The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka - 73. Muscle Matters: Debunking Plant-Based Diet Myths with Mike Mutzel, MS

Episode Date: June 25, 2024

Key takeaways you’ll learn in this episode: Is a plant-based diet harmful to longevity? What is the link between Omega 3s and health? Why muscle is your greatest metabolic currency. Get weekly tips from Gary Brecka on how to optimize your health and lifestyle routines - go to ⁠https://www.theultimatehuman.com/⁠ For more info on Gary, please click here:⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://linktr.ee/thegarybrecka⁠ ECHO GO PLUS HYDROGEN WATER BOTTLE ⁠http://echowater.com⁠ BODY HEALTH - USE CODE ULTIMATE10 for 10% OFF YOUR ORDER ⁠https://bodyhealth.com/ultimate⁠ Have you ever wondered how muscle health impacts your longevity? Gary Brecka is sitting down with nutrition and functional medicine expert, Mike Mutzel, MS. Mike shares his personal journey, shedding light on the pitfalls of plant-based diets and the importance of a whole-food omnivorous diet. You'll learn about the surprising connections between muscle, metabolic health, and mental well-being, as well as why muscle is being viewed as our biggest metabolic currency. Tune in to gain actionable insights that can transform your approach to diet, exercise, and longevity, along with practical tips for incorporating strength training into your daily routine! 00:00 - Who is Mike Mutzel, MS? 03:00 - How did he get started in functional medicine? 06:00 - Why did people start studying the keto diet and its health impacts? 08:45 - What is the link between metabolic and cognitive health? 10:30 - How gut health impacts the brain. 14:30 - Is it ever safe to drink alcohol and how does it impact your body’s inflammation? 17:30 - Is a plant-based diet harmful to longevity? 24:00 - Why Omega 3 levels can be an indicator of heart disease. 29:00 - How to know what vegetables are good for your specific body. 30:15 - Why are people seeing improvements in their anxiety and depression with the carnivore diet? 37:00 - What diet does Mike Mutzel follow? 42:00 - Top tips for getting kids to eat healthily. 44:30 - Why muscle is your greatest metabolic currency. 47:45 - How leptin and insulin resistance creates inflammation. 50:30 - Why Mike Mutzel stopped drinking Bulletproof Coffee. 54:00 - What data should people track? (Recommended blood & hormone panels.) 59:00 - Should you get body scans to track body fat percentage? 01:03:00 - What is the MOST IMPORTANT thing you can do for your health?  Connect with Mike Mutzel on Instagram: @metabolic_mike ⁠https://www.instagram.com/metabolic_mike⁠ Visit Mike’s Website: ⁠https://highintensityhealth.com/⁠ Visit High Intensity Health on YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@Highintensityhealth⁠ Links Mentioned: Omega 3 Index Test by Omegaquant: ⁠https://omegaquant.com/shop/⁠ Gary Brecka: ⁠@garybrecka⁠ The Ultimate Human: ⁠@ultimatehumanpod⁠ Subscribe on YouTube: ⁠@ultimatehumanpodcast⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A lot of what we're all preaching now is really kind of getting back to the basics. Again, I would love to eat just a vegan diet. You know, no animals are dying, all this stuff, but it's just not really totally aligned with human health in my opinion, especially as you get older. The amino acids from plants don't contain the leucine and other essential amino acids that will stimulate the muscle protein synthetic pathways. When a lot of people go on a vegan diet, they might supplement with B12 or folate, but they're forgetting about the other conditionally essential carotene nutrients, like I mentioned, creatine, carnitine, taurine, some of these other compounds that you're not going to get from plants, sadly. So I think that if you were to look at just one thing,

it would be make sure you at least... Welcome to the Ultimate Human Podcast. Today we have the pleasure of speaking with Mike Mutzel, also known as Metabolic Mike, a highly respected figure in the field of nutrition and functional medicine. Mike holds a BS in biology from Western Washington University and a master's in clinical nutrition from the University of Bridgeport. He's also a graduate of the Institute for Functional Medicine's Applying Functional Medicine in Clinical Practice program. Mike's worked extensively as a functional medicine

consultant, nutritionist, and he's also the author of the highly insightful book, Belly Fat Effect, the real secret about how your diet, intestinal health, and gut bacteria help you burn fat. Through this popular YouTube channel how your diet, intestinal health, and gut bacteria help you burn fat. Through this popular YouTube channel and podcast, High Insensity Health, Mike shares cutting-edge research and practical advice for optimizing health through diet and lifestyle. Join us today as we delve into the importance of gut health, the benefits of intermittent fasting, and the latest trends in functional medicine with Mike Mutzl. Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast.

I'm your host, Gary Brekka, human biologist, where we go down the road of everything anti-aging, longevity, biohacking, and everything in between. Today's guest is a figure in the field of nutrition and functional medicine. I had a chance to spend some time with him before the podcast. I think that this is going

to be right in the sweet spot of my audience. And I really want to welcome to the podcast, Mike Mutzel. Gary, thank you. Thank you for having me on. It's a pleasure to be here. That was a great walk we had. We got about 2000 steps there, which was fantastic. You know, what's amazing about being in the biohacking space, like, you know, we both sat down to do the podcast and then my team was like, hey, we need to back up this SD card. It's going to take 25 minutes and you're like let's go get some sunlight go for a walk that's awesome um and then i almost got hit by a car because we're in london and i didn't expect them to come from the right and not from a little bit to get used to that hey yeah and then i got turned around but thankfully you knew your way around london somehow i don't i don't know how but he got us

back to the hotel so So here we are, we're both in town for the biohacking event in London. You know, I always talk about, you know, with guests of mine, and I find that very often the people that are making the greatest impact in the world are the ones that have solved a problem in their life. They have gone through some sort of pain, some kind of innovative moment, and it changed the course of their life. And it led to them becoming an advocate for Lyme disease or for addiction or for physical exercise or any number of things and we started you know on our walk to talk about um your trajectory from having worked in the sales industry to starting your own supplement

company and some of what you've discovered along the way so tell us a little bit about that journey that's brought you to where you are right now one of the authorities on muscle and it's linked to longevity and muscle as our metabolic currency sure yeah i would love to you know it started out for me um really being fatigued in college you know as an undergrad i was a pre-med biology undergrad and uh was i yeah i love biology was so fun i mean now it's so relatable to everything we do i just wish the professors back yeah it's cool now it wasn't super fun or cool back like here's the krebs cycle but they don't relate it to energy metabolism it's just like this theoretical thing that happens

within your cells but i wish they could tangibly relate that to hey when you breathe oxygen or eat carbohydrates this is where it goes you know right so yeah to make a long story short so i told you you know i dabbled with anabolic steroids i wanted to be a bodybuilder early on in college hurt my back dead lifting and realized that you know doing a couple cycles of steroids probably wasn't a good idea long term um and but i really wanted to get into intense i loved intense exercise and i couldn't lift weights anymore because my back hurt and i have since resolved that through core work and everything got into cycling as a way to like you know lance armstrong was competing in the tour de france back then my father's really

got all fired up we went on a bike ride one time and just started crushing some hills i was like Like, you know, Lance Armstrong was competing in the Tour de France back then. My father is really not a cyclist. You got all fired up. We went on a bike ride one time and just started crushing some hills. I was like, this is amazing. So I joined the bike team at my college, Western Washington University. Okay. And I realized after losing a lot of muscle through endurance exercise that my libido wasn't what it used to be. My energy, my confidence.

