Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz - Part 2: How Amino Acids Play A Vital Role In A Fasting Lifestyle – With Robb Wolf

Episode Date: December 13, 2021

For full show notes, resources mentioned, and transcripts go to: www.drmindypelz.com/ep100/ To enroll in Dr. Mindy's Fasting membership go to: resetacademy.drmindypelz.com This episode is all about how amino acids can help solve the world's metabolic health crisis. Robb Wolf is a former research biochemist and 2X New York Times/Wall Street Journal Best-selling author of The Paleo Solution and Wired To Eat. He and co-author Diana Rodgers recently released their book, Sacred Cow, which explains why well-raised meat is good for us and good for the planet. Robb has transformed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around the world via his top-ranked iTunes podcast, books and seminars. He's known for his direct approach and ability to distill and synthesize information to make the complicated stuff easier to understand. Please see our medical disclaimer. 

Protein-rich foods tend to be also very nutrient-dense. The main nutrient that the body is sensing is protein, and specifically amino acids. And when one consumes enough of that, then we tend to be satiated. If we under-consume protein, then we will tend to over-consume all these other foods. I am a woman on a mission that is dedicated to teaching you just how powerful your body was built to be. I like to do that by bringing you the latest science, the greatest thought leaders, and applicable steps that help you tap into your own internal healing power. The purpose of this podcast is to give you the power back and help you believe in yourself

again. My name is Dr. Mindy Pels, and I want to thank you for spending part of your day with me. On this episode of the Resetter podcast, I am back with part two of my discussion with Rob Wolf. So if you're grabbing this podcast as the first one, know that there was one before this that will link nicely with what you're going to hear over the next several minutes in this discussion. Here's something to know about Rob. So he has a two times New York Times bestseller.

He is a biochemist. And what I loved about this discussion is is that he offers context to the world of nutrition that you are not hearing. And he is controversial. He is opinionated and he is well educated and has a perspective on something as simple as protein and electrolytes that you're not going to hear anywhere else. So this is part two. I hope you enjoyed part one.

And as always, if you guys love this information, please share it out into the world. We are, as you will hear, in a metabolic crisis in the world. world right now and conversations like this will absolutely move the needle forward in helping people understand how to regain better metabolic health. Enjoy. Let's move to a different nutrient in our body that I think we're deficient in and I know you're a big fan of chatting about this one, which are amino acids. So tell me where amino acids, do we get them only in animal protein? Can we get them anywhere else? And where would they show up in fast? We've been experimenting with a combination of the electrolytes with amino acids, putting them together, and it's killing hunger during a fasted state, and helping people actually, you know, be able to go longer.

So help me understand amino acids and protein and why everybody appears to be amino acid deficient as well. Well, folks are definitely not eating enough protein. And there's a lot, my third book, Sacred Cow, which I think you can see this. This shoulder. Diana Rogers really did my good friend and a registered dietitian, a brilliant woman. She really did the bulk of the heavy lifting on that, looking at the health of populations that consume adequate protein versus inadequate protein. And really what a lot of things boil down to is if one consumes inadequate,

protein, inadequate amino acids, then when we'll overconsume the other nutrients, protein or carbs or fat. There's a scientific concept of protein leverage hypothesis, which suggests that all organisms tend to eat to a protein minimum because protein rich foods, whether we're talking about clover for cows and horses, or whether we're talking like fish and chicken for omnivores and carnivores, um, protein rich foods

tend to be also very nutrient dense. And so the main nutrient that the body is sensing is protein and specifically amino acids. And when one consumes enough of that, then we tend to be satiated. We tend to not be hungry. If we underconsume protein, then we will tend to over consume all these other foods.

And, you know, we're in an environment now where we're told that animal husbandry, is unethical. It's bad for the environment. It's the primary driver of climate change. You know, it causes cancer, causes diabetes, cause all this stuff. But when we really dig into the literature looking at, say, like, vegan and vegetarian diets, it's interesting. They're very similar to what we see in developing countries where people have no or limited access to animal products in that the people tend to overconsume starchy carbohydrates. They have over-nutrient, efficiencies, iron, zinc, various B vitamins, magnesium.

So it's, you know, it, people can tinker a lot of different ways, but, you know, what we've found is that if body composition is a primary concern, if somebody's not in the pair of skinny genes they want to be in or, you know, what have you, the person never is eating adequate protein ever. I mean, we do. If you're overweight, like so what I, sorry, that was just too powerful because if you are struggling to lose weight, it's eating more protein that's going to help you drop weight. Is that too linear of a connection? That's it.

And, you know, that that is crazy. In my opinion, the most important starting place towards facilitating that whole process because you will, spontaneously modify your appetite. You will tend to eat fewer of the other foods. Now, if all the food you still have around looks like a buffet and it's ice cream and this, like, you can still eat good protein. And then if you have shoddy options around, we will still tend to overeat. But even that said, people will tend to eat less of these, these bad foods so long as protein

is adequate. it. You know, on the extending the fast side, could, you know, I could see that potentially benefiting people. I wrote my first article on fasting in 2005, and I got to be honest, by 2006, I regretted releasing that article because I saw people go nuts over the fat. It mainly went out to the CrossFit community. So you had people that were training six or seven days a week. they started intermittent fasting 22 hours a day because of 16 is good. Then clearly 22 hours a day is better. And they ate five grams of carbs a month.

