The Dylan Gemelli Podcast - Episode #91 Featuring Zane Griggs! The TRUTH about carbohydrates! NO HOLDS BARRED discussion on the polarization of carbs and HUGE misconceptions surrounding them!

Episode Date: February 17, 2026

Episode #91 Featuring Zane Griggs!  The TRUTH about carbohydrates!  Strap in for this no holds barred conversation as Zane Griggs is fearless in his approach to discussing the most polarizing topic in the world of diets today, CARBOHYDRATES.  Zane comes prepared with facts and numbers to back up his words.  Dylan and Zane start by discussing low carb diets, explaining what they are, how they work and why they are not sustainable.  Zane also goes into detail about the carnivore diet and the many health problems he is seeing the longer people adopt this diet.  Zane discusses why carbohydrates have become such a polarizing topic with a very long and detailed discussion about the differences between processed foods and good, clean carbohydrates.  The conversation shifts to insulin resistance and its role in metabolic health and closes with metabolic flexibility and how carbohydrates play a significant role in staying metabolically flexible.  This conversation is extremely enlightening and provides another side to the puzzle of diet structure and implementation.  You DO NOT want to miss this one!!       Today's episode is sponsored by TIMELINE   To PURCHASE MITOPURE visit Dylan's landing page and use code DYLAN to save 20% OFF!! https://shop.timeline.com/DYLAN   _______________________________________________________________________________   Get the Apollo Neuro for $99 OFF!! USE CODE GEMELLI to save https://apolloneuro.com/gemelli       TONUM supplements for the MIND AND BODY!   USE CODE "DYLAN" to save!!  https://www.tonum.com/DYLAN       TRULY Increase Your NAD LEVELS with WONDERFEEL NMN: https://getwonderfeel.com/?utm_source=DylanGemelli&utm_medium=podcast       MESCREEN: The world's first and only at home mitochondrial efficiency test Save $100 with CODE   DYLAN   https://mescreen.com/cart/47561239626013:1?discount=&ref=DYLAN         HIRE DYLAN ON THE MINNECT APP HERE: expert.minnect.com/@DylanGemelli       Follow Dylan on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Tiktok @dylangemelli and PLEASE SUBSCRIBE and leave reviews!!       MAKE SURE TO GO TO DYLAN'S YOUTUBE CHANNEL for MORE video content!!    https://www.youtube.com/@DylanGemelliBiohacking   Email Dylan for booking, collaborations and/or to apply for the Dylan Gemelli Podcast [e-mail]   Visit Dylan's Homepage https://dylangemelli.com

When we think of health, most think of diet, working out, or even stress levels. I, like so many others, overlooked the crucial importance of my mitochondria. When your mitochondria work better, everything works better. Maintaining muscle gets harder with age and cellular energy plays a significant role in strength and function. My world turned upside down when I learned about mitapur gummies. Mito peer gummies are longevity gummies in the only clinically proven form of urolithine shown in human studies to help renew mitochondrial function, which is designed to support cellular energy.

So you feel stronger and more vibrant as you age. They are my key component to longevity and quality of life. Not only do they taste great, but they are sugar and allergen-free, non-GMO, and clean label projects certified. Support your cells and how you age with mitapier gummies from Timeline. Visit Timeline.com backslash Dylan Jameli to save up to 39% off your might appear gummies. timeline.com backslash Dylan Jameli.

All right, everybody. Welcome back to the Dylan Jameli podcast. So I have a good friend here with me today that is going to shake some things up, so to speak, but he is super knowledgeable. I've had the pleasure of speaking with him now multiple times. We did an Instagram live that I felt was pretty impactful. I really, really like his dedication and approach to helping people challenging things, asking questions, everything that I believe.

in he believes in and so my goal at all times is to bring people on like my guest today that have different outlooks mindsets and can back it up and their motive is simply to help people and that's why he's here today flew in to see me which i thank you for as well because i know that's always tricky but he's been you know helping people as a personal trainer since 1998 he's got an amazing podcast healthy after 50. He has really reached so many people over many years, and I feel like he's making a really strong impact right now, which I want a spotlight.

So my friends, welcome Zane Griggs. Thank you, Dylan. Appreciate it. I have to be here. Thanks for coming to see me, bro. I appreciate it. Like I said, and I've told you off-camera multiple times, I am very much looking forward to this.

I was excited to have you here. I think you're a very quality human, and I think that your motives fall in line with mine. I don't necessarily agree with everything. Anybody that comes on here does, but I'm always wanting to learn from somebody else. And I feel like you have a lot of keys that we need to discuss and provide to people.

And I want to get into all of your different types of mindset that you've changed with your diet over the years, things that you've been working on. You have a huge knowledge base and I'm going to drain you for all of it. Well, thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah, happy to do it.

Let's talk about first, just, I don't like to do everybody's, how did you get into this? But when you're talking about fitness and nutrition, it is important to get a little bit of background on you, how you've learned what you're, you know, what you've gone through to get to where you're at today. Sure. Well, I was, I was really curious about diet and fitness early on, like in my 20s. I was, I seen my relatives basically struggling with metabolic disease and I didn't want that to be my future. For some reason, my 20s, I got a sense of mortality. Yeah. And I started playing around with, I started with a vegan vegetarian diet back and forth in my 20s, became a trainer in 98, like you said, and started using low carb. I'll be right around 2002 for my clients wanted to lose weight. Okay. And then so that was over 20 years ago. And started playing with intermittent fasting later on top of that in 2010. So by the time I got to enter my 40s in 2010, I was, I was had a little bit, pretty much a low carb diet. with intermittent fasting, lots of fasted workouts.

And I was cranking that for about 10 years almost until I kind of hit a wall. And I just kind of, it was like basically I can tell you, cortisol was too high, right? You know, it was too much stress hormone. Not sleep was not great. Byword was working too hard. So I had all the signs of high metabolic stress.

