Interview with Dr Ted Naiman

aloha everybody we are here with my favorite keto doctor in the world i don't know if you really want to call it keto he's like the best doctor i know and i've got to meet some of your patients and it's really cool to hear them just preach how amazing of a doctor you are so welcome today thanks yeah thanks for having me great to talk to you guys thank you very much thanks for being with us ted uh you know you're i think the first time i met you was in uh low carb seattle uh and i saw your i think it was the first time i saw a presentation by you as well and one of the things that really i don't know if this is the engineering background that i have and you have to but the way you put things in your presentation about energy metabolism just like it was kind of an aha moment for me like yeah it's really kind of simple you know when you look at how pr you know your body processes these fuels it's like sun and plants and then it's basically electrons coming into your body and i that really struck me and uh can you let's uh one of the first things i want to start talking about is uh energy metabolism in general because i think there's a lot of uh misunderstanding out there about uh fat and how it's processed and what happens to fat when you eat it right right kind of a you know important thing when it comes to like ketogenic lifestyles and stuff because that's kind of the one thing that there's some disagreement on and whatnot so but we get so many uh people coming to us and say i worked with a keto coach that told me oh you're not losing weight add some more fat 10 tablespoons of oil and yeah why don't you tell us what really happens to it got it okay all right sure yeah absolutely so fat when you eat fat it's basically broken down in your intestines and absorbed and goes into these kylo microns and it ends up going pretty much directly to your fat cells so every time you eat fat it it it's a very slow process it has to basically slowly absorb through the wall of your small intestine get packaged into kind of microns it gets dumped out into your lymphatic duct your in your lymphatics i mean your thoracic duct in your lymphatics it ends up going to the liver and getting repackaged it ends up in your fat cells finally like 12 hours later it's very slow it's very passive it doesn't change your body's metabolism or your insulin levels much at all and it's kind of just passively happening in the background but basically almost every bit of fat you eat is just immediately passively stored in your fat cells to be released later as free fatty acids so free fatty acids non-sterified fatty acids one of the major fuels in your bloodstream is only released from your adipocytes so like basically you eat the fat it's immediately stored in your fat cells and then it's slowly released later as these non-esterified fatty acids bound to albumin and that's how you run your body off of these fats but they're only released from your adipocytes so so basically every bit of fat you eat gets stored in your fat cells like pretty much immediately passively it does and it take it's such a slow process that you don't really feel it like it's not giving you a ton of immediate satiety it's not improving your performance it's sort of background it's sort of passive and statistically speaking about 99 of all the fat in your fat cells came from dietary fat basically you eat fat gets stored as fat which you're releasing later and so eating refined fat is refined fat has horrible satiety per calorie it's tons of calories with very little satiety and you can literally we have studies in every animal on the planet if you add refined fat to their diet they will just slowly passively immediately get fatter we have studies in humans monkeys pigs rats mice you pour oil on their feed and just adding a refined fat that adds calories in the satiety and they will immediately passively get fatter this is literally how we create obesity in rats and mice for research in rodent models you add refined fats and omnivore mammals just get fatter and that's how it works it's basically eating fat makes you fat like i i hate to say it like that but these refined fats are terrible versatility two important points you you touched on there and that is there's a lot of belief too that you know the fat you're when you're obese a lot in eating a high carb diet a lot of that came from carbohydrates but that's not the case right because mostly it's carbohydrates displacing fat oxidation and allowing all that dietary fat to be stored right exactly right right so carbs and fats have two totally different storage compartments you know fat is not water soluble and is only stored basically in your fat cells and then carbs are water soluble and have to be stored as glycogen in your liver your muscles and when you eat carbs like if carb if you're not eating any carbs you're burning pretty much all fat mostly fat as soon as you eat carbohydrate you're just smoothly displacing fat oxidation with carbohydrate oxidation iso calorically and then when the carbs are all gone you smoothly go back to burning fat it's really like just this sort of smooth gradient