I was lean and physically fit, but i realized that i was overdoing exercise and went to the school doctor the nurse and they said i was depressed first time i've ever been really depressed like i'm talking i can can't even focus in cellular and molecular biology classes like i loved organic chemistry and i used to just be a straight-a student loved all that sat in the front of the room, couldn't follow the course. And the school nurse said, well, you're just, it's common. You're a pre-med undergrad. We'll just give you an SSRI. I was like, that sounds not like really it's going to solve the root cause of the problem. That sounds typical though. Very typical, standard, just give a short-term solution for a problem that we need to unravel. So I started to dive into PubMed because we were learning how to do research

and things like that. And I was learning about overexercise and how that affects and can contribute to hypogonadism. So I was just really on a quest to figure out how to resolve my own health issues. And that's why I found functional medicine. Thankfully, serendipitously, I got a job selling professional supplements

to doctors that work in the functional medicine space, working with compounding pharmacists, integrative medical doctors, DOs, naturopaths, and just... And when you say professional supplements, you mean these are supplements that are sold to physicians to use as treatments for... Correct, hypothyroidism, autoimmune disease. Yeah, it's a subset of... I like that, that you're actually in the supplement space for. It's awesome.

Yeah, there's different sort of criteria for supplements, if you will, or hierarchies. And the practitioner channel is a billion-dollar channel that many people don't know about. And in so doing, you get to work with some really great doctors that are, as you mentioned, treating Lyme disease or intestinal permeability or mold issues or thyroid issues. Those are the trailblazers too. Exactly. No doubt. They're doing things that a

old mentor a friend of mine charles poliquin would always talk about how practitioners are ahead of the academic literature because by the time someone enrolls people in a randomized clinical trial and gets money for that practitioners have been observing this you know anecdotally and that's what led to the clinical trial right we can talk about the carnivore diet for example i mean people have been doing that for the last five years. That's now just being studied academically in a randomized controlled trial format. Same with the keto diet.

I mean, the keto diet's been used for well over 100 years, but before we had clinical trials for preventing dementia or treating autoimmune disease or weight loss, people were losing weight on keto before there was clinical studies. Yes. So that to me- Originally keto was for epilepsy, as I understand it, right?

Correct. It was really done to reduce the inflammatory condition in the brain to help improve transmission speed and it was quite successful. Very successful. If you look at the literature and then along came Dilantin, which was the first prescription anti-epileptic drug. And then practitioners, I think, and probably patients as well, didn't want to change their diet.

It was easier to take this pill. And so the keto diet really lost favor until about the early 2000s when people started using it anecdotally. Individuals like John Rowe and Dom D'Agostino started utilizing this clinically. And now there was a huge resurgence in interest, not only just for lay people but academically you know looking at cancer treatments looking at obviously treatment refractory epilepsy right also weight loss and all the other metabolic health applications you know it's interesting i

did a podcast with dr palmer who's a harvard um md uh phd i think as well. And he is treating some of the most drug resistant mental illnesses. And I'm talking about very severe mental illness, right? Where people are literally tortured inside their own minds. Schizophrenia is paranoid schizophrenia is with diet. And i found it really really refreshing and very exciting that someone of that caliber with that level of expertise especially in one of the mainstream institutions was really leaning towards things like ketogenic dieting as a way of helping treat drug resistant mental illness and i've used diets like the keto diet we were talking about this before the podcast um you know to therapeutically help patients like you know dana white um and intervene for a period of time to help help correct their blood work but i didn't mean to steal the thunder

from you but we're so much on the same page and i'm so excited about this journey because uh i think i think you're really you know on the same page as far as diet and and muscle go and exercise but totally well i mean just to unpack that a little bit i think the connection between metabolic health and cognitive health is just incredibly fascinating and now we know the molecular pathways you know when you go on a low-carb ketogenic diet for example you can increase gaba neurotransmission in the brain, which can help improve feelings of anxiety. And just the connection between normal glycemic levels and mood stability, I mean, has been well recognized for a long time.

You know, working in that practitioner channel, I got the opportunity to speak with a lot of medical doctors and one friend of mine, Norm norm schwartz who was going through his residency was working in a hospital with someone who was just really violent very aggressive and they had to like chain this person down to the bed and he remembers this moment really well and they tested her glucose and it was over 300 and so they gave her some insulin dropped the glucose and all of a sudden she calmed down And so we've all as parents seen young children just running around, you know, seemingly impatient, like, give me, I want this.

And just really this hyper impulsive behavior. We see this in protests and college campuses and things like that. So I think it's really important that we understand that our diet and our fluctuations and the glycemic variability has a direct impact on our cognition and our mood and how we feel. So anyone with anxiety, depression, any mood issue, seasonal affective disorder,

they should consider, I mean, it may not have to be full keto or carnivore, just a lower carb diet or the diet that you and I think... Especially refined carbohydrates and high sugars, things that are going to spike and your your insulin levels like a heart monitor right yeah we want to minimize the peaks and troughs so just the huge swings is what we want to avoid right and when you eat a real food diet and omnivorous real food diet you don't get these massive ebbs and flows because those ebbs and flows affect our hormones they affect you know adrenaline noradrenaline cortisol those hormones impact neurotransmission, they affect behavior. So it's all connected. And it's not hard to see in real time.

But the mainstream medical community just doesn't have time to work with patients. It's much easier to say, here's your Wellbutrin. Well, you know, we know that the majority of our neurotransmitters are made in the gut, right? So you have this factory in the gut that's creating neurotransmitters, or taking tryptophan, turning it into the neurotransmitter serotonin. It's traveling up the vagus nerve, creating mood in the brain. So you could say that, you know, my mood starts in the brain, but it really starts in the gut. And you could say that it starts in the gut,

but it really starts with what we're putting into the gut, right? I mean, if you didn't have the essential amino acid tryptophan, you wouldn't have anything to convert into the neurotransmitter serotonin. So sometimes I think that I'm finding that we're getting back to the basics. You know, we're at the biggest biohacking event in Europe right now. That's why we're both here. And I had a very interesting dinner last night and talking to Dr. Gundry and some just the real thought leaders in the space,

yourself included. And a lot of what we're all preaching now is really kind of getting back to the basics. It's like we figured out a thousand years ago, we unfigured it out and we're refiguring it out again. You know, the best medications are coming from you know mother nature we're never going to be able to replace sunlight grounding you know breath work movement exercise sense of purpose you know all of these things that are all around us you know and we're just chasing the exotic so well it's incredibly fascinating but i think us Western trained minds, we need this objective data to confirm what maybe our ancestors did inherently. And so I'm all about like you looking at the research and trying to prove these methodologies because it does come across to mainstream people as sort of witchcrafty or a little

bit woo-woo. But when you actually start to do this, you feel so much better. You look better. You age better. So yeah, I agree. but when you actually start to do this you feel so much better you look better you age better yeah so yeah i agree we are sort of just reconfirming what our ancestors inherently did right um but i think going back to the gut there's one thing i want to highlight there and it talks i spoke a lot about this in my book belly fat effect and you talked about the gut and tryptophan and all this there's also uh bad actors or pro-inflammatory bacterial fragments in the intestine known as endotoxin.

