Burn Fat, Not Sugar w/ Ted Naiman, MD

so if you want to just zoom way way out and dumb it really down insulin resistance is from overfilled fat cells and you overfilled your fat cells because you were eating carbohydrates inside at the same time glucose always controls oxidation preference in yourself so you've glucose is present from the outside you will oxidize less fat so exogenous glucose glucose coming in from the outside shuts off fat oxidation if you're eating fat at the same time it all gets stored so you just eat carbs and fat together like a doughnut all day every day you burn glucose all the time you store fat all the time you're at up sites fill up BAM you've got hyperinsulinemia an insulin resistance it's it's really that simple [Music] oh my gosh do you know this pudding is amazing oh hey guys welcome back to this episode I'm super excited that you're here thanks for tuning in I was just eating a little bit of low carb pudding that my wife Deanna she's over at Rowe food lab on Instagram it's an amazing coconut pudding here it's Friday night alright so let's talk about the podcast this is gonna be an awesome discussion all about the different ways and the mechanisms through which our diet and inactivity or activity how that affects your body's response to insulin our blood sugar control and our ability to either burn or score fat for fuel which is really really fasting so you know oftentimes we focus a lot on diet and diet is so important but ted's can really talk about physical activity and other lifestyle factors that modulate your body's insulin response and the crosstalk this is what's key the crosstalk between your muscle tissue and your fat tissue and how that you know again the activity or the macronutrient combinations within your diet how that affects your fat cell metabolism it's super super exciting I really hope you enjoy it along the lines of physical activity I want to give a shout out to our show sponsor health IQ they're a progressive life insurance company and I love their approach they take science and data and meld the two together and help health conscious people like you and I people that lift weights that hike that do yoga that it wouldn't if we eat a low-carb ketogenic style diet if we focus on our microbiome guess what we improve our health and our vitality and health IKEA will reward you for that by helping you save up to 33% on your life insurance premiums life insurance as you know is so important if you have dependents a spouse kids and so forth and something were to happen to you and you didn't have life insurance your family would be in a lot of trouble so you can get a free quote and see if you qualify but going to health iq.com force us h IH again that's health iq.com force us HH now last but not least there's another aspect of the podcast we really don't talk about but its sleep sleep is so important to your body's blood sugar regulation leptin insulin sensitivity cortisol and much more but it's not just about sleep quantity it's about sleep quality as you know i'm a huge fan of mouth taping because mouth taping can help improve your dream recall your sleep quality your deep sleep in your room if you use or ring or other sleep tracking devices that's why I'm a huge fan of the somme knee fixed mouth tape you see if you breathe through your mouth while you're sleeping your tongue can actually collapse on the airway and cause a mild hypoxic type event so it's very important to practice mouth taping because that helps your body relearn how to breathe through your nose which can help you get that deep restorative sleep and help you really recover and have optimal energy performance and blood sugar regulation and not experience the ebb and flow of blood sugar and food cravings throughout the day so Sami fix is a show sponsor as well please check out their product I'll put it in the show notes below it's absolutely fantastic and that so many people message me and comment on this blog and on my Instagram saying they absolutely love it and enjoy it and I suspect you will too the key aspect of the Sami fixed mouth tip compared to other tapes out there is it uses a hypoallergenic adhesive that doesn't make the practice of mouth tape being uncomfortable and you know you don't wake up peeling off this really strong adhesive and causing skin irritations and all that so that is all I have for you guys I really really hope you enjoy this podcast if you do please give it a thumbs up share it with friends and family and I'll be watching the comments as the video gets posted so let's dive into it but dr. Ted naman hello friends it's Mike mussel thanks so much for tuning back in to another episode I'm really excited to be here with dr. Ted name and today we're going to talk about insulin in some resistance protein fats ills and all kinds of stuff in between I'm very excited to be with you thanks for showing up and cool being here thanks for having me our neighbors we are yes so we're in Kirkland right now you're in Issaquah correct not too far away far away which is really cool yeah I'm local yeah awesome yeah it's really great when we can actually you know have someone local in the northwest be here so it's just a lot easier so let's let's kind of launch with insulin I think that's a big area that you've been helping us to better understand insulin resistance and so forth and this other component of insulin how it kind of keeps us holding on to excess energy right and it's something an element that we don't often talk about we talk about insulin makes us fat but also how insulin can prevent us from burning fat for fuel right right right so insulin is a storage hormone and the whole point of insulin is for you to hold on to stored energy and that's why you see in patients type one diabetes who have insulin deficiency they just melt their whole body down into energy they just get extremely lean and they lose all their lean mass into energy basically so insulin is there to store energy it's an energy storage hormone yeah so I didn't know that I mean as a known physician we don't really if you don't have a family member or loved one with type 1 diabetes you don't really know that so literally there's so much cachexia like that anabolism component that insulin brings to the body is diminished so like the lean muscle mass just kind of withers away they get really catabolic a-absolutely so if you ever look in the old medical textbook at pictures of someone with type 1 diabetes before we developed insulin they're just a walking skeleton basically just melt all your tissues down into energy all your lean mass protein all your fat stores it's just all converted into energy and that's that's really one of the best ways to look at what insulin actually does is to see what happens when somebody has none of it or see what happens when somebody has way too much mm-hmm well what's interesting about that explanation that you just offered us which I think is really fascinating is if we think about an insulin resistant person it's almost as though they're on the path of type 1 diabetes in the sense because the message is not being there because the receptors are resistant so is that why we see like maybe sarcopenia and lots of lean muscle mass and in some resistant people as well I I think that is part of why we do see some of those things in insulin resistance yes and then of course different tissues have different levels of insulin resistance so you might be more resistant at the at the muscle for example then you are at the out-of-sight interesting so on a more practical level I mean there's many ways that we can help to improve our body's receptors and become more insulin sensitive you're a big fan of protein you're big fan of exercise which I think we