And, you know, they felt good for two weeks. And then their hair started falling out and they had no libido. And I was like, well, you took a potentially good thing. And then you made it terrible because there were all these other allostatic stressors, you know, allostatic load, just total stress load on the person. So I'm really in this spot where I love fasting. I think it's an amazing tool. I just discovered they have a neurological condition called essential tremor syndrome,

which I've eaten a ketogenic diet, but I've started doing a little bit more like one day, two day fast to help manage that. It definitely helps. So a little bit of irony there because I've actually been kind of pushing back on the fasting stuff because I see people in my. opinion, potentially doing a bit too much of it. Like there's all this interest in autophagy and different things like that. And I think that that's great. But I'm not sure how much more upside there is versus lifting weights two or three days a week, eating a protein adequate diet,

and figuring out a way to just eat such that we don't overeat. Like, and that's a big lift. Like, you know, I just say that flippantly. And it's very hard for people to get to that. But I, I, so, you know, within that, that thing of like, do you need amino acids to extend the fast? Why do you need to extend the fast? What is the goal? And this is something that I think is really important regardless of what folks are doing. It really needs to be goal driven. And maybe the goal is like, well, for one time, I just want to see how long I can fast comfortably.

Yeah. Great. Great. But then above and beyond that, it's like, well, is your, if your goal is autophagy, You could drink a cup of coffee. You could lift weights. You could get sun on your skin. And that all stimulates autophagy, too.

And so, and lifting weights builds bone mineral density and it builds a hedge against aging. Sarcopenia is the loss of muscle masses. We age is one of the most concerning things that I have. And although I know folks like Jason Fung will say, well, you release lots of growth hormone when you fast, but you're still losing lean body tissue, including, you know, organ and whatnot. We're also whittling through our stem cells. And sometimes doing that is good. Animals that are fasted too aggressively end up dying young from multiple organ

system failure because they have no stem cells to repair their heart, their lungs, their kidneys, and all the rest of that. So it's, for me, it's a really powerful tool that I would, encourage people to be very outcome driven and very goal driven. What is the specific goal you're hoping to achieve in doing this? You know, and then where are you? A hundred percent. You know, where do you off ramp then? Okay, you're doing these fast. Where are you going to off ramp? Like, or, you know, or if somebody just, they landed a spot where they're like, I'm not going to change what I eat, but I will eat between the times of 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. Great. Right there with you. And

And they get more metabolically healthier. They get to a healthy body weight and all that stuff. That's great. But I just see a lot of folks kind of doing it to do it and absent a goal. Absent. And that goal is something, and I know I'm just talking like a crazy man today, but that goal for me is how we assess outcome. What is it that we're trying to do? And so then when we start doing it, we can say, well, that worked really well, based off of what I wanted to achieve here.

but I don't see enough people really sit down and delineate. What is the goal that I'm trying to achieve here? Don't you think the goal? I totally agree with you because I do a weekly Q&A on fasting, and I get the question all the time, how long should I fast for X condition? How long should I fast for this? And my comments always are, well, what is your goal?

And what are you eating? And there's more to that. It's not something as simple as what I can answer on a live Q&A. But I think that what we're trying to do with fasting and the way I teach it is fasting variation is we are trying to mimic our cave person day where we went through times of feasting and we feasted on healthy food and then we went through times of fasting. And there was a lot of variation to that. We may have gone through the whole summer with so much food, but then go into the winter

and we had to go into more of the ketogenic energy system. So if you just mimic that, that was not a very linear experience for cave people. It was random every single day. And that, I believe, based off what I'm seeing and the people who are applying these principles is what we want to get back to. It's not fasting the same time all day. It's not eating the same time all day. We need variation.

What are your thoughts on that? I agree and I disagree. I, and I mean, I'm like the paleo guy. Right. So the bulk of the research is, so I have a talk that never got around much because COVID happened and the title of the talk is longevity.

Are we trying too hard? Maybe what I'll do, I'll send it to you and then you can share it with your community. But when I really, I've been interested in, Again, like my first published article on fasting was 2005. And I'm really intrigued by this stuff. But as I started digging in and so when animals are fed a species appropriate diet and are fasted, intermittently fasted, they live shorter lives. They die younger.

And so when we, so that's a chunk of data. When we look at what animals are fed in a lab setting, they're, universally overweight. Like you have to really work to take a lab raised animal and do something to them. They have to be overtly calorie restricted to just not give them cancer, give them diabetes, cause them to be overweight. And the more and more I dug into it, I was kind of like, well, if some, these animals are being fed a very poor diet and feeding them less of the very poor diet is better.

Like that that makes sense. But again, when we start poking around and looking at more of like a species appropriate diet, I don't, I'm not sure how much upside there is waiting on the backside of a protein adequate, satiating diet that people spontaneously find calorie maintenance. Like there might be some, but I'm not sure. And I'm super in the minority on this. Like everybody is really geeked out on this stuff. And I fully acknowledge that, you know, fasting can be a great tool to get people in and started down these roads.

But then I, I've seen folks that were avoiding protein because of mTOR and IGF. Yeah, you're going to the extreme people. Yeah. Well, but there's a lot of them out there. There's a lot of them. There's a lot of fasting. And they, you know, and then when they do eat, they avoid protein. And these folks were cold.

they looked. They didn't look like they handled themselves in it. Like if somebody tried to mug them, they were, they, the mugger was getting their wallet for sure because there was no fight there. If this person's car slid off the road and went down an embankment, I don't know if this person was like climbing their way back up the hill and hiking to, to get help. And so this is where I am much more in that, that camp of like resistance training, adequate protein, sun on your skin. And it, And I do some time restricted eating. Like I probably have about a, you know, a six to eight hour window most days. Some days it's not that.