And so when we start to eat the French fries, the processed foods, we over consume alcohol, we start to release some of those gram negative bacterial fragments and cause a porousness in our small intestine. People know about intestinal permeability or leaky gut. And this can happen meal to meal. You can have really good gut health and then go eat fast food and have a you know milkshake and french fries it's really the high refined carbohydrates with oils together that creates this phenomenon of increased intestinal permeability and when these bacterial fragments get into your body they cause the symptoms of depression anxiety is that endotoxemia correct because i've used that've used that term... I've heard that term kind of thrown around that... And the endotoxemia is highly prevalent in autism

and other neuroinflammatory conditions, Alzheimer's, dementia. You know, we think they're caused by these plaque formations and these neurofibrillary tangles, but those are the consequences of the inflammatory process process for a period of time would you agree yeah i think there's ample evidence to support that but even just common metabolic health issues you look at there's blood endotoxin levels correlate with visceral fat tissue so just belly fat uh the degree of insulin resistance and so we look at these foods and we know they're high glycemic or processed but mechanistically what are they doing in addition to releasing glucose and insulin because they're

so hyper palatable and so on they're causing changes to the gut ecology and the integrity of the intestine and as a consequence of that you're getting literally you're poisoning yourself with bacterial fragments and so when we think about metabolic endotoxemia patrice canny he's in belgium i believe has done a lot of research on this um and even just alcohol consumption and i've i'm not an anti-alcohol person per se i tried a year of alcohol free i'm like 470 days alcohol free now are you yeah feel just much better constantly yeah i mean i miss every now and again a biodynamic wine but the juice isn't worth the squeeze in my opinion. Totally agree. But anyway, alcohol will increase the absorption of these bacterial inflammogens.

There was a study at Boston College that randomized people to drink one drink or up to four. They just took shots of vodka with a little orange juice. And the feelings of blood alcohol level correlated really tightly with endotoxin levels. So the feeling of a hangover, we're thinking, oh, it's the ethanol or it's the acetaldehyde. It could be that the bacterial fragments from your gut coming into the blood, creating inflammation, which creates the symptomology of a hangover. So if you're going to binge drink, you definitely want to have maybe some polyphenols,

some organic wine, or even just a little bit of orange juice or maybe pomegranate juice to mitigate that or just not binge drink at all oh just not binge drink there's that there's that option as well but what were you saying just just so i heard it correctly you you're the amount of alcohol um and the degree of the hangover was related to the level of endotoxin yeah there was a parallel increase with the blood alcohol level and blood endotoxin level oh as the alcohol rose the endotoxin level rose right um and this was what you're referring to as making the gut more permeable so these endotoxins were getting you're causing endotoxemia and inflammation by drinking the alcohol in addition to making the blood more acidic in addition to the acetyl aldehyde so lots of consequences and then the investigators also looked at inflammatory byproducts so they looked at interleukin-6 and

tnf-alpha from macrophages and monocytes and that correlated parallel with blood alcohol as well as metabolic and no toxemia so binge drinking the feeling of being buzzed is linked with more inflammation and then we we know that obviously that people who binge drink will have more prevalences of dementia, cognitive decline. Well, if you're increasing TNF alpha and interleukin-6 in your brain, you're going to exacerbate the decline of your cognitive capacities and beyond.

So, incredibly interesting stuff. No questions. One of the things that you said was eating a whole omnivorous diet. So I didn't want that to fly by without us taking a deep dive because my audience is also always looking for evidence-based mechanisms to help them make good dietary choices. I'm a big believer in whole foods, eating whole real foods

as close to the soil as possible. I mean, very often it's not my opinion it's not the food itself it's the distance from the food to the table um we take a lot of harmless compounds and really um make them harmful by the time they make it to your table what would you mean by a diverse omnivorous yeah i like to emphasize the omnivorous aspect of it because when we talk about a whole foods diet we often hear that sort of obfuscated with a plant-based diet. And I grow vegetables. I have 400 square feet of garden space.

We have raspberries, tomatoes, you know, apples, pears, a lot of blueberries. I love. You want to push your limits and feel your best? Hi, I'm Gary Brekka and plunge is your secret weapon. Cold plunging can reduce muscle soreness, boost energy, and enhance mental clarity. With regular cold plunging, you'll support your immune system and even elevate your mood. It's more than recovery. It's a lifestyle.

Take the plunge. Change your life. Visit plunge.com and shop now. Fruits and vegetables, right? But I think that the powers that be are really pushing a plant-based diet. And when people just start eating a plant-based diet, they're getting hyper-palatable meat-like alternatives that are vegan junk food. And a recently published study in The Lancet actually just showed, this was days ago, that a plant-based diet, if it contains vegan junk food,

which is what most people are consuming. I think I saw this. We got to put a link to this into the show notes. I'll text you that. I saw it getting on the plane. I didn't have a chance to download it. Was it in the Lancet? It was.

It was published, I think Tuesday. Very, I think incredibly fascinating because again, we have Stanford and Harvard and these institutions really foisting this diet saying that as long as you don't eat red meat, that you're okay. You can get all your protein needs and requirements, amino acid requirements from plants. There's no reason to have animal foods in your in your diet saw that too but now we know that uh these especially when you're eating

processed plant-based foods and most of the plant-based foods most people are not eating a lot of vegetables and whole foods when they start to go on a vegan diet they're getting a lot of processed foods beyond meat impossible no question and that's just it's processed junk food essentially and we now have research that shows that this is linked with higher prevalences of dying from all causes in cardiovascular specific mortality wow um because you know there's obviously other plant-based research that that indicates the opposite but it was always fascinating to me that um i think you could make that argument for it for any diet but if you're a vegan um and this isn't to attack

vegan diets particularly but to say that you could eat um you know white flour white rice white bread white pasta white potatoes and beer right um which would all be vegan or your cookies and or cookies and and so that's your diet. There's no question that that's not healthy, but it's vegan. And you could make an argument for non-grass-fed, non-grass-finished meats and highly toxic carnivore-based products too. I think when we say whole foods, we mean in their purest form without being highly processed because you could eat a lot of processed meats, high nitrates, keto junk food, seed oils, things like that because you can have a clean keto diet, you can have a dirty keto diet.

If you were eating a lot of processed salad dressings, for example, they're high in palm oil and canola oils, you would be keto but you would be in a pro-inflammatory state. And so I think that, you know, that's one of the reasons why I don't advocate hardcore particular for any dogmatic diet. But keep going. So you said that, you know, really the research indicates

by having meat in the diet, clean sourced I'm assuming. More grass-fed. More grass-fed. Things like that. But just more whole foods from an omnivorous standpoint. And the nail in the coffin for me was a study in 2018 that looked at whole blood essential fatty acids and looked at the omega-3 index. And the byproducts of that, I'm sure you've talked about this, these so-called resolvins that are created as a consequence of eating fish and animal-derived foods that the EPA and DHA,

the health-promoting launching omega-3s, they're converted into these anti-inflammatory metabolites that are specific for reducing inflammation, particularly in the brain. And they wanted to look at these metabolites as well as the omega-3 index and levels of linoleic acid which is an 18 carbon long fatty acid that's really derived from vegetable oil and how that can be converted more preferentially into pro-inflammatory products and so this these investigators in the uk actually looked at whole blood essential fatty acids with linoleic acid and then their downstream metabolites into these so-called omega-3 resolving compounds.

