The Megyn Kelly Show - How To Lose Five Pounds By Memorial Day, with Dr. Cate Shanahan and Mark Sisson | Ep. 321

Episode Date: May 13, 2022

Megyn Kelly is joined by Dr. Cate Shanahan, author of "Deep Nutrition," and Mark Sisson, author of "The Primal Blueprint," to talk about diet and nutrition, the importance of avoiding snacking, the truth about "metabolic flexibility," what foods to eat and which to avoid, the way to condition your body to burn body fat, "plateauing" as you diet, the types of seed oils to avoid, the best way to exercise, the reason to avoid dessert, the best wines without sugar, Keto vs. Mediterranean Diets, why "diet" and "fat free" products actually aren't good for nutrition, how we can apply diet and nutrition to kids, why walking is so important, how to exercise without a gym, the off label drugs being used for weight loss, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, and boy do we have good news for you. It may be Friday the 13th, but this is your lucky day. On the show today, we are focusing on how to help you take ownership of your health and feel your best this summer, and ideally shed five pounds by Memorial Day. I mean, it's a start, right? It's a goal. Hashtag goals.

There's a lot going on in the world right now, but it's important to take a break from the news cycle every once in a while and just take care of yourself. How are you supposed to manage all the nonsense coming your way if you don't feel well, if you don't look good, if you don't feel good about how you look? With us now to provide a roadmap for getting your nutrition and exercise routine in gear. And I have to tell you, just reading up on this segment made me feel more devoted to like, okay, come on, stop being lazy. And I want to go to the grocery store right after this show. At two o'clock, we We're all going to the grocery store and we're going to get new ingredients and we'll go through it. So I think you're going to feel that inspiration by the time the show is done. And here to help us do that to New York Times bestselling authors and health experts. Dr. Kate Shanahan is a physician, biochemist and author of Deep Nutrition. Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food. She also created the pro-nutrition program for the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team. And Mark Sisson is also here.

He's a competitive track athlete who spent years as a marathon runner before entering the nutrition and health space. Mark is a fitness author, founder of Primal Kitchen Foods and Supplements. By the way, I need to order their salad dressing, Abby. And author of The Primal Blueprint, Reprogramming Your Genes for Effortless Weight Loss, Vibrant Health, and Boundless Energy. Kate and Mark, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for inviting us.

So Mark, I say the salad dressing because I know my team said, what do you eat in a typical day? And I was, of course, very interested in this and I could do it all except the one thing that wasn't on my ingredient list in my kitchen was your salad dressing. So I'm like, okay, I can be like Mark if I just order that. All right, we'll get to that in a minute. All right, so here we are. I was looking at the calendar. We don't have three weeks to Memorial Day. We've got about two and change, two weeks to Memorial Day. And everybody starts to think about Memorial Day as the official kickoff to summer. We have to start thinking about our bodies, which is good. It's good because

it necessarily sort of dovetails with our wellness and what are we putting in our mouths and what are we doing to move and all that. So we're going to get into all of it. But overall, let me start with you, Kate, on this. Should we be thinking about jumpstarting a diet right now? If we want to lose five to 10 pounds, let's just start with something manageable like that. Should we be thinking about a diet or should we just be thinking about a way of eating, like a way of life? If you want to lose weight, you really should start in realistically start with thinking about how you're eating, thinking about your nutrition and think about your metabolism, because there's a reason you've gained weight in the first place. And, and that probably, I mean, unless you know, oh gosh, I, I totally overdid it. Most people feel like I don't

really understand why I gained so much weight, why it happened so quickly. And that's because most people have issues with their metabolism where they're not able to burn their body fat the way nature intended. And that's a serious, serious issue that makes weight loss with just a rapid weight loss diet, a total setup for yo-yo dieting and it's not just bad for your health it's demoralizing so i i always like to help people to frame it up that we want it to be like a long-term thing it's great that you want to look good in your bikini

but it's it's more important to be well in your bikini and feel better. And if you really want to get healthy, the goal is how you our metabolism and would love it to be a little faster. Everybody I know, especially people who are now like me in their fifties, and you can feel it slow down. For sure, I can feel it slow down. I'm not allowed to eat as much, but I still want to. It's so hard. I'm still so hungry all the time, but I know it's slow because the same amount of intake every day produces weight gain where it didn't before. So it's just sad. It's just sad, Kate. Well, let me tell you something that is actually good news is it is kind of, there's a lot of myths around weight loss and metabolism, and it is actually a myth that your metabolism even has speeds. And what you expressed is exactly what made people think and just assume that their metabolism has speeds is because it feels like it's harder to lose weight and it's become easier to gain.

But it has to do with your ability to burn your body fat, which is something related to metabolic flexibility, which is something that I'm sure Mark can speak to that as well. Just it means that you need to be able to burn your body fat easily between meals. Because if you're hungry, you know, between meals, if you get hungry between meals, and you feel like you need to snack, that is a red flag. It's a red flag that you're not burning your body fat because if you want to lose weight, then going between meals should be your best friend. You should be burning your body fat, but most people are not. And they're not because their metabolism is damaged by this stuff in our diet that we're all eating in massive quantities called seed oils that nobody has told

you are bad for you. I'm so into the seed oil discussion. We are 100% spending a bunch of time on that because I feel like, okay, elimination of just the choice of a certain food, that's easy, right? You don't have to get rid of all oils, but there are certain oils we're eating that we shouldn't be. But let me ask you about that, Mark, because when I looked at the Mark diet, one thing I did notice was there are no snacks on there. So to Kate's point, is that hard? Because I will say for me, and I think it's probably because I'm not eating the right stuff, it is very hard for me not to snack between lunch and dinner. And like you, I'm an intermittent faster. I know you don't eat before noon or 1230. So breakfast isn't really on the menu for me most

days, although some days I have it. Anyway, snacking is really hard for me to avoid. So you don't have that problem? You go right from lunch to dinner without having hunger? Yes, I do that. And to fill in a little bit of what Kate said, this concept of metabolic flexibility really is the holy grail of not just weight loss, but health. If you can develop metabolic flexibility, if you can train your body through choices of food that you eat and types of exercise that you choose to do, if you can train your body to become metabolically flexible,

you can train it to derive energy from whatever substrate happens to be available. So if you eat a meal and there's carbohydrate in that, you can burn the carbohydrates as glucose or as glycogen in your muscles. You can burn the fat in glucose or as glycogen in your muscles. You can burn the fat in that meal or you can burn the stored body fat when you choose not to eat. So metabolic flexibility is when you achieve kind of that that state, you are now able to go longer periods of time without eating, which includes not needing to snack. So this this you mentioned intermittent fasting. longer periods of time without eating, which includes not needing to snack. So, um, this, this, you, you mentioned, um, intermittent fasting. I call it a compressed eating window. Um, some people call it intermittent eating, but it's basically this idea that, that when you're metabolically flexible, when you're burning fat, when you're deriving energy from your own body

fat stores, and that's magical because then you're burning off your body fat, you're literally using it as fuel, which is what it was intended to do. Then the biggest issue of all starts to dissipate, and that is hunger, appetite, and cravings. Once your body knows that it can get energy from stored body fat and not have to rely on a fresh supply of calories every two or three hours, your body seamlessly goes into this mode of burning stored body fat without a shift in blood sugar, without getting hangry, without mood swings or any of the other sort of symptoms that people complain about when they skip a meal. So it's now what we're getting into is okay. How, you know, how do we, uh, arrive at this metabolically flexible body? Yes. How do we teach our bodies? It's very important skill.

Of course. But it's, and it's like good news, bad news, right? The good news is, well, I'll start with the bad. The bad news is you've got to do the work, right? You, you're going to have to eliminate certain foods. You're going to have to, um, orchestrate a way of eating, uh, that, uh, you know, that may be different from what you're going to have to orchestrate a way of eating that may be different from what you're used to. The good news is it's very easy if you know the right tools, if you have the right strategy. It's easy. It's delicious. You don't have to really sacrifice taste or flavor for any of this. Over time, what happens, because you're eating now more nutrient dense foods, as opposed to the, you know, the highly caloric dense foods without nutrition that most

people in this country are consuming, the body then says, I've got all of the, all the macronutrients I need, I've got all of fat, protein and carbohydrate. I've got all the micronutrition I need. I don't need to eat every couple of hours. And so the first thing that really I find, uh, disappears is this need to snack between meals. And that's kind of step one of this notion that in order to get rid of our stored body fat in order to lose weight, which is what most people will, will describe it as we need to burn off the, the body fat in order to lose weight, which is what most people will describe it as, we need to burn off the body fat that we've stored over the years as a result of eating too much food, simply eating too much food. As a practical matter, how do you train your body to eat the fat that's on your body as opposed to whatever fuel you've put in your body. Because

if you eat, let's say breakfast or you eat lunch, that food takes a while to digest. That energy is in your body. So isn't your body necessarily going to eat that fuel, that fuel first, those carbs, those proteins, those fats before it goes to your body fat. Like I always wonder, how do I make it get to the body fat and get past the food that I had to put in there, Mark? Well, you have to withhold some of those energy substrates. You have to decide either not to eat, like to skip a meal once in a while, to fast. Or there's a diet based around the ketogenic principle. So you, and I've written a couple of books on the keto diet, which is a way of training your body to become what we call fat adapted.