My digestion seems to be better as a consequence of that. But it's, I'm just not super sure how much more upside exists beyond that spot. Now, that's said, though, if we can't get somebody to modify the type of food they're eating, If we can't get somebody to modify the amount of food they're eating other than some sort of constrained eating window, different story. We're using it in a very targeted fashion there. But it's, yeah, like I get people cranky and angry with me all the time because I'm not sure how much more upside there is in some of these scenarios. But again, for many people that first experience of fasting, maybe the first time they've ever experienced, legit ketosis.

And they're like, oh, I could feel this clearheaded all the time. Okay, sign me up for this. You know, this is the first time that they've been able to drive really powerful, you know, chronic inflammatory conditions basically into remission. Okay. Like you've got my attention now. You know, so, so I acknowledge that this thing can be a really powerful tool. I just hope that people wield it more like a jeweler's hammer than like a sledge.

hammer, you know, and I see a lot of sledge hammering with it out, out in the interwebs. Yeah. Yeah. You know, how my whole YouTube channel got started is I was just teaching the science that I was finding on fasting and all the people who had read the obesity code had become, I call them the oh matters, where they had become the one meal a day and they told the exact scenario that you said, where they got great results and then their health started to fall apart. And I was working with my patients teaching them how to vary their fast and vary their foods. And I just started teaching that on YouTube. And I found to your point that there were a lot of people that get so obsessed with it,

that they do do it in the extreme amount. So I would agree with you on that. Then I look at things like the New England Journal of Medicine's meta analysis that came out and said, well, we now have decided intermittent fasting based off the research we're looking at is good for diabetes, obesity, neurodegesis. neurodegenerative, Alzheimer's, things like that. And I think in that study, to your point, they were looking at people who were eating a horrible diet.

And then all they did is add in fasting. And then they saw some improved, some incredible metabolic changes. So what I hear you is you're sort of taking the conversation to another level where you're like, okay, that's great. But then once you've got your diet really dialed in and you're adding in more protein and you're building more muscle through. working out, then where does fasting fit in at that point? It may not need to be your primary tool.

But if the individual is just like, I'm going to eat what I'm going to eat, but I'm open to eating between this time and this time, then that's, that in my mind is where fasting is a public health tool. Yeah. Yeah. What do you think, yeah. What do you think this 12% of Americans metabolically fit should be completely unacceptable to us. What do you think our way out? That number, it came out last year, that study,

or at least became popular last year. And I found that so disturbing. And then when you look at the immune damage that happens when somebody is metabolically unhealthy, and we've only got 12% of Americans metabolically healthy, I look at that statistic. I look at the New England Journal of Medicine meta-analysis, and I say, okay, let's just get people intermittent fasting so we improve metabolic health. What I'm hearing you say, though, is that there's more to that story. What do you think would get us metabolically healthy right now? That's simple. I think we need, no, I think your point is super well made. And I think that intermittent fasting can and should be a piece of the puzzle. And I think that this is what has been frustrating is that there's been a

one size fits all message coming generally from kind of mainstream diet. circles. It's like low fat, high carb, high fiber. And that works okay for some people. Like just for me, my digestive issues, that that approach crushes me just from my ulcerative colitis thing. Like, it does not work. It doesn't provide appetite control. I get hungry. I get cyclically hungry. Like, it's a terrible experience for me. Some people do really well with low carb diets. Some people, you know, this time, Peter Tia did a great, you know, this stuff has been hidden in plain sight, but he was basically said we can encourage people to eat less of whatever it is that they're eating. And that works for almost no one, but it works for a few people.

We can encourage people to eat different amounts of the foods that they're eating. And this could be high fat, low carb, could be high carb, low fat. And that works for a certain cross-section of people. And then the other piece is temporal. It's timing. And so when and how are you eating? Omad, fasting, mimicking diets, you know, etc. And so, you know, given the abysmal state of maybe 12% of people are metabolically healthy, I would say after COVID, that's probably more like 9% of people because virtually everybody got sicker and fatter being at home and being scared and terrorized and everything. So we need every tool that we can at our disposal to address this stuff.

But I guess in this, you and I are talking at a pretty high level on this because we're both practitioners dealing with this stuff. And sometimes I hesitate saying anything because it can be confusing when people are just at the beginning bottleneck of this. Which direction do I go and they just need something? They need a life jacket, drumtum, doesn't matter what color it is, you know. But I do see folks that get some benefit initially from any one of these interventions, whether, again, you know, people in the keto scene, they get geeked out on the autophagy and the fear of mTOR and this promise that, like, if we just suppress mTOR, that, you know, we'll never get cancer and we'll live forever.

