The Rich Roll Podcast - Ray Cronise & Julieanna Hever On Everything Plant-Based Nutrition

Episode Date: February 5, 2018

What happens when a NASA scientist teams up with a plant-based dietitian? Today we find out, with the return of my friends Julieanna Hever (RRP #13) and Ray Cronise (RRP #212). Specializing in weight management, disease prevention & sports nutrition, Julieanna is one of the world's most respected plant-based registered dietitians. She is a sought-after lecturer, talk show host, TEDx speaker, VegNews Magazine nutrition columnist, and the author of numerous journal articles and books that include The Complete Idiot’s Guide To Plant-Based Nutrition* and The Vegiterranean Diet*. In addition, Julieanna has contributed recipes to both New York Times bestselling Forks Over Knives books and appeared on a myriad of television programs including Dr. Oz, Steve Harvey and E! News. Ray is a scientist-innovator focused on disrupting diet and nutrition advice. A former NASA scientist that spent 15 years with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center working on Physical and Analytical Chemistry and Biophysics as Assistant Mission Scientist on four Spacelab missions, he matriculated to found Zero-G with X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis before pulling meticulous focus on nutrition to solve his decades-long battle with weight and lifestyle infirmities. A Matthew Kenney Culinary graduate, Ray teamed up with leading academic researchers at institutions such as Harvard and the National Institutes of Health to publish work at the intersection of healthspan and plant-based diets. He delivered an amazing talk at TEDMED 2010 and has been featured on ABC Nightline and profiled everywhere, including WIRED Magazine, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, Men’s Journal, The Guardian, The 4-Hour Body and magician Penn Jillette’s book Presto!* as the mastermind behind Penn's dramatic plant-based diet 100-pound weight loss. These two recently combined their wonder twin powers to collaborate on a number of projects that include personalized nutrition consulting and the co-authoring of both medical journal articles as well as their recently released book, Plant-Based Nutrition (Idiot’s Guide Series)*. Today Julieanna and Ray join me for a mind-blowing geek dive into everything you ever wanted to know (and then some) about plant-based nutrition, weight loss, chronic lifestyle illness and more. Break out that pen and paper, because you're going to want to take notes. Enjoy the exchange! Peace + Plants, Rich

It is so simple if you think about it. No one will argue that we need to eat more fruits and vegetables. If you eat half your diet from fruits and vegetables, you're going to do better. If you just eat less frequently and eat more fruits and vegetables, you'll do well. If you don't soak them in sugar, oil, and salt. We're talking about whole food. We're not talking about potato chips and french fries. That's Juliana Hever and Ray

Kronise. And this, as always, is the Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody, what's going on? How are you? Welcome or welcome back. My name is Rich Roll. And yes, that is my God-given name. People ask me all the time, is that a stage name? No, it is my name for better or worse. And I am your host on this podcast, Locomotive.

Thanks for choosing to spend a little time with me today. It's a pleasure to be here. It's a pleasure to serve. And my hope is that the experience, this experience, will leave you both entertained as well as enriched, perhaps a little bit better than you were yesterday with a handful of things to possibly think about, consider, and who knows, maybe even implement into your life. Today's show marks the return of two good friends of mine, both of whom have been on the show before, dietitian Juliana Hever from way back in the day, episode 13, the OG, as well as former NASA scientist turned nutrition expert Ray Cronise, who made his first and

very popular appearance on the show back in February of 2016. That was episode 212. If you missed it, check it out. It will definitely blow your mind. In any event, Juliana is one of the most respected plant-based registered dietitians out there. She specializes in weight management, disease prevention, and sports nutrition. She is a TEDx speaker. She is the host of a talk show entitled What Would Juliana Do on Z Network. And she is the nutrition columnist for VegNews magazine, as well as the author of numerous journal articles and books that include The Complete Idiot's Guide to Plant-Based Nutrition,

as well as The Vegetarian Diet. She lectures extensively and has contributed recipes to both New York Times bestselling Forks Over Knives books and has appeared on a bunch of TV shows, including Dr. Oz, Steve Harvey, and E! News. Ray, Ray Cronise, is a scientist. He is an innovator focused on disrupting diet and nutrition advice. He's the mastermind behind Las Vegas magician Penn Jillette's plant-based diet, 100-pound weight loss. And as a former NASA scientist, he spent 15 years working with the Marshall Space Flight Center,

where he focused on physical and analytical chemistry and biophysics as assistant mission scientist on four space lab missions. I don't know what any of that means, but it's super impressive. He's also a graduate of the Matthew Kenney Culinary Program, and he's teamed up with leading academic researchers at institutions such as Harvard and the National Institutes of Health to publish work at the intersection of healthspan and plant-based diets. He gave an amazing TED Talk at TEDMED 2010. You should all watch that. And has been featured on ABC Nightline,

as well as in Wired Magazine, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, Men's Journal, The Guardian. He was profiled in Tim Ferriss' book, The 4-Hour Body, as well as Penn Jillette's book, Presto, which is a great book, How I Made 100 Pounds Magically Disappear. Well, how did he do it? It all has to do with Ray, Ray Cron anyway these two juliana and ray have recently combined their wonder twin powers to collaborate on a number of projects including personalized nutrition

consulting as well as co-authoring medical journal articles and collaborating on their recently released new book plant-based nutritionased Nutrition, from the Idiot's Guide series. And today, they join me for a super geeky, mind-blowing deep dive into the ins, the outs, the hows, the whys, and the whatnots of plant-based nutrition. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment, an experience that I had that quite literally saved my life.

And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care. Especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. It's a real problem, a problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do.

And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. All right, we got through it. We did it. So this is me with Ray and Juliana. It's a fascinating and at times a little bit scientific, perhaps even highly scientific deep dive on all things diet, nutrition, weight loss, plant-based nutrition. So get that pen and paper handy and enjoy. Ready to do it?

Thanks for coming back. So nice to have you guys here. Ray, you were on, I think it was about two years ago, the last time you were on. I think it was, was it two years? I think it was February of 2016. Wow. As I recall. And Juliana, you were here early, early, early days.

It must have been four, maybe four and a half years ago or something like that. Yeah, I was number seven. I don't know why I know that. I think so. Oh, it was even earlier than I recall. Wow. I do remember 212 because I've heard it, people say it enough. Okay, 212. It's a big, that's a lot of work between- See, we count our lives based on what number of podcasts we were with Rich Roll.

Yeah, so there was BCAC and RR. Yeah, there we go. What episode are you? Well, I don't know what this one's going to be, but it's going to be in the 300s. Wow. Yeah, man. Great to have you guys here. So much has happened since I've talked to each of you guys individually, and now you're

here together. And let's pick it up where we left off. I mean, you guys have been collaborating together, working together. You've got this new book coming out. You did this study that got published. So let's just dig into it. I mean, where to even begin? First of all, how did you guys get together and decide you were going to collaborate on work?

Well, the first I heard of this guy was I was going for a run and I was listening to their podcast. And I was like, whoa, that guy sounds... It always comes back to the podcast. Yes, it literally came back to the podcast. I thought, well, I was fascinated and blown away by what he was talking about so i mean but that was it randomly and then simultaneously i published an article on plant-based nutrition in the permanente journal last july so that was 2016 and he had seen that paper and we'll let you explain that part yeah so i i saw this paper and it was the first

plant-based nutrition paper that just seemed to be hit all the issues and only the issues. It didn't go beyond and didn't stretch. And I sent it to everyone. I sent it to Joel. I sent it to Michael Greger, Joel Fuhrman, Michael Greger, Michael Clapper, all of our circle of people. And everybody replied, oh yeah, Juliana, she's great. And I'm thinking, well, I've never really heard of this person. I've never seen her at a conference or any of the things I'd been at, but I love the paper. And I write notes.

I'm old school. I can't do PDFs and iPads and Kindles. I print them out and three hole punch them and put them in notebooks. It's really kind of crazy. So I write all over them and I wrote a bunch of notes. And then I think as a result of being on your podcast and all the mutual friends, since she's so connected in with the plant-based community, it started coming up as a suggested friend on Facebook. So you know how when you go through your Facebook, you get all these people doing friend requests.

And for me, as long as they're not some porn troll or some, you know, no name account, I add people until it fills up. And so every time I'd go back, it was hers. In fact, you know, another, another friend of mine, Anthony Masiello, who's my co-founder and just sides, it was coming up in his fee too, suddenly. So Facebook has that weird, spooky connection. So the AI of Facebook was saying, come on, you guys, you guys are supposed to connect here. Right. So I did the friend request, and then we started messaging about her paper. And what was crazy before that is that we were going around saying the same stuff. Like we were saying, protein is not a food group.

Like we literally had verbatim messaging on a lot of different issues. And it was kind of weird that we had never even known about each other. Well, Juliana, I mean, you kind of came up inside the plant-based movement like you're immersed in that and ray you know you're you kind of came from the outside right exactly you weren't indoctrinated in you know the school of all these doctors that you know that juliana i was selfishly trying to sell you just figured it out from the outside and came into it i was selfishly trying to solve my problem, the problem I had. So the first part of that was the weight loss.

I did the weight loss. I did the cold stress for the weight loss. And that landed me in Tim Ferriss' book because, you know, he saw me in those circles, in the circles of Peter Diamandis and Singularity University and International Space University, which is where I, you know, that was the circle I was in. And after I lost the weight, I still had the diabetes. In fact, it got worse. And my cholesterol was still getting high.

And it wasn't until October 2009 at the TEDMED conference, it was the year before I spoke, that I ran into Dean and Ann Ornish. And he said, you know, Hey Ray, have you thought about dropping the fish, the eggs and dairy, but dairy was yogurt. Cause I wasn't really eating cheese. I mean, I'd have it occasionally on pizza or something every now and then, but it wasn't like I was eating cheese all the time. So it was dairy, eggs and yogurt. And I dropped that within, and I, and I came back on, in fact, we just recently looked at my notebook november 23rd

2009 i went to costco or sam's i don't remember which one and i had like 23 pounds of vegetables i bought that when i came back from this ted med conference and and started the week of thanksgiving 2009 by january it was gone it was gone i mean 50 pounds. Well, I had already lost the weight. The only thing that was gone was my diabetes. I had no longer had hyperglycemia. I was having hypoglycemia where I was passing out after meals. So I would be driving my kids in the car and then hitting the curb. Basically imagine the kinds of symptoms when someone's drunk. I would exhibit those after every meal.

Wow. And I would pass out on the couch and I'd have my children there with me. They'd be sick. And how old were you at the time? It would be 2009, so 45-ish. I'm 53 today. Right. So that was your initial introduction to the plant-based lifestyle.

Right. It just worked. I took those out. And I think I might have mentioned it the last time, and she and I have talked about it a lot when we were speaking at other places, is that for the first two months, I would say, I was really confused about what to eat.

And I think you talk a little bit about this in your talk that I heard at Plantrition this year, where I would go get a bunch of food and spend money and it would populate the refrigerator. And then I would circle around between the stove, the refrigerator and the pantry and say, what am I going to fix? What am I going to make? What is he going to make for those of you not from the South? It took me a year to get used to that. What did you say in Alabama? We're fixing everything. What are we fixing for dinner? What are we fixing for dinner? Yeah. Hey y'all. You think you're fixing a meal?

Like, is it broken? Exactly. So, you know, what would I make for dinner tonight? And so, you know, but I didn't go back. I stayed plant-based regardless. And I ate beans a lot, a lot of plain things. I ate fruit a lot. But slowly but surely, the symptoms of hyper and hypoglycemia, the post meal,

postprandial rise in glucose or the fall, the crash after the meals all went away. And so that sort of corresponded at the same time when Tim's book is just hitting it hard because he's, you know, he debuts at number one on New York times for our body was for, this was for our body. And so now everybody was challenging me about calories. Four-hour body. This was four-hour body. And so now everybody was challenging me about calories. There's no way you could have lost weight that fast. There's no way. And just to re, sorry to interject, but to kind of, maybe it's worth like explaining a little bit about what you did for people that didn't hear our first podcast.

Because that was all about thermogenesis. Right. our first podcast? Because that was all about thermogenesis. Right. So the short story was that when I was literally one day, I had sold my company, I was in this, you know, sort of quagmire about my health. I was above, I was overweight on my way down, but I just, I wanted to figure out, cause I'm the science type. I just wanted to figure out what's the most efficient way to burn calories. You know, if it was underwater bad, bad meeting, then I would have gotten scuba and done that. I had a spreadsheet. I still have it. I had a spreadsheet of the calories burned of every activity. And I was going to get them

added up. And at that moment that I was doing that spreadsheet, this would have been 2008. In October, I started October 27th. So it would have been between October 14 I started October 27th. So it had been between October 14th and October 27th watching TV in the background. And that was the year Michael Phelps was really making us come back when he really did. And that was the 12,000 calories a day. Remember when that was the big joke on Michael Phelps? So I'm thinking 12,000 calories a day. This doesn't make sense. And even if it was wrong and it was 10,000 calories a day or 8,000, it's still a big,

big, big number. And even if it was wrong and it was 10,000 calories a day or 8,000, it's still a big, big, big number. So I started thinking about why would this, how could this possibly be explained? And then I thought, you know, wait, water's 24 times more thermally conductive than air? And, you know, I mean, there's a lot of energy. I mean, you're this little immersion heater in this big giant swimming pool. And I, my prior company made composite swimming pools and spas. And I sat on the ANSI committee for both commercial and residential pools nationwide. So I knew the standards for FINA for, for swimming, the water temperature. And I'm thinking, wait a minute, you could lose a lot of heat because I mean,

the pool isn't going to get warmer. I mean, technically it is. Right. Even if it doesn't feel cold, it's so much colder than your core body temperature. It's like 74 or 72 or something like that. It's a huge drain. And so at that time, I just hypothesized, well, if I make my body cold, this should work. So I was doing crazy things. You can read this in the book. He tells the story better.

But the long of it was that I doubled my weight loss rate by adding the cold stress to, at that time, body for life. If people aren't familiar, that's six small frequent meals a day. And they would say one protein and one carb six times a day, two meals, add a vegetable. You know, we don't use that language. That's all, you know, evil talk to me now. But it worked. And the message to everyone out there is that any hack diet can work. The question is how does it work for me and what causes you to

gain? And I think some of our later work explains that, but it did put me on the map. Suddenly I had all of these, you know, I was, I was on ABC Nightline and Wired Magazine and I had all these people calling me up. But the other side of it was there, too, which is everybody was challenging the veracity of what I was saying. Because it's an N of 1. It's an N of 1. So then that inspired me to buy my midlife crisis calorimeter. And I've spent a lot of money on my midlife crisis calorimeters. Calorimeter. So, and I've spent a lot of money on my midlife crisis calorimeters. And, and so I built a metabolic lab at my home and I started fixing meals and going out into the lab and

measuring the metabolic response and glucose monitor and plant plants again, all in of one. But the advantage I had is at the same time, I went back a century and looked at all the studies had is at the same time, I went back a century and looked at all the studies when metabolism and calories was cutting edge science. When they're first being defined. Yeah. When they're first being defined and sold to everybody. And that's when scientists were really focused and doing all the detailed studies. And what I found was, in fact, my results didn't differ by about 10% from Levoisier.

