The Rich Roll Podcast - Our Broken Plate: Disrupting Nutritional Science, Intermittent Fasting & How He Helped Penn Jillette Lose Over 100 Pounds

Episode Date: February 8, 2016

If you enjoyed my conversation with Dr. Rhonda Patrick, you're going to love today's conversation with my new friend Ray Cronise. A passionate innovator, disrupter and scientist, Ray began his career as a Materials Scientist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, where he worked for 15 years in Physical and Analytical Chemistry and Biophysics as Assistant Mission Scientist on four Spacelab missions and projects like the impact of microgravity on biophysics; and space station environmental life support systems. I have no idea what any of that means, but it sounds impressive. Ray went on to co-found ZERO-G– the world’s first private parabolic flight operation – with XPRIZE creator Peter Diamandis. Otherwise known as vomit comets, ZERO-G flights produce weightlessness and approximate space flight conditions for purposes of scientific research, cinema and entertainment. But it wasn't until Tim Ferriss' The 4-Hour Body* featured Ray's pioneering work with cold stress therapy as as a tool for fat loss that Ray began popping up everywhere as the man behind the Metabolic Winter Hypothesis. Results motivated this prodigious scientific mind next to peer keenly into the chemistry, physiology, mechanics and research methodology behind human nutrition — specifically, what is wrong with current nutrition research and how to fix it. After copious investigation, analysis and self-experimentation, he has arrived upon a well supported but perhaps contrarian conclusion: a whole food plant-based diet is optimal for long-term health and wellness. Despite decades spent struggling to manage his own weight and stay fit, for the past six years Ray has kept the weight off using a combination of cold stress, healthful sleep cycles, and a plant-based nutritional regimen. Mainstream culture would deem Ray's ways extreme. But ask Ray and he will tell you that the way most people live and eat today is actually a radical departure from our natural state and is likely the root cause of our epidemic of chronic lifestyle illness. After listening to this guy you will realize one thing – he did not arrive at his conclusions lightly. Conclusions soon to be explored in his upcoming book, Our Broken Plate, which aims to change the way people look at all diets so they can make lasting lifestyle changes that improve what Ray calls healthspan. Over the course of an amazing 3 hours, we cover an absurd amount of territory, including: * Ray's upcoming book ‘Our Broken Plate' * the insanity of our protein obsession * the “over nourishment” of America * the impact of caloric & protein restriction on longevity & cancer * the impact of thermogenesis on diet and exercise * the importance of separating diet and exercise * telomeres and aging * nutrient deficiencies, supplements, instinctive eating; and * exactly how Penn Jillette lost 100 pounds Enjoy! Rich

Let's change our dialogue about food. Let's change our dialogue about exercise. Let's look at this stuff and let's change the way we actually do research. That's Ray Cronice. And today it's all about nutrition science, intermittent fasting, and so much more on the Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Greetings, kind dwellers of the podcast universe.

It's Rich Roll here, your host of The Rich Roll Podcast. Thanks so much for tuning in today. If you're new, welcome. This is the show where each week I sit down with the big thinkers, the paradigm-breaking minds and personalities across all categories of health, wellness, fitness, diet, nutrition, creativity, entrepreneurship, meditation and mindfulness, yoga, all the good stuff. And the reason that I do it is to help all of us unlock and unleash our best, most authentic selves. So thank you so much for tuning in today.

If you're new, welcome. I appreciate everybody who's been sharing the show with their friends and on social media. And of course, major shout out to everybody who has made a habit of using the Amazon banner ad at richworld.com for all your Amazon purchases. We just reconfigured the website a little bit to make that banner ad a little bit more prominent. I got a lot of emails from people saying they couldn't find it and they wanted to support, which is really sweet. So it's pretty easy to find on any podcast episode pages right there at the top. There's also a toggle switch if you're in the UK. People in Canada, I tried. They didn't approve my request for an amazon.ca, but I'm working on it. In any event,

thank you to everybody who has made a habit of that. For those that are new to the show, it doesn't cost you a cent extra. You click through that banner ad, buy whatever you're going to buy on Amazon. It doesn't cost you anything extra. It's just that Amazon kicks us some loose commission change out of their coffers, throws it our way, and that really allows us to continue to do what we do. So mad love, mad shout out to everybody who has done that. Thank you so much. All right. So this week on the show, I've got my new best buddy, Ray Cronheis on the podcast. He is the guy that my friend, Matt Frazier over at No Meat Athlete calls the nutrition guru you've likely never heard of,

or perhaps more accurately, he's the nutrition guru you have heard of, but just didn't realize it. I've got much, much more I want to say about Ray in a second, but first. All right, you guys, today it's all about Ray Cronise. So who is this guy? Well, let's break it down. A passionate innovator, disruptor, and scientist, Ray began his career as a material scientist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, where he worked for 15 years in physical and analytical chemistry and biophysics as assistant mission scientist on four space lab missions and on projects like the impact of microgravity on biophysics and space station environmental control and life support systems. That is like a crazy mouthful. I can't even begin to understand what that is.

Ray began appearing on the cultural landscape by virtue of Tim Ferriss' book, The 4-Hour Body, where he was featured as a pioneer of cold stress therapy as this powerful tool for fat loss, which is kind of a manifestation of Ray's personal 20-year struggle to manage his own weight and remain fit. He also co-founded Zero-G with XPRIZE creator Peter Diamandis, which was the world's first private parabolic flight operation. It's that thing otherwise known as the vomit comet, those planes that create weightlessness and approximate spaceflight conditions, which is really, really cool. In recent years, however, Ray has aimed his prodigious science mind keenly on nutrition. And after copious research and self-experimentation, he has arrived upon the considered conclusion that a plant-based diet is optimal for long-term health and wellness. And after listening to this guy, I think you're going to realize one thing. He did not arrive at this conclusion lightly. This guy is completely next level when it comes to truly understanding how the body

functions and the profound impact of nutrition on physiological processes. And today we cover it all a ton of ground, which includes our obsession with protein and the overnourishment of America. We talk about intermittent fasting and the relationship between caloric and protein restriction on things like longevity, cancer, and healthspan. We talk about intermittent fasting and the relationship between caloric and protein restriction on things like longevity, cancer, and healthspan. We talk about the impact of thermogenesis on diet and exercise, the importance of separating out diet from exercise. We talk about telomeres and aging, which is something I touched on with Dr. Rhonda Patrick, who is buddies with Ray. We talk about nutrient deficiencies, supplements,

and instinctive eating. And of course, we talk about how Ray famously helped magician Penn Gillette lose 100 pounds on a whole food plant-based diet. Ray is an absolutely fascinating guy. So if you enjoyed my recent conversation with Dr. Rhonda Patrick, today's your lucky day. I think you guys are going to freak out with Ray. So let's talk to him. Did you get down to Malibu Creek State Park? Actually, I passed it and went on to Malibu. I got to the ocean.

I had a head for the ocean. Well, it's a nice day out there today. It was actually beautiful. And after writing for the last 30 days, being outside makes a huge difference. Yeah, good. I'm glad to hear that. Well, thanks for taking a break from the writing project. We're going to get into all of that.

I mean, there's so many things to talk about. My biggest fear is going into the weeds too far on any one thing. And perhaps we're not going to cover everything and you can come back and tell me. Yeah, I'm ready to talk about. My biggest fear is going into the weeds too far on any one thing. And perhaps we're not going to cover everything and you can come back. I'm ready to come back. So, you know, if you just want to count on me coming back, we'll do that. Well, we have, you know, we have your scientific background. We have your career at NASA. We have all the work that you've done in thermogenesis, right? Is that the right word term for it? And then we have your more recent exploration of nutrition and weight loss and the current

project. So why don't we just, we can kick it off by talking about the current project because I know that's on your brain right now. Right. And then we can segue into the other stuff. So tell me about the broken plate and then we'll just kind of launch into all the tangents from there. a lot of us do. And the more I dug in, the more I realized that some of the contradictions we have is really the language that we're using around food more than the fact that we don't understand things or that there's contradictions. And so what Our Broken Plate looks at is really two centuries

of how our social relationship with food changed. So if you go back two centuries and sort of fast forward through the literature, if you read like I did most of the major nutrition or metabolic textbooks or studies that came out during that time, sometime around the beginning of the 20th century, the story doesn't change anymore. And what's really interesting is that you can actually see if you read it sort of as a novel and you know how the story ends, you can see where slowly but surely how we talk about food changes. So, for example, you know, we're always – I know people always tweet us both when I talk about protein. So everybody wants to talk about protein, right? Because this is it, this whole, where do you get your protein idea? And what's interesting is, is that, you know, protein happened to be the very first thing,

a very first nutrient that started us looking at food in a different way. So, you know, think about before we start knowing what's in food, food's just sustenance, you know, they didn't shut the pyramids down. Nobody back in the day is thinking about macronutrients yeah micronutrients so just eating and trying to survive exactly they didn't shut the pyramid you know construction down three times a day to feed these guys you know they threw them some water they said chisel pull the ropes you know work you know and every now and then they ate some bread and they ate whatever they could eat and see when you don't know what's in food when you don't have an idea or a notion about what a balanced diet should be, you're just trying to eat.

And of course, we're an animal just like any other animals without the social order. And the idea of knowing what your food has or what you think it should be, we obviously have people that disagree about what those percentages ought to be or what the emphasis should be. So obviously somebody – everybody can't be right. Somebody has to be wrong. But just the act of knowing starts impacting what you're doing every day. Right. And so when you mentioned sort of the story, we learned what this story is. When did you say?

The beginning of the 20th century? Yeah. And so what is that story? Yeah, I think really it changes significantly around 1840 when Justice von Liebig, one of the great German nutritional scientists, he basically organizes food as protein plus fuel. So basically he knows that, hey, protein is something unique that's different, that it becomes the tissue formers. This is something that – As opposed to an energy source. Right. And the other ones are just the energy sources.

And he says, you know, we've got to do something. We have to look at these differently. So now food becomes protein plus fuel. 40 or 50 years by the time Atwater rolls around and everybody knows about the Atwater factors for, you know, calories per gram and nine and four for the protein, proteins, fats and carbohydrates. And now food takes on a new, new meaning because it's really about the economy of food. So what most people don't realize is the reason why Atwater did this was not for a health reason or for a balanced diet reason. The reason why he did this is for what was economically equivalent. So those four – those relationships were energy relationships for what was economically equivalent. And what they did in terms of what people should eat is they actually surveyed what people were eating based on their jobs.

And what's really interesting is we look 100 years later, and our rules of eating are still the same. But when you go back and say, why did they make those rules? The rules are completely nonsense. So then we have to wonder, how in the hell is it that our rules are still the same a century later? And of course, we know we've got a lot of problem now with chronic overnutrition. But how the rules a century later are still the same when we know that the basis for what those rules were is really kind of a crazy idea. Right. Interesting. And so in your estimation, where does this obsession with protein start to creep in and kind of monopolize our approach to foods we're eating, particularly with athletes? Right. Well, you know, what's really interesting is it's an unintended consequence. So it's an unintended consequence. And what I mean by that is that in the beginning, there was calorie

deficiency. Okay. So when you have calorie, when you just don't, when you're economically limited by food or when you are accessing by food and nature, there's just not much food out there, then what you're eating matters a whole lot more. So let's think about a budget. If you've got plenty of money in the bank, $100 is still $100 to someone who has no money. I mean, the value of $100 is the same. But if you barely have enough each month, how each $100 is allocated becomes far more critical. And the same is true of nutrition. When you're barely getting enough to eat, how you allocate each of those nutritional elements matters way more. So we start with the idea that around the turn of the 20th century, economically food

was restricted. And so because of that, we had to look really at food differently. So fast forward, forward, there's a really amazing article by a guy by the name of McLaren. And is this 1974? And it's called the great Protein Fiasco. And to read that article, maybe I'll give you a link. We'll put the link on your podcast so other people can read it. But basically what happened was is kwashiorkor is the only known protein deficiency disease. It turns out it's not one now, but that was the only one that happened. Not one now, but that was the only one that happened. And what he points out in this article in 1974 is we created this entire to-do with children and malnutrition saying they were malnourished and it was a protein deficiency.

It's really just starvation though. That's right. It's when you see the distended bellies and starving exactly children and it turns out kwashiorkor even isn't a protein deficiency it turns out that it's a it's a microbiome issue it's just that these protein supplements help mask the symptom like a lot of diseases we see you know like diabetes you know mask is masks the symptom when someone just switches over to a high fat diet they're not really changing their their diabetes state their diabetes state. They're just masking that the fact that they've got a broken, you know, carbohydrate metabolism. So, so backing up before that is really the Germans.

So the German, all those Germans really wanted to justify meat in the diet. So Rubner is one of these guys. He's an economic, like sort of economic. It was a social status, you know, it was considered to be a food of affluence. So what happens is they start with this idea that you need this amount of protein. So there's a lot of debate and I'll explore this in the book. There's a lot of debate going on right around the turn of the, between the 19th and 20th century about how much quote protein we need. But when we step away from it, and I know you've talked about this before,

but, you know, maybe we talk about it together because it actually leads into longevity, is, you know, really, we don't need any protein. That's the truth. The truth is the word protein doesn't mean anything. In fact, it shouldn't even be a food label. It shouldn't be used in food. And I know that sounds disruptive and crazy,

but you and I both know if you're getting enough to eat and you're eating something that was once alive, you're not going to have quote a protein deficiency. In fact, protein is just those 20 amino acids. And of those 20 amino acids, there's nine of them that are the indispensable or essential ones. And those are the ones we needed to get from the diet. No animal makes them.

So you eat the plant or eat the animal that ate the plant, but the nutrition all came from the plant in the beginning. Right. I mean, the animal is a middleman sort of, you know, efficient repository of those 20 and of course the nine, but we're just, by eating plant-based, you're just sort of cutting out that middleman and going to the same source. Exactly. I mean, the argument that comes up, though, just so we don't forget to talk about it, though, the sort of counterpoint that comes up to that is that, well, these animals, these herbivores digest their food differently. And you can't make this analogy that humans are the same as the rhinoceros. Right. But guess what? They digest protein exactly the same way.

The difference in our digestive tract is the digestion of carbohydrates, another word that I think shouldn't be used. And why do I say that word shouldn't be used? It can be a simple sugar, a starch, cotton like my shirt, paper, bookworms eat paper, or lumber, two by four, cellulose. So termites eat wood, moths eat cotton. So a carbohydrate could be in it. Chitin, when the crabs shell, that's a carbohydrate. So my daughter's taking biochemistry right now.

They've got to learn what carbohydrates really are. And the real difference between the digestive tracts of herbivores and carnivores, et cetera, all really get around how they digest carbohydrates. We all use the same protease, the same kind of protease, the same kind of breakdowns into the breakdown in the gastric juices, the acidic breakdown into those amino acids and absorb them about the same. Where we differ significantly is how do we extract glucose? So a cow is extracting glucose from the fiber of that grass where you and I, that goes straight through. We don't have the ability. So even that excuse is not good. They can't use that one on us either.

That's very interesting. What's, I think, equally important to that that I hear is, well, yeah, but animals have amino acids, these essential amino acids, the one that we really need, the ones we can't synthesize. They have them in their body at about the same concentration we do. body at about the same concentration we do. Because, you know, of course, we're all, all animals are made of about the same thing, you know, versus a, say an asparagus protein, you know, concentration of amino acids. And the other side of that debate is in longevity experiments. So whether it's yeast or flatworms or fruit flies or rodents or even primates, those essential amino acids are the very ones we have to restrict in order to get more longevity. That's interesting.

So if you had to break it down into percentages, a typical human's daily intake of these amino acids, specifically the nine essential amino acids, would be what? I mean, our recommended daily allowance is set at 10% for some reason. I'm sure there's political reasons that went into coming up with that. The answer is in 24 days of a water fast, even doing my amino acid, blood plasma amino acids, every four hours, 24 hours a day on the seventh day, I wasn't deficient in any. In other words, about 90% of your amino acids every four hours, 24 hours a day on the seventh day, I wasn't deficient in any. In other words, about 90% of your amino acids actually get recycled. So when you ask that question, I'm going to reply back. I'm going to say, well,

it depends on what state you're in. So in other words, as you, the longer you go on a lower amino acid ingestion, because you can't store an amino acid. So within four hours of ingesting that protein, it either becomes waste, heat, or glucose. You don't store an amino acid. So within four hours of ingesting that protein, it either becomes waste, heat, or glucose. You don't have an amino acid storage organ. So you see a blood plasma rise of amino acids and then they fall, you know, four to six hours later, you know? So the answer is, is that we have a storage in our plasma. We have a storage of amino acids and a lot of them are recycled. You know, so, you know, we have, for example, you know, back to what proteins are,

think about the gastric juices or the pancreatic enzymes that are used to digest food. Well, we have around a hundred grams of those juices, that pancreatic enzymes, the enterocytes that slough off the lumen into our digestive tract. These are our own tissue. About 100 grams is that. But guess what happens? As soon as you start into a water fast, within the first, and I reproduced some of the, with this fast I just did, I reproduced exactly what Francis and Benedict and those guys did for a 31-day fast around 1918 or so is when they did this. But you start out that you're nitrogen lost. So in other words, the amino acids we digest, they come out as urine.