And it's a lie. Like, they're really taking a very myopic view of a highly complex scenario and they end up, like, losing significant muscle mass. So now they're frail at a young age. And if you, okay, maybe you do or don't get cancer. I don't think that modifying mTOR and the way they're describing is going to affect that at all. But guaranteed if you slip and fall, your likelihood of being institutionalized after that because you're incapable of caring for yourself just went through the roof because you lost all your muscle mass and your bone density sucks. So these are the kind of nuanced things that I'm trying to inject into this story so that. so that we can sift and sort people into more appropriate buckets,

but also provide them these different tools, which clearly they need. You know, given the ubiquity of crappy food, the temporal part may be the only tool that we're really able to use at the end of the day. And from a public health perspective, it could be that some amount of intermittent fasting or, or time restricted eating,

maybe the only thing that averts like the looming, catastrophes we have on neurodegenerative disease, type 2 diabetes and obesity related issues. Yeah. Yeah. I had at the peak last year of the pandemic, I had a principal at a high school reach out to me and said she was in South Carolina and she said that her teachers were really scared about COVID had just come through their town. And what I'd get on a Zoom call with her teachers and talk to them about what they can do

around their immunity. So of course I went in and talked about metabolic health. And when I got to some of the lateral changes, I was talking about just swapping out your oils for good oils versus bad oils. This one teacher, brave man, asked me, he said, if I'm standing at the peanut butter aisle and I have a choice between a peanut butter with good oils or bad oils, that's an $8 difference in that jar of peanut butter was the way he explained it. And he's like, that's $8 that I do not have. And then another teacher said the way my life is so full and busy being a teacher that the only way for me to even be able to eat is to drive through McDonald's, grab some food. And so they kind of pushed back on me, which was really interesting. But it gave me a perspective that's different than we're talking about and made me realize we do need a free tool.

We need something that everybody can do. and even if they're going to persist with eating McDonald's. Right. Yeah. And I mean, you know, we see this within the meat elitist scene. Like people will say it should be grass fed meat or nothing. And it's like, okay, so the family of four trying to raise kids and trying to provide nutrient dense food for their kids. The Walmart or Costco meat is just goddamn fine.

And it's way superior to a bowl of cereal or, or, goldfish for those growing kids. They get tons of nutrients. They need the protein to grow, the iron, the zinc, et cetera. And so this is kind of a funny thing. Like the seed oils, it's kind of like, yeah, like you don't want to guzzle the stuff by the gallon. But at the same time, like if you, if you have a big jar of peanut butter and you like peanut butter and it's satiating and it gets, you know, and you eat that with a piece of fruit as part of your two meals a day because you're doing some, you know, two meal time restricted eating and it's got a little bit of sat flower oil in it. And we're going to shake that person down over that. We're idiots. Like,

that is dumb. That is so, so missing the, the bigger picture. The person going through the drive-through at, you know, McDonald's, get an extra burger patty or two, ditch half or all of the buns. You know, that's a huge win. And instead of a sugary soda, do a tea or even, God forbid, a diet soda. Just don't drink a ton of sugar on top of that, you know, and then people start freaking out about like, what about aspartame? It's like, well, aspartame is probably not great. But worrying about aspartame relative to high fructose corn syrup is worrying about your dripping faucet when your house is burning down. It is so misallocating, you know, resources there. So, and I think that this is our continual challenge, you know,

taking these big picture things to get people moving forward. Are seed oils great? No. Um, but should that should you go crazy trying to avoid seed oils? Well, if you have really complex health issues and like that's kind of where you've ended up maybe, but for the lion's share, people that just, um, they're not doing a bagel. They're not doing nachos like they're doing a peanut butter and apples and some chicken. That's a win. Like that, that is. win, win, win all day long. Like we can see it metabolically. The person feels better.

They look better. They perform better. So yeah. See, but this is funny. I think that that was golden what you just said there because again, I'm going to go back to this 12% because I have obsessed on how sad that number is. And I realize that we got to help the person who it doesn't have the financial resources and help them understand what they can do to become metabolic.

healthy or we're never going to bring that number up. And as more emerging viruses appear and we go through more of this chaos, this metabolic health has to be the thing that we address. But we have to be able to address it for all socioeconomic backgrounds. So I love what you just said. I think that is so powerful. We did a piece. I think I shopped exclusively for a month at Walmart. And it was like paleo. And it was easy. It was easy. And like there was tons of grass fed meat there. And there was this and there was that.

And, you know, but the, was all the produce organic? No, it doesn't matter. Like it doesn't matter. Particularly again, relative to the family of four just getting going. Both parents are working. The kids are in school. They're sending school lunches if they even still can because schools get so squirly about like sending tree nuts.

different things. So you're trying to feed your kids well so that they, they aren't, aren't crazy. And those folks are like, we know we need to eat better. We want our kids to be healthier. And so they are only going to be allowed to shop at whole foods and everything is organic and the meat is organic and grass fed and it's $32 a pound. It's like, this is ridiculous stuff. You know, and it's, I see people, one, dismiss ideas. like fasting and keto and paleo. And they're like, well, that's just elitist. That's for wealthy people.

And I really find that repugnant. I was, I have a, I just move my office around. I don't know if I have it, but I have a, I have a food stamp from when I was five years old. And I went shopping with my mom. And I was like, hey, mom, what are you using there? And she was like, I'll tell you when we get in the car. And she was like, so we're poor. And the government sends us money.

