Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Dr. Cate Shanahan on the Power of “Deep Nutrition”

Episode Date: July 19, 2017

In this episode I interview Dr. Cate Shanahan, who’s an author, physician, and nutritional consultant for professional sports teams like the Los Angeles Lakers and Houston Rockets. Cate has been studying the relationship between diet and health and wellbeing for a long time now and recently published a book on the matter called Deep Nutrition, and I wanted to get her on the show because of how many people in the fitness space have little regard for the nutritional quality of their diets. Thanks to the rising popularity of flexible dieting, more and more people are realizing that they can more or less eat like shit and still be lean and muscular, which is why you see the social mediaz full of such people boasting about how much crap they can “fit into their macros” while still having abs, as if it’s some sort of “lifehack” or dietary achievement. Well, what they’re failing to realize that our bodies need a lot more than just “macros” to function optimally and stay healthy and, ultimately, disease-free over the long-term. And I don’t know about you, but I’m more interested in making sure that Future Me is healthy and vital than pleasing Current Me with mountains of junk food delights. So, that’s the topic of the discussion that I had with Dr. Shanahan. In it, she shares quite a few insights on how our food choices affect our physical and mental health and performance for better or worse, including... The two biggest problems with most people’s diets. How eating a lot of vegetable oils and sugar screws up your metabolism (among other things). How you can use flexible dieting in a way that gives you the best of all worlds: a great physique, enjoyable meal plans, and outstanding long-term health and vitality. One simple dietary change everyone can make to immediately improve their health and possibly even body composition. And more... 5:41 - What is the concept of deep nutrition? 7:00 - How much do lifestyle choices contribute to diseases? Can you offset poor dietary choices with exercise?    9:26 - What are the effects of processed foods on your body? How does it affect your metabolism and energy? 20:40 Can you manipulate your macros for maximum muscle gains? 22:41 - What is epigenetics? 33:09 - Does a high carb diet benefit training? 43:51 - What are the common types of vegetable oils and why are they bad for you? 47:41 - What are some common foods that are rich in vegetable oils? 51:35 - What are some dietary changes people can start on today? 57:12 - How can people connect with you and follow your work?   Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: https://www.muscleforlife.com/signup/

Well, hello there. This is Mike Matthews and welcome to another episode of the Muscle for Life podcast. In this episode, I interview Dr. Kate Shanahan, who's an author, physician, and nutritional consultant for various professional sports teams, including the Los Angeles Lakers and Houston Rockets. She has been studying the relationship between diet and health and well-being for a long time now, and she actually recently published a book on the matter called Deep Nutrition. And I wanted to get her on the show because of how many people in the fitness space have so little regard for the nutritional quality of their diets. Thanks to the meteoric rise of flexible dieting, more and more people are realizing that they can

more or less eat like shit and still be lean and muscular, which is why you see the social medias full of such people boasting about how much crap they can quote-unquote fit into their macros while still having abs as if it's some sort of life hack or dietary achievement. Well, what they are failing to realize is that our bodies need a lot more than just quote-unquote macros to function optimally and stay healthy and ultimately disease-free over the long term. And I don't know about you, but I'm more interested in making sure that future me is healthy and vital and doesn't die of cancer than pleasing current me with mountains of junk food delights. So that's the topic of the discussion that I had with Dr. Shanahan.

And in it, she shares quite a few insights on how our food choices affect our physical and mental health and performance, for better or worse, including the two biggest problems with most people's diets, how eating a lot of vegetable oils and sugar screws up your metabolism, among other things, how you can use flexible dieting in a way that gives you the best of all worlds, a great physique, enjoyable meal plans, and outstanding long-term health and vitality, one simple dietary change that everyone can make to immediately improve their health and possibly even body composition and more. Now, this is where I would normally plug a sponsor to pay the bills, but I'm not big on promoting stuff that I don't personally use and believe in. So instead, I'm just going to quickly tell you about

something of mine, specifically my fitness book for men, Bigger, Leaner, Stronger. Now, this book has sold over 350,000 copies in the last several years and has helped thousands of guys build their best bodies ever. And that's why it has over 3000 reviews on Amazon with a four and a half star average. So if you want to know the biggest lies and myths that are keeping you from achieving the lean, muscular, strong, and healthy body that you truly desire. And if you want to learn the simple science of building the ultimate male body, then you want to read or listen to Bigger, Leaner, Stronger today, which you can find on all

major online retailers like Audible, Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, and Google Play. All right, let's get to the show. Hey, Kate, thanks for coming on the show. I'm glad we had to reschedule a couple of times, but here we are. We made it. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I'm excited to have you on the show because I came across you and your work through your book, Deep Nutrition. And that's why I wanted to reach out to you because actually I've written and spoken a fair amount, obviously about obviously about the, the, the, about dieting in general, but not just calories and macronutrients, which is where it's particularly popular in the fitness

space right now. Um, there's, you know, it's called kind of the, if it fits your macros style of dieting, which is kind of the, um, I don't know that that's like the colloquial term for it. The more technical term, uh, would be flexible dieting, uh, even though it's not very technical, but that's what you probably more find in the scientific literature than I F Y M. You know for it. The more technical term would be flexible dieting, even though it's not very technical, but that's what you probably more find in the scientific literature than IFYM. You know what I mean? And I've spoken a lot about that. And because I think that's a good entry point for a lot of people that have no idea how the basics of the human metabolism even works. So it's a good place to start. Okay. Let's talk about energy balance. Let's talk about protein, carbs, and fats and how they interact in the body. And let's, let's learn that it's not if, when, if you're,

if your goal first and foremost is to lose 20 or 30 pounds, uh, it's not so much about the types of foods that you're eating. It's about how much you're eating. So let's learn that. Let's see that. And then from there though, I think that's where a lot of people get stuck. And they, cause I mean, that's a, I understand that it's, it's I understand that it can be cathartic for people that have been struggling with all kinds of diets over the years. And they finally just realize that, oh, so I'm burning a certain amount of energy. I'm eating a certain amount of energy. If I just imbalance that, if I create an energy deficit, I can lose fat. And then I can finally get to my weight that I want to be at.