So once you withhold carbohydrate and now you're telling your body, hey, you're not going to be getting all of the glucose that we've been feeding you every two or three hours for the last 20 or 30 or 50 years. Now we're going to have to go into plan B, which everybody has this blueprint in their body. Everybody has the ability to build the metabolic machinery to be better at burning fat. We just never give it the opportunity. So that's part of that work that I'm talking about. There are no real hacks around this. You will have to, in order to develop metabolic flexibility, you will have to selectively remove certain things from your diet. It may be, and I think most of us

know, removing sugars is probably appropriate for just about everybody. We eat way too much sugar. I would say removing starchy processed carbohydrates, mostly processed grains, pies, cakes, cookies, crackers, cereals, things like that. Remove them. And as Kate alluded earlier, you come down to a list of very healthy and natural foods, meat, fish, fowl, eggs, nuts, seeds, vegetables, some fruit, some starchy tubers. And over time, when the brain gets the notion that you're not going to be delivering it fresh glucose every two or three hours, breakfast, a snack, lunch, a snack, dinner, and a midnight snack, the body has all of these amazing genetic switches that it turns on that says, okay, we're going to get ready to burn more fat. We never had to before now, but now we're going

to get ready to burn more of the stored body fat and call upon those reserves, those energy reserves that we've been building up for years and burn those instead of the plate on the food. So when you say, how do you train your body to burn the fat as opposed to the breakfast? I say, don't eat the breakfast. If you wake up in the morning and you're not hungry, there's no reason to eat breakfast. Breakfast is, you know, it's been sold as the most important meal of the day. Uh, it's not, uh, and most of the people who get into, uh, this idea of a metabolic flexibility or a compressed eating window will say, if I wake up with all the energy I need, why would I need to eat? This is an opportunity for my body to get 500 calories from body fat between now and the first meal I have at maybe lunch or 1 o'clock, noon or 1 o'clock.

Okay. But now I know, and I know you write a lot about this too about plateauing kate because i will say that and i want to get stay broad but i'll just as a quick um aside i've been an intermittent faster for a while and it worked great in the beginning to take off you know just the extra flab here and there and i've never been one of those like bone skinny people but i'm thin you know fine i was fine with and I'm still fine with where I am. But then I do think I sort of plateaued. And even now, if I go hardcore on the fat and the intermittent fasting, you know, because I'll cheat, I'll have like a couple of crackers, which I know you're not supposed to do, whatever.

But let's say it's summer's coming. So I go hardcore. It's not changing anything. I think I'm a plateauer. And I know you've dealt with that issue. Yes, actually, quite a bit. It's one of the most frustrating things that people run into, and there's always a reason for it. I usually like to just back up and give you the big picture of getting back to what we

were talking about with, with snacking, snacking trains your metabolism for you to want more snacks. So it's an incredibly dangerous habit, because people don't realize how many calories they actually consume when they're wandering around going, Oh, I'll just have a little bit of this, and I'll just have a little bit of that. And many people have doing that have two or three times more calories. So 200 400 600 more calories just from these little snacks that they pick up. And that is why I say there is no such thing as a healthy snack. Because it's not a healthy habit. Even if you're eating a healthy food during your snack, the habit of snacking is not healthy because snacking trains your metabolism to wait for you to get another snack instead of doing what it should do, which is burning your body fat.

But the other thing I want to- Go to the fat on my body. Go to my thighs. Don't wait for the carrots or the beef jerky. If you've been eating seed oils, the fat that's in your body fat has changed because of that. And, and this is why I wrote a different book, an entirely different book also, um, for weight loss called the fat burn fix, because I realized at a certain point in my career, I realized that what people had been telling me about their struggles with weight, I understood that it wasn't making sense to them and it wasn't making sense to me either. They would say, I hardly eat anything and I'm not losing weight. I work out all the time and it used to work, but now it doesn't anymore.

Something is wrong with my metabolism. And I realized, yeah, there is something wrong with your metabolism. It took me quite a bit to figure out exactly what, but what it was, was that their body fat was damaged by all these seed oils. So seed oils are things like soy and corn. Do you want me to list out what they are? Yes, because these are the devil. People should know Dr. Kate feels that seed oils are things like soy and corn. Do you want me to list out what they are? Yes, because these are the devil. People should know, Dr. Kate feels that seed oils are the devil and that if we can stop eating them and she's got good alternatives, it's going to be so much easier for us to lose weight. So this is actually really important.

It's not just about, this is not as heart healthy. It's about these are undermining your ability to lose weight and feel great. Okay, go ahead. These, I call them the hateful eight because there's eight of them. There's three C's, corn, canola, cottonseed, three S's, soy, sunflower, safflower, and G and Y, like sometimes Y, grapeseed and rice bran with the vowels. So there's eight of them. Everybody should memorize at least the first six because those are in 95% of the products with an ingredients list that you buy in the typical grocery store.

Even if you shop at fancy grocery stores, the upscale ones like Trader Joe's and Whole Foods, to name names, if we can do that. Yeah. Wait, let me just repeat what you said. Canola, corn, cottonseed, soy, sunflower, safflower, grapeseed, rice bran. What did I miss? I think I'm at seven. Did I miss one? I thought you got eight.

Corn, canola, cottonseed, soy, sunflower, safflower. I did make up a little song for it, but you probably don't. Yes, I do. Okay. So it's corn, canola, cotton, seed, soy, sunflower, safflower, please. Carefully, carefully, carefully, carefully read labels and avoid all of these. I'm not a good singer, but I can handle it over and over. Look how she cares, audience. Look how she cares about us. She did it. I appreciate that. All right.

So those, you don't want those. I noticed that olive oil is not on the list. I mean, is olive oil, you don't, do you like olive oil? Because that's what most people use. Olive oil is a traditional oil in Italy. Ask anyone from Italy or Greece or most of the, not the Middle East. What do they call that? Somewhere in the Mediterranean. Thank you. I've never been there. But yeah, so all of those Mediterranean cuisines, they rely heavily on olive oil. Olive oil has been used for many,

many thousands of years. And the reason that's important is because people cultivate what they want. So we've cultivated olives that are high in fat. And that has so many benefits. Not only is the fat itself healthy and full of vitamins, when you do first press olive oil, you're getting all of those vitamins and you're getting the healthiest form of oil, but it's been cultivated to be so rich in it that you just need gentle pressing with a stone. That's the traditional way that they did it. Gentle pressing, no factory required to get out a whole bunch of great tasting oil. So that history is really important. And you're going to find, if you go

to my website and look at my list of the good fats and the bad, that it's the traditional fats that are on the good list. I saw lard is on there. I was like, lard? How can lard be better than sunflower oil? It doesn't sound right. I know. It's crazy. Actually, it took me four years before I was comfortable even saying the word lard without apologizing for it, because it was just like a four-letter word in the American language. But, but yeah, it is a traditional, traditional, we've, we've cultivated pigs to be fatty pigs. We've, we've bred them for so many thousands of generations of pigs that they are, they're like, we bred them literally to be a little like walking butter sticks, you know, walking little butter balls. And they, they are, they are basically a huge source of healthy

fat for people all over the globe, because pigs made their way all over the globe. So yes, large is a healthy fat. And, you know, the reason that these things are not toxic has to do with the fatty acid composition. And that's like chemistry that we don't necessarily need to get into. But understanding the fatty acid composition is key, really, to ultimately becoming to understand the difference between fats that are healthy, that sustain your energy between meals that make not snacking be like your default because you don't get hungry. You don't get hangry when you have your body fat, your body fat stores these fatty acids. And that's why it's so it was essential for me to understand this chemical difference in the way our body

processes these different fatty acids in order to be able to explain what was happening, truly happening to people's metabolisms and that it wasn't slowing down. It was just losing its efficiency. It was not able to efficiently go, as Mark was saying, from burning the calories in the food that you just last ate to snap immediately into releasing your body fat from storage and burning that. And when that happens to you, you feel like weight loss is a bigger struggle because you feel bad when you're burning your

body fat. You need to burn your body fat to lose weight, but what's in your body fat is from those toxic seed oils. And that starts to make your cells dysfunction. So you start to feel kind of tired or cranky. You get brain fog. You get hangry. We have so many people using the word hangry now. And it wasn't even a word. Like when I was in school, Mark, did you ever hear that word when you were growing up?

Only in the last 10 years, maybe. This is so, I can relate to all of this. You're saying it's because it's basically it's like we had on a guest recently explaining to us how mercury can stay in your cells. And, you know, some say, oh, no, it'll go. It'll it'll leave. But no, it might be lurking in there and you could get sick from it for a long, long time. That's kind of what you're saying about these bad oils. They're in there. And when we're telling the body, eat the fat, eat the fat, it's eating the fat, but the fat is kind of toxic. And that's making us feel bad. So if we can make our fat healthier,

we'll enjoy the non-eating periods more. They won't be quite as hard. They'll actually be glorious because what happens when you go long enough between meals is that your liver starts chopping up the big fats into little tiny special things called ketones, which are your brain's favorite fuel. They actually energize you. And when you get to this state, you feel so energetic, you feel better. You feel like I don't want to eat. And that is why having a healthy metabolism and a flexible metabolism is the key to truly effortless weight loss. It's actually the only key. I mean, there's all kinds of drugs you could take and all kinds of people promising this or that supplement. But really, the key is optimizing your metabolic health so that your liver will produce ketones for your brain. And that takes a while.