The vegan dieters had zero levels of these anti-inflammatory resolving mediators, these so-called pro-resolvings. Some people call them SPMs. There's different supplements out there that sort of quantify or isolate these anti-inflammatory compounds. In contrast to the omnivorous diet group where they had significantly higher levels of omega-3 fats in their whole blood, much lower levels of linoleic acid and much higher levels of these anti-inflammatory long-chain polyunsaturated omega-3 derived compounds. So for me, that was really the icing on the cake.

And then a recently published study this year looked at, we'll talk about muscle, I'm sure, later. To say that seed oils were the culprit, you're saying, rather than meat-based fats. Correct. Is what you're getting at. That more of the vegan dieters were getting much higher levels in their diet of linoleic acid-derived seed oils. So probably canola, probably cottonseed with Crisco and whatever else. It's really soy canola and cottonseed are really where people... I've been censored by the Canola Oil Society of Canada.

It's insane. I didn't know there was actually a canola oil society in Canada. It's called rapeseed, by the way, guys. Canola is sort of a brand name. But even in my rant on seed oils, I wasn't particularly attacking the seed itself. But what I said was, you know, when you industrial process these, right, you put them in a commercial press, it comes out gummy, you degum it with hexane, which we know is a neurotoxin,

then you heat it to 405 degrees, turn it rancid, and then you deodorize it with sodium hydroxide, which we know is also a carcinogen. And then some of them are commercially bleached, and then bottled and then put on the shelf. I mean, you'll never convince me, I don't care how clean the plant started, if it ends with sodium hydroxide and hexane

and potentially commercial bleach. And then even at safe levels, then you'll never convince me that that's somehow healthy healthy and non-pro-inflammatory and and there's a lot of indications now uh that are starting to you know take the blame off of the infamous ldl cholesterol molecule is just being at the scene of the crime not pulling the, and these pro-inflammatory compounds that are really calling the inflammation to the damage in the endothelial wall. Would you kind of agree with that? I agree wholeheartedly with that.

And I think there's this whole LDL oxidation hypothesis, that it's not the LDL inherently going around and damaging your coronary arteries, it's that the oxidation is initiating the uh the process of atherosclerotic plaque formation and part of that oxidation is the high prevalence of linoleic acid in our blood and in our cells uh is and so i think the omega-3 index is nice bill harris has done a lot of research on helping us better understand when our omega-3 index and this is i have no financial ties with the company um it's a 49 test and it can help to uh basically enumerate and give us better ideas about sudden cardiac death and what's that test

looking at the proportion of omega-3s in your red blood cells it's a blood spot test blood spot test is that the um dr gunnery was giving me one that he thought, because I want to put that test in the show notes. Yeah, that's a good one. It's not a test that my company runs. We do 74 biomarkers in the blood. We do five markers in the genes. And I think that that helps you target supplementation. But certainly looking at the processing of fatty acids

in the red blood cell would be a great test. Say that one more time. It's the Omega-3 Index, the company's Omega Quant. They're out of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Okay. I actually went and visited him, did a podcast with him. I've been a fan of that work for a while. But yeah, when you eat an omnivorous diet,

the point is that your Omega-3 Index and your levels of these health-promoting Omega-3s and their metabolic byproducts are going to be higher compared to if you eat a vegan diet. And the consequence of having high linoleic acid in your red blood cells and other cells could be they're more prone to oxidation. Right. And that could contribute to, among other things, atherosclerosis

or the narrowing of your very small coronary arteries causing plaque and even clotting cascades. And then I think almost even more importantly is the half-life of linoleic acid when you eat it is about 600 days. That's what I heard. It's insane when you start to look at this and we are having orders of magnitude more linoleic acid. If you look at... Hey everyone, if you've been tuning into the Ultimate Human Podcast for a while now, you know I'm very selective about the products that I endorse. I only feature items that I personally use daily to enhance my own health and wellness. One product I use daily is the Echo Go Plus. This portable hydrogen generator is a game changer. Simply take the top off, pour your bottled water in, and with the push

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Consumption of linoleic acid in the 1990s compared to now, it's like 300%. Every restaurant, know processed food item has canola oil because it's cheap and we can deep fry in it and and we and it tastes just like some of the other oils that are that are healthier for you um so we can and it denatures even at high temperatures but we still fry in it right. And the repeatedly fried stuff is the problematic. When we look at that, all the oxidation products and advanced glycation end products that are created as a result of that are problematic. So yeah, I think that's why I emphasize the whole food omnivorous diet.

And again, another nail in the coffin was just looking at muscle protein synthesis, comparing a protein matched omnivorous versus vegan was just looking at muscle protein synthesis comparing a protein matched omnivorous versus vegan diet and looking at the rates of muscle protein synthesis and we know that as you get older muscle is even more important compared to when you're younger it's harder to stimulate skeletal muscle as you get older there's sort of this animal grams per kilogram of body weight equated for plant versus animal derived and keeping those grams the same. And what was the muscle synthesis outcome? So I want to say, yeah, the difference was between 40 and 60%. It was pretty massive because eating, uh, and again, I would love to eat just a vegan diet,

you know, no animals are dying, all of this stuff, but it's just not really totally aligned with human health. In my opinion, especially as you you get older i would agree with that because the the you just need uh the amino acids from plants don't contain the leucine and other essential amino acids that will stimulate the muscle protein synthetic pathways okay so those two studies for me were like okay this is why we really should be pushing a whole food omnivorous style diet okay so with with with um with meats clean source meats as the foundation and um vegetables and would you say fruits yeah in very limited quantities correct and a friend of mine stan efforting he's done a lot with the vertical diet really big in the bodybuilding space uh something that i borrowed from him him is eating vegetables that agree with

you so i think a lot of people think oh cauliflower is healthy or kale is healthy most people the brassica derived vegetables they don't do well with that they're having a lot of gi issues and so forth so for me it's like having fermented vegetables so having kimchi sauerkraut olives for example coconut avocado so you can get a lot of diversity in there. And these are low anti-nutrient, low oxalate vegetables and fruits that you can digest readily, that support gut health, that have the polyphenols that are healthy for you. And it tastes good.

That's the most important thing. You know, I think honestly for autoimmunity, for GI issues, for depression, going carnivore is amazing. But most people get kind of bored of having rib eyes or just ground beef all day long every day so adding that diversity again with whole foods that don't upset your stomach and gi tract yeah and you said um you know depression going carnivore um and i don't want to gloss over that because i think that you're you're you're really on to something something that we've noticed not just anecdotally in our practice because we see a voluminous amount of new patients on a monthly basis.

We provide supplements that you find in carnivore-based diets, meaning B vitamins, B complexes, methylfolates, things like that. And we do see a significant impact on what patients at least anecdotally report as depressive symptoms, symptoms of anxiety, ADD, ADHD. So talk about that a little bit as it relates to the carnivore diet. What's the mechanism of what's going on there? Why do some of these elimination diets have such profound effects for people. And why do you think it is that modern medicine is not very accepting of, you know, just the impact of diet on overall well-being,

even mental illness? I can't tell you the number of patients that have come to see my clinical team that have been discharged from oncology treatments. So these are people that have finished chemotherapy and it will say dietary recommendations, none. We see it all the time. So I'd love to dive into this a little bit with respect to the carnivore. On more granular detail. So the first part of your question is mechanistically, how is this working? I think it's multifactorial.