where you're eating more carbs you're burning more carbs and less fat eating less carbs you're burning more fat again and that's just how the system works so the problem with refined carbs is they have horrible satiety per calorie and so if you eat a bunch of refined carbs you're starving three hours later you didn't get protein you didn't get minerals you didn't get all these things you need and they have a really high caloric density so like your breakfast cereal um you know very little weight and volume huge caloric density very little protein or minerals or satiety it's just a tidy for calories terrible um your blood sugar goes way up three hours later goes way down you're hypoglycemic you're starving you're eating more but refined fat is really not much better now the thing that's better about refined fat is you won't get the glycemic excursion and then the fall that makes you feel hypoglycemic three hours later so you're just kind of like this but you're just passively getting fatter and you got no satiety at all so refined carbs are really terrible first time calorie but refined fat is pretty bad too you're not gonna get as much hypoglycemia three or four hours later um and you're not going to change your whole body metabolism from this carpet fat thing but it's really bad for satiety for calories so you really don't want to eat much fat sorry once again oh sorry my theory i'm serious interrupting like we always tell people chew your calories it's you know like get the fat in the steak but for me i prefer a filet mignon anyway any day but you don't need to add all of this add a stick of butter to the steak yeah and to us we're like or mct oil or mct oh do a shot of mct oil i don't have the chart but i'll put it in this notes below uh if you i compared the nutrients in mct oil to sugar sugar sugar has more yeah it's they're basically you know both terrible yeah refined fat is garbage for satiety per calorie like you literally want to avoid it it's i mean i'm right there with you guys and and thank you for bringing this up because it's something that's just killing the whole keto like you know the the word keto is is already going down in google search trends like it's going to be dead in a couple years i hate to say it well i totally agree with you like that's why i said we want you to be like the keto doctor but really i mean we just want you to be like the nutrition doctor whatever because i don't really like that word that much anymore anyway but i first mentioned that it does have that name but i first met you on the low carb cruise and at that time this was this was like when we first had kids maybe nine years ago or so um i would do these pure protein days and like you know refer people to do these pure protein days and on that cruise people are like no no no maria too much protein turns into sugar and i was like oh really you know like these doctors and like very influential keto people told me this i was like oh okay so i went home and i'm like craig you know people are telling me on the cruise that we can't do this pure protein day we need to add a bunch of fat and so we're like okay let's try it and guess what we just got fatter yeah right and i know mean you were talking about that too for a hot minute you kind of were like oh i guess you're right yeah try that and yeah oh yeah i was there too i was like okay i'll just eat macadamia nuts and bacon and butter oh i was totally doing that like five years ago i didn't know i was like oh i heard too much protein was bad but you know after researching it i realized it's just kind of not true and uh it's really more about satiety per calorie and i think that's what you know people need to spend more time looking at and that's the really important thing is satiety per calorie because a lot of people will say well i eat fat and i stay full a long time right because you just ate too much yeah i drink a bulletproof coffee with four or 500 calories and i'm i'm i'm full until dinner time well guess what if you ate seven eggs instead it would be hard to eat them you probably won't even be hungry at dinnertime exactly more nutrients in it right right people just don't know exactly what they're eating they're like well if i eat all this butter i'm super not hungry that's tons of satiety so what are you talking about well yeah but you just need a billion trillion calories and you have no idea and that's exactly right like people don't actually know what they're eating and so i like i you know it gives me a lot of satiety eating an entire pizza but that's like 20 000 calories and so like the satin for calorie is terrible so it's all about like you said per calorie exactly one question i get all the time i know you probably get it too is like what about the kidneys because you know we're told too much protein is very bad for the kidneys what's your response to that right i mean this is basically completely not evidence-based uh the problem is when you have kidney damage you spill protein in your urine and so doctors will use the amount of protein in your urine to see how bad your kidney damage is and then also if you eat a lot of protein you can have more protein