The very first thing he does, this is 1790. The very first thing he does in his study is that he looks at a man at room temperature, a man in cold, about 30 degrees or 40 degrees, a man after exercise and a man after digestion. He basically nails it. He gets the basal metabolism rate. He gets the digestive metabolism rate, the increase in metabolism rate due to cold and the increase of metabolism rate due to exercise. This is with right as you're learning oxygen exists. I mean, this is way back in history. And then you fast forward a century forward to Atwater and Atwater and Benedict measured hundreds of people and they get all the same numbers. So the current, if you go back to 2008, 2009, 2010, somewhere around there there i think the kinds of messages from someone

like gary taubes and other people that are saying all correct calories aren't created equal and a calorie is not a calorie and they're questioning all the science but they're doing it such a superficial level and the truth is i wanted to know what was going on and and in fact i confirmed it i i was getting the same results as they were so even even though I had an N of one, if an N of one agrees with an N of many, it has a lot more weight. And it's repeatable. It's repeatable. For yourself, right? And for them.

And so this sort of slug line conclusion from all of that is what, if you had to articulate it? All calories count if you count all the calories and so the take home and what does that mean yeah the take but but that is the summary what it means is is that when we eat calories and this gets into sort of oxidative priority the body prioritized is prior those the body prioritizes those calories based on its ability to store energy. And that's an adaptive evolutionary pressure. In other words, in the real world, we lived in a calorie scarce, we adapted and evolved in a calorie scarce world. It was an abundance. And the, you know, highly fantasy ideas of, you know, man, the hunter, which really started out in 1968, you know, but this idea that we're all running through the bush, you know, attacking animals and put taking down big came. That's probably not the big innovation.

The big innovation was fire and cooking. So we prioritize these calories based on how our body can store them. And we can store fat the easiest and the most. We can store alcohol the least. So when you ingest calories, they have a priority. The body has to do with something, has to do with something, something with everything you swallow. We don't have a fuel tank and our digestive track isn't a storage area. It's a process that begins, you know, when you have your last sip of wine and then there's a rise for the next couple of hours and your blood alcohol peaks and then it starts to fall, you know, and four to six hours later when they let you out of the drunk tank, the

alcohol is back to zero. It doesn't matter how much you drank. Your body pounds through it. And so what are some of the symptoms of that alcohol? You get sweaty. You want to dance. You get loud. You get obnoxious.

These are all things that your body's doing just to burn more energy. And at the same time, if you actually measure what's going metabolically, the body's starting to prioritize alcohol. Fat suppression after a drink goes almost to a zero for about the next four hours. Fat metabolism is suppressed to zero for about four to six hours after a glass of wine or alcohol. So if you eat fat after drinking, you're more likely to just store that in your subcut your right so then cutaneous fat cells or whatever so and this isn't a summary i know what we got off from the summary but it is a complicated thing the next on the priority scale is amino acids from you know from protein you can't store amino acids you

have a pool of them they're in your blood plasma but the reason why i'm a quote unquote high protein meal raises your metabolism so high as to get rid of all the excess amino acids that your body can't store. I mean, you're not going to just shove it into tissue. It's not going to float in your plasma. You know, during my fast, even I measured the protein cycle during the amino acid cycle during the day. And surprisingly, even 24 days into a water fast, all my amino acid levels were high, none of them were low. So when you have a meal that's high in protein or high in amino acid, which I think is a more useful term, your blood plasma

swells with that amino acid, just like it did with alcohol. And then four to six hours later, it goes back to what normal is. And how is it metabolizing those amino acids? What is actually going on? So you deaminate it. There's an amine group. So an amino acid has an amine group and it has a carboxylic acid. Once you pull the amino group off, the rest of it drops into your TCA cycle and it's metabolized just like sugar. Right? And this is the funny thing. Everybody thinks sugar turns to fat.

No one says protein turns to fat. No one ever says that. Yet the pyruvate is exactly the same pathway. In other words, once you take the first step of metabolizing an amino acid and turn it into the backbone chain, it's no different than what glucose looks like. So, all these people that are just glucophobes and dealing with glucose, they don't see that an amino acid chain isn't much the same in terms of its metabolism. So is it fair to say if you ingest an excess amount of protein or amino acids beyond what your body can immediately metabolize, that there is no beneficial impact on, you know, muscular repair or, you know, building lean muscle mass that that

just gets converted into fat stores. Is that what you're saying? Let's come back to that. When we talk about where do we get your protein? Okay. We're skipping ahead a little bit because if we do, we'll lose oxidative priority. The here's what I am saying. I'm saying that that excess amino acid pool from that protein shake, pea protein shake that you slug down after the event causes an increase in amino acid in your blood pool. And that for some hours afterwards, your body is going to prioritize that over lipids. It doesn't need to liberate lipids when it has all these amino acids to get rid of. And for most people, by the time it gets back to zero, they're on to hitting their next meal.

It didn't really help them. They weren't deficient in amino acids to start with. It would take a long time because, you know, we'll come back to the use of amino acids. The next one is dietary carbohydrates, whether they're starches or simple sugars. Those do the same thing. Everybody knows what that glucose curve, it goes up and down.

Mine was going really high and coming down really low, and that was a problem. But your body, unlike amino acids, you can store 1,500 to 2,000 calories of glycogen. So for like you, you run all the time. So if you have a diet that's high in starches and sugars, you'll store, you'll replete your glycogen stores. In fact, you have created glycogen stores that are better than the average person through your exercise. You've recruited more glycogen storage, and you probably store more than I do because I don't do the running you do. But that's a quickly depleted store. Right. It's a quickly depleted store. Right. It's a completely, but for each meal to meal, if you go out and bang those calories and

they're glycogen calories, and we'll talk about that, you can replete those. Now, the glucose above and beyond repleting those stores in the liver and in the muscle tissue, that gets burned just like the alcohol and the excess amino acids. So now we come to fats. You can store unlimited fats. your body has an infinite sink and in fact you're the limit to how much your fat you can store is how much you can absorb in your intestinal tract for any particular meal so mostly you got these guys say oh i'm i'm eating six seven thousand calories of fat and look at me i i'm not i'm not gaining weight and the calorie is not a calorie.

No. Go measure your stool. You've got lipids in your stool. You won't find excess amino acid or protein in your stool. You won't find excess carbohydrate in your stool. You won't find excess alcohol in your stool or in your urine unless you have a kidney issue, right? In other words, your body is going to effectively metabolize those three. But fat, drink a cup of olive oil.

Put some lemon juice in it. Make some bile soap in your intestinal tract and call it a gallbladder cleanse. Because it's going to come out the other end. It's going to pass through. So this is why these disparities start. Because the food that we're all primarily eating, which are the right side of the food triangle, and if you have the ability, if you're listening to this, if you can find the food triangle out there, if you got a link from Rich and have that in front of you as we're talking later today, this becomes an important part.

But if you're eating on the right side of the food triangle, which is lots of leafy greens and mushrooms and things at the top, and then whole food starches, whole food grains, whole food fruits on the bottom right, a lot of our daily calories are coming from those dietary carbohydrates. Plants tend to store their energy as carbohydrates. On the left side are the animal products. They tend to store their energy as fat, just like we do, right? But this idea or notion that these carbohydrates get turned to fat it would be just as realistic to say okay well then why doesn't why doesn't protein get

stored as fat no one's claiming that but now getting back to the oxidative priority and back to your party you know you have the glass of wine, the vegan cheese, the cracker, right? There's protein in it. There's alcohol present. There's carbohydrate present. And there's fat present. You're going to burn the alcohol and the cracker and the carbohydrate in the cracker and the protein in the cheese. And you're going to store the fat in the cheese.

And you're going gonna blame the wine. Because of this prioritization. Exactly. The alcohol has to get metabolized first, and then the glycogen stores, and then the fat will just get stored. Yeah, amino acids second, and then, this is all blood plasma.

Think about each meal as raising your blood plasma plasma and it falling four to six hours later. By about four to six hours later, you're back to normal state. So this idea that what I was doing, Body for Life, for example, eating every two hours, small frequent meals. We hear about, oh, it'll boost your metabolism. Yeah, it boosts your metabolism to burn the food that you can't store. That doesn't dispose of excess fat. So I'll say that again. These frequent meals boost your metabolism to burn the part of the meal that you cannot store.

It does not tap into extra fat that you're trying to lose. So explain to me what the takeaway is from that. The takeaway is the less frequent you eat, the more you're going to tap into your fat reserves. So, when I did my 24-day or 12-day water fast, or last day I did three days, last week I did three days, I'm burning 100% fat at the end of that. I have to be. Glycogen stores are depleted, at least the liver ones um and the fat stores are being liberated all right well we're jumping all over the place here but back to this sort of timeline you you lose all this weight and you share your experience of how you did this thermogenesis and the like but you're still left with this diabetic condition right right? And you find yourself after meeting Dean Ornish,

this is your introduction to the plant-based way of eating. And through that self-experimentation, you're able to better manage your diabetic condition. Is that fair to say? That's fair. And that kind of launched you into this exploration of what is actually going on in this plant-based diet universe. Yeah, why is it working? Because I'm just curious why. I found, obviously, it was working. I wanted to know why. And fortunately, at the same time, through TEDMED, my talk has happened by this time on cold. I met David Sinclair at Harvard, who's one of the leading longevity researchers

the leading longevity researchers in dietary restriction, sirtuin genes that are working on, that are responsible in part for longevity in model organisms from yeast to primates. And also Dr. Andrew Bremer, who at that time was at Vanderbilt. He was a pediatric endocrinologist specializing in type 2 diabetes, but has since moved on. He's the program director for type 2 diabetes at NIH, National Institutes of Health. And so I had these two collaborators, and David was pushing me to say, Ray, this work you're doing on mild cold stress, actually at the cellular level, what happens when you do the mild cold stress, this actually overlaps with the work we're doing with dietary restriction. And so in your last episode, what we did together, that's what became the metabolic winter hypothesis. So this idea that I'm measuring all of this metabolism and how metabolism was changing and answering these, what I thought was a caloric conundrum. I wanted to say, you know, I just,

in nature, you don't have contradictions. Contradictions only exist in our interpretation of nature. That's my approach. So, when your interpretation, you know, conflicts with what you see in nature, you're wrong. Nature isn't wrong. So, you know, that gets me to the point where I'm really trying to understand it. At the same time, now I'm being basically assaulted for being, you know, a vegan and it's all being ideology and it had nothing to do with what I was doing. You know, just saying that I was plant-based became some, that somehow I was taking some side, you know, because Tim's group heavily into the paleo, which was really big at that point. heavily into the paleo, which was really big at that point. Crossing over was really Matt Frazier at No Meat Athlete. He wrote a really amazing blog post on paleo versus vegan. And I just became more interested in what was the preponderance of evidence out there, not what was the latest little meta-analysis study that everybody was going to. What was the actual underlying physiological evidence? And increasingly, I was seeing that if you really looked at diets and look at our food triangle and you start at bottom feeding, meat and potatoes, burgers and fries, or steak and potatoes, burger and fries, pasta and meat sauce, curry and rice.

You'll see if you look at the food triangle, this is all bottom feeding. As we go to the- Why is it? How do you define bottom feeding? Because these are foods from the bottom of the food triangle. I got you. That's why I said- We should just at least sort of establish that you guys created this food triangle, right, as a new kind of paradigm or way of thinking about um nutrition and how we

you know how the best way to approach it right so maybe just describe the food triangle because we can't see it right but they should get a copy in the show notes i'll put a link up or maybe i'll even like embed the graphic itself so david and and uh drew and i on the first paper established the food triangle to get away from protein carbs and fat the idea is those words aren't specific enough and we'll talk about this with juliana in a second in our paper but they aren't specific enough to describe something being iso metabolic meaning metabolically it reacts in the same way. So they're isocaloric organization of foods. So all proteins have the same amount of calories, but when you ingest those, the different amino acids can have different amino, different metabolic consequences. Right. So essentially

what you're saying is rather than look at how these foods are composed, you know, what they're, you know, the, the macro aspects of what makes up these various food groups, you're looking instead at how does the body metabolize these? Right. And in the specific context of 80 years of longevity research and healthspan research. So we organize the foods in such a way so that the top, you have leafy greens, cruciferous vegetables, stems. Yeah, asparagus, celery, you have onion, garlic, those kinds of things. Down the left descending side, you have your animal products.

So, you know, all the fish, eggs, dairy, etc. Down the right side, you have, you know, legumes, starchy vegetables um whole grains fruits etc so down each descending side you're adding calorie density we're not really specifying what that is but on one side you're for example just to get jump a little head you're adding more phytonutrients more fiber on the other side if you're sliding down the right hand side, yeah, the right side, the plant-based side. On the animal-based side, you're adding more fats and amino acids and proteins, right? So in other words, what's really beautiful about this is it segregated the calories in a whole food way because from an evolutionary perspective, it's whole food. We can all compare sugar and olive oil all day long. And those, so what?

You know, so what? What do you learn? But if you look at the whole food implications, we see that health span research tracks some of these things. So it gave us a convenient way to segregate food so that we're talking about whole food. Because as long as we're just building studies and gaming sugar versus fat, what are we really learning?

I don't recommend people eat coconut oil or sugar. You know, I think of coconut oil as the white sugar of fats. You know, I mean, this idea that we're having an olive oil deficiency or a sugar deficiency in our diet is kind of crazy to me. But the dialogue, like the debate is so focused and centered around this issue.

Like, is it the fat or is it the sugar? It's the sugar. We call it macro confusion because basically if you're comparing sugar, like if you're putting in the same category carbohydrates and you're saying this lentil chili is isometabolic as candy, you know, just pure sugar candy. That just doesn't make sense. Our bodies treat it completely differently. It's metabolized completely differently when you're adding, you know, intact fibers and all these like whole foods versus this highly processed refined food. And it acts completely different throughout the whole process. So when you lump those all together, which all of these studies do

because they're literally counting macronutrients, it all looks like one category of carbohydrates. So we think of it as the number one reason for so much obfuscation with respect to nutrition. So do you attribute that confusion to the argument that you hear, you know, getting bandied about that? Look, there's no difference between a Coca-Cola and eating an orange. Exactly. Yeah. People are afraid of fruit. I mean, that just, it makes no sense that people think they say, well, there's sugar in fruit, but it's a fruit. It's not, it's not where the sugar has been pulled out of the fruit. And when it's compared the same in a study, you know, it makes it seem like something you can go with it. It makes it just become part of the dialogue. And that's how people discuss it now. And it's completely different when it goes in the body.

The body recognizes fruit, you know? Right. Ray, you just said, you know, what do we learn from this debate about sugar versus fat? But, you know, I think there is something to be said for at least sort of fleshing out what are the causal factors that are leading to diabetes, obesity, and heart disease. And there are these camps like it's the sugar. No, it's the fat. Like Neil Barnard will tell you the diabetes is really attributable to all these animal products that we're eating. It's not about the sugar like everybody thinks.

And then there's a whole other group of people that will say, no, it's about the sugar. The average consumer is like, well, I just don't even know what's what here. Right. And as it turns out, they're not mutually exclusive. It turns out that saturated fats do absolutely contribute to these diseases, but as does refined sugars. But sugars in refined foods is not the same as lentils, even though they're high in carbs, too. So both can be true at the same time. It's not a dichotomy.

