The Dr. Hyman Show - Do You Have To Eat A Ketogenic Diet All Of The Time To Get Its Benefits? with Mark Sisson

Episode Date: May 20, 2020

The ketogenic diet has gained a lot of popularity in the past couple of years. If you’re not quite sure what it is, why it could be beneficial, or you’re well-acquainted with it and just want to learn more, this episode is for you. The ketogenic diet, or keto as it’s called, is a high-fat low carbohydrate diet. While some people take this to mean loads of conventionally raised meat and dairy, the true (and beneficial version) means lots of beneficial fats from things like avocados, nuts and seeds, and coconut; high-quality protein from clean sources like grass-fed meat and pasture-raised eggs; and plenty of non-starchy vegetables.  To hash out more of the details about keto and how it can support good health, I was excited to talk with my friend and one of the leading voices in the Paleo/Primal and keto movements, Mark Sisson. Mark is the founder of the popular daily health blog, Mark’s Daily Apple, godfather to the Primal food and lifestyle movement, and the New York Times bestselling author of The Keto Reset Diet. His latest book is Keto for Life, where he discusses how he combines the keto diet with a Primal lifestyle for optimal health and longevity. Mark is the author of numerous other books as well, including The Primal Blueprint. This episode is sponsored by Joovv, chili, and my Sleep Master Class. I recently discovered Joovv, a red light therapy device. Red light therapy is a super gentle non-invasive treatment where a device with medical-grade LEDs delivers concentrated light to your skin. It actually helps your cells produce collagen so it improves skin tone and complexion, diminishes signs of aging like wrinkles, and speeds the healing of wounds and scars. Check out the Joovv products at joovv.com/farmacy and use the code FARMACY at checkout. One of the easiest and most effective ways to get better sleep every single night is through temperature regulation, which is why I was so relieved to discover the transformative products from Chili. The chiliPAD and OOLER system are two really cool gadgets that fit over the top of your mattress and use water to control the temperature of your bed - which helps lower your internal temperature and trigger deep relaxing sleep. Right now chili is offering my audience a really great deal. Get 25% off the chiliPAD with code hyman25 or 15% off OOLER with code hyman15, just go to chilitechnology.com/drhyman In this modern world we place too much value on staying busy and deprioritizing sleep, which is why I have created my first ever Master Class. It guides you through the most important steps to getting better sleep, starting today. To learn more about the Sleep Master Class, head over to drhyman.com/sleep.  Here are more of the details from our interview:  Mark’s wake-up call to change how he ate and exercised at 28 years old (5:42) Tenets of the Primal Blueprint (13:50) Reversing the aging process through metabolic flexibility (19:36) What is a ketogenic diet? (24:37) How long does it take to adapt to the ketogenic diet and why do people get the “keto flu”? (33:15) Can you eat too much on the ketogenic diet? (35:53) The way to know if you’re doing a ketogenic diet properly (39:28) Weightlifting and the importance of muscle, especially as you age (41:12) Why burning fat is better than burning sugar for longevity (44:21) Do you have to be “keto” all of the time to get the benefits of a ketogenic diet? (53:02) Find Mark online at www.marksdailyapple.com and follow him on Facebook @marksdailyapple, on Instagram @marksdailyapple, and on Twitter @Mark_Sisson Get Mark’s latest book Keto for Life at http://www.ketoreset.com/forlife/

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. The number one benefit from all of this is getting control of hunger, appetite, and cravings. Yeah. That's what everyone reports when they finally hit that keto zone. Hey, podcast community, it's Dr. Mark Hyman. And right now, more than ever, we need a strong immune system. And that is why I'm offering my eight-part sleep masterclass free to my entire community. If you want to get access to my free course and reclaim your sleep, go to drhyman.com forward slash sleep and sign up today free.

That's drhyman.com forward slash sleep. Last year, I turned 60, but the older I get, the younger I feel. And that's because I make a point to stay active. And as we age, we naturally lose muscle and are more prone to injury, but I'm determined to avoid that. I like to try new types of exercise and lots of different kinds of movement to stay flexible and mobile and keep my muscles strong so that I will be able to do what I want in any age, even past 100 years old. Now, the only downside of trying new workouts and pushing myself harder is feeling sore the next day or sometimes dealing with aches and pains from an inflamed joint or muscle. I always make sure I nip this kind of thing in the bud right away so it doesn't become a chronic problem. And one of my favorite ways to recover after a workout or treat muscle and joint pain is with red light therapy

from Juve. Now Juve's devices have special LED lights that deliver safe concentrated light to your skin and cells. This actually reduces oxidative stress and promotes cellular energy and renewal. So it lessens inflammation and tired or damaged tissues can repair faster. All I have to do is stand or sit in front of my juve for 10 to 15 minutes a day. And whenever I do this after a hard workout, I really notice a difference the next day. I'm more mobile. I'm able to get back to my routine without feeling stiff and sore. Red light therapy also has lots of other benefits. It supports natural collagen production for younger, clearer skin,

and it can even increase melatonin for better sleep. If you want to check out Juve's various red light therapy devices for yourself, just head over to juve.com forward slash pharmacy. That's J-O-O-V-E dot com forward slash pharmacy with an F, F-A-R-M-A-C-b.com forward slash pharmacy with an f f-a-r-m-a-c-y it's an amazing addition to any wellness routine to get multiple benefits without really doing a thing now let's get back to this week's episode welcome to the doctor's pharmacy i'm dr mark hyman that's pharmacy

with an f f-a-r-m-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. And if you're confused about fat and you've been hearing about keto and want to know what the scoop is, this conversation is going to matter to you because it's with the founder of the popular daily health blog, Mark's Daily Apple, Mark Sisson, who essentially is the godfather of paleo eating and also a huge advocate and practitioner of ketogenic diet. I have dug into his research. I've read his stuff. I use his blog as source of information for myself. He's a real inspiration for me. And he is an incredible guy. He's the New York Times bestselling author of The Keto Reset Diet and his latest book, Keto for Life, where he discusses how he combines the keto diet with a primal lifestyle

for optimal health and longevity. He's written lots of books, The Primal Blueprint, which was credited with turbocharging the growth of the primal paleo movement back in 2009. He's been researching stuff for three decades and educating people on why food is the key component to achieving and maintaining optimal wellness. Who knew, right? Not really, yeah.

Mark launched an incredible company called Primal Kitchen whose products I used and use all the time. It's a real food company that basically takes out all the crap, puts in real food ingredients, and create all sorts of things like condiments, sauces, dressings, bars, collagen, ketchup, whey protein powders, no artificial ingredients, no added sugars, no trans fats, no weird oils

like soybean and canola, no artificial flavors, colors, dyes, waxes, or preservatives, just real food. Welcome, Mark. Geez. Welcome, Mark. Geez, thanks, Mark. That's a long intro. Do we have time for a show? Yes, and I just want to say that his company, Primal Kitchen, was so amazing and grew so fast that it was bought up by Kraft, which some would say is a sellout, but I think is a good thing

because the more pressure we put on big food to change, the more they're going to change, the more they're going to get rid of their products and start selling more of your products and products that all of us actually can eat. Yeah, I appreciate that. I mean, I think we're going to look back on the food movement, which is really shifting dramatically now, and look at sort of the sale of my company to Kraft as sort of ground zero for a massive shift in big food, finally getting

it, finally understanding that this is where the consumer wants to go. They want these sorts of products. Absolutely. Yeah. So when they bought us, it was like, we love what you're doing. We don't want to change a thing. So we kept the entire company based in Oxnard. It's run by the same people that I grew.