in your urine even though it's not harming your kidneys so somehow doctors got to this point where we're like uh protein gives you protein your urine kidney damage gives you protein in your urine protein gives you kidney damage yeah it's just like but it's completely fraudulently wrong now we have a meta-analysis that shows that higher protein diets are actually protective against kidney damage they're awesome for your kidneys if you eat tons of protein your kidney literally gets larger and stronger and your glomerular filtration rate goes up it's like a bodybuilder doing curls all day long it's like your bicep gets bigger so your kidneys like actually more bulletproof on higher that's a very good point because a lot of people when they start this way and start to prioritize protein they will see their gfr go up right and some doctors will say oh you're getting fatty liver or sorry getting kidney damage your kidneys aren't liking this lifestyle but you're saying no it's getting stronger and that's why it's going up right right right and yes and blood urea nitrogen will always go up in higher protein diets but it's not harming you at all and so some doctors are like that could be bad but yeah it's just completely not evidence-based so and there is no evidence that high protein diets harm your kidneys at all and then to take it one step further like most nephrologists will recommend some amount of protein restriction for people who have known existing kidney damage and even that's not evidence-based so the vast majority of people with bad kidneys don't benefit from protein restriction we have these um huge meta-analyses on protein restriction in the setting of chronic kidney disease and like only you know five percent of chronic kidney disease if you have this rare primary glomerulonephritis like a primary glomerular disease which is super rare um protein restriction maybe helps it a little bit but only in men and not in women and it was like one percent and the studies that showed this were deeply flawed and then we have just a mountain of other evidence in people who have the more common kinds of kidney failure diabetes and high blood pressure none of these people have ever been shown to benefit from protein restriction at all so like if you have diabetes in diabetic nephropathy and your kidney functions decrease you actually don't benefit from protein restriction and doctors are still recommending protein restriction even though it's not evidence-based so this is definitely a huge problem yeah absolutely on that front uh the next question a lot of people get then is okay what about mtor and aging right so you eat a lot of protein you trigger a lot of mtor and mtor has some weak associations with aging so can you talk a little bit about that right right so the thing that triggers them for the most is being over fat and have chronically high insulin levels you know what i'm saying so if i eat let's say i eat uh twice as much protein as i did before and i'm way thinner i'm actually going to get less area under the curve mtor stimulation because i'm leaner all the fuels in my bloodstream are always lower 24 hours a day by fasting insulins way lower my like you know i have patients who are bodybuilders they're fast against the levels of one their triglycerides are a 30 their a1c is a 4.0 like the fuels in their bloodstream are so low their mtor signaling is low but they're eating you know 200 grams of protein a day instead of 100 grams of protein a day well who cares someone over here eating 100 grams of protein a day could be you know 100 pounds overweight and they're fasting insulin's 50 and their blood sugar is too high and their triglycerides are you know 300 and they're just basically a wash with energy toxicity insulin is chronically one or two orders of magnitude higher and it's because they're eating less protein they have less satiety per calorie and they're constantly overeating calories and they're just fatter 24 7 365 with more fuels in their bloodstream so like that the whole idea doesn't even make sense if you can eat a little bit more protein and be thinner your amateur signaling is actually much much lower than someone who's like worried about how much protein they're eating so it's completely mind-blowingly ridiculous well that's the thing i was supposed to i did write recipes for dr rosedale for this book i think it was maybe nine years ago it never happened um but he wanted me to keep the recipes below 20 grams of protein per meal per meal and it was very difficult it was i mean eggs it was hard to get you know it was a really fatty protein and uh i just don't know if he really ever ended up believing in it because the book never happened the recipes are sitting there but yeah right well i mean i love dr rosedale he's an awesome guy i've met him right he's cool i i you know he's a super smart guy and he's really cool but i don't think we see eye to eye on the protein issue and you know so yeah i hear you say he's little he's like me he was like my size um so uh one thing i wanted to touch on before we completely move off of it is back to the you know the dietary fat um so a lot of people say well