And then I can just kind of control my food intake, even if it's just intuitively and stay there. A lot of people are excited and then they kind of just stop there and never move beyond. Well, there's more to diets like our body doesn't, it needs more than just calories and macronutrients from food. And so that's why I wanted to get you on the show because I have written a bit about this, but this is something that you know a lot more about than I do. And so, you know, I've touched on the basics and the obvious things, but I wanted to go into it deeper with you. So here we are. Say, I'm the deep nutrition. Absolutely. So maybe you want to start there.

And obviously that's the name of your book. And what does that mean? What's that concept? Sure. Yeah. So we call our book Deep Nutrition because I wanted to go deeper than the soundbite type of science that I learned in medical school and that we hear over and over again. Like fat makes you fat. Salt causes hypertension. Like one nutrient, one disease kind of connection and not really a integrated thought process there. So with deep nutrition, we go deeper in three ways. We go back in time to study what people were doing before all of these disease epidemics because I think everybody who studies nutrition and its connection to health comes to the same conclusion that it's the modern diet that's making us sick so the question then is well what did we do before so to analyze that

we we go back in time but we also go back geographically we go deeper geographically than just like one type of diet like the mediterranean diet or the japanese diet or even the blue zones which went to which are which are clever marketing concepts. I mean, yeah. So when we look at all geographical areas to find out what is it that people all everywhere did to look for what was a common element. Right. And just to just to throw a question out to you, how much do you think I mean, looking at the just I mean, pick a disease and it's basically skyrocketing, especially the ones that we care most about. Um, how much of that do you think is due strictly to dietary, um, conditions versus lifestyle conditions versus not exercising and stress? Yeah. Well, people, yeah, exactly. People in general are less active

than they were. You know, we know that caloric expenditure on the whole is going down as we kind of move from the agrarian or industrial type of economy to the more informational informational knowledge economy. And, and so, so you have sedentary living, and then also, like you said, stress and physical and of course, mental, mental and emotional. Out of curiosity, what are your thoughts in terms of like, what are the, how, how, how much do those factors contribute versus diet? And then on the flip side, how much do, and this is something, again, the reason why I'm bringing this up is because I just know this kicks around in the fitness space as a, as a hypothetical. And then, so as a, as another hypothetical, how much does exercising regularly, and especially, you know, emphasizing resistance training, which has a lot of health benefits that you can't necessarily get from just cardiovascular and vice versa. How much can you offset the negative influences of poor dieting with exercise and otherwise living fairly healthily. The fundamental key piece is the nutrition because you cannot out-exercise

a bad diet. How so? You can't out-train a bad diet, right? If you are getting foods that are fundamentally unhealthy, your body is not going to process them normally and you're not going to be able to, your metabolism will be dysfunctional. So you're not going to be able to get the maximum benefit out of your, I mean, at the very best, you're not going to get the maximum benefit out of your exercise program. And at the very worst, you're not going to be able to exercise for very long because you're going to get sick. You're

going to get some, if you don't get overweight, you're going to get some autoimmune disorder. And, you know, if you do get overweight, you're on the way to diabetes. So those are kind of like the two branch points of types of diseases that I feel like people develop as complications of weight and autoimmune diseases. But what if you take weight out of it? And again, these are questions I'm not trying to be confrontational at all. These are things that I just know that people listening, a lot of people are going to be thinking this because let's take, let's take weight, right? So if you take the weight part of that equation, because let's say a person is cognizant of energy balance and they're cognizant of, you know, of their, their, their good intuitive eaters basically. And in some cases it's that, or in other cases, people

are actually a bit, um, you know, I would say neurotic with their food intake. And because they do want to eat fundamentally, you know, highly processed kind of just nutritionally bankrupt foods, they track, basically they're willing to kind of spend half of their waking hours hungry so they can eat mostly just kind of shit calories. And there are a lot of people in the fitness space that do that. And sure that you don't, yeah, so they're not going to be overweight because they're willing to be that, you know, they're willing to get that granular with their food intake.

But what's your, for those people, what would you have to say? I mean, I know what I would have to say, but I'm just curious what would you have to say? I mean, I know what I would have to say, but I'm just curious what you would have to say in terms of, all right, fine, you're not going to be overweight, but let's look at this bigger picture here and how does that lifestyle play out? And keep in mind, a lot of these people are also young, so their bodies are invincible. You're talking about, let's say someone's in their early 20s. Yeah, they probably feel pretty good in general. It takes a lot to feel like shit at 21 years old, you know what I mean? But what are your thoughts on that? So there's those two branch points. So one is the people who tend to develop weight

problems and then the common complications of weight problems involve, you know, diabetes and heart disease and stuff like this and joint uh, joint problems, skin problems. Um, and then the other, uh, is kind of the auto, what happens to the immune system when you eat these kinds of processed foods. And so you get autoimmune diseases, you get, uh, digestive problems, you get neurological problems. And, um, you can see this when you do the right kind of testing or ask the right kinds of questions. You can hear about it. So even in a young person, even a teenager. What would some of those questions be? So do you get what happens when you get hungry?

I mean, what happens when you go between meals? How long can you go without getting hungry? And if they say, oh, I can't, I can't. That's a problem right there. That is a red flag. And what it's a red flag for is an inability to burn body fat an inability to access your stored body fat for energy and if you're an athlete and you have an issue with accessing energy you will not be your full potential athlete

because athletes need energy that's why we love watching sports because it's an exhibition of healthy genes expressing abundant energy. And we love, you know, energetic people and how what they can do. And so if you're an athlete and you feel hungry, you know, every three, four hours, you're you have a serious problem. And, you know, this is be lying a serious problem with when we treat our serious problem, it's just simply snacking or eating more often. But what is happening under the hood there, if you pry open your metabolism and take a look at what's gone wrong when you have to eat that often, you have damage in many systems in your body. But the key is the mitochondria. The mitochondria are the energy powerhouses of the cell, your muscles, you know, one of the key markers of how they do research into whether how your nutrition is affecting you is whether or not it's producing, helping you to produce more mitochondria because mitochondria produce energy and mitochondria have to be able to have access to saturated fat and monounsaturated fat in your body to optimally produce energy.