mutually agree like you've got to be exercising typically compound movements and so on what are some of the tools that you implement as a physician in the clinic to help people overcome this lifelong in some resistance that they have gotcha ok all right so the big problem with insulin resistance is you don't have any place to store fat right so people get insulin resistant when their fat cells are full your your fat cells expand and the larger your fat cells get the higher your insulin level goes you can graph out your fasting insulin level in the diameter of your fat cells and it's just a straight line so you overfill your fat cells you have no place to put fat and your insulin levels high all the time so insulin trying to store this fat but it's really struggling and that's where you get ectopic fat storage and things like that now the big question is why did you ever fill your fat cells right like did you eat too much fat well actually you overfill your fat cells because you're eating carbohydrates which displaces fat oxidation so every cell in your body with mitochondria in it is constantly burning either glucose or fat reciprocally you you basically don't burn them at the exact same time you do to small degree but there's constantly this fat versus glucose oxidation going on in your mitochondria and in your cells and if you're eating glucose all the time you displace fat oxidation and then you're storing all your fat right so if I'm just eating carbs all day long any fat that I just gets stored and eventually fill up your adipocytes you run out of room there all distended if you're genetically able to you grow a bunch more fat cells and then you can be huge if not you gain 30 pounds and you stop and you can't get any fatter now you've hit your personal fat threshold now your insulin is high all the time now you have no place to put any fat well you you've got to either eat less fat which is where we see people having some success with very low fat high carb diets or a better idea is eat less carbs because that's what stopped you from oxide and fat in the first place so if you eat fewer carbohydrates you can oxidize more fat and then you've got more fat Headroom and your adipocytes you know need me right right more leeway so that so I think a point here that that's really kind of woven into what you were just talking about is the origin or one origin of insulin resistance and that is dysfunctional adipocytes or fat cells right and so I think there's a there's so many different theories out there sleep issues circadian rhythm and bounces microbiome got hormones but in your eyes as a physician you know and based upon the research that you've done it you've really looked into this it's those dang fat cells are getting to enlarged with excessive fats convert from carbohydrate oxidation and so forth that is causing fundamentally at the cell level in some resistance correct yeah absolutely so if you want to just zoom way way out and dumb it really down insulin resistance is from overfilled fat cells and you overfilled your fat cells because you were eating carbohydrates and fat at the same time the carbohydrates glucose always controls oxidation preference in yourself so if glucose is present from the outside you will oxidize less fat so exogenous glucose glucose coming in from the outside shuts off fat oxidation if you're eating fat at the same time it all gets stored so you just eat carbs and fat together like a doughnut all day every day you burned glucose all the time you store fat all the time you're out of sights fill up BAM you've got hyperinsulinemia an insulin resistance it's it's really that simple so anything you're looking at to reverse insulin resistance is going to be either oxidizing or fat and you can do that by restricting glucose alone works great but so my main strategy is you know how can you burn more fat and store less fat and it's all about eating less glucose less exogenous glucose coming in right yeah that's fascinating I think this is a key point because we often don't talk about the fat cell and this idea that the fat so gets enlarged and that is a primary cause of insulins and there's a lot of research coming out about the different hormones and cytokines and adipose cytokines released from these these fat cells adipocytes like leptin and resistant and this fat and nad panetta and so forth we're talking offline as a physician you'll be just like waist circumference as like your main biomarker but are you looking or in some patients do you like to look at some of these what we call adipose cytokines released from fat cells I'm really not know now I do track fasting insulin level but I'm not looking at a typical eyes they're not really super helpful on a practical level right and if they're wastes or if it looks like an apple or if it walks like a duck quacks like a duck you know walks like a duck it must be a duck right so so let's talk about them the waist circumference an easy strategy easy tool that people at home can they can go get a tape measure and look at height waist circumference and what does that tell them right so for most people the circumference of the waist tracks with the size of the adipocytes and fasting insulin and insulin levels there's a really good correlation between waist circumference and insulin levels and insulin sensitivity so for your average person you could look at a waist to height ratio and know pretty much where they're at in terms of insulin sensitivity you basically measure your waist at the bellybutton you divided by your height you really want to be less than 0.5 if you're higher than that you're probably in trouble and you can draw graphs of fasting insulin level versus waist height ratio it's very linear you can graph out years of life lost and waist tight ratio and it's exponential so like the bigger you get the faster you're just gonna straight-up die it's a pretty very powerful number I could replace you know half the lab tests I have with just a waste to height ratio it's extremely powerful question LabCorp we're not like that they wasn't like that yeah right right we want to keep things really complicated all right nobody goes yeah yeah costs a lot right right but there's a I think a small caveat correct me if I'm wrong small caveat to that waist expansion is therefore think we're talking about and this would be the quote unquote manhua group the metabolically obese normal-weight individuals all right and you were saying off what was maybe define that and talk about the trends at using as a practitioner well I learned a lot about this from my patients with lipodystrophy lipodystrophy is this fascinating condition where you literally have no subcutaneous fat and these people look thin they actually look ripped I have a patient with life who looks like a pro bodybuilder but he he just has no subcutaneous fat at all and all of these people are horrific ly insulin resistant they're all diabetic they're extremely brittle diabetics because when they ingest fat they have no place to put it their insulin goes through the roof so you're looking at people who are really really lean but the few fat cells they have are just massively distended so so one of my patients with life a dystrophy for example he had a few like comas I don't know if you know what a lipoma is because my dogs it's a little fatty tumor some people have a few of them this patient the only fat cells he had were a couple lipomas that grew to just like bowling ball-sized and had to be removed Wow and so basically you're massively over expanding any fat cells you've got and once they're full your insulin resistant and all of these people have crazy high insulin levels we did an amazing rat model study on lipodystrophy where we took rats that