there's other things that can happen in the body or you know the fat can go right through you or uh you know possibly some other things that are happening to the fat like cellular wall building all the stuff i mean what kind of percentages are you talking about for those kind of uses of fat well okay so like i have this crazy study from 50 years ago or something where people basically drank like 10 000 calories of corn oil every day and they measured their stool to see what their absorption of the fat was and it was it always remained at like a high 90 percent you know 98 absorbed or something so you you really are absorbing the fat that you eat most of the time and it really does end up in your fat cells there's basically no other place it can go because it's not water soluble so i'm not sure what people yeah a lot of people have magical beliefs about metabolism if they don't understand it well enough yeah and the reality is your body is just a machine it's literally just a mechanical machine when you when you put fat in your body it physically has to go someplace and that's in your fat cells because that's the only a non-water soluble storage compartment you better hope it goes to your fat cells right because otherwise it's going to build up if they're full it just circulates in your bloodstream and that's why your triglycerides are 500. you know but this is what's frustrating is uh at ketocon the last time we had ketocon uh we walked into the building and this one you know keto doctor came up to me like marie i got to tell you about my experiment he's like i just drank the shake and it was butter mct oil coconut oil it was all pure fat and my insulin didn't go up at all and then the next day i had a plate of eggs bacon and my insulin went up so many points and i was like dude i have to get the stage i don't even have enough time to tell you what's wrong with that picture right tell us what's wrong with that picture and i think a good point here too is recently uh the hall came out with uh another kind of this you know insulin carbohydrate model and and that kind of thinking and i think that relates to it a lot is that we they're in this community there's such a irrational fear of insulin spiking at all and and the thought that if insulin rises i'm storing fat but you can't store what you don't eat right like if there's no fat there to store it for insulin goes up a little bit right nothing exactly like mechanically all these carbon atoms have to go somewhere when you eat fat the carbons literally end up in your fat cells and when you eat glucose they literally end up in your liver and muscles and then when any of that's burned you exhale the carbon atoms and you can literally just count all the carbons and see where everything goes and none of it's magic at all there's no magical anything happening it's very mechanical and once you kind of understand it uh i mean i have a like a edge because i'm a mechanical engineer your body really is just this mechanical machine um and then i think you asked me a question about um i don't think i'm answering your question that you originally asked just i know craig has some questions about getting into insulin is insulin the devil i mean i know you have a graphic i watched you and marty you know you had this this devil image of insulin and it's like well you need it right yeah so okay all right so here's i think a lot of people don't understand what insulin is actually doing here's the deal with insulin right your entire body is just poised to uh melt down every bit of tissue you have into energy and flood your bloodstream with it for emergency use so like um glucagon is like this lead foot on the accelerator where if insulin is not there to stop it you'll just literally have wide open lipolysis flood your bloodstream with fatty acids flood your bloodstream with glucose from stored glycogen like every tissue in your body will break down catabolism and flood your bloodstream with energy without insulin and that's for emergency purposes the default is that you just have tons of energy in your bloodstream and if glucagon wasn't there norepinephrine epinephrine cortisol every single one of these hormones will break down every tissue in your body flood your bloodstream with energy and you've got tons of energy and the only thing holding that back is insulin right so like look at a type 1 diabetic they don't have insulin they're melting down their entire body into energy they're they've got you know the free fatty acids in their bloodstream is off the charts they have wide open lipolysis they've dumped all their glycogen into glucose ketones every fuel is maxed out in the bloodstream you give them insulin and all that stops right like you're sitting there right now in a fasted state and the only reason you're the fatty acids in your bloodstream aren't off the charts is because your pancreas is constantly monitoring the fuels in your bloodstream and if the fatty acids go up a little too high insulin also goes up and tamps that back down it's like a very sensitive thermostat that's constantly monitoring there's a your pancreas is a fuel pressure sensor and it's monitoring the