My team is still there. Nobody got fired. We hired more people. It's been a phenomenal same people that I grew. My team is still there. Nobody got fired. We hired more people. It's been a phenomenal experience. That's amazing. And you're 66 years old. Physically, you look about 30. Or actually, the truth is you look better than probably 90% of 30-year-olds who these

days are pretty flabby considering 75% of us are overweight. And you always were focused on exercise. You were always an athlete. You were an extreme cardio You were always an athlete. You were extreme cardio guy, an endurance athlete. And you had a really big high-carb diet, which was the thing at the time, carb loading. Absolutely. It was a big deal. And I was a high-carb guy, you know, back in the day, because I was low-fat, and that was just what you did. But it led you to a big wake-up call. What happened? Well, I started running in my teens.

I was interested in longevity for some bizarre reason as a 12-year-old. Really, seriously. And I started running. I read a lot about running and how it was supposed to be good for you. And then in 68, Cooper's book came out on aerobics and assigned some metric to the more miles you ran, the healthier your heart would be. So you would get points for putting time in, and I like points.

So I started accumulating the miles. It started with my just jogging to and from school. It was just a convenient way to beat the bus to and from school. That's what I did in medical school. I ran four miles each way every day, four miles there, four miles back with a backpack and my books and my clothes. Yeah, it probably took you less time than if you'd been in traffic. Yeah. And then I went out for the high school track team because I was too scrawny to play football, basketball, baseball, hockey. And lo and behold, I started winning races. I started,

you know, this little bit of training that I was doing running to and from school was enough to have me win the mile and the two-mile. Through college, I started, well, even before then, I started looking at ways in which I could enhance my performance, such as it was, through diet. Like, how could I fuel all the miles that I wanted to run? Because, you know, if you run enough miles, you sort of, you get tired, and you have to do it again the next day and and the next day, and the next day. The mantra of the day and of the time and for generations was carbo-loading. You know, like you've got to refill those glycogen stores, because if you exhaust them in the run today and you want to run tomorrow.

So what's glycogen? Glycogen is the storage form of glucose in your muscles. So the assumption was that your muscles need a lot of glucose to run efficiently, and you can't keep much glucose in your bloodstream. As you know, there's probably a tablespoon or teaspoon worth of glucose in your bloodstream at any point in time. So the body takes glucose, and it stores it as glycogen in the muscles. And you can store 500, 600 grams of glycogen in the body. It's like 2,500 calories.

It's a decent amount of calories. And if you allocate some for the brain and you allocate some for basic survival functions, you wind up with about 1,800 to 2,000 usable calories in the muscles that you can use as fuel. Now, ideally, and we'll talk about this as we get into the nuances here, you ideally want to burn as much fat as possible and spare the glycogen. But we didn't really know about that at the time. And we thought that, again, if you remember Covert Bailey, who wrote a book, I forget what the name of the book,

but the line was, fat burns in a carbohydrate flame. So you had to eat carbohydrates in order to get the fat to burn. That was, again, the sort of science of the day. And then Tim Noakes, who wrote a book called The Lore of Running, was the guru of carbohydrate management. So everything— And he became a low-carb guy. Oh, my God. He actually—

It's one of the great shifts in science. Yeah. It's one of the great heroic acts in science. He got vilified in South Africa where he's from. It was a heroic act for him to change his mind. But over the years, as I ran more and more miles and I performed better and I ate more and more carbohydrate and I could, I was skinny, I could eat 6,000 calories a day and, you know, 1,200, 1,300 grams of carbs was like not a big deal for me to do. I weighed 30 pounds less then than I weigh now, and I'm the same body fat.

So you'd think that all of this stuff would be like trending toward a healthier, lean, fit, happy, productive body. And my race times came down, and I turned out to be a pretty good brother. I finished fifth in the U.S. national championships in 1980 and uh eventually went on to amazing fourth at Ironman in Hawaii in the early days um but I was falling apart I had osteoarthritis in my in my feet I had tendonitis in my hips I had irritable bowel syndrome that literally ran my life like I like if I were driving to the studio today to do this podcast, I'd have to think about how many bathroom rooms there were open at gas stations on the way here. Yeah.

Like, that kind of thing. Wow, that's bad. It was horrible. And since, from the age of 14, I suffered from that. And then I had, you know, multiple upper respiratory tract infections every year. I'd get sick a lot. I thought it was a training, but it turns out, you know, it was a combination of that and this amount of sugar that I was consuming. Yeah, sugar suppresses immunity. Yeah, and it's, you know, it competes glucose and

competes with vitamin C for, you know, the GLU4 receptor. And it's like, you know, if the sugar's there, the vitamin C can't get in. Anyway, all these things became clear to me and obvious to me years later. But at the time, I literally fell apart. I had to quit running. I got my injuries were debilitating. How old were you? I was 28.

Wow. Yeah. Going on 68. Yeah. No, exactly. I couldn't walk right in the morning for an hour. It would take me that long for my feet to sort of warm up and the arthritis in my feet to allow me to move

without limping throughout the day. And you were having, what, bread, rice, pasta? Yeah, I mean, all the healthy whole grains, you know, all of the stuff you were supposed to be having. But you weren't having Twizzlers, right? No, I was not eating sugar and candy. Well, I shouldn't say that. There was a point at which I had a half gallon of ice cream

every night for like six years. Nice. Because I could. But at some point pretty early on, I just realized that this was not a sustainable life. I was falling apart. The irritable bowel syndrome was ruining me. I was sick a lot. Even when I stopped training, I realized that I needed to do something about my diet. And

so I started researching food. And the first thing that I realized was that whatever that I was consuming that was converting to glucose so quickly was effectively the same as eating sugar, as eating Twizzlers. I mean, I would say that, you know, the difference between a bowl of rice and a bowl of Skittles is, you know, one has artificial colors, but they both convert to glucose pretty quickly in the bloodstream. Yeah, below the neck, they're the same. Yeah, exactly. So I started down this path of looking, really, my goal was to be strong, lean, fit, happy, healthy, productive, with the least amount of pain, suffering, sacrifice, discipline, and all this stuff. Was there a shortcut? We call it a hack today, right? But was there a way to do this that was much more efficient and effective at achieving?

What had been my original goal was to be healthy and live long. And that kind of, again, started the process of multiple years of research, decades of research. I was pre-med in college, so I had gone down that track initially. I was a biology major. I was focused on evolution. So when genetic studies started to point to all the good stuff and bad stuff happening in our body, happening at the level of gene expression, that was the most exciting thing for me. It's like, are you telling me that we have these hidden genetic switches that we can figure out how to turn them on or off based on some of the behaviors that we choose to undergo? Our genes aren't fixed.

