean, first thing that comes to mind is you can really control what you feed the dog and it can be very difficult on controlling what a human eats. But what are some of the results that have the results been pretty positive in terms of a ketogenic style diet?

Or is there still so much more that needs to be i mean the one thing that you see visually is a total alteration of body composition so what you see is the dogs become very lean and muscular right um now as we kind of pointed out earlier like maybe that is going to be something that is is going to help you live longer additionally when you look at the blood markers you see huge correction in the blood markers. Right. And then of course, in the case of disease, that's on an individual basis.

I mean, generally when you look at the spectrum of response with cancer, the later stage cancers, you can slow it down a little. The early stage cancers, you got a real shot of, of making a full correction. Right.

And you, you know, you have to take that on a case by case basis. And there's a lot of variables, you know, particularly for pet parents at home, not everyone checks their dog's blood. Why?

Well, it's very cumbersome and it's not convenient to do that. Um, but you can do it. You can have, you can keep a very, very, uh,

tight leash on what those numbers look like and use the numbers to make adjustments, uh, to, to the meal program. So, you know, it just depends.

A lot of it is that the execution and implementation is a big determinant of the kind of health outcomes you get. But, you know, what's interesting is we get calls from pet parents and veterinarians all over the world to say, Hey, I sort of followed what you guys did and here,

the results are very favorable. And this is like with no support, no research sciences, no veterinary oncologists, right? They're just sort of following it. So they're probably executing imperfectly, but they're doing it well enough to induce a favorable response. And that's where the story gets really interesting because it means that effectively people who

don't have the support apparatus that Ketopet Sanctuary has and the resources can still do something. Can make some small changes that have a huge impact. It's very impressive, you know. It gets to be frustrating when you just don't know. Yeah. That's the thing that always bugs me when you just, you don't have the education, you don't have the tools.

Sure. You're not understanding that. Like, it would never occur to me unless I heard my brother talking about it. Yeah. That what you feed your pets could be, you know, really harmful. Like what a shitty, like that sucks to understand that, you know, and I guess it is something that should be more well thought out. But it is kind of crazy that you're trying to do something good for your pet. People are always trying to buy like toys for their pet and this and that.

And then here we are, you know, perhaps causing them more harm. And it's tough because, you know, food is love, right? And so people want to give their pet something. Or their kid ice cream. Or their kid, yeah.

So it's a way of building rapport and having a nice moment. Yeah, you got a treat for him. He's all fired up. Exactly, yeah. Everyone's getting something of value

out of that interaction. The challenge is if what's being, you know, what's being offered as know, what's being offered as food is moving the dog backwards metabolically,

then you can recalculate what that treat looks like. Right. Right. And it can be something else that moves them forward. That makes a lot of sense. How did all this

get started for you? Because we mentioned, you know, obviously through you talking, you're extremely educated on this topic. Did you go to school for this or, you know, how did any of this? No, you know, obviously through you talking and say, yeah, you're extremely educated on this topic. Did you go to school for this or, you know, how did, how did it really this, you said it best, it was kind of Ron and I running around and just being interested. And then, you know, one of the things that we do really well together is learn. And so, you know,

and we're privileged, we get to learn from dominic dagostino and peter atia we're in a privileged spot they come in they give us a master class our level of understanding and insight jumps dramatically and they're just they're just two names and just you have accelerated learning yeah due to the resources of quest nutrition you know exactly so we we had to go through many many many remedial biology classes with dr ang Angela Poff and Dr. Shannon Kessel and a number of experts in their various fields who are schooling us on histone deacetylase transport and things like that, which we would normally never be exposed to. But because of their generosity and also their corresponding interests in what we're pursuing, we were able to really gain a grasp and an understanding of this. And frankly, you know, it's also invariably intriguing. Like I'm never bored with this stuff.