So that urine, urea, is a byproduct of the first step of using an amino acid. We pop off that urea and that's what comes out. So the first couple of days, you, we pop off that urea and that's what comes out. So the first couple of days you see a really big loss and then it sort of flattens out and gets flatter and flatter. And then you just don't see much loss again. So even in around 24 days, I really only lost about 1.2 pounds of, you know, of, you know, lean mass, but it wasn't all muscle mass. It was all the other kinds of cells that was associated with the 24 pounds of body fat that left me as well. Adipose tissue and the like.

Yeah. So amino acids are all through all of that. And so your body becomes really, really efficient. So where you are today and where I am today is because we don't have huge loads of amino acids that we're doing. We're not slugging down shakes all the time. We're not, we're not, you know, we're not ingesting massive amounts. Your body gets much more efficient with it and utilizes more of it and restores it. If you do the excess of all those amino acids. Yeah, that was the next question. Like people, you know, a lot of people, particularly athletes, they're ingesting, you know, hundreds and hundreds of grams of protein daily. Like what is the metabolic process that occurs when you're taking in so much excess protein? Yeah, they're hammering on their kidneys. So the renal system's

getting hammered on. Most of it's leaving their body as waste heat. Yes, in some sense, some of those amino acids do signal growth, you know, stimulating growth hormone, stimulating IGF-1, insulin-like growth factor. But those are the exact things we want to bring down if we want longevity. So think about it this way. Reproduction, fecundity, to be fecund, you know, reproduction goes up when those amino acids are plentiful and longevity goes down. And conversely, when those things go down, longevity goes up. And we see this across species.

So it's conserved in different organisms. So it's almost like, you know, we have evolved that when things are plentiful, those amino acids are plentiful, it signals, hey, reproduce, go. And a lot of our society is geared around, you know, this virile, you know, testosterone laden, you where, hey, we're done passing on our genes, so we don't have that part going. We can still be physically fit. But if we want to extend our health span, what all of the lab experiments say in terms of all the animals and animal models, that we really need to reduce those things. Right. And that's sort of a core idea at the foundation of this project, really, the idea of restriction for purposes of longevity. And it gets into this idea of kind of looking at the evolution of mammalian species and understanding that longevity is more a function of restriction. And we're living in this era of excess, right?

And that brings in a lot of the thermogenetic ideas that come into play and the fasting and et cetera. But when you give too much of anything to anything, that is impeding longevity, right? And it's in the restriction, it's in the reducing where you're seeing these gains and these benefits. Right. And I think what we're doing is, so a plant-based diet at its highest level is automatically amino acid restrictive, okay? And that used to be an issue when we didn't have enough to eat. Then it starts mattering a lot. But because we have quality food to eat and unlimited amounts of calories, you know, basically, then essentially we don't have that

issue to deal with. And so, you know, we have in the paper, the metabolic winter hypothesis, we have something called the food triangle, where we at the top of the food triangle, the apex of it, we have cruciferous greens, leafy greens, mushrooms, stems like asparagus and celery, and bulbs, you know, onions, garlic, that sort of thing. And then down one descending side, we have plant-based increasing energy sources. So cereals, fruits, starchy vegetables, those kinds of things, legumes. Down the other descending side, we have animal products, which are poultry, fish, chicken, whatever. And what you find is when you actually organize food in this way and you start looking at each side of this food triangle and you say what does this mean in terms of diet so we start with ours a plant-based vegan diet would be you

know down the right side of this food triangle and you say well what are we doing you know well we can look at the nutrient distribution there if we we took down the left side, that'd be like a paleo diet. They're really not today. They've moved really far off of obsessing about meat. So I think it's not fair to say that it's really an Atkins-like diet. I think paleo has moved a long way. I know I'm responsible for making potatoes paleo. So that's kind of funny.

You can Google it. Are you? You're good at that? Yeah, exactly. potatoes paleo so that's kind of funny you can google it yeah exactly if you google ray cronus potato and paleo you'll see they're actually i think they gave me honorary paleo status and it was really a joke to show that a white carb which i hate those words doesn't actually make you gain weight in fact there's no way to gain weight doing that right well you know dr mcdougall has been screaming that from the mountaintops for decades exactly exactly increasingly frustrated that he's not being heard on that point exactly

well i did it for him so i i told him i said you know if you you're you know right now that you know having listened to this you can go back and and see back when i started attending his little workshops and i was there with nathaniel uh domini, who basically is an anthropologist up at Dartmouth, and we started working together, and he does a lot of work on what we would call starchivores, you know? But anyway, the bottom of this food triangle is the energy density stuff. So, if you think about a Western diet, on the bottom we have steak and potatoes. We have burger and fries, fish and chips, pasta and meat sauce. These are all really energy dense foods at the bottom. And eaten together, it means you're going to start aggregating fat. Or if you're trying to survive a hundred years ago when these

combinations came together, if you're trying to survive that's actually a great place if you barely got enough to eat that's a great place to get it but today in our excess that becomes where everybody has now on the right side or on the left side is the paleo like we said hey based on a standard western diet paleo diet means you know we're actually adding increasing amount of vegetables, so plant material. So you might go Atkins would be at maybe the extreme top, and then way down is paleo. Then Mediterranean, they take a little bit more out.

Then we get down to vegetarian, they take even more out. And then we get down to vegan, and they take more out. But then they add sugar, oil, and salt back in and go back to the top. But they just do it with non-animal sourced versions of the same thing. And then eventually we get down to like maybe I'd say a Joel Fuhrman, which would be a nutritarian diet, which was more what I follow. That's kind of where you're coming from. Yeah, that's where I am. And which is I want to make sure that I'm getting plenty of nuts and seeds, not for the fat content that's in them, but for the phytonutrients that are in them, the polysterols, those kinds of other things.

The fat comes along and I have to adjust the starch to make up for that calorie that I'm getting there. So it's what I want from the nut seeds and avocado are the other compounds that are in them, but the fat comes along for a ride. So my diet probably ends up being on the order of say 15 or 20% fat, although I don't track that so much. I eat an ounce, an ounce and a half or so, maybe two ounces of nuts and seeds a day, mainly in sauces and things or some avocado, whatever. And since I'm not exercising at all right now, and we can talk about that, I can't just eat unlimited portions of those so when we look at each side of this fruit triangle and what our next paper that's about to publish

um it's in it's in review now but the next paper is about to publish looks at this energy really closely and says hey let's try to explain some of this from just a really simple energy paradigm but not use the words protein, carbs, and fat. Because as soon as you get rid of those words, foods start meaning a lot more. Because if you can imagine, if we could do right now, if you and I and Rhonda Patrick, I'll throw her in there because she and I, we just did a recording too. I'm going to go down and I was on her podcast, and I'm going to go down and visit her in a couple of weeks. Excellent. So we need to get together here. Here's what we were talking about idea. Imagine if we could get some people to pay to come hang out with all of us for six

weeks. We want to do a study, but we want to do whole food. So we'll let people select what kind of diet they want to do. We follow their biomarkers, have them pay to be there. We all give talks. We all get together. It'd be like sort of a research vacation. I think we could aggregate a lot of people together. We get Dave Asprey in there, all the different competitive ideas out there. And we look at it. And if we just looked at the food triangle and said, eating on each of the descending sides for six or 12 weeks how do you what what happens what happens to blood lipids what happens to blood pressure what happens to you know uh um um your various other biomarkers for longevity you know i love that and and one of the one of the reasons i love it is that it's a very it's it's at its core like anti-dogmatic and every yes

you're just let's look at the science let's take the blood let's analyze it and let's remove all of the vernacular that we're used to that gets us caught up in old ideas that perhaps are not serving us and and you know in fairness let's face it it was a really good first effort to try to segregate things and like whole protein constant or whole carbohydrate constant or whole fat or lipids constant. But that really doesn't help us in the grocery store. And what's happened is those things that we in science want to hold constant have now been translated into complicated terms that really no one knows what they mean because they don't know the difference. Most people don't really see the difference between sugar and a complex carbohydrate, a starch.

But if you don't have the word carbohydrate, if you just say sugar and starch, you can actually see the difference. carbohydrate. If you just say sugar and starch, you can actually see the difference. Now, a scientist can't manipulate that and substitute, for example, if he's taking out some fat from a meat product and adding in a starch, there's a change in protein. They'll say, well, wait a minute, these percentages are all changing. I'm saying, what if we forget the percentages? Because it hasn't worked. The sugar versus fat arguments, you know, debate is getting pretty old at this point. Right, right, right. I don't know. You must get questions all the time like what is your percentage of carbs?

Yeah, and the answer is we don't know. I go, I don't know and I've never thought about it and I've never taken the time to even consider that. So imagine if we just started doing studies and Colin Campbell has been calling for this in his book Whole. But imagine if we just did studies where we just looked at whole food. We said, who cares what the percentages are? Let's just look what the net net is. Let's just look at the net net of health is

the way we might eat or the way Tim Ferriss, another friend of mine, the way he might eat. And rather than create the ideology around it, rather than wrap it with the details, so we don't hold them constant. We've got plenty of studies where they hold them constant. And quite frankly, I don't know that we're any closer now than they were 100 years ago to figuring it out. So what does it hurt to just do something different? And the idea of, back to this book,

of me being able to crowdsource, Ray, why didn't you go to a publisher? Well, I might go to a publisher, but I have this option right now. I have this option to get started. I had $88,000 raised or $89,000. Your Kickstarter just closed. Just closed yesterday. Yesterday. So incredibly successful Kickstarter. Yeah. It's top five of all time in journalism, which was really great. Books do traditionally really bad on Kickstarter, but I got some great- Yeah, it's like, what do you need money? Just write the book. Right. It's a tough ask. Yeah. And now what's really great about it is I think we can do research. So what I did before

I'm doing the book, and I know sort of backing up to that, but what I did before I did the book is I got a really distinguished science team, David Sinclair from Harvard, Andrew Bremmer from NIH and Vanderbilt and and some other guys that will be announced for our next paper, which I am thrilled that I would publish with. And they're like, you know, we like these ideas. They're disruptive. And if they're willing to put Harvard and these kinds of names behind my crazy ideas and put them out there, I felt like in my book, the bar that I wanted to raise is before I go write another book, you know, another, you know, book on diet and another book on what everybody has out there. If I could submit all my disruptive ideas to the peer review process first, that to me says, hey, at least I'm giving science a shot at it. I still may not be right because we all know there's papers out there that aren't technically

correct, but at least I'm aggregating people that are experts in their field, world experts. I mean, David Sinclair is one of the leading experts in longevity. Andrew Bremmer, he is the program director at NIH for type two diabetes. So if we're acting about, if we're getting disruptive ideas in there on that, and I have those kinds of people on the team, they're questioning.

And some of the things they disagree with, and that push and pull is in that process. So bringing it back to myself and you and Rhonda and some of these other people, if we could put together some of these events and get these people out there, just like crowdsourcing, get them to pay that $25,000 or $3,000, whatever, to come hang out for a period of time. We give good talks. We get to hang out. We get to do things. But more importantly, everybody gets to be part of collecting data. And what's really amazing is that they are now self-selecting.

And in science, we don't want people to self-select. We want it to all be random. But then that leads to the stupid like Gardner A to Z study where people are, quote, doing an Ornish diet, but they're not even following the diet, which I don't think how people follow diet books ought to be the litmus test. The question is, if I lock you in a room and I feed you this, how does your body respond? That's biology. It doesn't have the social element. And that's where our broken plate comes back in. It says, hey, look, when you add the social layer on top of it, the social lubricant of

food, suddenly we're no longer doing science. We're doing science under this lens of what we think is socially normal. And what is socially extreme, not eating for 24 days, drinking water, is not biologically extreme. That's the important distinction here you know it's it's a shift in in perspective that's informed by really an anthropological anthropological look at at the evolution of of humans right and and when you canvas kind of what's going on right now we're like obese but we're also start we're eating an incredibly nutritionally poor diet, but we're obese, so we're sick. And when you look back at, you know, kind of how we sort of made our way through the world through ancient times, there were periods of, you know, extremely long periods of very little food, right?

And this is something that you're playing with in your research. Right. with in your research. Right. And during those times of very little food, what your body does, back to our original question about protein, what your body does with those amino acids is your body starts scavenging. You know, here's some cells that I don't need. I'm going to use this material now. Instead of them just sitting around as waste product, you know, going on about their business, you know, you end up doing that. As you lose that body fat, you know, some of the fat soluble things, you know, some of the things that we accumulate in our, in our body, we're like, you know, it's like the, you know, the rings on a tree as I'm, I lost this body fat. So this right

now I'm at like 161 today. My lowest was 155. I've not been this weight since I was like, uh, pretty much. I've not been this weight since I was like 21, 22. And your biggest weight was? 240. 240. Oh, wow. 240. Yeah.

I was a big guy. I'm like 90 pounds. Yeah. So, the point here is, is that the fat that I just lost, you know, the last little bit. So, I'm not counting for the water shift because there's no sodium during that fasting time. And there is obviously food in your intestinal tract. Then there's glycogen. That all has some mass.

So that's about five or six pounds. So I'm a true 160 or so. I'm going to go down to a true 155. That's this last little bit I have left. And that fat that I'm losing is fat that I've been carrying around since I put it on way back then. And so what Michael Clapper and some of those people see is that as people are losing this, they end up having certain things that come out. They've been on a certain drug or they've been on certain things. So you actually see this stuff sort of come off and the reverse, it goes on.

That's so crazy. Well, I want to unpack this whole fasting world. But before we do that, I don't want to leave this current conversation without talking a little bit about this, you know, the project that you have in mind with this book and this kind of scientific approach to really parsing out what works and what doesn't. And when you look at the current state of nutritional science, for the average consumer, it's just incredibly confusing. You know, you have Dave Asprey saying one thing, you have Tim Ferriss' Four-Hour Body talking about protein shakes in the morning, and you have the T. Colin Campbell China study people saying one thing. And for the typical person who's just trying to make sense of, you know,

look, I just want to lose weight and feel good. And they go online and they see all this stuff, and it's impossible to make sense of any of it. So how do you then, you know, take all of these minds, you know, the Peter Rattias and all, there's so much conflicting understanding out there and everybody's really kind of dug in. How do you get everybody to put all that aside and to, you know, come to the proper conclusion? And then of course, like, how did you come to your current, you know, perspective? Right. So I think the first place we need to start and where I think the book will do a good job looking at is most of us pick what we want to eat first, and then we go look and search for justification of why we made our decision. And this is pride of spending. My watch is the best watch because I made this decision.

My phone is the best phone. My OS is the best phone. My OS is the best OS, you know. So that's not to say there aren't good and bad of all of those things, but we tend to sort of buy in, and that's a diagnosis bias that comes along. In my case, I was helped along by this thing called, you know, type 2 diabetes. I was helped along with reactive hypoglycemia. I mean, I was passing out in my car with my kids. I was helped along with my, you know, my grandfather who I never met because he died when he was 54. And my mom, you know, my mom's side. And then my uncle, he had his first, you know, either heart attack or surgery around 37. On my father's side, my grandmother had her first open heart surgery around 49. I'm at this age.

I'm 240 pounds. I'm fat. I have high cholesterol. I'm passing out after meals. My blood sugar is high. So I needed to do some triage on me. And when I lost the weight and I got down to the 180 thing, which is the story that's in the four-hour body, you'll see literally, it's just, it's really the six-year anniversary just a few days ago.

I started on October 27th and then ended on December 8th. When I lost the weight, I didn't fix those problems. And it was a conversation with Dean Ornish where I said, look, you know, the only thing he asked me what animal products I had left. I said, eggs, yogurt, and fish. Those are the only three things. I'd given up chicken, hadn't had steak, didn't have those things. He said, why don't you just try losing those for about three months and just see what happens? He wasn't the way he's a lot often presented in the media as being some extremophobe. He wasn't at all. He was saying,

there's some room for those in diet, but why don't you just try getting rid of those and just see what happens. I thought, you know, three months, I'm going to go back and I'm going to do this for a year. And if my fingernails are coming out and all my hair is out and I, you know, I'm dying of some protein deficiency or whatever, that's what I thought. And at that time, were you ascribing to any particular quote unquote diet? Right.

So I used Body for Life, Bill Phillips' Body for Life for the last two. The fattest I got, me personally, was after I did Atkins. When I went off Atkins, that's when I swelled up, ballooned up to the highest level. And that's around 2006. So I'd lost Body for Life. You know, it's six frequent meals a day. And they would say one lean protein, the sign of your hand, and one carb, the size of your fist, this words that I hate, you know, six meals a day and then you add an extra vegetable on the other one. So I did that with the six exercise, upper body, lower body, alternating with cardio, right?

Six days a week. So that's actually how I lost weight and I added the cold stress on top of that to increase my weight loss. So that's the – Let's talk about what inspired your journey into the cold processes. Well, that's where I was going. I was actually – but before I get there, let me get some of the diet and we'll pick right back up there and we'll loop back around. So to finish the question on the diet, I came back October 2009. It was around Halloween 2009.

And I said, you know, I'm going to do this plant-based thing for a year. And I had no idea what I was going to eat. So I bought, you know, you know, Bernard's, all the different books I could buy. Happy Air Before I See a Happy Herbie. So I bought Lindsay's stuff. Hi, Lindsay. I bought Lindsay's stuff. Hi, Lindsay.