And I realized, okay, well, everything I've been doing to kind of, I think, you know, kind of crank everything harder was catching up with me. It was a combination of age and time. And I think if I'd been younger and smarter, I might have figured it out, but I think age helped me have to make this decision, like really take a good look at myself and say, what am I doing? And is this the best strategy? And that's why I had to kind of reset everything. Yeah. So that's kind of where I am now coming through a few years of reset. In your view, what does it mean low carb? Is that like 100 grams of carbs, is that like 20 grams of carbs? What's the definition of low carb? So technically, of course,

there's different divisions of it as people died by a Pito, carnivor, all that. But technically, what it is supposed to be is about 25% of calories or less coming from carbohydrates. Now, our studies that we have out there, not to confuse the issue, but we have studies out there where they say, oh, a low carb or a low fat diet. And some of these studies, they just, they use those terms, but they aren't really sticking to a metric. All right. You'll see a low carb versus a high carb diet and it's a 55% carb diet versus a 40% carb diet.

Well, that's not really much of a switch and you're not going to see a lot of changes. Even with low fat, they'll say, uh, low fat coming from, you know, 40, 45% fat to 34% or 30% fat. Well, the average American is eating 35 or so 40% fat. So what's 30% fat's not really low fat to me? But those are the kind of studies. So when we see these studies, it becomes very confusing. That's why it's so confusing because it seems to be a very arbitrary term.

Yes. But generally in the health space, nutrition space, the practitioners would say low carb is 25% or less. And then, of course, keto would be like, usually it's 50 grams, but usually like 10% of calories or less. Low. You know, so really super low. but that's generally kind of the ballpark is 24% of the calories what i think would be good is because once again these terms ketogenic carnivore vegan vegetarian i i swear these terms get thrown around a lot but i don't think people know what that actually entails or means so

and we don't have to spend an hour on one diet but could you give like your breakdown on just a few of these what is keto what is what is uh carnivore like what is this entail? Well, keto really takes low carb down to a level where, you know, it's about 10%, someone would say 10% of calories and some just use a straight across like 50 grams or less for most people. That's you're in the ballpark of both of those. And the purpose being, and a lot of those carbs are often to make sure you don't hit, you know, go too high is a lot of vegetables, really. Nothing that's too carb rich. And so you have this higher fat. So keto is supposed to really increase fat.

So it's not just the carb level, but ideally you have a fat makes up the predominant amount of the calories, not protein. And then you'll hear them argue within the keto space as well that someone might be saying, oh, you have too much protein. You need more fat. And so there's this tug-a-war between how much protein is appropriate. it because if it goes too high, some of it may be turned into glucose through gluconeogenesis, or the fat needs to be higher to create more ketones. And so there's a, there's nuance within ketogenic where there's a bit of, again, some disagreement. This is normal.

Whether someone should be having a 65, 70% of the calories coming from fat or it's okay at down and around 50, 55 and you have 25% protein. So there's a little bit of that back and forth. and some will argue one is better than the other for ketosis, but the carbs stay low. Carnivore is generally speaking zero carb. And then, you know, so it's basically, and that may, for some may include high fat, zero carb dairy, so like a cheese possibly. Or, but primarily it's meat and fat, basically, butter, things like that.

There is even a degree of that, which someone has to make it even. even harder, right? The lion diet, which is meat, salt, and water. And, you know, I mean, yeah. So it's like, it's like, it's really a bare bones. And I understand for elimination diet, someone who's encountering a lot of inflammation, Michaela Peterson is the one who kind of coined that because she was dealing with rheumatoid arthritis and you're going to reduce inflammation. So she was really the big proponent of the lion diet. But even recently, I've seen she has added in some other foods like sweet potato, mango, and coconut. But that was basically that the purpose is an elimination diet. Let's get rid of anything that may be irritating the gut, it may be causing

inflammation, reset the brain if you've got some sort of food addiction. And there's always those little factions within carnivore saying, oh, you shouldn't have dairy, you can't have dairy, you can't have. And so it's, but it's pretty much just meat and fat. Too much. It's a lot. It's a lot. You know, vegan, when I was doing vegan back in the 90s, so back then vegetarian, we didn't have eggs. That was like a lacto-over vegetarian. They had to say lacto if you had milk and eggs. And then pescatarian, but it was just like you had a little bit of maybe some cheese here and there, but the vegans were like straight up, obviously just no animal whatsoever. So when I was doing that diet, I basically ran to the ground by immune system.

I did it for three and a half years. And I just got weak. I lost a lot of muscle, a lot of weight, was hungry all the time, kind of tired. Yeah. I wasn't recovering. Yeah. I was having to eat constantly until I got this virus that my doc said, you know what your immune system is a low. I think it's your diet.

How was your training on that hypodiac? It was, I had to back off. I mean, I had to like, I couldn't train as often. I was still in my 20, so I could, you know, we can abuse ourselves under 20s. We could take a beating, but I was just very thin. Yeah. I added in some weigh proteins of salmon and some eggs, which a lot of people say, oh, that sounds like vegetarian.

It wasn't thin. It wasn't vegetarian. But a little bit of fish, way and eggs, and I felt like my brain lit up within a week. Right. You know, it's just like everything, the fat came back in, the protein was there. I felt myself recovering better. I was sleeping better. I was awake up in the morning and just didn't even reach for coffee.

Like, I went three days without coffee and didn't even realize it. It's just one of those things where it's like, oh, I was definitely missing this. So it's another way I had to learn the hard way, you know. Yeah, that deprivation, man. Yeah, for some reason I could get to gravitate to these things. Yeah. Hey, I've done it. You don't even want to know.

We'll get into that. We'll get into that later. A mind's a brutal. What about like a paleo diet? What is that? Is that lower carb or what is that? It tends to be lower carb, but not as, not like keto, but it's a, a little more like going back to what would have been available paleolithic.

Right. So very whole food is a good way to look at it. So a very whole food diet. So plenty of meat, saturated fat, maybe some tubers, maybe some roots and fruits. Okay. You know. Got it. And some leaves thrown in there probably, but mostly roots and fruits.

So it's a countergatherer kind of diet is what you think of. Yeah. And so it's a good way to clean up the diet as well, not going in too much of an extreme one way or the other. And then lastly, because this is the one where what I find most people go to is the Mediterranean diet. Well, they'll just say, we'll just do a Mediterranean diet. I get that all the time. If people are trying to go, I disagree with that highly, but I want your thoughts on it. Because to me, that's like, huh? When I hear that, it's really? It's really broad. That's what I'm thinking. If the Mediterranean diet, I really was popularized through marketing

as a way to market olive oil. So they say olive oil companies invite these doctors out to like the south of France, basically for a nice little vacation. Oh, come out here and we'll put you up in the south of France and we'll let you taste all these olive oils and we'll tell you how healthy these olive oils are for you. And then you can go back and tell everybody how healthy. And then so basically that created this olive oil campaign to sell this all over from Spain in Italy and France and so forth.