They're actually able to be changed in their expression. The single most empowering thing, I think, that a person can realize, can understand. So I dedicated my life to kind of figuring out these hidden genetic switches and doing the research and giving people not like my way is the only way or the best way or the right way. It's a way that has been well-researched. And if you're frustrated at the amount of success or not that you've been getting in your, you know, attempts at losing weight or attempts at reducing pain or attempts at reducing anxiety, then I've got a nice little template that I call the primal blueprint within which you could craft a lifestyle that would work for you. And what is the primal blueprint? So the primal blueprint is basically my distillation of all the behaviors of, you know, in human history for,

you know, two and a half, going back two and a half million years as humans, and then 60 million years as proto-hominids before that, and then 100 million years of mammalian evolution before that, that got us to where we are today. This concept that our genes are a recipe that rebuilds, renews, regenerates us, recreates us every minute of every day based on certain inputs. It's not, as you say, it's not a fixed, like it's not done doing its job. You have a predisposition but not a predestiny. Correct. And so in understanding how the genes work and what turns them on or off, we can understand what the genes expect of

us. Like we have this recipe that expects us to be strong and lean and fit. It doesn't expect us to be diabetic. It doesn't expect us to be grossly overweight. It doesn't expect us to be arthritic. That's not the normal human condition. It's not the normal human condition. Except for now.

Correct. And so we messed it up. You know, we overlooked some of these simple little fixes and, you know, not anyone, single person's fault, but as a society, we sort of crafted this strategy where we want things to be easy

so we don't want to have to work so hard. We want to eat stuff that's crunchy, salty, fatty, sweet, and quick. And we've kind of taken us down this path. So what are the bullets of the primal movement? So the bullets are, you know, eat lots of plants and animals. Full stop. But it means, you know, the subtext is don't eat processed crap.

Right. Move around a lot at a low level of activity. It doesn't mean train for marathons because that's a high level of activity. It means move. It means walk. Like walking is still one of the best things you can do. Or ride a bike, easy. Or, you know, swim a little bit.

But move around a lot throughout. Move your body through different ranges of motion and planes of activity throughout the day because that's what the body expects. If you just sit at a desk, crouched over a keyboard, you will become that hunched up thing. You see people have that body type so much. You know, the chiropractors talk about kyphosis, you know,

and everybody's necks forward and all this stuff. Yeah, I got that problem. Everybody has that problem. You know, it comes with the territory of being a modern human. So move around a lot at a low level of activity. It's lift heavy things once in a while. So our ancestors didn't just move around a lot. They actually had to lug logs back to the campsite or carry carcasses that they just came across or killed

or lug babies or climb trees to get a lookout or take rocks and build whatever. So there was a lot of lifting. And then sprint once in a while. And that's one of my favorite ones. It's one of the most effective exercises we as humans can do. Sprint once in a while. And it's not every day and it's not even every other day. It's one of the most effective exercises we as humans can do. Sprint once in a while. And it's not every day and it's not even every other day. It's like once a week or once every seven days.

Just run as fast as you can until you throw up and then. No, pretty much. It's like six or eight seconds. Could be 20 seconds. Could be an orchestrated kind of track workout if you're that kind of an athlete. But it's basically going all out. They call it HIIT training, high interval intensity training. Yeah, yeah, yeah, high intensity training, which, you know, is now a thing,

but it's been a thing for millions of years. Right, we had to run really fast from the Tigers. And somebody had to figure out, you know, that in a scientific context of how we can make that part of your lifestyle, even though it's always been part of our lifestyle. Right, right. You know, get plenty of sleep. I mean, sleep is huge, And as I know, you know,

it's one of the most, you know, overlooked, bypassed lifestyle, you know, things that people say, well, I'll sleep when I'm dead. Well, you'll be dead soon enough if you keep that attitude up. You know, play, engage in play. Humans are designed to play. Our brains require play. It's one of the reasons that we're able to figure out complex things later on in life because we spend time actually playing and sort of practicing, whether it's as an animal, practicing escape routes or whatever. Avoid trauma. It's an easy one.

Avoid traumatic incidents. But as an early human, if you broke your leg or twisted your knee, you were off the back. Man, you were like a dead weight for the tribe. So avoiding, just being smart about wearing a seatbelt, not smoking, not over-drinking, all these things are- Basic common sense. They basically are common sense, and yet I think people still need to be reminded of it now and then. So you've been focused a lot on longevity since you were 14, which is impressive. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, it's funny because I have too.

I had a gym teacher named Mr. Gibson in the eighth grade, and he was very into physical fitness. And he showed us a movie, which I still literally can see the entire movie in my head. It was so impactful. And it was all these different people who were exercising and what it did for their lives. There was this guy, Larry Lewis, who was 105 years old. And he ran five miles to work every day as a waiter and five miles back. There was this guy who ran the Boston Marathon on stumps. There was one story after the other.

And I'm like, you know, this is amazing. And I started running then. I started exercising and became a runner. And so we're all really focused on aging. It's $140 billion a year industry. We want that special pill, that lotion, that supplement, that diet that's going to fix us. We're all sort of scared about getting old and dying and decrepit, which is really a threat because we now have six out of 10 Americans who are chronically ill. And it's true. And a lot of it has to do with our food. But what you talk about a lot is how we can actually reverse the aging process, how we can sort of unlock our full longevity potential. And you think the best way to do that is through a ketogenic diet, which is essentially the hottest diet trend out there right now.

Well, you know. What is it and how does it work? Yeah, so that's a bit of an oversimplification that the one way to do that is a ketogenic diet. I think the way to do that, and if you go back and look at some of the sort of industry leaders, Michael Eads and Ron Rosedale. Protein power. Yeah. And these are guys who early on recognized that the less sugar we eat in a lifetime,

the better off we are. So if you kind of use that as a guidepost, like if you can figure out a way to get by with eating less sugar throughout your life, you'll probably be healthier and live longer. 100%. Yeah. So how do you do that? Well, you do it by developing what we call metabolic flexibility. Most people are so dependent on three meals a day plus two snacks to keep their blood sugar up, to keep their energy up, to get through the day,

because they're good at burning sugar, but they're terrible at burning fat. They've never really prompted the body to develop the mechanisms to tap into fat stores and burn stored body fat as the primary source of fuel. So humans are like hybrids, right? We can run on carbs or fat, on glucose or ketones. Or ketones. So we are born with this amazing machinery that allows us to be metabolically flexible.

The concept, which I've tried to popularize over the past couple of years, metabolic flexibility basically means you can derive energy from the fat stored on your body, the fat on your plate of food, the carbohydrate on your plate of food, the glucose in your bloodstream, the glycogen in your muscles, or the ketones that your liver makes. Those are some— So you've got a lot of options. You've got a lot of options.

And if you become metabolically flexible, the body goes, you know what? I don't even care where the energy comes from. I'm not at the effect of shifting my energy switch over from ketones to carbohydrates or glucose to glycogen. The body becomes adept and efficient at burning enough of these different substrates under different circumstances that it becomes irrelevant. I mean, the main thing is, how do you feel? And if you feel great and if you feel good and energetic, then I don't care whether— That's a clue that you're probably doing something good.