Fat burning machine. Okay. Now I want to say that you like the following oils. You say eat these instead. Avocado, butter, fats, avocado, butter, coconut, duck fat, ghee, lard, which we covered, olive, peanut, tallow, sesame, flax, walnut, almond, and macadamia nut. Anything that says cold pressed, and this is critical, everybody, unrefined. It has to say unrefined. But here's my question to you. So all of us can do that. When I'm cooking dinner tonight, I can definitely use lard. It'll be fun to buy that at the store. But I have olive oil, so I can do that. But you've raised a bigger point, which is virtually everything in your pantry has already got all the bad stuff in it. Like, don't go in your pantry. I mean, it's funny because I'll tell you, Kate and Mark, I've been, one of my listeners pointed this out to me recently. Last June 12th, I made a resolution to try to go one year without having a French fry

because they were becoming a problem for me. I was just not able to exercise willpower on them. And I'm almost there and I've done it. Right. We're like a month away. And a guy from Israel called into the show like a week or two ago and said, I decided to do it with you because I invited my followers on Twitter to do it with me. And he said, I've been doing it and I'm successful. And what are you going to give up this June 12th? And I've been thinking about it ever since. I like the idea of

like, as opposed to January 1st, I'm just going to make June 12th my day where like for a year, I decide like, what could I do? It's a test of willpower. And I feel like originally I was like, I'll give up the pantry. I want to ask your opinion on what I should give up. But like everything you just listed is all over my pantry. I don't think I'd be able to avoid it. And everybody out there is in the same boat, Kate. So what do they do? How do they avoid it? It's in bread, it's in crackers, it's in everything. So actually on my website, I have a shopping list that helps people find alternative products that don't have seed oils. And one of my favorite companies is actually founded by Mark, that way, that way, because he uses avocado oil in especially like

mayo and the dressings, right? Because when you're eating healthy, you don't want your salad dressing or the, you know, the sauces that you put on your healthy vegetables or your healthy meals. You don't want that to be full of toxic fats. And most people have no idea that that's actually what they're doing because, because, you know, most of the sauces that are come in jars and most of the condiments are just made out of the cheapest possible stuff that the companies can find, which is always going to be the hateful eight oils. So, um, yeah, so, so you can find more and more products. It is possible, but you have to know what you're looking for. You have to know, uh, to do this, you have to know to do it, right? Like that's the, the first step is you need to

know that you need to do this. The second step is to follow me again, decide that you're going to do it with her because if she can do it, you can probably do it. Right? So you, so remember, okay, you like unrefined, you like unrefined. You don't like anything that says hydrogenated or any of those hateful eights. Don't go for hydrogenated, go for unrefined. We're going to take a quick break, but for the people who are just listening to this right now, can you give me the website? Because they're going to want to know. DrKate.com, D-R-C-A-T-E.com. And then just go to the search bar and type shopping because you'll find it that way. Within an hour and a half, I will be doing this. And then Mark's got some thoughts too, not just on diet, but on

the supplements that may make sense for you when it comes to metabolism and to metabolic flexibility. I like that new term. Mark, I've heard this before, but can you help us understand what does it mean to remove sugar and starches? It seems so hard. And I just ticked down what I could remember of what you said. I'm going to go back and listen to it later. Pies, cakes, crackers, cereals, single tier. I love my crackers. I can probably handle the rest, but I love my crackers.

So what do you mean? Because removing sugar seems absolutely impossible. I never understand when someone's like, I gave up sugar. It's like, well, how? Well, it's pretty daunting for sure. And the truth is, you know, our brains are wired to seek out sweet things. So it's one of the reasons that we're attracted to fruit, for instance, fruit is sweet. And by the way, very enjoyable and very healthy in the appropriate quantities. So I'm not advocating giving up fruit, for instance. But it's interesting.

All of these things we're going to talk about today exist on a spectrum of like really good to probably really terrible. Fats are a great example. There are really terrible fats you want to avoid at all costs. And then there are really good fats that you want to incorporate in your diet because they're healthful and they taste great and they're satiating. Well, with sweets, there's a similar sort of spectrum. So we want to get rid of the processed sweeteners, the sugars, the table sugar. Agave is a great example of something that was sold as a health food kind of thing. It's basically worse than high fructose corn syrup. We've all heard how bad high fructose

corn syrup is. On the other hand, some amount of honey, because it's natural, is probably fine for some people. So this idea of giving up sweets really has to kind of look more closely at what exactly it is you're willing to give up and what is practical in the context of an eating strategy that you're putting together for yourself. So, you know, getting rid of desserts would be a great first step for a lot of people. I always thought dessert was kind of a weird, it's like the meal you eat after you've just eaten a meal. And it, dessert has a pretty devastating effect in most cases on, you know, on your insulin level. So when you are trying to lose weight, one of the things you want to do is keep your insulin levels low because insulin is what locks fat into the fat cells. So that's one of the reasons whenever you eat something that has carbs in it, whether it's starchy carbs, whether it's, you know, bread or crackers, for example, it'll tend to cause your insulin to go up. And insulin is there as a hormone that's intended to sequester nutrients into cells.

So it'll open the cells up and try to put the glucose portion of that into muscle cells, for instance, as glycogen. But it'll also drive amino acids into other cells, which is protein. But it'll also drive fat into cells if insulin is high. So you want to try and, over time, lower the amount of insulin you produce. And that kind of goes hand in hand with the amount of sugar that you take in. So now sort of good news, you can buy some, quote, keto and quote crackers. So you can get that crunchy, salty, fatty, sweet taste without-

Spreading that down. Yeah. So there are now analogs of some of these things that we're going to ask you to give up. And there, there've been paleo desserts and keto desserts for years. I think it's a sort of an abomination at some point, because a lot of times they, they use some of these ingredients that we're talking about avoiding, but, but giving up, giving up sugar is, is the tough one for a lot of people. On the other hand, we're not really addicted to sugar. People say they're addicted to sugar. And I think the definition of an addiction is something that if you don't get it, you'll go into a biochemical reaction that'll, you'll sweat, you'll, you know, you'll, you'll, you'll go into pain or whatever. That's a true addiction. So what we haven't in most cases is first of all, unlimited

access to sweet things. They're everywhere. And then what I call a lack of impulse control. They're everywhere. And oh my goodness, they're in the pantry or they're in the freezer. I've got frozen chocolate in the freezer, or I've got one of the best things you can do for yourself is do what we call a pantry purge and just go through and take away that temptation, which isn't to say that you should go hungry or that you should suffer or feel like you're sacrificing enjoyment of your life in pursuit of this better eating. No, it's just to find things that will replace those that are more helpful for you. Okay, so we have to talk about the replacements.

I mean, I will say right now with young children, this sounds impossible. You know, they, you know, you know, right? Like, you know what's on my shelf without even me telling you because I have an 8, 11, and 12-year-old and not to mention what's in my freezer. And I know we could say, well, get rid of the ice cream or get rid of the chocolate chips or get rid of the cookies. It's like, there'll be a full on revolt in my house if I, okay. So we'll get to that. But, but how does somebody start that? Cause you say, stop with the dessert. That's a good place to start. You know,

there are a lot of people who are like, I can't do that. Like, I need it. I need it. So to that person, what does that person do tonight when the habit is there to eat the dinner and then have the dessert? And now it's go time. You ate the dinner and all the instincts inside of you are kicking in like now it's my time for my treat. What do they do? Well, there are a number of strategies.

One of them would be to recognize that it's human nature to see what we can get away with, right? So we see how much of this meal can I eat and not gain weight? How much food can I eat in a day and not gain weight before the wedding three months? What's the biggest piece of dessert that I can eat and not feel like a glutton, you know, or be uncomfortable. So we come at it from a what can I get away with perspective, rather than how much of this is going to satisfy the sweet tooth. And so the first thing I would say to some people is, you know, you can serve the giant piece of cheesecake and your brain is going, well, that's a serving. So it's not like I'm having two servings. I'm having a serving, even though it's a, you know, a cheesecake factory,

1800 calorie piece of it. I would say, you know, take the first bite and enjoy the hell out of it and love it and, and savor it. And then take the second bite and recognize it. It's great, but it wasn't as good as the first and usually with most desserts by the time you get to the third or fourth bite you go you know what i got it i got the sense i got the sweetness from this point on i'm just having a contest with myself to see whether i'm a glutton or not so first first thing would be to just cut back and just see if you can limit yourself to two bites or three bites of ice cream or something like that, or whatever it is that's your poison. It's so much easier though, to just

say, if I have room for dessert, then I have room for another lamb chop. So I'll skip the dessert and have another lamb chop or another chicken wing or another, you know, whatever, whatever it is you had for dinner, that's actually providing protein, um, and some form of healthy fat and some, in the case of a chicken wing, some, some, uh, collagen, you know, whatever. Um, that's the way I would approach this. And that's when I said, it's, you know, the good news, bad news thing, the bad news is you have to do the work. That's part of the work. The good news is you can find things. I mean, my, uh, my, the favorite dessert that my wife ever serves people when we have a dinner party, uh, is, is mixed berries with mascarpone cheese and whipped cream. So it is berries,

which I say are tart fruits, which I'm allowing as a, as a, um, something to address your sweet tooth and the mascarpone, uh, and the and the, and this whipped cream together with a little bit of lemon zest. It's unbelievable. So people will say it's the best dessert they've ever had when they come to my house. And these are people who are used to pies and cakes, everything else. So there are some substitutes, some alternatives that will address the sweet tooth part of you without having you say, Oh, I have to give up the rest of my life. And I can't, you know,

I can't, I can't enjoy food ever again. No. And Kate will agree with me on this. I mean, we, oh, I have to give up the rest of my life and I can't enjoy food ever again. No. And Kate will agree with me on this. I mean, Kate and I eat like kings and queens. I enjoy every bite of food I put in my mouth. So it's not like I'm ever feeling like I'm sacrificing. I just choose foods that are, A, good for me, and, B, I know I'm going to love and love the taste of. And when you prepare them right

with the right sauces, dressings, toppings, that's why I started my company, Primal Kitchen. You know, if I'm going to make a giant salad, I don't want to ruin it with canola oil or soybean oil or any of that other stuff. I want to enhance the experience of the flavor of it with the dressing. And I want to enhance the healthfulness of it with the dressing. And I want to enhance the healthfulness of it with the dressing. So you can have both of those. I was going to say you can have your cake and eat it too. But you cannot. I will say just for anecdotally, sometimes it helps me to avoid because my kids love dessert. My husband loves dessert. And I also occasionally like dessert. But if I just go for like a tea, I like this apple cinnamon tea that it's, you know, you just put it in.