So it was, and again, it was somewhere in the Mediterranean, but they basically flew these doctors out. And that was, I think that was in the, maybe the 70s or so, 80s maybe. But it was a beginning of a marketing campaign for the olive oil. And then that's when you see all the articles from the Mediterranean diet. And you put enough money behind something. Get some doctors on board, have some articles written. And there you go.

You've got a Mediterranean diet. Now, are there worse ways to eat if you actually ate the way people eat on the Mediterranean? You know, it's a great way to eat. I mean, it's a little bit of everything. It's like Greece, you know. We have two blue zones in the Mediterranean, right? Yeah, yeah. So why, you know, Sardinia and Ithia, wherever that little Greek island is, I can't

remember on the top of my head right now. But basically, you have meat, you have olives, you have garlic, you have olive oil, you have, I mean, there's homemade bread, there's all sorts of things. It's a very broad diet, fruit, obviously. It's all whole food. though. And it's kind of hard to go wrong if you're eating all whole food in my family. Yeah. I agree. You know, you know, uh, but, but I don't know how many, depending, the ratios you could have in that are so nondescript. It's all over the place. You could be eating 80% carb and meditraining or you could be

eating 80% fat metatrain. I mean, if you really tried, but it's just, it's, it's, uh, it's a free for all. It sounds like it sounds really tasty, but I don't know how much of a change you could make. If you're healthy and you're eating this broad diet as whole food, you're probably great. If you're metabolically unhealthy, you might need a little more of an intervention, in my opinion, to change things at a distinctive pace, right? You can get healthy over time with whole food only for sure. It would definitely change the way you live. Change your health.

But if someone's like, I really need to lose 100 pounds or I need to reverse diet, diabetes, you may want to have a little more oversight over ratios, in my opinion, of how much fat protein and carbs are eating just to help move that along at a pace that keeps you interested, you know, keeps you on board. I'm sure you noticed this, but every single diet we're running down here, aside from that Mediterranean one, it's got something in common. It's always low carb. So everything is lower end carb.

Is there a high-carb diet that you ever talk about or that's out there? I mean, I'm personally talking about a high-carb diet right now. But is there one named diet that's out there that's higher-carb? The closest one that was popular right around 2010 was called the zone diet. Barry C. I remember that. Yes. It was 40-30-30-30.

So it was 40-carb, 30 protein, 30 fat. Great for an athlete. Yeah. Everybody else should put weight on. 100%. I'll tell you what, those bars, they were not good for you, but man, they tasted good, those chocolate peanut butter went on the bars. They were so good. They were free.

They were, I mean, they sold a bar. But if you were to eat whole food that way, I mean, there's plenty of, I don't know, I think it's a, if you'd have to be a very active, lean athlete. Okay. To make that work in my reunion. I agree. And we can get into why, but I would, that's basically you're in the middle. But there's probably a lot of studies. been done in that middle section that it seems like the swamp land of macros where it's all

kind of merged to almost the same and yeah most people wouldn't survive there with all the processed food we have you're right right if it was a whole food diet be one thing but there's been so many damn diets i remember south beach diet i mean oh yeah so many things that were just going through the pipeline that we're marketing and that's a marketing one for you. Of course. My gosh. Well, I want to talk to you about one more before I get into more aspects of carbs. This was my lane that I lived in hell for like 15 years or 20 years, which was just a straight low fat diet, which to me, we'll talk about this later, you and me. I feel like this is the worst thing ever personally. I was as miserable. I think that the need

for fats and overall health in terms of like our cellular membranes and brain, function. I'm not saying I disagree with that carnivore diet where it's so high in a fat. I don't like that either, but I feel like just, just eliminating it. I feel like it's, to me, it's one of the worst things ever for a long-term health. How low weight of fat? You were tracking, right? 15, 20 grams max. 15 or 20 grams? Yeah, max. Oh, wow. It was only coming from peanut butter, only for years. Dikes. And I'm a nutritionist. But one that suffered an eating disorder for many years and a complete fear, even though I was teaching people the polar opposite. That would be like a spoonful, though.

It wasn't anything. I mean, that's 15 or 20 grams of peanut butter's. Nothing. It's nothing. It's like a teaspoon. It's nothing. Wow. Now I eat about 130 a day.

Okay. Yeah. We'll talk about me later. You interview me, but I feel I learned so much over that experience. I feel like that's some of the reason. and I had some heart conditions. I feel like it's a reason why I had so many blood markers off. I know it's why I was a crabby prick a lot of the time and couldn't focus.

And my whole world changed when I made that change. But I want your thoughts on why that was brought into existence and why it was so, you know, out there for so long. And what's your thought on keeping fat super low? Well, that's a, that's very low, long term. Yes, you definitely have some. some downside to it. And peanut butter, of all things, not even a very nutritious fat. Horrible.

It's like there's no nutrient value in that fat. I'm surprised you were able to get protein in with that little fat of fat. But I think there are, when I think of low fat that's somewhat sustainable, like what I would use for someone who, the way I'm thinking now as far as someone who would reverse, and we can get into this, but reversing as an intervention to reverse disease or lose weight, you can use low fat, but low fat would be more like a 15% of calories, not 15 grams. And there's a big difference there. And so 50% of calories on the low end would definitely make a big lever pull while getting

enough fat to maintain some of those functions that you're mentioning, like brain function, hormones and even then it would be an intervention it would be something you'd toggle up and down from you go too low i mean i think that was that sounds like a bodybuilder kind of like yeah gym bro kind of like yeah diet and i think where we're sacrificing um a goal of an aesthetic over health and that is dangerous yeah i mean that's what you said you had a bit of an eating disorder because you can't eat a normal natural diet like that. No. A lot of egg whites, a lot of fat, free-grit yogurt, a lot of protein powder, a lot of like the lowest fat fish, like cod, for example, or like the leanest cuts of chicken that you

could possibly find. That type of thing is how I made all the protein. Because I had to make sure doing all the training and the working out. And that were steroid use and everything. So you combine all that together and it's a recipe for disaster. Yeah. I mean, organ dysfunction. Oh, all sorts of things going on. I had to reverse a lot of things, man. Did you have any heart palpitations for that? I still am kind of like recovering from it still to this day. Everything's back in line now, but you know, to reverse that for all that long time and term is not easy.