It may not be either or. It may be both. And so in that case, it may absolutely be. Like in my case, clearly, my type 2 diabetes went away when I took the fish. In fact, I can give myself type 2 diabetes, and I have with five servings of salmon. That's all it takes. Wow. Five servings of salmon with a continuous glucose bug monitor, and I have high fasting

glucose. Now, what's really interesting is when we look at this, part of this problem and why I think someone would listen, I can understand them being really hesitant and say, wait a minute. If this is so clear, why are you saying this so confidently? And I'll say because people believe that the gold standard of studies is the blinded control, double-blinded control, right? They think this idea that people don't know what they're eating okay is just like we do with medication we give them a placebo versus the medication and we and we hunt for side effects

this is the gold standard for medicine when you're concentrating a substance that's biologically active and you're looking for a response and you're looking for an over response in a subpopulation but how do you double-blind control a banana? You don't. What they do is they'll do stuff like they'll have two muffins, and one will be lots of refined sugars, and the other one will be lots of refined oils, and that's how they compare it because they're pretending to mask it.

But, yeah, randomized control trials don't work so well in nutrition. The ideal study would be you take a whole huge community of people from birth with different, you know, different genetic backgrounds, different culture backgrounds, and study them for life and watch everything they eat. Because there's so many things that go wrong in nutrition research. But then you come up against the argument that that's just a corridor of population study. And, you know, but this is a bunch of people, this is a bunch of people now that are just arguing over process. They're not really doing what I did, which is okay. If you think something, go out and get some really reputable science, group them, start writing papers, go get studies done.

That's what we're working on. Hopefully in 2018, we'll do our first clinical trial on the food triangle. Julianne and I have already met with NIH on that, and I think that it should go forward. And the idea is we want to use whole food. And I think that it should go forward and ideas. We want to use whole food I would love to do a whole food left and right side and look at the difference in certain and certain outcomes and so we might get to do that this year, but One thing we have to break and this is what my goal and Juliana's goal was coming into this and why this there was so much synergy with our messages being merged and that, as long as you're organizing food around the 170-year-old idea of protein,

carbs, and fat, you're not going to get there because food just isn't distributed that way in nature. I don't care if the animal eating side is right or the plant eating side is right. It really doesn't matter to me. I just want to find out what's right not who's right and so for me if we could do whole food and match them calorie for calorie on both sides and know there is going to be a difference what i can say gives me confidence that the three of us are closer to the truth is that when i look at healthy diets if you think about it

the more plants you add into the diet if you really go from bottom feeding you know from atkins to bottom feeding to vegetarian to mediterranean all the way around to finally you go to vegan and of course they of course they add sugar and oil back to the vegan diet make it unhealthy again that's equivalent of bottom feeding as you add more plant-based you seem to get a lot of success and rather than talk about the magic of plants and the nutrition of plants and the healing stuff all that may be true and not the real thing it may just be and this is back to what my collaborators and I are talking about in our papers, which is it may just be that eating a plant-based diet is a wonderful way to implement

dietary restriction without malnutrition, which happens to be the only way we've ever extended life in the lab. We've never done it through excess. It may just be a convenient way to eat a lot of volume of food and not overeat. But what we're doing, and I think Juliana and I both share this concern, is that in the plant-based side, we are making such hyperpalatable food now that 10 years from now, when you do those observational studies you're talking about and all the self-identified vegans report, they're going to see no different results than probably than the omnivorous side because they're chronically overnourished having more and more clients come to me that have been vegan and now unsuccessful their health is actually just as bad as my meat eating clients it's a really interesting time because we're seeing this explosion of interest in the vegan lifestyle eating plantbased. And that is commensurate with science catching, food science catching up to how to create

palatable meat and dairy alternatives. So now when you go to the market, there's all these yummy cookies and coconut ice cream and you name it, right? Anything you could eat, I could eat vegan now. This is amazing. And it's so easy to delude yourself into thinking you're eating healthy

because you're not, because these are animal free. These don't contain dairy or meat. And that is not serving us. It's unfortunate. It's it's more environmentally sustainable. It's more compassionate. There's there's good reasons to do that. But but the idea that you're eating healthy by by making those choices is not quite accurate. It's not quite accurate. If you look at the nutrition labels, they're almost identical. If you look at how much saturated fat and how much, I mean, the sodium, these are things that we know causes problem. It's the saturated fat that's one of the biggest elements that promote diseases, you know, and all that stuff, sugar, sodium. I mean, the nutrition labels are almost identical to the animal full version.

And then on the other side of the thing is that, you know, amino acid restriction. So, if we want to get to the where to get protein, because this is the place to just touch on it since we tend to touch on it every single time, you know, I mean, it's not enough for most people to look at the obvious, which is, you know, we take the top 10 animals that walk on land, you know, five rhinoceros, two elephants, a hippopotamus, a giraffe, and a gar, okay? They don't have any problem getting protein without eating flesh, right? And the truth of the matter is, is of those, you know, proteins, plural, our genes encode about 25,000 different proteins. Some of them last a few milliseconds and some of them last decades

in our body. So they're constantly being built and destroyed. So our genes, when we talk about solving the human genome project and talk about our genes, our genes are protein printing presses. But the problem is, is that they're made of these 20 letters, like the 26 letters of the alphabet. And just like jeopardy you end up having to buy a vow because there's about nine of those amino acids these are the essential or indispensable amino acids that um only come from diet now where do they come from plants can't eat they have to photosynthesize and through the nitrogen cycle they make all 20 so you eat the plant or eat the animal that ate the plant,

but those essential amino acids came from the plant. Now, it is true that animals concentrate nutrition. They don't necessarily create it. So as you go up the food chain, you get a more concentration of these essential amino acids. Absolutely true. And a good first guess 170 years ago by Eustace von Liebig or Karl von Voigt, some of the heavyweights in early nutrition and protein, was the fact that we would maybe eat stuff

that was kind of composed of the same distribution of amino, you know, eventually with amino acids, they started with just protein as us. But ultimately, what we found in all of this healthspan work is that dietary amino acid restriction is how we're extending life in the lab. when her master's in nutrition, in nutrition school, and as a dietitian, all turn out to be right, meaning animal products are restricted or limited in essential amino acids. But that happens to be a good thing, not a bad thing, because we've never fed animals more amino acids like methionine and leucine and isoleucine. And, you know, all of these essential amino acids, particularly the branched-chain amino acids, have an issue with the liver.

But the point is this excess amino acid in the diet is what causes the animals to live less. I may give you another example. In certain cancers, for example, breast and prostate cancer, methionine, which is one of those essential amino acids, happens to be sort of an interesting player in this. In that, if you take breast cancer cells and put them in a Petri dish, and you take breast tissue cells and put them in a Petri dish, and you restrict them both from methionine, breast cancer has absolute methionine dependency, meaning those cells all die. But the breast tissue cells substitute and they live.

So this idea that a plant-based diet is limited in amino acids used to be the thing that we all defended. Oh, yeah, we can get enough protein. Oh, yeah, we got pea protein. We got powder. We can protein combine all the stuff that got made up and it turns out maybe the answer is we're the standard we are the standard for amino acid acid restriction limiting it not deficient but limiting it and that a plant-based diet may be just mimicking that. Because when we look at the primates, for example,

all they do is restrict the monkey chow by 30% or 40%. They don't give them any special diet. They don't do any special protein manipulation. They just take the monkey chow. This one got 30% or 40% less. And if you look at the pictures, you'll see that there's a tremendous difference in those primates when they're at the end of their lives.

I mean, the ones that do the dietary restriction look as if they exercised, looked as if they took supplements, but they didn't. And have lower chronic disease incidence and longer lives. And from that, a couple questions or observations. questions or observations. The first one is, you know, an argument comes up that when you talk about these strong, fierce herbivores, that they are metabolizing protein differently than humans. They're metabolizing carbohydrate differently than humans. That's why, you know, they're able to like... Extract glucose from fiber as opposed to us. We can't digest. We can't break a beta-1,4.

Yeah, we can't chew on bamboo. Yeah, we can't break. Why termites can survive on wood. That's right. Cellulose, which is what a 2x4 is made out of, and everyone knows a termite eats a 2x4, and it becomes glucose. That's cellulose. So there's an alpha and alpha-1,4, beta-1,4 linkage, an amylase or amylose linkage between those glucose molecules,

and that's the difference between wood and sugar that we can take. We don't have the enzyme to digest that. If we could, we would be able to survive on it as well. So most of that digestive tract difference if you look at a comparative comparative digestive tract or comparative biology of it most of that digestive tract is about extracting glucose from these high fiber high high fiber meals so that part is true but in terms of amino acids as long as you can rupture the cell wall the plant proteins plural remember every cell has 15 or 20 000 different proteins in it all make doing its metabolic mayhem you know if you've ever seen the big

metabolic charts of all the stuff going on in the body. Those are all constantly going on. As long as you can masticate, rupture the cell wall, and that cellular material spills out into your digestive tract, you can get the amino acids out. Right. So there is no difference in the way that those animals are digesting the amino acids. There are slight differences, but that is not the salient difference between it. There are slight differences because they have, for example, certain bacteria that will metabolize and create amino acids as well. So I'm not going to say there's zero difference. I'm saying it's irrelevant.

It's rounding error compared to us. And we're not suffering from a protein deficiency. We're not suffering from an amino acid deficiency. When that happened is when we were suffering from a food deficiency. We're not suffering from an amino acid deficiency. When that happened is when we were suffering from a food deficiency. But if you eat enough potatoes to meet your daily calorie needs, not something easy to do, 20 or 30 potatoes, you will get more than your daily value of amino acids. And that amino acid distribution you will get will be a little bit better than say a comparative amount of 90 lean beef right yeah i had uh you guys know andrew taylor the spud fit guy

yeah yeah i had him on the podcast exactly only potatoes for an entire year exactly the guy was glowing and he had tons of energy lost all this weight he had this incredible experience i mean it's just the human being is incredible and how it can, it's very adaptable. Like we're looking at what's optimal, but you know, the body can basically handle, you know, a lot, whatever we throw at it. Right. We always like to say that our bodies can handle a lot at the beginning too. Like we could handle a lot until mother nature is done with you and you're done reproducing. And that's when everything starts to hit, you know, that's when all of those diseases start coming into play in our forties and fifties and reality strikes because we're not needed anymore. Yeah. Yeah. So if you do the math here, you know, it takes 15 years

approximately to hit your reproductive age, right? Then there's another 15 to 20 years of reproductive prime. And then there's another 15 years to raise your youngest offspring. Somewhere around 45 to 50, Mother Nature is done with you. Yeah, we don't need you anymore. We're not worried about what you do now. All these people that talk about an evolutionary-based diet, okay, I get it. It means we can eat anything and make it through reproductive prime. But what should we eat to mitigate age-related disease

that happens after our genes have already passed? By definition, they're not necessarily there. And this is where we get into the stuff you've talked with Rhonda Patrick about epigenetic modifications. How does environment change those genes along the way? But what we can do with a plant-based diet, eating on the right side of the food triangle, is that we can mimic dietary restriction without malnutrition.

In other words, we're restricting and limiting these things. When we start fortifying foods, and we did this first with flowers, rip everything out and then put it back, and then put it back wrong. And next thing, 20, 30 years later, you have a problem. Now we're right now it's being done with plant food, taking perfectly good plant foods, ripping it all out, reconstructing it, making a burger that looks like a burger, tastes like a burger and acts like a burger in your body. And 20 years from now, you're likely, it's going to be the same load of amino acids, same load of saturated fat from coconuts instead of lard, who cares? And you're going to end up probably with the same load of amino acids, same load of saturated fat from coconuts instead of lard.

Who cares? And you're going to end up probably with the same kind of response. Right. Because we've seen this fortification thing hasn't really worked well. Now, there's some certain cases, iodine and salt. But what's really interesting is you go back to the beginning of iodized salt. Originally, they wanted to give them, this was the, I brought it up and now I'm going to forget the study, but Kearns. Anyway, it's in the 30s, I believe.

I'll double check on this one. But anyway, I can tell the bigger story. They took a bunch of schoolgirls and they gave them iodine. And what was interesting is the original authors actually had proposed that the iodine for animals be put in salt because of salt licks. And for humans, that they just take iodine drops. But iodine salt became a really big, hey, if we give them iodized salt, people eat that. And it became an excuse to eat salt. And that drove salt consumption over the next however many years.

I think to this day it's still if you get more insult it says iodized on the right and so this is one of the one of the really interesting first things we had a real iodine deficiency that was centered around goiters right yeah but i mean but and fast forward now we've got like these granola bars that are like you know protein fortified i mean it just it's just taken off it's all about that's the beginning of the marketing of food and nutritionism reductionism and and nutritionism all started with that. Yeah. I mean, I want to get into that. Before we get into that, though, I didn't want to gloss over one other observation I had about something that you said when you were talking about

breast cancer and the implications of various kinds of diets on the advance of that. When we're talking about that lower rung, that lower left-hand corner of your triangle, the animal products, I mean, these are foods that, in addition to being concentrated sources of these amino acids and saturated fats, et cetera, we also have to talk about things like IGF-1, and there's a lot more going on.

I mean, I would say, like, in the macro sense of this conversation that we're having, it's an attempt to transcend the reductionism that is part and parcel of the scientific method that's wrestling with what's true and what's not when it comes to diet and nutrition and health. On some level, we have to be reductionists in order to look at these things.

But ultimately, what you're saying and what we're talking about is that these things are just so much more complicated than that. You cannot look at the one thing, whether it's the iodine or the amino acids or the nine amino or whatever it is, without having a conversation about everything else that gets packed into. So let's unpack one element of that as it as it likely applies to athletics and athletic performance. Since you are an ultra marathon person and you like that performance, and clearly you're not having a problem doing it on a plant-based diet. But let me give you an example.

So if you take whey and casein, the two main proteins in milk, it's kind of reasonable to think that milk is hormonally active, meaning it helps your young child or whether young cow or young human, those same proteins are in human breast milk. It's specifically designed to blow an animal up as quickly as possible. Or slowly in the case of humans. But the point is it stimulates growth. Whatever that species rate that they grow is dependent. But we know that we can take, and there's studies out there with adolescent boys, we know that we can take casein away and put it in a diet, especially when they hit puberty, and we can see an increase in IGF-1.

We can see an increase in growth hormone. And an increase in IGF-1. We can see an increase in growth hormone. Now, and an increase in insulin. Okay? Now, all three of those things are necessary if you're trying to build muscles in the gym. So, these people may be getting a medicinal effect out of pounding, weighing casein shakes. Because remember what we said earlier, what's really great about this high protein diet

is not only is it anabolically active with what I'm saying right now, but it also doesn't get stored as fat easy. So if you're in the gym and you're slamming protein shakes and it's not getting stored as fat easy and it's anabolic, that's a really good thing if you're trying to grow. The downside is if you're done

growing and you're at the other end of this you know evolutionary you know play it could also be what's causing the excess because all these cancers now you know milk used to advertise igf1 as being a benefit but now that all these cancer studies are all intersecting at increased growth, increased anabolism, increased insulin. So the very guys that are trying to limit insulin by ingesting glucose are increasing insulin on another level and could be increasing it by the anabolism of say that methionine because it has those kinds of effects. Isoleucine increases insulin, but it also decreases blood glucose. So the point here is that I want you to see that the complication is when we're talking to someone in the gym and they're saying, yeah, but I see these results with these protein

shakes, you may be growing. But just because you're more muscular doesn't mean you're going to live longer. Yeah, there's a counterbalancing of priorities. So if you're in the gym and you just want to get huge, right. So you're going to have to eat a lot of food. This is going to happen. Here's the question. Like if somebody is coming into this and they're like, I don't care about longevity. I just want to get ripped. You know, like I'll worry about the longevity part later. I want to have six, you know, a six pack abs. And what you're saying, Ray, is I'd be better off pounding way shakes than adopting a plant based diet.