Exactly. Hey, everybody. It's Dr. Mark Hyman. Now I'm always trying to stress the importance of great sleep because over and over I see my patients or even my friends and family ignoring it and suffering because of it. Sleep matters big time. It's when your muscles repair, your brain detoxes,

your body can work on a cellular renewal process that happens every night. We just can't afford to miss out on adequate amounts of high quality sleep. Now one of the easiest and most effective ways to get better sleep every single night every night, we just can't afford to miss out on adequate amounts of high quality sleep. Now, one of the easiest and most effective ways to get better sleep every single night is through temperature regulation. Studies actually prove cooler temperatures lead to deeper, more restful sleep. And the insomniacs actually lack this natural drop in their core body temperature, which is what keeps them up at night. Personally, I run pretty hot. And that means even if I keep

my room cool, I might wake up sweating or uncomfortable several times throughout the night. And that can be pretty frustrating for obvious reasons. And it is why I was so relieved to discover the transformative products from Chili. That's not Chili the country, that's Chili as in cool. The Chili Pad and the Uhler system are two really cool gadgets

that fit over the top of your mattress. And they use water to control the temperature of your bed, which helps lower your internal temperature and trigger deep relaxing sleep. The ChiliPad is remote controlled and the Ooler is controlled through an app on your phone with smart scheduling, a warm awake feature, and UV light to auto clean the whole system. Since water has 30 times more thermal conductivity than air, these systems are a lot more efficient than just cranking up the AC. Ever since I started using the Uhler system, I've noticed I fall asleep faster, I sleep deeper, and I wake up feeling fully rested. Now, my wife is not a polar bear like me, and she likes to sleep a little warmer,

so I love that we can each choose the right temperature for our side of the bed. Chili products can range between 55 and 115 degrees Fahrenheit. Right now, Chili is offering my audience a really great deal. When you go to chilitechnology.com forward slash Dr. Hyman, that's C-H-I-L-I technology.com forward slash Dr. Hyman. You can get 25% off the Chili Pad with the code HYMAN25 or 15% off the Ooler with the code HYMAN15. That's chilitechnology.com forward slash Dr. Hyman with the code HYMAN25 for the Chili Pad or HYMAN15 for the Ooler. Sleep is something we could all use more of. And we can all take small steps toward better sleep to improve our lives in a big way i hope you'll check out chili and see why i love their products so much now let's get back to the doctor's pharmacy so uh so back to what is

what is a ketogenic diet a ketogenic diet is a diet that basically recognizes that we have not set ourselves up to become good at burning fats. And so we need to eliminate that one fuel that we've sort of relied on relentlessly for 10,000 years, that regular supply of carbohydrate at every meal. And if we reduce or eliminate carbohydrates for a certain period of time, the body responds, the epigenetic response of the body to turn on certain enzyme systems and upregulate certain gene systems that will build the metabolic machinery to burn fat at a higher rate and more efficiently. And what that looks like is that we have these little powerhouses in our muscles and other cells that are called mitochondria. And that's where the fat combusts. That's where the fat burns. What that looks like is that we have these little powerhouses in our muscles and other cells. They're called mitochondria.

And that's where the fat combusts. That's where the fat burns. Well, people who are what we call sugar burners and are reliant on carbohydrate every couple of hours to get through the day, they never really – the body just has no reason to build more of these furnaces, of these little powerhouses. And so you get by with – as long as you continue to eat, you know, a breakfast of waffles and or pancakes and or toast. The American breakfast is basically sugar for breakfast. Sugar for breakfast. And, you know, promoted by then the cereal industry and Anita Bryant back in the, you know, you got to have your orange juice. That's right. And then that sets you up for a

horrible day. That's a prescription for early death is cereal and orange juice. Absolutely. And yet, that's how I grew up. Me too. Everyone, you know, everyone. Captain Crunch. Yeah. So the. American Heart Association says that Twix are actually a heart healthy food.

I know. And Cheerios and whatever. It's like. Cocoa Puffs. No, it's beyond. But by the way. Because they're low in fat. Diabetes Association used to say that, you know,

you can have your favorite dessert as long as you continue to take your meds too. Right. It's a crazy world. Just take more insulin. That's right. So we go back to this, you know, if I want to develop metabolic flexibility, I have to take away the carbohydrates as a source and kind of prompt, gently prompt my body to respond by becoming better at burning fat.

And we call it fat adapted. And when you become fat adapted and your muscles start to get comfortable burning fat as the primary source of fuel while you're moving about your day, not just sitting around doing nothing, but while you're walking and then eventually while you're exercising. And you get to the point where you can derive 85, 90% of your energy requirements from fat if you become good at this. Your body fat or the fat you're eating? Exactly. Your body fat or the fat you're eating.

Exactly. Yeah. So people talk about car loading. You only store about 2,500 calories. Yeah. But for fat, you probably got 30,000, 40,000 calories of fat on your body. Absolutely. It's a lot bigger energy store.

By the way, 30,000 calories of fat, that's just like 10 pounds. Right. I got that. Right. You know? So, I mean, and I could walk 300 miles without eating. Right. Not that I'm going to or want to, but I could.

You are? Okay. Theoretically. So, the idea is to develop this metabolic flexibility. Both those things don't sound fun to me. No, no, no. Of course not. Walking 300 miles or not eating.

This is all hypothetical. But when you become metabolically flexible, you're able to derive all this energy from your stored body fat. And then an amazing thing happens, which is the liver, when you withhold carbohydrate, which becomes glucose eventually

through the digestive process, when you withhold carbohydrate... And just to be clear for people, when you say carbohydrate, you mean refined starchy carbs. You don't mean broccoli, right? Okay, so we can make that distinction. I mean all carbohydrates, but I'm going to put a big asterisk by broccoli and say that when you go keto, you can eat as much vegetables as you want. That's right. Okay, so green leafy vegetables. And they're all carbohydrates. But they're locked in a fibrous

matrix. So what we're talking about is how accessible is the amount of sugar or the carbohydrate that you take in real time to the body. And if it's made less accessible because it's locked in a fibrous matrix, as in the case of broccoli, that's fine. Or any vegetable. Any vegetable. I mean, but, you know, for picking on my favorite vegetable. So you not only become good at burning fat, but then the body starts to – you create these ketones in the absence of glucose. And people will typically say, well, I'm feeling woozy because my blood sugar is low.

My brain isn't working because my blood sugar is low. That's why they feel like they need to have a meal. That's why they feel like they need to have a snack because they get – they have these wild blood sugar swings throughout the day because they've been so dependent on a regular supply of carbohydrate to keep their glucose up. Well, when you cease doing that for some length of time, the body gets wise and the brain goes,

well, look, I know how to burn ketones. I just haven't done it for a long time. So the brain becomes quite adept at deriving energy from ketones. The whole theory that you need glucose to fuel your brain, that's a false? That's correct. You don't need it. Like one of the things that's become kind of a… Because it's supposed to use 25% of all the glucose, right?