It doesn't need milk and doesn't need sugar. It seems like a treat and it's something warm and it takes a while and it keeps you sort of away from them while they're eating their treat. You know, that moment you're most vulnerable when everyone's unwrapping their their popsicle or, you know, spooning in their ice cream. So for whatever that's worth, Kate, I know you share the aversion to refined flours, refined flours, but I have to tell you what, I don't even know what that means. And I feel like I've been fairly exposed to this world, but even I sitting on like bread, I mean, what is, what, what does that look like? Flour. So whether it comes from wheat or spelt or any other kind of thing that's been pulverized into a fine powder, that is something that is very processed. And

because of that, it has almost no nutrition and it's pretty much empty calories. But you're correct in that I do tell people to be aware of these things, but I don't tell people that they have to avoid them 100%. I'm, I'm, you know, I'm not in the all or nothing camp. It's not like having a little bit of something sets your metabolism back in some kind of, you know, horrible way. No, it's those both refined sugars, which basically just means, you know, table sugar, something else like like granulated sugar or something that is basically pure sugar like corn syrup or agave nectar, the things that Mark was listing. Brown sugar, all of those sugars are basically mostly empty calories because they're so processed. And they're so, so like addicting because they, they raise our blood sugar and they're

addicting in a way that you're there that we haven't talked about yet, but that gives you energy. There's a metabolic addiction that does happen when your body's, when you've been eating seed oils. So there's, there's a lot that I just said that I want to unpack a little bit. So first of all, I, I say, you know, you can have granulated sugar. You don't have to do funny things where you like, and you have like some sort of date paste instead, or, you know, honey from from

anointed bees, you know, in the Himalayas. You can have like sugar is sugar once you've digested and broken it down, and it's gotten into your bloodstream, it's identical at that chemical level. Your body can't tell the difference, but you want to get a handle on how much you're having because it's so easy to overeat this stuff. And so you want to like, you know, plan it ahead. And to answer your question of how do you deal with this? Like, how do you control sugar? How do you make it so that you're in control of how much sugar you eat, not whatever you've happened to have in the cupboards or even your children who want you to keep stuff in the cupboards? And the answer is there are two strategies. And Mark, you did a great job of

summarizing one of the two strategies, which is like the mindset, right? Your mindset about, you know, focusing on dinner, right? Like what I do to myself is I look forward to dinner and I know we're going to have a good dinner. And I'm like, all about the dinner. If I was, if just imagine what it would be like, if I was like, I just want to breeze through dinner so I can get to something sweet tasting for dessert. That's my eight year old's approach to life. That's what that's. You just outlined his entire nutritional approach. And that's how like probably 90% of Americans think about dinner. It's like something we have to get through so that we can eat the ice cream that we really are, you know, really wanting to get through all this stuff.

Sure. Yeah. I like burgers. Sure. I like pizza. But really what I want is cookies. So that is, you have that because you've been thinking that way for so long. So it's ingrained in your mindset. It's a habit, but you also have a metabolic problem there. And that's the whole other

strategy that, um, that like, I think is the most important part of why I wrote the book, The Fat Burn Fix, because there's a lot going on with our metabolisms because of these seed oils that makes our brains need sugar. So we are addicted not just to the taste, which is what everyone knows. It's addicting taste. You have a little sugar. You want a little more sugar. It's like any other drug. And that is all true. But the, the other part of this that is so important to understand your relationship with food is that if you have too much seed oils in your body fat, which every, everyone does, unless you've been avoiding them, you are, your brain thinks that sugar equates

to energy because your brain does not trust your body fat. Your brain says, I don't want anybody to be burning body fat because when that happens, I don't, I feel bad. And so that your brain now equates sugary things with energy. And that makes it very hard for willpower to use your willpower to control how much you're eating. So you have to get to that underlying metabolic cause and understand how to handle that. And that's where the healthy fats are key and knowing, learning how to build meals, meals that sustain your energy. So you don't want to snack and healthy fats is one big piece of it. But the other big piece are kind of like the complicated carbohydrates or the, the high glyce, the low glycemic index carbohydrates, the starchy foods that are not refined, things like beans, starchy vegetables, a kind of bread that is made the old-fashioned way, the way they used to do in the Bible days called sprouted grain bread.

They don't make it out of flour. You can get that. You can get that at, I think, Whole Foods, right? Dave's, I'm trying to remember, they freeze it. Ezekiel. Ezekiel. Ezekiel is the best. Dave has a brand too, but I've tested people's blood sugars after they eat Dave's and after they eat Ezekiel, and it's better with Ezekiel because Ezekiel is just more pure sprouted grain. Whereas Dave seems to have some more flour in it or something. And it spikes your blood sugar. And that spiking of blood sugar is not a good thing because every time you spike your blood sugar over a certain level, you're exposing all your tissues and your joints to too much sugar. And it basically it's like sugar in your joints is like rust in an engine. It,

it, uh, it makes them sticky and it's the last thing that you want. So, um, so spiking your blood sugar is bad, but it doesn't mean you have to give up bread or all starchy carbohydrate things. It just means you want to eat those that your body breaks down more slowly. So I call them the slow digesting carbohydrates because the technical term is low glycemic, but that doesn't really mean anything. So slow digesting things that break down slow, like beans, actual beans, you know, carrots, those have some carbon in them too. Not potatoes because they're so that we, we bump our blood sugar pretty quick with those, but pretty much every other like

whole food that's a little bit starchy breaks down very slowly in your body. And it's a great way to sustain your energy between meals. That's what I was getting at. It really helps you not snack. You have to know all the strategies to not want to snack because there's when your metabolism is, is like refusing to burn your body fat, you really have to build meals in a smart way so that you don't get that hangry between meals. Hangry is an example of how you feel because your brain is addicted to energy, the energy and sugar and can't use your body fat. Hangry is an abnormal metabolic state. And, and that's why I teach people how to get rid of that hangry feeling. What are you going to do? What are you going to eat step-by-step? Because it's, it's quite a, uh, it takes a bit

of learning really to be able to get to that point where you can finally lose weight effortlessly. Now, this reminds me of her comment to Kate's comment, Dave, about Mark, about, you know, just you can have some sugar. Just make sure it's small. I read that you start your day with some French press, heavy cream in your coffee. Same, by the way, I heard that trick, that trick. And I love it. And monk fruit sweetener. So now are you embarrassed that you. And monk fruit sweetener. So now are you embarrassed that

you're having monk fruit sweetener instead? Oh, and I, you know, I, sometimes I use monk fruit. Sometimes I use a, uh, a teaspoon of, uh, of table sugar. Ooh, you know, as Kate said, it's, it's one of these things where it's not about, um, it's not, it's, it's the dose that makes the poison, right? And a little bit of sugar isn't going to derail you. Um, and it's not it's it's the dose that makes the poison right and a little bit of sugar isn't going to derail you and it's not going to put you you know your metabolism out of kilter I have a real issue with grains it was probably the most revolution revolutionary thought that I had 25 years ago changed my life entirely when I realized that that my my arthritis that I had, my IBS, my irritable bowel syndrome, my getting sick many times a year was largely due to my intake of grains. I was a marathoner,

triathlete. And so I was always looking to take in extra carbs before I knew how inflammatory my diet was. And through the years, I was taking in bread and pasta and cereal and beer and all forms of carbs that came from grain. And when I finally eliminated the grains, everything that had been bothering me in terms of my health cleared up, went away. So I realized, number one, how antithetical grains are to actual health. And the fact that the U.S. Department of Agriculture had listed them as the preferred fuel source with six to 11 servings per day at the base of the food pyramid. I found that. We've been misled.