If they have to burn sugar, they do not function normally. They don't live as long. They do not optimally produce energy because sugar, burning sugar has a metabolic cost. sugar, burning sugar has a metabolic cost. And, you know, not a lot of folks talk about this because the dieticians and the nutritionists all learn that sugar is the perfect fuel for athletes because it can fuel both anaerobic and aerobic activity. Right. And by sugar, do you mean like sucrose or do you just mean glucose, any form? Are you talking about table sugar or just a carb? Yeah. So, so the form that the mitochondria tend to burn the most is glucose. But your body can interconvert. So like if you have a lot of fructose in your diet, your liver

and other parts of your body can convert the fructose to glucose too. Yeah, yeah. No, I just want to make it clear so people understand that you're talking about by sugar it's really because ultimately every carb just turns into glucose, right? Whether it's a green bean or a Snickers bar. Exactly. So when you are burning sugar for aerobic exercise, right? So you have to burn sugar for anaerobic by definition. But if you're burning it for aerobic exercise, burning it for aerobic exercise, there's a cost. And the cost is acid in the muscle. And that comes because metabolically when you're converting sugar into something that the mitochondria can burn, you produce 30% more carbon dioxide than the respiration of

the sugar, produces 30% more carbon dioxide than the respiration of a fatty acid. And that carbon dioxide is not just something we breathe off. It has a cost even before we breathe it off. But meanwhile, hey, we do have to breathe it off. That means we have to pant more, right? And so that means you feel worse. You don't feel so good when your blood level of carbon dioxide is high and it affects your body's ability to regulate things like pressure and blood flow. So your blood flow is not optimal. You can't regulate it as quickly or as fast. And, um, the cost in the muscle is that you have to turn on these enzymes that try to fight the acid and, you know, eventually they, they can't do that and you do get acid building up in your muscle eventually.

Part of training is not just building more muscle, it's actually building more of these enzymes if you're not a fat burning athlete. It's building more of these enzymes that help you deal with this overload, this air pollution of carbon dioxide in your cells. Right. So. And that obviously, like you said, that's more, I mean, with aerobics, that'd be what more applicable to endurance type stuff versus, I mean, if you're talking about strength training, especially proper pure strength training is it's, it's a very anaerobic,

obviously just glycogen. You know, it's you there's, there's, there's not much in the way of lactic acid build up in the sense of like a cyclist, you know what I mean? Right. Well, yes, it's a different type of exercise. Absolutely. However, you know, we've, all the studies that we've done are on people who don't burn fat very efficiently. And so even in the cardio world, we're finding out that the cardio athletes, if you give them a high-carb diet, they're still not burning fat as efficiently as if you give them a high-fat diet. So there's a lot of adaptation that can take place.

That would be expected, right? Yeah. sure that can that would be expected right because yeah and you know i mean if you're doing weights you're not just always using those type two fibers there's the other fibers you're using as well for everything else in the that you do during the workout so there's that that inability to access the stored body fat which is um going to make you hungry it's going to make you tired it's going to make you fatigue it's going going to make you tired. It's going to make you fatigue. It's going to cloud your concentration. And after years of doing that, you can get away with it for a little while metabolically in terms of developing more hormone imbalances. But eventually, you start to see issues in the blood. And by eventually, I don't mean very

eventually. I mean, it depends on your genetics. Some athletes, if they're really abusing their body, they can get away with it for 10 years. And what would you consider, what qualifies as abusing when you say that? Like if you're having a lot of your calories from junk foods, sugar and carby, vegetable oil-rich foods. Highly processed stuff. Processed foods, yeah. So it's the two things that define processed food are sugars and vegetable oils. So if you're getting a lot of your calories

from those things, then you're hurting your body. Right, right. And the average American gets somewhere around 80% of their calories from those two things. That's crazy. So that's why we have the average American.

Yeah, the average American is— And that's because, I mean, we know why sugar is added to a lot of processed foods. And why so much vegetable oil? Because it's cheap. And it just makes stuff more palatable? It is a flavor—it's a delivery vehicle for the other chemicals that deliver the fat-soluble flavor, uh, it's a delivery vehicle for the other chemicals that deliver the fat soluble flavor, um, things like in Doritos and, and, uh, Twinkies and all this sort of stuff. So I came across, uh, what book was, I don't even remember. So it was the guy that invented

the Cheeto. He's a food scientist, right? And it was like a quote from him about, uh, he was, he was so excited and so like proud of himself that he invented what he thought was the perfect food, the perfect addictive food. And he was breaking down all the reasons why. Even one of the things that was kind of clever in a kind of Machiavellian way is that the mouth, like the melting in your mouth. that type of mouthfeel or that when you're eating it, it doesn't trigger the same type of response in the body for the calories as calories that don't interact with your saliva in that way, right? I mean it's probably because I'm sure it plays into just volume, right? So what's going in your stomach is so low volume versus the calories if it were a vegetable or something. But yeah, so I just people listening just know that it's just one. I think it's unfortunate that we have this is on the in

the bigger picture. We have like a lot of the smartest people in the world are not figuring out how you can be healthier and happier. They're figuring out how to make you click more Facebook ads, play more, you know, stupid mindless games on your phones, and eat more shitty food. This is an example of that where it's a science of how to get you to get more and more, how can they deliver maximum instant gratification and make it maximally addictive and also minimally satiating. You just want to keep eating. So you can go through. It's such a win for the Cheeto. Whoever owns Cheeto is such a win.