And this is some of the money we use to buy food. And I was like, okay, I'm never going to do that. that's an adult. Like I just like, but I kept this thing. And some people are in situation where they have to and it's great that we have safety nets. But when people just dismiss the notion that someone who is comparatively poor has no capacity to change their situation, I find that so incredibly disempowering that I literally want to throttle the person saying it. It's like, I get that they may have challenges. Let's figure out how we facilitate the ability to change that situation and support the individual, not just explain away for them how they're going to

fail this from the beginning. Like, that's ridiculous to me. So yeah, and this is, you know, whether socioeconomic stuff or COVID or whatever, like these minorities and low socioeconomic standing, these are the people that are hit the hardest by all this, like the wealthy and the middle class. They absorb it. They're able to absorb it, you know, but those are the people that we really should be thinking about. And I don't know, this is always, and I'm just diverting here, and I'm sorry, if you want to cut this out, you can absolutely cut this out. I'm fascinated. But I'm not going to go there. I'm not going to go there. It'll get a thing. So I'll use better judgment right now. Oh my God. You're funny. Again, this is why I love intermittent fasting.

Fasting of all type is because it's free. And you can give it to a CEO who has no time. You can give that tool to the teacher in South Carolina that is burning the candle at both ends and doesn't have money. And we can start to move the needle on their metabolic health. So it takes time and money I find are the biggest hurdles to people being able to get well. So if we take that off the plate, now at least we're a step forward. So that's why I like, again, that study just, it wakes me up at night. It really burns in my brain that we've got to come up with some solutions. And when you look at what big food is doing, it's, it's, we're not, that's like a beast that I do not know. It's like big pharma. I just don't know how we're going

to be able to stop the damage to health that these big corporations are doing. But what we can do, people like you and me, is we can empower the individual to start to figure out how to create a lifestyle based off their socioeconomic constraints or, or boundaries, that is going to make them metabolically healthy. I personally think metabolic health is the number one health crisis right now that needs to be addressed. We don't have an immune system problem. We have a metabolic health problem. And I just am searching for tools to be able to help these people because it's unfair when

the South Carolina teacher goes to McDonald's because she doesn't have the time and she's teaching our youth and toxifying. herself, building metabolic damage, making her more immune compromise, that scenario breaks my heart and needs to change. Well, and you, you know, it's funny, I was just talking about kind of the, the meat elitist and whatnot, but a lot of my pushback on fasting has been directed at the people who are at the outer edges of our community. It's the people who they've read every Peter Ritia blog, and they've read every Peter Ritia blog, and And they have Rhonda Patrick as like a wake-up voice on their phone, you know, talking about gut microbiota and stuff like that.

And these are the people that I've done a lot of my recent talks catered to because I see them going overboard. And the funny thing about that is I bitch and bemoan all the time how people are looking at this tiny top of this pyramid of a lunatic fringe and how that's going to have zero impact on. the bulk of people. And so it's kind of funny. I fell prey to some of my own, um, my own stuff there. And, and you make a really, uh, super credible case that, uh, some degree of intermittent fasting, time restricted eating is a remarkably, uh, a democratic way of helping people reach better metabolic. You, you, you, you did some, some, uh, perspective changing for me. So I really appreciate that because I've noodle on that stuff. but I haven't really couched it as much in terms from like a public health perspective.

It's like, okay, are we going to win against big food? Probably not. Okay, if we just get people to eat it between these hours and these hours, at least maybe we are turning a tide of some kind, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I, you know, I only have come to this place out of two experiences.

And one was when we went into the pandemic, it was, I was very clear, we don't have a virus problem. We have a host problem. what's going on with the host. So when I went to go research that, I saw metabolic health. But then when I had this interaction with these South Carolina teachers, my heart hurt afterwards. I thought I didn't do those people a good service. I should have just said, whatever you're eating, the research shows if you eat it in a 10-hour window and you leave 14 hours for fasting right now that you're immune to metabolic damage. So let's just start there. That doesn't cost you any money. The whole class should have been that for those people.

I would agree and I think one of the gimmies is like no liquid calories, like a diet soda in lieu of a standard soda and then whatever else you can pull off. And I think that that and try to get a whack of protein at every meal, whether it's a bag of jerky or whatever. And I think that that's really actionable and meets people much more where they are. And it's not so complex. Like we've talked at some pretty high level stuff on this. And for the vast majority of people, that's not what they need.

They just need to know how to feed. We'll, yeah. Yeah. Let's just move the needle a little bit. Let's just get, you know, your A1C now a little bit. Let's just get you a little bit moving in a positive direction because the way I see it right now is we're moving in such a bad direction that we got to start with the people that can't afford stuff and don't have the time and money. Absolutely. Yeah.

Awesome. I have so many other questions for you, but I want to respect your time. The one thing I have to tell you, and I have to talk about this, when I brought element into my house, I love the taste of it. It's, you know, easy to drink. And my 21-year-old and 19-year-old got a hold of it. And pretty soon, they figured out that it's an incredible tool post-party. And all of a sudden, I've got, you guys have to have a whole market.

for this because my 19 year old's about to go off to college next on Saturday. And we're putting his packing his stuff together. And he's like, can you get me some boxes of element? So I got him like four boxes. His girlfriend just went off last week. I brought her a care package of a couple boxes of element. She sends me a picture from her dorm room where she's got element in some special spot. Explain why it's good for hangovers.

And you need to open up the market for the college students. So the funny thing is we weren't sure if element would take as like an electrolyte product. And so the first couple of flavors were such that we could pivot and have it be a drink mix. So like the citrus and then like the habanero lemon and you know all that stuff. And so I mean, one, it tastes really good as kind of a drink mix base. And then most of a hangover is dehydration and sodium depletion. And so if you fix the dehydration and the sodium depletion, then a significant, there's also just the basic poisoning of, you know, detoxifying ethanol, but you know, by your liver. But most of what we feel terrible from low electrolyte status and dehydration.