Now, I haven't had a problem getting, you know, building lean muscle mass and getting strong without way in case. I'm saying I'm not saying it would be better. I'm saying some of the explanation of the results are there. I'm not I'm not I'm not saying compared to what I'm not saying you would be better. I'm saying some of the explanation of the results are there. I'm not saying compared to what? I'm not saying you can't do it because clearly Tory Washington is ripped and he's not doing it. You could do it with pea protein likely, especially if it's fortified with those same essential amino acids. explanation for why they may have seen results is because specifically case in a way come from a milk extract and they probably are hormonally active above and beyond above and beyond just the

calories of proton quote-unquote the grams of protein that everybody wants to calculate so i'm not suggesting that someone goes slam those shakes. I'm just saying I like to observe what happens and try to explain what it is rather than talk someone out of some success that they see. With that said, the question is, is huge muscle mass a good thing or a bad thing long term? thing long term. You know, we're about to start seeing that because the first level of the 70s pumping iron clan are all getting right in the middle of their age-related disease. And I think we'll start starting to see how well all the anabolic steroids, I wouldn't do anabolic steroids to get big. A lot of other people would. I wouldn't abuse insulin to get big. A lot of other people would because they're young and life seems like it's forever. But did you think really I'm 53, you're 51, 51. Did you think you would feel this youthful at our age? When you thought about the idea of 51 and 53, most people don't guess our age when they meet us. Secondly, I never thought I would feel like this.

I had this idea of 53 as being unbelievably old and maybe I'm still fooling myself and I really am. But you know what I'm saying? We feel very alive. If I'd have known that when I was 20, I would have thought, you know, what can I do to live longer? Not live longer, but to live, to be fully functional. And so one of the things Julian and I do in our book is we talk about this idea of health span as compared to longevity. Not just how many years you're going to live, but how helpful are you going to be for the whole idea. Right, the vitality that's packed into those years. And I believe for all of their extra gain and performance in the medals they won in

their 20s and 30s, or even in your 50s with the competition you're doing now, I think that a lot of anabolism could be problematic as the rate of age-related disease as you approach the age of age-related disease starting to accumulate and what we've learned in the animals and all of those models is that dietary restriction has worked almost you know universally and so if you're restricting your nutrition and increasing the rate at which your body tears down tissue through the exercise, I'm not saying don't exercise. I'm just saying extreme performance. There is a question about how helpful will that what's the soft landing? You know, you started late in life. So, you know, you didn't spend your whole life competing. You started late. But what's that soft landing for athletes so they can start saying, you know, I'm kind

of done with this, you know. Gary Turner in the UK was a MMA guy over there, fighter, just extreme. And a good friend on Facebook. Runs a few groups. And what's really interesting about Gary is that we had this conversation a couple years ago, and now he's switched over mostly plants. He's still eating some stuff. But he's leaner than he's been in all the years.

Now, you know, he maybe doesn't have the same mass for the MMA fighting. I don't know. You know, it's really crazy watching what these guys do in gauge fights. It's not my thing. But the point is, is that this idea of a soft landing for people when they get our age, because, you know, for Juliana, she's done having children at this point. You know, she's a decade younger than us. And basically, what's her soft landing?

Where does she go to maximize her, to minimize her chance of getting any of those age-related disease? We're not talking about that in the athletic world because it's profitable to sell more food. It's profitable to have more competition. It's profitable to have more age groups. It's profitable to go out and compete more. And no one ever questions exercise.

But if what we say is true, which is exercise may just be a proxy for shivering in mild cold stress, meaning the metabolic winter hypothesis, it may be that active life is not the same as excessive activity. But I just want to say something. There's a difference between high exercise and anabolism. Because I mean, the big weightlifting, trying to do whatever you can to bulk up is different than what you're doing, Rich, and what a lot of these endurance athletes are doing. And I think there's a big difference. There's a lot of evidence about how healthy this is and how it supports longevity and health span in the long run to do a lot of exercise. There's also studies out there that establish like ischemic damage for long-term endurance athletes. I'm always, people are always tweeting me these studies that, you know, perhaps I'm doing something wrong. I'm hurting my heart and, you know of that and i think when you look and and i don't

know the truth of that i just i know that i love being active and i love going i i you know most of what i do is at a very kind of low intensity level yep and and i've kind of reduced that intensity as i get older for that reason perhaps. But when you look at the blue zones, for example, these people are not out running ultra marathons. They're just living actively. They're always kind of moving. They're gardening. They're pushing a wheelbarrow around or whatever.

Fishermen. Yeah, exactly. So it's not overly strenuous activity, but it's sort of perpetual constant motion. And my only point is I want to give someone a choice. I don't want to tell them what to do, and I don't want them to think I'm down on bodybuilding or down on MMA or down on ultramarathons. I love that people love to do what they're passionate. But I don't, you know, like when I talk about diet, and this is what I can say confidently from the other side of the wall

as a plant-based diet person in other words i started clearly in an in the eat ribs in the south you know and chicken wings and all that camp and i came all the way to the i'm all plant-based without one minute one minute of guilt of guilt and shame about animals. I didn't make it here through that path. So what I'm telling both of you, I never saw something, I never saw a video and said, oh my gosh, that makes me want to change.

I never worried about the planet. I never worried about these things. Not that those things may or may not be important. My point is I got here completely from the health side. And what I can say confidently with now having coached over 150 people, until the new diet is equally convenient, familiar, and enjoyable, you don't have a choice. You don't have a choice.

What do you mean you don't have a choice? You don't have a choice between diets because convenience, familiarity, and how much you enjoy something will win. You guys came over right in other words like a plant-based diet just can't compete with that in terms of trying to get people but it can for the three of us there's not three of us that are tempted by that now you guys came over by ideology that became your wall to keep you from going back i came over from health yeah i came over from health so ideology followed yeah and now now these other things have become very important to me but they were not initially i mean i came from into it from so we represent the three we

represent the three things because she was inspired by ideology earlier in life and came over eventually and had a long time where it was difficult you know because of pressures and other stuff you came over and then went over and i i'm still over here i'm just the plant-based unethical guy or whatever i don't know i hate but as a scientist don't you find the environmental argument pretty compelling i don't deal any of those really i super individualist i'm an objectivist okay if i do the right thing and i'm not hurting other people then i want everybody to do whatever they want i don't care what they eat. I don't care. I'm not an activist. I don't, I'll never be an activist. But can't you make the argument

that if somebody is eating certain foods or buying certain products that are ultimately not in the best interest of the long-term health of the macro ecosystem of our planet, that that is in certain respects doing harm to us all? If you want me to be controversial, I'll be controversial. The controversial take on that is the Earth was here long before we were, and the Earth will be here long after we will, and so will life. And what we might end up doing is making it really inhospitable for humans, but ultimately the Earth will just chew us up and it'll be the next eons. Well, right.

I mean, we're disposable right so it'll be a lot better if it comes back yeah so if it comes back to health in the end meaning us living on this planet this little blue ball the only one we know that has life on it to this point if it comes back to health then i'm just going to do my part it's 100 my control to deal with my health and with what i'm doing if it's helping everything else that's great and if it's not i'll be a part of that evolutionary blip that gets goes extinct because it wasn't okay consistent juliana's shaking her head i know yeah this drives me crazy i'm very passionate about the environmental benefits of eating a plant-based diet and the benefits economically. And, of course, the animals.

I just think it's a win-win-win. I don't think you have to divide them up. But, I mean, he's just very focused on the science. I want to do the best. And I want to give people a choice. So the segue to this was about people having a choice. And if I go to people, and I would suggest to you that, you know know the 600 and some odd people that lost 30 000 pounds due to pendulet's book alone and have been following us and gone 90 plant-based that that's

a market that that's a group of people you would have never reached with every amount of argument of environment and animal that you did and i'm not saying even if those are right i don't know if they're right i don't know what you're saying. Everybody has their own entry points. Exactly. But, you know, we're innately self-interested, you know, organisms. That's what I believe. I think we, I think, I don't believe that. Some are more self-interested.

I don't believe in altruism at all. I think that people get some. I love to do things that are, you know, from a philanthropy perspective. And I love to do things for people. And I don't think that it's musically exclusive. I know that I get something out of it. I feel good. Well, and either way, no matter where you're coming from it, everyone benefits. That's right. But I've been at conferences with vegans that really come unglued because I don't push the ideology side. And I'm like, well, wait a minute. I just eat plants.

Why am I the other side? And I think vegans need to hear that, not because I'm saying they're wrong, but it becomes an issue of point. And if I go back 100 years, the temperance movement had exactly all the same arguments. 200 years. The temperance movement had all the same arguments as the vegan movement today, and they got about 2% to 4% back then. Right.

It's ineffective ultimately when the kind of moral judgment is baked into the fabric. So I like to take the morality out of it, the ideology out of it. I hope someone who reads our material, I hope someone who reads what we're doing knows that who reads our material, I hope someone who reads what we're doing knows that I'm really trying to make the best health decision and best look at the information I can. Don't put me in the vegan box, not that it's a bad box, but just don't put me there because that's not

how I approach the problem. And if it happens, if I could get somebody, for example, if I take your argument and say that it's important to two of you, right? And as my friends, I want to help my friends in things that are important to them, right? So, you know, if you could double the number of vegans from 2% to 4%, and I could get the other people to go back to 85%, I'd be saving, what, 49 times more animals in doing so so even with that argument More animals would be saved by the gut person that occasionally does it the argument that will come back is well No, people won't occasionally do it. It'll be the slippery slope and I

Haven't it hasn't been a slippery slope for me. My health is enough motivator. And it's if I'm not motivated by my own welfare, how much welfare am I going to have for someone or somebody I don't know? That's just me. I'm just thinking about it. So I just want a choice because you ask, you know, I think until the new diet is equally familiar, convenient, enjoyable. If it's not those three things, ideology is a good reason to stick to it. It gives you a reason to stay, a reason for willpower. But once you eat the diet long enough, all three of us would agree, anybody that comes at our house and we would fix dinner for them, they would love it because we've learned how to make amazing food.

We can make decadent food on occasion and it can be really good. And maybe instead of being a two on the health scale, it's a six on a scale of one to 10, but it's a great experience. So my point to you is what I think we do for people in our transformation program is that we actually get people to a point where they get all this new food that's equally enjoyable, equally convenient, equally familiar. And then they can sit back and say, do I really want to eat this way or not? And that's the point I was making about exercise. If someone believes exercise, I've never heard anybody, like, for example, I have people pause exercise while they're losing weight.

Now, these are people- Yeah, we talked about that last time. Yeah, they had not exercised for the last 20 years, and I'm saying wait six more months while they lose weight, and the community says that's heresy. If I'm starting a diet, I must have them be active. Well, maybe they start like Penn after they get to their new weight.

What's a six-month more pause? But the point is, until we get a soft landing about what level of activity matches those blue zones? And how much do we do? And we have some ideas about it. It's not something I've studied yet, detailed. But I'm just saying that there's room for the, right now what I see, the plant-based group people being sort of cannibalistic to their own cause. to their own cause.

Because if you start slugging all the shakes, if you start making all this hyper palatable food, if you start adding sugar, salt and oil and all these things and all the nutritionism and mimic in plants what we've been doing on the animal based side, I think the statistics and the studies are going to start coming out increasingly in your disfavor. Yeah, I think that's true. I would imagine that's's accurate and we probably are going to see that um and i think that there's when you say like the vegan movement i mean there's so many subcultures within this group and they like to argue with each other yeah so you know it's it's hard to say well this is there's no one consensus point of view like the more immersed you are in the community as juliana knows like you see the it's it's quite um bifurcated in terms of perspectives

of what you should and shouldn't do and the whole food plant-based and fruitarian and like you know whatever like there's a million slices to this pie um but ultimately you know the idea of eating whole plant foods close to closest to their natural state is really the way to go here. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. I think the vegan movement, adding in all of those issues and fighting amongst ourselves, I'm part of them, but I'm not an activist, is to its detriment. And I think that's why people get turned away and are intimidated by it. And then if you just talk about what you're eating, which is what we are doing is focusing on what you're eating and not what you're not eating

and why you shouldn't eat that and guilt and shame, I think that would make it much more appealing to a broader population. Let's talk about this idea of oxidative priority, which is something that you guys came up with. What does that mean? Yeah, so we kind of covered that earlier when we were talking about the order by which we store.

So essentially the take-home from what we talked about earlier is that you can store an infinite amount of fat, but you can't store alcohol. So you're going to metabolize the alcohol first, the amino acids from the protein seconds, the carbohydrates third, and then fat becomes last on the list. Okay. So that pretty much wraps it up we have a more simplistic sort of explanation of it in uh the idiot guy uh idiot guy to plant-based nutrition like how to hack it how to hack it use that to our advantage right

so what does that mean then well okay so there's different ways to utilize that you could think about it if you're trying to lose weight, which most of my clients are, especially all of our clients in our company, you can separate the way you eat. So instead of, if you think about the bottom feeding, right, you want to look at the stuff that's the most calorically dense, and you want to keep those separate. You don't want to do them together. You don't want to bottom feed. bottom feed. So a plant-based food triangle is a little different because nuts and seeds are the real concentrated sources of fats, right? Versus the starchy vegetables and whole grains that are concentrated source of glucose. And so instead of combining those together, where you're going to get what Ray likes to call a fat bomb, like for instance, having a sweet potato with a peanut

sauce or a bean burrito with guacamole, where you're getting high starch and high fat at the same time, and you're going to use up the starch, but you're going to absorb and retain the fat in your adipose tissue. You can hack that and you could have your fats because we need to have some fats, usually ideally from nuts and seeds, a little avocado. You could have your fat for the day together with the lower calorie foods, like vegetables and fruits. So, you know, a fruit and a nut butter or a salad with a tahini-based dressing. And then all those calories from that, there's not that many calories in a huge salad, you're not going to store much. So you'll be able to burn through it. So you don't want to combine your sources of fat.

Combine is a bad word because food combining means something to a lot of people. And this is not food combining. I don't want someone to walk away and say, oh, yeah, that's the Herbert Shelton food combining stuff. Okay, so there are probably some elements of this that overlap with what he was looking at and observing. But this is a more analytical, scientific way of coming at this so so the idea is is that you when you're eating your the fat the dietary fat that you need because we're not advocates of of the no fat diet by any means when you're if you're as you're increasing the amount of fatty foods in your diet even plant sourced fatty foods avocados coconuts you nuts and seeds, you're going to have to probably

decrease the amount of big starchy foods or even the fruits in some case, because they have the sugars and that will cause the same thing. So you can kind of think of it as nuts, seeds, avocado, and those things really eating them more with cruciferous vegetables and salads and the things that don't have a lot of calories in them in general, or they're not high in sugar and they're not high in starch. So those things, but, but things like beans and starchy vegetables and, and, and some fruits, because some fruits are higher in sugar. When you start having those, those become sort of the meal in the, in and of themselves.