And basically, I tried to live this way, and I failed miserably for two months. I took seven ingredients out of my cooking list, and it was as if I was starting all over. I would look at the pantry and have no idea what I was going to eat. I would fix stuff. Anyway, so I failed miserably. And when I say failed, I never ate an animal product, but just stuff would go bad in the refrigerator. I buy all this stuff, spend all this money, it would go bad. But then I started getting into a groove and Joel Fuhrman's stuff resonated with me just because he had so much science in there. And I started reading a lot of the papers and checking up and saying, wow, this stuff is really making sense. I like what he's saying. I like that he's not

really dogmatic about this. He's just saying, hey, you know, if you want to eat some fish every now and then, here's what it is, but I'm not going to do it. And about two or three months later, and I don't know how you got into it, but I started to hit my stride. I started like I could go to the grocery store, go right to the produce, grab stuff, throw it in the basket, get out, didn't have to have a list. I knew what I was getting. And I'm not a salad guy. I mean, I've learned to like salads, but I'm naturally not one. So I eat them because I need to, but they're not something, that's not my go-to thing. So once I got that part together, you know within 45 to 60 days even though i was failing um not socially but failing from a from a satisfaction a personal satisfaction

um i was i was seceding biologically because my glucose my my my hba1c went down, my cholesterol went down. And by the end of that year, I was down to 130, 140 in my cholesterol. And it's like, this is really great. So as soon as Tim's book came out in 2010, I started doing that stuff again, just to sort of solidarity, because I didn't do this for an ideological reason. And when I added things back to my diet, boom, immediately I started having issues again. So for me, it was clear what was going on. I had now a choice, but because I could now go to the grocery store and eat either one of the diets, I knew how to fix a body for life diet. I knew how to fix a Furman diet.

They were equal convenient equally convenient they were equally enjoyable for the first time in my life i had a choice and i would say that for the people we talked to that say oh you know i tried this plant and i just i failed i think it's because they never got to the point and the truth of the matter is if they lived off on an island somewhere and that's all they had to eat, they'd be just fine. They would get used to it. It would be fine. So anyway, so circling back around to the cold stuff, when I was losing the weight, and this is detailed in Tim's For Our Body.

But when I was losing the weight, it was right before I was – it was like I was a major change in my life. I was going to start over, and I knew, hey, I had to get healthy. I had to be a good dad, and I was going to figure out what I was going to do. What's Ray 3.0 going to be about? What's my next career going to be about? Because I sold my company out to my business partners. And at that moment, it was 2008. And I was looking, I was literally doing a spreadsheet on my kitchen cable in the fall and looking at the calories. How could I maximize calorie burn? Because everybody thinks as an output side, I've since realized it has nothing to do with output, but at the time I did.

And I thought if I could, whatever I could do, and I'm seeing, and it says, Michael Phelps is eating 12,000 calories a day. And if it's 12 or eight or six, whatever the number is, I'm like, what the hell I'm eating 12,000 calories a week. You know what? Is this like some, you know, you know, is this something for the Chinese team? So they get fat, you know, and you fool them into eating more. Right, exactly. And then I, and then I realized, wait a minute, water is 24 times more thermally conductive than air. And he's a little immersion heater in that swimming pool. He's spending five or six hours a day in the pool. And when he's not in the pool, he's sitting on the outside and that water's evaporating. And I had just taken a trip to Tempe, Arizona. And one of the interesting things between a mud puddle in

Arizona and a mud puddle in Alabama, mud puddles in Alabama are hot. Mud puddles in the desert are cold, you know, because the evaporative cooling is always keeping that water so you can get out of a pool and it's a hundred degrees out and you're shivering so these ideas all came together and i'm like it's cold and so i realized i'd never been cold in my life and so i began it was a it's an unseasonably cold uh that fall. We went back and looked at this for Stephen Leckhardt for the Wired article they did on me. And it turns out that I got on my back porch and I said, I'm going to sit here until I can't stand it anymore. Why would I have to go inside? I'm just going to be cold because it has to work.

If your body temperature stays the same and the temperature outside drops, you have to burn more calories. I mean, thermodynamically, it's simple. And what I realized pretty quickly is it was my symptoms were like my hands, my nose, my ears, my toes, like those became so miserable that I had to go in. It was never my core. So I started, you know, covering those up and then I would go on these crazy shiver walks because I didn't know what I was doing at all. Maybe I still don't, but I would go on these walks where I would walk as long as I could until

I was so cold that I couldn't stop shivering. Now this is a crazy idea. You don't need to do this. I have way better ways to do it today. But back then, this is what I did. Walked as far as I could and then I would run back. And what was interesting is after that three-mile run back, I was perfectly warm. And I could sit on my back porch for a whole other hour and be just fine. So from that, you infer what? That's right. From that, I inferred, hey, mild cold stress because my weight loss doubled. My rate doubled.

And I changed nothing. And that's what ends up in my first TED Talk that's in 2010, which sort of launches is this plus Tim's book. And suddenly I'm writing a blog. You're the cold guy. I'm the cold guy. I'm the freeze your ass off guy. I'm the ice cube diet guy. Now, nobody listened to the rest of the story that I was doing diet and exercise, that this was on top of it. They just turned it into extreme because they always do right you know now before you know what every you know i never did ice baths i never did that that was some things tim did i did some contrast showers later um but you know i uh i

was working with wim hof and a lot of people talked to wim and and he and i became really close friends back then and it was before he sort of had his surge and i spent some time with him in amsterdam and we talked about how the body responds. And what I loved about his is first, he loves it being science-based. And secondly, he says, hey, everybody can do it. I'm not special. And those two things make him, I think, unique as a human. Well, he's an extraordinary communicator too. Yeah. And he's so excited and- Exactly. And he can get people excited about it. But I love the fact that his message really is that he's nothing special. I mean, he does these insane things like climbing Everest in

his shorts and all of that, but his core message really is that this is a populist thing. Absolutely. And what's interesting about that is the incredible capacity of the human body to really adapt and acclimate to extreme conditions. And it goes back to what we were talking about, about perception, because it sounds like a crazy thing, but in the evolution of man, we were forced to endure this,

you know, to survive. And now we live without winter. We're always in 70 degrees, as I know you've said, and you know, in game of Thrones, winter is coming,

but winter is not coming. And the last three words of my papers, winter never comes. And so, and so a lot of people have joked on that with me, but yeah, and exactly that point. So what you find is that once I got that message out there and I started getting challenged, before you know it, I was being challenged on calories. I was being challenged on the veracity of everything I was saying. And that made me dig in. On my blog, I was challenged. On my blog, I was wrong about a lot of things too. And the challenge was what? About calories. Everybody was saying, you know, you really didn't burn this much. You really didn't, you know, they just challenged it. So

then I started needing to know more. And of course that led me in to eventually spending $30,000 for a calorimeter, indirect calorimeter. So I knew exactly how much I was burning because I really want to know. And I built a metabolic lab in my home. And so I have my midlife crisis calorimeter. I've seen a lot of midlife crisis cars out here in your parking lot out there. But the point is, is that I was really studying this. And I said, like, I want to know, I, you know, I would always use the word metabolism, you probably use the word metabolism.

Have you ever measured a metabolism? No, I mean, I couldn't even, I don't know that I could really even define what that is. Exactly. And, and most of the thing, not only that I was using the word just like that, just like we always do. I had measured a metabolism, I didn't know anybody had measured metabolism. Now I've measured hundreds of them. And they're very, always do. I had measured metabolism. I didn't know anybody had measured metabolism. Now I've measured hundreds of them and they're very, very predictable. I mean, I measured my metabolism every single day during this fast. And of course it doesn't go into starvation mode, doesn't go into shutdown mode. It's exactly as it's predicted to work a hundred years ago. But the point is, is then I started looking at food a little bit differently. And so I started

asking a question just a little bit different, which is instead of why do I lose? I started asking what causes me to gain. And our next paper really focuses on that. So closing up the cold stuff, what ended up happening is I was in line at TedMed and David Sinclair, who's now my collaborator. He and I were in line together. And he asked me, you know, what I was in line at TedMed and David Sinclair, who's now my collaborator, he and I were in line together. And he asked me, you know what I was doing? I said the cult stuff because that's the reason I was there. Dean came in, the inventor of the Segway, and Mark Kodosh, who was one of the founders of TedMed, had invited me.

I met them up at Google. I was there with Peter Diamandis. We were doing the founding opening of – they were doing Singularity University, and I just came out there. Peter and I co-founded Zero G to grab together. Which is a whole other podcast. A whole other podcast. Yeah, we can talk about that. But Peter and I, that was my sort of the brother I never had all through college.

And he and I, we did all of this disruptive stuff in space. So that's sort of Ray 1.0. And this is now Ray 3.0. And so I was around all these guys. I had the cool kid club membership. Yeah, that's now Ray 3.0. And so I was around all these guys. I had the cool kid, you know, club membership. That's quite a group. Yeah. So you're in there and we're at, I'm at Google Saifu and you're talking, you know,

there's, you know, Brand Stewart sitting here and there's, you know, George Churchill sitting there and you're telling this story about cold anyway. So they invited me down to TedMed. We're standing in line and I, and I started telling this stuff to David. He's like, and we had just met, but he didn't have who he was from or anything on in line. And I started telling this stuff to David. He's like, and we had just met, but he didn't have who he was from or anything on his badge. And he said, you know, and he's talking, he's like, you really need to look deeper than weight loss, because I actually think there's some other things here that you need to do. And about that time, Steve Wozniak came up and sat in front of us. And we both kind of went, oh, you know, he sat, he got in line with us and started talking about who knows what he was talking about. I'm like, I'm standing with Steve Wozniak. This is great, crazy. And we're having this conversation. So I didn't get David's name and I didn't see him that night. And then the next day he gives a presentation. If you Google be this leading longevity expert from harvard and so then we got together that night we really mind melted

and he he encouraged he said ray i actually think you can take this well beyond weight loss into longevity i think there's an intersection so we started working together over the next year and eventually we published the metabolic winter hypothesis, which we'll put in there, which basically says these genes that start being activated with calorie or dietary restriction that we know about, you know, this is the only way we've ever lengthened life is by restricting without malnourishment. So restricting and these things that upregulate this cold stress, the same thing that whim is activating, which is also a natural biological, that these things actually are, are that are overlapped. And it may be that part of

that overlap has to do with this idea of a metabolic winter. So metabolic winter would be cool, dark, still, and scarce. Metabolic summer would be bright, warm, active, and abundant. And what we've done in all elements of health is we've taken elements of metabolic summer and crammed them through the whole year. So I heard you say earlier, the idea that we're always warm, the idea that we're always fed, the idea that we're always active. If you take something like seasonal affective disorder, where people are depressed in the winter, that's not a bad feature. If there's not a lot of food, sleep, hang out, conserve calories. And what do we do? We give them bright light therapy. But it turns out that we can perpetuate this idea that it's summer. I mean,

I certainly feel that with the shorter days and I just have this incredible instinct to just hybrid and do much less. have clients like Penn Jillette lost, you know, 105 pounds when he really 80, 80 something, but in, in, in about a 90, a little bit over a 90 day period, he averaged 0.9 pounds of fat a day. And yes, we had a whole medical team and yes, it's completely safe. And you know, anybody who is worried about the rate at which he lost weight, they should consider that every bariatric surgery person loses at the same weight. So if it's safe to lose weight that fast by surgically rearranging their intestinal tract, then certainly telling them not to swallow. And when they do eat, eating a bunch of plants, a bunch of healthy foods is probably just as safe. I'd say it's a lot more safe, but for some reason there's a, the medical community seems to, or the diet community all seems to be down on this idea

that we can't lose weight rapidly but anyway this idea of of metabolic winter is you know you don't really need much your body can actually survive on a lot for that short period of time and i don't have them exercise during that because what is exercise well you tear down the tissue and then through hormesis it grows back stronger right i mean that's the idea that's why you go on training right i mean there is some cardiovascular performance but i'm saying in terms of the real the part everybody does and my my my look at this was why do i want to tear it down when i'm restricting the nutrition.

Right. We want to separate these parts. Yeah. So we have not, we have not, and that's one of the things I'm trying to do in the book. The next paper, we'll talk about this as well. We've not significantly separated diet and exercise. They're inextricably intertwined. And not only are they intertwined, but I would suggest you and I have different nutritional needs, different activity needs as we age. In other words, doing what you're doing is an amazing

feat from a competitive perspective. But I can assure you that there's a lot of people, because you have so many really super athletes that do it for competitive purposes. So let's take the sport out of it. Let's take the fun out of it. Let's take the, you know, this is my passion out of it for a second. Just talk biology and say, you know, do we want to be running really long distances all of our life? And when I take someone like you, or I take, you know, on one of the Facebook groups that it's Gary Turner, who is a, you who is a big MMA fighter in the UK, multiple champion. He can't do that at 45. He can't do that for the rest of his life because at some point it has a wear and tear on our body.

So the question is how do we give someone a soft landing from that? And is the high that you get off of a runner's high, is that equivalent to the high that people get from overnutrition? In other words, where's that balance? And right now, just like protein, carbs, and fat, it's all muddled together and it's hard to separate. And we've never put Reese's macaques in a cage and told them to run all day and they live longer. Right. We restrict their calories. Their activity goes down accordingly.

And what's interesting is sarcopenia doesn't happen. The muscle loss that we would see, the age-related muscle loss doesn't happen in the ones that are dietary restricted. They're not malnourished, but they're dietary restricted. So part of what we have to do is separate the sport, the fun, the excitement. Again, my daughter, Erin, loves your podcast, has no idea I'm here. Hi, sweetie. She has no idea I'm here.

And so when she downloads this, because I'm not going to tell her. Oh, you're not going to tell her. She's going to, oh my gosh. I won't tell her either. Yeah. So it's going to be really fun. But anyway, she loves to run. She's also completely plant-based.

I mean, she never deviates and loves to run. And right now, that's really great. I mean, she put back a lot of muscle mass. She lost a lot when she switched diet-wise. She was restricting too much. But then she came back, started eating healthy, started running, and she loves to run. I mean, she just goes out, run, run, run, run, runs. And that's great.

But at some point in life, that has to taper off. And so one of the things, another project is, you know, this idea or concept I call soft landing. If you've been really exercising a lot, how do you soft land older in life? And what's interesting is swimming, back to Michael Phelps, is the only exercise you can start at any level of fitness, at any age, and do it to the end of life. And one of the main things you might be getting from it is this model called stress. Yeah, it's interesting.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I grew up as a swimmer. Swimming is my background. And I can certainly testify to the hunger that happens when you're spending four hours in the pool. testify to the hunger that happens when you're spending four hours in the pool. Like I've gone and done ultra marathons and all these crazy ultra endurance races and trained for them very hard, but I've never had the appetite that I had when I was training for four to five hours a day in the pool. It's like nothing you can imagine. And so what is the difference between running great distances and swimming in the pool? It really is the cold water.

And what I can show you, I'll show you after we're here, but it's also on my blog on one of the things. We'll maybe put a link to that. But when Stephen Leckar came from Wired, we measured his metabolism just sitting still in 60-degree water. In fact, in the book I'll show, we actually did up to his legs and his hips, then his shoulders and his face, and we completely submerged him and measured. And what's interesting is you start out when you're shivering, you're burning mainly glycogen, right? But then after the shivering goes away, your body goes purely into fat burn. that I talk to a lot of swimmers. Another friend of mine, Catherine Garceau,

who was an Olympic swimmer for Canada for synchronized swimming. And they did all the synchronized swimming in cold water. So when she was out here, she would swim out in the ocean here, loves cold water. But one of the things you find is that actually when you're swimming, you probably were never hungry.

But when you got out of the pool, at some period afterwards, you get this enormous appetite. And a lot of swimmers have a problem because once they stop swimming, they've been burning an enormous amount of calories. And then suddenly they put on a lot of weight because they don't adjust the appetite. And also, you also notice in swimmers' physiques that they always retain a layer of body fat. They don't get as lean as cyclists or runners. It's almost like this innate biological kind of reaction that makes sure that they retain some layer of body fat to keep warm in the pool. It's not the warm part, it turns out.