were bred to be life a district and we actually sewed fat underneath their skin and connected it to blood supply so they now had some deflated fat cells in place to store fat and immediately it cured their insulin resistance in diabetes which basically proves that the adipocyte model of in some resistance is true I mean that you can look at lipodystrophy and the studies of these subcutaneous fat transplants in mice and really know all you need to know about the actual cause of insulin resistance I mean it is running out of places to store fat Wow very interesting so I have they translated that animal model research to humans I know nobody's volunteered to get a fat soda in the skin if they're a lipo district but I'm sure it would probably have the same effect and very interesting so it may seem like a blessing in one sense like oh my gosh you have no fat cells right so that you can stay lean but there's a metabolic consequence or cost there's a huge metabolic cost that absolutely and so that the patient that may look lean is actually metabolically obese so they have that individual that looks ripped that like if you were to look at there maybe coronary artery calcium score or other diseases which we can count transition to linked with elevated levels of insulin it would be probably pretty high well yeah absolutely but that brings us to a really good point the personal fat threshold so everyone has this genetically built-in amount of fatness that they can achieve right as you get fatter you can either have out of sight hypertrophy where you get bigger fat cells or you can have out of sight hyperplasia where you grow more and if you're someone who's genetically able to grow more fat cells you can be 600 pounds and completely insulin sensitive I have a patient who's 450 pounds and perfect insulin levels very insulin sensitive probably can just expand forever and beyond you know my 600-pound life or whatever that shows and but other people I have patients from Southeast Asia for example from India and some of these locations they'll gain just ten pounds of fat just a tiny amount of abdominal fat and bam they're horrifically insulin resistant the second they overfill the one out of a site they've got their diabetic insulator insulin level goes through the roof they're completely diabetic they literally cannot get fatter they've hit their personal fat threshold and that's what hyperinsulinemia is you hit your personal fat threshold you can't get fatter and and now you've got in the next step is diabetes hmm and it's different for everybody I don't think you can actually do much to change your personal fat threshold that's the one caveat to waist to height ratio of course is if you have some sort of life in dystrophy where you can't get more so beat æneas fat interesting so ethnicity genetics all play a big role here into this personal fat threshold right yeah and you kind of explained indirectly this so-called obesity paradox that has kind of caused a lot of confusion amongst individuals my brother-in-law's a interventional cardiologist and so he'll see someone come in with chest pain and things like that and do a stent he would expect based upon their body composition that they would have really nasty occluded arteries but they're squeaky clean and contrasts the you know 56 year old relatively lean male that is a smoker and so forth that their coronary arteries are disaster so we talked about this quite frequently do you see that in your practice absolutely I mean you'll see thinner people getting more Alzheimer's dementia and so for a lot of people getting fatter is protecting you from hyperinsulinemia and high blood sugar high insulin diabetes you're as long as your fat cells can just suck up all the fat glucose you're actually protected a fair amount interesting the problem is when you get this visceral fat you know you've already filled up your subcutaneous fat so the subcutaneous fat fills up first really harmless very protective great stuff but then when you run out of that you fill up your this real fat now you're in the hyperinsulinemia zone and the next step is a topic fat deposition where you're just put packing fat in anywhere you can your liver your pancreas your heart I mean you you could have fat everywhere your your muscles are full of fat everything is full of fat you literally have no place to put any more fat mm-hmm so you're trying to stuff it's like you see those shows orders you know what people I have boxes everywhere so that's what's going on literally with fat that is enter and once you filled up your subcutaneous adipose sites you know absolutely as a physician have you seen ultrasounds of people's liver or pancreas that have this topic with the deficit all the time I mean we just constantly doing CTS and MRIs indexes and all sorts of imaging and honestly everybody has fatty liver now like it used to be 25% of everybody walks into our had fatty liver but now I'm trying to think back to when I ordered abdominal ultrasound and the radiologist didn't report that they had fatty liver and I couldn't see a fatty liver it almost never happens at this point it's quite ridiculous that is really scary and so what are the metabolic consequences or physiologic consequences of that and the reason why I'm asking this question is if we look at the ketones that everyone are chasing we want they want to be ketogenic and so forth we know that that is those ketones are made in the liver right so if you have all this this fatty liver are we able to metabolically function normally or deliver I really know I ends up having these you have a lot more free fatty acids in your blood and none of none of your cells or tissues want that fat and so your body starts to be a war with itself like every tissue gets more and more insulin resistant because it doesn't want this this stuff and the cells the cells are always looking out for themselves right so insulin is supposed to tell your cell to allowing more glucose and burn more glucose because you just ate a doughnut but the cells don't want anymore energy they've already got too much fat and so the high insulin is really just a war between your body and your cells and different tissue types and it's like it's like musical chairs right no none of your cells want anymore energy they've got too much it's already probably damaging your mitochondria they don't want more fat they don't want more glucose we really don't want more glucose and so you just see these levels in the blood getting higher and higher and none of the tissues or cells in your body want it at all and that's when your insulin is high all the time right right and so for people listening right now they might be thinking like well they're talking about fat a lot fat cells having too much fat then why would it look why would a high fat diet help me so help us kind of grapple with that and well actually okay so I'm a low carb guy right and I'm gonna take some some hate mail for the low carb community for saying this but you can actually reverse insulin resistance by eating it either a low fat diet or a low carb diet and we have studies that that completely prove this I mean we have studies where they randomized people to an extremely low fat high carb diet or an extremely high fat low carb diet and both groups reverse insulin resistance exactly the same waist circumference comes down insulin comes down all the markers are looking at come down why do I prefer low carb well I think it's better for a bunch of reasons first of all it makes way more sense my evolutionary perspective so if you look at what humans are supposed to eat I mean I really don't think that we were supposed to eat a very high carb low fat diet that's very hard to find if I just drop you off in the