And so it really addresses that. And I wouldn't say it's a total get out of jail free card, but it's shocking how much worse one could feel if you've had a couple of drinks and not had element versus like wrapping the night up with one of those or like, you know, kind of going in between or again using that as like your drink base. It's kind of remarkable. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I took it and I put it in a big jar in our house and like, I'm like, now I know how much my kids are drinking because I can go and be like, oh my gosh, where'd all the element go? it's really, it's really amazing.

But they are like, they're like, I feel good on it. So, you know, I always just love that nutrients go back into them. The other question that I have for you that I really want to answer. And I've talked a lot. Like last week I interviewed Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, who is really big on protein, as you know. And there were two things that I discussed with her that were that I've been noodling on. One is that she believes when we eat protein that you got to hit a 30 gram mark to initiate the, nutrient sensors for amino acids in muscles in order to grow muscle.

Would you agree with that? Yes. And she and I are great friends. And she is maybe even more neurotic about that preventing sarcopenia than I am. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you would say if I go and I eat a hard boiled egg, which has like, you know, 17.

Yeah. Something like that. Like, it's not a huge, but it's still pretty packs of a protein punch. I'm not triggering muscle growth until I eat enough hard-boiled eggs to get to that 30-gram mark. Correct. Yeah. Okay. And how many amino, how many, how much protein do you feel like people need in a day? The bracketing that I have is a gram of protein per pound of lean body mass all the way up to a gram of protein per pound of body weight. So if we had a 200 pound male 10% body fat could be as low as 180 grams of protein or as high as 200, 210 grams of protein.

And that seems to be a pretty good operating window there. And part of our healthy rebellion community, we do three times a year resets where people focus on food, sleep, movement, and community, kind of the four pillars of health. we have not had a single person who had body composition goals who was eating adequate protein, not one. And this is in thousands of people going through this. And these are people like, Rob, I read your first book in 2010 and I got a lot of benefit. But, you know, I just haven't been able to shake the last 15 pounds. And then when we really get in and look at what they're doing, we have people weigh and measure

their food for about a week. And they're like, son of a gun, I was eating like 50 percent. under the amount of protein I was supposed to eat. And we fix that and just magic happens with that. Yeah. And so do you think there's ever a scenario where a vegetarian can thrive? So vegetarian could be, I mean, I don't exactly know what that, like vegan is, let's start with vegan.

Yeah, there's lots of variations. It's going to be tough. It's going to be tough. And what we find is that because the protein is very non-dense, they eat more calories overall. And this is that protein leverage hypothesis thing. To hit their protein minimums, they end up eating more calories overall.

If you look at the protein and the nutrition in two or three ounces of steak, it's like 200 calories. You need to eat 800 calories of beans and rice to get the same amino acid profile. So it's just tough. It's very tough to pull that off. You have to do a lot of protein concentrates, tofu, tempe, things like that. It tends to be a very monochromatic diet.

You know, when we shift to vegetarian, again, I'm not, some people say fish works, some people say dairy works. Like the more latitude you have and the more access to relatively dense protein sources, then the easier it is to pull that off. But I, some people have good body composition on, on a kind of low protein, uh, vegan diet, or at least they're skinny. Um, but I, I think it's, it's fraught with difficulty to really make that work, particularly over the long haul.

So you should go back and talk to Gabrielle because one thing that she mentioned is that there's a new research coming out that some people's microbiome actually will make amino acids. And those people, you probably already know about this, that those people may be okay on a vegetarian diet because they have the right microbes to make the amino acids to support. Yeah. So it's not just what you're putting down in your pie hole, but they may be, making some in addition to that. Right, which is fascinating. And this may be some of the inter-individual variation that we see like one person does it and they do great. Another person does a vegan, vegetarian diet. And it just craters them. Yeah. How do you explain that? And this is where I could geek out on the microbiome because I think that's where you explain it,

is that we have such variations of the microbiome. So. But the real takeaway there at the end of the day is that the person had to hit a protein minimum, whether they consumed protein specifically or whether their gut microbiome assisted them in hitting that protein minimum. That was a non-negotiable piece of that, that story. And how do you know if you have that strain of bacteria that's doing that? So you would only know because you might be listening to this and going, well, the vegetarian and vegan diet works for me. And so that would be your only clue. So yeah. Yeah. Well, this was awesome. I could, I could chat with you all day. I have five questions for you.

Some of them we ask every guest. Some of them are unique to you. So let me just rapid fire these at you for the last little bit. I'll do my best to rapid fire answer. I do terribly at that. Yeah. It's all good. I'm as talkative as you are.

Okay, we're creating a book, a list of our guest's favorite books. So at the end of the year, we're going to put it together. What's the one book? And you can say one or two that you feel like everybody needs to read. Oh, man. From like a health perspective. It can be anything. Some people have said fiction.

So it's like the book that just really like you like opens your mind to something new. And you think, God, if humans just read this, they might have a different perspective. Okay. Thomas Sowell economics in one course. Oh. Okay. We haven't had that one. And so tell us why.

as ill-informed as folks are on nutrition, and probably rightfully so, they just live their lives and everything, people are shockingly ill-informed on the basics of economics. And economics isn't just money, it's resources and the way that resources get allocated around the planet. Like the way a termite mound operates is an economic engine and resource reallocations. engine. And in my opinion, a lot of the problems that we face societally are an outgrowth of people operating from an emotional spot of what they think the world should be versus the logical reality of what economics and resource allocation is. And Thomas Sol is one of my favorite people

in the world, a black man born in very humble means. Got a PhD in economics ended up at Stanford and has been a luminary in economics for 50 plus years. So an amazing man in a very accessible short piece that, again, I think that 80 or 90 percent of the problems that we face today are at least to some degree in outgrowth of people just really not understanding economics and or the reality of economics being so at odds with what they're. emotional thoughts about what the world should be versus what it is and it creates. Ironically, a lot of where people go wrong is, in my opinion, is they want to do good by people, but the path to hell is oftentimes paved on good intentions.