fuels in your bloodstream and keeping them down by suppressing lipolysis right and so what ends up happening is that you know your insulin is just trying to keep the fuels out of the bloodstream by keeping them in your cells and then as you get fatter and fatter like let's say i gain a hundred pound i eat a hundred pounds of butter and i gain a hundred pounds now all my fat cells are too full they don't want any more fat so the fat is just circulating in my bloodstream and my pancreas is just dumping out insulin trying to clear it but none of the cells want it and then all my muscle cells are full of fat and now they don't want glucose either and so all these fuels are really high in my bloodstream and insulin gets higher and higher and higher but none of the cells are listening to it so i just have too much fuel in my bloodstream so high chronically high insulin is just a sign of energy toxicity it just means you have way too much fuel in your bloodstream which means you have way too much fuel in your cells and it's the whole thing backs up and so the the high insulin itself isn't really the problem it's just a marker for the actual problem which is energy toxicity too many fuels in your bloodstream and then too many fuels in your cells the the reason the carbohydrate insulin model is wrong and completely broken is because the carbohydrate insulin model says you eat carbs your insulin shoots up drives all the energy into your fat cells and then you have internal starvation where you don't have enough fuel in your bloodstream uh that never happens at every step in the fattening process the fuels in your bloodstream are higher as you're getting fatter than they would be in a thin person who's not getting fatter you know what i'm saying so as i'm getting fatter every fuel in my bloodstream is higher than someone who's thin if if someone's eating a like a really high satiety per calorie diet so they're super thin and they're not getting fatter um all of their fuels in the bloodstream will be lower than someone who's actively getting fatter or is too fat or diabetic glucose will be higher in the fattening person triglycerides free fatty acids every fuel at all times will be higher in the bloodstream because insulin is just reacting to those fuels in the bloodstream it's it's the cart and it's not the horse you know what i'm saying is just reacting and so the internal starvation thing is not happening as people are getting fatter they have higher fuels gary talbs please yeah we should have him on people i look i love gary towels i love david ludwig i love these guys i loved the carbohydrate insulin model for a long time because it really spoke to me because it says what you eat determines how much you're going to eat right the carbohydrate insulin model i love the fact that how much you eat is downstream from what you eat you know what i'm saying if you eat salmon and asparagus you're going to eat way fewer calories and you're just going to be thinner than if i'm eating like sugar and oil if i eat sugar and oil i'm going to eat way more calories and i'm going to be fatter and i'm going to be less healthy i'm going to have worse body composition and so what you eat definitely determines how much you're going to eat and so i love that but the carbohydrate insulin model says it's because insulin went up drove all the fuels into your cells and then you're internally starving which is completely backwards and absolutely wrong insulin is just reacting to fuels in the bloodstream if they have no place to go so it's actually completely reversed wrong the reason people get fatter is because they're eating foods with low satiety per calorie if i eat a food that has tons of satiety it's got protein minerals micronutrients and only one calorie like if i eat a one calorie food but i got boom all the protein micronutrients and everything i need i'm going to have amazing results because i have ridiculous high satiety per calorie and then if you're just eating like sugar and oil your satiety per calorie is you know sub-zero it's like completely horrible you're going to eat a billion calories and you're just going to get fatter and better and fatter and we have these studies in animal models you know you give them refined carbs and refined fats and they just gain a billion pounds and so it really comes down to satiety per calorie which is destroyed by refined carbs and refined fats either one or especially both and that makes you overeat and then your insulin is high it's not the other way around it's not like how i ate carbs and then my insulin shot up and that made me internally starving it's actually no one's ever documented this internal starvation part with low fuels in the bloodstream that's never been documented because it doesn't exist yeah i think uh the way i like to look at insulin you know that model looks at insulin as like this hammer that drives things out of the blood into storage whenever it goes up and i think you've got some graphics on this too i like to think of it as a more like a net holding back the floodgates right or you know a dam like you've shown in some of your graphics where it's this damn just kind of