I think, as you alluded to, the different levels of micronutrients that are very specific for improving cognition and the synthesis of critically important neurotransmitters, serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, et cetera. I think that's part of it. You are getting, you're getting more zinc, you're getting B12, you're getting folate, thiamine, and then the omega-3s, like we alluded to. I think that's part of it you are getting you know you're getting more zinc you're getting b12 you're getting folate thiamine and then the omega-3s like we alluded to i think that's part of it i think on

the flip side it's just lower in inflammation so when you and the medical community doesn't really grapple understand that well because we've been told red meat is inflammatory red meat has saturated fat saturated fat is bad for you because it's purportedly linked with heart disease although we now know that that data is really not sussed out, which we can talk about later. So I think it's hard for mainstream medicine to grapple with that. But in my opinion, it just minimizes the amount of antinutrients and problem compounds that can contribute to feelings of dis-ease or malaise, supporting gut health and beyond. One study found, several studies,

I think a lot of people with depression have GI issues. Oh, I mean, almost. Strong correlation. I don't know that I've ever had a client that complains of any significant level of anxiety that didn't also have gut issues. Yeah, and a lot of people with gut issues, they are in high fiber. And there's serotonin right there amongst other things.

Yeah, that link, but also just the fiber. I think there's this myth that if you have more fiber, it's going to improve your gut health. And a lot of people that eat high fiber diets, they either have tinnismus and they're going to the bathroom multiple times a day, have no warning. Once they get the urge, they have to go. Or you have people that are constipated. And numerous studies now show that lower fiber diets are actually better for gastrointestinal issues than higher fiber diets. But this one study or a group in China

has been tracking individuals as a gastroenterology clinic. And there's such a bias in people towards fiber, even though when they went on a low fiber diet in this particular study, it improved their GI symptoms, but they reverted to a high fiber diet and their symptoms came back so there's this bias that we have to have some threshold of 20 or 25 grams of fiber i agree right so i think if you are having gi issues and you eat a high fiber diet it behooves

you to mod modify the amount of fiber that you're eating so as to see clinical resolvement in your you know gastrointestinal problems, especially if it comes to constipation or tinnismus. Yeah, I've certainly seen that, I think you're right, part of it is the elimination of the anti-nutrients and part of it is the inclusion of what we need to not have the absence of the basics. All human beings need two essential fatty

acids eight essential amino acids 91 essential minerals and as we get depleted in those areas i think we get the expression of disease and then we go chasing the disease that's in the leaf instead of the nutrient depletion in the soil um and you know i've i find that that's why sometimes these types of elimination diets can be the panacea for people they're not the panacea for everybody and i think being hyper dogmatic for a prolonged period of time is usually not sustainable um but in the short period of time they can be you know life-saving very effective and then moreover the other conditionally essential micronutrients that are found in an omnivorous diet for example carnitine creatine these other very important carna derived animal derived nutrients are really

important for metabolic health creatine really helps with cellular energy production it helps in the brain there's numerous studies that find that creatine helps with cognitive recall and memory, especially in elderly people. So I think that's another part of it as well. It's not just the B12 and the folate and all this. When a lot of people go on a vegan diet, they might supplement with B12 or folate, but they're forgetting about the other conditionally essential carotene nutrients, like I mentioned, creatine, carnitine, taurine, some of these other compounds

that you're not going to get from plants, sadly. So supplementing with that I think is helpful if you don't eat enough red meat, but several studies and there's a researcher in Australia, I can't remember her name, she's looked at putting especially women who have anemia and issues with iron absorption and so forth, and depression, putting them on a whole foods animal-based diet and and correlating that with possibly the creatine and other parts of the the meat matrix that we don't really talk about that are very helpful yeah and i think when you see uh a

normalization of hormones you see you can even see the anemia is being affected we know that that men and women that have clinically deficient levels of testosterone, free testosterone, have a higher propensity for anemia. You know, their red blood cell counts are lower, their hemoglobin levels are lower, their hematocrit, their blood viscosity is usually lower. And then when they either go on hormone therapy or they go on supplements to support healthy hormone production like DHEA, D3, boron, if they're dealing with SHPG, then as their hormone levels come back, boom, the anemia seems to fade away and their energy level returns and their sleep returns and what have you. So what is a normal, what is a day in the life of Mike Mus look like from a yeah yeah from a dietary standpoint

how how are you wandering around london right now what um yeah it was a good question um it is a little bit hard when you travel yeah um but but at home i have backyard chickens so eggs you do oh that's great we have 17 chickens one rooster um and it's great because my daughter gets involved with that and we use the manure for the garden and all that. And it really connects you with your food. So we have fertilized eggs because we have a rooster. So I'll do raw egg yolks in a smoothie, for example, with some blueberries and some grass fed whey protein. But I generally two to three meals a day based upon my activity level. So I think, you know, people get really hyper focused on how much protein to have, how much food to have.

And I base this as sort of, you know, it's like fuel in the tank. How much do I need to fuel what I'm trying to do? If I'm going to do a 20 mile, you know, two day backpacking trip, I'm going to eat a lot more food than if I'm just sitting around doing podcasting or video editing or whatever else, but generally two to three meals per day, you know, 30 to 50 grams of protein per meal. And very heavy, heavy on protein, red meat, grass fed, you know, or wild caught game that I've harvested myself. I work with a local rancher and get cuts from him, try to cook in a slow cooker as much as possible. So using bone in, you know, whole food,

you know, derived, um, you know, we'll do, um, you know, ribeye, of course, with the bone in, we'll do, um, rib, rib rib rib rib steak rump roast i mean you name it but i love to saute onions in ghee put that in the slow cooker and cook it on low and slow um with rosemary for example and cook a roast or grass-fed you know just ground beef and then mix my daughter is an athlete she's really into track and so we'll do some sprouted rice do they like to eat like that too, your kids? Yeah. She's actually never had fast food ever.

Really? Good for her. You know what's crazy? I bet if she did, it would taste like chemicals to her. Whereas someone that's brought up on having access to a lot of fast food, their palate changes. And they would prefer not to eat whole foods they actually prefer the taste of artificial sweeteners and and fried and processed foods yeah what we're doing to kids is so sad gary i think the studies journal of the american medical association in 2021 found that kids are 65

percent of the calories that kids are eating is coming from hyper palatable ultra processed junk food. And so we are training our children. 65%. It's yeah, it's almost three quarters. I mean, in some households, it's 100%. You know, you've taken your kids to birthday parties and whatever else. And we are rewarding our kids with junk food. If they do well, we give them junk food. Oh, it's Valentine's Day. It's so and so's birthday. It's, you know, St. Patrick's Day trip. It's Cheetos and Doritos and MSG and, you know, fake cheese. I mean, it's valentine's day it's so and so's birthday it's you know st patrick's day trip it's cheetos and doritos and msg and you know fake cheese i mean it's you know because you're you're you're on a road trip and it's what we do um in the kids classrooms you know bring donuts to school we bring processed you know bagels to school um i think that the school lunches and you know a lot of times in the in the public school system are.