If they can go on average, we can increase someone's consumption of one bag of Cheetos to 1.5 by adding this chemical and making this change. And everyone, the board meetings are jumping up and down. And, you know, so that's just the unfortunate truth. Yeah, it's easy to sell addicting substances because they're addicting. But it's also figuring out how do you make them more and more addicting. Yeah, it's really more than the competition. Not so much even more addicting. It's about the competition because it's an easy sell.

But to get to your earlier point that you brought up about like, you know, manipulating your macros for maximum muscle gains and stuff like that. A lot of nutrition science starts off by getting ahead of itself. It starts off by saying, well, how do we prevent heart disease? Or how do we make, you know, people build muscle faster. But the thing that they always skip over is what is the baseline? What is a basic human diet for somebody who just wants to be healthy? They say they don't have heart disease they're trying to reverse, or they're not trying to become, you know, 3% body fat and 80 pounds of muscle. So that's what deep nutrition does. And the subtitle of our book gives away the answer, why your genes need traditional food. So what we do is we define what is traditional food.

And that gets back to how we go deep around the world by looking at what everybody ate everywhere that they all had in common. where what everybody ate everywhere that they all had in common. And we found that there were four things, four common strategies of extracting nutrition from the environment that people employed no matter where they lived, whether it was Alaska or Hawaii or Japan or whatever. So those four strategies are to eat fresh food, to eat fermented food and sprouted food. I put those two together and I'll explain why.

To eat meat on the bone, meaning like including the fat fermented food and sprouted food, I put those two together and I'll explain why, to eat meat on the bone, meaning like including the fat and the skin and the bone, and to eat the organ meat. So those four strategies were employed everywhere you look, whether or not it's a frozen tundra or a sultry tropical climate um and um it wasn't just like these were just like add-ons to their diet this was the full everything in their diet pretty much could be described as one of these four pillars and so each of them has a standout benefit and um so the and our genes depend on this right so in deep nutrition we talk a lot about epigenetics, the science of epigenetics, which

is the new and improved field of genetics. Basically, it talks about the relationship. I want to just quickly for people that don't know what epigenetics is, just give a quick, what is that? Yeah. The best definition is it's everything that makes your genes come to life, right? So your DNA is made out of genes. That's only about 1% of your DNA.

The rest of it is regulatory segments and stuff that's accumulated over the billions of years that control how those genes function. And your genes and all those regulatory segments function based on your diet and, of course, every lifestyle factor you can name, too, like whether you smoke or not, how much you sleep and exercise and all this. And the fact is that over the generations, our genes have built up these expectations in terms of all of that stuff. And if they don't get something that they expect that's when we get sick or we don't feel so good or you know we ultimately can even lead to a genetic mutation in the next generation so there's a lot of intelligence built into these billions and billions of letter code information that is is our DNA and

when so the reason it's important to understand how complicated that is is our DNA and when so the reason it's important to understand how complicated that is and I guess I haven't said that it's complicated it's really complicated if you string together the DNA and all your cells from end to end it would reach to the moon and back multiple times so there's a lot of information in there and it is a information repository system dna it's a survival mechanism it is the ultimate survival mechanism nothing beats it because it's been around if you've been if you're here that means it goes all the way back to the beginning of life on earth which we think is 3.5 billion years of trial and error and perfecting the performance of life. And so that's why fertility is actually the best way to define or to identify a healthy diet, right?

So a lot of these books and people that talk about… And you say that's for men and women. Yeah. Okay. A lot of the books that talk about pro-vegan actually and vegetarian are from the Seventh-day Adventist community where they do have a lot of longevity. But these are people who also do a lot of gardening. They were like the macrobiotic folks in the 70s. They did fermenting and sprouting.

And they do eat meat. They just control it and they tend to get healthier meat. And they have a lot of control. They don't eat a lot of junk food as a group. And they do live a long time. That's wonderful. But is their fertility any better than anyone else's? No. The fertility aspect is what DNA really cares about. And the modern diet, folks say, a lot of folks who are in this kind of like, oh, I don't want to think about it. I'm going to die of something, everything in moderation. We're living longer now. So how can our diet be so bad?

Or even like, eh, science is moving pretty quickly. I'm sure by the time it's a problem, I'll be able to just like pop a pill. I'll be good. Yeah. So yeah, maybe. But in terms of actually a marker of health, if we look at longevity, so maybe the modern diet maybe will turn out to be okay. We don already know that the fertility in America is declining drastically. I mean, aside from in vitro fertility and that need for that going up, the cesarean section rate going up, you know, somewhere around 25% to 30%. And a tiny, they call it, so a lot of folks think well cesareans people do that

it's an elective right they choose to have a cesarean yeah like you schedule it right just because you schedule it doesn't mean your body could deliver naturally so the the reason these are scheduled is because there's some problem that is picked up during prenatal screening and this is how we're preventing people from dying during pregnancy without these cesareans. You could argue that our neonatal death rate might be, you know, a hundred times higher than what it is, might be as high as 10%, 20%. Who knows? Because these cesareans are scheduled for a reason. It's only the emergency cesareans. I know. I don't know. I don't know the big numbers.

I know the people that the people I know personally that have scheduled was because that's what they wanted to do. But I'm sure that's not in the normal. Like they were just like, oh, yeah, whatever. I don't want to. I'm just going to schedule. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's very not the norm, right?