So, so, you know, another way to look at this, if, if someone's looking at the food triangle, those become sort of the meal in and of themselves. I gotcha. So, you know, another way to look at this, if someone's looking at the food triangle, remember we have the animal products on one side. You know, one thing that we're now introducing with our new book is the idea of thinking about the vegetarian. Because the vegetarian is a left-side eater. They've just eliminated everything but eggs and dairy, right?

So they have a lot of the issues of still bottom feeding. So predictably, I think a vegetarian would have a harder time maintaining their weight than either a vegan or a paleo person. Explain that. Because they don't see all the starchy foods as the enemy. And so they end up bottom feeding on the bottom of that triangle remember the animal products plus the starchy vegetables that becomes the the steak and potatoes but for them now it's eggs and potatoes or pizza or right cheese or whatever so i you know we see because i always have these people yeah well you know look i know this person a vegetarian and they're overweight.

It's actually probably more likely that you're going to do it. Now you go over to the other guys, the raw guys that are completely on this side. They're not eating as many starchy foods. So now what do they do? They start all getting really super lean. And then what do they end up doing? They end up adding oils and nuts and seeds back so that they're not losing too much weight. Right?

Right. So in their case, their food triangle has nuts, seeds, and avocados. Now they start putting oils and things back in. Or for the 80-10-10 people who are doing just massive doses of fruits. Yeah, the 80-10-10, essentially fruitarian, people that are eating just massive amounts of fruit. There's a whole culture around that. And I know people have been doing it for a long time. Yeah, well, Jaffa does this.

And they're very passionate. Jaffa's study on fruitarians is the only historically significant study on metabolism and nutrition from the turn of the 20th century that I don't have. And he does this really, this is around 1908, 1915, somewhere around that. There, Jaffa is the scientist that does it from the USDA. I think it's 1908, 1909. But they studied fruitarians then. And it was fruit, nuts, and seeds. And they had exactly the same conclusions as you would see in any book on it today.

But they've eliminated cooked foods. See, a lot of them are raw. And they've eliminated cooked foods see a lot of them are raw and they've eliminated the starches so they're bringing their starches down in the same way that a paleo says a potato is a carb and it's bad right they're just coming at that from a different perspective they're coming up from a different perspective but here's the point if you know the vegetarian is probably in the most peril for weight the typical The stereotypical lacto-ovo vegetarian that eats a lot of cheese. It just happens to be common. And they eat potatoes and they eat grains and they eat rice. And so this becomes an explanation and I've never heard anyone else

offer it. And I think our food triangle predicts it very, very thing. So the interesting thing is the vegetarian ends up on the left side of the food triangle, not on the right. The vegan ends up on the right. And the only way the vegan's really going to gain weight is through oils and nuts and seeds. That's really the only way. They're going to end up, you know, falling for the coconut oil scheme. They're going to end up falling for the olive oil scheme. You know, you know, Juliana's one of her first book was the vegetarianium. And you might, you know, say just about the highlights of the idea of the Mediterranean diet. Yeah.

I mean, all of these diets can be explained on the food triangle, which is kind of exciting because I didn't have that tool when I did the vegetarian diet. But, you know, everyone associates the benefits of a Mediterranean diet to be due to consuming fish, red wine and olive oil. That's what that gets all the focus. Yeah. Yeah. Like that's like the gold standard is, oh, we just have to have more olive oil.

So they're pouring it over their, you know, steak or whatever and just saying it's a healthy diet, having a glass of wine and thinking it's going to do anything. But really, that's not the reason the Mediterranean diet was so successful. The reason the Mediterranean diet was so successful is because it was really, at its essence, a whole food plant-based diet. The majority was like 85% of the calories were coming from plant foods a lot of you know a lot of activity so like what we see in the blue zones because one of the blue zones or two of the blue zones are in the mediterranean yeah you gotta yeah yeah you gotta eat in greece right yeah sardinia and sardinia exactly so the the real benefits are

because it's it's we're eating a lot of plants we're active social you know was just a different life, everything we've studied. And so I think what it looks like is that the Mediterranean diet is healthy despite the olive oil, not because of the olive oil, because, you know, there are no magical foods, there are no demon foods or no, like, you know, soup, you know, can't just give all the credit or all the blame to one food or one food group. And because most of us, what, 2 billion people around the world now are overweight or obese, you know, an easy way to restrict calories and an easy way to help maintain a healthy weight is to cut out oils or reduce them, at least reduce them. So use them as a flavor instead of as a cooking base or cooking substrate.

You feel like we were in Italy last year and it was just, you know, everything just doused in olive oil, you know, and they're starting to have the same problems as most of the Western world. So is Greece. They've got the same thing too. So back to, you know, unpacking this hack is that when we look at it, I think paleo, the paleo diet, look, they give up dairy. I think dairy of all of the animal products, dairy. When I tell people, I say chicken, cheese, and eggs. And when they say, what three things should I do?

I say, get rid of chicken, cheese, and eggs. And they say, chicken, cheese, and eggs. And when they say, what three things should I do? I say, get rid of chicken, cheese, and eggs. And they say, chicken, cheese, and eggs. I say, exactly, because you think that way. You're probably not eating red meat that often. I mean, literally, you know, the 1977 McGovern Report was so effective that people still think red meat is significantly different than other color meat, which is kind of crazy, right? And there's a lot of confusion about chicken. Everyone thinks that's... Right, but chicken's high in methionine, for example.

So is that tagged to this high breast... And fish, high in methionine. Eggs, high in methionine. Is that tagged to this increase in prostate cancer? No, because protein has such a health halo that people think, oh, but it's protein, it's lower fat. So when you look at it, what's sort of interesting is that

I think the part of the benefit, I've seen people get healthier on a paleo diet relative to bottom feeding. You know, it's always- Compared to what? Compared to what? It's always compared to what? Relative to bottom feeding,

going to the paleo diet and dropping dairy is probably a decent good thing. Now you see, I knew it was coming around. We predicted this two years ago. I said that eventually these high fat guys are all going to start reducing amino acids. And now you see all these people that are doing high fat, lower or restricted protein. Why? Because all the studies, there's no study no studies says more protein more amino acids in

the diet makes organisms live longer in the lab it just doesn't happen that way so they're getting there but when they get on of this left side they're eating more of this mediterranean kind of side you know a little bit closer to that they are restricting some of the calories from the starchy vegetables and the fruits and stuff they'reophobic, and I think that that's wrong. But the point is, is that they're getting some benefits. But the vegetarian, they're the ones that actually- I've ruined the word vegetarian for him. He always wants to say vegetarianian. I love that.

I had such a hard time saying vegetarianian when it came out. Now you say it even more naturally. Now I can't say Mediterranean, and I can't say vegetarian anymore. It's crazy. I love that. We're all creatures of habit. That's having an impact. Convenient, vegetarian anymore. It's crazy. I love that. We're all creatures of habit. That's having an impact. Convenient, familiar, enjoyable, right?

So just remember that. But I think the vegetarian is actually in more peril of chronic overnutrition because there's so many choices. You know, when I go to Sam's or Costco or any other kinds of place and look and we used my kids and i used to joke i go chicken chicken cheese chicken chicken cheese eggs chicken cheese eggs chicken cheese and eggs are in everything so if you're not eating chicken cheese and eggs there is a unbelievable amount of food that comes right out of the shopping cart and that isn't that really what most diets do for people there's a bunch of stuff that comes out. If eating too much is a problem and less is more is the solution, all of these diets, people see a short-term shift in health towards beneficial.

Then they put an anchor in the ground and say, this is ideal and optimal. Sprinkle on that some stories of evolution, you know, a few scraped bones, a couple of handprints on a wall, and suddenly we've got the birth of the Paleolithic diet, the Paleo diet. And they're definitely better than your average Western diet. The other side of that is on the raw side. It's really easy to get convinced that all these enzymes and we're back to nature and the food's really, you know, really good. But what ultimately we know is that we can, again, get through that first 45 or 50 years doing kind of a lot of things. So I think, you know, with the hack, you know, if you are eating heavily from the starches and fruits, you're going to have to watch nuts and seeds. You know, Penn Jillette, we just did his podcast this last weekend.

And, you know, Penn's now three years into this. His weight has stayed within 10 or 15 pounds or 20 pounds. I think the highest he got up was maybe 20 pounds above his lowest, which is great for most people after losing 100 pounds. But his only issue on his diet, he doesn't like chicken anymore. He doesn't like turkey. He doesn't eat any animal products. In fact, when he can eat anything, he pounds nuts and seeds. He loves nuts. He loves them. And so it's funny, and we joked, the only thing that he has to watch on his diet is something that's actually on the diet.

He said, I don't need to eat seafood anymore. Disgust me. And he said, I just don't need that. It's weird how your cravings change like that. Yes, they do. And people don't believe that. They don't believe it. And they don't believe someone, if you come from an ideological perspective, they don't believe you're telling them the truth. With Penn and I, and that's why I feel like we are helpful for what you guys are doing is that we clearly we're not that. And I'm telling you, I mean, I don't even, I can't even think about the last time I even thought about

that. So I would say the only thing left in my diet, and this is very situational would be sushi. So like, when was the last time you had sushi? Well, I know, well, I would have veggie, but my son loves sushi. And now he occasionally has fish. I don't have a problem. He mostly doesn't. But the fact of the matter is I see, I know five servings of salmon sashimi, you know, in a week or so or whatever. I know my diabetes come back.

So I watch it and he watches it for me. But if there was anything I missed, it would be occasionally going to sushi. Yeah. I mean, I worry about the mercury. I don't want that mercury concentration. I don't want, um, all the other things that concentrate in fish, but I'm going to eat it so infrequently that all those things don't matter because if it's, you know, 10 or 15 times in a decade, this is just not right there.

But go ahead. Oh no, I was just going to, I was going to provide my own anecdotal, you know, experience with that. Like I, you know, I used to be a cheeseburger fanatic. I just love fast food cheeseburgers, just couldn't get enough. And I'm 11 years into this and I tried the Impossible Burger and I got totally freaked out by it. Like I didn't like it. It was too weird for me. It tasted too much like a burger. I just, it didn't like, it didn't meet my expectations of what, cause everyone's like, oh, it's amazing. You got to try it.

You got to try it. And I tried it. I was like, I don't like it. Yeah. I had the same reaction. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's a great product for people that are trying to transition.

I don't want to, this is not about bagging. Right. No, just for me, like I've been doing this long enough where it's like I'm kind of past that. My palate has shifted, and I don't crave that whatever that taste is, the heme or whatever is in there that's supposed to satisfy that urge or that impulse. And so, look, people are motivated for a lot of reasons like you guys said earlier. If someone's motivated for the animals or environment, I'm, I'm okay with that. They can do, they can do what they need to do individualistically to, to do that. And, and having those available, if they want to eat and die young, that's, you know, part of that. Do what you want. You want to die young.

I'm okay. All right. But I think people should be, I'm the same way on drugs and everything else. I, I just, I'm really libertarian about this kind of thing. I don't care what people do to themselves. Right. I don't like the USDA mandating the school lunch program that children have to drink milk. That's what I don't like.

You know, I don't like that we have 27 national institutes for health or 26, whatever. It's one of those. 27, and nutrition is controlled by the USDA. I don't think it's a conspiracy, but I worked for the government for 15 years. It isn't going to be good. Their goal is to sell more of everything. Yeah, and it's just weird that we entrust that organization, the USDA, as a regulatory body to tell us what's healthy and

what's not. And we don't understand that it's a quasi-private organization that is funded by lobbying dollars that have made our public school system a marketing adjunct for its products. I mean, you go into these schools and there's posters for milk. You couldn't have posters for cigarettes in a school. Why are we allowing? It doesn't even matter what product it is. The fact that any product whatsoever would be advertised in a public school system just seems inherently wrong to me.

Yeah. And what you're going to, you know, what I uncovered in our broken plate, I still have to finish this. I know. That was the question I was going to open this whole thing with. When we talked last time, it was all about the broken plate i know and this book was coming out like what's going on yeah so so but but one thing i do deal with is um the march from the discovery of protein carbs and fat all through some of the early economic issues because

our broken plate is a history mystery it's's not a diet book. And there's, you know, there's a lot of people that if they're expecting a diet book, they're not going to be happy with this. But, but the point is, is that when the school lunch program is introduced, the school lunch program ends up becoming something that drives people to eating behaviors. And it drives people in a time when calories were really scarce, it actually had a really good benefit. In fact, dairy had a really good benefit early on because it kept children from malnutrition, from starvation, from not having enough food. There's a downside 100 years later, but back to your point of the posters and the cheese. I mean,

you know, I saw a really compelling presentation. I have it somewhere in my Facebook history, but I think it's around, I'm going to say it's around 2009, 2010 of the checkoff programs, you know, the dairy, the dairy checkoff program. And they were talking about, you know, the consumer voted with their, with their purse or with their money, and they all were going towards lower-fat dairy. And all of that milk fat was being stored away. And essentially, they came up with all these programs with fast food places to put cheese in crust, to put more cheese, to double the cheese, to over the cheese. And literally in the decade after the 90s, where we voted with our money to say we want less less fat in our dairy products right they took this cheese and banked it and sold it back to us the next decade you know so it's a per

pound kind of thing for dairy so the the point i'm making is is that you know ultimately um you know i i i don't care what people eat individually to do their stuff, but I want them to have a real choice. And I think the real choice requires that you have a certain amount of being informed. But real choice also means back to what we just relayed with our three experiences about food is that all food is habit. It's not real. It's just habit. You're habituated. If you say I'm craving protein or if you say I'm craving carbs or you say crave, crave or whatever, craving is a term of addiction.

It's not a term of survival. It's very conveniently used for people to kind of opt out of whatever program. They're like, well, you know, my body was telling me that I needed this thing. And I was like, was that really what was going on or were you just decided that you didn't want to do this anymore? You're validating your decision to not want to do it anymore. And it's not true. Yeah. There's no biological reason for that. Yeah. Lethargy, lack of focus, irritability, you know, everybody would say I'm hungry, but that's also what happens when you give up caffeine and meth and alcohol. Right. You know, I mean, these are, and it's not to the same degree.

So I don't like the loaded addiction, food addiction thing. I don't like that term, but it's habituation. And when you give the body a substance every couple hours for decades, and then suddenly you withdraw it, your body has a limited amount of symptoms that seem to present themselves. Yeah. I think there is an addictive component to it when we have foods, processed foods that are scientifically devised, backed by millions of dollars in research and marketing, etc. To specifically activate these pleasure centers in our brain and, you know, kind of compel that, you know, that biological response that activates the craving, you know, so that you can't just eat one chip. Like there's something to that that you know that biological response that activates the craving you know so that you can't just eat one chip like there's something to that you know absolutely no there's

a physiological nefarious yeah it is and then here's the scientists so now i'm so now watch this guys rich roll just gave you that really technical answer and i'm gonna say they sell it because people buy them and they taste good. Of course. Period. But they also know that the more that they can create that sort of compulsion around the behavior, like in the same way that, look, you want to be in the business of addictive substances. That's the best business to be in, right? So you want to create that and then the demand will follow. But something that equally describes that same thing without the nefarious thing because i have no villains in our broken plate and i and rat if i take the villain stuff away just for a second and then nefarious stuff away for a second and just say if if i'm

doing the pepsi challenge back in our generation remember the whole commercials of the pepsi versus coke well it turns out that if you serve if you you look at Pepsi back then, it was sweeter. It's still sweeter than Coke. So the warmer that you make the drink that you serve, the better Pepsi tastes and the worst Coke tastes. So the way they worked that out wasn't like rocket science. They just made sure that it wasn't really cold and people always chose the Pepsi because it was sweeter.