Yeah. Yeah. And we are willing to just take a headline or a social media blurb or clickbait of some kind and then call that truth. I also think we just, on every topic, we need to teach people how to go. deep in their thinking. I heard recently that actually in Finland, they're doing this with kids, where they are teaching kids how to critically think. And that is missing in our education system, for sure. Well, you know, it just says a little bit of funny backstory. If you do some research

on where the Finnish school system came from, they sent researchers to the United States back in the 1950s and went all over the country and found the best practice. being used within our school system and then consolidated it down and systematized it. We never systematized a lot of the good stuff that was happening here. And then we went down all these other kind of squirly routes. But they developed a lot of the finished school system off of observing. Like there was a time where like we had a really robust gifted and talented program. We had a very deep special ed program. So there was a lot of customization to meet the kid where they were. And over the course of time, it's become a one size fits all, which ends up

serving no one. Yeah. Yeah. We even had some PE programs too. That got taken away back in the day. Okay, what's the craziest thing you've ever done for your health? Or my health, man. Or it may have ended up not being for your health, but you're willing to give it a go. I mean, the most disastrous thing I did was a vegan diet and trying to. trying to do that while doing a graduate program. And it nearly killed me. I thought I could just get by on three hours of sleep and live in Seattle and never see the sun and eat a diet that it was undigestible for me.

That was catastrophic and nearly killed me. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. I can see that. If you could give a concise definition of health. And I'm not saying that because you like to talk. I'm just saying that we do.

don't have a good definition of health for people. What would your definition be? The ability to do most everything you would like to do and feel good doing it. Amazing. I think that's, that is a perfect definition. I have found people think it's like a, like something that you're going to get to and you're going to arrive at. And one of the things I've been teaching my community is I feel like we shouldn't look at health as a noun, and that's how it's used in the English language, it's a verb. It's action. So we got to redefine it, which is why I love what you said. So the pandemic was crazy, but a lot of good came out of it for, I mean, there are lists of good that came out of it for my family. What's a big aha and

and something good that came out of it for you? Oh, man. I mean, our family has been very fortunate during the whole thing, but we've seen a lot of people that really had a very rough sledding during all this. It's not really that positive of a thing, but it made clear to me that social media may end up being the undoing of Western civilization. Right. Yeah. And I have social media accounts, but I finally, I really like working with people. I like helping people. But I have 100% constrained myself to doing podcasts and then being in my healthy rebellion community. And that's it. Like I just can't do the other stuff. I post things. And I have my assistant post it, but I don't interact. I don't check comments. And it kind of guts me because I've done that for like

23 years. I love doing that. I love interacting with people. But when I learned maybe a year and a half two years ago that the algorithms are tweaked to promote conflict. It made a lot of sense because when it was just back in the old forum days, I would chat with people about economics or social political stuff or health or whatever. We would start off at very different places. And I wouldn't say that I convinced everybody to believe what I was saying. But at least I got, man, that is a very reasoned, thoughtful thing. And I'm going to give that some thought. At least I got that. times I got you're an asshole and just go die, you know, screw off. Everybody on social video gets that. Yeah, but that's all that we get now, you know, and it was interesting because

I'm like, wow, am I like losing my mojo? Do I do, do I not care? Am I not empathic anymore? Because I just couldn't, no matter how hard I worked to make a case and like just to get some dialogue. Yes. There was no dialogueing, you know. And then when I, I think it was the social dilemma film and then just some articles talking about how these companies figured out that, you know, cat memes are cool and they make the rounds and, you know, good news stories are okay and they make the rounds. Nothing spreads like wildfire like figuring out what makes someone upset. And so even to the tune that these things figure out, well, Rob doesn't really get along with Nadia. So we're going to make sure that Nadia sees as much of Rob's stuff as possible to get her inflamed and to get him

inflamed. And when I figure that out, I'm like, this literally could be the undermining of what we consider Western liberal civilization. And with some of the censorship, like my website was censored back in 2017 as part of the Google Owl update, like way before getting censored was cool. It was one of the first people to do it. And like overnight, 97% of my site traffic disappeared because Google, viewed my material as being dangerous. And the credible material that it would refer people to was WebMD. And some people might cheer that. I have lots of folks that I disagree with, you know, vegans, you know, whatever.

I would be horrified by seeing these people deplatformed and removed. And so I know that, again, that was like not the concise answer at all. But, you know, don't worry about the long answer. I think you're spot on that. people don't realize the information that they're, that they're, how it's being manipulated and brought into their brains. And like you,

one of the things that I saw through the pandemic was, A, to, to be able to put content out there and then distance myself. So I'm not attached to how that content's being used on this free platform. And then I've been like, let me get people into like you have your health rebellion group. I have a reset academy.