I got to squeeze in a quick commercial, but we have to talk about grains because that's like all the rage. Mark, we left off at grains and I know you're a big fan of keto. Some of our viewers, we asked some of the folks on Twitter to weigh in, like what, what questions do you have? And one of our guests wrote in, this is from Nathan, one of our fans, high fiber diet, yay or nay Mediterranean diet versus keto. You're a big fan of keto and not of grains. So go on. Well, so I'm a fan of keto. I employ the strategies of keto once in a while. I don't engage in a regular ketogenic diet because to be frank, I like eating food. I like

eating a variety of foods and some of the things that would not be allowed on a ketogenic diet, I want to consume them once in a while, and so I do. Grains, in my estimation, and there's been a lot written about how antithetical grains can be to health, they're basically a cheap source of calories for most people around the world. When people don't have access to food of any kind, grains can be a lifesaver. For us in the United States, we have access to much more healthful foods. So grains, I mean, I refer to them as beige glock that you have to put stuff on to make it taste great. You know, if you have dry toast, isn't that great? You got to put a jam on it or butter. A bowl of spaghetti with nothing on it is not that appealing. You got to put a jam on it or, or, or butter, a bowl of spaghetti with nothing on it

is not that appealing. You gotta, you gotta have the marinara sauce or whatever. And I just say, why don't you just order a bowl of the marinara sauce? Um, so, so, you know, having said that, you know, the smell of a yeasty bread coming out of the oven is pretty appealing. So once in a while, um, even though I, I keep bread and other grain products out of my diet for the most part, once in a while, I'll have a couple of tastes, a couple of bites of bread with a lot of butter on it because I want that experience. So this is, it's a situation where, you know, you craft the ideal diet for you, which includes what's best for you in terms of food you know that you should not be eating, but also to, you know, to include a variety of foods that you want to try and you want to taste, make your life

enjoyable. I mean, as I said earlier, every bite of food I eat, I want it to taste fabulous. If you made me a kale salad with lemon juice dressing on it and said, this is the most healthful thing you could eat, Mark, I'd say, no, thanks. Take it away. Thank you. All right. So let's talk. I've been, I've teased the audience long enough. Let's talk about your, what you eat in a day. I talked about your coffee in the morning. Can you just spend 20 seconds on why heavy cream? Just makes the coffee taste a little bit better. It's, it's full fat. So I'm, you know, I'm, I'm a fan of, of consuming an appropriate amount of saturated fat. So it's a great way to start the day with a little bit of a dollop of fat, if you will, in my coffee. It's just the right taste combination

for me. Again, I want to enjoy that cup of coffee. For lunch, I typically have some kind of fish, usually just for variety. I'll have salmon or tuna or tuna sashimi, a little bit of vegetables. I become less and less enamored of vegetables. We can talk about what that, what that looks like in the context of fiber, for instance. Um, and then for dinner, I'll usually have a steak or I'll have lamb chops last night with steam broccoli, glass of red wine. I'm very happy camper with that kind of a. So there's no starch because you know, the, the traditional American dinner plate has a protein, a veggie and a starch, you know, whether it's rice or couscous or a little bit of pasta or something, right? Like, are you getting so to people who worry, well, I'm not I'm not going to be full enough with just a pork chop and some broccoli.

What say you? Well, first of all, the the pork chop with its fat and protein content is very satiating. It's probably all most people would need to be, when you say full, you don't need to add a layer of potatoes or rice or anything like that onto that. The vegetables can take up space as well. It's a little bit of fiber, but I'm in that camp right now that I don't think you need that much fiber. I think the reason that your microbiome works well is because you're feeding it the right

sorts of substrates. And so, for instance, if you're a carnivore, you'd say, well, how do these people even go to the bathroom, right? How do they even have a bowel movement? Well, because their microbiome, the bacteria in their gut, do very well on the gelatinous material in the steak they're eating or in the animal protein they're eating and can convert those into the short chain fatty acids that they need. So you don't really need fiber and you certainly don't need this concept of scouring your colon with

fiber. That's long been anthropogenic. Wait a minute. So talk to me about the wine, because I saw something about, I didn't actually understand the note, Dry Farm Wine Selection. What's that? Well, Dry Farm Wines is a company that provides curated wines from around the world. I didn't mean to do an advertisement for them, but that's who I use. Same. But there are companies like them who will find wines that are old country, old growth wines that don't have any sugar in them. So most American wines have a lot of sugar.

Some wines in the US have more sugar than Coca-Cola. Yeah, my doctor just reminded me. He said, you and your husband share a bottle of wine at night. That's like having a bottle of grape juice. Remember that. Bingo. Well, it doesn't have to be because there are a lot of wines from around the world, mostly not the US, that have no, like less than a half a gram of sugar per bottle, that have none of the additives that are allowed in the US, so none of

the sort of histamine, you know, tyriide. They're fantastic. I prefer them now to the old big, thick, fat, chocolatey, leathery, California calves that I used to eat. So they were so thick. I used to eat them. But yeah, so I enjoy a glass of wine with dinner. I mean, again, I want to enjoy my meal. I want to enjoy every bite of food I eat. And I, and I craft my eating strategy around long periods of not eating where I'm living my life and not worrying about missing a meal or, or the energy that I might get from that meal. Cause I have all the energy I want. And then when I sit down to a meal, I'm like very thankful, very grateful, um, tastes great. It's one of the better experiences of my day. Now I know Kate, you say don't buy, we've heard like the fat free thing

was nonsense, but I, but you say don't buy low fat, don't buy low cholesterol, don't buy fat free food. Don't buy skim milk. Like all the stuff that's had the fat taken out of it was wrong. Exactly. And, and they do that so that they can kind of sell you the fat back to you twice. Like they make money twice, right? They sell you the skim milk and the skim yogurt that's got extra sugar in there. Sugar is very cheap. But to make ice cream and cream and those kinds of confections where you really need butter, they want to keep that to use that separately. But also, it helps make you hungry all the time so that you're more likely to snack.

So it really benefits the food companies in multiple ways. Yeah. Yeah, they get you coming and going. They're really good at that. I wanted to just touch a little tiny bit on grains. I don't think anybody's really saying that grains are toxic. It's just that they're easy to overeat. And I actually use flour to make one of the most delicious liver dishes ever. I mean,

actually, I'm lying. I don't do it. My husband does it. And he dredges the liver in flour and it just comes out so unbelievably good. I never thought I would actually look forward to a meal with liver, cow liver. No, that is one part of the Kate Shanahan plan that I'm like, oh, I don't know I can do it because Kate loves four things. She loves meat on the bone, organ meats, hello liver, fermented and sprouted foods and fresh uncooked ingredients, you know, raw. She says those are inflammation fighters and antioxidants. I can do that.

I can do, you know, raw vegetables, but like organ meats, Kate, come on. How are we supposed to do that? Yeah, it takes some dedication. But if you really, if you literally can't do it, then you can get a pretty similar nutrient profile from egg yolks if the eggs are like pasture raised and, you know, were free ranging. So they were eating like a normal chicken diet with like including some bugs and some fresh greens and stuff like that not just the grain stuff but um but there there are so many liver recipes out there that like liver and onions when you do it right it's actually really good so that's why i say you have to kind of want to

because you're gonna try it a few times and there's all this smell of the house is it disgusting like the first time are you like oh i'm not gonna not going to be able to do it. Or is it like, actually, this is getting a bad rep. Yeah, it's a really good question. It has almost no smell. Like it's the only thing that's smelly about it is like what you coat on it, right? Or what you put it in or the bacon that you're cooking it with

or the onions that you're caramelizing or charring. What do you ask the butcher for? What do you order? How do you ask a butcher for what do you what do you order how do you get liver oh we go i go to a kind of a small little farm store where they have grass-fed cows and it's they're sold frozen in a pack like so when you thought it's always there they're like no problem we have tons of it kate yeah it's it because well you know it's if you think about it cows have livers, right?

So they don't want to throw them out. And if there's a farm that is nearby, they got to sell those livers. They want to sell every part. They want to make money off of every single part that they can. But I know you also say you can try it. You can do the liver pate, which actually is somewhat stomachable. So you like the organ meat. Can you talk for a minute about meat on the bone

and bone marrow? When I was in France recently, that was an order. You could order bone marrow. I'm like, what is that? I know people, this is a trend now, but why do people want to eat bone marrow? So the four things that you talk about, Megan, are, I call them the four pillars of the human diet because they're common to every single traditional cuisine around the world. And they include the fresh food and the fermented and sprouted food and the meat on the bone and the organ meat. So meat on the bone, let's break that down. Because meat on the bone provides you something that's really good for your skin, for your hair, for your nails and your joints. It gives you collagen and a whole bunch of other stuff that only come from when you take an animal

and you boil its joint material or its skin, it releases these very special compounds that are basically missing from the American diet. They're including collagen peptides, people heard of collagen now, but glucosamine and glycosaminoglycans, those are other chemicals that you get when you make just good old fashioned, like chicken soup, where you include the bone, the tendons, the skins, when you have a chicken, say, for example, that white stuff on the ends of the bones and the wiggly white ligaments and tendons. The gross stuff. It is full of nutrition.

So you're saying when you go to the grocery store, instead of getting the pre-trimmed chicken breasts that we all go for because it seems cleaner and easier, go for the chicken legs, the thighs with the bones? Yes. And just bake them or fry them or just, you know, they actually taste so much better, just easy in prepared in easy ways because the breast has had the fat and the skin removed. And those things taste really great when you crisp them up and fry them up. And this fills your house up with this beautiful fried chicken smell that, and those have extremely potent nutrients that help your skin, your hair, and your nails that are related to collagen. And they build your collagen, all of those things that I just mentioned, skin, hair, nails, and joints and bones,

they're made mostly out of collagen and the meat on the bone aspect of the four pillars helps fortify those collagen rich tissues. And there's no other way to do it because, uh, like, I mean, you can take supplements, yes, but, uh, they are not as effective as the real thing. And it's kind of, that's why I say it's like a missing food group from the American diet. Cause we don't do that. We use bullion to make soup. So don't do that. Just save the bones and, uh, and make your own chicken stock, or you can buy boxed bone stock now really easily. It's at every grocery store you can get from Amazon. It's a great deal at Costco. And that's so much better as a base for your soup gives it

so much flavor than just using water. And it's so much better for you than bullion because the bullion cubes to give yourself flavor, that's just chemicals in there mostly. There's no nutrition. That's amazing. Okay, so that's meat on the bone. Got to do the organ meats. Fermented and sprouted foods at least five times a week. You say that's yogurt.