It actually – it looks like, looking at the physiology, that it's a balance. It may be the reverse. In other words, it may be people that have that slight amount have a buoyancy advantage in terms of, because remember, swimming is not a power. It is powerful if you're Michael Phelps. But swimmer, it's glide left, glide right. It's body position. Yeah. It's streamlining through. And so, you know, the point is, is that, is that, you know, it's,

it's questionable. We don't know really the answer. And I would say, if you go swimming and then immediately do the sauna after you get out of the pool, you've just negated all the facts. What you'll see in the data from Stephen's, Stephen's's because we measured like 45 minutes after he got out he was burning pure fat so the idea is to go for a swim the the perfect water temperature as far as i can tell is about 75 that's enough of a enough of a a hit that you get the rush but not enough that you're going to be really uncomfortable right okay so i would say 65 to 75 is sort of that sweet spot. And one of the things I never knew, because I'm not a swimmer, I'm sort of, I'm not afraid of water, but as Tim Ferris would say, I look like a drowning monkey. I can't, that's one thing I'd love to learn is just

to swim like gracefully back and do laps. I have a swim spa on the back of my, in my house. I'd love to be able to feel comfortable doing it. I can do it. It just doesn't feel like it looks when you guys do it. Yeah. Well, it's like a golf swing, you know, perfecting the swim stroke. Right. I can get you in the pool. We got to do that. And so, but anyway, the idea here is, is that when you get out of the water, you don't want to immediately go for a high calorie. You want to get into that fat burn. So you don't want to mess it up by switching your metabolism over to digesting what you're

swallowing as opposed to the fastest state. And you don't want to jump immediately into the warm sauna. So you want to actually let that cold go. And Wim has the same thing. One of the things we discussed is Wim would let that hunger come. He liked to feel that hunger and he wasn't eating before he would go in. He would let that. And that's actually an advantage because that's back to that thermogenesis you were talking about. That's when the mitochondria switch over and they're preferentially burning fat to create just waste heat. So normally they're creating ATP that's fueling the muscle. So if you think of shivering as I'm shaking here, shivering is the original exercise, right? But if you keep doing that, you're going to tear down the tissue. So the body says after a while, it says, hey, I'm not going to do this anymore. I'm going to

bypass that step. I'm going to change the way the mitochondria uses the energy, and I'm just going to release 100% waste heat. And it preferentially uses fat or beta-oxidation to do that. So not only are you producing just 100% waste heat, but you're also using the thing it is you want to get rid of. Because we really don't want to lose weight. We want to lose the body fat when someone's out there. And what they end up doing is running and running and running and running and burning glycogen. And then they're not making progress. And so then they go to extreme like Peter Atiyah and Tim, those guys, and they say, oh, we got to get ourselves in fat burn mode. And I always think it's really interesting. And it does work. Both sides work. And that's why the food triangle is

predictive on both sides. But I think it's interesting. We don't need fat as the storage organ of another plant or animal. We don't need to eat the storage organ of another plant or animal to burn our own. My own personal experience with that is that being in fat burning mode or trying to increase your body's efficiency at using fat for fuel is more a function of the kind of training that you're doing than the food that you're eating. So my approach has always been, if you want to really enhance your body's ability to burn fat for fuel, then really focus on aerobic zone training because that's what creates that efficiency. And it's much less about the food that you're eating. You have plenty of subcutaneous

fat in your body. You don't need to eat any more in order to utilize that store. When I began my plant-based journey, like most people, being an athlete, I was terrified. I'm not going to get it. I had all these, I had tons of supplements, tons of protein powders, and I was using a lot of that. And then I kind of reached a point where I was like, do I need this stuff? Like, is this making any difference? And not that I've performed some, you know, kind of double blind studies on myself, but through a little bit of self-experimentation, I've realized like, I don't think I really need any of these things. And I've removed a lot of them from my protocol. And more recently, you know, I'm not training that hard right now. Like the training

that I'm doing is pretty casual, but I've been playing around with going out for a long run or a long ride without eating anything in the morning first, just going out and doing it. And then conventional wisdom would dictate, well, you need to, you know, replenish your glycogen stores and your electrolytes and all that kind of stuff within 30 minutes of your exercise. And not doing that. And just not eating until dinner. Right. So it's not like a super long fat multi-day fast or anything like that.

But like a mini like, let me see how this works or how this impacts me. I've kind of acclimated to that where now I'm at the point where I really can go pretty much until dinner without eating and feel perfectly fine and put in a pretty good workout in the morning as well. And so I'm thinking, well, how does that gel with everything I've been told about what you're supposed to do? Am I harming myself? I don't know, but I feel pretty good. I don't think you are. And Matt Frazier at No Meat Athlete who introduced us originally, Matt and I have talked about this quite a bit. And I think this is something – I've got calorimeters. So what we need to do is set up see exactly what it is because we can measure the stuff. But here's what I suspect to be true. First of all, what you said earlier is critical, and that is endurance athletics is, well, part of it is about VO2 max. So how efficiently are

using oxygen? You can go to a certain level, you can move it with training, but at some level, can move it with training, but at some level, human beings have intra-personal differences. In other words, in terms of people, each person uses that, can get to a certain amount. So, that is, you being a really super elite athlete, you might have biologically a better VO2 max capacity than me. So there is some biological difference human to human to human. But all that being said, part of becoming an endurance athlete is about getting into that fat burning burning mode more but here's what's interesting and we'll show this in our next paper is that even when you're doing it you're really still not you're not always burning more fat than you would have burned when you sit still and that's what's really interesting and i'll show you the math later and then the paper eventually come back we'll we'll

get maybe when that paper comes out we'll do another one where we can walk through it bit by bit and actually measure some of this on you and me matt and i talked about with me because i've not worked out for six years and you can see okay i'm not look pretty fit how old are you i just turned 51 you did yeah i mean you look incredibly youthful yeah and and it's changed if you look at my before and after pictures i looked completely different you know 10 years ago 41 i looked I looked much older than I look now, and my skin, everything's changed. But my point I'm making is that what Matt and I were talking about is the idea of going from this level where I've done mild cold stress. So I've changed my body, but to say, okay, how could we step me in and increase my VO2 max in the most efficient amount of time? So like Phil Mathetones, his work, could we use his training and measure as my body changes over that adaptation and look very specifically at how much fat am I really burning during that time.

And what I think most people are going to find is that fat burning mode means not zero fat, not more fat than you're burning when you're sitting still, but not zero fat. And I'll show you how the math works. You're going to be really surprised that it's not what we conceptually think. When you actually do the numbers, it's not what we conceptually think. And that's why Penn Jillette could lose 0.9 pounds of fat a day for 87 days straight. On the 88th day, he didn't lose a pound because he added some meals back and bang, it just leveled out. It's really surprising. It can't possibly be that much water.

And hell, if he lost 100 pounds of water, then, you know, go on him. Right. He looks a lot better in his blood pressure, you know, corrected. But my point I'm making is, is that, is that this idea of fat burning mode, this idea of all this stuff, it's all coming out of this body of literature from sports, which is connected to the competitive side, which is connected to entertainment. Okay. And I'm saying that not that any of those things are wrong, but it might be possible that that influence is causing us to miss the obvious thing. On the other side,

we're starting with restaurants and food and social entertainment of food, which comes back in and that intersects with the diet side. So on both sides, we have primarily entertainment and lots of profitable entertainment, whether it's professional sports or the running industry, you know, all the shoes, everything there. And I'm not saying that any of those things are wrong. And I'm not saying people shouldn't exercise. So, you know, if you've heard anything I've said and you think Ray's saying don't exercise, that's not the point. My point is it may not be as important as we say it is. Just like all the excess nutrition may not be as important as we say it is. Important in the context of longevity and being healthy. Let's say it is. Important in the context of longevity. Let's say health span. Right, well, all you have to do is look no further than the Blue Zones and the work that Dan Buettner has done in those cultures.

I mean, they're not athletes. They're just constantly in motion. They're active people. But they're not overstressing themselves in any particular singular way. They're outdoors and they're engaged in their life in a physical way on a, essentially a constant basis every single day. Exactly. And so the opposite of sedentary isn't exercise. The opposite of sedentary is active. And one of the things I do when I have a lot of these clients I've helped,

you know, I think it's disingenuous or I think it's actually cruel what we do. A person is carrying 80 pounds. Like if I was carrying, if I picked up an 85 pound weight right now, you know, or 80 pound weight right now and carried that around, surely if I carried it around all day, you would say that constitutes activity because that's pretty heavy, right? Yet when I had 80 pounds extra on my body, no one would account that as exercise. So I think this idea that we take people that are overweight, that makes them prone to injury, that makes them get in a gym, they end up burning primarily glycogen in the first place unless we extremely skew their diet so they can't burn glycogen. This is the ketogenic phase. And yes, it works, but it's not the only way to burn tons of fat. And yes, it works, but it's not the only way to burn tons of fat. And really, they don't feel like doing that. Penn didn't want to exercise.

He was like, if I never have to exercise, that's great. Once he lost the weight, he actually loves it. He does the little seven-minute exercise. He's a juggler. So Jason, his trainer that works with him, Jason Garfield, they do exercises with with juggling and they do all this stuff. So they have these juggling and I get, you know, every day on my phone, I get, uh, an email with exactly what, you know, he's done in that day. And, and, um, and basically he does, and he loves to exercise now. He, you know, it's not a huge amount. That's the amazing thing. You know, it's, it's, it's what it's, amazing thing. It's the holistic change that takes place when you

change your... It's not a diet. It's like when you shift your lifestyle and then you start to morph into the person that you've always sort of meant to be biologically, then your preferences change and your desires change and your perspective on life changes. And that's so interesting that, you know, I'm sure he's told that story to himself his whole life, like I'm not an exerciser, I'm somebody who doesn't like exercise. Right. And, you know, like he even had to change how he did the show because the show, he was this big lurking kind of being out there, you know, the way he would, and he would broadcast and, you know, he's gotten kinder and gentler he, in his own words, you know, but, but basically he's, he's animated now. He's, he's not, you know, he's not, uh, you know, he's not just standing still anymore. So it changed a lot of things of how he had to do the show. And he wants to be more active. And, you know, one day I

remember during his thing, when he went by the gym and, oh, my God, I picked up a weight that was the weight of his child. He said, wow, I have lost one of my kids. And now when I carry her around, I feel great. You know, she you know, it's easy to do that. So exactly that. If we could switch the focus back to this diet and exercise, if we could, you know, if I could wave my magic wand and if I could have an influence and an impact with our broken plate, it would be say, hey, let's change our dialogue about food. Let's change our dialogue about exercise. Let's look at this stuff and let's change the way we actually do research. increased performance. I'm not against athletic superiority or athletic excellence. I'm not against understanding at the nat's ass detail level what nutrition does and mechanistically what's going on, like Rhonda Patrick would talk about. I want to learn all those little basic

things. We need to do that. But I'm saying in addition to that, we could be doing stuff that's more practically focused. In other words, when we look at solving problems, one way is to learn how the details are. We can have an equation, whatever. Another thing, and I've done several papers in this in neural nets and genetic algorithms, and what they do is they find what's called a state equation. And a state equation is sort of path independent. We're not really – we don't know how all the parts work. It's kind of like, you know, just tell me what time it is. I don't want to know how a watch works. So you can do state equations. And if we could a hundred and something years later, give somebody something that works, give somebody a protocol that just goes out there and works and not worry about all the details, not have to keep up with every, you know, calorie and every nutrient in our app, not have to keep up with our activity all the time. You know, all those things are all important, but, you know, let's look at it a bigger picture and let's take what you've, all these little anecdotal things that you've experienced and

say, can we translate those things into just sort of generic stuff, generic rules that aren't completely under the footprint of the diet and exercise industry today? Yeah, I like that because I think so much of the information does stem from looking at athletes and how they behave and how they eat. And I think what happens is that a relatively sedentary person looks at that and because they're in denial, because we're all in some form of denial, thinks that they need to eat some kind of performance diet because they believe, like we all believe we're going to be millionaires somehow, that that's what you have to eat.

And there's a distinction between a diet that is oriented around longevity and optimal health and a short-term performance diet when, let's say, a bodybuilder is going for a specific sort of short-term goal. Right. Exactly. And we can't extrapolate from that and apply that template onto the average human being. Right. That would be ridiculous. But that's what we do. And if we just look and say, okay, you know, and how old are you now? 49.

49. So we're basically at the same age. We have the same thing that we need to look at. Like, how do we age gracefully from this part out, right? We're sort of at that crescent. We want to make sure that we live long and die fast, right? We don't want to just die slow and expensive in a painful way, right? So if we look at a – this is a paper.

This is – I told you about it earlier, Interventions to Slow Aging in Humans. Are we ready? This is 30 scientists, top scientists got together. It just came out in 2015 from 38 institutions, and they had a list of things that they could do. And if you read the list in this, the first one is pharmacological inhibition of GH and IGF-1, growth hormone and insulin-like growth factor one axis. Well, what do we know? We know that a plant-based diet minimizes that.

If you want to build muscle mass, if you want to be a bodybuilder, you actually want to increase that because you want to grow more. But do you really want to grow forever? Is looking that, you know, growing and putting muscle mass on forever, they might say, well, we don't want to lose muscle mass when we're older if we put it on. But again, I still have muscle mass from when I worked out years and years ago. And so that's not to say no workout, but I'm just saying is, do we really want to hit it every day in the gym? I'm not so sure if I want to minimize that. Then protein restriction and fasting mimic diets. We hit on this earlier. That's not glucose restriction. That's amino acid restriction you know and and and it's specifically the essential

amino acids methionine lysine leucine these are the ones that are implicated like you know with michael greger you i think you did my michael greger show and how not to die you know he sent me how not to die and i read it and we work a lot together on a lot of his scripts and stuff he'll send me papers we go back and forth so yeah so we're great friends. He's been an amazing guy. And I can say, you know, for all these people that think he's just, you know, blind to plant stuff or blind to animal stuff, he doesn't. He really digs through. And there's a lot of times we have a discussion. He said if he could get rid of the word vegan tomorrow, he would just because he's so passionate about that plant-based stuff.

But the point is, is that, you is that he's got a really cool playlist. In fact, I have it, if you go to bit.ly slash eatyourplants, that goes straight to his aging list because I created that link. You did, all right. I'll put a link up in the show notes. And if you watch those series of videos,

because he's reading from the papers, which is really, a lot of people say, he's cherry picking, whatever, because he's reading from the papers, which is really a lot of people say, you know, he's cherry picking whatever. And he's really not. He's just pushing the part that he sees as being there. But if you see all of those series, he did about seven or eight videos. It's only about 15 minutes worth because they're short or whatever. about the effect of amino acid or protein restriction on cancer and on longevity and healthspan. And he explains it in a really interesting way. Then we go to the next one, which will also be something that will be explained. So we don't have to go into it here, but that's pharmacological inhibition of TOR S6K pathway, which is mTOR, mammalian target of rapamycin. He has a whole thing on there that explains exactly why.

It's like putting on the brakes in biology. And then you look at the next one, pharmacological regulation of the sirtuin proteins. This is the work that you'll see in our metabolic winter hypothesis with David Sinclair. That's his work out there. Resveratrol, for example, that's one of his things, along with some of the other sirtuin activating compounds. Again, they're all found in plants, along with some of the other sirtuin activating compounds. Again, they're all found in plants, okay? Then the next one on the list is pharmacological inhibition of inflammation. Well, we know our diet is not inflammatory. So in the first five

there, except in the fasting, everything on the right side of the food triangle does exactly that, but it does it without the pharmacological part. Now, if they can develop a pill and people can take that, I'm all for it. And let the pharmaceutical companies get rich, I'm okay with that. I am not anti-pharma. There's no villains in my book, okay? More power to them. I hope they do it. And if people want to eat steak and take a pill and they can mitigate it, that's okay with me. It's not what I'm going to do. It's not what I'm going to do. I'm just saying I don't want to tell anybody what they can eat and not eat. I want to make a choice. My personal choice is myself. I'm glad we make the choices we make. I think there's a lot of other reasons, but the point is I'm not going to, but the first five things on here are all, or the four of the five are all doing that. I say we can do every one of these. And David agrees that we can, each one of these, we could probably do with the kind

of diet, a modified version of the diet we eat. And that means feeding frequency, feeding window, what we're eating the most of, not tons of white potatoes and rice, but more of the leafy greens and vegetables, cruciferous greens, more of the colorful squash, the legumes. That's where we really need to get our starch because they're positive. And what's interesting is even people who study longevity don't actually implement it. So I've been, I don't know if you know who Elizabeth Parrish, she's another, but BioViva, another really good podcast.

You need to get her on your list. I will send you guys an email. But if you go to YouTube and do Liz Parrish and BioViva and watch her talk, she's doing genetic, she genetically modified herself, which is really great. How'd she do that? Yeah. I'll let her tell that whole story. There's a really great video on there, but she's trying to do this from that perspective.

We were talking and saying in the longevity community, we're not doing. She also eats vegetarian. Now I have her more over on to nutritarian. She's going to start optimizing. And our goal is, look, we're not even eating the best diet we could for what we know to be true and yet we're looking for all these pharmacological and you know interventions right and then the final thing in here is chronic metformin use now metformin we all know it as a oral agent for type 2 diabetes but really it's a sirtuin activating compound just like resveratrol is,

but it happens to be regulated because it had an FDA, you know, they had a use that it got certified for for type 2 diabetes. And so there is a lot of things to say that actually could be helpful. Chronic metformin use could be helpful for us to end that. So we look at these six things. Now, this is leaders in longevity and are saying, we're doing all this. Well, right now, you and I and Rhonda, because we talked about the same thing. I mean, the kinds of things we're telling people to do is mainly doing all of those things. We're just not doing it in an organized, documented and constructive fashion. And I think that this becomes a place where we can go, but immediately if someone's just trying to win a race, back to where we got off on the sidetrack, what you do to optimize

for performance may not be what we need to do to optimize that glide to death. And so the question is, how do we have that conversation without it becoming binary? Because as soon as I bring it up, everybody says, oh, you're being extreme. You don't want to socially eat. You're being weird. What's life like if you don't have food? No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying that we're a society of one continuous meal that takes breaks to sleep and work. And I'm saying, hey, let's just err a little bit on to a little bit less. One of the things I put out there is the pause and say, what happens if you have your favorite couples, friends, or family over for doing all those

things that's human, poetry, music, talking, conversation, watching a movie, dancing, interacting, falling in love, all these things that are absolutely human. None of them require food. And yet, if you think about having your friends over and not having food or drink, most people think, wow, that seems crazy. Like, what would we do? You would do those things that are human. So the idea is, if we could just err a little bit on the other side and start doing some of these things, if we could look at all those great things that we're doing with exercise, like you're doing for performance, and you achieved such amazing goals at your transformation

and do it. But okay, what part of that can we peel out to say back to this longevity side? And I'm not saying that everybody has to do it. And I'm not saying it has to be obsession. I'm saying we have a really unprecedented opportunity where us, like with no budgets and lots of people following us, we start aggregating N of one data and we start actually making input. We start making headways where there's no ROI on this because how do you sell nothing? experience and we can sell experience you and i and ronda can sell experience and people will pay to do that because after all that's why you go to a pen and teller i mean anybody can do magic but you go to pen and teller because you want to see pen and teller performance right anybody could copy one of their tricks right but they're not pen and teller yeah well nobody's pen that's right

sure that guy is one of a kind. He's right. Well, there's a bunch of things I want to get into, but before we get off this one thing, have you looked at telomeres and telomerase? Because there seems to be a lot of interest in science that's kind of emerging out of this field. Elizabeth Parrish is and Rhonda Patrick is. I know Rhonda is. That's one of the things I want to talk to her about. Right. And I think both of them would be a great person. It's not what I'm looking at right now, but I think we've got to start bringing this together. I think that we can throw away the protein, carbs, and fat debate, throw away the sugar versus fat, throw away the eat meat, don't eat meat, just get rid of all that stuff. And let's go to the things that we know and start zooming in and zeroing in, I should say, on some things that could really significantly impact longevity and bring people like David. I was talking to David recently with this next paper, and he's like, you know, Ray, there's no reason why this wouldn't work.