I love it. And to me, this falls in the same category of, you know, how can I get better at the gym? How can I improve my own performance? How can I gain a better understanding of human metabolism canine metabolism to me it's actually all the same thing in other words i look at therapeutics and performance is really just two different sides of the same coin what i learned in the gym i can apply to a cancer patient what i what i learned from a cancer

patient i can apply in the gym yeah oh it makes a lot lot of sense. And, um, you know, trying to, you know, discover and trying to unlock all these different things gets to be exciting. And then you unlock one thing and then your belief in something else changes and it kind of continues, you know, what's something in the last couple of years that's really changed your opinion of maybe something that you used to think, like maybe, maybe growing up and maybe, uh, being someone that hit the gym, maybe you were kind of more, more, more of a carb guy or whatever. Sure. You know, what's something that's changed drastically in the last several years? Um, I think probably the thing most recently that I've become just absolutely fascinated and it's a rabbit hole. Um, but I, I've kind of started to go down it is really taking a closer look at iron.

And, you know, we know generally that iron can be a catalyst in, you sent me a link to a book. Yes. That, that book, uh, it,

it's not, it's not, uh, a pumping iron, but it's rather dumping iron. Yeah. And that book sort of changed my life. And,

you know, uh, of course, uh, Ron Pennell was the guy who said, Hey dude, read this book because there's important stuff in there. And one of my, my key takeaways was that um uh green tea extract

is good for uh you know egcg is good for iron sequestration additionally you know this anecdotal thing of hey take a baby aspirin every day because it thins out your blood well it also allows you to very uh slowly sequester iron out of your body because aspirin is an irritant to the lining of the intestine. And it just makes you bleed just a little bit. Not in any way that's dangerous to you. I've heard Ray Peet mention that before. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Ray Peet. Yes.

And giving blood is a big part of making sure that you keep your iron levels low. And giving blood is a big part of making sure that you keep your iron levels low. And one of the things that's interesting is, you know, we don't have this as much today in developing countries, but then we may have in the past so all of this has really made me refactor um managing my iron levels uh and looking at hematocrit more consistently and that's something that i think um there's there's a lot more to learn in that domain um but it's become a great interest to me because you're right about the rabbit hole it gets to be confusing too so iron is iron attached to like your red blood cell count or something along those lines or well it's it's it's a whole ecosystem that that is uh uh related so for example like we talked to you we just talked about a lot of guys that use stuff their red blood cell count well yeah as does does rb count. That's absolutely true. Right. So for example, anything that you bring in exogenously, if you're using pharmacology for performance enhancement, those are some of the effects.

And managing that is very important. Giving blood is a great way to counteract that effect. It's probably the best way, right? Yes. The quickest, fastest way, right? But also using these other things like baby aspirin, like green tea extract can also assist in that, which is very interesting. Additionally, we talked about A1C, right? Well, A1C is basically a measure of glycated and non-glycated hemoglobin. In other words, in very simple terms, and I'm oversimplifying it, sugared blood cells to non-sugared blood cells.

Gotcha. Right? And in humans and dogs- It's a way to check people for diabetes, basically, right? Yeah, it's a long-term marker, right? And so if you're looking at hematocrit, iron, ferritin, and A1C levels, now you have a very good index of where you stand in relation to potential disease acquisition. It's not a perfect index, but if you're looking at that, man, you're getting a keen view on where you stand. So those things have really sort of captured my imagination. What's the danger of having high amounts of iron? Well, in a cancer model, it can act as a catalyst for progression, as can folates.

So those are, I mean, that's not new information. In fact, you might know that in the early 60s when chemotherapeutics were being developed for blood cancers in children, they weren't called chemotherapies. They were called antifolates. So there's a tradition of understanding there in that landscape, which isn't new. But as you continue to read and as you continue to research and talk to people, all this new, it's not really new information, but it's represented information. And for me, this is all very new. Before we hopped on the podcast, you were kind of mentioning how you got started with Quest Nutrition. Share that story with us a little bit. Yeah. How that whole thing. I'll give you the condensed version.

What's your background career-wise? the condensed version. What's your background, um, career wise? Ah, so it really total departure from all this. So I studied biology in college, uh, but I didn't stay in college because when I was in college, it was like the mid to late nineties. And that was during the tech boom. I was in San Francisco. So I became very involved, uh, in software development companies. And I sort of hopped from software development company to software development company. So I stayed in sort of the tech world. I spent a long time in the uh travel technology vertical which is a very niche niche technology vertical it's it's global uh but it's very narrow and it's in its application and function and um it really wasn't until i moved to la that uh this connection with Quest happened. And it happened through a very, very circuitous