Obviously, that's fermented. You say sprouted grains. We kind of talked about the Ezekiel bread. That would be in there. Legumes, sprouted nuts and seeds and then fresh uncooked ingredients. So just everybody's inflamed. I mean, everybody's inflamed. Maybe you two aren't. But like, I don't know a woman who at night when she's putting on her nightgown or pajamas isn't like, why do I look 10 pounds heavier than I looked this morning when I got up, you know, and it's

inflammation. And I don't know if, if I eat, if I do all these things that you're saying, am I not going to have that anymore? Or is that just being human? 80 to 90% of the inflammation and inflammatory problems people are suffering from is coming from these seed oils that were never in our food supply until they, we invented the factory processes for doing these. They were released into the food supply without any studies showing that they were safe. And the worst irony here is that the American Heart Association got money from a company selling one of the seed oils. So they actually decided to declare it as heart healthy. So that's why these things have gotten

a pass for so long, because and no one's really been talking about them or paying attention to them, because we have been misled into believing that not only are they not toxic, they're actually the thing to go for. And that we've been misled into believing that these things are what we should eat instead of traditional fats like butter. And we've made lard a dirty word literally because of the American Heart Association and its relationship with these companies that gave them money to say seed oils were healthy, but they, they, they should not have been released into the food supply without studies to first show that they were safe. And now what's happened is that we're all eating them. We are eating, we're getting

80% of your fat calories from these seed oils. So it's like, we've been in a giant experiment without like our consent. Like nobody told us we're in this experiment. And the experiment is what happens when you feed a population seed oils. What happens is you get inflamed and you don't feel like exercising. You overeat, you get fat, you get diabetic, and you develop all of these chronic diseases. 80 to 90% of the chronic diseases that I see every day when I see patients are related to inflammation, which comes primarily from all these seed oils. So it's really like when you get them out of your diet, it's really the gift that keeps on giving. Yeah, just reminding people that Kate is in addition to being a biochemist and a nutritionist, is also a doctor and practices

family medicine. So she sees patients and knows of what she speaks. Can I spend a minute on collagen, Mark? Because I know this is something that you've spent some time on too. And I just liked the look of these collagen supplements. I saw at this little inn, my husband and I went and stayed. They'd had sort of the old fashioned delivery look on the outside of the bottle. And then I never did anything with them. And we have an advertiser that sells collagen too. And I wonder, because I've heard both things, you know, like it's great, it's a game changer. And I've heard, no, it's yet another sort of placebo effect kind of thing. What say you? Well, what I say, much like what Kate said, I've been referring to collagen as the fourth macronutrient for 10 years. You know, if we go back and look at that meat on the bone

picture that we all had, basically in the last, in the 50s and 60s, grandma made chicken stock or she boiled beef stock, made soups. My mother used Knox gelatin. Kids ate Jell-O. So we actually had some source of these gelatinous materials, these collagen peptides in our diet. And even into the 80s and 90s. And then 90s, the early aught ops, people stopped eating jello because it was sugary and they stopped. I don't know anybody takes Knox gelatin for their skin, hair and nails now. And so, and then we were eating the choice cuts of meat, right? Just the ribeye and just the, you know, just the quarter house and the new whatever we weren't, we weren't consuming those parts of the animal that we're providing. And by the way, we were eating chicken

without the skin and like skinless boneless chicken breast, which was the bodybuilding, you know, go-to for, for high protein. So all of this caused, I think, a generation of people who had severe issues with cartilage, with ligaments and tendons. So you get ACL tears in, in professional sports, you get all these issues because we weren't giving the body the raw material we needed to repair the actual collagen parts of the body. You know, collagen represents the predominance of the protein type in the human body. And we weren't giving our bodies the raw material. So with that in mind, I've been looking at collagen supplementation for the last 15 years. I mean, I fixed a severe Achilles tendon issue by supplementing with a lot of collagen every day.

So I had a personal experience with this. So I think collagen is critical for maintenance of the soft tissue, the connective tissue, the fascia, the ligaments, the tendons, the cartilage, the skin, hair, and nails. And so I supplement, personally, I supplement with collagen because I'm also one who I'd like to eat nose to tail, which is how you can get collagen. But I'm averse to certain nether parts of that animal, just like you might be. And I don't think I get enough of it through eating chicken skin or gnawing on the bones the way I used to as a, as a kid. Wow. That is so fascinating. So does it matter the form of the supplement, you know, cause you can take like a powder,

you can like, what, how do you do it? There's a lot. Sure. I mean, um, there's a lot of different, there are types of collagen type one, type two, you know, type three there and they're a mixture. Some is bovine, some is a-based, um, some chicken-based and, uh, and, and as Kate said, you're, you also want glyc, glycosamine, glycans and glycine and things like that. So some of the supplements have, have all of these in them. Um, but they're basically collagen peptides. They're, they're,

they're, um, they're amino acid peptides. So they. So they're like two or three amino acids at a time bonded together that can pass through the gut barrier and get into the bloodstream and go where they need to go. All right. And you're too polite to say it, but I think we can get it at your website too. So tell us what that is, because this is not you trying to advertise. You weren't even going to mention it. I'll mention it. If you want some, at primalkitchen.com, we sell collagen peptides in varieties. We have coffee creamers and just unflavored or flavored or whatever you want. Just make people's life easier. They've come to trust you.

So it's like, you know, there's a lot of charlatans out there. They don't know. Wait, let me pause you there because I want to get in a caller. Pam in Texas has a question about MCT oil. And I have the same question. Hi, Pam. What's your question? Hi, I saw a TED Talk of a lady whose husband had Alzheimer's was in the beginning stages of it, and had the scan done, and it was just not good. And then she gave him MCT oil was more than it says in the bottle, and coconut oil.

And then months, months, months later, they went back and did another scan, and it was so improved that her unofficial recommendation is that you should incorporate that into your diet. She also talked about the ketones in your brain, why Alzheimer's happens with glucose and all that. So I don't know, is MCT oil something that is helpful to incorporate? Go ahead, Kate, you're the doctor. You actually get the exact same benefits from incorporating really any healthy fats and following an otherwise healthy nutrient-d dense diet. In fact, you get more benefits. MCT oil is just kind of high in a certain kind of a fatty acid that if you're

metabolically damaged, then you can sometimes some people can get a little more energy from that. But it's nowhere near as effective as the whole program of just cutting out the nasty stuff, especially the seed oils, the excess sugar of just cutting out the nasty stuff, especially the seed oils, the excess sugar, and including all the healthy fats that you possibly can in your diet and also getting a good balanced amount of protein. So yeah, people will love to sell you supplements of all kinds of things just because there's such a high profit margin there. But you really want to be careful. And the collagen supplements is one of the few actual supplements that I do recommend myself. And in fact, I consult for a company myself, uh, that sells

collagen supplements, but that's, that's it in terms of, for me, for supplements, then the rest of your supplements would be vitamins and minerals, because most of it is total hype because most people would rather just say, here, take this supplement, then go through the whole spiel of what is the actual healthy diet? What are the hateful eight? How much sugar should you have and all this sort of thing. And you know, you do if you just get even just a tiny benefit from a supplement that gives you a lot of hope. So maybe that is a good thing. It's a fast way to get yourself motivated. But that's just the first of many steps that you can take in order to improve the health of somebody who is starting with early Alzheimer's or has any kind of a cognitive problem, actually, because they're all related to inflammation.

Kate, you touched on something about people doing these supplements. I was surprised to see one of your other recommendations is do not buy protein powders. It's like my entire morning smoothie that I make for my children is falling apart. We put MCT oil in there and we put protein powders in there. Now we do put spinach in there and a bunch of berries and some yogurt. So I'm with you. I think I felt like I felt like a good mother until we got to this last part. Well, we know there's this term that's come out in the past few years that I love. It's called ultra processed foods. And it's they're starting to talk about how.

OK, so we don't need to worry about cholesterol. We need to worry about how the food is processed. And the ultra processing is the worst. And there are three major types of ultra processed ingredients. Fat, which is the seed oils, protein, which is most of protein powders, and carbs, which is refined flours and sugars. Those are ultra processed ingredients that make up ultra processed foods that everyone is now on board with the idea that these things are what's killing us and making us fat and making us metabolically unhealthy. So yeah,

so protein powders are just they're ultra processed, the most of the nutrition is removed, we were never meant to have our protein pre digested for us, it's basically pre digested. So we'll bump up your to your blood, your blood, not your sugar, but your amino acid level in your blood, which has the same kind of detrimental effects as too much sugar in the bloodstream. So protein powder is actually different from collagen powder because the way it's made and processed and the way your body processes it, there's dramatic differences. So that's why I, that's why I still can recommend collagen powder. Although I would much rather you make your own bone broth. Um, and I put that in

the smoothie, but the smoothies already got yogurt, so I don't need to add protein. All right. I like this call. This is William from South Carolina, Mark. And he's got a question like a lot of the people who listen to this show live when it's on Sirius XM, uh, he's a trucker. And so, you know, he hears us in the, in his truck and he's got a question about, uh, about that.