wilderness you know what I mean so I the other thing is people who are oxidizing more glucose and less carbs are just metabolically less healthy so we have a lot of studies on metabolic health and you really want your respiratory quotient to be as low as possible that's how much fat you're burning when you're just sitting around vs. glucose so I think it's healthier to burn fat instead of glucose I people who are brain fed said Lucas are much less hungry much less tied to food they can exercise in a fast and stay they can go a lot longer without eating I think it's the way the human body is designed to function I think you're supposed to mostly run off of fat I think you're supposed to be in a fasted state the majority of the time running off of fat and then you refuel by eating something so I like the low-carb high-fat approach but the point is that you can reverse insulin resistance with a low fat high carb approach and the idea here is that the real problem is eating fat and carbs together because fat and glucose are oxidized reciprocally so if you eat one or the other you're going to be okay right so let's say I eat just tons of carbs right I'm yes my glucose is present I'm bringing a lot of glucose which means I shut off fat oxidation and any fat that I'm eating will get stored but if I don't eat any fat I'm not really storing anything you know I'm saying yeah I'm following you the one one that comment that I would say that that might that's kind of causing a mental some some conflict mentally is this idea that if we eat carbohydrates and we spike insulin as well I'm not promotes lipogenesis so help us understand that well okay so that's a great point and in fact if you're fat to begin with you should do the low carb high fat approach right because you want to be burning fat you have a lot of extra fat on your body you want to be really good at burning fat so you avoid eating carbohydrates glucose producing digestible carbs so there's no exogenously Coast coming in from the outside which frees you up to just burn fat all the time and you seamlessly go from dietary fat to stored body fat and now you're gonna lose a bunch of weight and that's why low-carb guys are way way better for anyone who's overweight but if you are already thin to begin with like some sort of you know hyper vegan and you you have very low body fat if you eat a high carb low fat diet you will remain thin because while you're displacing all your fat oxidation with glucose from carbs you're not eating any fat so you're not storing any fat so that's why we have these studies where you know insulin sensitive people do just fine on a high carb low fat diet well the truth is they do just fine on a low carb high fat diet as well but when you look at people who already have too much fat on their body they definitely do better on a low carb diet and so I like honestly low carb for everybody but I do respect the fact that you can reverse insulin resistance by either eating less carbs or eating less fat and my personal favorite both which brings us to protein I mean if you're not eating extra fat because you have too much fat on your body and you're not eating carbs because it displaces fat oxidation what are you eating and that's protein and my favorite diet for someone who's very overweight and very insulin resistant is is protein heavy a lot of the the keto people are kind of scared about protein because it's a gluconeogenesis insulin so let's talk about that right all right so I'm not talking about large absolute amounts of protein I'm talking about a high percentage protein basically you go out of your way to target protein and eat enough protein for satiety but then you're restricting carbohydrates so you can burn fat and you're also restricting some fat because you have too much fat on your body and this seems to be the very fastest way to reverse insulin resistance I mean we we know this from Studies on protein sparing modified fast that's where you're basically just protein it is the fastest way to reverse insulin resistance and some people would say well if you're just seeing protein then you're probably not consuming enough calories so that's the reason why you're losing weight because there's the whole Calgary argument gets so it interconnected and it kind of complicates everything what would you say to that well I mean I guess that's true and in fact fasting you'll lose a lot of weight the problem with fasting or under eating calories is that you're gonna lose just as much lean mass as fat mass so if I just stop eating or if I eat the standard American diet 60% carbohydrates and just need a tiny bit of it like I eat one Twinkie a day half my weight loss is going to be muscle loss lean loss you don't nobody wants to lose weight everyone wants to lose fat you don't want to lose weight you want to lose fat if you are eating more than adequate protein and restricting carbs and maybe restrict these and fat as well all of your weight loss is going to be pure fat right like very very high percent just fat but if you just under eat I feel like okay I'll still eat just the you know McDonald's shake and fries but I'm just gonna eat one fry and one shake like everyone's doing these diet experiments now where they just eat junk food but they shrink the calories down well that's great you'll lose a lot of weight but half of that way it will be lean mass in your body composition it's just gonna suck so that's why you that's why macros are is so important and that's why you want to prioritize protein that's why you go any more protein and less energy by percentage I'm not saying absolutely sure routine you know I don't want anyone D 400 grams of protein a day right right yeah I would love to dive into the specifics but maybe let's knock out some of the nuances a little bit more this protein leverages Theory you were talking about hopefully I'm pronouncing that right so it's not something I know much about and that's something you've been diving into quite a bit I think it's it's a new conversation new narrative our protein that people need to understand definitely so protein leverage hypothesis this is something we've proven in animal models over and over basically every species has to has to navigate between protein and energy right and so if you give an animal a food that's pure protein and a food that's pure energy carb or fat they will eat a little bit of one and a little bit of the other and between the two get to a very exact ratio that they need for optimum function right you can do this with any animal from fruit flies to locusts to primates to slime molds you offer them different foods at varying amounts of protein energy and they will always kind of go the direction they that's optimum for them either for reproduction or function or both humans have the exact same thing and humans have this very very strong protein satiety Drive like we have to eat a certain amount of protein and we have proven in studies that if you don't hit this protein target you will overeat energy that's carbs or fats so we know that protein leverage is real and we know that humans will overeat energy to get enough protein that's our role of compromise if we can't get enough protein our diet will overeat energy to get there and that's what you see happening in society today I mean everyone likes to either blame some people like to blame carbs for the obesity epidemic right look at all the refined carbs sugar and flour yes that's true we have way more carbs other people blame fat look at all the vegetable oil look at all the soybean oil the reality is if you graph out the macros that have flooded the food supply over the past 100 or 200 years you do see carbs going way up you also see fat going up what you don't see going