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Terrifying. Yeah. You know, we usually made lunch for all of our kids growing through until they graduated from high school. And now luckily they're all adults and they're in control of their choices. And I, for the most part, they're very, very healthy. But how does a typical American family get ahead of this? I mean, because if your kids are going to public school

and you know what, we feed kids mostly in the morning, Pop-Tarts, cereals, bagels. They're not only nutritionless, but I believe that they have a lot of anti-nutrients in them, like folic acid, which is a non-natural form of folate, like cyanocobalamin, which is a very non-bioavailable form of B12, and then lots of empty calories that make them hungry again. So, what are some like tips and tricks for getting your kids on the bandwagon? And then I

want to ask you some questions about our muscle discussion. Yeah. No, it's a great question. I don't have all the solutions, but I think cooking with fat and using salt is key. So my daughter loves lamb and lamb happens to be very fatty. And so a lot of the food that I cook for her is in the slow cooker, add in a lot of real salt. I'm a big fan of the Redmond real salt and, you know, use garlic and spices and just make it taste good. So she wants to eat it. And most importantly, getting your child to feel the tangible effects of how that food is impacting their health and how they feel and getting them involved in the process too. We go to the store together. She's picking out the fruit she wants.

I say, okay, well, what do you think about this lamb? You want more eggs, more yogurt? So in the morning, it's yogurt and berries, and I'll sneak in some whey protein. So it's very simple. And just mix it into the yogurt or kefir or whatever you're making in the morning. Totally.

And if I add raw egg yolks, it makes it really rich. I mean, the things that we like are salt, sugar, and fat. So if we add more fat and salt or a little sweet from the berries, then she's going to enjoy it. Right. You know, I think it's hard once your kid is addicted to processed food to get them off. Right. And that may be where a vacation or some sort of elimination diet comes in. I don't have the, the, all the tools for that, but we slowly weaning kids off of that really affects her performance and she can run a mile um just shy of six minutes you know wow so she's how old she's 11 wow she's super fast and great good for her she can do on a hike i mean we've done a 22 mile hike in one day before and

that was when she was nine so she's very and so she gets it and So she's very, and so she gets it. And so she's very unique, but I think it's important. Any kid could do what she does. It's not like she's genetically gifted. We just have primed her mitochondria and her exercise capacity and her diet. So she doesn't crave these things. She's in bed by nine, you know, no screens, no iPhones, things like that.

But getting back to the nuts and bolts, what do parents do? Just not buy the processed food, not buy the packaged food and learn how to cook. Cooking is a lost art. I think so too. And it doesn't have to take a long time. I mean, I love to cook. I'm constantly posting what we're cooking on my Instagram channel. One of the things we talked about that I think you and Dr. Gabrielle Lyon are doing a very good job bringing to the forefront is the importance of muscle, not just exercise, but our actual muscle mass over our lifetime. And I think, again, both of you guys out there are bringing this more into the mainstream,

muscle being our metabolic currency and being more than just something that looks aesthetically pleasing um it's not really considered by mainstream modern medicine to be an organ right um you refer to it as an organ today um which i tend to agree with but talk a little bit about um where you know your journey has led you to to really prioritizing muscle and what supporting evidence is there that muscle is our metabolic currency? Yeah, well, there's tons of research there. I mean, I've been fascinated with muscle since I was just a little kid, watching Jean-Claude Van Damme and Arnold Schwarzenegger, just the aesthetic side of it.

And it's just serendipitous that now we have this dossier of literature supporting the fact that muscle and muscle mass and strength are independent variables that will predict longevity. Yeah. Grip strength. You know, and speaking of grip strength, there was a recently published study that found that people who have better grip strength age biologically slower compared to people who are weaker. And so we hear a lot, you know, we're at a longevity conference, this whole field of geroscience or longevity science, you know, people are taking, you know, NAD a longevity conference this whole field of geroscience or longevity science you know people are taking you know nad boosters or getting ivs or methylene blue all that stuff is fine but if you're not strong good luck trying to live to 180 i mean how are you going to get up

and go to the bathroom by yourself and so strength i think is really important and uh prioritizing exercises that support strength and it it turns out zone two training, as good as it may be for capillary density in your aerobic base, it doesn't necessarily translate into improved strength. And so I think that's the most important thing that we should prioritize. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic,

numerous studies emerged. People who are more likely to die from COVID had low grip strength. Yes. We have multiple studies. Low grip strength, low vitamin D3, and the more frail, the higher the incidence. Totally agree with you.

Right. As a mortality expert, we saw that. Yeah, higher visceral fat, lower body mass index, people that were very sarcopenic from age-related muscle wasting, much, much higher. It didn't have to do with the diameter, it had to do with the density of the muscle, the muscle and fat ratio.

I read some of those, you know, studies myself. So for somebody listening to the podcast, that's a lot of my audience is not sedentary, but we have sedentary family members, friends and family. What's the importance of getting off the couch and getting mobile and like how can somebody incorporate strength training into their daily routine where do they start yeah it's a great question um to tackle the importance so recent and haynes data the national health and nutrition examination survey this is the longest ongoing study cohort study in the u.s finds that 96 of us are on some spectrum of being insulin resistant. 96%?

Yeah, so only about 4% of US adults are metabolically healthy. Wow. And so when we think about our organs of metabolism, we tend to think about the liver and the pancreas and fat tissue. But our muscle is where most 80% of glucose is disposed into muscle. So it's really a glucose and insulin sync. It's also a leptin sync. So if you want to be leptin sensitive you want to focus on muscle so that's what i think is the why we want to support metabolic health by prioritizing muscle strength and i think just capacity and muscle

health really why is it important to be leptin sensitive yeah so leptin it turns out is really it helps regulate or is critically important in appetite control and regulation but i think even more importantly leptin is a pro-inflammatory immunologically active signaling molecule so the more leptin you have for as a consequence of being overweight or over fat the more inflamed you're going to be and that's why i think leptin is so problematic we in the early or late 90s early 2000s it was all about the leptin resistance diet right um i've read all about that you know so and that's fascinating and and really leptin resistance correlates with insulin resistance so you don't really people can test their leptin levels you want to do it first thing in the morning fasted

because there is a diurnal rhythm of leptin secretion and so on you can test that but the best way to ascertain whether or not you have high leptin levels is just to look at your body fat and and what about looking at um insulin when you when you're looking at a glycemic profile and you're looking at glucose hemoglobin a1c the three-month marker of blood sugar and insulin where where do you like to see those those biomarkers if people are going out and getting data on their body um where do you like to see those those biomarkers wonderful question gary you know i think having a fasted insulin under five is ideal you know there's really no need for high fasting insulin if you think about what does insulin do it helps us in the post-meal window

to partition the energy that we ate so if it is high in the fasted state that would suggest to many of us that there is some degree with post-meal processing because of being sedentary we can talk about how being sedentary causes hyperinsulinemia but also too much processed food and so i like to see fasted insulin under five most people are between five and seven you know so it really depends on your last meal and by the way i do like to see postprandial insulin as well once people have a baseline about 90 to 120 minutes after a meal it is good you know to look at your non-fasted insulin and non-fasted glucose as well as non-fasted triglycerides and where would you like to see postprandial insulin let's say two two hours out from a meal yeah like under 12 under 12 generally okay uh and glucose under 125 you know and then