I hacked this in my son's salsa competition at school when we made the salsa that tasted exactly perfect. He said, oh, it's exactly perfect. I said, okay, let's make it sweeter now. Dad, you just ruined it. Well, wait. I'm going to come to a point on this. Dad, you just ruined it because now it tastes too sweet. I said, I know, but all of your friends don't eat like us. Watch what I'm talking about. And so you present it to him and he won the competition for a school with salsa

because I made it a little bit sweeter. We made really good salsa and we made it a little sweeter. I didn't like it the way I gave it to him. When I was in culinary school, I could always add more salt. I can add more sweetness and I would get, you know, a better review on that than how I would do it. So my point is, is that because we have slowly habituated people to this excess hyper palatability it's not wrong for companies design foods impossible burger that meet those satiate that and satiate that appetite to consume that product i don't want to say impossible burger or beyond burgers is a bad company because they're does that they're designing to the burger compound or and to be clear i'm not saying that at all so but what i'm saying is i also don't think they're

evil saying that they're designing impossible burger to be in make everybody addicted to it so that they can't do it no but like but like the chip companies. I'm telling you, every food company is the same. What you did is because you guys have a bias for Byron Burger because it's sort of new and you know the people, you're just assuming Lay's is that way. And I'm telling you, in their food labs, they just do it. They just eat it. And again, it doesn't matter what their intentions are.

They want to sell more are they want to sell more they want to sell more and we're chronically overnourished and the only way any person listening right now is going to change this is they're going to have to develop a new palate on their own that's equally convenient familiar enjoyable and not hyper palatable and the more often you deal in those kinds of foods back toatable. And the more often you deal in those kinds of foods, back to the craving changes, the more often you stay in that space, the more you're gonna want that kind of food.

Yeah, I agree with that, but it's not a fair fight, right? So what I'm saying is whether we agree that it's creating an addictive response or not, when you're dealing with a giant food corporation that has a massive war chest to come up with the exact color scheme for the packaging that it's going to be, that's going to be just enticing enough that you're going to pick that one, like all of these things that get baked into how that product ends up in your kitchen versus, you know, a banana or, you know, a celery stalk. Like it's

not an even fair fight. And when we're trying to get people on board with this idea of eating more plant foods close to their natural state, we're dealing with foods that don't have lobbying groups and have war chests to, you know, convince people that this is what they should be eating. Or to be at the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics conferences or the medical association. That are sponsored by McDonald's and whatever. You know, like it's insane. And you go to these panel discussions or these presentations that are literally funded by the food companies that are making us sick.

Exactly. Right. But guys, having looked at the economics of food over the last century, here's what I'm here to tell you. When we come back and the three of us do episode around 3022. Hopefully we back sooner than that. When we come back for that one and Beyond Burger is a multi-billion dollar corporation. And it will be.

And I hope that it is. Well, wait, wait, wait, wait. Because potato chips don't kill animals so don't burp i'm telling you if if that same saturated fat excess amino acids and that kind of hyper palatability on there which isn't beef i agree that it saves a lot of cows right or saves a lot of chicken potato chips don't kill animals. And so you can't go and say these evil potato chip companies are making unhealthy food. And at the same time, when you say, if someone eats a burger and believes it's a plant-based diet, it has good

benefits. And I don't think there's wrong with anybody eating anything, including real burgers every now and then from a health perspective. If they eat them every day like you did with cheeseburgers, it's going to be a problem whether they're plant-based burgers or not. That's what I believe. That's what I'm saying. So I'm going to say potato chips can be vegan. Oreo cookies are vegan. And we don't ascribe necessarily evil modes to those.

And what I'm saying with all food, all food, their goal is to sell more. Every plant-based restaurant, they're popping up everywhere. I made myself sick in New York City in 10 days. Just going from one. Yeah. One vegan restaurant to another. I've never been hypertensive in my life, even without the excess exercise. And I came back at normally it's 110 over 67 or so.

I came back 134 over 99. Yeah. Because there's so many amazing. And I came back at normally it's 110 over 67 or so. I came back 134 over 99. Yeah. Because there's so many amazing, there's so many amazing like, you know, plant-based analogs to these animal foods at these restaurants. We didn't even eat. Super tasty. We weren't even eating analogs. We were eating food, like, but just like really salty, oily versions of it.

You know, we were going for Korean food and it wasn't the analogs necessary. It was just salt and oil and sugar. My goal is i'm asking you guys i'm asking everybody let's just take the villainization out of it completely even if it's true just assume that it isn't for a second you know what i tell my kids and they think somebody's really against them like okay we'll just treat make sure pretend they're not against you and let's just deal with the facts. And the fact is, if you heat this hyper palatable, if food is served in a restaurant, it's served for the average population. And the average population doesn't have the palate of the three of us. But that's the problem.

The problem is you can't compete with that palate. You can't. And you can't, it's very hard like for children my children included to be you know bombarded with sugar oil fat highly processed foods and then for me to try to feed them my chili or my stew or whatever and they're not they're not wanting to eat it that is a big problem yeah it is it absolutely is the ubiquitousness of having these foods everywhere. It's a problem. Yeah, it is. So it is nefarious.

Well, no, it's a challenge. But what I'm trying to say is that what we all just came back to is that each person with their headphones in their ears right now has a choice. This is Ray's individual thing. You have a choice to change your palate. It is very possible to do. It's easy to do in a couple of months, three or four months. You can completely transform the kinds of food you like to eat. All three of us transformed our palate.

And we can go out and occasionally have whatever decadent food we want, and it doesn't necessarily impact us. I overdid it a little bit in New York City, but I recovered too. It wasn't the end of the world. So the point here I'm making is that I don't believe this is going to be a top-down approach. I have no confidence that Beyond Burger is going to evolve into a place of making the healthy Beyond Burger beyond what they're going to do, which is they're going to do the same amino acid profile as beef. They're going to do the same

heme iron as beef. And what they're going to end up same amino acid profile as beef. They're going to do the same heme iron as beef. Intentionally. Yeah. And what they're going to end up doing is mimicking the flavor. And it has a benefit. If your benefit is only the planet and animals, I'm not against that. And people who want to eat that and it's going to lead to their early, I want them to have the choice to do it. I'm okay with that. But see, what I'm saying is, is that I think it's the individual that ends up being in control of their own destiny. And I

believe that, you know, when I, you know, Matthew Kenny, for example, you know, we're both friends with Matthew and I went to his school and, and, and Juliana and Matthew and I've all talked as well. You know, Matthew doesn't eat at his restaurants every night. You know, he eats a more simple diet. He knows that this is the occasional celebration. The problem we have is every meal is a celebration. Every meal is a celebration for the average person out there. And so these diets, the vegan, the vegetarian, the Whole30, whatever, all of these take some of that nutrition out and they get part of the

benefit. I personally believe and Juliana, and I think you believe that a whole food plant-based diet is like at the end of that path. That's probably the best you can get in terms of all those things. And what a lot of people who listen to you might be saying right now is, man, I can't give up cheese. I just can't give up cheese. I just can't give up cheese. And I'm thinking, well, if you can't give it up, you should. Because why do you want to spend your life? You're admitting that you're a prisoner to something. Prisoner, yeah.

So if you give it up long enough. Which goes back to the addictive thing. Right, it does. It does. And I just don't use it because it's a loaded term. And I don't want to trivialize the drug and the alcohol hold on your on your your past with cheese i just think that's unfair you had a much more physically addictive situation no i appreciate that but i think it is important for people to understand that that you know your

cravings can be hijacked by certain foods absolutely and that awareness allows you to see that there's a certain sense of powerlessness that you need to address. And it goes back to what, I mean, ultimately what you're saying, Ray, is like this is a personal responsibility thing. And like I get that and I'm with you on that. But when we're butting up against all of the ubiquity of like these products, the amount of personal responsibility becomes amplified because it's hard it is hard right and so you're having to make choices when the healthy choice isn't always the most convenient the most readily accessible choice so i think it's important to admit that there is like a little bit of work that you have to do it's not like oh this is just

right you can just go to new york city eat at all these vegan restaurants, it's gonna take care of itself because that is not the solution. And that's our message, even in Plant-Based Nutrition, our book, which is, it's all whole food paste. And so whether you're a person that is coming at this from you're not being successful and you're already vegan, or you're not vegan and you want to look at what's your plant curious, as Juliana likes to call it, or you have friends and you want to

introduce them to a plant-based diet from sort of just a health perspective. Our book, I hope, is friendly to all of those ideas, And it is based on whole foods. It's not, you know, it's not full of recipes, full of sugar and oil. Juliana, you look like you were going to say something. So I was just giving you a moment. No. Okay. Well, here's one thing I would like to talk to you about.

I'm interested in your perspective on this. You know, right now, the sort of nutritional approach diet du jour isn't necessarily paleo. It's this ketosis diet, right? So where do you come down, Ray, as a scientist and somebody who understands, has experience with, and believes in the idea of intermittent fasting. Because these are intertwined to some extent. Right. So, there is no doubt that ketosis allows us to survive times of no food. You know, without ketosis, that really great body hack, my body would not have survived those 24 days without food that I had had just before last time I was here or last week for three days. And there's also probably really good evidence that ketones do activate some of those sirtuin genes that I was talking about, these longevity genes,

these longevity proteins that are formed from these genes. And we have a good idea that these longevity genes are important because we can take mice that have these same genes as we do. We can genetically pull those genes out and then restrict their diet and they don't live any longer. So they live longer with a restricted diet and then we do that. I believe that while that may have some of those impacts, it may be that the kind of diet these people are eating to live in that state of ketosis

might not be the best. And I don't know that we haven't had, for any of the animal models, we've never had to induce ketosis. In fact, most carnivores, like a cat, will not go into ketosis unless they're completely starved. So just maybe a little bit of background for people. Ketones are basically an intermediate of fat metabolism. They're kind of an intermediate step. And our body during times of no food,

no input, your blood glucose never goes to zero. You still have a background need for blood glucose. So it never goes to zero, but it's supplemented by these ketones. And so you'll hear a lot of advocates talk about ketones being brain food because, you know, 60 to 70% of the glucose requirement of the brain is offloaded to these ketones during this time of no food. And it is true that ketones do activate certain sirtuin genes. So those things are both true. But I don't think that there's immediate evidence, you know, back to that carnivore. You know, a carnivore doesn't go into ketosis unless they're completely starved because any amount of amino acid they make, they use a process called gluconeogenesis to create that blood glucose. In humans,

we can't do that to that level we can create some glucose and we can have a low glucose and this is why these guys get such great blood glucose scores they're all using glucose as a biomarker and i don't think it's the right thing to use but they eat all this meat the excess amino acids in there get turned into glucose they have a small amount of glucose it's level it's stable and of course none of the aminos are stored as fat. And so just like the raw vegan guy doesn't gain fat either, they end up, you know, because they have all the carbohydrates on their side that also aren't stored as fat. Both of these guys, I think, are sort of out in the frays. I'm not sure the ketones are the magic elixir, but I do believe that the diet that

they're doing is restrictive enough that like we saw moving from bottom feeding to the right or the left, when you start eliminating stuff, they might probably have increased health benefits, but I think it's going to be in spite of the ketosis, not because of it. This idea, like I especially saw the explosion in the last two years of fasting. Nobody was talking about that. I really don't believe all of the stuff that people are doing. They're just selling more, you know, butter and coffee stuff. I mean, this is just, you can do it. You know, putting butter and coffee is not a lot worse than putting half and half in coffee. It's kind of the same sort of thing. I don't think medium chain

triglycerides are going to be the savior of people and make them live longer. I don't believe the brain involved because it had all the extra fat in the diet. I think it was cooking that caused the brain. Now, there's a really good book out on paleoanthropology that says that humans working together on hunts, not the food they were getting, but that they were working, that the cooperation caused acceleration in brain development, you know, and the kinds of things to do. But it just wasn't a really that reliable source of food. And when you think about it, most of disease is avian or swine based and dysentery was a very high level of what people died of pre-antibiotics, pre-modern medicine. So cooking was probably more a responsibility, but bringing this back to the

ketosis to kind of close that up, I believe that feeding frequency in general is probably one of the easiest ways to be chronically overnourished. If you start eating from the time you wake up and eat to the time you go to bed and then know that once you take your last bite or your last drink, that process goes on for another four to six hours. So you'll see in our oxidative priority paper, there's a figure. It may be figure one or figure two. I can't remember but anyway it'll show the chronically fed state and so what i think these people are doing that's good

is compressing the eating window you know i normally only eat one or two meals a day i have not eaten a meal today okay and um i think that but you don't need to conflate ketosis ketogenic diet with intermittent fasting. That's right. But what I'm saying is feeding frequency is probably where they're getting their benefit. And if you wanted to do a ketogenic diet, you could also do it with a plant-based diet, too, just by eliminating the starches and fruits. The problem is you're eliminating a lot of phytonutrition, which has been demonstrated over and over again. And legumes have been demonstrated over and over again to have positive health benefits.

So I think it's a stretch, but it's interesting. It's different. It's going to sell. People are doing it. But where are the people doing it that are 70, 80? They're not. You know, again, what can we do in reproductive prime? We can survive a lot of things.

Relative to most of these people's diet, it's probably better. But I don't think the final word in optimal nutrition is that. What I do believe people are doing, because that was the other half of the question outside of the ketosis, was the intermittent fasting. And I don't like to talk about it about intermittent fasting because then something simple like eat one meal a day talks, they start describing it as intermittent fasting. Look, break fast breakfast is whatever time you eat your first meal. And the idea that food has time of day stamps that people eat bacon and eggs in the morning or, and, you know, steak and potato at night, you know, or whatever it is, tofu scramble in the morning and, you

know, and, uh, you know, uh, what's a good, a good hearty vegan meal that somebody would show down, huh? Chili. Chili or whatever at night. The point is this idea of the chronically fed state all day long with this idea that you're having this energy deficit, that you need more energy, need more energy, need more energy. You, as an endurance athlete, the way you have adapted your body is your body is tapping into fat earlier into it. And if you increase your VO2 max, because remember, you can support 100% of VO2 max with glucose, but only 55% to 75% of VO2 max because remember you can support 100 of vo2 max with glucose but only 55 to 75 percent

of vo2 max with fat so what happens is if you go too high you bonk yeah you crash right so you have developed this fat early kind of perspective and the point is these guys are completely on a ketogenic diet that are glycogen depleted have forced their body into that same sort of state now they may not perform alt optimally at the highest level but i'm not surprised they can run forever and use fat and they won't bonk at that point because they're not making that sudden switch yeah they're in their aerobic zone of output right and as an as an ultra endurance athlete that's what i'm always trying to focus on like most of my training is in that zone to aerobic uh realm of energy output so that

i'm not relying on glucose stores for propelling me through that workout that i am relying on my fat stores and my experience is that you know perhaps i'm getting the results of somebody who is on a ketogenic diet without being on a ketogenic diet because i'm doing it physiologically like i'm i'm trying to increase my body's ability to be efficient in that zone and i've gotten to the point where i can go out for like just hours and hours and hours on the bike without really taking in any calories. Right. We talked about this last time.