It's a lot of long-term damage. Yeah, when you go super, some people feel the heart palpitations from super low-carve as well. They just didn't have arrhythmia of carnivore or very low. They're more sensitive to it. Low fat. I mean, the heart likes burning fat. Yeah. Now does it mean it only needs fat?

It works well with carbs as well, but it needs both to keep rhythm. Electrolites. That's thing. Electrolites, organ function. I mean, all these things that we're not, we have all three macronidriates for a reason. Thank you. And we can toggle them and we can play with them. Eliminating them is going to have.

it's going to have consequences. And we see this because when we eliminate either carbs or fat, when we have too little for what our bodies needs are, we can make each of them. Our bodies can use protein and shaving off some glycerol to make glucose, glycerol from triglycerolsticase to make glucose. And our bodies can make use carbs or glucose to make saturated fat, which can then, if it needs to be converted to mono and saturated fat. So our bodies can make either one. Yeah. And so if we're at a point where our body is working really hard to make the majority of either one of those, either carbs or glucose or fat, we're at a point that is not, in my opinion, long-term sustainable. A little bit of that on the edge and the ebbs and flows a little is one thing, but where it's such an extreme

where the majority of the fat that you needed was being converted from the carbs you were eating. And what little fat you were getting had very little nutritional benefit, like unlike butter or like tallow, which would have some nutrients in that fat, whereas peanut butter is just void of everything. Benefit. I went back and kind of did the math because I wasn't doing it properly. So I was eating about 14 to 15 servings of vegetables a day, right around there. Wow.

And then it was like two and a half to three servings of oatmeal with the protein powder in it. with the yogurt protein pattern. So you see the pattern. I'm trying to get it however we can hand here. And I thought must have been. It was terrible. And I was really doing such high carbs and didn't even realize it because I was having raisins, dried apricots because my potassium was low.

So all of these like high carbohydrate, even though it's sugar, it's natural sugar, I was eating a lot of fruit. And I love fruit. I'm not saying don't eat it, but I was eating too much. Didn't compensate the hunger and the sweet tooth that I had from not eating any fat. Yeah, long term. I think that was the thing. And I think like you probably could have used that over a six or eight week period

to get really shredded before you stepped on a stage or something like that. Right. You could have done that without a lot of harm. But it still wouldn't have been good, but it wouldn't have been, it wouldn't have been as harmful. Like it's like, okay, we know this is your short term. Here's where we're going to move. And you would have attained the goal and then moved on. But since you were trying to stay there, that's where you started getting the,

The body starts adapting to these diets and our adaptations, people say, oh, you've got to adapt to the super low fat or adapt to the super low carb. The adaptations are not ideal. No, no, they're not. No, they're not ideal. You have thyroid issues. You have stress hormones elevated. You have all sorts of things that take place in the mitochondria that, as well, when it's

trying to make energy or make ATP, when you're missing these long term, there's, adaptations that might make it seem like it's gotten easier to do, but what's actually happening is your body's adapting in a way that hormonally, that has long-term risks to, again, like I said, thyroid, how well you're making energy, how much of that energy is being burned up as heat, or is it actually being converted to ATP or the, you know, the cellular energy that we need, or how much is being stored as fat. And that's where the danger comes with the difference between a short, extreme diet in short term versus long term.

Short term it can be tolerated before your body starts adapting to it. And that's why a lot of bodybuilders carb cycle. Yeah. They go in and out. So they get the benefit of the shock, but they don't fully adapt to it to the change. And so by not adapting, they get the benefit of that. The benefit of the change before the body starts saying, oh, we need to compensate.

Same with low calorie. Yeah. You know, you adapt to low calorie diet. I mean, your metabolism drop. And then it no longer works, does it? Right. That's another one. So these adaptations in any of these extreme diets, they make it so that your body isn't under as much what it feels like, immediate stress doing it.

But long term, there is some stress or some underlying stress. cellular level that's actually causing. And that's where people start seeing kind of the long term, like it shows up maybe six months a year, some people three years later. But I'm talking to a lot of people now that are finding that they stayed on in these diets, some of these diets too long. Yeah. Why are carbohydrates so polarizing? Why? Like what is it? What is it that has gotten people so triggered that I see that you deal with or just scared? Like what are the reasons why? Oh, boy.

You know, I can, we have an epidemic of metabolic disease. Yeah. And we needed to find someone to blame. And so this is a new thing. So like 1900, 1901, the obesity rate in the U.S. was 1%. And now it's 40. So type 2 diabetes, maybe even 100 years ago, 1930 impacted maybe one third of 1% of the population. Now it's diagnosed.

12, 13%, but undiagnosed, at least double that, right? And then pre-diabetic, people moving in that direction, you're probably looking at 40% of the population very easily. So fatty liver disease. Fatty liver disease used to be just for alcoholics. Now non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, which is coming from our diet is now the primary reason. So when we get a liver transplant, and it's a primary driver of fatty liver. It's non-alcoholic fatty liver. It's from processed, it should be processed food fatty liver, is what? And that's good. So it's, so it's, really we have um but we had to find a culprit right and so like we know the story with ansel keys back in the 40s and 50s he started blaming saturated fat and heart disease and saturated fat for

all these things which we know was was just uh was just his way of looking for a way to be the hero basically and to put himself in prominence and and find and he manipulated his dad to make that happen but then we had to we had to find a new we had to find a new villain you've you villain as we came into like low fat we had low fat 70s 80s 90s really and then we everything flipped and then we had to go to the carbs or bad well processed food is bad but if we look back over the last oh 10,000 years we've all been eating a lot of carbohydrates for the last 10,000 years without an epidemic of metabolic disease and we can look at current indigenous populations like whether they're in South America, New Guinea, Africa,

where their indigenous diet is maybe somewhere between 8 and 15% fat all the time. And their carbon take could be more from 60 to 85%. But it's what they gather from their environment. It's whole food. And they have no metabolic disease. There's actually one in South America. In Bolivia, they have the best hearts in the world that they found. They did CACs on them, calcium.

scans and they have the best the lowest rates of of houselified arteries for over 40 year olds and then over even over 65 lowest rates in the world that they found and there's like 70 70% of their diet comes from carbohydrates and only about 12 or so percent comes from that and so these are not these are natural indigenous diets now is every indigenous diet that way? No, some are as high as 30% fat. Some, I mean, it, but none of them have processed food, right? None of them have a metabolic disease. None of them have ultra processed food. And so that's really where, but, but how what happens if we really say, now there's some study I just saw floating around the internet just saying, oh, we find processed food is impacting, like no kidding.