triglycerides it depends on how much fat that individual had with the meal but triglycerides generally under 150 fasted yeah uh post meal oh post meal fasted i like to see him low like 70 65 70 yeah i would agree with that. Triglycerides, and this is what, by the way, not to interrupt you, why I got off the bulletproof coffee. I mean, I love Dave Asprey and what he does, but I was having a lot of these bulletproof coffees

and I was learning about this lipid load test that was emerging in the literature. So I looked at my post-meal triglyceride levels after having a bulletproof coffee and my triglycerides jumped to 220. And fasted, they're 60. to me i was like this this liquid fat as health promoting as it may be maybe for enhancing ketone levels was not doing me any favors in the post-meal window right so i really tamed that down right and and a lot of that is well i mean not with with the aspirates but you

know it's coming but people are getting those those fats from pro-inflammatory sources of right of fats and even seed oils i know people are putting seed oils right right into their coffee it's not grass-fed butter right or the mct oils it's you know it's the high levels of seed oils you know what's interesting is we knew in the mortality space when we would look at um people's cholesterol profiles and their their lipid levels that um people that had elevated levels of ldl cholesterol and low triglycerides um were were generally markers for longevity people that had the same level of ldl cholesterol and elevated triglycerides over a period of time, it would be a marker for cardiovascular disease.

And why do you think that is? Does it have to do with the particular size of cholesterol? There's a lot of hypotheses surrounding cholesterol as being the culprit when I think it's at the scene of the crime but not pulling the trigger. Yeah, I think it has to do with the remnant lipoproteins that are related to the elevated levels of triglycerides. And so these are very atherogenic, the VLDLs, the remnant lipids,

and these tend to correlate on par with triglyceride levels. So if you have high fasted triglycerides and post-meal triglycerides, you're going to have high levels of these very atherogenic remnant lipoproteins that are much more problematic than just ldl so i think the context in which ldl is particularly problematic is if you have low hgl and high triglycerides and this has been repeated in the literature and now we know about the lean mass hyper responder phenotype dave feldman has

really helped us better understand this literature for a long time so when individuals have a high non-fasted or sorry high ldl cholesterol i automatically look to their lipids their triglycerides and hgl and so if their triglycerides are say 60 or 70 and their hgl is around 60 70 in that ballpark i really don't get too concerned about the ldl right but when we see this hypertriglyceridemia, elevated levels of blood triglycerides with high LDL, then there is more of an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. We saw exactly the same thing. The opposite correlation with low triglycerides and high LDL

than with both of those being elevated as being markers for cardiovascular disease. So if someone is starting out and wants to get data on their body, what are some of these? Because I think you could go down the rabbit hole of biomarkers until you get paralysis of analysis, right? And I think LabCorp has something like 1,500 panels that you can pull, right? And so where does somebody start? Like what data would you say were the three or four most important things to look at in the blood?

Yeah, I mean, I'm sure you include all these on what you do. But I like to get a baseline of just your Chem 24 and CBC. So just your standard potassium, albumin, white blood cell count, high sensitivity to serrated protein. And if you're going to run LDL, you might as well run ApoB and ApoA1. It's $17 to add on. And that will help you better understand, you know, the potential atherogenicity of your high LDL.

Right. So if you have those ApoA's or ApoB's, I'm actually, I have APO little A. Okay. So I'm starting on a niacin protocol. Sure. Cholesterol, triglycerides are amazing. HDL is amazing. VLDLs, low single digits, but the APO little A.

And I'm going on a niacin protocol and i'm going to track it and post about it but um so you would do full cholesterol triglyceride panel liver enzymes liver including ggt for whatever reason that's often omitted i never understood why yeah we omit that but yeah the liver really tells you what's going on metabolically because the first place you start to fill up with fat ectopically right outside of your fat cells is your liver your pancreas and your muscle so if your your liver is starting to reflect fat build up those ast alt ggt will start to increase over 25 or 30 and so i like to look at those because they really not only look at metabolic health but also the toxin load

and we know that if we're filled up with these so called obesogens these toxins well it's going to be hard to be healthy and lose weight so i like to look at occupational exposure to toxins what does your house look like do you have perfumes you know the conventional scented candles capital of the world yeah florida yeah in in mi. So do you recommend that... So you think a hormone panel, glycemic panel, you know, looking at glucose, hemoglobin A1C... Iron. Iron, CBC, the complete blood count, comprehensive metabolic panel. And then when you say toxic loads, what are you referring to?

Well, I think just measuring that can be tough. I mean, I know there's boutique labs that look at blood levels of persistent organic pollutants and heavy metals and things like that. Right, I go way down the rabbit hole of that stuff. Yeah, so I would just look at your liver function tests initially and then look at more symptoms and then occupational exposure, you know, that way. But if GGT is pretty high, like in the 60s, for example, then I would suggest or we want to look at maybe a glutathione need because ggt can increase as a consequence of increased glutathione turnover that that enzyme is involved in the pulling of

glutamine glycine into make glutathione tripeptide so right i'll look at that um fibrinogen i like to look at as well f Fibronagin? Yeah, because of the clotting potential. And then especially if LDL is high, there's a strong correlation with potentially blood clotting and more blood viscosity. So I look at also the hemoglobin hematocrit as well, especially in men on HRT, that tends to increase.

And so sometimes we recommend blood donation okay for individuals therapeutic phlebotomy when the hematocrit level for so for male hematocrit getting what in your 50s yeah if it's and i gary i like to look at unearned you know so if if your hematocrit is 47 and you've never been to the gym that's an unearned hematocrit okay if you're not an endurance athlete why would your hematocrit be 47 right you know never been to the gym, that's an unearned hematocrit. If you're not an endurance athlete, why would your hematocrit be 47? So it's kind of like some people say, oh, my HL cholesterol is 120. And you eat like crap. You're like, well, that's not an earned high HDL. So the same thing with hematocrit. If you don't live at altitude and you don't exercise, your hematocrit shouldn't be close to 50. I mean, this is why people in the Tour de France would love to have a high hematocrit,

but that's earned from years of exercise. So you kind of differentiate that along with the hemoglobin, especially in men, it gets close to 18 or 19. That's going to suggest more... Well, first of all, iron is pro-inflammatory, it can be. And then just thick viscous blood, that can contribute to this process of atherosclerosis right so you know sort of helping people to better understand that very simple stuff you can gather a lot of insights from just a basic chem 24 and cbc yeah that's that's

what i try to tell people is that you should just get a starting point get some data um because what you can measure you can change right so the So the Chem24 and what other basic data, are you a big believer in body mass index, looking at visceral fat versus body fat versus overall muscle and then tracking that to see if you're making progress? I do like the bioimpedance for a DEXA. Yeah, I do.