conflagration of circumstances. And it all started with the famous, famous bodybuilder, Robbie Robinson, who some people know as the Black Prince. You can see him in Pumping Iron. Pull up some pictures of him. Yeah, his physique then and now is so so impressive and um i had an opportunity to train with him and through that opportunity um he had asked me one day to hey go go talk to these guys at quest uh and see what they want and at the time

quest was uh was was doing an affiliate uh right there oh yeah phenomenal man um uh they were doing an affiliate uh athlete program and they were considering robbie to come into that and so uh i met my colleague ron penna uh as as well as another colleague nick robinson who's chief marketing officer at the time and uh we talked a little bit about this affiliate program but then we started talking about all these other things and at the end of that conversation ron goes to me i i don't know how we're going to do it but we're going to work together and i said okay sound familiar yeah i said well you know i guess that's possible but not probable um and then this very strange sequence of events occur where ron would

call me up he said hey dude you got to come to the office to see you know dr scott connelly's coming in and we gotta talk to him about the such and such. And at the time I was preparing for my series seven so I was at home doing tests on a computer and it was a lot more fun to go hang out with Ron and the guys at Quest and meet these people who I knew of but had not made their acquaintance personally.

And so he would call me up on the weekends, dude, meet me at the Starbucks seat because we're gonna talk about this and I got this plan and then we're going to do this right he just sucked me in man that's great he knew he needed you yeah and it was one of those things where we found out a couple things we truly enjoyed each other's company we shared so many overlapping interests that it was almost like ridiculous it was it was almost like brothers from another mother um and eventually we just sort of looked each other crap, you know, I guess we are working together and You know because quest at that time was still very small. It was still very intimate but

Financially was taking off like a rocket ship That's when these weird and strange and sort of non sequitur ideas started coming into the into play weird and strange and sort of non sequitur ideas started coming into the, into play. Um, and, and, and Ron and, and the rest of the team,

not only are very creative, uh, but very, I would say, uh, forgiving and accommodating to all this weirdness. Because I mean, if you think of it,

you take a step back, like, you know, weird things were happening. Like I would call up, you know, equipment. So yeah,

I'd like to buy a pet CT scan. So, Oh yes, of course, sir. Uh, which hospital we were with? No, no, no hospital. I just want to buy it. Click. Hello. Right. So yeah, I'd like to buy a PET CT scan. So, Oh yes, of course, sir. Uh, which hospital we were with? No,

no, no hospital. I just want to buy it. Click. Hello. Right. I mean, you,

you really like we had to invent doing this. Um, but we saw like that cost 240 or whatever. Yeah. Oh, it was, it was ridiculous. I think it was something like 52,000,

53,000 a month to have somebody. It was totally, it was totally insanity, but we gave each other permission to go after this. And at the the end of the day what we were really interested in was just finding out the truth to the best of our ability through the highest standard of validation that we were aware of at the time and that process continues and in many other domains not just with the dogs but also with the people uh you know we're also focused on early cancer detection. We're very, very interested in the effects of breathing and the effects of carbon sequestration in the body.

Carbon dioxide sequestration in the body as impacts bore effect and the tissue perfusion of oxygen and things like that as interventions against disease so there's all these other things that we maintain an interest in or pursuing just sort of trying to figure out what works you know if something doesn't work okay we chuck it to the side and we move on if something does work we double down and we dig deeper yeah as i was uh mentioning earlier you know a really big thing of all, of all this is to be passionate and excited about what you do. Um, I think you kind of hear that a lot, you know, nowadays people are like, you know, find your passion, find your passion. But, uh, what does really, you know, kind of like make you tick is really an important thing. Sure. You guys would have never been able to get halfway down the road with any of these ideas

if you weren't excited about it. And if it was like, oh, here comes Ron again. Right. Well, part of it too, is that some of this stuff really does constitute like mysteries, right? Where you have certain clues, you have certain pieces of the puzzle, right? You're making certain educated guesses, particularly with the help of domain experts who are sort of like, no, no, don't go down that path over here, guys, right? Saving you some time and money.