I mean, we know when we do experiments with Reese's macaques, with the monkeys, you know, we know that there is a significant difference. You know, I mean, if I show you a picture of these, they live to be about 40 years old or 27 years old on average, and that's their menial lifespan. So that would be like 80 human. And then their maximum lifespan is around 40. But if you look at the difference between those two monkeys, those are 27.5 years old. So they're basically at the human equivalent of 80. The difference

between the left and the right there is one of them ate a healthy, perfect monkey diet, and the other one restricted by 30 to 40%. Which monkey do you want to be at 80? Look at the difference in the posture know look at the difference in the posture look at the difference in that and what we see is even in the age-related disease diseases we see there's a significant difference the ones that were dietary restricted don't have the age-related disease whereas the ones that that aren't have normal amount and this is not a western diet to dietary restriction. This is a healthy diet to dietary restriction. So when we know this and we're close enough to

primates, come on. Right. But here's the thing. You're a scientist. You're looking at the evidence and you're extrapolating from this certain truths that are applicable and helpful in our daily lives to get the most out of our, you know, however many years that we're going to be along. But the bigger problem, I think, is the psychology surrounding food. And it's not the understanding, it's the implementation, right? So when you're talking about our binary approach and perceptions of certain things being extreme, I think that's where the battle has to be waged in winning the hearts and minds of people and finding strategies and ways

of making this information accessible and allowing people to understand that they can implement them without having to go and live in a cave somewhere. You know what I mean? So how do we do that, right? And I think the first step in kind of unpacking this is just to talk about this spectrum of what we consider to be extreme or not extreme. Right.

And what's really interesting is that what you do is extreme in the terms of the physiological performance right so you push the boundaries of what is human possible in terms of running in terms of performance right that's some of the stuff you've been working on to me it's normal i know for you it's normal and so what i'm saying is what's what's interesting is that in all of these extremes i think there's a biological normal on there and and the social thing, most people don't run the way you run. And I'm saying that where you've had success and the people that have followed you and the people that you have, you know, inspired to go out and do it, you know, when we talk about, you know, Matt and talk about that, that really that comes

in terms of this need to belong to a group, you know, for the same reason people do religions and politics and sporting teams, this need to belong. And I'm saying that we have an unprecedented opportunity in human history where the technology to collect data and the technology to change and monitor things and the technology to aggregate that information and the entertainment value because there's no one who tells you you can have a podcast you can just do it and ronda can just do it and i can just do it and so the point is we have this unmatched opportunity to take what we're doing fun, do some crazy stuff, but not dangerous, right? And aggregate a group of people together for six months, eight months, or a year that say,

you know what? I want to be a part of this. I want to try to do something. And so that's what I'm hoping one of the things that can come out of our broken plate is that I can at least break down enough of the contradictions and say, look, here's what the literature says. Here's what the popular myth is. And oh, by the way, here's when I do the self-experiment on me. I got exactly these results over here.

And there's a conflict. that were starvation mode, that your body's going to shut down and it's going to lower your metabolism and it's going to hold on to fat because you don't have food is just on its surface ridiculous. Of course it burns fat. I can tell you when I wasn't eating for 24 days, it was burning all kinds of crazy fat because I was still living, right? But we repeat it. We repeat the starvation mode and it's in every blog and it's all these people start

and they say it with authority and they say it with conviction and then people start to believe it. So what I'm saying is what we can do is create an entertainment experience because that's what your podcast is about. It is about information. It is about doing it. So many people look forward to hearing this every week because they just feel like they're part of something. This is not what they hear at the office this is not what they hear you know

maybe with their spouse or with their kids or whatever and this becomes their sort of you know retreat and so i think now that we have more people that are scientists doing this as well and we have the attention of really serious academic scientists too. And I'm saying, why not do this in a way that becomes a, you know, a ground up crowd, sort of a grassroots kind of effort? Right. I love that. And I love the idea of bringing people into it and sharing the experience as we go. And I think we have a lot in common in the sense that, you know, for me, like I go off and I, you know, look, I did five Ironmans in a row and, you know, I'll do it all on a plant-based diet. Not because, you know,

the average person is going to go do that, but they can look at that story and they can be inspired from that. And then maybe they can meet me halfway or it changes their perception of nutrition and human possibility. In the same sense, you often do these crazy self-experiments where you're going to do this stuff with cold water and you're going to go on this fast for an extremely long period of time, not because you think the average person is going to model that exactly, but it's going to change how they perceive, you know, food and how they perceive longevity and change their perception that, oh, you know, if I don't eat for 24 hours, I'm going to wither and die, right? And your example proves out that

that's not the case. And that makes people question the status quo and the paradigm, you know, that exists right now and opens up their mind to greater possibilities. And I think in that you can fertilize, you know, a grassroots movement of people trying out their own experiments. And, you know, like yourself, like I'm not telling anyone what to do or what to eat. I'm sharing my experience and I'm bringing on people who have interesting experiences, some of which agree with me and some of which don't. But I think it's all just information for people to then take and, you know, take what resonates with you and what inspires you to then go and implement and change your own life and improve your own life, right? And the intersection between how we approach that, which is really great, and science is that some of us are right and some of us are wrong.

And so science is about teasing out and saying, do I believe this because it's a beautiful story or do I believe this because it's true? And we never really know. And what you'll find, and I talk about this in several places in history, in my book, I'm going to talk about two competing scientists that really got into it and back then they used to actually write with color in their papers like they really got into it you know that became you know that became you know you're not supposed to do that now you're supposed to keep everything independent which means they just hide that bias in their data you know they don't report you know so you got all this stuff on high fat they don't report their

ldl numbers anymore because you know that that makes their stuff not look so good. So anyway, the point I'm making is that you see in history where these guys go at it, and it turns out many times they're both wrong looking back. But because we moved from one group to the next, it moved it along just enough that it kept it moving and eventually we got to the right answer. So this pluralism is what we're talking about where you look at the same set of data. It's two people looking at the nickel. One sees a buffalo. The other one sees the Indian. We're both looking at the same nickel.

And so there is kind of a pluralism in what those people see. And a lot of times they're they're right for the wrong reason you know i i i love in our world since you know i know you talk a lot of the plant-based stuff i call it the mcdougall firman paradox you know this is the nuts and seeds versus starch and my next paper is going to explain the ferment the firman mcdougall uh paradox so so john's been a nice guy joel's friend friend of mine. They're both guys that I like, and I think they're both earnest and severe. But it's going to be interesting because they're both right for the wrong reasons. Now, Joel knows why, because I've given him an inkling, and John

eventually will know why. McDougal will know why. But the point is, is that they're looking at this thing for a really – for their own perspective, from their own – one is looking at this thing for their own perspective from their own. One is looking at compliance and one of them is looking at nutrition in a different way. And again, they're both perfectly legitimate in that. But it creates this clash and that little bit of clash causes a huge amount of debate that goes on and on and on and on and on. And we don't – we need to move beyond those kinds of things. Well, we do. I mean, the consumer looks at that and says, well, they can't even figure it out, so I'm just going to keep going to McDonald's.

Right. Exactly. And we've done the same thing with sugar and fat forever. And perhaps it's both. Right. I mean, has everybody stopped to say we don't need to eat coconut oil and olive oil. Not that we can't, but we don't need to do that to be healthy. We're not dying of coconut oil deficiencies. We're not dying of olive oil deficiency. You know, no one's dying of protein deficiency. In fact, if you take most people on the gurney and you do a complete analysis, they're probably not deficient in anything. They're overnourished. That's really hard. Now, that's not to say that the stuff Rhonda talks about, it's not to state the stuff

she's talking about, about optimal levels in terms of like she talks a lot about vitamin D. And there are some people, there are some things for us, B12. I mean, we'd be crazy not to supplement with B12. But I don't think my diet is to supplement with B12, but I don't think my diet is deficient in B12, meaning I need to eat something just because it happens because I know how much I need and I can take a supplement and I can get B12 from that things. Same thing with iodine, same thing with zinc, vitamin D, K2. There's a whole list. And Rhonda and I, when we were talking about it, we went through that little list. It's a small number of things. And we know what they are. She asked me when she interviewed me if I took a vitamin D supplement. I said,

no. But I live in Southern California. I'm out training. I don't really worry about it. My blood markers show that I'm fine with that. And I got the idea that she was a little bit surprised. And it's also excess showering too. Because Joel Fuhrman, one of the things he talks to Michael Clapper. I've been with Michael now for the last two months, which has been amazing hanging out with him. But the fact is that vitamin D forms on the surface in the oil just like the vitamin D is mostly from the oil from wool, from lanolin. That's where they start to synthesize a lot of the animal-based one. And then it has to be absorbed back into the skin. And we bathe so often that that something happens or we're not in the sun.

So for many people, vitamin D is an important part of what they need to take, but they don't need to take two, three, 5,000 units a day. They need to take it. And I like the way Joel Fuhrman's approach is, you take it but test. And I think Rhonda Patrick's the same way. Take it but test and see where your levels are. And then even those numbers, there's not a manual on human beings. Those average numbers that we come up with are best guesses. And it may mean more, it may be less because you started way back in the beginning of this conversation talking about what are the RDA levels and how much do we need a day? And the answer is, we really, really don't know for a lot of these things. We have some good guesses and I can tell

you, none of them are just enough. All of them, let's get just enough for this person and then let's overestimate so we make sure we don't leave anybody behind. That's the just enough for this person. And then let's overestimate. So we make sure we don't leave anybody behind. That's the way we do with budgets. That's the way we do with everything in life. And what we find is it's the excesses that cause the problem. We've seen excesses in vitamin E being a problem, excess in vitamin D being a problem, excesses in fats and saturated fats, excess in simple sugars being the problem you know there seems to be a theme and it seems like everyone would say look everything we've talked about becomes an item and then we decide to ingest it for reasons other than it's just a food

because we're getting something out of it and then we end up having an excess amount of it. And back to the gurney table, when we have the body die, they die of excesses. That's what I mean by excess. So I wanted to clear out that I'm not against us pushing like Rhonda's very specifically looking at vitamin D, very specifically looking at some of the amino acids, some of the things for neurotransmitters uptake and how branch chain amino acids might chain amino acids might compete with serotonin uptake into the brain. She has a lot of things that she talks about which are really pertinent and relevant. But what I'm saying, generally speaking, is we're probably chronically overnourished.

We're eating. We're in the fed state from the time we get up in the morning to the time we go to bed at night. And digestion is a pretty hard process. So one of the things you're probably experiencing, because you asked me this when we were talking on the phone before we got together today. I said about eating. I said, well, I can eat or I don't have to eat. It doesn't matter if I eat today or tomorrow or the next day, which I know that sounds crazy to everybody listening, but I've gotten to the point now where I no longer have to stop

and what I'm doing to eat. And I would say the same thing with you with drinking water. So hunger to me is the same as thirsty. I'm thirsty now. And that means I'm swallowing a lot. Water would taste really good, but I don't have to stop the podcast to get a drink. I don't have to move off. And if we were driving home, I don't have to pull over to get something. And people go after these addictive sort of ideas about hungry, lethargy, lack of focus, irritability, shakiness, headaches. Those are the same kinds of things when you give up alcohol. Right. When you're detoxing or something. When you're giving whatever, those are all withdrawal symptoms. Now, they're not as severe. So I don't want to equate food to addiction the way everybody does. I just want to say these are terms of addiction. And they're a different level of severity and they're a different level of

duration. But once you get beyond that, you eat instinctually. And this is something I learned from Joel Fuhrman, which is when I'm hungry, and I am now, my mouth is watering, and food would taste really good. And when I did the podcast that's about to go up on Rhonda Patrick's Found My Fitness, it was like day 22. I hadn't eaten for like 22 days and I did the podcast. So when you see me, I will, we'll say what day it was, but it was like the day before I broke, broke the fast. And, um, and you know, I went to cooking classes up there, you know, chef AJ comes up there, all these people do these, these, these cooking classes, umvo chef bravo at true north

yeah so so we would go to cooking classes and you would say that is crazy you're sitting here watching a cooking class and what's really interesting is most of taste is smell anyway and at that moment when you haven't eaten and you smell something like we went i went to see the martian which was really kind of fun with my friend, Rich Ross. And the smell of popcorn, it was like, oh my God, it was like, it was as if I was eating it, but I hadn't eaten for 20 days or some crazy amount of time. And you could just smell all the stuff. When I was in front of your house, the eucalyptus, you must have a eucalyptus because I could smell eucalyptus so strong. Is there a eucalyptus tree there? Yeah, yeah, yeah, there is.

Yeah. So I just remember smelling and my sense of smell right now is really really acute and my sense of taste is really cute so any restaurant i went with a guy yesterday for or saturday yes yesterday no it was saturday for uh one of these kickstarters another really cool thing uh which is called 10,000 rides it's a really cool book about giving 10, 000 people ride and we went to this taco licious place and i had some plant-based taco things but it was so smothered in oil and so smothered in salt and so sweet and it just tastes sickening overpowered kind of i mean it tasted good so i'm not saying it tasted horrible like everybody said oh i can't eat a hamburger again. But it was like overload.

But it's just overload. Is that the last time? When was the last time you ate? Is that the last time you ate? No, I ate yesterday. Okay. So I ate yesterday. I had some vegetable rolls.

And let's like unpack that. So the longest fast that you did was 22 days? 24. 24 days. All right. And so what inspired you? Did you know you were going to go that long or were you playing? Yeah. So I went 21 days, um, primarily because I wanted to do this nitrogen for the book. You're going to see my nitrogen loss. So I had to urinate in a bottle 24 hours a day, collect all of my urine and we measured the nitrogen every day.

And I reproduced- And why is measuring nitrogen important? Because that gives me an indication of how much protein I'm metabolizing, how much lean mass, because that's what everybody's worried about. Oh, you're going to burn your muscle mass. You're going to lose lean mass. And what's really paradoxical is my fat-free mass, which is the not fat mass, even when I did DEXA scans a year before, it was coming down steep. But when I get in my fast, it actually levels off and you don't lose much because your body

goes into recycle mode. But that doesn't happen until about the 10th or 12th day. And so a year ago at True North, I did a 30-day very low calorie diet. So I did starch, nutritarian, and then I did 14 days of water fasting. So it was a six-week period that I lost 30 pounds. And then this time, I was going for 21 days, and I went a day or two extra because actually I was doing some stuff with glucose. I decided to do some things with glucose, which I'll explain in the book but basically i wanted to see i wanted to do it but the number one reason why i picked 21 days is because the reality show naked and afraid

because the this section in the book's going to be called eat don't eat the lizard and so you got these people walking around an island and if they get out of the bugs and they don't get bit by snakes and they don't walk around and step on something in an affection and you know they just chill and find water and they just drink water and sit really still for 21 days like everybody says you got to go on naked and afraid you know uh because you would do great on this show because you know you can go without food and i like you know i'm a boring contestant i'd be a boring contestant you know i'd have to get into a fight with with with the with the the person with me but the idea is don't eat the lizard because you're going to get giardia you're going to get some they end up getting dysentery they end up getting sick and they don't need protein but listen to every single show it's

all about protein so i that's actually why it was 21 days and then it also happened to superimpose with the old fasting work we did in 1918 um that says this leveling happens at around the 10th or 12th day. So I wanted to capture that. So that's why 21 days. And so during this 21-day period, you're doing nothing but drinking distilled water. That's it. Right? Yeah.

And so in kind of evaluating your metabolic processes over the course of this period of time, what was it like? Was there a couple days of acclimating where you're uncomfortable and then you kind of adjust to it? What's going on emotionally and physically? First, I had a glucose monitor implant. So I'm measuring my blood glucose, 24 hours a day, seven days, just basically transmitting to my phone, Dexcom G5. And also I have my calorimeter, indirect calorimeter, which you didn't know about metabolism. So we'll talk about it really quickly. You know, the carbon dioxide you exhale is the fuel that you're burning and the oxygen you're taking in, that's your VO2 max,

the oxygen you're using. If we look at the ratio of that carbon dioxide that we produce to the oxygen we consume, we get sort of a unique thumbprint or a signature. So fats have one ratio, starches, sugars, carbohydrates have another ratio. And then protein happens to be right in the middle, which in the really nice thing about being in the middle, it doesn't influence either one. So we can tell what percentage of fat or glycogen we're burning at the time. And then if we collect the urine and we get the nitrogen, we can back out how much of it was protein right down the middle, you know? So I was doing the 24 hour urine collection. I was doing my metabolic measurement every morning. I was doing that glucose. And then I was doing somewhere in

the neighbor, 80 biomarkers every seven to 10 days. So literally 16 vials of blood or 18 vials of blood they were taking out of me, looking at everything from, from IGF-1, we talked about in slight growth factor, to all the other cytokine panels, amino acid panels, lipids, et cetera. My lipids go through the roof. You know, everybody freaks out because your cholesterol, your lipids go through the roof. Why? Because your body's mobilizing fat. Right.