up is protein which has stayed pretty flat now everyone's ignored protein up to this point for that reason they're like oh we're all even so much carbs or no we're all eating so much fat has to be carved in fact in the background protein has stayed you know most humans in all cultures and all societies across the world have stated this very rigid 14-person protein diet like everywhere but if you really really look at the food supply in our country we went down in percentage so our protein intake went from 14 percent to 12 and a half percent and so now we have protein dilutions it means that we flooded the food supply with carbs and fats these empty calorie carbs without sugar flour oil which is every processed packaged food you can think of protein got diluted now to eat the same amount of protein you have to eat more the the studies show that for every one percent of protein that goes down in your food supply you have to eat 14 percent more of that food to get where your body wants to be so we dilute protein and then people overeat carbs and fats as a result and you really can't explain most of the obesity and diabetes epidemic with protein dilution if you if you look way way back we didn't have as much energy eat we were very protein constrained you know what I mean if you ate animals but maybe you didn't get plant sugars in the wintertime or maybe you didn't get really really fat animals that had been to grain so you're eating a leaner animals and you're getting a lot of protein but maybe you're not getting it a lot of energy so humans crave energy we love to add energy because we've been protein constrained for so long so humans are always seeking out you know honey or fat or something to add energy to our protein because you know you can't eat a really really high percent approaching so that's what's going on in the background it's like we were always protein constrained we're always looking for energy now we've got tons of energy we've dumped all this energy into the food supply protein percent went down and we're all eating more as a result so our operating system hasn't been updated and so we're kind of seeking out this protein and in so doing we reading a lot more energy from from non protein sources trying to get the protein is that kind of right right so like if I give you a low protein food like french fries it's you know 5% 10% protein you have to massively overeat the carbs and thigh and french fries to get to your protein target and that's just how it work right and so that's why some people but I hear this a lot from clients of mine in our courses and stuff like that they say I just have these cravings like I just crave crave craving and they end up eating cookies or junk food or gluten-free treats whatever it is and so they're that's why they're still overweight but that that protein is also very satiating so is that part of it as well the satiety inducing effect of the program that's part of it as well and it's interesting about the cravings that we have studies that show that if you protein restrict someone they're they're snacking and craving for savory snacks goes way up because you're just trying to get this umami flavor this is indicates protein and coming into your body and so yeah absolutely that's you will continue to eat non-stop until you get this protein satiety right right let's talk a little bit about vegetarians and vegans we're talking offline you know that's part of the reason why you got into this is because you were relatively in your own words unhealthy when you were a vegetarian can what can we do about those diets because those individuals for philosophical reasons whatever like I told you I'm eating a little bit less proteins I have the chickens and were empathetic towards animals what are some of the consequences there for that group and how can they correct it because you have a lot of patients in your own words that are can do this healthfully you know but because you're getting other protein sources right all right well in the plant world there's also higher and lower protein foods so grants sugars starches horrifically low protein high energy basically crap but if you look at green you know green vegetables very high in protein the protein to energy ratio is actually quite high any kind of green vegetable high protein energy ratio mushrooms high protein to energy ratio soy I don't need a lot of soy but it does have a high protein energy ratio you can also for vegetarians I think that you want to prioritize the few animal foods you do eat like eggs or dairy cottage cheese is great eggs are great for vegans it's a little bit more difficult I think to get adequate protein and some of the more successful vegan patients I have are doing some sort of supplementation in addition to b12 supplements and other you know crucial supplements they are using protein powders for example so that's that's one strategy but the the less processed and refined your diet is of course the higher the protein energy ratio you're gonna have so you can always just eat cleaner and that seems to help by itself seems to work yeah you've studied in sexual diets and diets through out populations and things like that are there any populations that you've found or researched or talking with people I know you spend a lot of time recently with Gary Taubes and stuff like that that eat a primarily a vegan diet that are unand us realized and so forth well you know it's interesting I've been doing a lot of research into this in you can look at populations on earth and what their carb to fat ratio is and it's radically different like in Japan they eat way more carbs and way less fat than we do and here we weigh more fat than other countries in weight and so so there are these huge swings in carb fat ratio but the protein ratio is like laser focus across every society on earth like the the the skew between protein to energy ratios is tiny and then the carb fat swing is really really big so that's just one more reason for me that I think protein might be a bigger piece of the puzzle that nobody's realizing because we're like oh wow these Okinawan see all these carbs and here we are all this fat and then what about the French and we have all these paradoxes but if you really look at protein it's pretty conserved across all these groups and you'll see tiny changes in protein driving huge swings in and intake and it's it's pretty dramatic there's a there's a lot to it right right we were talking before we started recording about some of the fear in the kitto world about protein mm-hmm that it spikes insulin that it's gluconeogenic so it's gonna raise your blood glucose kick you out of ketosis all that sort of stuff but you know you mentioned yourself you're like well I you know get my energy for lifting weights and doing pull-ups and all this from the gluconeogenesis from the protein and so forth so what would you say to those folks that are pretty scared about birth I think they you really want to get to ketosis with carb restriction you know what I mean and for most people that will get you there even if you're eating a lot of protein so you could eat a thirty five percent protein diet that's pretty much equal grams of fat and fat and protein right let's say you're eating eggs it's uh you know six grams of protein seven grams of fat or steak it's you know 22 grams of protein 20 grams of fat these are one-to-one grams protein and fat foods you're eating about thirty five percent protein you're gonna be in ketosis all the time when you eat these foods we have Studies on very low carb high protein diets the participants in these days eight thirty five percent protein pretty much equal grams protein fat really low carbs they're in ketosis at all times they're in it