Saving you some time and money, saving you just mistakes, costly mistakes, right? And you're sort of placing bets on where the right place to dig is, right? And so far, we've been pretty lucky in hitting on the right places to dig is right. And so far we've been pretty lucky in hitting on, uh, the right places, uh, to dig. That's super, that's super cool. And, and, you know, one thing you're going to see, you're going to have Ron on the show at some point. Uh, he, he just, he loves lifting, you know, he loves lifting. He loves to talk about fitness. He loves to talk about nutrition and obviously he's passionate about business as well. He would never been able to thrive the way he was able to thrive. I think Quest, you know, went from like 400,000 to billions of dollars in like a four or five year span or something, something crazy like that. And, you know, he would have never been able to do that if he wasn't passionate and excited about the brand and about everything they were doing. passionate and excited about the brand and about everything that we're doing.

But it's kind of, it's like you got to kind of pride some of that out of him. If you want to talk about business sometimes, whereas the opposite happens when you talk about lifting. Right. And he's somebody that, I don't know if he's still following the diet, but he was following Vince Duranda's diet for a little while. Steaking eggs. Is he still doing that? I think so.

I want to say. Yeah. It's almost at every meal. What you guys are going to find out when you start doing some of these diets on your own and start to experiment is, is they're going to become your own. You know, that's really the goal. The goal isn't for you to be forced into me trying to preach something to you. I may suggest something to you and maybe you start to go down that path and maybe your diet looks different. Maybe, you know, there's so many versions of the ketogenic diet. Bodybuilders have been using it for years. They used to use like a, you know, three days on one day off protocol. I mean, many, many people have done many different versions of it. So you're going to, you know, you'll go down a rabbit hole, so to speak. And as you dive deeper and deeper into it, you might find yourself getting a little crazy about it, which is okay. That's fair. But then it will morph into like its own thing and you'll end up with your own lifestyle that surrounds it all.

Sure. Yeah. I mean, you make two great points. One, it's not new. And two, people apply it in their own unique ways. You know, Larry Scott, the first Mr. Olympia was famous, no famously known for drinking quarts of heavy cream. Cause he was,

that was one of the ways that he used, you know, these, these huge boluses of fat to upregulate hormone production, uh, and to get sufficient calories to put on the muscle. Yeah. And you know,

so in that regard, how do we get bigger or more muscular? You know, some people will say, you know, insulin's most anabolic thing that we got. And, you know, so in that regard, how do we get bigger or more muscular? You know, some people will say, you know, insulin's the most anabolic thing that we got. And now, you know, you're preaching the war on carbs and we don't have any carbs. So how are we going to get bigger? Can you, you mentioned earlier that there's been some evidence that you can get a little stronger while on a ketogenic diet. Can you gain muscle mass a little bigger? You can, you can get a little bigger. Like I mentioned before, you know, and this is a guy you'll definitely want to have on the podcast,

Dr. Jacob Wilson. He's him and his team of research scientists have probably looked at this, the most in resistance trained athletes. Jacob Wilson is jacked, right? Isn't he pretty jacked? He's in pretty darn good shape, man. I mean, you look at him, you can tell, okay, this guy clearly trains. You know, the other guy you'll want to talk to is dr jeff volick of ohio state university yeah he used to be a power lifter indeed and you know he he looked at the the distance uh or or endurance model so he looked at ketogenics in

these you know uh triathletes and ultra marathoners the guys have run 50 100 miles um and when you look at those two models you see two two corresponding things. One is inflammation drops dramatically and risk of injury drops dramatically. So that's the big one. Now in resistance trained athletes, obviously you're not going to have the same muscle building effect that you would with high protein and high carb. Right. Right. You can know that, but it doesn't mean that you can't make gains. Additionally, because of the upregulation of acetoacetate when you're in ketosis, guess what? That's muscle sparing. So your ability to maintain strength and not lose muscle mass is key. Right. And so, for example, that's one of the reasons why the ketogenic diet is so appropriate for the military, but also for astronauts.

Why? In a low gravity environment, what happens? You lose muscle. Right. So if you're in ketosis and you have, you're, you're essentially,

you have muscle sparing substrates floating around in your body. That's a huge advantage. Right. Right. So, you know, there's that spectrum and landscape of response depending on what's going on. And you have to look at that.

Again, I think it makes a lot of sense. A ketogenic diet in bodybuilding or in powerlifting probably makes the most sense post-contest. Right. Right. You're restoring hormone balance, right? Particularly pharmacology is involved and you're letting your body rest from that. Right. Those high fats help you.