It just finally came out. But how, what, who would this impact if it's saying, it's saying, 70 years ago or 60 years ago, they said, actually it's processed food that's causing the increase in heart disease that was affecting the president, which was a big deal in the 50s. That's why Ansel Keys, right? Heart disease. Heart disease, obesity. What if it's all the new oils, the Crisco, the new TB dinners that really came up became popular in the 60s? And all this ultra-processed that was replacing home-cooked dinners and our original kind of like simple farm food, so to speak. Yeah. What if they had known this then? What would have happened to that entire industry?

I mean, how much money could be lost if we actually let every, everybody was convinced that processed food was the real cause of disease. It's not a carb. It's not a, it's not the fat in your steak. It's not the carb in your fruit. Okay. It's this thing that comes in a box, a bag, or a bottle in the middle aisles of the grocery store. There's a lot of money to be lost if that actually became the true villain. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And so there's a lot of industry influence in pointing a finger at a particular food group, because, you know, when we have low fat, we can make intimates, right?

Remember the intimans of the 90s? I'm sure you ate it if you were. You know, you're on your low-fat diet. You know, we had all the, in cereals, right? Super low-fat. That's the whole vegetarian push, right? The influence of the vegetarian group, if you want to call them, the lobby, whatever you want to call them. But all those cereals, Kellogg's came from a vegetarian, you know, family.

And so we had to find, we have to find a demon. We have to find something polarized. Yeah, of course. Carbs is just the latest. And I was a very big, big part for 20 years, being part of making them the villain for disease. I'm not saying they're going to make, I never told someone fruit would make them fat.

But if they're trying to turn things around, maybe limit group, but definitely not eat processed food. And where I think we've had a few, very few people early on pointing the finger at seed oils, like Dr. Kate Shanahan 20 years ago, was pointing the finger at sea oil, which is a major ingredient in all processed food. And it's a very inflammatory oil.

Right. So if we go back to really the origin of disease is that oxidative stress in the cell is what causes disease. Inflammation in the cell, which is usually from oxidative stress. Right. So when you think about what causes oxidative stress, because that inflammation, once it gets, when you get oxidative stress in the mitochondria, that impacts your energy production. and when you impact energy production, your body has to respond. And it responds by increasing stress hormone, releasing fat from your fat cells. It actually increases gluconeogenesis, so we make more glucose, because it's trying to make more energy all of a sudden.

And so this was really Kate Shanahan's theory of disease of insulin resistance, where she's saying it's not the carbs, it's not the saturated fat. those things really haven't changed much of the last 120 years. What has changed is the introduction of processed food. And the unique new ingredient, yes, the processed grains aren't great. The processed sugar is not healthy for us. But it appears that these oils, in her theory of incident resistance, are the ones that uniquely creating more oxidative stress in the mitochondria,

which decreases the energy output of the mitochondria. Exactly. And causes a stress response to the brain saying, okay, we don't have enough energy. Some of these cells won't live more than a handful of seconds without constant energy. So we need to put up more energy. And so it's the elevation of cortisol, epinephrine, adrenaline, even glucagon, to release more energy into our system from the liver, glucose from the liver, fat from our fat

stores, to put energy into our bloodstream. and then hoping that that brings back some of that energy that was diminished from this oxidative stress in the cell. And what we see with diabetics and people with fatty liver disease is that their fat oxidation, the fat breakdown is about 50% higher than it would be if they were in, like, you're a metabolically healthy person. The fat breakdown is 50% higher and the gluconeogenesis level is about 30% higher. They just have this flood of energy of both glucose and free fatty acids, triglysteroides, flowing through their system. So energy toxicity. And so they have all this energy that's now flooding their system and then they eat and they've got more energy coming in. So it's this panic of low energy or release more energy, high stress hormone. And then they continue with the diet

that created this problem. And that's when you start seeing blood sugar level. going up. Low energy for themselves because they're just, they still haven't fixed their root cause of the problem, which is the damage mitochondria or the, the, the mitochondria keeps getting fed food that doesn't help it make energy. Right. And so this energy, this potential energy, this food's coming in their body, instead of being converted into ATP, it's being, much of it's being converted to fat. Some of it's being

converted to be, but not a great percentage of it. A lot is being converted back into fat. And so for a long time, you talk to many doctors who still understand this, this is what they were told in medical school, that diabetics don't burn fat. They can't burn fat. Oh, their insulin's too high. They can't burn fat. No, everything's up in these bodies. Then cortisol is high.

Their insulin is high. Their glucagon is high. They're releasing blood sugar out of their liver. They're releasing fat from their fat stores. It's a metabolic dumpster fire, essentially. of too much energy. And then there's all this excess energy in the tissues and the body say, we don't need more.

Muscles are saying, we're full. We don't need more. The cells are saying we're full. We don't need more. So that's when you see the blood sugar going out. So that, and that's the insulin resistance. But because blood sugar is going up, the easiest culprit to blame is cartwright.

Yeah. Of course. And so that's very a symptom. It's like looking at symptoms. Oh, if we give them insulin, And oh, that pushes the glucose back into the cells, and that's how we lower that symptom of blood sugar, but it's not really addressing the root cause.

So elevated blood sugar is a symptom of the disease. It's not the cause of the disease. Thank you. And so when you see diabetics who have elevated blood sugar in the morning, the dawn effect, right? They wake up, they haven't eaten for 8, 10, 12 hours. And their blood sugar might be 130, 140, 150, 1. 180.

they haven't eaten. Where'd that come from? But it came from the liver because these stress hormones are going and they're pumping out lots of blood sugar and they're pumping out fat at the same time and the mitochondria are like

well we can only process so much energy. Right. And so the fat oxidation of the mitochondria is blocking the glucose from entering the mitochondria. Okay.