might be the not the deepest ketosis you've ever seen that you get from just fasting and eating nothing but coconut oil yeah but they're in ketosis they're constantly in ketosis I'm in ketosis regularly even though protein for me is either one to one with fat or the dominant macro fight sometimes I'll eat two grams of protein for every one gram of fat which is basically the macros of ground beef or meat or poultry or any your average animal food is two grams of protein to one gram of fat and you can be in ketosis just eating that it's a it might be a lighter ketosis but you don't have to feel everyone thinks oh I eat too much protein I get kicked out of ketosis or I get pulled out of ketosis and there are all these verbs for how protein just completely shut off your ketosis and that's that's crap you can actually eat a ton of protein and be ketogenic you could eat nothing and being ketosis you could eat nothing but carbs but a really tiny amount and the ketosis you could just do the time exercise I mean ketosis there are so many other ways to be generating ketones besides restricting protein I just don't think that that's the way to do it right because there may be other consequences associated with that right like you know honestly muscle is so important like so so important muscle is the organ of longevity I mean you have to have muscle you can look at how strong someone is and how long they're gonna live and it's just a straight line you always want to have the highest lean mass you can pull it off with the lowest fat mass I mean that's let's face it that's the goal and you want the lowest fat mass because that's gonna give you the very lowest insulin levels the very most insulin sensitivity you're gonna have plenty of place to put fat so insulin is a little all the time so your whole goal in life is to max out that lean mass in and minimize the fat mask and it's really about eating protein and a higher protein to energy ratio yeah I would agree with that 100% but there are some people that talk like Ron Rosedale and others that look at the link between mTOR stimulation which is stimulated with protein and so forth and also exercise and higher prevalences of cancer so what would you say you mentioned and I love that way I froze a more quote whatever that muscles you organ of longevity but then if we also look at cancer is a disease associated with aging and then we have this in-between this growth factor called mTOR for stimulating that with protein or we increasing a risk for cancer like I have a friend I was just texting with him last night we're like grappling with this mentally alright help us add some clarity there oh sure okay the whole secret to all of this is to keep it pulsatile right so like like insulins bad you never want to eat anything raised insulin well insulin goes up every time you eat insulin goes up if you eat just fat insulin goes up if you eat protein yeah so the secret to insulin is to keep it pulsatile you know your fasting your insulin is really low you're running off the stored body fat insulin is just barely detectable and then you eat a giant meal goes way up big spike of insulin that you store the fat so what your body's supposed to work right you're basically battery-powered your body's running off a chemical battery and you're supposed to run on battery power for a long time and then eat a whole bunch of stuff and refill your battery not overfill it but refill it and then you're good to go for another period time in this setting insulin is not bad insulin is great insulin is awesome it's doing exactly what it's supposed to do you want it to spike you want fasting and feasting you want this pulsatile insulin really low for a long time super high back down to low you want to do the same thing with mTOR you want these fasting and feasting cycles right you don't want to just drink six protein shakes a day like a bodybuilder and then we all die like I think they all died of liver cancers I know you don't want to do that you want to keep mTOR pulsatile you want you don't want to eat constantly you want to have these fasting and feasting cycles and i really think that's the secret i don't think you want to restrict protein all the time so mTOR never gets triggered just the way you want it never eat anything all the time so your insulin never goes up you want to have these clear pulsatile messages and I think that's I think that's the secret I think that's why mTOR looks like it's gonna get people cancer but it really doesn't if you if you're if you're triggering it appropriately and within its normal physiologic levels like like you're saying because if you're constantly having an for stimulator from protein shakes and snacking and inactivity and so forth the inactivity won't raise it but you know I'm saying then that would be super physiologic levels of this gross stimulus whereas if we're eating like you're saying adding in the element that was tacitly implied that you practice of time restricted feeding aka intermittent fasting then were were you know keeping things the the valleys and troughs where they should be right right what to do yeah and I think that you know looking at it here and I believe maryland's I'm pretty sure that's how it was supposed to work you know awesome gosh we've covered so much here but one thing that we didn't cover that we're talking about offline that I think is important is brown adipose tissue and the heats not on in this home it's fall right here and Seattle it starting to get a little cold and we were both in agreement that two thumbs up for that because the link between elevated house temperature correlates with body fat and I know we talked about subcutaneous and visceral fat brown fat is emerging in humans we've had a lot of animal data what are your thoughts on brown fat house temperature and being cold yeah I mean it's really sad but ambient temperature is a huge factor for diabetes you can look at latitudes on earth and the closer you are in the equator your higher your diabetes risk so the reality is if you're cold all the time you're gonna get way more mitochondria in your fat cells just like if you're lifting weights all the time we're gonna get way more mitochondria in your muscle cells and the more mitochondria you can get the better and the way you get mitochondria is you have to have a transient energy crisis in your cells of some kind right so you lift weights to failure you add more mitochondria in your muscle you're freezing your butt off you add more mitochondria tear fat the both of these involve a level of discomfort that nobody wants nobody wants to be uncomfortable all right everyone never wants to be cold or feel a discomfort of high intensity exercise but you really want to push yourself out of that comfort zone you want to be cold a lot you want to be hit muscle failure a lot you want your body to struggle it you want to have these transient energy crises in your body where your body's like oh my god we can't get warm enough or we can't lift this super heavy Boulder and only then will your body make itself better you get more mitochondria fat muscle hopefully both so I love thermal loading I love being a little bit cold all the time my house is kind of cold too so yeah good for you that's perfect and I think it's hard for some people to do because it's human nature to never be uncomfortable mm-hmm but you really have to push yourself out of that comfort zone right right yeah I found that with high achievers successful people like yourself that they're always pushing the boundaries you know people that live within their comfort zone whether it's work family life physiology like we're talking about here staying lean they don't really hit that and so what I just personally I'm interested