Yeah. Recover and restore that equilibrium. Hugely important. Additionally, particularly in bodybuilding, man, you've been starving yourself a touch for three, four weeks, right, of an eight or 12-week prep cycle. Feeling satiated without eating everything in that restaurant is a big part of controlling that rebound response. Right. So you still look great. You're still lean, right? And rebound response. Right. So you still look great. You're still lean.

Right. Um, and you, you still have strength. There's some people listening to this right now and they're like, these guys are full of shit, man. You know, they, they definitely hit a big wall when they try a keto diet. And again, um, if you feel that way, then a lot of times it's because you're restricting the food that you're eating too much. You're going from one extreme to another. And you may want to take your time going into it, just like we do with training protocols. We're not going to go from doing sets of 10 to sets of one. We're going to do sets of 10, sets of eight, sets of six, and so on. And we're going to prep ourselves for that. Or if we wanted to start doing some crazy workouts, we want to start to introduce a lot more volume.

Well, we'd start to prep ourselves for that because we make ourselves too sore. Then we open up the door for injury and we open up the door to basically just go backwards. And so you always have to be prepared for whatever it is that you're about to do. And if you're going to try a ketogenic diet, when you start to think about powerlifting, MMA, bodybuilding, When you start to think about powerlifting, MMA, bodybuilding, we start to think about those, we start to think about those sports or football or any of these things. There's not a lot of great reasons to not eat carbohydrates. You know, carbohydrates can be really, really effective. But if you want to try to make some changes to your lean body mass, if you're somebody that ends up taking it too far when you are allowed to eat carbohydrates, well, then maybe this is something that you might want to look into. And also to just give you better brain function.

Now, in MMA, I know a lot of MMA fighters, a lot of former fighters are using a ketogenic diet to try to help repair the brain. Is that correct? ketogenic diet to try to help repair the brain. Is that correct? Oh, it's, it's, it can't be overstated how crucial intervals of ketosis are for, uh,

the neuro neuroprotective effect. Right. I mean, one of the things that I would love to be able to, you know, if, because I love fighting, I love UFC,

UFC, I love boxing. I love watching stuff. I would love to be able to sit down with the physicians who are, you know, part of the, the UFC apparatus and are, you know, part of the UFC apparatus and say, hey guys, why aren't these fighters on exogenous ketones before and after a fight?

And why aren't they in hyperbarics before and after a fight? Lowering inflammation, right? Lowering the- That's a genius. That's a pre and post workout carbohydrates almost, but for the brain almost. For the brain, yeah. Because look, man, there's no getting around it. Let's recover.

Just like football, just like soccer, just like rugby, just like any contact sport, they're receiving jarring, jarring blows to the brain. And, you know, as durable as a lot of these athletes are, you simply can't protect yourself from injury. And whether that presents acutely or whether that presents in the longterm, if you're not a steward of that, if you're not doing some kind of intervention to lower the preponderance of brain injury, man, you're really losing an opportunity to do a couple of things. One, increase and sustain the longevity of these guys' career. And two, increase and sustain the longevity of these guys' career. And two, increase and sustain the longevity of their health. Yeah.

Right? Because wouldn't it be great if all these guys, man, they were sharp as a tack after they retire, they go on TV, they're great announcers, they're great color commentators, right? You know, one of the great sadnesses in my life is that I've been privileged enough to meet a lot of my heroes in boxing and in MMA and you talk to them and you can clearly see mental deficit. I mean, it's just obvious. It's very painful because these are like my superheroes and I want to talk to them. I want to interact with them. And I can see that it's very difficult

for them to do that. And I'm not saying all of that can be avoided or you can totally insulate yourself. Yeah. I mean, you're still punching each other in the face. You're still rattling each other's noggins. Um, but man, there's a lot you can do to mitigate the most egregious effects of combat sport. It's insanely interesting because what if you could somehow manage, you know, they'll say, oh, this guy got knocked out. Now he's gonna get knocked out more. You know, he's gonna get knocked out more often. What if, you know, what if something like what you're talking about, what if it could help somebody with that? It could change their career. Well, and you, we know this from,