And it creates a, so then it shoots that back out into the system. You have more lactate building up and then you have a back of glucose in the system it's like a clog sink and so you have a clock sink you got the water faucets running you can see the water so if let's just cut the carbs out let's turn off the water and so you don't have water going into the sink anymore as well if the clogs fix let's turn off the water so just remove the carbs it's like turning off the water oh you just don't see the blood sugar

you still haven't fixed the root cause of insulin at the cellular level you haven't fixed the clog in the sink. And so, but it, but it makes for a good, like, oh, symptoms resolved. Now, and we, and so this is where I start to go, a step on some toes, like we're seeing the same thing with low carb diet. We're just removing the carbs. But are we really fixing the problem? Because you could still have high fat diet blocking the entry of glucose into the mitochondria. And so that, the glucose gets backed up and causes blood sugar. So talking. to a friend of mine Brad Kearns who wrote several books with Marxists and like that, including the keto diet reset. While he's writing the keto diet reset five or six years,

six or seven years ago and training. This guy is like he was a top ranked top five ranked triathlete in the U.S. world and the world actually in the 90s. He's now 60 years old. And track and field. He's playing he's hitting the masters where he is number one for the high jump. Number two for the 400. He's running a 460 seconds at 60 years old. So this guy's in great shape. Him and Mark's Sisson, you know, Mark's Daily Apple, write and wrote probably four or five books together.

He was writing the keto diet reset. Following a ketogenic diet, great shape, waking up to a blood sugar level of 1.30 in the morning. He hadn't eat, he's eating a keto diet. He hadn't eat for 12 hours. He's waking up to blood sugar at 1.30. What's going on? Yeah.

And it was the keto, it was the, it was the, It was the elevated stress hormones, the elevated gluconegia. He's working out, so that's a little more stress. And then the high fat blocking the entry of glucose into the mitochondria, causing the blood sugar to go up because when his gluconeone, you know, it's normal to have some cortisol elevation in the morning. Well, yeah, yeah. But because of the position he's in with, he's exercising, he's on keto,

he has a little more stress going on, and the blood sugar would just would go up in the morning to, with normal cortisol response, it might go up in the 90s. Yeah. He's going to 130, which is diabetic level. He didn't have diabetes, but his blood sugar, because of the high fat diet, because of the stress on the liver, he had that backup of glucose in the system. It's become clear over the last few years that that low-carb diet and all the intermittent

fasting and all this metabolic stress I was creating was putting a dependence on fat, over glucose oxidation to the point that my blood sugar was in the 90s, which is someone to say, oh, that's not bad. It's not bad, it's not great. I'm metabolically healthy. Yeah.

I want to be between 70 and 90. Yeah. And so I knew there was something wrong. There was something, I was like, why is this, why is my blood sugar high if my fasting insulin is low? What's going on here? And that's where I had to start digging in.

And adding carbohydrates to my diet, significant amount of carbohydrates to my diet, diet has now brought my blood sugar down where it's around 80. My fasted blood sugar is around 80. Yeah. Yeah, it's perfect. It's right where I want it. And my A1C is 5.3. It's lower than ever has been. My fasting insulin is still, you know, between two and a half and three, 2.5 and 3. It's still really low. But my thyroid's better now and I don't have the high, you know, the high, you know, stress markers. So, and I'm recovering better, sleeping better. So this is where I'm like, why? Why is this happening?

and I had to dig in and sort of looking for some history on how have we overcorrected for these problems with obesity and diabetes and how were we able to have these low fat high carb diets for the last 10,000 years prior to the 20th century in the United States, but for the last 10,000 years without diabetes, without metabolic disease, about obesity if carbs cause metabolic disease. Yeah. You just kept digging and asking questions. I kept digging, asking questions and trying to like, I had to roll back things I've been saying for, yeah, that's what it fell about, man. That's how you learn. You're not, we're not going to know everything from this. No, but we get stuck. Yeah. Oh, yeah. We get in ruts. We get stuck. We think we've got it figured out and we

we run with it. And then we put on the t-shirt, we put on the hat and we call ourselves something, or you know we change our handle and we put we put put strategy on our we put a tool on our brand and when we put a tool on our brand then everything's about the tool everything's if if all you got is a hammer everything's a nail that's right right and so you just want to hit everything on the Sometimes you need a screwdriver. Sometimes you need. And we've, what I'm seeing, we start putting strategy ahead of health outcomes of the people we're trying to help. Yeah.

So, you know, I refer to scripture a lot in the Bible and how I learn now. And people wonder how that's possible because it seems like it's so straightforward, but it's this thing called pride that you learn about in there. And then you realize pride has multifaceted definitions, one of being being stuck in your ways. That's a prideful sin, essentially, because it's a wrong. Right. And what you've been able to do and what I've been able to do is take accountability for the mistakes we've made or not even so much on purpose, but just look back and go, hey, let's revisit this. Let's look at other things. I'm seeing things. Right. Which are, because I used to do this, Zane, a lot when I was first starting into this, the whole fitness space. I hated to get challenged. I thought I was always right. And I would figure ways to twist and turn to make it how I wanted it to be. Now I meet a guy like you and I go, oh, shit. shit let's talk show me teach me what am i missing i'll tell you what i see you tell me what you see and let's compare i love that yeah doesn't mean you're right doesn't mean i'm right maybe we're both right

maybe i take part of what you take you take part of what i take our understanding of the truth is that is such a single digit image yeah we truth has not completely revealed herself to us yeah and so we're all i think it was like we're looking we all have a jigsaw puzzle in front of us and we're trying to find the, we're going to try to solve this puzzle. And some of us start with the corners. And some of us kind of start in the middle. We start with, oh, this is a bright yellow thing.

I'm going to put the bright yellow thing together in the middle and then work out from there. And so we're all just working with the pieces of the puzzle that we have that we like to work with. And some of us start the same way. And we kind of, oh, yeah, I like working from the outside and working in too. I like working from the inside out. And so we start grouping together. But we're all figuring, we're all trying to figure out the same puzzle.