You said this was your experiment you were going to start doing. I rode three hours this morning and I haven't eaten any food yet. So I'm experimenting myself with, you know, you don't like the word intermittent fasting. I don't know what else to call it. But like I haven't eaten. Decreased meal frequency. I feel fine. Yeah.

And I don't know that I would do that every day. But I'm adapted to the point where, you know, I don't eat. It's rare that I would eat three meals a day. Yeah. And I don't know that I would do that every day, but I'm adapted to the point where, you know, I don't eat. It's rare that I would eat three meals a day. Right. I just don't. But remember when you used to be on the schedule because we talked about this last time. You acclimate to that. Right.

And this is where we are now. So now I think in terms of our body, I like to equate it to sleep. You know, I could take a lot of things and stay up all night okay but during sleep you know you consolidate memory your brain is doing all kinds of mental housekeeping I believe during the fasted state metabolically a lot of housecleaning is going on as well and so I believe the chronically fed state the way I would like to term it is the chronically fed state, the way I would like to determine it, is the chronically fed state is sort of the antithesis of dietary restriction without malnutrition, which would be the technical way to say what we've done to make organisms live longer. That's consistent, scientifically consistent from yeast to primate.

So if we try to implement that, the way that looks is from a nutrient profile level, it's a whole food, plants-based diet. And the way it looks from a social relationship with food, it's a decreased eating frequency in the day. But what propelled you, unintentionally, to eat more was the idea that you needed the fuel for the workout. And I'm not saying that's not true if you're trying to win something, if you're in a competitive, hardcore competitive situation. But for your day in day out kind of workout that you're doing, you now have the choice because you know, I'll do fine without eating right now. And if I eat something, I'll be okay too. And now you have a choice. Am I going to eat today or not? I don't have time. I'm just going to go. Whereas before you didn't have a choice. This gets back to that

idea of when I told you people don't have a certain choice. And I think that what's going to come good out of intermittent fasting is this idea that we need to eat three meals a day or six meals a day back to how I lost weight. I'm not saying you can't do it and lose weight. Of course you can. I did it. I don't think that was optimal from a long-term health span perspective. And so, you know, that's where Julianna and I want to go in the future, which is with the clinical trials we want to be able to do, we want to be able to say, what are the

metabolic changes? Eating a slightly different nutrient profile that happens automagically with animal and plant source food. And, you know, also what happens when we combine that with feeding frequency? What, what, what is that? Because I can gain weight or lose weight eating one or two meals a day, depending on the kinds of foods that I decide to eat. If I eat, you know, that high decadent eating out food, I'm going to gain weight. And if,

but really the freedom I have, the freedom that a lot of our clients have is this idea that if there's nothing available, then I just don't have to eat anything. Right. And I didn't have that flexibility before. So as we're talking, it's mid-December, but I'm going to put this up at the beginning of January for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that's when the Idiot's Guide to Plant-Based Nutrition comes out, right? January 9th, I think the book comes out. But above and beyond that, I mean, that's great timing because it's the new year. And I would imagine there are people listening to this who have been listening to me for a long time, but just haven't made that leap. But now it's January.

It's like, you know, let's make the resolutions. OK, I'm ready to do this. Like, I want to start. I've listened to your podcast with Neil Barnard and Garth Dave, whatever, and Juliana and Ray and like all these people and haven't yet actually implemented any of this into my life. But now I'm ready. All right. So the book and this conversation, I think, is a perfect launch pad at this time of year for people who are finally in that spot and want to take that leap.

So I thought it would be good and instructive to try to help guide people towards that first step. And because it is, you know, look, it's called The Idiot's Guide to Plant-Based Nutrition, right? By its very nature, the work that you guys are doing is introductory for a mainstream audience. And, you know, Ray, you got on the map in a big way because of what you did with Penn Jillette

and him writing about that in the book. And now, you know, if you go online, it's like the Cray-Ray diet. I'm doing the Cray-Ray thing. How many beans of potatoes? And, you know, the funny thing is it has nothing to do with potatoes. When people actually read the book, everybody went on this potato thing, but that's actually not what I do with clients, which is kind of funny. The bigger point being like, you know, these are, and the people that are like blogging

about this are like, gosh, you wouldn't expect to like try a plant-based diet, right? In whatever form that is. So not try, these guys are committed now. They love it. They, once they get that, see, we all got on the backside of this. Once the familiar, convenient, enjoyable wears off, then you start feeling great. And when you go back to have that other food. Creates that own momentum. Yeah. It just, you feel it just like you, you know, you feel it.

Right. So let's start at square one. Like somebody's listening to this. They're like, okay, tell me what to do. Where do I go? What, what's my first step? What do I get rid of? What do I eat? What do I focus on? What do I not have to worry about? Like, how do you, and all the people that you counsel and work with and all the success stories that you've had with your clients what's the first step the first step is to keep it simple you know we really just there's an infinite variety of combinations of vegetables fruits whole grains legumes nuts seeds herbs and spices and you can meet any kind of taste preference you can meet any kind of you know culinary desires from making from experimenting with those

foods those basic foods. So the first step is to go, okay, I'm just going to do this, you know, commit to a certain amount of time just to try it and see what happens. And now, I mean, my gosh, from the time that we made this transition, it's completely different now with the internet is exploding with recipes. There's information everywhere. There are books everywhere, your books included. There's so many great sources and there's so many great things on the market so you know I like to look at it as learning a new language you know first you got to learn the letters you know if there's a different alphabet and so oh there's 10 different varieties of rice at the market now and there's five

different types of you know colored lentils that I could try so those are like the letters and the words and you start kind of putting them together. Look for recipes, do a search, find books that sound good, that appeal to you. Look online and find recipes that sound delicious to you and then flip through them. And if you happen to love meatloaf, try a nut loaf or a lentil loaf. If you happen to love chili, try find a great bean chili, just anything that speaks to you. Start marking those off. And I like, you know, you just slowly build up your repertoire and you start building those words and those sentences. And suddenly you become fluent in this because you can go to the market and go, oh, I'm going to make that, you know, that burrito and I just need these three ingredients.

Sort of like you just have it on the top of your head. But it's a learning curve and it just takes practice and experimentation. But I also recommend people think of it in a positive way. You know, it's not like, oh my gosh, I can't have, I can't have that. I can't have this. I can't have, instead think about all the new things you get to try. And you're literally recreating the plate. You know, we all grew up with that meat in the center of the plate and we're used to thinking about food in a certain context, but there's so much more. And if you look, you just even, you know, culturally speaking, there's so many delicious cuisines that are based on these plant foods, you know,

you know, Ethiopian food and Mexican food and just traditional diets that have all these really delicious types of cuisine that you may not have really spent time with. This is the time to do that. You know, go to different types of countries and look at their traditional diet and start experimenting. You know, look at how many times, three times a day in Asia, rice is consumed. You know, that is like the staple or potatoes in Peru, or we're talking about potatoes or corn, but find these staple foods and just start building your repertoire of foods you love. Like what I did when I first started before the internet was I was collecting recipes I loved and I just would put a heart on them and I would save them. And then I have this pile of recipes that I loved. And then you start becoming comfortable in the kitchen, you know, and you start becoming comfortable

playing with it and maybe swapping out the herbs and making it this way. Or, you know, you just start becoming more confident as you learn this whole new way of cooking. Oh yeah. It does. Sriracha and nooch. You know, nooch. I don't know if you've seen that vegan food pyramid. And you just pour, there's one side pouring nooch on and the other side pouring sriracha, and it just makes everything taste delicious. Sorry to ruin your flow there, but this is true, though. Finding these ways of hitting that I love it zone with the food. And we have, I don't remember how many, 70-something or 40-something,

I don't know how many recipes we have in our there's 75 in this book and there's new recipes in this edition a wide variety of people and we also deal with different phases of life people who are pregnant early children the nutrition of that everything from infancy to seniors and athletes and everything in between a recipe in there from from mattzier, you know, in terms of running, some high-calorie stuff that you need if you're doing the long endurance stuff that you guys are doing. Yeah, there's a chapter on sports nutrition and fitness. In the geriatric group, you know, for the elderly, we've got stuff in there, people who don't have the proper dentition.

In fact, we have a link to our – maybe we'll put a link in there to our paper on the journal of geriatric cardiology. Um, it's right now the number one downloaded paper in the history of that journal, which is really great to see. It's got like almost 30,000. And it's a good nutrition overview. It's just, it's basically the more scientific version of this idiot's guide. It's like, it's for healthcare professionals. So, so if you have this book and you were to go to your physician or go to somebody and you had that paper at the same time, you would have both a peer reviewed version. And then this is sort of a simple version of the same thing with some recipes and things. You don't need to be perfect to get started. And in there is some work on

oxidative priority, a very simplistic view. We deal with protein, the question, the P word. We deal with that in there in a simplistic way so that everybody can have access to this. And Juliana's had meal plans from the past that we have that have incorporated some of the new recipes. There's some shopping list guides, how to go and navigate the grocery store. Because, again, looking for all these ingredients that are hidden. People get overwhelmed. Back to that. Back to New Year's, New You, starting this off.

Find the simple ingredients. Start with simple. It doesn't have to be complicated. You don't need to make some gourmet meal we want to over complicate it right like where's that but i need what kind of spirulina do i need yeah if it doesn't have an expiration date on it buy it food that naturally that you can tell that it's not healthy to eat like fruit fruits and produce they don't have expiration dates on them you can tell that it's rotten oh Oh, but they expire faster than the processed foods on the shelves, ironically. But you know that. So what my point is, they don't need a label. Fruits and vegetables

don't need labels. And you can buy things without labels. Yeah, I mean, it's really, it is so simple if you think about it. No one will argue that we need to eat more fruits and vegetables. If you make that your number one New Year's resolution to eat half your diet from fruits and vegetables, you're going to do better. Eat less frequently and eat more fruits and vegetables. Yeah, that's the two takeaways. Two things done. If you just eat less frequently and eat more fruits and vegetables, you'll do well if you don't soak them in sugar, oil, and salt. So when we're talking about eating

fruits and vegetables, let's be clear. We're talking about whole food. We're not talking about potato chips and French fries. Those don't count. Veggie chips, veggie whatever stuff in the bag with the stuff that you're talking about from the evil companies that you guys were discussing, right? We're not talking about the middle of the store stuff, right? But it's true. disgusting right we're not talking about the middle of the store stuff right but it's true but but if you just go with a vegan or plant-based label we have to say it today we didn't have to

say it a decade ago because those things didn't exist but today everything can say vegan can put the vegan so i'm saying if you go to and eat you mean you're just saying that just because it's vegan doesn't mean it's healthy right exactly just Exactly. You need to recognize it in nature. Yeah. Yeah. Well, one of the things that I think is interesting in your approach, I wanted to ask, in your experience of working with all these people and all the success stories, people screw up. They mess up.

They make mistakes. They slip backwards. What are some of the common things that you see that are tripping people up? Followed by, you know, the next question, which is what are the strategies to avoid that? But even before that, like we were talking before the podcast and Ray, you had said something really interesting that you actually build in this like failure mechanism into into the approach. into the approach you want them to fail because that experience of failing will confront them with the kind of circumstances that led to the misstep which creates greater self-knowledge for long-term future success yeah just like fatigue and muscles and and working out to to the failure point causes that strength to happen i believe that the main obstacle we have to success are the social

pressures to eating. You know, today it's a lot more socially acceptable to say I didn't eat for 24 days than it was two years ago. Only marginally. And we're in LA. But more people do it today. What do they say in Alabama? They think he's crazy.

I'm fixing to shoot you. No, but today it's more acceptable to say I eat a plant-based diet than it was 10 years ago. Everywhere you say it. And now we've been all over. We've been all over the country and beyond now. No matter where you go, even in Huntsville, Alabama, where he lives, people go, when you say you're plant-based or vegan, they're like, oh, like they know someone. Oh, I know someone. So I was vegan.

Everyone has heard that term or is more familiar with it. And so what I was going to say with this is that the social pressure to eat is huge. Yeah. And that's one of the, that is one of the pitfalls. And that's also one of the solutions. And one of the things people should focus on if they're going in there, find your people, find support. Even if it's not, if your family doesn't agree with you or your friends,

you don't have a friend that's on board with you, find it online, go to a conference, find people that are like-minded because support is really important. But so in terms of what we do to plan that failure in is that, you know, one of the things that Penn and all my, our, all our clients do, and this is our, our, our site is justsides.com, but you know, our clients are invitation only. The only way you become a client of mine at this point is know someone who succeeded under me already. And we, we try to limit that because I only want people that really want to do a major transformation. This, I do not want to be the potato hack guy. I don't want to, I don't believe in that. I think it's wrong to tell people to hack their diet and do all that stuff. Because I think

that losing and gaining and losing and gaining is probably more dangerous than them just staying the way they are. So, so the point I wanted to make is that, um, you know, feeding frequency, the more often you eat, the more often you're going to potentially overeat. So if we take those two rules, eat mostly whole food plants and produce and vegetables, produce and fruits, and eat less frequently, one of the biggest issues you have is it's always time to eat with someone. Food is the ultimate social lubricant. And so we're a society of one meal that takes breaks to sleep and work. Everything else is a meal.

And so that means that you, and back to this individual responsibility that you had to take, that I had to take, that Juliana had to take, is you're going to have to say no to some of these meals. But you can say no to the meal and still go to the event. You don't have to eat just because everybody else is eating. It's going to be socially difficult at first, but just like everything, you put a little resistance on the muscle, the muscle grows stronger. And so, you know, it's, you know, unfortunately our society is obesogenic. No one says, you know, you're kind of looking really fat. You better lay off of the veggie burger or whatever. Nobody says that or the vegan the nachos, the vegan nachos,

but they will say, Oh, you're looking gaunt. He's looking thin. He's looking skinny. What are you doing? And I don't think it's right on either side. I think it's not right to comment. You know, you know, a lot of my clients look perfectly normal at the end of their adventure after losing 140 pounds. They, if a stranger would see them, they would just look like a lean, healthy individual. But when you're used to seeing them at 300 pounds, they're like, you look like you're starving. Right, our body, back to the cold stress stuff, our body is really good at sensing differences.

It's not good at sensing absolutes. If you're driving on a highway at 80 miles an hour and you suddenly slow down, you feel like you're going slow, but you might still be going fast. And so if you walk out from a warm room to a cold outside, you feel cold or from cold to warm, you feel warm. We sense changes because the amygdala was, you know, the tigers jumping out from behind the tree. You need to pay attention. But sometimes you drive all the way home and you can't remember the roads that you're on.