I mean, we, we know this both anecdotally and from, from the, from the literature. So for example, the person who's probably done the best work on this, or,

or at least the most well-known work is Dr. Adrian Sheck out of the Barrow's Institute in Phoenix, where she looked at the combination of hyperbaric oxygen therapy and radiation on glioblastoma compared to just radiation only. Huge difference in tumor response. Additionally, ketogenic diet and radiation versus radiation only. Again, huge difference in tumor response. And not only that, in the ketogenic group or the hyperbaric group, the side effects were much lower because you have the anti-inflammatory effect, because you have the neuroprotective in the ketogenic group or the hyperbaric group, the side effects were much lower because you have the anti-inflammatory effect,

because you have the neuroprotective effect. So she's really elucidated, I think, a very formidable case in a disease model, which it wouldn't take much to tip over into a performance model. That's what I was talking about before. What we learn from the brain cancer patients, man, I can apply that to my boxer or to my, to my MMA fighter.

Right. So that, that's where it starts to get to me. That's where it starts to get very exciting. Right. Is we can look at that science. Very good science has been done and say, Hey, how can we apply this in novel ways to people who, you know, they're risking themselves every time they go in there. And if you get knocked out, man, you should be in the hyperbarics as soon as it makes

sense to be in there. You know, obviously you have to be evaluated. Every MMA fighter should have some access to those things. Well, and it's, you know, what's interesting is there are some hyperbarics as soon as it makes sense to be in there you know you obviously you have to be evaluating every mma fighter should have some access to those things well and it's you know what's interesting is there are some hyperbaric chambers and uh in nfl teams but they're not they're usually used like if if there's like a soft tissue injury they're used for that but they're not used as part of a consistent protocol for addressing edema or other trauma to the brain right right and it's like that's where the biggest bang for the buck is right right and going cycling in and out of ketosis the use of exogenous ketones that's a whole landscape that could totally alter the

long-term health effects uh and performance athletes has there been proof that supplemental ketones work uh in varying degrees yes not in the specific domain that i just spoke to yeah i mean so for example if you take as much as ketones do ketones rise in in your blood yes they do right uh do they induce neuroprotective effect yes that's actually been been uh demonstrated uh can they give you a little boost in your workout uh conceivably i mean it depends on how much you take and in what form so for example we're talking demonstrated. Can they produce... Maybe give you a little boost in your workout? Conceivably. I mean, it depends on how much you take

and in what form. So, for example, we're talking about the salt thing. Just taking salt can have an impact or performance. So, see,

when I was taking a ketone supplement, what I think I was noticing, and it was very minor, but I did notice I could work out a little bit better. I didn't really notice

anything with the brain necessarily, but that's probably just because I'm already doing a keto diet. So maybe I'm not noticing anything extra. But what I took from it all, my hypothesis on the whole thing was I looked at the ingredients and it had like magnesium and salt and things like that. So I was like, well, maybe it's just the electrolyte balance I'm getting a little kick from, along with the ketone perhaps. Yeah, the salt can make a big difference. Part of it too is in the mineral formulations,

your net dosage of BHB is usually pretty modest. It's usually like eight to 11 grams. Whereas if you're taking like a diester or a 1,3-butane, you could take 50 grams. Right. And there's no dose limitation because of a mineral. Right. You're dose limited on a salt version because all of a sudden now you're taking too much salt. And this ester version, it tastes weird, right?

Oh, it tastes like jet fuel. I mean, it's absolutely heinous. Yeah. So, but, you know, great for bodybuilders. I got some from somebody, but I didn't know what to do with it. They were telling me to take it with glucose. And like, why do they propose? Maybe with a Diet Dr. Pepper to wash the taste.

Because it's also viscous and it sits on your tongue. I mean, it's absolutely heinous tasting. But you take a good bowl, it's 20 to 30 mLs of that. Man, it literally, like your world changes. You get this huge, huge mental clarity. I also get a, when I take it, I get a visual acuity effect where everything becomes a lot sharper.

Not everyone experiences that, but I've talked to other people who say, oh yeah, like lights get a lot sharper and brighter as a result. So it's, and what's interesting is that happens right away. So there's a signaling effect that one can induce induce from from that

because the the time it takes to get those those mental and visual effects is much faster than it would be to consume that as a as a fuel substrate so there's some there's a cascade of signals going on there's you know that's there's a whole area of science that has yet to be explored have you tried to use it for working out oh Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it gives you a little endurance. I think also for me, like particularly when I do very strenuous workouts on leg days, sometimes like I'll have a tendency to want to vomit. It checks that.