But what we should do is start getting angry with other people who are learning their puzzle from a different position because they'll have different perspective. Three, 100%. And I love learning constantly. And I love being pointed out to things that I'm missing because we're always missing something. I don't care how much you think you know or how good you are at something. There's something you're not doing. Of course, always. And so I think that's important. So I've got to. a couple I don't think they're simple questions it's more of like your experience or because these are questions that I think most people ask or they don't understand so for instance what I want to ask you is what are your most either the ones you recommend are the best sources of carbs and one maybe one might want to avoid that could actually be on the problematic side of carbs so what are some of your staple carbohydrates and one are you some that you are maybe likely to avoid or tell

people, hey, be careful here or look elsewhere? I typically eat mostly fruit, sweet potato or some kind of potato, and then white rice. I like a simply, simply digested or easily digested part with not a lot of phytonutrient, or not my know, phytonutrients, things like that. So limited, easy digest, limited, the plant toxin, if you want to call them, the things that could disrupt digestion. So I tend to avoid legumes. And nuts are like something I would maybe indulge around Christmas or some kind of, you know, just because I like the taste of them. Yeah. But they're not going to be a regular part of my diet because of that digestive issue.

But fruit, white rice, some potato. And then I always say, look at how you digest them. Yeah. You know, what is easy for you to digest? What tends to be difficult for you digest? Maybe maybe it's just an adjustment, maybe your biome just needs to adjust, but if it seems to be over time, you don't digest that well, may not be the best one for you. Right. Most people can handle digesting fruit because it's pretty easy to digest. It's a simple, soluble fiber. And the glucose is easy to process the fructose, I think is beneficial as well. And there's a lot of nutrients in there that like antioxidants and so forth. Yeah. And they're very hydrating. They're very good. They're Casey. And I think there's a reason for that. Why do we have a sensor for sweet on our tongue if we weren't supposed to use it? Exactly.

You know, as well as salty, as well as savory. I mean, oh, we and then when something is so bitter that we want to spit it out, that's, tells us something as well. You know, and so vegetables, like real vegetable. I mean, so must eat leaves or like broccoli or something. like that, I would definitely say cook them because they're just too hard to break down. And I think some of those those lectins and fteses and so forth that can be problematic for digestion. Yeah, which vegetables do you prefer? I don't eat a lot. I mean, I eat more like low sugar fruits that some people think of as vegetables like squash, tomatoes, peppers. Those are fruit technically because they have seeds inside them. Yeah. Right? Olives, you know, are great. But I don't these days, like I got to the point even in my maybe 10 years ago where a big salad would would disrupt my stomach like I just couldn't digest it anymore. I'm like okay something's tell raw lots of raw veggies not not ideal no

no thing no I don't touch salads or anything I eat a lot of I told you I was eating 14 15 servings of fish yeah I bet you're like done now I check the mark I still like them so I'm an Italian background so I love peppers so I like green peppers red more so I have peppers mushrooms mushrooms and onions, pretty much every day, onions, both green onions and white. That's about what I normally have for my vegetables every day in there. Eggplant every so often, but not a lot. But that's the ones I prefer,

and then a little bok choy here and there. Sure, you could get, yeah, you can eat bok choy. But I don't eat salad or any, I never do. I'm not a salad guy. I like tomatoes, but, you know, I. Yeah, those are all technically fruit, by the way. And zucchini. Yeah, those are technically fruit.

You have seeds in them. So they're just lower sugar. But I think there is some of that room for like digestive and your microbiome and how well it adapts to it. But or how well you digest it. And that may be regional. It may be genetic on some level. I think humans, we've become the dominant species on this planet. Not because we're the biggest.

Not because we're the strongest. We're not the fastest. But we are the most adaptive. Yeah. And so it's, I think, in our digestion, in the way we live, we make tools, we communicate, obviously, but I think we're extremely adaptive. And we are omnivorous and we can, we've been able to survive because we can live on, our diet can have a lot of room for variety or be very limited for extended period of time and we will still survive. Exactly. We may not be thriving on a limited diet, but we're.

surviving and then to get us to the point but too long and we'll adapt to that. Again, we over leverage these adaptations as when we start to run into problems over time. Something I would love to just bring out where carbs, Carves made a villain, but at one point there's been interventions where they were used to reverse diabetes, reverse obesity, reversed hypertension, and even heart disease. and there's a study that a lot of people I've heard about. It's a study, actually. It was an intervention that was conducted at Duke University

starting in 1939 for like 74 years. All but 10 of the 74 years it was conducted at Duke University by this German guy named Walter Kempner. Came from Germany, right, for World War II, landed at Duke University, and he started with a group of people that hypertension. Now, back then, there were no hypertensive,

there was no medication for high blood pressure. Right. So you would be more likely dead in six months, maybe a year, it would kill you to have heart disease. So he wanted to reverse hypertension. And he put these people on a pretty much called the rice diet. So it was mostly rice with fruit, fruit juice, and allowable even table sugar, processed sugar. So it was 92, 93% carbohydrate, maybe 4 or 5% protein and 2% fat from the kernel in the rice. And they were in a ward. They were in this ward in Duke.

And he reversed hypertension, like from, you know, we're talking about people with like 200 over 150 and they're back down to normal hypertension. So then it was diet. They tried it with diabetes. They tried it. And renal failure. So the kidney issues that come with metabolic disease. Right. Of course.

And reversed. Even some level of retinopathy was reversed on this diet. And they're not under, 2,200 calories. Some of them had to give them more because they were losing weight or trying to help them maintain their weight. Yeah. or they just killed after they didn't want to eat. Now, he did have a weight loss component as well. And he did cut the calories for them.

There were like around 1,000 of maybe 1,400 calories. Same diet. Rice, fruit, fruit juice, and sugar. And these people, he, he, he, he, uh, put forth a stellar example of what he had, in 1974 from, I mean, 18,000 people came through this program, but in that 74 year period at Duke. and two-thirds of them were considered successful. That's pretty good numbers. Yeah, absolutely.

So he showed of 106 people that he had treated with this, they had an average, all of them had lost at least 100 pounds. The average weight loss of 140 pounds. One guy lost 300 pounds in just over a year. Most of these were losing this, you know, 100 plus pounds anywhere from six months to a year's time on this diet. Now, is this a sustainer? diet. No, it's an intervention, but you could at the time, hypertension was not sustainable either.