Hi, William. What's your question? Uh, yes. Um, thank you for taking my call. I just had, I travel a lot. I go from South Carolina to California and back as an open road trucker. And I just want to see if there's any suggestions on trying to eat better and be a little bit healthier out on the road. But it's very tough. You know, all the ingredients that she, you know, you just can't make that in a truck.

If there's any suggestions. It's a very good question. William's not having luck finding Ezekiel bread at the Motel 6 diner. Mark, what are we going to do for him? I mean, that's a really tough one. I mean, I would say that access to healthy food is a real issue for a lot of people, and especially truckers. And I don't think the pilot, you know, the stops that you make are going to be providing a lot of this. And I don't think the pilot, you know, the, the, the, the, the stops that you make are going to be providing a lot of this. So I think there's some work involved. I think it's going to, it's going to be planning meals in advance and a lot of Tupperware. I mean, I hate to put it like that, but alternatively, if you can find a steakhouse on the road and just go

get a steak and a grilled vegetable and be done with it and not, you know, and forego the rolls, the basket of rolls, forego the baked potato and kind of fill in the gaps there. If you are at a restaurant with a decent piece of meat and a decent vegetable, you can cover a lot of ground with that. And then the other thing I'd say with truckers is whenever you can get out and walk, do it. Yeah, well, that's important. And we're going to talk about exercise and we're going to talk about the weight loss

drug sweeping these sort of rich circles that I've got a toe in. And I want to know more about this diabetes drug they're saying is going to be some sort of a cure-all. Is it? Is it? Kate and Mark have answers right after this break. Okay, before I forget, can you guys help me understand how this applies to children? I've referenced my kids, my assistant Abby's worried about her kids,

all my staff has kids. Do all these same rules apply to how we feed our kids, Kate? Nature likes to make it simple. So yes, what's good for you at one stage of life is good for you at every stage of life. And yes, in fact, the earlier you start with kids, the more benefits they get because it can potentially change things like how tall they will get, how strong and robust their joints are, whether or not they're going to go through puberty, like on time, or even completely go through puberty, there's a huge, huge impact on the child's health. And so like, it's, it's really the more important, the earlier that you start. And it does get easier. It just has to, you have to believe it yourself.

You can lead by example. And then when children are given foods, actual really healthy foods that taste interesting or new and you seem to like them in a positive kind of, you know, imagine the Italian family around the table, like, you know, try this. I worked all day making it that kind of a thing. That's one way that makes introducing new foods and healthy foods easier. Let me ask you a follow up. I find breakfast is the hardest meal to get your kids to eat healthy at. Like my kids will, they'll have eggs. They like eggs. Two out of three like yogurt and even plain yogurt, as long as you put enough berries in there, they'll have eggs. They like eggs two out of three, like yogurt and even plain yogurt. As long as you put enough berries in there, um, they'll eat it. Uh, and then we

run out of really healthy options. You know, I don't, I haven't, they're not much into the Ezekiel bread. Like if I made them do it with peanut butter, they might do it. But like, do you have any good breakfast suggestions for kids that are healthy? Well, there's like 87 different thousand different things you can do with eggs. And one of the things that kids might really love is make crepes. So crepes are a lot like pancakes, except they're mostly egg and just a little bit of flour to hold it together. But then you can put like a whipped cream in there with just a little bit of vanilla and a teeny bit of sweetener. And you're giving them plenty of healthy fats. You're giving them the protein and nutrients from

the egg. And it's something like familiar and can play with that. And then there's all kinds of like paleo versions of pancakes too. And, and then there's like muffins that are made with more, uh, protein rich kinds of starchy elements. So you can make muffins out of beans. You can make, um, what are those things called? Uh, savory, um, custards, right? Or you can make custards. Custard is a really, you know, it's like pudding basically. Um, and a lot of kids, what you can make a sweet custard for a kid, or you can make a savory one for a more sophisticated palate. So there's a thousand and one things you can do with eggs. And then there's a lot you can do with a dairy too. Like you already started there with putting yogurt and putting a little fruit on it, but you can bump up the, like the, the pleasure of it with,

you can actually top yogurt with whipped cream. Why not just put a very lightly, um, a lightly sweetened, uh, like a tiny little bit of sugar sweetener in the whipped cream and a little bit of vanilla because vanilla magnifies the natural sweetness that's already in there. And actually I did that for the Lakers. We had that at their breakfast buffet and it was just, it was a huge hit and then put other little things that, like as out for them to top it with, sort of like a sundae bar, except but with yogurt. Or if they don't like yogurt, cottage cheese. Or if regular yogurt is too sour, then use Greek yogurt. Is this all in your book? Is this in the fat burn fix? Yes. I have lots more ideas like that there. Good, good. Because people are going to want to

know. It's good to know. Mark, let's talk exercise because we got to do it. We got to do it. And I like the way you approach it. You say, look, forget everything. There are four essential movements you need to do. They're just four. Do these four and you're going to be in relatively decent shape. What are the four? So let's take a step back. This is in the absence of a gym or in the absence of a trainer or in the absence of access to weights, you can get a tremendous workout doing push-ups, pull-ups, planks, and air squats. The planks are just, you know, you're on your elbows on the ground with your body out straight um and and so that's that's sort of like my vacation uh there's no there's no gym in the hotel routine right and i can get a tremendous workout doing it um but what i would

say is with regard to exercise look all of the weight loss gains are going to come from how you orchestrate your eating strategy, your diet. A lot of questions about that. A lot of questions asking what's the percentage food versus exercise. You cannot exercise away a bad diet. That's sort of a mantra now. But also, people shouldn't, for instance, count the calories that they burn in a workout. And these wearable devices that will tell you, oh, I played tennis and I burned 1200 calories. It's BS. It's there's, there's no way that that's

even an issue. And the fact that you did burn some calories in many, in many, many cases, if your diet is not right, you might go home and overeat. You might, your body might, your brain might have you over consume carbohydrates, for instance, to make up for all the glycogen you burn because you weren't that good at burning fat. So if you train your body to become a good, good at burning fat, that kind of goes away. But the strategy really is, is it's about movement. What we what we want to do is we want to lose fat from the way we eat. And then we want to tone and we want to create, you know, range of mobility from our choices of exercise. So for that reason, I say everyone like walking is still the greatest thing ever invented for humans.

Look, we're bipedal. We're supposed to walk. We're designed to walk. So we should walk as often as we as we can. You want to jog. That's fine. You want to run. That's fine. But as much as you can. I mean, you can walk walking a minimum of 45 minutes three times a week would be a great start. And then if you want to supplement that with getting on an exercise bike or a bike outside or swimming, all these low-level aerobic activities are designed to keep your body moving. They're designed to make the fat metabolism improve by the throughput of these fat substrates. So that you do that,

you burn that instead of the glycogen or instead of the carbohydrate. And then twice a week, do some kind of weight training. That's the four essential movements that I just talked about, or it's going to the gym and throwing some weights around in the gym. And then, and then one, once a week,

I tell people you got to do something really all out. You got to sprint and it could, it doesn't have to be sprinting like running from something, but it could be 20 seconds of all out effort on a bike, swimming, on a Stairmaster, on an elliptical, whatever you want to do. Do it 20 seconds hard, wait two minutes, 20 seconds hard, wait two minutes, and do that a couple of times because the body really is designed to be in that sort of a fight or flight mode once in a while. Oh, that's fascinating. Okay. Cause I do have a note. What does sprinting mean? I don't like, I didn't understand. So you're saying

at least once a week, cause the way you, your short forms on these three main components of the primal blueprint for fitness program, lift heavy things, uh, three, two to three times a week, run really fast one time per week, move frequently at a slow pace, three to five hours per week. So the run really fast, you have sprinting, but it doesn't have to be sprinting. You're saying basically kind of interval training, or I guess, but go hard for 20 seconds, rest for two minutes, 20 seconds for a total of 15, 20 minutes. Yeah, that's it. And, and it doesn't sound like that much, but if you do it right, you're pretty gassed at the end of that. and again a lot of people who don't have um you know their knees are

kind of um broken down over the years or can't sprint like can't run sprints you know you can do it on a bike as i say you can do it on an elliptical trainer you can do it on an air on an airdyne you can do it um you know there's lots in a pool for sure yeah yeah that's very easy on your body i like that a lot and walking. So I see my cardiologist once a year because my dad died of a sudden heart attack at age 45. So I'm very conscious of my health, heart health, and thank God I'm in good shape. But, um, I go once a year and I have a stress test and it's, you know, they put you on the machine and you run and then they, you have to lie down right at the end and they hook you up and they check all that. The cardiologist said, walk, walk, walk, walk, walk. He's telling me about somebody who was

65 years old who came in and her heart capacity was basically that of somebody half her age. And he said, what's the deal? And she said, I don't lift weights. I don't do anything. But every day I walk around the reservoir in New York City, you know, the Jack, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis reservoir. Um, and it'd probably take you about 25, 30 minutes to walk around the reservoir, not to mention what it takes to get there and get back home. And she said, that's all I've been doing since I was 25 years old. So for 40 years, that's what she's been doing. And she, he said she was off the charts in terms of her lung capacity and her heart health and all that. So good to know, like good old walking. As you point out, we were meant to do it, do it. Yep. I think the key point in what he said to you, your cardiologist said to you is that the best exercise is the exercise that you enjoy

because the, you can know all, all the things in the world about exercise, but if you don't do it, they're not going to help you. And there's really no wrong kind of exercise because your body benefits from every kind of exercise that, that there is out there. We just used to call everything that you described, Mark, the term probably sounds familiar, cross-training. Like we, we used to just say, yeah, do, if you are a runner, make sure to do some lifting, maybe do some biking or swimming or something else, or actually play a sport. Most team sports are actually a great like super, super form of exercise. Dancing is also an amazing form of exercise. And one of the things I want to just point out is that when we're talking about diet

and exercise, we talk about them like they're separately, but they really shouldn't do that because diet supplies the raw materials to do what exercise just told your body that you need to do more of to build like the parts to do all of that. And so when you're walking, you're doing some cardio, you're helping keep your cardiovascular system, building new blood vessels, keeping your heart healthy. When you're running, you're doing that times 10. When you're lifting heavy things, you're building muscle, you're making your bones stronger and more robust. So the two things are, they go hand in hand. And that's why we always talk about them together. But they really, like the role of exercise is not so much weight loss. It's about building healthy tissues and being healthy and being able to just enjoy life.