Right. We've all had that experience and so people you some of your un and and this is i want to say this carefully some of your unintentionally worst um um sabotagers are usually the people that love and care about you the most yeah Yeah. That's without a doubt. And I think they enable drugs, they enable alcohol, they enable bad relationships. Yeah, exactly. So, so the idea here is, you know, it gets back to this individual responsibility. I love the rugged individualism and I failed.

I continue to sort of find tweak. I'm not perfect, but at this point, by any stretch, I'm not a food police of any kind. But I think what they're going to have to do is they're going to have to learn to eat at less of these events. It's really tricky. And I think it's important to just validate that it is a real concern because I think it is the number one thing that trips people up. And the first way to step forward and through that is to acknowledge that it is a real thing, you know, because look, food gets conflated with love. It's very emotionally convoluted. And these social scenarios, whether it's, you know, it doesn't necessarily mean, you know, not necessarily talking about traveling home to see the family at thanksgiving although that's a hot

button for a lot of people it's the daily interactions just your co-worker or where are we eating lunch today or all these sorts of things and no one wants to be the problem right and they don't want to be they don't want to be on the receiving end of all kinds of attention and questions. And and that's enough for people to say, forget it. You know, and so it does require like a little bit of resolve. Yeah. Resolve. Exactly. And Rich, what you're saying is the reason why people fail at all diets, not just this one. This is exactly what ends up driving everybody back to their their old habits because it's most comfortable.

But if you continue to train just like you've done, which because you're sore, you're tired, I don't want to finish this, but eventually you get that strength where, okay, I can do this, I've overcome it. You have that endurance, you know, that you have. And to use that analogy, I think with food is not a stretch. No, and to use that analogy i think with food is not a stretch i mean and to extend that analogy as an athlete you're going to have days where you feel lousy and your workout is going to stink or maybe you overslept and you missed workout or you blew it off but that doesn't mean that you decide you're no longer going to be an athlete or that you're not going to compete in that race that goal that you set for yourself that's the difference between people that are

successful that's oh you have to keep eating diet like, but in diet, like, well, you know what? I screwed up. I ate ice cream. So I guess this is too hard. So I'm not going to do it. And they just give up completely. And that's the difference between people that succeed and are sustainable and people that just give up.

It's the, okay, I messed up. Big deal. Move on. It's one meal. It's not going to ruin everything. Look at us in New York City for 10 days. Michael Godot, one of our other co-founders of Just Sides, and he's a juggler, but he had a really great point, is that, you know, I gain weight or I lose weight in this bite, in this moment. He said it was really weird for him to realize because he lost like 50 or 70 pounds or something, has two artificial hips.

He juggles. He rides unicycles and shows there. I mean, he's a, he's a performer and, and his body was just giving out with the extra weight. But what was interesting about him describing this is he said, you know, I, I, it's really interesting how many times I negotiate and say what I ate in the past or what I'm going to do next Monday. And he said, yet my whole life I've gained weight and I lose weight in this bite so whenever the fork is going to your mouth in that moment is the only time that you need to be making a decision it doesn't matter what you did

last week it doesn't what matter what you did on the earlier meal the question is what am i doing right now and I think those of us that are successful are more focused on that part of our two strategies of eat more fruits and vegetables and eat less frequency is the less often you're tempted with that thing the less you're gonna I mean how big of a mistake can you meet how how big a mistake can you make if you're eating once a week how big a mistake can you make once a week I want to start with unreasonable

that's unreasonable right but then okay if i'm eating every three days how big of a mistake if i'm eating every day once a day mistake or if i'm eating six times a day once mistake you tell me statistics you know hazard is risk times exposure and exposure is never going to zero because you guys aren't going to let me get in with get get on with the breathe area and i don't need food right so there's always going to be an exposure and there's i mean there's always going to be a risk there exposure the frequency is the only one you can take note to newbies you don't need to eat every once a week only that's not how you're going to succeed i think the takeaway really especially for somebody who's

you know thinking of embarking on this journey is the, what you're getting at really is just a mindfulness around your daily actions and trying to anchor yourself in the moment, not to be reactive, not to be impulsive or compulsive and to root yourself in what is actually going on. Like this is, these are things like I learned in, in sobriety, like in recovery, like the hokey, like it's one day at a time and it's the first drink that gets you drunk and those stupid sayings like right those are true like that is that is actually quite profound if you think about it so yeah the the bite that you're taking right now that's moving you towards your goal or away from your goal and the more you can be mindful of that and really cognizant of of of being present with your food choices and your daily habits, I think the more better served you'll be. But I can say from a psychological perspective, the fact that everybody pauses on eating once a week when I said that, the fact of the matter is everyone listened to this unless they're

in some critical medical, advanced medical condition and they would know that. If they were without food for a week, and I'm not saying they need to go do that but i'm saying if they were without food a week they'd be probably fine okay so but the fact that we psychologically need to protect that you know we don't want to say that the what i'm saying is that down to the daily interaction with all your friends and family is exactly why you get convinced to eat or co-opted into eating so often often it's exactly that's why i started with something unreasonable because you guys reacted in a predictable way you reacted the same way in an ordinary situation if i'm just trying to eat once a day the kinds of bombarded i'm going to get from the social pressure you see and that's the kind of thing we do in our coaching program, which isn't the potato

diet. We deal with that. And you ask about these plan failures. I put foods in there. We put food in there purposely that I know that a person who's been losing 0.6 to 0.8 pounds a day, which is what our average person loses on our program. I know that when that food hits their lips, they're going to overeat it. I absolutely know.

I can tell you every single meal. I can tell you the meals that are going to make them constipated. I can tell you the meals that aren't going to fill them up, and they're going to feel hungry later and want to eat more often. And so they're not magic meals. It's not magic fuel. It's a whole food plant-based diet. It's stuff that you would recognize.

But the point is, by challenging them that way, when they have me to lean on, or Juliana, or one of our other four founders, when they deal with us from a coaching perspective, what they're able then to do is say, okay, I made a mistake. I see what it is. Oh, wow. I see what happened there. The scale stops moving and they panic. Because look, fear of loss is more motivating

than the desire to gain. I can tell someone that weighs 360 pounds, won't it be great to be 215? That's not gonna motivate them. But you know what? If they've been losing weight every day for the last three weeks, and suddenly for the next three days it's level, they're panicked. Why did've been losing weight every day for the last three weeks and suddenly for the next

three days it's level, they're panicked. Why did I stop losing weight? Why did I plateau? It's always the same answer. I'll tell everybody here. It's always the food. It's always the food. Let me say that one more time. It's always the food. It's never the exercise. It's always the food. Because for any level of activity, there's a level of food that you could eat less than that you would lose weight every day. So the point is, as soon as it plateaus, and when I take the excuse away, because diagnosis, when I give you a diagnosis, that kind of means not my fault. That's what a diagnosis means. It means, Hey, there's something wrong with you. It's not your fault. You got this,

you know, and we did this diagnosis. Di diagnosis diagnosis is you're acting like an idiot yeah or or genes yeah they i i got fat genes or i'm big boned or whatever by the way that predictability where everyone has the same response to the same planted triggers are the same failures that we plant that predictability shows that it's not everyone is everyone's very similar people say well i'm different because i have blah blah blah or i was diagnosed blood type yeah blood type i mean all the stuff that people use as excuses really we are biologically almost you know very very similar yeah all animals all animals that's why that's why they mimic in so many things in in studies the fact is we're very similar. We're not like asparagus. So it is very predictable.

And what I like to say is everyone's not really that different, but they start at different places. And we're accounting for this in the study that we're going to be doing later this year, the clinical trial. But the fact is it takes a certain period of time to get everybody to the same point. And then once you get onto that line, it's as predictable as the Harris-Benedict equation was 100 years ago. Well, we got to wrap this up, you guys.

Great. That was amazing. It's a lot of fun. It was cool. I feel like, Ray, you can just wind him up. Oh, yeah. I love it. Hours and hours. And it's all fascinating. know a lot of people talk but he talks with substance yeah

no it's fascinating it's a lot of fun and i feel like i i feel so fortunate to be living at this point in life um you know the average person has more information in their hands than the most powerful person in the world 25 years ago. So crazy. I don't think we really appreciate. And now look at it. People like us are able to connect with people and change lives. And my goal is very simple.

I said it the last time. I'm going to say it again. And Julianna's I've co-opted her and a number of other people in this process. I want to change 10,000 people's lives. 10,000 people that I can point to and say, these people transformed their diet. This is who they are. This was their transformation and change.

And I think it's amazing that all of us get to do this, that we actually get to reach out, not push people, not pressure them. If you want to change, it's available. The information's there. If you don't want to, I'm happy with you doing whatever you want to do. I agree that this is an amazing time. I would encourage you to raise your bar because I think 10,000 is too low. I think you're capable of doing more.

I hope I do more, but I'm telling you what my goal is. Aim at nothing, hit it every time. Okay. Great. So, uh, hit it every time. Okay. Great. So the new book is The Complete. No, it's No Complete Idiots. They took out The Complete. We're no longer Complete Idiots. We're just Idiots.

I'd like to be in the boardroom where they made the decision, like, we're going to change it from Complete Idiots to Idiots. Yeah. And still people get offended as if we titled the book. It's kind of funny. People go, I'm not reading that. How could you title it with Idiots? But it's a series with thousands of other titles but this is basically they changed the whole formatting of the title so it's plant-based nutrition

and in parentheses it says idiots guide to second edition because it's a second edition it's a black cover study yeah yeah black cover not the white cover so if you get two online one of them's black cover uh pendulet wrote the forward for it so it will say under there juliana haver ray cronice and pendulet for the forward on if it's amazon and they're pushing it out to all the other ebook uh okay yeah yeah by the time this cut you guys come out yeah yeah so it comes out january 9th yeah and if somebody's listening and they're raising their hand and they want to be one of your pupils they want to apply to your program how does that work so visit justsides.com it's going to very rapidly just side just sides like just sides side dishes right so justsides.com you're going to see a bunch of

recipe dishes there but um i'll tell you what justsides.com forward slash richroll. If you do justsides.com forward slash richroll, we will make sure that goes to a sign up and we'll decide, you and I can decide, all three of us can decide in 2018 whether we want to do a super select group of people. Could we rope you into doing something like that? Yeah, we could talk about it. Sounds interesting.

So maybe we might do something like that and figure it out, but we'll at least collect people's name and, and contact them that way. And also if you're just new to the situation and you're just still trying to transition or all that stuff, I still take clients. I'm still doing my private client, my private nutrition counseling at plantbaseddietitian.com. And pick up your other book. How do you say it? If you could say it, yeah.

Vegeteranio. Vegeteranian diet. Vegeteranian. Gluten-free cooking. Oh, yeah. The Idiot's Guide to Gluten-Free Vegan Cooking. Right. Very cool.

And you guys are easy to find on the internet. Juliana is at plantdietitian on Twitter. Yeah. And Ray's at Raycronice. And anywhere else for people to find you guys? I still love Facebook. And actually by the time this, by the time you release this, I will have a show on Facebook watch.

So you can look for me there. Yeah. That's what we were doing in New York city. I was filming, filming episodes. Yeah. I wasn't allowed to talk about it, but now, now, now it'll come out afterwards. So we can actually say, yeah, you're the first person I've met. Who's doing something with Facebook watch.

Oh, cool. Yeah. It airs starting January 8th. So it'll precede the book by one day, which is kind of exciting. Okay. So how do you like, so what is the show about? So I'm going to talk about it. I know.

My God, can I really talk about it? Well, it's coming out the day after the book, right? Yeah. So this isn't going to come out until then. Well, we're going to start promoting it next week anyway. So it's called Home Sweat Home. It's my first time talking about it. And I have me and my co-host, Joey Thurman.

We are taking people through a mini transformation and going into the homes and living, staying there overnight and like giving them some suggestions to kind of transform their lives. So it was fun. It was really fun to film. How many episodes did you do? We did five initially. We're hoping to do more because we had such a good time. Like half hours or how?

No, because Facebook Watch has very strict parameters. I think they're going to be like 8 to 20, I think 8 to 14 minutes, like really crazy fast, little mini episodes. So when that premieres, just go to the Facebook Watch page and search for it? Well, yeah, we're just going to figure all this out because we're back in time here. But if you go to my page, Plant-Based Diet i'm plant-based dietitian on facebook i'm going to be linking and promoting it and we'll send you links that you could put in your uh your show notes yeah so by that time we'll have all those things on that and then also on our stuff and i'll make sure that people have a sign-up sheet so we can at least reach out to people that are

that are truly interested this is not about a. This is if you want to make a permanent lifestyle transformation. That's what we're doing with Just Sides. I love it. You guys are a gift to humanity. It's true. Listen, you know, people are dying all over the place from these crazy chronic diseases. It's insane.

It's ridiculous. Yeah. And we really do have a lot of power we really do have a lot of power with our fork it's it's pretty exciting yeah well good i'm excited for the book to come out thanks for talking to me you guys thank you so much rich keep doing you're changing a lot of lives oh my gosh everywhere i go around the world people thing here are impacted cool thanks you guys thank you you know how i close this down you want to say it peace plants yes fascinating stuff i hope you guys enjoyed that discourse that conversation perhaps it even

blew your mind or maybe even some of the concepts alluded you ray has a tendency to talk very fast he's an extremely intelligent human so maybe go back and listen again to make sure that it all kind of percolates down into that gray matter. In any event, pick up their new book, Plant-Based Nutrition from the Idiot's Guide series. Hit them up on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, social media, wherever. Let them know what you thought of the conversation. And please make a point of checking out the show notes where we have copious links to take your edification and infotainment beyond the earbuds. If you would like to support my work, please, please, please subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts. Only takes a second, really does help me out, helps the show out with visibility,

extending reach, growing the audience. And that way I can find the best people for future shows. It's a win-win. Other things you can do, share the show with your friends and on social media, leave a review on iTunes, subscribe to my YouTube channel, youtube.com forward slash richroll. This episode was not videoed because it predated my collaboration with Michael Gibson,

but all episodes going forward in 2018 are being videoed unless I'm like out of town or some other kind of weird situation. Also, we have a Patreon account set up for people who would like to support my work financially. Thank you very much to everybody who has done that, is doing that. It means the world to me. I am going to be doing an AMA, ask me anything for Patreon subscribers soon.

I'm going to get that scheduled right away. Also, you can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at Rich Roll. If you need help with your diet and nutrition, I've provided you with a ton of resources today. Also, all the sponsors at the beginning of the show will help you with that. But also, it's worth mentioning that you might want to check out our meal planner. It's got thousands of custom-tailored plant-based recipes, grocery lists, and even grocery delivery right at your fingertips. Basically everything you need to eat the way you deserve and to do it in a very cost-effective and efficient manner. It's just $1.90 a week when you sign up for a year. So to learn more and sign up, go to meals.richroll.com or simply click on

meal planner on the top menu at richroll.com. And of course, thank you to everybody who helped put on the show today. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production, interstitial music, help with the show notes and the WordPress page. He does a lot for the show. Thank you, Jason. Sean Patterson for all his help on graphics and text design and the style and the look of the show. That's all about Sean.

And theme music, as always, by Annalama. Thanks for the love. See you guys back here soon. Until then, make it great. Eat well. Treat yourself well, you guys. You deserve it. Peace, plants. Namaste. Thank you.