holding back the floodgates of all this energy and you have more energy to hold back the you know dam has to get bigger then that has to get bigger to hold back from flooding the bloodstream and that's where that basal insulin can go up and up as you get over fat yep exactly exactly it's just very mechanical and it's really just responding to those jewels if you eat fat it's going to end up in fat storage regardless if you have the spike of an insulin or not right yes and that's what and this is so if you're if someone's a type 2 diabetic if you drink a whole gallon of heavy cream right tomorrow morning 12 hours later you're going to have the highest fasting blood sugar you've ever seen and all the whole low carbohydrates like whoa there must have been look at the trace carbs and heavy cream it's got to be let's trace carbs they don't get it it's like when you eat all this fat it slowly passively goes into your fat cells enlarges them all you're slightly fatter you're slightly more insulin resistant your fasting insulin has to go up just to try to hold it back out of your bloodstream and then your sugar has to go up too because you don't have any place for any energy to go and so fat is basically eventually isochorically raising your insulin just as much as carbs are but it's raising basal insulin carbs raise glucose and insulin immediately and then it goes back down fat just raises your basal insulin fish now you're fatter and you're more insulin resistant and i think a lot of people don't get that and you know glucometers are not helping because everyone looks at their economy they get a big spike and they're like oh well that was bad yeah if you could actually see your basil creeping up 12 hours later where you're slightly fatter and slightly more insulin resistant or if you had a glucometer that showed your triglycerides because you drink your heavy cream your oil your triglycerides are gonna do this four times higher thing or more if you're over fat i mean like we i've seen extreme triglyceride excursions in people who are eating a lot of fat like you know we get these crazy numbers in the clinic and so you don't have a triglyceride glucometer at home i guess it would be called a triglyceridometer or whatever but you don't have that at home and if you did if you had a sensor that showed you your free fatty acids and your insulin and your triglycerides at all these time points you'd realize oh hey when i eat refined fat the next morning i'm like way worse metabolically than i am right now and another question related that i've had uh uh sometimes people will see a higher fasting glucose in the morning if they over ate fat the prior day can you talk about that connection uh hell yes and like it's exactly just what i was saying like imagine or right now do a thought experiment or right now you eat 100 pounds of butter right um and tomorrow morning 12 hours later your every fat cell in your body is like expanded right now all your cells are really refusing glucose right your triglycerides are going to be higher because the vassals don't want fat um your muscle cells are filled with fat so they don't want glucose all your cells are in energy refusal mode and that and then your blood sugar is going to be way higher your insulin is going to be higher because it's trying to get the fuels out of the bloodstream but it can't all your cells are full your everything goes up right and so that's how fat makes you fatter and more insulin resistant it's just such a slow process it's really showing up you know 12 hours down the road so it's very confusing to a lot of type 2 diabetics they're like man i never eat carbs but my fasting sugar is you know 150 what the hell uh it's literally how many grams of fat you ate the day before full stop this was so frustrating i was on uh i went to costa rica to be on a television show with a couple doctors and i was the chef and i planned you know protein meals or whatever but then they all brought in all of this heavy cream and they were like i'm fasting until one o'clock maria i was like you just put like 500 calories in your coffee you are not fasting do not be mistaken but other people were telling them that is okay right yeah i mean i hopefully everybody will look back at this sort of thing 10 or 20 years ago and it'll just be a laughingstock i mean i think we're already at that point but not everybody is and so yeah we just need to get more people to realize that refined fat is not helping anyone with anything at all ever period but going back to the cgm issue i wore a cgm and my highest numbers were when i was running and we are getting a lot of people like buying these you know cgms or trying them out and they're like oh i ate so much protein and it went up so much i was like that's not always a bad thing so does it mean i should stop running because my blood sugar went up exactly that's a beautiful point like like most people hit you know diabetic range glucose when they're doing maximum intensity exercise and that's not harmful and that's not bad for you and these spikes in the glucose are not necessarily that terrible and what you're not seeing is your giant spike and