It suppresses that, which is great for me because then I don't get made fun of in the gym as the guy who threw up. So there are, there's some social advantages to it too. too when it comes to supplements you notice a big impact from anything in particular you mentioned uh the iodine salt um being helpful for you sure you know i think one of the most interesting supplements is one we talked about before which is the cluster dextrin right highly branched resistance carb which is non-insogenic. So this is a great way if you're in ketosis. Yeah, Ron was mentioning these to me as well. To me, that's very interesting.

I definitely use it. You could potentially use it post-workout, even if you're on a keto diet. Yeah, pre-workout, post-workout. Gotcha. You know, I'll take 30 to 50 grams, depending on what the workout is. If it's, you know, anything other than back or legs, I'll take 30 grams. If it's back or legs, take 50 grams. Something where you've got more energy.

Yeah. And it makes a big, big difference. And you can test your blood sugar, man. It does not budge. So it's very powerful in that way. You know, additionally, the exogenous ketones, like we said, play a role. I mean, truth be told, I think I'm like you. I'm not like a supplement guy.

Yeah. You know, I'm a food guy for sure i think there's a few supplements like protein powder you know i weigh it isolate way case in it okay that's pretty that's a pretty good supplement try and true but i'm not like a pre-workout guy yeah um you know i'm not like an estrogen blocker guy like those aren't things that are particularly compelling to me because even though they might have some effect, generally it's at the margins. And particularly with pre-workouts, I think one has to be judicious about overriding one's own body's ability to tell you where you're at in a workout. Right. pre-workout, you don't really have it, overriding that, overstimulating yourself, maybe moving you

backwards because you may try things that you don't really have, you don't have it today for that. And I'd much rather let my body tell me that than, you know, just steamroll past it because I feel like I got to hit a PR or I got to do so many extra sets or whatever the case may be. So I think the use of stimulants is one of those things that you know it's probably important to be judicious about what about vitamins or minerals in particular is anything anything like supplementation and not just getting it just from food or i mean so for example uh the use of uh b complex uh in the form of an intramuscular shot that's well known to to produce benefit oral vitamins there's a lot of loss right stomach chews everything out yeah there's a lot of loss so so you know that the the true yield in vitamins

is pretty low and that's why you notice like bodybuilders who take them take vast you know they're taking 5x you know why because they're trying to get a sufficient amount uh of that and they're bigger humans typically so you know you know, there's a correspondence there. You know, like you, there are times when I take certain supplements, but usually it's asymmetric. I'll do it for a little while and then stop. Yeah.

I think the only thing that I come back to with some frequency is vitamin D supplementation when I'm not able to go to a tanning bed. Right. So I'll take vitamin D3 and vitamin K2. not able to go to a tanning bed. Right. So I'll take vitamin D3 and vitamin K2. Not able to get in the sun maybe.

Yeah, if I can't, if I can't get vitamin D either from an artificial source which is a light bulb that's spitting out UVB rays or the actual sun,

then I'll come back to that supplementation. But I try to get it mainly from a light source. Yeah. If I can't. So that's probably the one that I return to with some frequency because sometimes when

you travel and things like you can't, you can't get that done. There was some really interesting research that Sean Baker brought up with us about, uh, uh, you know, like vitamin C and some of these other vitamins sometimes getting, I guess, you know, in a weird way, getting cannibalized by a poor diet and like you need more nutrients because you're eating like crazy amounts of carbohydrates or something so on his with his carnivore stuff he was basically kind of saying that because there's the absence of all the sugar and all these other all this other junk that he had in his diet uh that potentially for him he didn't need as much

vitamin c and things like that yeah that that's actually a well understood phenomenon. So, so high carbohydrate attenuate, attenuates, uh, absorption of vitamin and minerals, which is why like things like wonder bread and, you know, captain crunch are re fortified. So good. Yeah. They're so delicious, but that's why they're re fortified is the understanding that like, if you, if you didn't re fortify, actually you'd be in a deficit because of the high glycemic carb. So, you know, and it's the same thing. It's why, you know, going back to the dog food thing, it's why kibble is re-fortified.