25% of your energy. Right. That's different than what I learned in medical school. Yeah, yeah. No, I know. You're saying that's wrong. No. So the brain…

Let me put it one way, which is that there is no dietary requirement for carbohydrate in human nutrition. Yes. So you should just unpack that because there are essential amino acids with protein. There are essential fatty acids from fat, but there is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate and we don't need them. Correct. Now, we don't need them, and I'm not suggesting that we should never consume them, but the reality is we don't need them because we have this elaborate and elegant mechanism that takes stored body fat and, in the absence of any food, allows us to live for five, six, seven days, not just survive, but thrive and be mentally alert and to be willing and able to hunt for the source of food. Because

remember, throughout most of human history, we didn't have three square meals a day. We had food, and then we didn't have food. And so the design of the system, and again, this elegant system, phase one of the system says, the brain, when it comes across food, you've got to overeat because you don't know where the next source of food is going to be. And so when you overeat, you take the excess amount of energy that is in the food and you store it as fuel that you get to carry around on your body. That's right. By the way, conveniently located right over the center of gravity.

The belly, the butt, the hips, the thighs. It's such an elegant system that we would be able to carry this fuel with us for long periods of time and not worry about, oh my God, it's noon and I'm going to get hangry because there's no food around or there's no deli nearby. Because you have the ability to use that fat for energy. You just, you'd use that truck for energy you just you'd use that fat for energy and and that's how the system's designed so unfortunately we get to today where we've lost the ability to so we're very good at storing fat and we still are wired

to overeat but because i mean yeah there's like 200 genes that protect us from starvation yeah but none that help us deal with abundance and excess. So it's an artifact of civilization. So we kind of have to override that with our cognition. But one way to do that, again, is to use a ketogenic way of eating for some period of time. Again, not necessarily for the rest of your life. What is keto? Define keto. So keto to me is cutting carbs back to 50 grams a day or less.

Which is what is 50 grams in terms of a food? Like a bagel? Yeah, pretty much. Like a bagel with some jam on it and you're already over the top. Or any, like if you got rid of bread, pasta, cereal, rice, cookies, candies, cakes, sweetened beverages, sweetened drinks, and all you had was, oh my gosh, real food. Broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, salads. You would be fine.

You would be within that 50. You'd be hard-pressed. Could you have grains and beans? No. So you don't have grains and beans on a keto, on a true keto diet. Now, we'll talk about what pedo looks like. Pedo, okay. Paleo keto or what are we going to call it?

Your pegan version of keto. What's it going to be? Keegan. Keegan, okay. It's a Keegan diet. It's like a keto vegan? Yeah, yeah. I have a friend who's a keto vegan.

Yeah, yeah. So you can do it for sure. It takes some adherence to this. At the end of a couple of weeks, though, you have shifted your metabolism to one of greater efficiency and... So it takes like three weeks to adapt to it. You need to make sure you have enough fluids and sodium and magnesium because otherwise you feel the keto flu. And some people still get the keto flu, but it's not like the flu.

You feel achy and tired. That's your brain going, where's my glucose, dude? And until the brain kicks in and says, wow, these ketones are amazing. The liver can make up to 750 calories a day worth of ketones. Wow. Like, chew on that for a second. That's unbelievable, right? So when you look at how we're designed for survival, if you look at... I mean, not from

diet, but just from your fat stores. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. And we have this stored body fat, and when we cut off, just theoretically, if, let's say you do a fast, which we can talk about what that looks like, but you do a five-day fast, you become a closed loop. It's amazing that the body takes fat out of storage, combusts some of it in the muscles to get you through your day, and people who do five-day fast, they work out, they'll exercise, not, you know, hard, heavy, but so you combust some of that fat in the muscles. Some of that fat, as you take those triglycerides and you strip out the glycerol, it becomes a backbone to make enough glucose through gluconeogenesis to supply whatever amount of brain cells do require some glucose.

It's not a big number. It might be 40, 50 grams a day. The liver makes ketones. The brain thrives on ketones. The brain prefers ketones the brain thrives on ketones the brain prefers ketones yeah the brain does way better on yeah fat than on sugar well on ketones yeah because the brain it doesn't burn fat but it burns ketones ketones are derived from fat are derived from fat so you have this substrate this fatty this fat substance that that then can become uh combusted by itself as fat. Part of it can be used to actually make glucose if needed. That's why you don't have an external need for carbohydrate and glucose.

And then you can make up to 750 calories a day worth of ketones. Now, one of the best things that happens in this scenario is that, again, epigenetics at work turns on genes that cause the body to spare amino acids and spare protein. So whereas normally on a day-to-day basis, you might eat a big meal and you might have more protein than you need, and then your body has to kind of go through this work to deaminate it and pee it out because it's too much. You don't need that much. And so when you become this closed loop, this closed system, the only reason you need the amino acids are for structural, for repair, for building and repairing things. Not to make sugar.

You don't want to combust. So people have a false idea about keto, that it's all like steak and bacon and cream and all this stuff. It's not necessarily that. No. In fact, you can eat too much in the way of, well, I mean, a lot of people who first come to keto do so because they, I heard that I can eat 4,500 calories a day and not gain weight, you know, and I'm like, well, yeah, some of the science shows that, but that's horrible because that's a bad idea because first of all, if you want to burn off your stored body fat, eating 4,500 calories a day want to burn off your stored body fat eating 4,500 calories a

day will never tap into your stored body fat that's just you know that's just trying to prime the pump with this external source of fuel that that's fat that's circulating through your through your bloodstream and and and that amount of calories because you're not generating insulin which is a which is a nutrient storage hormone um the nutrients have nowhere to go. The body has to figure out, how do I burn this stuff off? I can't store it as fat. So the body undergoes this thermogenic high heat kind of thing. Well, that's so powerful because people don't understand that if you don't have insulin,

which is only produced by eating carbohydrates or protein, can also increase insulin. If you don't have insulin you can't gain weight. So if you're a type 1 diabetic the classic symptoms are polyphagia meaning you eat everything in sight and you lose weight. So they could eat 10,000 calories a day and lose weight because they have no insulin which is required to store the fat on your body. So the best way to get your insulin down is to cut out the starchy carbs and to eat more fat. Reasonable amounts of protein. More fat and reasonable amounts of protein. So you don't make it up with, you know, you don't make the calories up with extra amounts of protein.

Yeah, so 20%? Okay. I mean, I prefer to deal with hard numbers, like what's a good number for protein? Maybe it's 75 grams a day for a man as a minimum number, and maybe it doesn't exceed 120. And within a range there, you're going to be fine. And then because the body is so efficient, again, at conserving amino acids, protein, that it doesn't even matter meal-to-meal or day-to-day. It might be on a four-day cycle. If you get 300 grams of protein in a four-day cycle, you're good

because it'll just figure out with the different various protein sinks that we have in the body how to keep it and not pee it out. Yeah. So back to this closed loop that I'm talking about. So you're combusting fat in the muscles. You're making a little bit of glucose through gluconeogenesis. You're making ketones. Now we figure out that you don't really need that many calories to get through a day.