I think that's very helpful. A colleague of mine, friend, Sean Amara, he does a lot with the visceral fat MRI. And he's found that just helps motivate the patients that he's working with. When they see that their abdominal region is filled up with fat, it's gonna motivate them to not have the ice cream

and the cookies and the crackers. And so I think if you have access to that and paying cash, we're talking four or $500 that can really motivate people to adhere to lifestyle change. Yeah. Um, but I'm more of a big fan of other objective markers, like looking at your VO two max doing that once a year. Yeah. It's not just for athletes. You want to get a baseline of where your strength and fitness is. Cause going back to the importance of muscle, we're going to lose that as we age. So slowing down that loss I think is really important. So having these objective biomarkers,

we don't have any way to really characterize this, but how many pull-ups can you do? How many push-ups? How many squats? I mean, this is real stuff. It's not just for fitness junkies. We know about grip strength and biologic aging. The weaker you are, the faster you strength and biologic aging the weaker you are

the faster you will age biologically the more likely you will die from all causes so why are we looking at objective ways to quantify and enumerate this and you know it was incredible years ago um i was an investor in a crossfit gym and one of the things we did was different community outreach and we would reach out to the public school systems. We said, hey, we'll do this basic fitness assessment for the kids in the public school for free. And we'll allow after school programs, you know, at no charge. If you get the kids here, we'll do, you know, these 90 minute programs or three hour programs with the kids for basic physical fitness. What shocked me, and I've talked about this before, was it was a group of sixth, seventh and eighth graders. And we brought them into the gym from Naples Elementary School.

And we just did basic, basic testing. One of the tests we did was we had them sit down on a box jump that was 12 inches off the ground and without their hands, just stand up from a box jump. You would be astounded at the number of sixth and seventh graders that could not stand up unassisted from a box jump. Now, mind you, their butt was a foot off the ground. So they couldn't just take it from that squatted position, stand up, without rolling to the side, without putting their hand down, without putting their hands behind them. And I just remember the coach, TJ, was my partner back then, Joey.

I remember us looking at these kids going, I can't get my arms around this. I mean, and they looked healthy. They were so weak. weak their hip flexors that you'd put these kids in a basic plank and we wouldn't even say hold it for a minute we would say hold it for 10 seconds and they would get up in a plank and their butt would just sink um down to the floor they couldn't dead hang for more than 15 or 18 20 seconds yeah um just hanging under their under their own weight so super super basics um you know i just remember when i was in high school you know pe was pretty pretty intense um you know in grade school we played like kickball and stuff by the time i was

in high school p was like full contact we called it flag football but we we we call it uh smear the something or other and now we throw the ball up we just smash each other up but i mean we were we were intensely exercising for right for that and i think that that's that's fallen by the wayside so back to um muscle as our metabolic currency um you know the basic blood panel that you say adopt a lifestyle of an omnivorous diet um including healthy meats eggs yeah um yogurt yogurts um fermented vegetables um and you know if if you were going to say that one thing um makes the greatest difference in what you do in terms of longevity you know how many more years you have left on earth what would that one thing be that's a tough one i mean i i would kind of go back and forth with i think outdoor exercise and

walking you know, because I could say the activity in the world walking. Yeah, I really do think so because it translates into better sleep, better hormones, better metabolism. So there's just one tool that you could do. And if you look at the blue zones, you know, this has been very controversial, you know, because the blue zones, the media likes to portray these blue zones as being very plant heavy in their nutrition. Some of them are not, actually. Right. But one commonality with the blue zones is they're very physically active.

The people that live amongst community and meaning a purpose and all of this. Community, purpose, and very active. Very active. So I think that if you were to look at just one thing, it would be make sure you at least walk 8,000 steps per day. And that was kind of the thesis of my talk today was, you know, most people are just sedentary. And when we're sedentary, even if we go to the gym and we work out and Edward Coyle and folks over at UT Austin have been studying this, when you relegate people to just walking 2000 steps per day, when they go and do a HIIT workout for 60 minutes, they actually don't oxidize much fat during that exercise session.

Wow. It causes a phenomenon known as exercise resistance. So we need to be just recreationally active, just moving all throughout the day, take a little exercise snacks or exercise breaks. I love that snack on exercise. I talk about that all the time. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think there was a study, I don't want to quote it, but it looked at the difference between a single 45 minuteminute walk in the morning versus three 15-minute walks. You might have seen this study on the glycemic profile. And the three 15-minute walks had a substantially greater impact

on hemoglobin A1c, even though it was the same duration of exercise, but it was broken up into 15-minute walks after each meal. And this goes back to your comments about the muscle being our metabolic sponge for glucose. And anything that's going to keep our hemoglobin A1c down for a prolonged period of time is obviously not only going to help us with weight loss, but it's going to help us with a reduction in all cause mortality. So it's interesting too, that I think people sometimes look at the daunting commitment of exercise and they go, I don't have 90 minutes. I don't even have 60 minutes. Well, if you've got eight or 15, three different times a day, you could actually spread this out and

snack on exercise. And it would be superior in contrast to just one 45 minute block right you know so i think that is the take-home and and if possible do it outside then you're improving your circadian clock health you're getting you know natural vitamin d for example help with sleep and sleep pressure so we fall asleep so i think that's the most important thing and bannock at all just put out a meta-analysis involving i was using the uk biobank data big data set and he enumerated this individuals or they enumerated this individuals that don't walk at least 8 000 steps per day have a dramatic increase in all-cause mortality and cardiovascular specific mortality and every 1 000 step decrement off of 8,000 translates into a 15% added risk. Wow. So if you just only walk 4,000

steps per day, you're at a 60% higher risk of dying from all causes compared to when you walk 8,000 steps per day. So I think that is really pretty compelling to suggest that we just have to be more active. And here in Europe, I don't know if you've noticed, but there's really few obese or overweight people. Yeah, everybody's walking everywhere. Yeah, we just went out for a walk and I was running into all kinds of people. Mike, where does my audience find out more about you? Where can they find you,

find out more about what you support and what you're teaching? Sure. Well, thanks for having me on. Highintensityhealth.com is my website and we're pretty active on YouTube. So the channel is just High Intensity Health on YouTube as And then my, if you want to follow me on Instagram, it's metabolic underscore Mike on Instagram, metabolic underscore Mike. And what big things

do you have on horizon? And my audience needs to know about, yeah, working on a book all about metabolic health to really help people to better understand these concepts because they're pretty simple, but I think people need the research now to really sort of validate what they're doing um and then we have a lot of just great great videos you know breaking down studies and things like that over on our channel uh we've talked a lot about ldl cholesterol the importance of looking at triglycerides huge love so just basic stuff but people need to hear it because when they go to the doctor the doctor doctors are like monomaniacally focused on ldl cholesterol reduction meanwhile triglycerides can be through the roof.

It's like, hey, why aren't we talking about that? Such a great message for the masses, man. Such a great message for the masses. Well, thank you for coming on. Get ready for my audience to find you everywhere. Thank you so much. And I appreciate the work you're doing, man. And I appreciate you giving me your time today.

So I wind down every podcast by asking all my guests the same question. And there's no right or wrong answer to this question. That is, what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human? I love that. I think to be resilient, you know, emotionally, physically, psychologically, athletically, to be resilient, you know, strong people are resilient in all sorts of facets. You know, we all have tough life circumstances, but to bounce back from that and then also to be physiologically resilient, to be able to travel like we did

and our time zones are all screwed up and to be able to cognitively perform. I think resilience is key in all domains of life. And if you look at these different disease states that are characterized by being of poor health, it's just a disease of poor resilience yeah from diabetes to depression to what have you so focusing on being resilient and choosing exercises that improve and modalities that improve resilience yes i think the body would call this

hormesis right i mean exactly stress with a strengthening response yeah um but also resilience um and i happen to agree with that there's no right or wrong answer, but we are definitely aligned on that. Nice. And as always, guys, that's just science.