It's being taken out of its subcutaneous location and put into the bloodstream. Exactly. So that you can utilize it. So we're looking at that. And so I was looking at all these markers, but what I was actually doing every day is I was reading the material to get ready for writing. I was doing podcasts with pen, preparing for the, getting my Kickstarter going. I was going to the cooking classes. I was meeting with Michael and some of those other people talking with friends. I was just perfectly normal. So back to your question about how long did it take me to adjust?

Well, because I've lived a dietary restricted lifestyle for the last three to four or five years, I really don't have any symptoms. And even at True North, they all say, I can't believe you're running upstairs on the 20th day. Right. I mean, that was going to be one question. So just, you know, maybe explain a little bit about what True North is. And, you know, on staff, there is Dr. Michael Clapper, who I've had on the podcast, Doug Lyle, who I've met. I don't know him well, but he's an amazing guy. Doug's great. Yeah. We spent a lot of time this time together. And Jeff, of course. Yeah. Right. So what are these guys? And also Alan Goldhammer, who runs the whole thing up. Jeff Novick.

Yeah, Jeff. And so what's interesting that they do there is most of what the interaction is is around dietary intervention or fasting intervention for people that have issues. And so these can be, for example, hypertension. They have the most successful hypertension intervention of anything, better than any medication there. Like if Penn could actually take off long enough to do that, we could bring his blood pressure and control a lot, lot faster than it's going to take naturally to do it over the last year. So we got him down to like maybe one and a half of his meds from eight, which is great, but he still has got his heart has to, he always got to do it. But when you go on a fast, you dump all that extra sodium, has to always got to do it. But when you go on a fast, you dump all that extra sodium,

all that extra water, my blood pressure is still at 102 over 64 and 104 over 64, but I haven't been doing any training. Your blood pressure is probably low. Your pulse is low because you do all this cardiovascular work. Mine is because I dumped all that out. Now, if I keep eating sodium, I can pump it back up. Now, it probably won't go up to high. I'm not hypertensive. But the point is that it's a dramatic intervention, and it's a shame. It's really a travesty that we're not using fasting for hypertension intervention. Now, once you're done with the fasting and you bring it down, if you go back to eat the same diet, it's going to come back up. If you eat what you and I eat, it's going to be fine. It's not going to come back up. If you eat what you and I eat, it's going to be fine. It's not going to go back up. And you find that. So that's one example. Yvonne is another friend of mine from there. She was there a year ago with me. And they've got a paper that was just accepted to BMJ. But she had non-Hopkins lymphoma. So she had like, you know,

golf ball size lymph, you size lymph tumors. And that's what her mom, I think, had died of. And she got with her oncologist and with her doctor, her primary doctor and said, you know, I want to try this other thing. And that, you know, one of them was supportive, one of them not so much, but it turns out that all of her tumors shrank down in a way. And they're now completely, she's in remission. Now the one- Doing that in conjunction with chemo and radiation? No, no, no, none.

Without of it, she did that. And Stanford Oncology, they sort of afterwards, she came back and said, hey, I really want to look at the after. And they weren't really so interested. They said, come back to us when it comes back. They weren't interested. And I'm not trying to be down on doctors. Because I don't have

this hate for medicine like a lot of people do and it's not like all i'm not trying to say alternative quackery but i'm saying that it's scientifically interesting enough and as human beings we should be when you would be human enough to say my gosh if you could drink water for 23 days and significantly and make the tumors non-detectable by feeling, and then even on scans, they're just completely done. You'll see the paper, what they wrote up with the case study. Even if that only gets her a year what can we do and i mean there's a um there there are several places where we see in in these dietary restriction models that the necrosis you know the the tumor factors that tumors shrink and go away so it's like we're not doing that and now what's really interesting is the longevity people are teaming up so fontana from the university of washington has been down

there they're working with the bucks institute goldhammer is working with a lot of people right now to bring the longevity community in and say, hey, we've got this test bed where people will pay us to not eat. I mean we got a line, which is crazy pants, right? This is great. And this is back to this business that we're talking about. If we could just have them stay here for free and it's a lot cheaper to stay there than to go to a hospital and try to do the same thing. And what's amazing is I – In a completely controlled environment. Completely controlled environment.

You have doctors checking on you twice a day doing all your vital statistics. You shouldn't be fasting 21 days. I see so many people online, the ketosis crowd, and they're all talking about their fasts and they're all coming out with their quackery about what they broke their fast with, whatever. Really under five days, you're probably not going to have a problem three to five. And that's what Michael Clapper talks about. You know, they fasted like 15,000 people through their facility alone. They don't have any serious issues at all. And so the point is, is that when you get beyond that, you really need to see because there's really not fast. And so the point is, is that when you get beyond that, you really need to see because

there's really not fast. And the longest medically supervised fast is 382 days. The guy lost 276 pounds of body fat. And five years later, he kept it off. But 382 days. He didn't eat food for 382 days? 382 days. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. I mean, look, well, let's hold on a second. So that's insane, first of all. But like, for most people, the idea of even going a day without food is anathema, right? Absolutely. So when you're starting to talk about these extended periods of time, I mean, people are going to freak out.

Right. And there's a lot of fear around this. And there's also – look, there are not – it's not like we're without incidences of things going wrong. I mean, wasn't there an incidence at one of Doug Graham's retreats where a young girl- I wouldn't count those. I wouldn't count those the way I would count a real facility that's doing this. And so what I'm saying is that people really need to be supervised by a team that knows what they're doing if they're going to do extended period of time.

Now, where we got off on that is by saying that there's real medical modalities where fasting could be used. And what's interesting in the data is that I've got data from 100 years ago, but a lot of the stuff was being done with diabetes, with some of these other metabolic issues where we see normalization stuff that these guys see every day. I mean, Alan Goldhammerhammer if he was sitting right here today he'd tell you in a heartbeat give me a hypertensive patient give any medical intervention in the world put anyone side by side i'll beat their pants off i will get them off their blood

pressure medicines and and the protocol is they drink they drink water and within 13 to 14 days their blood pressure is normalized and then they bring back the food and it's going to be a sugar, all sugar, oil, salt free plant based diet. Right. Okay. So he's going to do that and he's going to have an effect. Now they may not want to eat that way. That's a different problem. But biologically, he's fixed the problem.

Okay. So you now know what's caused it. You know, you continue to eat this way. Your hypertension. They've got people that have hypertension has never, ever come back. They've never had an issue again. They're off medications, you know? So, so that's one thing. The other angle though, is this longevity thing. This is activating these sirtuin genes, activating this, and this community wants to come in and says, wow, people really will go

without eating, you know, back to what you're, the question you're asking, which I think is a valid question. It seems extreme. But again, it's socially extreme, not biologically extreme. Not that we're telling anybody right now to go off and do 7, 10, 20 days or whatever and trying to do that because there are things that can happen. But as long as you're monitoring, they can monitor creatinine and BUN and say, okay, you're in a situation where you're having a renal function problem. You need to go back on food. So the things they're looking for, the things that they can tell where they say, look, your body's not doing well. Now it's going to be after the three to five day part. So back to your

question about what do you feel and how do you get there? And where am I today? Because I spent so much time doing the one or two day things or three day things or doing exactly what you're doing now, waiting longer and longer and longer and longer in the day. Okay. You're getting better at it. You're habituating. Just like you habituated to eat all the time. Most of that food left your body before as waste heat. Now you're just never putting it in there in the first place right can you draw down on your glycogen stores absolutely can you replenish them

sure you've done this your whole life with with training you've you know carb load and one of the things when you're carb loading that you're doing is you're literally training your body to pack more of that glycogen and at the same time utilize fat with the first step. So the difference between me and you right now, if we went to run, is that your body can pack a lot more carb, a lot more glycogen in than mine can, and you're going to burn fat better. And then of course we got a respiratory exchange of oxygen that's going to happen. And that's the only reason why, you know, you and I, I couldn't do what you do and, you know, in terms of doing that, but I could train my body to do those things. Similarly with eating. So I could train myself to do a 21 day.

You don't even have to train, you just do it. But on the third or fourth day, you'd probably feel miserable. Okay. You'd probably feel miserable. And a lot of people feel miserable on the third or fourth day. And then that sort of goes away. But then the next time you come back, it's, you know, maybe not so bad, but in between then, if you did a lot of two or three day mini ones, you know, I'm going to go 24 or 32 hours, you know, Penn's done a few of them since then, just small ones. Then you get to the point where you're like, you know, okay, I feel a little something, but it's just not uncomfortable anymore. And I would say when you think about running, you feel some discomfort. How would you describe when you get to that mode where you feel some discomfort, but it's not so bad you need to stop? feel some discomfort, but it's not so bad you need to stop.

Yes, the low-grade, tolerable level of ill at ease, but nothing so severe that you're going to stop. But in the beginning, that same sensation might stop me. Would you say, or would you feel it more? How do we use something from your world? Well, yeah, it's acclimating to a new normal, I suppose, right? Yes. You don't use something from your world. Well, yeah, it's acclimating to a new normal, I suppose, right?

Yes. So what's interesting is that I can't imagine that anybody who goes through an extended period of time of fasting, whether, you know, and that's all relative. Maybe it's three days. Maybe it's seven. For you, it's much longer. But when you get to the other side of that, it's got to lead you to question so much of what you sort of understood as conventional wisdom with respect to food and nutrition because you're like wait a minute why did i would have thought i couldn't have gone a day and here i went all these days like you know what the whole idea of the recommended daily allowance is now suddenly called into question like what do i actually need every

single day beyond water and oxygen? Right. And one of the things that teaches you really quick is the peanuts they hand out on planes. Not only are they not nutritious, but they're just entertainment. They're just keeping you busy with your mouth. They're just keeping you busy with food and drink and telling you to chew and swallow so that you have nothing else to do. And unfortunately, that's why we eat most of our meals.

It may be decadent, good tasting things, but what we're really doing is just primarily entertaining ourselves. But the only real biological reason to eat is to nourish your body and hopefully for a helpful time. And someone might, for example, question what we eat and say, you know, Rich, Ray, you guys, you're missing out on so much. But we wouldn't because we've acclimated to our new normal. And that's the term I use with our guys. I say, you know, you've got to find your new normal. And so what happens immediately when you even go the one or two or three days, the safe kind of the things that we see in intermittent fasting. Or in your case, what you're doing is you're fed.

The postprandial state is about four to six hours after you eat. So, you know, by eating one meal a day, you're fasted for say 20 and you're fed for like four. So you're literally intermittent fat intermittent. One meal a day is basically alternate day eating if you do the math right so what happens is is that is that you get to the point where you say okay well i mean if i don't have anything to eat right now i'm okay and i've been on business trips where i didn't have a really good choice and i just didn't eat for a day or so i just drank water and i was just fine

because i just do other things which but to everybody listening that's just crazy talk it's completely crazy talk but that's like saying oh well you know i decided one time i was going to run 500 days in a row i mean that's just freaking crazy talk. But the fact is, from a human physiology perspective, we're born to do it. You just have to acclimate to it. When did Penn Jillette come into the picture? Was he a friend or how did you meet him? So yeah, we've known each other for 20 some odd years. We were introduced by another friend, Tim Jennison. And so to really explain all of this, if you go

out and get the movie Tim's Vermeer. Tim's one of my best friends in the world, one of Penn's best friends. And Tim basically figured out, he's a video guy, he's got a company called New Tech that does all kinds of video processing equipment. Had the video toaster in our day because we're both old enough to remember the video toaster if you're into audio and video.

But anyway, Tim and I became really great friends. He helped me with Zero-G. We did the accelerometers. We did a lot of great adventures together. But he reverse engineered how Vermeer, the Dutch painter, did his paintings. I remember this. I remember this. So I'm in this documentary.

So I'm helping him build this room, you know. But anyway, so Tim introduced me to Penn and Teller 20 years ago, and we all became friends. And actually, I've been always closer to Teller than I have been Penn. So we've been friends for the last 20 years, and I've known them, and I've seen their show a bazillion times. So a year ago, I was coming back from True North from the fast, just like I'm going to leave today and go to penn's house tonight but i i stopped in to to to see them and to see the show

and of course i just lost all this weight and penn's like you know you're a skinny fuck you know i mean he's you know how penn is he's just going to go after you and i was with my daughter my daughter alexia came out because i didn't know what it was going to be like i hadn't eaten for two days and is it safe to drive across the country? You know? I mean, I, I, you know, I don't know. I was just like you, man. What the hell? It seemed crazy. Talk to me that you could go 14 days and then I show up and oh, you're, you're going 20. Oh, you're going 40. You're going 35, all these old people and whatever, like going and I'm like 14. I'm feeling like, I thought I was big man on the block here at two weeks and I'm like 14, I'm feeling like, you know, I thought

I was big man on the block here for two weeks and I'm nobody, you know, they're going way longer without food. But anyway, so I was coming back and it turned out retrospectively, I didn't know this, but Penn had just been in the hospital in October with uncontrollable hypertension and they ended up putting a stent in or doing a stent, doing some kind of, you know, intervention, some kind of procedure. And they had said, hey, look, you got to get a stomach sleeve. You got to get a gastric bypass or you're going to die. You can't do it. So anyway, I didn't know any of this. And so he's listening. And I could tell that I was going way too long in the little monkey room, the green room afterwards. I mean, I knew that normally Penn would have cut me off.

I mean, just I know his style, right? So I started telling my story, and he kept asking me questions. He kept asking me questions. He's going to talk about – he's got a book called Presto that's about me and him for this year and his weight loss and his journey. But basically he said – he kept asking, kept asking. He wanted to cut me off, but he kept asking and asking. And later he texts me. He's like, you know, hey, I think I need to talk to you.

Like, we can do this. So the next day we talked about it. I said, look, you can do it. But, you know, you really have to get started. So a year ago, a year ago, a year ago on December 8th, he started. In fact, what I was just, I was looking for the thing. And here's like one of Penn's original pictures when he's way big.

He just sent me his before on December 14th, you know? And so Penn basically, you know, every day we started texting. It's texting. I put him through the same protocol. I've put everybody through and changed his relationship with food, ended him on a plant-based diet.

He's still on it a year later. His weight has stayed solid. Lost 105 pounds. 105 pounds, yeah. And he's only changed within like 10 pounds or maybe 12 pounds from his lowest to his highest weight over the last year, which I think is just spectacular. Everybody thinks if you lose it fast, it's going to come back. Not if you keep your diet,

not if you change your lifestyle. And that's what Penn did. This is what his weight loss look like. You can see when he started. I'm looking at a graph. You're looking at a graph and it's just in a crazy amount of weight. Now, this is from a withing scale.

And in fact, there's a campaign going on right now with withings. They're not paying me. I guess Penn's probably get paid, but they're not paying me at all. But I use that scale so that every time what is a withing scale withing scale their body analyzer it's you get on the scale and there's my app and every time he gets on the scale bam it shows up on my phone so you can't hide from me because you know the people who don't

want to measure the weight every day and whine and say oh that's not healthy i'm gonna worry about those are the people that aren't making progress. If you're making progress on your diet, you want to get on a scale every day. So this Withings scale allows people to get on the scale and it measures body fat by bioimpedance. And then it transmits it to my phone so that even if they don't get on the scale, I know they didn't do it. And so I can send them a text. And so there's a big campaign. If you actually put Penn, Gillette, and Withings right now, you'll see that.

What, like a Kickstarter campaign? No, no, no. They're an international company. They're a French company. But they're doing a big promo right now with Penn's Weight Loss being the center. I got you. So it's really, really great. In fact, what I did have them do, and I don't know if it's okay with you. We'll cut the center. So it's really, really great. In fact,

what I did have them do, and I don't know if it's okay with you, you'll cut it out, but it's not for me. I don't get money for this, but for discounts, if you put Ray in their discount code, you get a 15% off and free shipping. So on all of their products, they have this watch that does sleeping. They have a thing that monitors your sleep during there. They have a pulse monitor. They have a blood pressure cuff. So Penn was getting his blood pressure and it was transmitting to me, transmitting to his doctor. We were having to change his blood pressure medicines, not we, not me, but his doctor, his team of doctors was overseeing this. So all the stuff you read in People Magazine about how many calories ate a day and then the crazy stuff, all the stuff, Penn Jillette doesn't just do something just out of the blue. We did it all by the book.

And all of his physician team is ecstatic because he's way more healthy now. For all those people that blog and comment and say, oh, it can't be this healthy to lose weight this fast and it's dangerous whatever baloney he's way more healthy today than he was there so so that's how it started right um and um and basically um he um you know we switched him slow over that you know that that time his his goal was to be below 230 i I think it was, by his 60th birthday, which was like March 5th. And we had this big party, and I turned out to end up being the center of Penn Jillette's 60th party.