Like get them there so we can have conversations. So we actually started, I started a coffee talk with my group on Zoom every Saturday morning. And it's so freeing because we're on Zoom. I'm just bringing the information that I'm seeing as it pertains to metabolic health and immune system. And we could have a really cool dialogue and that we can't have on social media anymore. Right. Right. And that maybe we will, my wife and I were talking and I was like, you know, if we went back to like forums and blogs,

Yeah. That was kind of the golden age of the internet in a way because you could find a lot of information. You could find some community. People could be jerks, but it wasn't, it wasn't this weaponized thing. And with the emergence of things like substack and medium and, you know, doing these, these kind of, you know, private communities, maybe we will turn the corner on that. And we'll get something more akin to that because I, part of what I loved about,

interacting with people on Facebook and Instagram and stuff like that. I learned an enormous amount because you get several thousand people who are sharp and they're reading all the papers and they're listening to all the podcast. They're like, hey, Rob, have you heard of this? I'm like, no, I haven't heard of that at all. Like, tell me more. And, you know, it was, it was a good way to get smart fast, you know, by having a smart group of people around you that, you know, supported that. So maybe we, maybe that is the, the, silver lining and all this stuff. Yeah.

And I think you and I both come from the space of we're not trying to get people to think like us. We're just trying to show you some evidence and then you make the decision for yourself. That to me like should be what social media stands for. But it doesn't stand for that anymore. But in our behind like, you know, in a podcast, in a Zoom call, we can start to get people to think again. That, you know, outside of metabolic health, that's my next.

quest is like, let's get people to think about this deeper. Let's help them find their end of one. Let's just, we got to go back to that. But if everything on social media has been censored and put into a really big box, it's just not, that's really difficult because you're getting one message and that's it. Yeah. So, yeah. Okay. Last question. And again, I could chat with you forever. But if you had one message for the world, like you could get into everybody's brain, what would that message be? Oh, man. This is geeky, and I kind of alluded to this, I really think if everybody had a high school physics level understanding of the way the world works, like thermodynamics, energy inputs and outputs, a basic economics perspective, you know, like this economics in one lesson. and then a basic understanding of evolutionary theory, like, it doesn't give you all the answers,

but it allows you to at least begin asking questions. And in my opinion, absent those three things, evolution, economics, and thermodynamics, the world is effectively magic for people. Like, they literally have no idea whatsoever why things work. So like we did this sacred cow book. And one of the examples I use in there, ethanol is held up as this green fuel. And people in corn states are going to cheer that. But it costs more energy than what it gives you.

The people raising corn for ethanol drive their tractors on diesel and gasoline because it's a, it costs more than what it gives. And so it's a boondon. It's a complete farce to say that this is a green thing. And when we talk about climate change and food policy and all kinds of other stuff, again, I see people, you know, for misaligned financial reasons, for kind of simplistic emotional reasons, they will look at something like, well, is ethanol a good, good, viable fuel? And they're like, well, yeah, it comes from corn.

That's got to be great. And it's like, well, it actually costs more energy than what it takes. And I think if people had a basic understanding of that, like, and this is going to sound super hoity-to-to-y, but for a lot of people, I don't even think they know enough to ask the right question. So they're not even on the right planet to get the right answer. They're not even in that, you know, we're in a Zoom room. They're not even in the Zoom room of getting the right answer because they haven't even asked remotely a reasonable question yet. And I think that people would struggle a lot less. They would find a lot less negative surprise in their lives because they kind of intuit and anticipate a lot of the things that are happening around them instead of it happening to them.

And one of the best ways that you can, I'll flip this around. One of the most stressful experiences people have is a lack of agency, sensing a lack of agency and inability to do anything to change their situation. but if you just allow people the ability to understand what it is that's happening to them, like I've been a little bit of a doomsday prepper for like 15 years. I was the one that thought that the housing market was going to blow up in 2005. I couldn't believe it took until like 2008 to go. I was just flabbergasted. But I knew that was going to happen.

I just didn't know when. And the timing is really important. but when it did happen, it wasn't as stressful as it was for any people. I didn't make the decisions that got me in trouble. I missed a lot of opportunities, but for stuff like that, it's better to be early than late. And even with this pandemic, I've known for ages that the potential of a pandemic or an EMP pulse or something like

that was real, that food distribution could be interrupted, that you could have social unrest and all kinds of other things. and it doesn't insulate you from all the effect, but you're not in that terrified, paralyzed moment because it's a complete surprise. How on earth did this happen? Hey, resetters. I just want to start off by saying thank you so much

for all your wonderful reviews and those of you that have left me comments on iTunes. I just greatly appreciate your thoughtfulness and how much you guys are enjoying these episodes. And it seems like you're enjoying. them as much as I am enjoying doing them. One of the things that I've learned in just interacting with so many people is that we've really lost the art of deep conversations. And for me, the Resetter podcast stands for having meaningful conversations with people who are thinking

about health, about life, about mindset in a way that we may not be getting on social media or in mainstream media. And so I just want to say, give you a lot of it. you guys a shout out and just say thank you for participating in this process with me. Because as much as I absolutely love delivering the information to you, I love even more knowing that it's impacting your life. So please let us know if there's anything we can do to make this podcast more customized to you, to make it better. We are now officially in season two and we are working to bring you the best conversations that health influencers have, that mindset changers can give and to really deliver you something that you're not able to get anywhere

else. So from the bottom of my heart, as I always say my YouTube, from the bottom of my heart, I am deeply appreciative of you. I am deeply grateful to be on this journey with you and let's get healthy together.