Like there's not a lot of OBGYNs that do that, you know, and, and, and not a lot of, um, women choose, choose that. Um, especially now with all this stuff about like the, um, the flora, right. They don't get the flora. Um, so it's a pretty brutal surgery. I mean, it's not, it's not something that I want to watch a lot of recovery. It's not nice. Yeah. So anyway, what I was getting at is the baseline normal diet, right? So we have this. It's the four pillars of world cuisine, you know, and each pillar has a specific benefit. It helps your fertility. It does help you live longer. you want to do, you know, if you're an athlete is you want to understand how to tweak that

baseline now to do something that nature really never intended you to do. Okay. And so that's the fact, right? So nature really never intended us to exercise intensely four to five hours every single day. If, if you, um, you know, go back historically, you will find that people did do, obviously, more exercise in general on average than the average American now. Or if nothing else, just moved more because of work, because they were working industrial-type jobs as opposed to just typing on a computer or whatever. Yes. So there would be periods where people who are herder gatherers would migrate, you know, across mountain chains, across the entire range. Yeah, so it would be like a month every day you were on that, you know, in height trudging through the snow, carrying something all day every day. But that would be one month one way, another month one. And the rest of the time you were kind of hanging out and skipping and frolicking and collecting flowers and watching your goat herd. So it was a pretty easy life except for that.

So it wasn't this all day, every day with the all year. Yeah, or I want to find out how far can I my, what, what's my, how far can I push my body until it breaks? Like that's kind of a more modern thing. Right. So to answer those kinds of questions, we don't really have very good science at all. It's all trial and error. So this is why I have a lot of respect for the people who are bodybuilders who've like found a way to do it because you're pushing, you know, you're the edge of the envelope here of science because the fact is the reason I say we have no good science is because, or very little, is because very little of the science that's done on bodybuilding is done on

people who are fat adapted. And fat adaptation is the baseline, right? So fat adaptation means you burn body fat when you're not doing anaerobic exercise. It means you burn a lot of body fat, a lot more. And so I was running an office called the Fat Burn Factory when I was living in Denver, and I was actually testing with the test that – really the only test we have for whether or not you're burning body fat versus sugar, the ratio, what's the proportion of one versus the other, because, um, the average American is, is not burning body fat very efficiently because of how often we eat and the kinds of fats we eat and how much sugar we eat. So there's three factors there. But so the average person burns about half their calories from sugar and half from fat. And this includes actually the average athlete as well. As an athlete is, say, let's say you're a cyclist or somebody who does some kind of a cardio type exercise. When you start out your exercise, you start out pretty close to half and half, but if you're not a fat-adapted

athlete, but as you exercise for longer, you gradually get over that insulin, that little bit of insulin resistance you have there, and you start burning more and more fat, but you never get to your peak unless you're fat-adapted, and your peak is just a lot higher than whatever people used to think. They thought we could burn maybe a gram of fat a minute. But Volokh and Finney have blown that away. I think it was like more than twice. I actually can't remember the numbers very well at the moment. But people who are fat adapted can burn. If you're running at a high level of, you know, let's say you're doing a six minute mile. If you're fat adapted, you can be burning most of those calories at a high heart rate, around 160. You can still be burning a trace of carbs. So you really need very little. And so,

you know, if you want to train anything, any like non glycolytic fiber exercise, you can get a lot stronger just on burning fat. Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it? Because no amount of marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. So if you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it. It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say thank you. You can find me on Instagram at Muscle for Life Fitness, Twitter at Muscle for Life, and Facebook at MuscleForLifeFitness. really just because it's healthy and to burn energy. So I'll, I'll, you know, ride on my upright bike, maybe do some hits sometimes some lists or whatever, but performance wise, I mean,

isn't it, isn't a high carb diet. I've, I've written a little bit about this. So I feel like I couldn't, I couldn't cite anything off the top of my head, but I feel like I've seen quite a bit of research comparing high carb diet versus low carb with endurance athletes in particular, especially high level. And there's a reason-carb dieting is so popular in that the performance is you can't make up for the declement that comes with it. I may be wrong with that. I'm just going off of, again, it's not something I've honestly read all that much about. It's what we're training and what we're comparing.

The body gets good at what you're training. When you're doing a low-carb study, in order to be in the study, they're having you restrict your carbs constantly, no matter what you're training and when you're training and so on. Sure. The longer the study, the more you're actually down-regulating your body's use of carbs, right? So you're untraining your ability to use carbs sure so to me what makes sense is the baseline is again we want to get to the baseline what is the baseline healthy state and then if we want to do something that nature maybe didn't intend well now we're using food

as a drug or as a performance enhancing tool. Right. So, so, but we have to start and understand the baseline properly. So the baseline is fat burn for most exercise and carb burning. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, physiologically, that's why we have fat on our bodies is it's, it's just an energy store. So like we should be able to tap into our natural energy stores efficiently. But that same baseline is also carbohydrate use for the glycolytic muscle. And if we are not training the glycolytic muscles at all, because we're in this study that is restricting our carb intake so completely, well then you are going to lose that a little bit. So don't do either one, right? You have to become fat adapted.

And if you're not, that is a process. And that is a process that a lot of people are like Primal Endurance are helping people with. I'm going to be putting a program together to help people with the training with their fat adapted state. But then on top of that, you just use carbs as a performance enhancing tool. So you just back load, right? This is a very enhancing tool. So you would just backload, right? This is a very popular strategy and it is been, um, it's successful because it's the smart strategy, right? You, you don't force when you, when you forload the opposite of backload, when you have carbs before, now you have

adjusted, you've, you've altered your hormones and you're not at that baseline state. We're not meant to exercise in the fed state. And when you have just eaten a lot of sugar, that is a state that we rarely ever were in, not to mention exercised in, right? Because we never really had access to that much sugar. And when you have just eaten a lot of sugar, you block your fat burn very effectively because you've got insulin and insulin blocks adrenaline and so you can't have – just for a lot of reasons, you can't access your stored body fat and your mitochondria can't burn it. So you have to burn sugar. Well, I mean you do to some degree though, right? Because like just with RO studies if you –

To some degree if you're trained. Yeah, of course you're going to burn more and more carbs. This is what training does, actually. It helps your mitochondria become, if you're training, if you're a high-carb training athlete, you're actually training your mitochondria to deal with too much sugar all the time. So that's part of what training is. It's just a crazy thing. So you want to train to burn fat when you need to burn fat.