triglycerides when you eat all that fat like if people could literally see that they would be like oh hey refined carb refined fat both doing crazy stuff to the fuels in my bloodstream both have horrible satiety for calorie uh both are not helping my body competition maybe i should eat some protein instead well i think in the the cgm's are great and for a lot of people it can really be enlightening if depending on their diet but what i think is good kind of happening in in certain communities especially with the you know kind of bad information that people follow in the quinoa community about glucose and insulin is that it can actually be counterproductive in a lot of cases and we have people doing this where they're like well i ate more protein but my my glucose went up 20 point or my glucose spiked and we're like well okay how much like 20 points so it's like went from 80 to 100 so what right like they want this flat line for glucose yeah not necessarily the best way it really isn't yeah it's i mean yeah it's just really eating through glucometer can be problematic because you'd literally just eat butter all day long and then you'd wonder why now you're fasting sugars you know 150 even though you never eat carbs and that it's just it's definitely a problem it's a huge problem so on that related question that i want to make sure to ask ask which is so you get some people who will then say okay i'm going to lower my fat and i'm going to up my protein and as a result they end up with higher fasting glucose the next day or you know over a course of a week or whatever in the mornings it might fasting glucose might creep up to 100 110 so in those cases what's happening and is that a concern well probably they're actually eating more grams of fat than they realize and they probably are getting slightly worse uh like for example let's say you're a diabetic but you do everything right you're just eating lean protein super high satiety per calorie you're shaving off grams of carbs and fat you're exercising you're losing weight you will steadily see your fasting blood sugar get lower and lower and lower and lower and lower that will happen there might be blip there's up and downs it's never linear you know there'll be days where you're just your cortisol stresses you out and it'll be higher and you'll be like i don't know what happened but like if you if you zoom way out and look at the trend over weeks and months and years you will steadily have a lower fasting blood sugar if you're doing all the right stuff and that's higher satiety per calorie diet which is usually way more protein and way less refined carbs and fats and exercise to deplete um intramuscular triglycerides and stuff like that what's that what about sleep is there a relation there oh yeah a huge relationship like just sleep deprivation will immediately increase insulin resistance and cortisol and stress and all these things so there are all these other factors but it's true that if you're doing everything right over time you should see your fasting blood sugar go down if it's if it's abnormally high and so that is that usually means you're doing something wrong and it's typically having no actual clue how many grams of fat you're eating a day i agree with that you know there's studies that shown that people on average underestimate how many calories they eat by like 45 percent and overestimate their exercise by like 41 or something crazy right but you know back to that there are some people that they say they are getting a you know a lower amount of fat and they upped the protein and i think this might be related to insulin resistance so if they're insulin resistant they might initially until they can shrink those fat cells is it is it possible that uh the morning fasting glucose could go up because of the insulin resistance well i mean yeah the more insulin resistant you are the more your blood sugar goes up but again and and again there's a lot of other factors like day-to-day cortisol and stress and sleep and blah blah but uh honestly if you're doing everything right your blood sugar should be eventually lower so the first thing i would suspect in someone who says oh hey i'm doing what you told me but my um fasting blood sugar is going up uh you really have to literally count how many grams of fat you're eating every day because everybody in the low carb world we know our carbs oh i eat 20 grams of carbs like we're tracking our carbs we know our carbs i'm trying to go from one gram of carb a day to zero by never eating any salads and now i'm just a carnivore uh or a you know i was a rock cardboard but i was worried about glycogen and the liver i was eating so like you know if you're trying to shave your carbs super low uh you might have absolutely no clue how many grams of fat you're eating a day and so you know like a lot of people in the low carb world they can't really tell you how many grams of fat they are today and so that's typically the number one problem is it do you think it still is the issue for somebody like for example dr shawn baker he has a kind of a higher fasting glucose you think that's more related to his level of activity and and one