You know, it was called Penn's Favorite Food. And we hired amazing chefs to work with me, and we did a whole plant-based thing for like 80 people. Rick Rubin was there, a bunch of people were all there. And everybody loved the food. It was great food. Rick Rubin was there. A bunch of people were all there. And everybody loved the food. It was great food. We had a great time. Billy the Mime was there. He did an act. And Piff the Magic Dragon was there, which was great. He did something. It was really great fun together, but it was all around Penn's new favorite food, which was a really great theme.

And his blood pressure is normalized. great thing. And his blood pressure is normalized. Well, his blood pressure is way lower, but he's off like six of the eight medications. I think he has like one and a half left. And what happens according, and I don't know the specifics of this part because I haven't studied that physiology, but the heart takes a while. It's a muscle. And it takes a while to not be that hard thing that's pumping with the vascular system. The vascular system has to get more plastic again, more fluid. But it's way, way in control where it was completely out of control. His apnea is way better.

His eczema is gone. We know. We talk to people about this. Now, I didn't tell him about this. And if you listen to his podcast – I did. I just listened to the one with you on him. And I mean, it's amazing to hear him evangelize this lifestyle and sort of chastise everybody else who can't wrap their head around it because he's, what's so powerful about him is, you know, first of all, you know, his larger than

life personality. Right. And when he gets behind something and is passionate about it, he's going to let you know about it. Right. And the fact that he is, you know, by nature a skeptic. Right. So he's not somebody who's going to come into this woo-woo thing and buy into it. Right. You know, he's going to really look at it. Right. And, you know, anybody who listens to him or has any history of listening to him knows

this about him. So it was really powerful to hear him kind of give his testimony. And, you know, he's not doing it for an ideological reason, but for those people that are ideological about it, I mean, that's okay with me. I don't have a reason why someone can't do that or worry about the environment or those things. Those are true. But the good news is that I'm not eating any more animals than they are. And so I'm helping even though I'm doing it for my own selfish reasons. And so I think what – amongst all of them, what you heard, Matt Donnelly, Matt Donnelly.

Yeah, he got his buddies in on it too. And I think that's a big part of it when we're talking about translating this information into action that can be implemented. This is 90 days of transformation. It's like a new human. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there's accountability built in he knows that if he doesn't get on the scale you're going to see it and he's got his friends that are doing it too that he's showing up for them and they're showing up for him right and i

think they they turn it into like something that's fun that they can then share also right his gigantic audience right and and so that's one of the reasons why i insisted that withings that this person geting scale because I wanted. I mean, you can see like in this app how many different people I've been tracking. All these different people have been clients. So how many people are you working with right now? at one time. And the reason why is because I get really emotionally involved in helping them. It's a lot of energy because essentially I have to talk to them once a week and get them through the next seven days. And then society pounds, pounds, pounds back to the social things you're saying. And you can't slip up. If you put yourself in this mode and you're in the weight loss mode, you can't, when you jump off, you screw up for the next seven to 10 days. It's not just a one day hit. It's not just a calorie hit. It's a longer, much longer hit.

So mentally I have people stay on game the whole time. I don't do the cheat day thing. I don't do any of those. I take a completely different approach, which will be explained more why I do it in this next paper that we're doing. But the point is that I can't really do more than about, you know, have three or four people at one time just because you start peeling back all these social interactions with food. And what's really amazing is, you know, I can't come up to you and say, you know, your face is getting pretty chunky and your clothes are looking real tight. You really shouldn't be eating that, having that Starbucks or eating that, you know, that bagel, you know, but, but they can look at us and say, you know, you're looking kind of gone

and you're looking kind of thin, you know, I mean, you're looking kind of like a cancer patient, you know, sure. You're, you're not having an eating disorder. And so that fact that society. That's okay. It's okay. You can't do the other way around. interviewed me and she said, you know, well, aren't you worried about, you know, telling people not to eat that you're going to do anorexia or get them anorexic? And I'm not saying that people don't have a food eating disorders. But what I did say is I said, you know, look, a food eating disorder is a lot more serious than I told them not to eat a bagel. That's not what creates food eating disorders. And okay, let me accept the responsibility for every anorexic and bulimic in the country.

If the other side that's telling them to eat, eat, eat, eat, eat, will accept the responsibility for all the people that die of nutritional overnutrition. Right, right. That's way bigger, a way bigger audience. But you are going to have a self-selecting group because people that have control issues around food in a very real way, people that have anorexia, they're going to be attracted to the idea of doing a prolonged fast. Yeah, but maybe or maybe not. But the point is, is that when you're, that's why I say it's emotionally there because I'm watching the scale and we know what the ideal weight is. Now, even me today, and I think we all have dysmorphia. I don't know if you have this experience too,

today. And I think we all have dysmorphia. I don't know if you have this experience too, but the fact is I can't tell that I lost weight. When I look in the mirror, I still see, and, and, you know, Penn's seen some of this too. You got to take a picture. And what's really interesting that anybody can do this, take your phone in the bathroom. Okay. And hold it up towards the mirror and take a picture of you in the mirror. And then look at the picture on the phone and look at the mirror and you'll see two different things. Yeah, that's true. And that's an amazing weird thing. That's its own pendulite magic trick.

Right. This is why when we take a selfie, it looks like us. But when somebody else takes a picture of us, it looks like a bad picture. Or, you know, it's like a bad hair. You know, a lot of women or men will go and they'll get their hair done in a hair salon and it looks like crap and they got to go home and fix it right away. And the truth is nobody else can see that you're having a bad hair day, but you can. So this is a weird thing.

And so this is true. And this is why I think having that accountability that you were talking about, I'm not going to let them go to extreme. I'm going to get them down to a level where they're in that level. And I'm going to say, look, it doesn't matter. We're not talking about perfect body. So I think those kinds of disorders are far more likely to happen when people are going for the perfect chiseled abs and the perfect magazine look rather than, hey, we're just trying to get within this healthy size and do that.

So it is true. It's something we do have to be concerned with. So, I'm not dismissing it completely. I'm just saying that I think a lot more people are probably dying and sick of swallowing too much. And we're talking about decades of their lives cut off. Whereas, you know, eating disorders are very complicated. They're very rooted and they're focused in a smaller group of people. And I think that in general, you know, we've got a lot more people that could restrict and do it in a helpful way. You know, having somebody eat a big giant salad or three pounds of spinach like he was eating, big bowls of corn stew, you know, big things of rice. You know, the kinds of foods he was eating, which you just, you can't possibly keep weight on eating this stuff, you know?

And it's also peasant food because basically, you know, the other criticism is, well, he's super rich and he probably has his own chef that travels with him and all of this sort of thing. And in the podcast, he kind of lays it out. He's like, well, I'm eating room service. So it's costing, you know, 10,000 times more than it should. But basically, it's just steamed vegetables. It's brown rice.

It's black beans. Three pounds of steamed spinach. Stuff that you can get for very cheap. Literally the price of two happy meals at McDonald's. And his wife, Emily Jeanette Lett, I've known them since before they were married. Emily and I worked together, and she cooked all those meals. But really, there weren't a lot of them. There was a lot of repetition. There was a lot of repetition in his diet because if you make it too exciting, it just brings back the desire to eat, eat, eat, eat, eat. Every meal becomes entertainment. Every social interaction becomes entertainment. And he talks to that story about that one time where he went to a business lunch and he wasn't eating and it turned out he had this power play. And I would say for everyone, if you just put Withings, you know, W-I-T-H-I-N-G-S, pen and letter in Google and read his letter to

himself that he wrote for Withings from 10 years ago. So he's writing to 50-year-old Penn from 60-year-old Penn. And I think it captures a lot of really the amazing spirit and that transformation. And it happens. And I think you'll resonate with your transformation. You did. Certainly, it resonates with one mind. And even though all three came at it from a relatively different perspective, it's really easy to see that one of the most difficult things of, for example, doing a plant-based diet is that social lubricant side. Whereas the paleo,

the reason why I think these guys really think, quote, this is easier to do is because it's so much closer to what everybody else is doing that they can just call anything paleo. And I'm not being generic. They've also done a very good job of creating community and and culture around it so there's a lot of support right and plant-based it's all around activism and so i'm trying to get it out of that so what you'll find is you know around pen around math matt around michael goodell we're not centered on the activism again i don't want to dissuade anybody who believes in those things and really wants to push that side or push the environmental side. That's not the point.

I'm not trying to focus a negative light. I'm trying to say a positive thing. I'm trying to say, you know, the reason we would work together on something would be how do we take, you know, authentic athletic performance and calorie restriction or dietary restriction without malnutrition? How do we take those together and optimize and activism for over 200 years, actually all the way back to Pythagoras. There's a lot of history in it. What I'm suggesting though is what you do every day and what your podcast deals with even from performance perspective but from nutrition that we can move this debate beyond that. And I've heard you have some of your podcasts with other people that have a different opinion. Everybody say, well, why would you give them,

you know, the time, you know, why would you put them on? And it's not even about airing our differences or comparing. It's more about, I say to everybody, like I got one of the nutritarian bulletin boards. They said, you know, Ray Kronos recently with my Kickstarter, when Joel Furman did a blast out, he's in the Tim Ferriss book, you know, Ray Kronos recently with my Kickstarter when Joel Fuhrman did a blast out. He's in the Tim Ferriss book. You know, isn't Tim a recommendation? That's a horrible diet compared to what they were eating. And I said, my reply was, hey, wait.

Anybody who's on a diet, at least they care about what they eat. Most people out here are on autopilot, and they don't even think about what they're swallowing every day. They don't even, it doesn't even cross their mind. So at least they care what they eat, even if it's not what I agree with, or even if it's what not I believe to be optimal. Like I said, a lot of times there's this pluralism where people are looking at the same side of it, different sides of the same coin, and they're seeing different things from their vantage point.

But the truth is something that maybe is a third thing that you're not considering. And I'm saying that, you know, bringing it back to where we got off on this was this, the idea that our diet is mostly at odds with the social normal, where the paleo diet is more, is closer to the social order. They're adding more plants. They're adding potatoes now, which is great. Well, the paleo thing seems to be always morphing. Right, but it's changing. I'm actually not quite sure what exactly it is. It's really not.

I mean, look, let's look at Paleo 101. If there was an ancestral diet, if it mattered what we ate, if it was an adaptive evolutionary thing, then basically what would happen is once you reproduced, you've stopped influencing your genes. And what we're dying of today, what everybody's trying to deal with is age-related disease that happens after your sexual prime. There's no feedback loop into evolution for that. So right off the bat, there's a thesis.

What we ate in the past is somewhat irrelevant because, you know, what we ate in the past, because humans can eat everything and a lot of things, doesn't necessarily mean they should. What that means is they can reproduce and they can survive past sexual prime. They can reproduce and they can survive past sexual prime. Once sexual prime is hit and they've reproduced, evolution is out of the picture completely. So all the things that people are thinking they're going to do about the perfect diet or whatever. Longevity is not an evolutionary priority. It has nothing to do with it. They're done with us. And what we really look at is we have grandmothers.

No other species has grandmothers this is what i learned from nathaniel domini at one of mcdougall's adventures and you know from an anthropologist we don't we have grandmothers and other species don't have it and one of the reasons that's the grandmother hypothesis one of the reasons this hypothesized we have grandmothers is because they're actually good at gathering or at least watching the children while they gather so we're really gathering hunters not hunting gatherers this whole i don't have you mean other species because they leave right yeah because they're not useful because in in and this is a lot of doug lyle stuff with when he looks at the hamilton rule and looks at trading versus

mating and we get rid of the dead weight and all other in all the other animal groups we just get rid of the dead weight humans actually don't you so they're, but it turns out a grandmother could be perfectly well to, to, to gather underground storage organs. And it turns out when we go down to the southern parts of Africa and we look at where humans are first in the early hominids are, it turns out that's one of the densest, that's one of the densest areas of underground storage organs. I'm talking about tubers like a potato, bulbs like onions, a corms, which is a swollen stem, which is like a water chestnut, right? And rhizomes like ginger or one of those rhizomes.

So these are the four things. And these are all where the plants store their energy down in the ground so that when spring comes, they can pop back out. And it turns out that underground storage organs fueled a lot. And Nathaniel Domini looks at how many copies of the amylase gene, which we need. The amylase is in our saliva to break down the starch to the glucose. We look at the copy number of the gene, and that varies based on how starch-heavy the diet is. It also is, there's a lot of copies of it, which means it's important.

You don't want to go without that. know he talks about us being starchivores now we can't be say carbivores because everybody freaks out about the word carb but the fact of the matter is starch is important part and we have a huge glucophobia going on right now which just is is crazy talk we'll get over this extrapolated to to fruit being verboten. Yeah, exactly. This is just, it's so ridiculous that people could be this, and this is because the word sugar is used out of context. This is because the word carb is used out of context. And so anyway, there's a great combination. And there's also other species down there, like the naked mole rat, which basically works on these underground storage rogans. They'll eat some of it, and then they'll pack it with mud.

They burrow, and they kind of have – I can't remember the technical term for it, but they have like a queen that gives all the birth. And then they have all their workers, so they're more like a beehive than a mammal that you would think of a mammal. And what's interesting is they have their thermal regulation gene turned off too. And they live like 30 years. They live longer than those kinds of animals would ever live. So they have the thermal regulation part turned off. They don't have any, you know, they're really ugly. If you Google them, naked mole rats are very ugly.

And they eat nothing but starch, you know, so the starchivores. So, you know, it's kind of interesting to say that, you know, again, here's a place where that metabolic winter, where those genes sort of overlap, you see this longevity happening. And anyway, back to where I got off of that is that humans basically evolved in a place where gathering was big. And if you actually go down, even with the hazdas, because my friends hung out, you know, stayed with them and studied and put calorimeters on them while they were farming, because some of them farm, some of them are still gathering in the woods. They're being forced off their land, a lot of them, which is really a thing. But even them, they will hunt animal products and trade it for starch products, plant products. And, of course, their diet's being manipulated.

But, again, just because we can eat something doesn't mean we should. I mean, certainly pandas are carnivores. But because they only eat bamboo, they're really limited to where they can live. If you put a panda up in, you know, where polar bears are, they're going to be sucking wind. They're not going to jump in the gene pool with all the polar bears that are used to that environment. So human survival is because we can eat anything. And these idea that we're going to go to the Inuit, we're going to go to all these little isolated groups of people and say, oh yeah, see, they're perfect until we came along and fed them carbs. You know, that's, this is their words, not mine.

You know, that suddenly that we ruined it. No, no. They just learned to live that way. I don't want to live like the Inuit. I don't want to have their obesity and diseases and their stuff. They don't match in terms of longevity. And most of the stories that are being told are just like the Ancel Keys story. It's really sloppy science. The story that gets handed

around on the blogs and internet. I mean, I think you cobbled up- Right. This sort of, yeah, the toppling of Ansel Keys and this sort of revisionist history of his work. And you're seeing it with Dean Ornish now as well. Exactly. You know, he's getting lambasted and crucified. And I look at that and I'm like, I don't even, I don't get where that is even coming from. And I mean, even if you disagree with him, I i know him dean is a good friend and his wife ann and they're nice guys and and he's not he's not some monster he's doing stuff and he's getting results

is his stuff the be-all and end-all no and neither are the other ones. But the idea that we villainize, this is about these tribes. Seth Godin is a really good mentor of mine and a great friend. And his book Tribes, I think, explains it in so many ways. And we create these tribes. But the fact is that we really villainize everybody. And that's why I'm saying with us, you know, getting together with people getting together on the other side, just the fact that we can talk and, you know, back to the paleo thing, you know, what we did eat is irrelevant. I mean, even if we knew exactly what

they ate, seeing a handprint on the wall and some scratches on the bone doesn't say that that's what we ate. We have no idea what they ate. It's just a wild ass guess because they could have been digging in the ground like they still are. They could be cooking. They have tubers down there like five feet in diameter. They dig up these big giant things they do. But we see what our primate first cousins eat. I mean, come on guys, let's look at this. We're not that far away, but that doesn't mean we can't eat meat. That doesn't mean that any amount of meat is going to immediately kill you. And that's the problem is because we're so adaptable, we can read a range of diet. But what we want to do is optimal.

And I think Joel Fuhrman, that's why I resonate with his message the best, because Joel Fuhrman teaches four levels of diet. He says at the top, we need to eat sufficient calories or sufficient nutrition with minimum calories. Okay. So the minimum amount of energy that you need to get through the day, not how much can our bellies swallow and not get fat. That's not the game. Sufficient nutrition with minimal amount of energy to supply what you need. The next level of his diet says comprehensive nutrient adequacy. And that doesn't mean every single meal has to be perfectly balanced. It means over a span of days, weeks, whatever,

you need to have a complement of things so that you get that and your body is good at pulling out what it needs. Again, you don't need to overload it and slug a shake down every day because you might be short in some lysine or taurine or whatever. You don't have to. It's not that exact. The third level is that your food should be hormonally favorable. And hormonally favorable means it doesn't negatively impact. Well, milk and dairy. You and I know.

it doesn't negatively impact. Well, milk and dairy, you and I know. I mean, anyone reasonable about this says, look, no other species drinks milk after it's weaned and no other species drinks another species milk. And then on top of that, if you talk to any mother out there and you tell her, the only thing your baby got from you, the only thing your baby got from you was calories.