You would die. And I would argue that diabetes, obesity, heart disease, these aren't really sustainable. We've made them sustainable with drugs. But I wouldn't want to stay in that chronic disease state. I would rather eat rice and fruit for six months than be diabetic or obese. Yeah, personally. Absolutely. So this was an intervention diet that, was not meant to be forever. And it reversed this disease by basically improving their insulin resistance. They basically improved their glucose tolerance. Their blood sugar came down.

They no longer, the people who were diabetic no longer needed insulin. Is this to say this is the best intervention we should have? No. Is this a great diet? No. What this shows me is that carbohydrates do not cause metabolic disease. Of course. Because they were used in pretty much a 90, basically 100% carbohydrate diet to reverse them.

So how could we blame them for a disease that we can use if they ate 100% carbohydrates to reverse? And there have been vegetarian, like Pridicin came from the 60s and 70s. Ornish was a vegetarian diet that also was very successful at reversing diabetes and obesity. And so am I advocating for those diets? No. But they show us that whole food carbohydrates are, even with sugar, he was using sugar, like 100 grams of sugar a day on top of their rice and their fruit. And they were still losing weight and still reversing the disease.

That tells me carbohydrates are not causing this disease. And so that's, that was like, that was a light bulb moment. Like, okay, this just flipped the script on me completely. I need to understand why, how, what's, what's impacting this, you know, on a sailor level. Because looking at symptoms, looking at blood sugar going up and down and saying, oh, that's bad. We need to fix that. It's not the whole story.

That's it. And that's the problem is people don't look at the whole story. They take the bits and pieces that they want. Doctors are taught this way. And I'm not trying to be critical of doctors or medical school. But they're taught. Here's a easy method. You can apply to a lot of people.

that works most of the time. I know. And just it's rinse and repeat because they've got about 10 minutes with somebody. That's true. And it's like, this works most of the time, seems to help the symptoms,

write them the script, tell them to do this, and then, and just repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. It's true. It's true. It's 100% true. I'm laughing and smiling

because you say some of the same shit that I say all the time. So it makes me smile because I love it. I can't believe we're almost done. Oh, wow. I want one more question. Sure. Of course. What is, and tell me this, because I talk to Ben about this all the time, and it's his thing, but what is metabolic flexibility? Why is it important? Do it quick. I don't have the same answer as Ben. No, you don't have to. That's why I'm asking. No, no, no, no. You're talking about Ben-Azati, right? And we are buddies. That, me too, but that's why I'm asking you because I want a different answer. So metabolic flexibility, in my opinion, is that you can switch between glucose and carbohydrate, or glucose and fat. flexibly. That's right. Right. But take someone who's been on a keto diet or a carnivore diet for a

year and put glucose in their body. What happens? They will fail a glucose tolerance test. Your glucose will go through the roof. That to me is not metabolic flexibility. That's metabolic rigidity. Thank you. That's what I'm saying. We're always burning fat. We are always using fat. everyone from a diabetic we are always using but we never the misconception is that if we're eating sugar we're not using fat no we're always using fat we're always using both if we're eating both and our use of it will move with our diet if you're at 30 percent carb and 30 percent fat that's about how much you're you're going to you're going to burn if it's half and half you know you're going to be burning both and you're training and you're trained but even if you're not you're using both because that's how

body works it always uses it has a useful structure nutrition and energy it's not just all energy we're looking at everything just from a energetic point of view it's it's too small when we can use both we can flow back and forth without a glucose spike then you have metabolic flexibility right and that's what we want that's ideal because in your energy systems are working together seamlessly and you'll have plenty of energy but if you are on on a low, high fat, super low carb diet. And when you consume glucose, your bloodshare goes through the roof and things are out of, you know, out of range.

That's a sign you are not metabolizing glucose properly. That's not metabolic flexibility. Dude, I, I swear we're going to have to do another, another one of these, this I didn't get through a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of what I wanted to do. Well, come to Nashville. We'll sit down there. I will. I absolutely will.

We're going to do several of these. I've got to talk to you off camera about a little. lot of stuff here. So I really appreciate your insight and your level-headedness and your willingness to discuss, your willingness to go out on a limb and the data that you have to back it up. And the amount of time that I can see that you've put into it as well as your accountability, because this is one of those things that I feel is lost. And it's not just our community. It's every, it's everyone. Accountability is something that I value highly. And I had to work on it myself a lot and that's how I feel like I became more successful was being more accountable and I can

tell you're an accountable guy and I love that and I relate to you in a high regard and all of these things so I just want you to know just for me that I appreciate that I'm sure everybody else does too but on a personal level it's refreshing man like I love that about you and I'm glad that we met and talked and that we are like developing this relationship because it's valuable to me appreciate that thank you yeah I know I really love having someone I can like go back up worth with and it's just man and that's how we that's how like you said that's how we uncover new thing yeah that's how we think look at things differently and see different patterns that's how we learn tell everybody the best places to follow you and how they can

maybe even get in touch with you or watch you because I think it's important to sure I appreciate that so my website zangrigs.com would have all my socials on it I'm most active on Instagram at zan griggs fitness and on YouTube at zan griggs and then in my community the the Metaflex community where I have, like, that's my, those are my people where I dive a little deeper. I can answer some questions, do Q&A and, you know, get a little deeper with, with helping people. And that's why I'm choosing to work with people more so now than when I was one-on-one a lot in my early days of training. I'm really digging the community aspect because I think it's really important for our health. Absolutely. As well. And to stay connected in this world that's sometimes just way

too digital, right? I know. But to have real, these real conversations, in community. And so that's why I shifted to a more community aspect of my business. But those are the best places. Instagram. You can see all the haters coming at me. So show me some love if you would at Zane Griggs Fitness. And then YouTube of course Zangreeks. You know I got your back. I appreciate it, brother. I really do. This is part one of probably many. So all right, everybody. That wraps up another one. I hope that you enjoy this. Take it to heart. learn from it, implement it, try it, be open to new ideas and new methods, because that's the key and that's how we make changes and get better. So that being said, stay tuned for plenty more to come.

Dylan Jameli and Zane Griggs, signing off.