in like the characteristics behind that what what in your upbringing childhood where you're a raise or where does that come from for you you'd say like always pushing the envelope whether it's a weight training music you go to med school engineering like you've done a lot of things to push yourself that are maybe uncomfortable honestly I think it's from seeing patients okay so if you look at the healthiest person who ever walks in the door at my clinic like they're just they look like they're carved from solid granite some sort of fire-breathing crossfitter who's just completely ripped in the healthiest person you've ever seen and then you look at the most decrepit human specimen you've ever seen they shuffle in and or maybe they're in a wheelchair they have a sarcopenia osteopenia they look awful really the only difference between these two people it is diet and exercise like honestly and what happens to turn someone into the humans on the sarcopenia osteopenia person is they never ever push themselves into any kind of discomfort that they just sit on the couch their whole life they don't do any kind of even movements that are in even slightly uncomfortable you'll see them sitting in a position of least energy like literally where they don't have to activate any muscle in their body the temperature always has to be perfect for them they barely move they never push themselves to do anything difficult or exertional every bit of glucose that they're running their body off of they ingest instead of making their own glucose the hard way via gluconeogenesis our protein like your ancestors did right so on one hand you've got someone who's restricting carbs making all their glucose the hard way and they're live out of leukemia Genesis they're lifting weights there there their posture is awesome they're always there they're always making their body work harder right to produce energy and to be stronger and to do war it to go war and versus someone who's just basically lived in this tiny little comfort bubble and just never pushed outside of that and the health implications are just enormous like it's just absolutely ridiculous which is why I'm constantly trying to you know you'll see me doing bodyweight exercise that I'm just like in the park or you know I'm always trying to make things a little bit harder for my body thermal loading bodyweight exercises making all my glucose from scratch the hard way out of protein these are all really really good strategies but they all involve discomfort it's just a lot of work you know I mean it's easier to just lay in bed and just Pat your feet your whole body down to nothing right and just hit your beats and have food delivered in it right right right stuff like that exactly so I mean as a practitioner when you're working with a patient like that and you know mentally maybe then I've been ready to take the steps that you want them to do to make those lifestyle shifts what would be like the biggest piece of low-hanging fruit for that person well I mean I think diet is the biggest right so it's always start with diet and it's basically one meal at a time replace your carbs with protein so like breakfast eat some eggs you know I mean and that's how you start it's like pick one wheel trade your carbs in for protein it's difficult for people to not eat glucose if they're used to just running everything off of glucose it's kind of painful you hear about the keto flu mmm it's it's an uphill battle metabolically switching over and making your own glucose and running off of fat when you're not used to it there's a lot more working it's basically the metabolic equivalent of exercise a CrossFit or something right so so I like to start with a diet it's one meal at a time you usually start with breakfast and you just trade out your carbs for protein and so you're eating you know steak and eggs instead of breakfast cereal so I like to nail the diet first one meal at a time drag people kicking and screaming into it and only after you've got that nailed I think can you really dive into exercise but once people get a little bit of success sometimes you see a snowball and these people come back in a year later you can't even recognize them and they're just like a fitness model you know and they're doing all kinds of different things right right right yeah and then it just grows from there and now you're pushing yourself to do all sorts of insane stuff so it seems to me that you need a few small wins and then people realize like wow I do feel better and then they start they need that internal - how - that's how they garner this intrinsic motivation is a few little success where maybe they didn't have any of it but any success from sitting on the couch and eating whatever so yeah sandy Sweeney past podcast guests talked a lot about that about when it comes a well-known fitness instructor group fitness director and I was like what separates the people that just are here 6:00 in the morning whether it's you know the day before New Year's Eve or whatever their training and she's like you know what they're the ones who feel that success and then that like sparks an internal motivation alright then you just really kind of said that in a totally different perspective which is awesome we know having small wins in the day can really kickstart internal motivation and so forth and successful people practitioners physicians like yourself have kind of a set of rituals and things they do in the morning let's talk about your morning like what do you do when you first get out breakfast all that good stuff oh wow um so I don't really have a morning ritual I mean I I feel like if I was a real biohacker I wouldn't meditate for 90 minutes and I'd make a list of stuff and I really don't have that luxury cuz uh I'm seeing my first patient at 7:30 so my day just hits the ground running i I do fast in the morning I I usually don't eat till about 1:00 in the afternoon so my only morning ritual is just enough coffee to stay alive and then go straight to work so I don't have any sort of you know great biohacking routine in the morning it's just basically survival black coffee and go straight to work so no fatty coffee bulletproof just straight black the table I might put a little half-and-half in if it's super bitter in his room you know yeah I made it or where I got it but it's typically called brew black because it's less bitter and I can just drink it black like nice you make it at home yeah buy that okay yeah my wife loves that it's got a nice caffeine kick to it the core a cold Brews where it's at yeah yeah you can drink it black lots of caffeine what's not to love yeah love it speaking of so your morning routine let's talk about if there's just one exercise you could do only one for the rest of your life what would it be and why laughs a lot mm-hmm muscle up probably the best upper body exercise I mean it basically hits everything you've got pulling and pushing in the same movement you know you have to do both to do muscle up it's probably the single greatest upper body exercise if you could only choose one yeah that's awesome now how much rest in between I mean days when I'm preferring to because a lot of people would get stuck in this everybody push lower body push upper body pull and do Monday Wednesday Friday etc would you do back-to-back muscle up training days work so okay you know how there's intensity frequency and volume it's kind of like this little triangle you know I intensity frequency volume I love the intensity side of that triangle I think that's the absolute most important I think if you really go to failure and just max out the intensity you can let the other two slide quite a bit I have patients who do a really high intensity training maybe once a week