And then you want to train to use carbohydrate when you need it, but you have to have it on board. But it doesn't need to be in your stomach. It needs to be in your muscle or in your liver, the two places that store glycogen, so that it can be released into your bloodstream on demand. You don't want to have it be in your bloodstream because you just ate something. You can't have your stomach be regulating your blood sugar. And that's what they're doing when they're telling people to drink Gatorade constantly and having all those gels and everything like that. You want to have your liver and your muscle be regulating the access of your muscle to the liver regulates access of the brain partly.

And the glycogen in your muscle regulates the access of your muscle, your glycolytic fibers to that stuff. So you backload because when you, I call the glycogen stores in the muscle like the little tiny suitcases and they're the store sugar and you empty out those little suitcases when you exercise so fill them back up after fill them back up afterwards but if they're full already and now you're eating before you're having carb beforehand you're not putting a lot more if any in those suitcases what you're doing is you're forcing the liver to store it. And the liver tends to turn it into fat if it gets too much.

So you're turning on your fat storing. And when you do that, your liver cannot make ketones. And your brain needs ketones to exercise. Your heart needs ketones to exercise, to pump stronger. Your heart pumps 30% stronger when it's burning ketones than when it's not. So there's all these advantages to being fat adapted that help you no matter what your sport, because your brain's going to function better and your heart's going to function better because your heart is the ultimate cardiovascular exercise. Uh, right. And you need that thing to be healthy when you're a weightlifter. I agree. Um, I do, I do totally agree with, uh, the starting instead of looking at it. Cause again, in the fitness space, it's very popular to look at nutrition as a, as a tool to just manipulate body composition. And that's about it. It's very popular to look at nutrition as a tool to just manipulate body

composition. And that's about it. That's about as far as a lot of people go with their diets. And as long as they can look in the mirror and be happy, that's pretty much enough for them. And it's actually something I wrote about recently that I think that's the wrong way to look at it. And I'm putting together a series of digital courses that I'm going to be selling and stuff. And one is kind of a deep dive into nutrition. And it's looking at it more from what you're saying. Let's look at it the other way around. Let's start with a baseline of health. And what do you need to get more from just, I mean, yours, what you're talking about is actually quite a bit deeper. I'm starting with, because again, I want to take people from,

okay, so they've probably, let's say they understand calories, understand macros, they understand how it influences body composition, but they don't even really understand the importance of the basic spectrum of micronutrients that your body needs and why, you know what I mean? Um, and I mean, that's, that's, that's the case. I mean, if you ask most people, Hey, so like vitamin K, what is it? Why does it matter? Vitamin D, what is it? Why does it matter? Vitamin A, anything, you know what I mean? Magnesium, what is it? What foods do you eat that have magnesium? You know what I mean? Magnesium, what is it? What foods do you eat that have magnesium? You know what I mean? When you start looking into it, it's not very good. But I totally agree with that viewpoint of let's first build a baseline nutritious, healthy, in that sense, diet.

And then once we have that in place, okay, so now what are you trying to do in your exercise? Most of the people that follow me are – well, I have a lot of athletes but also a lot of people that also are looking to change their body composition for the better. It doesn't – that's not even so much bodybuilding per se. I mean maybe you would call it that but it's more everyday people that both guys and girls that want to have they want to be lean they don't they want to be unhealthily lean but they just want to be lean and they want to have a healthy amount of muscle and they want to look uh like i would say more like an athlete versus a bodybuilder um so you know i think that's a smart way of approaching it and i and i i hope that through that course and then some other content I want to create along those lines just to make that mentality more popular in the fitness space in particular because it's just not right now.

I mean if anything, it's kind of actually demonized. It's funny enough. It's labeled, oh, clean eaters. It's the people on the other end of the spectrum where they think that they can't eat if they have any amount of sugar or if they have – let's say they eat one donut every two months or something that they are causing permanent damage to their body or that they think that such and such food is just going to make them fat so they can never eat it. That's the other end. But the idea that you even pay attention to your food choices in the fitness space is you're probably more likely to just be made fun of as a clean eater. As if you don't understand that you could just eat a fucking Pop-Tart instead and you still would look the same. You know what I mean? But it's so mindless. Yeah. just eat a fucking pop tart instead and you still would look the same you know what i mean but it's so it's so mindless yeah so there's a there's a lot of different myths out there and uh having worked with athletes in la there a lot of them are into that clean eating thing and i think it is what you mentioned a lot of it is the idea that like there are some foods that are inherently going to make you fat somehow.

Yeah. And that doesn't quite make a lot of sense. Like gluten has really been demonized. Yes, that's another good example. What we have to do, you know, if we want to bring any sense of law and order back to the field of nutrition, somebody should stand up and apologize for that because, you know, most people don't even know what gluten is. Some people think it's a carb. It's actually the protein and from the protein in wheat that makes it gluey. And it's not poisonous. It's not toxic. And a lot of folks cite certain articles that compare, you know, that they don't fully understand as evidence that gluten causes leaky gut in healthy people.

And that is not what the research says. But what does cause leaky gut in healthy people is vegetable oil. And this is why one of the things that we like to... And can you just give a, just what are some common vegetable oils that people that are listening are probably eating? Well, I don't know, maybe not so many of my listeners, but a lot of people out there are eating a lot of.

