Mark Bell's Power Project - Power Project EP. 4 - Robb Wolf 10Min Walk Talk

Episode Date: February 7, 2018

Welcome to the 10 Minute Walk Talk, the accessory to your 10 minute walk. Mark Bell invites two time New York Times & WSJ best selling author Robb Wolf for this first edition. Mark asked Rob to speak on how he handles carbs, what's new in nutrition, and how should our kids be eating.

Hey, folks, my name is Rob Wolf. Mark Smelly Bill pinged me and asked me to answer a couple of questions as part of his new short format podcast. And I'm incredibly honored to do that. He fired off three short, but really great questions for me. And hopefully it's worth your time listening to this. So just as a little bit of background, I was a research biochemist in my past life, mainly in the areas of cancer and autoimmunity. I was a former California state powerlifting champion, a half-decent Thai boxer at one time, not particularly good, but I was incredibly nearsighted. So most of other people's movements looked like a blur instead of something that was actually helpful in a combative sense. Today, my main activity is old guy Brazilian jiu-jitsu. I have a purple belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. And this kind of leads into one of the first questions that Mark fired off to me, which is how am I using carbohydrates today for my life and fueling and whatnot?

This is kind of an interesting story. And clearly the high carb, low carb deal is like as contentious as like some sort of Northern Ireland, like, you know, truck bomb type type deal. People are super spun out on all sides of this. You have the low carb jihadis that insist that low carb is the only way to eat. You have other people that just dismiss outright that there's any efficacy to reducing carbohydrate for folks. And, you know, my own experience in this is growing up, I basically was in a fog my whole life until I was about 28 years old. When out of desperation due to a host of health problems, including some really, really nasty gut issues that I had, including ulcerative colitis. I went on a low carb diet. I basically picked up an Atkins book and read it and it made a lot of sense and felt better within a few days of doing that than literally I'd ever felt in my life. And this is almost 20 years ago, like it's a few months away from 20 years. As I'm recording,

this is the day before my 46th birthday. And so it's been quite some time since I first embarked on all this stuff, 18 to 20 years since I started this. And for me, eating on the lower carb side of things has always worked way, way better than the alternative. And I've improved my ability to tolerate carbohydrate over time. And I'll talk a little bit about that, how I kind of partition them and whatnot. But both of my parents developed type two diabetes in their 30s, late 30s, early 40s, bad diet, smoking, all that type of stuff. But there's clearly some high genetic predilection on or predisposition on both sides of my family. Virt virtually everybody in my family is overweight

cardiovascular disease type 2 diabetes or peridiabetic my 23andme genetic screening suggests that i'm three times more likely than average to develop type 2 diabetes and yeah type 2 diabetes ultimately is a manifestation of overeating i'm not in the camp that is directly in that carbs, insulin hypothesis kind of deal. But there is a reality that a lot of people, and I am among those people, they just don't tolerate carbs all that well. And it's really easy for me to get into a hyper and hypoglycemic blood sugar roller coaster and i'm hungry all the time if i eat too many carbs so i've found kind of my my qualitative type of carbs that i eat if you're familiar with my work i kind of advocate this paleo diet approach is is kind of a beginning template

i'm not religious about it i just you know when people are used to eating out of the snack aisle and you're trying to give them some direction it It seems like a decent North Star to use to to kind of direct people down a particular path. And then we kind of iterate from there. But I've had good success with ketogenic and very low carb diets in the past. But my Brazilian jujitsu, the volume and the intensity of doing that, I do it between three and five days a week. I do a little bit of weights on in addition to that, just for some maintenance and kind of injury prevention. But I find that a legit ketogenic level of carbs, you know, 30 to 50 grams a day just leaves me flat and kind of knackered. I don't have that low gear in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. And so a

couple of things that I've done, I try to do a little bit of a time restricted feeding window. I try to make my dinner happen around four or 5 PM. And that works pretty well with the whole family. We have a three-year-old and a five-year-old girls, and we like to get them into bed early because it keeps our sanity good. And also what I understand and continue to learn about circadian rhythm. I think that getting kids into bed early and minimizing their light exposure in the evening is really, really important. You know, potentially controversial topic. You can't trigger people faster than talking about what you do with your own kids because people assume that you're talking down your nose at them about their kids. And that's not what I'm doing. But maybe at some point in the future, if Mark wants to chat about that circadian rhythm piece specifically, we can,

but, uh, I, I, again, I try to make that, that last meal around five o'clock in the evening. Um, I don't eat again until nine or 10 AM the next day. And so, I mean, it's a 14 to 16 hour, you know, I guess, intermittent fasting window. My first meal of the day is pretty big. It can be 15, 16, even sometimes as large as 1800 calories, because I do try to actually just eat two meals a day. So that first meal is pretty large. And I might do 50 grams of carbs as part of that and a big whack of protein, decent whack of fat.