or even every two weeks and they're growing muscle or maintaining so intensity is number one and I always bring the intensity because let's face it if you're gonna do an exercise and you're not back some of the intensity you're just leaving money on the table all right then the second one I like is frequency I think that if I didn't exercise a muscle group at least every 48 hours I basically started going a little bit backwards so I like really really brief high-intensity workouts maybe even as frequently as daily or every other day cool so I aim for at least three times a week every muscle group full by high intensity but really low volumes and actually recently I've been experimenting with a single set to failure daily like a really low volume but just working daily and a lot of people are afraid that you know maybe they'll start going backwards and I I really don't think that's true if the volume is low so you know you can do a single set to failure like 60 seconds yeah as long as you stop there and the volume is low you're not just crushing yourself I think intensities the best frequencies second volume you might not want to overdo it because there's definitely such thing as too much volume mm-hmm so I honestly try to be a single set of body weight exercises to fail your everyday that's so awesome and then but you're also having the amino acids and the protein to help with the recovery so it kind of brings this whole conversation full circle right just really great that's fantastic okay I know you're not a big supplement guy but if there's one with our whole food herb nutrient just some botanicals some supplement that you just couldn't live without what would it be and why uh yeah I honestly I take no supplements at all I really recommend them I am trying to do with food I think most people can yeah so yeah I don't have a really favorite supplement you know even vitamin D I'd much prefer people go outside vitamin D is a great example everyone's deficient in vitamin D low vitamin D is associated with every bad thing you can think of I mean Alzheimer's and multiple sclerosis and diabetes and obesity and everything bad is associated with low vitamin D but we've never proven that taking vitamin D prevents or reverses any of that crap low vitamin D is just a sign that your health sucks somehow you know what I mean so it's not like taking vitamin D is really going to fix that necessarily and there might even be other photo nutrients that we don't know of in addition to vitamin D so it's always better if you can go outside and get some Sun you know what I mean yeah I think it's kind of the same story with supplements and food I think you're always better off getting it from food I don't have a one killer supplement that I could live without I almost never take them and I rarely recommend them yeah that's good I think that's brilliant me you can't compensate for lack of sunshine with 4,000 I use it variety there's so many different components and factors so yeah thanks for sharing that and it's brilliant advice Sachin Patel who's been on the podcast before us talked a lot about that and he said in his words he said the natural tendency is to just if someone's low in vitamin D to give them vitamin D but where they really need as you said sunshine right you know it's a great advice so if you were in an elevator with a politician parliament member from another country they turn to you and said doctor name and you know you know a lot about them metabolism nutrition and 30 seconds what's the biggest thing the biggest impact that I can have is a policymaker to help the the people that I'm trying to regulate and improve to improve the community's health what would you say to them and why I would say reverse protein dilutions you know everyone's eating all these carbs and fats together this is basically obesogenic rat chow and we're all you know fat as hell and you have to reverse that people have to prioritize protein they have to be protein first proteins are most expensive and so there's a huge economic factor there you like you can graph out poverty locations and obesity locations and superimpose them and it's exactly the same because proteins the most expensive you can look at every food in the grocery store and price it by how much protein is in it and it's just perfectly linear prating the most expensive proteins the hardest to get proteins the least profit for companies everyone's under eating protein protein dilutions now Rafa mmm-hmm so is that kind of a contrast to that or something like that that you know the naysayers or even myself we would say something along the lines that well companies like Tyson and and all the GMO food that's fed to animals that's just kind of reinforcing that whole factory farm model what would be the kind of argument to that right and I do think factory farms are terrible I that's bad for everybody the people the animals environment we have to do it right and I think honestly the way to go is rumen at agriculture I mean you a cow one cow can feed one human for a whole year powered by nothing but ambient sunlight and rainfall I mean that's powerful that's huge you take a cow at ambient sunlight and rainfall and you've fed a human for a year with a very high protein very nutritious diet we have to do it the right way with rumen and agriculture raised on grassland ruminants convert cellulose which is unusable by other animals in humans it's nobody's competing for it it's just covering 80% of the land mass of the planet they convert this cellulose that nobody can use into really high quality nutrition for free using ambient sunlight and rainfall and actually sequestering carbon in the soil and making topsoil so they're better than carbon neutral that's how it's done right we need better room and agriculture on just natural grasslands and that would that would turn so much stuff around I mean that that would turn around obesity and diabetes that would help the environment I mean we use way less fossil fuels because we're basically eating oil for fertilizer right now yeah mono cropping is dead factory farming is awful you gave me some grass-fed beef mmm and so you encourage your patients to find a local farm grass-fed in in the northwest we're very fortunate we're lucky yeah we've got it everywhere yeah yeah I mean we've got like wild caught salmon and grass-fed beef as far as the eye can see so we're very lucky but yeah that's that's where it's at mm-hmm except for there's little snack food with the salmonidae hear about that we're the Atlantic salmon that were farmed oh yeah 400,000 Atlantic salmon just migrated in the Puget Sound health yeah okay the important scary stuff out there well dr. Damon really appreciate you coming on the show this oh yeah and so we connected on Twitter and that's how we got to know each other and so forth and connected for this interview so folks want to connect with you what's the best online resource for that probably Twitter or I've got a website burn fat not sugar cool and you have your lectures and so forth are posted there so you have quite a few really good lectures on YouTube as well yeah okay awesome all right guys I really appreciate you tuning in thanks for listening all the way through if you want to connect with dr. Ted please click the youtube description below and don't put the show notes there as well have a good one

Channel: High Intensity Health

Views: 339,756

Rating: 4.8030262 out of 5

Keywords: insulin, fat burning, Keto, ketogenic, Ted Naiman, The P E Diet, Body FAt, Fat Loss, keto diet results

Id: JipRwP754jA

Length: 62min 31sec (3751 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 22 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/rickamore]

I didn't know Ted owned a shirt