Like we assume if we do that math that's online, you know, you plug in your number and your height and your, you know, your weight or whatever, and your activity level from one to five, and you come up with some number, oh, it says I can have 2,700 calories a day or 3,200 calories a day for maintenance. No bearing whatsoever on reality. We probably, if you, again, if you do the math, if we, for long periods of time, if we say that protein, protein shouldn't even have a calorie assigned to it. It's like, it's structural. You don't burn protein, so why would you even assign a value of four calories per gram to protein? Right, but it can turn into sugar. It can. If you eat excess amounts. It can. So, you know,

and I guess if you burn it in a bomb, Caloruna, you get some amount of thermic effect. So how do you know if you're doing a ketogenic diet properly? Well, the main thing is, can you go a meal or two, skip a meal or two, and just feel just fine? And if you can, you're... It cuts hunger. So when you have ketones, it cuts your hunger. The number one benefit from all of this is getting control of hunger, appetite, and cravings.

Yeah. That's what everyone reports when they finally hit that keto zone. So it's not bad willpower that people want to crave and eat other food? It's just biology, right? It's biology. It's absolutely biology. And people come to this point pretty quickly where they go, Jesus, Mark, you know, three meals a day is just too damn much food.

I just don't feel hungry. I feel like I'm overeating at three meals a day. And so typically what they do is skip breakfast. They wake up in the morning. I have a cup of coffee. I go about my day. I do a hard workout. I'm like, not only do I not need to eat, I don't feel compelled to eat. I don't

want to eat. And I might have my first meal at one o'clock or one thirty. It's like time-restricted eating. It's what it is. And so then you get to the point where you're eating maybe two meals a day. And then from there, it's like even those two meals feel like if I have two regular, what would have been in the old days, regular meals, now it's like I'm going to have lunch, kind of a smaller lunch because I want to enjoy a to have lunch, kind of a smaller lunch, because I want to enjoy a regular dinner. If I have a regular lunch, then I won't be hungry for dinner. It's amazing how hunger dissipates in this context.

But you don't get super skinny. I mean, you look good, right? I work to keep my weight on. Although I notice, Mark, is I actually have a problem. If I don't have things like sweet potatoes or some black rice, I will lose too much weight. Do you lift weights? I do. I started.

Okay. Lifting weights is what causes you to keep muscle on. If you don't lift weights, especially as you get older, like when you get to be 45, you'll see what I'm talking about. I'm 60. I passed that mark long ago. I'm just messing with you. But I'm biologically 39 because I passed that mark long ago. I'm just messing with you. But I'm biologically 39 because I did my telomeres. As you get older, the importance of lean tissue becomes more and more critical.

Muscle is the forgotten organ. And people think, well, if I'm jogging in my 50s and 60s and 70s or riding a bike, that that's accomplishing what I need to accomplish, and it's not. It's actually much more important to spend some time in the gym lifting heavy weights, like the heaviest weights you can lift without getting hurt. Without getting hurt is a key component. I don't want to... So my trainer tells me I should do more reps. I do three sets.

Yeah. And I do... It's pretty hard, but it's not like my maximum that I can do. Sometimes it is. But is that the same, or is it more better to do heavy weights? How many reps do you do? Are we talking 6 or 35? I do like 10 to 12 and then I do 3 times

that's fine that's a standard that hasn't changed in decades that's still and there's no right answer there there's no magic it's like whatever you feel good doing is that building enough muscle or should I do more heavier weights heavier weights and fewer reps? Sure.

Heavier weights and fewer reps builds more strength over time. But there's no... I can't tell you that that's where you need to go. But I'll give you an example. It's sometimes the type of weights you're doing. So if you're just doing bicep curls, that's for the beach beach but that doesn't really impact bone density you know muscle mass throughout so hex bar deadlifts you ever do those yeah yeah that's the best thing you can do what about just a regular deadlift yeah they're good but they're i'm too concerned with my back so so i lift heavy with a hex bar deadlift oh really yeah so but i do it once every

week and i do three sets of that. I keep adding weights. How much do you do? I do up to 300 pounds. I do one to two rep max on 300. Oh, one to two reps. Yeah, I can do 335 on one, but it's too much. I wind up taking too long to do it, and I'm afraid. Again, I don't want to hurt myself.

Yeah. So I do, but that's like that that one exercise impacts the entire body. It's not just what you would see obviously from doing the weight of the glutes and the lower back and the hamstrings and the quads, but it's pulling on the shoulder muscles. My grip strength is sometimes the thing that gives out more than anything else. But that one exercise then has an effect on the pulse of growth hormone and testosterone. It involves so many muscles, including major muscles, that then when you go do the pull-ups and the push-ups and the dips and the squats and all the other lunges, then you get the impact is greater.

The effect, the muscle building effect is greater because you did that. Yeah, I like that. I like that. So I should do that first. Or last or whatever. All right, well, that's amazing. If you do it first, a lot of times you'll like, you know, you won't have the strength to complete the other stuff.

So what is the biology of doing it? You mentioned you can burn fat, but why is that better? Like what does it do in terms of longevity? What does the science show? Well, as we, so burning sugar is a, in and of itself, it produces reactive oxygen species at a greater rate than putting, combusting fat through the mitochondria. So the more energy you can drive through this metabolic pathway that uses the mitochondria,

the better off you are. A lot of times people burn sugar in the cytosol of the cell, not even... The way I think about it is interesting. So when you eat a lot of sugar calories and starchy calories, it burns dirty in your mitochondria and releases a lot of waste products, which is these reactive oxygen species or oxidative stress or free radicals that are driving aging. And when you burn ketones, it's more like hybrid, like an electric vehicle, it burns clean, right? Like a 93 octane on your fuel. Yeah, it burns much cleaner.

Is that true? That's true. I mean, that's the simplest way of looking at it. Then there are other nuances to this, which are when you become good at burning fat, then when you skip a meal or when you have this very easy to manage compressed eating window, all the good stuff happens when you're not eating. Yeah. So the longer you can go, and that's why fasting has become the rage,

the longer you can go without eating, the more your body says, oh, this is a great time to do some house cleaning. And the term autophagy is thrown out probably too much now. But the body does tend to want to clean up and consume damaged proteins. Autophagy means like you're literally eating yourself. Correct. So eating all the waste products. Eating the waste products. Pac-Man goes around and cleans up the place. Correct. And if you never fast, you just become this increased collection of garbage in your body.

The whole three meals, three snacks, eat late at night, after dinner snack, and wake up eating right away, that's a bad idea. It's a bad idea. And what's ironic to me is that even going back 15 years ago in the bodybuilding, in the weightlifting, in the general health community, the mantra was don't go more than two hours without eating. Bring your Tupperware little meals with you with some amount of protein, some amount of carbs, no fat, skinless chicken breast, and all that stuff.