I mean, it, it literally, when that thing comes out prior to re-fortification and flavoring, dogs won't eat it. It's literally like a piece of cardboard. They won't eat it. Once you put the flavor, once you put the re-fortification, then it becomes attractive to the dog. So that's something that, you know,

the same thing in human foods. When you have something that's super highly processed like that and re-fortified, it's probably not something that you want to make a regular part of. Right. Of your nutritional consumption. Yeah. Awesome, man. Well,

we, we covered a lot today. We did a lot of damage. And, you know, I know that this was a long podcast, but when we have a material expert like this who's had so much real world experience and so much knowledge, I figure we might as well just pour it all out on the table. I really appreciate having you here. Are you on Instagram and stuff like that? To a degree, yeah. You're like, oh, never mind.

I'm not a big social media guy. Gotcha. You can find me on, I believe, Facebook and Instagram. There you go. Yeah. Oh, there, yeah. Daniel Orego, I really appreciate having you here, man. It's really cool.

Oh, there's the old punching bag. Oh, that's the Allstrike. Yeah, yeah. That's actually making a comeback, by way easy bringing it back yeah we're we're gonna do that through uh our partner uh rev gear um which is a california-based uh uh equipment distributor so you'll see the the the rev gear all strike coming out i think in about like 45 days it's it's very very soon so for those folks is that ron's idea yeah that was something that we came up with some martial arts and stuff yeah i mean this is one of the things we both love

fighting and martial arts and uh and so this was one of the one of the projects that we worked on really in the early days of quest because we wanted to solve the problem of the artifact of you know uh a heavy bag is a cylinder. And the glove. Yeah. Yeah. You know, focus mitts, while they can be useful in acquiring certain skills, really, you know, no one's head is flat or this big. So we created the Allstrike, which is sort of an anatomically realistic head, which allows you to punch and kick and really focus on precision striking. Watching this video, you know, as they're going through it.

Yeah, I mean, it looks like you got some boxing skill. It looks like you've been boxing for a while. Oh, yeah. I mean, I started fighting when I was a kid. Oh, cool. Yeah, and so I've enjoyed it since then. And that was one of the things that Ron and I really connected on because he loved fighting and he loves martial arts.

So when we started working on this project you know this this was like this was another rabbit hole i mean this taught us about cad design this taught us about 3d printing this taught us about mold making um it was it was so difficult to make that product the fact that even exists is somewhat of a miracle yeah but it's really satisfying to know that it will come back into the market here, like I said, within the next 45 to 60 years. Yeah, I remember years ago, and everyone else probably had the same reaction I did. I was like, I'm confused. Now they have this head thing, and I'm like, I don't know what's going on.

Yeah, like, what does that have to do with anything else? I don't know what the backstory of it is. Because, you know, Quest Nutrition is way different than what I have going on here at Slingshot. Slingshot is attached to my kind of lifestyle, whereas Quest Nutrition was not really ever attached to like a person in particular. Well, that was purposeful because, you know, sometimes when you have a personality, there's advantages and disadvantages there.

Correct. The advantages is people can relate to that personality. The disadvantages, if there's a population or a demographic that doesn't relate to that personality, then they don't become customers. Right. So if you have something that's more inclusive where there's not one personality, but there's many. Right. Then you're going after a larger demographic. So that was a strategic decision in the case of this particular thing coming out, this head strike thing, if that was associated to a person or someone's story, then maybe like initially maybe it would have done better or just made more sense.

But for a lot of people, they were like, oh, where's this coming from? And people don't know a lot about Ron. He's very quiet. He's like, he's pretty. Yeah. Yeah. He's very. Yeah.

quiet he's like he's pretty uh yeah yeah he's very yeah you just have no idea that he's such a savage when it comes to fitness and when it comes to business you just don't know until somebody points out to you hey that's the only request right right super cool anyway awesome having you here i'm fired up to uh do more stuff with you you know i'm gonna need your help for this movie that we're doing so we get all our facts straight and that we're not spewing out too much bullshit. And also fired up to have Ron Penna on the podcast coming up pretty soon.

Strength is never a weakness. Weakness is never a strength. Catch you guys later.