So exercise should always be fun. One of the things not on your list, Mark, is cardio bunny, you know, is do an hour of aerobics a day. And if that's, if that's your, your thing, go for it. I don't know much about cardio bunny. I've gotten away from the more popular, you know, exercise du jour kind of things. Look, as Kate said, any kind of exercise that you enjoy. And I was a trainer in the 80s when, you know, the aerobics movement became the big thing. And Jane Fonda basically transformed.

Not just Jane Fonda, Mark. Some of us are out there doing our part in upstate New York as well. Kathy Smith's a good friend of mine. She was there too. But that was amazing and it changed a lot of lives, right? But then there's the possibility that you can overdo that sort of thing, which brings us back to why walking is still the best kind of thing that you can do with regularity for the rest of your life.

And I think that that's exciting because it's not as daunting to think, well, geez, if longevity is what I'm after and mobility, and all I have to do is walk, are you kidding me? I don't have to go struggle and suffer and sweat and sacrifice and strain and get injured and all these other things. Yeah. To quote that should have been Oscar winner. Santa Claus is coming to town. Just put one foot in front of the other. Okay. Sorry. Um, let's talk about, if we want to say, forget all that, I'm not doing it better living through modern medicine. What are the options? Because I will tell you here in Connecticut, where I am, um, my friend, my hairstylist just told me this,

that half of the women are on some diabetes drug that is supposed to be, you know, the new elixir when it comes to losing weight. It's of course very expensive. That's why I say it's like when it's well off circles, but Dr. Kate, what is it? And is it legit? Like, should we be trying to pursue? I'm trying to find the name of it here. Wee Govie, metformin. That's all I have written down. Metformin has been with us for a long time. It's a diabetes drug that we use to help poison the liver so it doesn't produce so much sugar. So it will lower your blood sugar. And then the newer drugs come from actually a lizard poison called the Gila monster. And they're in this category called GLP-1 and their names are like Trulicity, Bayetta, Ozempic. Most of them are injectable. You're going to have to give yourself a little subcutaneous shot once a week or sometimes once a day. And they do help to lower

your fasting blood sugar. Now, does that translate to weight loss? Not very much, if any. The studies actually show that you do lose some weight. You do lose maybe the average person lost in a study where they take the maximum dose of the newest one, which is the Gila monster type, maybe they would lose about two pounds in a year, maybe three. Some people gain weight. So it's not really the answer. No, it's not the answer. That's disappointing. Okay. So that's not as exciting as I thought. What about, okay, this is actually one of our listeners called in. Janelle from Texas has got an interesting question that we've also been buzzing about on the team. Hi, Janelle, what's your question?

Hi, mine is about the fennel seed. I was told that fennel seed is good for anti-inflammatory. I have a lot of problems with my knees. I'm a diabetic also. All right. True or false? Fennel seed. Fennel seed in the diet is good in terms of there's some nutrition in it because it's a spice. In terms of does it have special anti-inflammatory properties? No. most of the inflammation that causes arthritis is driven by everything we've been talking about in this show, like the seed oils that have toxins, the empty calories,

and the lack of nutrition. So that's really the fundamental basis for treating any kind of inflammatory problem. But well, is it what's easier taking this supplement, which I happen to sell off my website or explaining everything, right? So nine times out of 10, the answer for some kind of anti-inflammatory supplement is going to be, it's just eat the food. If you like fennel, you're going to get more benefits from that than you will from some pill that claims to have fennel in it, which probably has some fennel at the max, right? Maybe it could be anything. So most of the anti-inflammatory- Abby, cancel the fennel order it, which probably has some fennel at the max, right? It could be anything.

So most of the anti-inflammatory- Abby, cancel the fennel order. Thanks a lot, Canadian Debbie. She got us all excited about this yesterday. Okay, let's go to Anne. She's also in Connecticut. She's got a question that I think will be good for you, Mark. What's your question, Anne? Hi. Hi. It's actually first a comment, more of a comment. In 2018, I picked up Mark's book, The Keto Reset Diet, because I always am looking for ways to feel better, have more energy. You know, I'm 57 and right around 50, I thought, you know, I could put a little more effort into it. And it was hugely intimidating, but I just knew there was something to it. And it was hugely intimidating, but I just knew there was something to it. And I kind of want to say to the audience listening, it's really hard to get started eating healthier, but it is so much better. And once you know this stuff, you can't unknow it. So you go through the

supermarket and you start reading labels and you just put it back and say, I know this is bad for me. Why am I going to put it in my cart and pay for it? So I want to thank Mark for his book. I mean, I dragged my husband along and we did keto for over a year and then it got really boring to go out to dinner with friends. So we sort of left being so strict because it is really hard. But the way I eat now is so much better. And it's, it's just a habit. It's not saying I don't fall off the wagon, but it is so worth it to just take control of what you're putting in your body and you feel better. All right, and I got to wrap you because we got it. We only have a short time left. Mark, your thoughts on keto to close it out because it's very popular, but there is a question about whether it's sustainable. No. So Anne had like the ideal consummate experience, which was it worked for her and then it got boring for her. The book that she's talking about is called The Keto Reset Diet. It's about using keto, a keto strategy to reset your metabolism, to develop this metabolic flexibility. And now she's at a point where she doesn't

need to eat keto, but she needs, she knows what to eat. She knows how to read labels. She, the good news is she knows what to do. The bad news is if she falls off the wagon, she knows what to do. So, right. Okay. Let me ask you a quick follow-up question though, on, on, on the meds, is there a supplement? So not fennel seeds and maybe not those other things, the diabetes things. But is there a supplement that helps with appetite control, anything like that? Or is it just back to see the beginning of our discussion about eating better to curb

hunger? You got to do the work and there's no shortcuts. You can't hack your way around this. Really, it's like there are no pills that work. There are lots of pills. There are no pills that work. You have to do the work, but the good news is the work is easy if you understand it. And hence, Kate's book and my book, and what Anne commented about, once you understand what's going on, then you know what to do. I want everybody to become an intuitive eater. I don't

want anyone to say, well, what would Mark do? Or what would Kate say? I want you to become an intuitive eater as a result of this metabolic flexibility. All right. Last question. What should I give up on June 12th? I'm going to ask you both that. Kate, I'll start with you. What should I give up for this, just to try for a year, starting June 12th? Seed oils. And if you don't know where to start with that, then the most fattening food, according to Harvard, is French fries. They are saturated with seed oils. I nailed it. And the worst type. Yes. Good guess.

Okay. So that was the worst. And then, okay, Mark, what do you think I should give up? Because my audience may come along with me for this ride. Well, I mean, I would have said seed oils from the beginning of this whole conversation. And I would say that, so the biggest issue is going to be when you dine out like every great restaurant which has great cuts of meat, great produce they destroy it with soybean oil and all kinds of other stuff that they put in the sauces and the dressings so that's really where I'd watch out

for everything. What do you do about that? You ask them, can you cook it in butter? If it's a salad can you just do some oil some olive oil and vinegar? There's some ways around that, but you got to be really careful because restaurants are pretty insidious for a lot of people trying to avoid seed oils. Okay. And then, and then desserts. I mean, you got to,

this thing about your kids having ice cream, I don't want to criticize your parenting, but it's, you know, but at some point, I think if you could replace some of those with, with sweet, healthier choices, and then you make those choices yourself and your husband as well. And by example, sort of reduce the amount of dessert in your life. That would be the big thing for me, like dessert twice a week, not more than that. Yeah. Oh, I love it. You guys, you are awesome.

We have to do this more often. I was like, how are we going to fill two hours? Now I'm like, we need two more. This wasn't enough time. Thank you both so much, Kate and Mark. All the best. Buy their books, support them. They're trying to help us all.

And we greatly appreciate it. Thanks for joining us today and all week. We are lining up some great shows for you next week, including one with Dinesh D'Souza by Popular Demand. He has a new documentary out called 2000 Mules that's getting a ton of attention. So you requested him, we'll provide him. Download The Megyn Kelly Show on Apple, Pandora, Spotify, and Stitcher in the meantime so you don't miss it. Also at youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly and stay tuned because next week could be the week we find the Supreme Court leaker. Thanks for listening. Have a great weekend.

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