It was a horrible concept. And yet the thought process was you don't want to cannibalize your muscle tissue. And if you go more than three hours without eating, you'll cannibalize your muscle tissue. Now, all of that was predicated on an assumption that glucose was the primary fuel that we needed. When we ran out of glucose, it would cause the brain to go into a state of, oh my God, send a signal to the adrenals to secrete cortisol so we can basically melt some muscle tissue and send some amino acids to the liver to become glucose. It was a horrible, again, it was all based on a concept that somehow assumed that glucose was the muscle fuel that we needed. And if we didn't manage glucose, all hell broke loose.

Now we know that fat is the preferred fuel for human movement and human activity and that ketones are not just a legitimate alternative energy source. They're probably a preferred energy source in many cases. As a doctor, I see a lot of patients and I test them and I see the results. And it's humbling because you can come up with all these great theories, but then you see the individual in front of you. And I've had patients I put on a ketogenic diet eating butter and coconut oil all day and they lose 20, 30 pounds.

Their cholesterol comes down 100 points. Their triglycerides drop. Their good cholesterol goes up. Somebody else does that and all their numbers go terrible, and they start getting really bad cholesterol numbers. And I'm one of those guys. If I eat too much of saturated fat, I get in trouble. And I think, how do you understand sort of how to personalize this? All right, so a couple things. First of all, you know, we've never had this conversation, so I don't know what your stance is currently on this, but, you know, I've been pushing for 15 years to take the weight off cholesterol as a bad guy.

You know, the cholesterol is not the proxy. In the blood or in the diet? Both. But let's just talk blood cholesterol right now. I don't think cholesterol is a bad guy. Cholesterol is one of the most important molecules in the human body. It's integral to life. The body makes 1,300 milligrams a day, whether or not you have any in your diet. And to vilify it and spend a trillion dollars for the last 15 years to try and eradicate it in humans is absolutely unconscionable. Through statin medications. Through statin medications. And I shared with you before the show. So I just had some blood work done.

I'm between 245 and 290 on my total cholesterol. But my HDL is 98. That's the good cholesterol. That's the good cholesterol. And my triglycerides are always below 75, sometimes 45 or 50. My A1C is 4.9, which you know to be- That's your average blood sugar, which is really low. Really low. Fasting insulin is between six and seven. It can be as high as 45 in some people. So all my markers are great, except that if you didn't ascribe to that whole cholesterol theory,

you'd go, oh my God, Mark we've got to put you on a— everything looks great. By the way, I had a full scan of my carotids and all my blood supply to my coronary arteries, my liver. I mean, they were digging in so deep, I thought, oh, my God, they're looking to see if I have colon cancer. But they were trying to get at my kidney supply. And they said, you know, you're clean. You've got like the blood supply of a 30-year-old. It's clean as can be.

That's all that counts, Mark. I don't care what my cholesterol numbers are. But aren't some people more at risk, though? Some are. But again... These lean mass hyper-responder phenomena? Yes. And it all, I think, comes down to...

And I'm not a doctor, so I'm only giving you my opinion. You can opine with greater, you know, I guess you have more liability for saying it than I do. I have no liability as long as I say I'm not a doctor. But it's inflammation and oxidation that are the primary culprits here. And so if you have an otherwise inflammatory lifestyle, inflammatory diet, we can talk about sugar. We can talk about stress. We can talk about, you know, and then we can talk about some familial predisposition. Yes. But in general, so back to your two people.

Some succeed wildly on the ketogenic diet and some not so much. But the not so much, if you're evaluating just on short-term blood markers, I'm not going to say it's not working. I'm just going to say that's, you know, if you're keto and you're good at burning fat, you've got to transport the fat somehow to the muscle cells. There are a lot of things going on here. Yeah, we just don't know. And we just don't know. Now, some people, having said all of that, some women in particular, are not good responders to keto. It may be. Who shouldn't be on it. Well, so I think pregnant women probably, you know, you just work with, if you want to do this and you insist on doing this, work with somebody who knows what they're doing.

Right? And I wouldn't, you know, I wouldn't introduce a three-year-old kid to a ketogenic diet. Do you think it's something everybody should be on? I think at some point in their lives, everybody should be on it because it's the human experience. So you think cyclical keto, that's the idea. Cyclical keto, yeah. So do you ever go above the 50 grams of carbs?

Oh, my God. I have, last night, I'm visiting here in Los Angeles. My daughter is a great chef, and she made a lasagna last night, I'm visiting here in Los Angeles. My daughter is a great chef, and she made a lasagna last night. Like, I'm not going to not eat two servings of that. I mean, you know, and it was somebody's birthday, and we had some pie. And, you know, I didn't sleep as well as I would have had I not done that. But I also, like, I'm totally comfortable in the fact that— So then you go in and out.

In and out. And that's— That's what in and out. In and out. And that's... That's what we historically did. That's exactly. So when we talk about, you know, were humans, you know, always keto? No, there were periods of time when there was no access to food. You were like automatically, you were obligatory keto when you didn't eat. Yeah.

But because you didn't eat processed crap and industrial seed oils that would infect your insulin sensitivity and all these other things, even if you came across a treasure trove of bee honey or it was late in the season and you had a bunch of fruit, you'd store it as fat, but then you'd go right back to being keto when the food supply was cut off. Yeah. And you didn't go, as some of these people do, well, you know, whenever I have more than 60 grams or 70 grams of carbs, I get kicked out of keto. Kicked out of keto means nothing to me.

Like, I don't even care what your keto numbers are. So you don't think about measuring it or tracking it? No, I think it's a parlor trick. So what will happen is people who are new to keto will go, they'll chase the numbers, right? So they'll say, well, I didn't eat any carbs today, and I just had MCT oil, and I had my bulletproof coffee, and whatever. And I'm showing 4.5 millimolar or 6 millimolar.

Yeah, baby, I'm keto. Well, you're keto. You're producing ketones. But one of the things you've got to look for is you're just pissing those out. So your body has not become good at using them yet. You'll get there, but right now your liver is going crazy trying to make ketones and you don't know how to burn them. So once you build the metabolic machinery to burn ketones,

and once you build the facility— And it doesn't go away when you have a pie and lasagna. No, exactly, exactly. So let's talk about that. But once you built that, you spent three weeks, four weeks, building that metabolic machinery, No, exactly, exactly. So let's talk about that. But once you built that, you spent three weeks, four weeks, you know, building that metabolic machinery, you reset your metabolism to one of metabolic flexibility and metabolic efficiency, then if you go off the wagon, you know, one meal or eat one day of 300 grams of carbs, you might feel bad,

but you just come right back to where you were. It doesn't shift all the way back to being a sugar burner. Now, if you did it for three more weeks of just doing sugar, the body would say, well, I guess we don't need this expensive machinery lying around burning fat all the time now. I guess we're going to just go back to burning sugar, so we'll let all of these things atrophy. You dropped a little bomb earlier I want to come back to, which is you said you had the lasagna and the pie and you didn't sleep as well. So you've hacked sleep.

Yeah. And what does eating lasagna and pie have to do with sleep? And tell us how you figure out the sleep, because 70% of Americans have trouble sleeping. So, I mean, I typically sleep great. I go to bed at 10.30 or 11, wake up at 7.07, like with certainty every day. By the way, no matter what time I go to bed, I wake up at 7.07. But I have a dark, blackout curtains in the room. Keep the room at, if I'm away from home, I keep the room at 67. When I'm home, I have a chili pad.