Yeah, people do eat more than they realize. Somewhere between 25 and 45 percent of the average American's diet is composed of corn oil, canola oil, cottonseed oil, soy, sunflower, safflower, also grapeseed and palm. So these are bad because they are refined and the refining process damages the molecules in ways that damage our body and make them pro-inflammatory there and render them toxic actually and so beyond though even the processing in the amount that we the average American consumes them the The type of fat, so we've heard of saturated and polyunsaturated and monounsaturated. The type of fat being polyunsaturated is unstable inherently. And when we consume it, even if it comes from food, when we consume too much of it,

it's not good for us and promotes inflammation. because polyunsaturated fats cannot be burned readily for energy. They cannot. Your mitochondria don't want to burn them because it's difficult, because there's extra bonds in there that they have to shuttle them in and out and in and out and do all kinds of extra things. And they just don't do it. And when you have too much in your diet you don't have enough saturated fat around and you're having all these fats that your mitochondria don't want to burn you force your body to start burning sugar

and this is a big reason why vegetable oils promote diabetes so you don't have any carbs in these vegetable oils but you eat you give them to run rats the studies that I cite on my website and in my book where rats were fed vegetable oils they developed insulin resistance and and you know that's how you get diabetes even though they were not eating more carb right so we we kind of us we've been villainizing sugar and importantly because it's we eat too much and it's addicting and there's no almost no nutrition in it but we've been associating it as the one and only cause of obesity and diabetes and the fact is

it's one of two causes and maybe the lesser cause because we've always because sugar is a natural molecule our bodies can deal with it but the what the vegetable oils turn into during the processing in the factories and in in processed food is something we've never consumed like the toxins called 4-hydroxynonanol 4-hydroxyeanol. These things are carcinogens and they are cytotoxic and they damage mitochondria. They kill mitochondria. If you're an athlete and you're killing your mitochondria by having French fries, you're just not going to be the same athlete you could be, right? It's not going to give you a heart attack.

If you're looking to have a heart attack after you eat French fries and the failure of the heart attack to manifest is is like reassuring you that oh see they're not i'm still here so you're not looking for the right thing what you're what you're what you're doing is you're just missing out right you're just missing out on being the athlete you could be and sure maybe maybe you're kobe bryant and you played your best game of your career 68 baskets after a Domino's pizza and Pepsi. But, um, yeah, so what? Like, okay. You know, you're, if unfortunately, then you're Kobe Bryant who retires, you know, not at quite as old as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, you know? So, so you're just never going to be your full potential. And, and for the people that can, can you just share, like, what are some common foods that are very rich in vegetable oils that, you know, people eat a lot?

So, yeah. Or even if it's types. Even if it's types. Well, fast food, right? So fast food, that's what they cook with. So if you're getting anything fried there, whether it's onion rings or French fries or a Kentucky Fried Chicken. Unless you actually Chick-fil-A, they use peanut oil, so it's a little bit more durable. So Chick-fil-A is a chain.

It's on the West Coast. I don't know if it's out on the East Coast. Yeah, there's one right over there actually. Oh, okay. So yeah, so they use peanut oil, which is a little bit less degraded. So it's a little bit better if you really have to do that, then you can go there. So you're saying everyone should just eat Chick-fil-A, all right. You can do better than Chick-fil-A though.

But also like any kind of chip, unless it says olive oil on the front. Obviously, partially hydrogenated oils kind of fall under this as well, right? Yeah. So partially hydrogenated oils, they start with a vegetable oil and then they do another step. Yeah. And that generates more solid fats and trans fats, which everyone has heard about. And everyone kind of reads the fat-free.

Most people know that that is like, yeah, you should pretty much have none of that. Right. And so anything that might have that will also have vegetable oil in it because it's made from vegetable oil. So you have chips, other type of snack foods? Yeah, so like a lot of food bars or energy bars, most store-bought pastries and cookies, even peanut butter these days. A lot of stuff, they'll throw, even dried fruit will have vegetable oil in it now. Dried vegetables often do.

Even from Whole Foods and Trader Joe's, chocolate now can have vegetable oil in it instead of cocoa butter and milk fat solids, which would be better. Anything that has a label, if you're worried about it, you should look and memorize the six major vegetables, or seven actually if you include palm, that might be in there. I think an easy way to keep your intake low is to just don't eat a bunch of pre-packaged foods, which I think is general good diet advice anyway, right? I don't think anybody would argue with that, whether you're a vegan or a low-fat advocate or— A lot of people don't want to necessarily hear it or do it, though, maybe they would be like, yeah, sure. That sounds good. You do that. I'll write. So the other shop around the periphery type.

Yeah. So you can. Another thing that makes it easier, though, is if you're fat adapted, you don't get hungry that often. So you really only need to be doing if you're going to have to cook it yourself. You really only need to eat like we know you're going to have to cook it yourself, you really only need to eat like, you know, that do that once a day, right? You have your coffee with cream in it or whatever, like I do in the morning, I don't cook or do anything food wise until later in the day. And so I'm really just bothering with one meal and it's, you know, so that makes things a lot easier. Great. Okay. So, um, are there any other, before, before we wrap up here, are there any like just practical, actionable, so if people listening are like, this sounds interesting, I want to experience it for

myself though, which is also one of the kind of arguments that I have for people that I have kind of made to people that have particularly on, you know, just bad diets. 30 days, here, eat like this for 30 days, right? So cut out all this crap out of your diet and let's, let's put some fruits and vegetables in there and let's put some nuts and monounsaturated fats. Let's like fix your diet baseline, healthy diet. Just do it for 30 days. And by the end, I think you're going to feel a lot better. And it's not that you have to never eat this or that again, but I think you're going to be sold, you know, on like how much better you feel. You're going to notice differences probably in your sleep. You're going to probably notice differences maybe even your skin, nails, hair.

You're probably going to notice differences in your workouts. You know what I mean? So then they're sold on it. So is there anything that – like what are a couple changes people can make right now where they're like, okay, I like what she's saying, but how do I – I want to, I want to see it in action. Sure. The way I work with it with my patients, because I don't have time to go over a whole meal program. I just say, let's figure out a healthy breakfast for you because breakfast is the most important meal of the day not to screw up. And we do screw it up when we start out with processed foods and high carbs, because we start out immediately blocking our fat burn for the morning. And then if you block your fat burn, then you can be hungry.