And I'll do my Brazilian Jiu Jitsu training somewhere between noon and one o'clock most days, or I'll do my weightlifting same time. And then I usually will fast until dinner. Oftentimes, I'm just literally not hungry, like the volume and intensity of what I've done in the training. And also the that big meal in the morning, um, is enough to motor me through. And then on that evening meal, um, based off the volume and intensity that I've, I've had on that day, I will kind of dial in the carbs up or down based off of, did I have a really blistering, you know, day of jujitsu where there are, you know, 22 year old police officers in there that

weighed 30 pounds more than me or or was it kind of a mellow day and so i can kind of tweak both the caloric load and the carbohydrate load to fit that and things have been working really well my sleep's good my body composition is good like i i don't weigh and measure my food and i'm probably somewhere between eight and ten percent body fat i am by no means huge. There's lots of people who are 46 years old who are bigger and more jacked than I am, but I have a really busy schedule, lots of business obligations, family obligations. And again, my primary training shtick is Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

So I guess in total, on a big day, I might get 150 grams of carbs. On a really sedentary day, I might drop carbs down to around 50 grams and just kind of run right at that kind of periketogenic level. And I feel really good at 46 years old. I get a lot of stuff done. I'm there for my family. My blood work looks fantastic. I feel better now than honestly I did in my mid-20s when I was really sick with ulcerative colitis.

So it's been working pretty well for me. It's not to say it's going to work for anybody else. But if you find that you have a lot of blood sugar swings and whatnot, you might play with the amount, the quality of carbs, and then clearly some of the timing. And I've actually been doing more carbs earlier in the day versus later in the day. I know some folks have some success with like a carb backloading. I think there's a lot of ways to skin the cat. But again, with some of the stuff I've learned around circadian biology, I've been sticking more carbs earlier. So the second question, the most fascinating thing that I've heard about nutrition in the past year.

Man, that's kind of a tough one because it's just so much interesting stuff. And I was kind of racking my brain when Mark sent this to me, thinking about what might be, you know, something newsworthy around this. I don't know if it's a specific thing. microbiome i i don't know if it's a specific thing uh the the basic thing that i'm really geeked out about right now and and continually fascinated by is the gut microbiome and its interplay with our our health and our performance it's fascinating to me because there seems to be a kind of a push-pull mechanism going on here um the gut microbiome seems to influence our health, seems to influence our performance. So the makeup of the gut microbiome can influence our mitochondria and our hormonal status, insulin sensitivity, testosterone levels. Like it's really interesting. But then the flip side of that is our hormonal status,

our training volume and intensity, our sleep, our food, that can all influence the gut microbiome. So, you know, the chicken versus egg story there is really interesting to me. And I think it's going to make that story kind of difficult to unpack with regards to clinical application. And I guess that's one interesting thing is that there are a lot of folks who claim a remarkable degree of understanding about the gut microbiome. And they will sequence someone's gut bacteria and say, oh, you've got X, Y, Z, and this is good and that's bad. And I think there's some situations where we can kind of hang our hat on at least some of that. But one of the fascinating things that was discovered is that the gut microbiome seems to change like hourly if not by the minute like literally if we sequence someone's gut in the morning and then they do some exercise or they have some stress or even they don't have

exercise or stress like the gut microbiome just changes dramatically through the day so that's really interesting and i think uh, you know, the, the awareness that the gut health is really critical to our overall health, like that's continuing to be one of the really fascinating areas that I'm following, but I'm really learning that we are miles and miles away from a really tight prescriptive process in that. And there are some folks that claim that they, they understand that on a deep level, maybe they're a lot smarter than I am, but I haven't really figured that out yet. Finally, Mark's last question, how should our children be eating? Again, can't trigger people faster than by talking about what you do with your own kids. I've had people like the internet's just

kind of a fascinating place. Like I've described in the past what we do with our kids and how we feed them, what we do. And people will kind of gleefully chime in from the sideline. They're like, well, no matter how good you feed them now, someday they're going to eat whatever they want. And it's kind of like, yeah, that's being an effective parent, not creating a fucking robot. So but it's just funny, the venom around that stuff. But it's just funny, the venom around that stuff. But I interviewed a guy, Dr. Bill Schindler, who is one of the stars of the National Geographic show, The Great Human Race. And he's an evolutionary biologist and anthropologist.