Your breasts and your body was irrelevant just give them formula she will slap you this is offensive the truth is breast milk is very hormonally active and those proteins that are delivered are designed to cause and this is you know michael clapper baby calf growth formula. And so those things. And so anybody would say, well, you know, but that's breast milk. You know, yeah, I can understand human breast milk does humans. But what about a cow? We're, you know, that's not our hormones.

Well, you know, let's look at insulin, bovine insulin and porcine or pig insulin. They differ by out of 51 or 53 amino acids. They differ by three and two amino acids respectively. And we can use cow insulin. We can use pig insulin. We did for a long time before we synthesize it. So whey and casein are two proteins that guess what they do? They stimulate insulin, like growth factor and growth hormone, which is why people love

to do whey shakes when they're bodybuilding. It probably does work, but those happen to be the two things that we also don't want to do hormonally favorable where we are on this level. Those are the things we don't want to do if we don't want cancer to grow because IGF-1 and GH is implicated in all cancers. So that's what we mean about hormonally favorable. And there's lots of other things like the essential amino acids and other things that could hormonally kick off aging. And then his final look at it is the idea of things that don't basically naturally concentrate environmental toxins. So for example, he's not big on rice, not because 1.6 billion Asians eat rice and they're not fat. That's not the point. The point is a lot of rice is contaminated with arsenic same with fish most fish is contaminated with mercury and he's saying

look is one serving going to kill you probably not but you don't need to be but if you constantly eat that you're exposing yourself to things that concentrate environmental toxins i'm not using toxins in the alternative sense i'm using it in the real sense, things that we know are toxic, that you're just accumulating that exposure. Or some people would talk about pesticides and herbicides and those things. So when you look at those four levels of a diet, that at the very top, sufficient nutrients, minimum amount of calories, comprehensive nutrient adequacy, hormonally favorable, and then finally not concentrating environmental toxins.

And then what I add to that is reduced eating frequency. So I'm eating in a limited window on top of that. And that's how I feel like we can take the nutritarian maybe even to the next level where it starts intersecting with the longevity stuff we're talking about. Yeah, that's amazing. Wow. Well, that might be a good place to end it, but I got a couple more things I want to ask you really quick, if I could.

So the first thing is, when you get asked, as I'm sure you do every day, what about protein? You already elaborated on it at length earlier on the podcast, but when you only have a moment, right? Like somebody's like, well, what about protein? But you know you're only going to be talking to this guy for maybe two minutes. Like what is the – how do you manage that inquiry? So why don't you ask me? So where am I going to get my protein, right? I don't know.

What do you mean you don't know? You're the nutrition guy. I don't know. How can you not know? You're the nutrition guy. I don't know. How can you not know? I mean, beef has protein. Yeah, so you're eating beef, right? No. Well, cows, where do they get it?

Grass. They eat grass and hippopotamuses and giraffes. Yeah, but you can't eat grass. You can't digest grass. The answer is all these things get protein. I have no idea where they get it, but somehow it works. And I don't worry about it either. And I haven't seen any deficiencies. So I just don't worry about it. So this is a page out of the Doug Lyle playbook. This is a Doug Lyle playbook.

It's a little manipulative. It is. You talked about it on the other podcast with Pat. Yeah, the answer is that the question isn't really meant to be answered. It's meant to start a debate. And really what they really want is reassurance that what they're doing, what they believe to be correct there. Because it's not like they're asking because they genuinely want to know. They want to dig in on their side to prove that or establish to themselves that what they're doing is okay. Yeah, exactly. And so it's not a real question. So I just don't worry about it. I give not a real answer. How does that go usually? It always goes there really, wait a minute, how do cows get protein? Everybody doesn't think about that. That really messes them up. And then, you know, obviously you can do the same thing with gorillas. You know, a lot of people use

the gorilla example, you know, where in the hell does a gorilla get protein? I mean, they're way more muscular. They don't go to the gym and they don't eat protein shakes, but I'm not going to get in a fight with a chimpanzee. I'm not even going to get to fight with a little bitty monkey. It'll kick my ass, right? So I'm not going to do that. So I just don't, I just, I know what their heart, I don't think they're trying to be this way, but I just think the word just needs to be eradicated from diet. I think we just need to not even consider it. And that's what, and I know that's preposterous and I know that's disruptive, but that's what the food triangle does. We don't even include it as part of it because again, from a longevity perspective, we need to eat less of it.

Right. All right. Final question. I know you're not a medical doctor, but if the universe converged to make you Surgeon General of the United States, what would be the first thing that you would do? Fund whole food research. So I would say let's throw out the rule books on protein, carbs, and fat. Let's throw out the typical randomized control trials. It's all designed for testing drugs where placebo really matters.

How do you double-blind control a banana unless it's going in the other end? You know you're eating a banana. What I would do is I would let people self-select and I would bring people together and say, look, I want you to eat this way for a year and we want to just track you. If you have an exception, take a picture of it. If I see a picture, I can pretty much know what I need to know from a science perspective. And I would start at a very massive high level scale of trying to get a granularity to get rid of the debate. And I think that I could design that right now, that we could start making some pretty good assumptions right now.

The very final bit of that would be hard to tease out, but we would rapidly get to something that we could eat. We would rapidly get to something that we could say is you know 80 70 whatever percent effective in mitigating chronic disease within a few years versus right now that we'll never get there because you know we're chipping away and chipping away and chipping away and we're down in the minutiae and now that language is out on the blogs and i have all these people out there talk talk talk talk talk talk they really don't understand i didn't understand what a protein was and i did protein synthesis at nasa i mean we were doing protein crystal course i didn't know what a protein was and I did protein synthesis at NASA. I mean, we were doing protein crystal course. I didn't know what a protein was. And what I mean

by that is I didn't really understand what it meant from a dietary perspective. And what was really interesting is at one of my daughter's errand swim meets that we were sitting at, one of my biochemistry professors from college happened to be there and happened to hear me talking to somebody else about my new diet. And he really called the bullshit flag on me. And I'm thinking to yourself, look, you're fat. And I said it, you're fat. You obviously don't get it. So I know you know that I know you understand, but if you're going to assault me and say, I don't know what I'm talking about as a biochemistry professor, I'm going to say, you obviously don't know what you're talking

about because you're fat. And of course I got got this. What did that guy say to you? He was pissed. I mean, that's not a way to win friends. But at the same time, you know, people did to me too. You know, I don't have the chiseled abs. And so a lot of people like when they see my TedMed talk where I had just lost 50 pounds and I was still at 180 and I hadn't done the last 20 because I was still doing research and I gained and lost a couple of times on purpose.

I mean, I can show you on the Withings scale afterwards. You know, each time I did them, except because I know I don't cheat. I know I could document what I was doing. But even now, I don't, I'm not as ripped as you are. I'm not in that shape. But I don't think you have to get to that level to understand a lot more about what it's doing at a medical level. Okay. And I think that's the problem.

If you set the goal too far, if you set it way out there, the bar so far out that you have to be a fitness model to have an opinion, people who are fitness models hang out in gyms, not in libraries. Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, people can say what they want. You know, I, I see it all the time. I ignore those like Tim, you know, you ignore the trolls, you just ignore them. You know, I used to engage and I realized you got to starve them of oxygen. You know, it's not that. And the converse is true too. picture is him you know in his bathing suit with his abs and he's 20 years old or whatever

you know these people these people they're trying but they're they're just going for the the low-hanging fruit that's the protein on you know seven up when we were young had a great commercial never had it never will do you remember that was caffeine. So it was one of the first things. And they made a whole avocatizing campaign around nothing. And, of course, we saw this in the low-fat, the fat-free foods of the 80s. I love Jeff Novick's talk of those fat-free and how they just made this whole campaign over nothing. They didn't change the soups. They just added water.

And the same amount of fat was in there. So all the people said, yeah, we reduced the fat. And look what happened. We got fat. No, They didn't change the soups. They just added water and the same amount of fat was in there. So all the people said, yeah, we reduced the fat and look what happened. We got fat or whatever. No, we didn't. We just added sugar to it. And then the sugar-free. So right now we're seeing all this and this is all this advertisement over nothing. And I see a lot of fitness models that's the same thing. When you're young, et cetera, having that as relatively easy to do. And the things that you're doing may in fact make you look amazing, but also may at the same time be aging you early. And the same that when I'm, when I'm taking you on, when I'm saying, you know, where do we make the soft landing for exercise? This is a hard thing to say to a guy that's major, you know, your, your mark on that.

But I think you take it in the right way that I mean it. Yeah, of course. So what I'm saying is that essentially, we've got to take these arbitrary labels. And so protein, carbs, fat, metabolism, starvation mode, these are all things I'm going to be dealing with in the book, in our broken plate. And I think it's this language.

I think it's this language. I think it's this, you know, constant obsession with this minutia where I was looking at proteins, I was synthesizing them. And I still didn't really recognize what they meant at the level you and I know today. Because every time you talk about the protein discussion, everybody would wind up tweeting saying, you need to talk to Ray and vice versa. We talked about that. They all would do us because we both talk about it. Same with Matt. It always – everybody, it's popular to talk about that because that question comes up and everything. Right now, they have marketing studies. If you put the label word protein on a package, it just sells.

And the food industry shouldn't be lambasted because they're selling more. The exercise industry shouldn't be lambasted because they're getting more supplements. They're selling more memberships. The restaurant shouldn't be lambasted because they're putting food that's selling more. No one tells you that you have to

swallow that stuff. No one tells you you have to go participate. No one tells you. you have to swallow that stuff. No one tells you you have to go participate. No one tells you. When you enter into this and you start going at it halfway and start believing everything, and that's the problem, especially when it's a complex molecular biology or physiology where the words are being used out of context, like insulin, like glycemic index, like insulin resistance, like these kinds of terms that are just being thrown around. And everybody has this story they can tell. But have they really put a glucose monitor on? Do they really know what's going on? Have they really measured their insulin response to stuff? Are they really doing oral glucose tolerance tests like I was doing when I was fasting and

looking at how it changes? The answer is no, they're not. And I wasn't either. I was just as guilty. So I'm not throwing rocks. I did the same thing. I think we need, it's time to change this. I think we need to, you would talk to Penn. I never talked about technical stuff when these people were losing weight. We never talked about that. It's like, we don't need, it doesn't matter. Where do you get your protein? I don't know. I don't care. When we figure, we don't need, it doesn't matter. Where do you get your protein? I don't know. I don't care. When we figure out we're deficient, what is a protein deficiency disease?

What are we looking for? I know what happens when I don't have vitamin C. I know about scurvy. I know about rickets with vitamin. I know what those things are. We know what every nutritional deficiency disease is and no one's dying of that stuff. So my point is, why don't we stop talking about it a little bit? Leave it in the lab where it needs to be studied. Back to your question that you asked me because I didn't forget, which is what would I do

if I was surgical general? Well, like the last one, I wouldn't be a fat surgeon general, you know, and that's hard to say. And I'm not personally attacking this person, but I watched a Ted Med as a fat surgeon general gave us a lecture about health. That is a severe cognitive dissonance, you know, it's an endocrine organ and it's hormonally active. So it's not just hanging out there and making you wear a bigger size. It's actively excreting hormones in your body that causes all kinds of other dysfunctions. And so when we look at it from a strictly medical perspective, you know, I think, you

know, PE teachers at school, you know, need to be in good shape. You know, I live in the Bible Belt in Huntsville, Alabama, and yet the Bible Belt happens to be the fattest states in the nation. And clearly, gluttony is not on any religion's, you know, things to do list, right? So, the point I'm making is that we have these contradictions that are all out there. And if we could get rid of the social dogma and get our discussion back and say, wait a minute, what can we do to bring this back into discussion? I don't think we need terms of molecular biology or biochemistry to go shopping. And I think the labels, you and I have the advantage. What do we do? We buy stuff without labels, you know, and even the organic versus inorganic, whatever that means, you and I have the advantage. What do we do? We buy stuff without labels.

And even the organic versus inorganic, whatever that means. I mean, even that, I would rather people eat vegetables, whatever they are, frozen, whatever, than I would have them worry about the last thing. Does organic matter in some sense? What does the word really mean? I mean, if rice is organically grown with chicken feces contaminated with arsenic, that's organically unhealthy. And, of course, hemlock tea is natural, and it will naturally kill you. And poison ivy skin cream is probably not the best natural selection for there. So this appeal to nature fallacy is everywhere.

Paleo is appeal to nature. Some of the plant-based people do the same. We're designed to eat plants. We're designed to eat lots of stuff and we survive and we've spread to all corners of a sphere. We've spread to all corners of the earth because we can eat a lot of things. But just because we can doesn't mean we should. And so what I would say is, you know, what we have to do is get back to talking about food. And I think the best food, in my opinion, is the food that doesn't need labels. And if somebody's listening to this and they're inspired by your passionate message and they want to get going, whether it's embarking on a more plant-centric approach to their plate, or maybe they want to learn more about this whole crazy world of intermittent fasting.

Where can you direct people? So right now, my blog, I only do it a couple times a year. I put stuff up there. I'm not the guy who has the mailing list that hits you every week. But just remember raycronise.com or put Ray, C-r-o-n-i-s-e if you put ray cronise or if you put ray nasa and weight loss in google you'll get a lot of links on me you're easy got it but but really i'm not the diet guy you know my book isn't a diet book what i want to do is explain the contradiction so our broken plate and eventually that website will be up our

the kickstarter campaign just completed um Do you have an idea of when the book will be completed? I'm hoping by the April timeframe. Oh, that's pretty soon. I would have thought maybe like a year from now. No, no, no. What I'm going to do is I'm going to finish it and get it out to my backers as quickly as possible. And at the same time in parallel, I'm going to negotiate with publishers or I'm negotiating with publishers to do it on a wider distribution. But I really wanted to write something that's outside of the traditional venue and write like the accusations I was making about exercise and food, how it needs to appeal or restaurants need to amass this. I don't want to fault the publishing companies to want to sell the most books. I really don't care about being an author or a writer.

really don't care about being an author or a writer. I like my papers I do that are free to download in, you know, and metabolic winter hypothesis is another one they can download. But I like that. So that's how I move science forward. So what I'm really interested in doing is changing about 10,000 people's lives. I know a hundred people, you know, a hundred people, a society of 10,000 people is one person away. I want to try to aggregate that first group and create that mass because I don't think this problem is going to be solved from the top down. a society of 10,000 people is one person away. I want to try to aggregate that first group and create that mass because I don't think this problem is going to be solved from the top down. I don't think this problem is going to be legislated. I don't think that the medical industry is suddenly going to get rid of one sick to the US economy that's all around treating sick

people that are eating food that are creating them sick. I don't think that's the way. I think it's going to be us getting together in our little crazy little ways, doing our experiments and sort of growing it into this longevity thing. You know, you know, having a group of people that significantly change. I hope my kids are inspired by what I'm doing right now and they make better choices and they do better than I did. You know, you had you and I both had our same crashes at about the same age. Like, you know, mine was 45 and it was just like a horror. I don't want my kids to ever have gone through that. None of them have obesity problems and none of them have issues. And, and so I think that we're going to have to grow out of it, but we're going to have to get wiser. And, uh, you

know, some of the conscious choices of food that you've made and things I've heard you talk about, and I think it's going to involve more plants, not less. So I would say that, you know, anyway, you can go look at Joel Furman's stuff, you know, stuff from Michael Clapper, stuff from all the plant-based guys. They all have a little difference and also read the other things. I mean, you know, some of the other guys have some interesting points, but I think we're going to see this the fat thing i don't i don't see that we're going to be you know we're not suddenly dying of fat deficiencies and that's not to say that all fat is bad but the obsession with that and the villainization of sugar is probably as ridiculous as the opposite problem was. So I think they're probably on polar sides of the same problem.

And I don't eat excess oils or refined sugars. So I take them both out. Right. Thanks for talking to me, man. Thanks, man. Are you going back up to True North? Not now, no. I'm going home to Alabama.

So I got my whole lab out there in my car. And so I'm headed home. Your whole lab in your car? My whole lab is stuffed in my car. And you're going to drive to Alabama? Yeah, I'm driving back. Not tonight. Yeah, so I'm taking my time.

So I may go to Las Vegas tonight and see Penn and those guys. How far is Las Vegas from here? Four hour, four and a half hour drive maybe. Yeah, so I may go there tonight. I may hang out with you whatever whatever we do so all right man well uh i appreciate it man it's super uh fascinating and illuminating and when the book comes out will you come back and absolutely we can talk absolutely great thanks ray peace plants so how was that for you?

Did you learn something? Of course you did. How could you not? Amazing mind, amazing man, absolutely incredible. So please check out this week's show notes for so much more. I've got tons of links and resources to take your edification to the next level on the episode page for this episode, do yourself a favor and delve into it. It's well worth your time.

For all your plant power and RRP swag and merch, go to richroll.com. Good stuff there to take your health to the next level. Keep sending in your questions for future Q&A podcasts to info at richroll.com. Shout out to Sean Patterson for help on the graphics on this show, to Chris Swan for production assistance, to Tyler Pyatt and Anna Lemma for the music. And Tyler is

no longer editing the show. You know this if you listened last week. I did the post on today's show. So if it's rough, that's on me. I'm working on it. Thanks so much for supporting the show, you guys, for telling your friends, for sharing it on social media, and yes, for always using the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com for all your Amazon purchases. And I will see you guys next week. Until then, I will say this. Doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results is the very definition of insanity. If you want different results in your life, you got to do something different. So what are you going to change this week? What are you going to change today? That's it. Peace. Plants. Thank you.