You're not going to make healthy choices at lunch. So what I do is I have, I've tried to help people get a breakfast that's going to be relatively high in saturated fat. And frankly, you don't need anything else for breakfast. You don't need to have a lot of protein. Now, if you are trying to put on muscle, you want to have protein meal, rich meals at least twice a day. I don't know if three times a day is really necessary, but at least twice a day i don't know if three times a day is really necessary but at least twice a day um but it doesn't have to be breakfast so so so what i go over with people is okay well what's a pretty high fat breakfast that you'll eat whether it's a smoothie that has a lot of vegetables and you know coconut um as the fat base or avocado as the fat base or macadamia nuts ground up as a fat base or, um, like a yogurt kind of thing. That's

a full fat yogurt. And you put a bunch of nuts in there and add a little bit of creme fresh. If you put creme fresh in whole yogurt and then add a little bit of coconut shavings and chocolate or cacao nibs and a couple of nuts, that is a really delicious breakfast. Um, or some people in Hawaii, they would just slice an avocado in half and put a little salt on it because avocados were fresh. It was really good. And coconut cream on top of that. That's a great high fat breakfast. Or what I have is kind of a variant of the whole, you know, I started doing this before Bulletproof Coffee, but I just have like coffee with a lot of cream in it and some milk. And that's super that's super simple or eggs, right? If

you have eggs and you cook them in some, you just add plenty of fat to it. Like not more than maybe one or two eggs and no carbs. Um, maybe a little bit of non-starchy vegetables. Those are some really great ways to start your day. So, you know, breakfast sausages, that's good. Um, but, um, start your day that way. And I can guarantee you that you will feel different than if you started your day with a very high carb, low fat kind of, you know, just like some croissant from, from, uh, Starbucks or some shit. Yes. You will not be as hungry by lunch. You will not be as distracted with thoughts of food. Um, and you do that day after day. And distracted with thoughts of food. And you do that day after day. And now you can maybe start to make a healthier lunch. Or maybe you're like, I'm not even hungry and I'm so busy. Maybe I don't have

time for lunch. And this is, again, not going to be a great idea if you're in the process of trying to build a lot of muscle. But if you're just a regular person, you can still tone up and have plenty of muscle doing this. You just skip your lunch and then just make sure that your dinner has a lot of protein in it. Sure. So, yeah, I mean you can stimulate muscle protein synthesis with multiple meals, but you can also stimulate it with just one really big meal if you're fat adapted and you've exercised and you sleep well. So I'm not clear that you really need to do the multiple small meals yet.

I don't think we really do have research saying that you definitively do. You may be able to just be fat-adaptive and have one big high-protein meal. Dr. Yeah. I mean, I've written about this. I've read a bit about it. I've spoken to a few people like in the bodybuilding space in particular. One guy is Eric Helms is his name. He's working on his PhD.

Very smart dude. Another guy is Lane Norton who did PhD research on protein metabolism. I think particularly leucine actually is really what he was looking at. And I would say from the bodybuilding space and among the evidence-based crowd, the argument right now looks like the weight of the evidence is more on that. It's not that you have to eat like eight protein meals a day, but that like, you know, three to five is probably better than one to two. And there are various reasons for that in terms of like refractory effects from, from leucine and so forth. But yes, I would say absolutely for the, so that's more applicable to saying, they want to look good. They train their muscles and they, you know, yeah, it's not, it's not that big of a deal. It's much more, let's say that it's much more important that you get enough protein, uh, every day than it is, you know, how frequently you're getting it. Right. Yes, absolutely. Um, and the reason I say I'm not clear that we have good evidence on the multiple small is because we haven't done it in fat adapted athletes and

we have not that, you know, if you're not able to burn fat you're going to process your protein differently you're going to burn a lot of it yeah and so so it takes more you know stimulus so yeah so so anyway i mean okay good so that's a simple so everybody listening if they want to try like they're they're there you can see then. And I think I also like that concept. If that's how, if everyone listening, if that's your experience, if it helps blunt hunger and just take food off your mind, that is just going to help with dietary compliance regardless of anything. So if that's a simple way to go about this and to kind of dip your toe in it, then I can see that being very beneficial. Yeah. And it's just, it's easier, right? I mean, so many people are working and they just can't. That's a good point too, because breakfast is usually, you know, it's on the go. And what

does that mean? Usually it doesn't, it's not the kind of stuff you're talking about. Yeah, exactly. So that's how I work with my patients, just because I don't have the time to go over a full program. So I say, just let's start with this and then come back and we'll talk about what to do next. Yeah, that's great. Okay. So talking about what to even do next, how can, so people listening, where can they find you, find your work? And if there's anything in particular that you're working on or that you have available besides the book, which you can, everybody, we've kind of talked about that, you know, you want to let everybody know about, um, let everybody know about it. Yeah. So right now I just have my website, which is drkate.com, D R C A T E.com. That will link you to the books

that I've published. I don't have like the, um, the fat burning program puts it together yet, but it's coming soon. I'm probably gonna be working with primal blueprint on that. And, um, together yet, but it's coming soon. I'm probably going to be working with Primal Blueprint on that and yeah, do some videos and that will help you burn fat. Awesome. And then the book is Deep Nutrition which you can buy online everywhere, bookstores, everything. Yeah. It's on Audible. You can listen to it too if you like listening. Yeah, I'm big on audiobooks. It's such a great, it's a great way to use downtime like driving or preparing food and stuff. So I'm a big fan of audiobooks. It's such a great, it's a great way to use downtime, like driving or preparing

food and stuff. So I'm a big, I'm a big fan of audiobooks. Okay, great. Well, this was awesome, Kate. I really appreciate you taking the time. And it's, again, I'm glad to have someone, this is a subject that's been on my list of like, I want someone to talk about this, somebody that knows more about it than I do. And so I it thanks again thanks Mike it's been fun thanks for having me absolutely hey there it's Mike again I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful and if you did and don't mind doing me a favor then please do give this video a like and leave a comment down below not only do I like to hear from everybody

and I jump in and reply to as many comments as I can, it also helps other people find their way to the show and learn how to build their best bodies ever too. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then just subscribe to my channel and you won't miss out on any of the new content. Thanks again for listening to the episode and I hope to hear from you soon.