The show is he and his co-host, Kat, are basically kind of replicating the spread of humans around the world, you know, from Africa and this kind of periglacial environment. And he's really well steeped in this kind of ancestral health idea, evolutionary biology, clearly and whatnot. And he had a really interesting observation, which was validating, you know, nothing beats confirmation bias and confirmation bias. But his approach to raising his kids has been kind of the following. And this is largely what I've done. I really try to focus on getting the good stuff in a variety of meats and seafood, good fats, avocado, some butter, as much vegetable matters. Vegetable matters, the kids will eat, although they're honestly pretty picky about that, like artichokes, asparagus, and some bell peppers, tomatoes, those sorts of things. Carrots, they do pretty well.

But like green leafy stuff, they just really are not all that interested. They will do a kale salad if you cover the kale salad in a ton of, you know, like olive oil and garlic and stuff like that. Interestingly, they will eat that but basically focusing on getting in as much of the good stuff as you can and then at the end if there our house is a gluten-free house i am wickedly intolerant to gluten um i was looking back i had gluten issues growing up as a kid it just just got worse as an adult. I clearly had some sort of a shift in my gut status and it went from kind of a low grade problem to a really nasty problem. Both of my kids have had gluten when they've eaten out or gone to a friend's house or what have you. And we've been like, okay, we'll just, you know, do an experiment here.

They don't seem to suffer any GI problems or any other kind of systemic problems, but I'm so reactive that I just don't want to have the stuff in the house. And at the end of the day, there's nothing magical about gluten containing items. Like we do a pizza night, uh, every Friday and we just do some gluten-free pizza. Um, if we do like a birthday cake or something, it's a gluten-free mix. And again, what I try to focus on is getting as much of the good stuff in at the beginning. And then if they want like a gluten-free cookie or, you know, something like that, we do it occasionally. We don't have sweets every single day. And I am doing my best to raise my girls to just be aware that there's consequences with stuff.

And I don't call foods good or bad. I actually try to talk to them like they with stuff. And I don't call foods good or bad. I actually try to talk to them like they're adults. And I describe to them what I do. Like I sit on the board of directors of a medical clinic that works primarily with police, military, and fire. And we do risk assessment around metabolic issues that these folks face. And we tend to use kind of a low-carb paleo diet to help these people.

And this is a group of folks that are exceptionally at risk for type two diabetes and cardiovascular disease. And this carb reduced kind of paleo type diet has been really powerful in that regard. And so I talked to my girls about what I do. What I do is I help people eat better. And if you don't eat well, you can get really sick and not be all that happy and have a lot of health problems. And so I'm just pretty honest with them. And I've tried not to get into

the emotionally loaded triggers of this food is good or that food is bad. But I do point out that you can overdo anything and sweets can definitely be overdone. And we've let the girls kind of go pell-mell

into like some gluten-free cookies or like around Halloween this last year, we kind of let them do whatever they wanted to do. And they felt like hell afterwards. And I, you know, we just use that as kind of a learning opportunity. Like, well, there you go. You know, a little bit of this stuff is nice and it kind of breaks things up and it's kind of a fun thing to have occasionally. But if you have too much of it, there's probably going to be some price to pay. And so just trying to teach the girls consequences around that instead of creating any type of an emotionally charged deal. And again, you know, like if they want something like a piece of dark chocolate after dinner, then they just need to plow through their protein, their veggies,

their sweet potatoes and all that stuff. And then yeah, no problem. No, no issue with having some dark chocolate at the end of that. So anyway, hopefully you found all this valuable, a huge gratitude to Mark Bell. He's been an incredible supporter of me, my work, and lots of other folks in this ancestral health scene. He has amazing reach, brilliant guy, and continually grateful for his friendship and support. So thank you.