Do you have a chili pad? Because your wife likes it warmer? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And softer. So we literally have a half of a pad on her side that's three inches of just foam. So my side of the bed is down. Yeah, I have a chili pad too. It's a game changer. It's a game changer. And that's like a pad that puts cold water through it so you feel cooler at night. Yeah, it uses cold water. It's not wet a pad that puts cold water through it so you feel cooler at night. Yeah. It uses cold water. It's not wet, but it uses cold water circulating through microtubules to keep your sleeping surface cool.

And it's so, once again, if we look at primal ancestral man, we slept on a cold ground covered with a heavy skin. Right? And that's what we're doing. I love a big duvet cover on top of me. But I keep that thing at, you know, I keep it at 64 and 65 when I'm in Miami. So, but I've hacked sleep, so I'm really good at sleeping, except when I have, when I go off the wagon. And so last night, again, we had a, it was grandma's birthday, and grandma made a blueberry

pie, and my daughter made lasagna. And I'm not going to be that guy who goes, I'm keto, I can't do that. No, I'm just, I'm like do that. No, I'm just, I'm like, I ate it. I loved it. It was fantastic. Had two glasses of wine. And then I went to sleep great. But then I woke up, you know, two o'clock and my liver says, you know, now's the time we're going to make you pay for it. So my heart was racing a little bit more. You know, I had a little bit more, you know, higher insulin promotes sort of a higher cortisol response. And I had that standard, you know kind

of thing that the body keeps you awake when you when you when you clean up your act this is good news bad news mark you know when you clean up your act you burn fat you feel better you have energy all day you don't get sick you look great you feel great but then when you screw up you pay for really notice it yeah yeah that's it's exactly what I've noticed as a physician treating patients when they clean up their diet I go you know I used, I used to be all the time, I don't feel as bad. I'm like, I think you felt bad all the time. All the time. You just didn't realize it. You got desensitized to it. Exactly. Yeah. Amazing. So talk about this whole trend of fasting, intermittent fasting, time-restricted eating, fasting-mimicry diets. They seem to all

do the same thing. And keto is part of that because it activates these healing responses. So tell us about what those healing responses are, why they're important, why we should care. Well, I mean, I would want to care because, you know, again, as a vain older guy who's facing, you know, an inevitable decline over time, I want to slow that, stem that decline as much as I can. So as I said earlier, this was first put in my head by Art Devaney. Do you know who Art Devaney is? He's an original ancestral health guy. Brilliant, brilliant mind. And he basically

said all the good things happen. We're most human when we're not eating. All the good things happen when we're not eating. So eating, and again, if you look at it from a historical context, eating is just like pulling the train over to the side and filling it full of coal, and it's just resting and getting energy stores taken in. And in the case of humans, it's overeating in most cases and loading up the energy. And then all the good stuff happens when you head down the tracks again, and you've stopped eating, and now you're basically metabolizing food, you're using your muscles to move through different planes of motion, you're using your brain to create, you're using your heart to love, and in not eating, your body is recognizing that this is a state where

the best opportunity to repair can happen. If you just think about two sort of cells that are surrounded by a lot of nutrition, a lot of nutrients, or let's just say one cell surrounded by a lot of nutrition, a lot of nutrients. Or let's say one cell is surrounded by a lot of nutrients. The cell goes, man, my job is to pass the genetic material along to the next generation. That's my only job, just to pass the genes along down. There's so much cool stuff around. There's so much nutrition. I'm going to divide and make two of me. That's the telomere thing, by the way. And then those two cells go, man, this is awesome. Let's divide again. What the hell? There's plenty for everybody. Meanwhile, that same cell, when

faced with not a lot of nutrition around, goes, Jesus, I mean, there's not enough for me, let alone two of me. So I'm going to take some of that damaged protein inside the cytosol. I'm going to take some of the damaged fats, and I'm going to consume those. I'm going to burnol. I'm going to take some of the damaged fats and I'm going to consume those. I'm going to burn those. I'm going to combust those. I'm going to use those for fuel. And while I'm at it, I'm going to fix some of the DNA that's been kind of not working recently. I haven't had a reason or time to fix it, but I'm going to fix that DNA. And so the cell cleans itself up. Yeah, it's amazing. It turns on the right genes for healthy aging. It builds your own stem cells.

It reduces inflammation. It turns on antioxidant systems, improves your brain function. It's super powerful. And you can kind of play with all these different approaches to eating and see what feels good to you. And I like how you talk about keto not being a permanent state. It is a thing that we used to go in and out of. So it's such a powerful strategy for a healthy longevity and aging. And you're 66. You look

amazing. I love that. You are an inspiration for me and your books are so great. The latest book, 21 Day Biological Clock Reset is just something you have in your new book, Keto for Life, which is great. And I think it's good to know that keto for life doesn't mean keto all the time. It just means a way of eating that turns on all the mechanisms that control our aging, that regulate our blood sugar, that help us have better cognitive function. I've had a patient who was in early dementia, and we put her on a ketogenic diet. It was like the lights came back on. It was just amazing to me.

I've seen it in kids, little kids who are autistic or had really autistic aggressive behaviors, put them on keto, and they literally stop having all those behaviors and wake up a little bit. And, of course, weight loss, diabetes. We see increasing studies showing that. I mean, you can cure diabetes. Type 2 diabetes, you can cure it. Yeah, 60% are cured with a ketogenic diet in a year. It's pretty amazing.

And I think, you know, your work is not only on that, bringing the science to life, but you actually created food products that help people enjoy delicious, yummy food. And now you guys sent them to me. I have so much in my cupboard. I love it. You have to give it to patients. I know. It's amazing. That's a good idea. I'm going to bring one. I get a box every like month or something. It's great. I have no idea why. Maybe you just had a dream. But it's pretty awesome. And I just love that you've been that force in the world that has educated people about this. You are the original dude doing this.

And the fact that Kraft Foods is starting to pay attention and the big food is starting to pay attention is a great thing. So I really am so happy that you're doing this. For his latest book, go to ketoreset.com forward slash for life. That's ketoreset.com forward slash for life. You can check out all his stuff on exercise, on YouTube, on micro workouts, his ancestral rest postures. You're going to look at how to be part of the research he's doing. You can look at all the great products that Primal Kitchen has.

They're amazing. And I just, there's more and more coming from you. You're still going strong. And I just love that. Mark, thank you so much for being on The Doctor's Pharmacy. Thanks for having me, man. And if you love this podcast, please share it with your friends and family on social media. Please leave a comment.

I'd love to hear from you. And subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And we'll see you next week on The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you to all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from.

And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health.

And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays. Nothing else, I promise. And all you have to do is go to drhyman.com forward slash pics to sign up. That's drhyman.com forward slash pics, P-I-C-K-S, and sign up for the newsletter. And I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger, longer. Hi, everyone.

I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed

healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.