thing he's a lot of fatty ribeyes yeah true i actually cannot explain what's going on with dr baker like i have really tried to explain uh his fasting glucose in a1c seems too high to me yeah and i don't have a good explanation for it i don't think that's due to his amount of exercise and i i mean i hate to say this but i think that if he was leaner he would have lower blood sugar and a1c like like if like if he just did like a bodybuilding show prep and just got scary lean uh i would be curious to see what his a1c and bletcher is i like like no disrespect to dr baker who i love plus like i don't want him to kill me like he can physically kill me with his very hands pretty easily so so sorry dr baker don't kill me but um like if he got like super super stage lean uh i would love to see his blood sugar in a1c and i'm guessing they would be normal yeah was it a year ago he did lean down by eating lean meat and he started doing marlene but yeah very interesting um one more question i wanted to ask you before maybe we get into a few uh questions from uh people online here um so let's talk about let's let's reverse insulin resistance right let's reverse our over fat situation in our bodies you're going to want to in our case we're going to cut the carbs down we're going to get enough protein you know for your lean mass so you get get adequate at least enough uh protein and then you're gonna adjust fat right so now the question becomes how low should fat go and how low can fat go especially in the in you know there's i'm sure there's context here if you're doing it one day like a one protein sparing day for the week maybe it's a little lower of a fat minimum or then also the second question then is what is the fat minimum if you're say going to be in a calorie you know deficit for three months because you have a lot of weight to it what's the kind of floor there that you want gotcha okay all right so like we're famous in the low carbosphere by saying that humans never have to eat any glucose ever like you can literally eat zero carbs you never need carbs you never need glucose uh right okay that's true um there are a lot of things about fat that that's actually also true for like so like the requirement for saturated fat in the human diet is absolutely zero you can literally make every bit of saturated fat you need on your own you you would be fine if you never ate any saturated fat the amount of cholesterol that humans require in their diet is zero you literally never have to eat cholesterol so you can manufacture your own saturated fat and cholesterol just like you can manufacture your own glucose now a lot of low carbs are like well that's not optimal and yeah it's probably not optimal but it's probably not optimal to never eat any carbs at all either like these are both on a u-shaped curve but the point is you really don't need a ton of fat like the amount of essential fatty acids that humans require in their diet it's under 10 grams a day i mean it's extremely small and when we do these um protein sparing modified fast liquid diets for pre-bariatric surgery patients i mean sometimes there will be as few as 10 grams of fat in these formulations like you probably want about 10 grams of fat so you don't get gall stones and so you have your essential fatty acids and i don't think that anyone wants to go that low indefinitely but for short periods of time you can certainly survive on 10 grams of fat i would say that your average person for any kind of length of time probably does not want to go below about 30 grams of fat per day and if you look at bodybuilders doing show prep they're very low to go below 30 i'm sorry 30 grams of fat a day and they're typically never going below 20 of calories from fat and maybe 30 percent of calories from fat so you always want some fat around and in fact if you go way too low in fat you start getting like some major negative health uh impact your testosterone goes down and your energy goes down and a lot of stuff like that so for most people i'm like okay you definitely need at least 20 or 30 of your calories and at least 30 grams of fat um and but you know it's it's actually if you have tons of fat in your body you can get away with these fairly low amounts of fat um indefinitely because you you already have a lot of fat i'm not saying like don't eat any fat but i'm saying a lot of people can really cut back without any problems well that's the thing craig did this great chart and he posted it on his facebook wall and it was about we're on the same page when it comes to this extended fasting we don't like it because you're going to lose muscle mass whether you want to believe it or not it happens right we are more of hey let's hit our protein goal so it at least you know stave off that muscle maintain muscle and you get your nutrients in because of you know how nutrient dense the animal proteins are and someone made a comment she's like i'm a trainer and when i have my athletes do protein sparing modified fast days they do terrible we're like why would you have a lean athlete do a protein sparing modified fast day right she ended up deleting your comment because a lot of people kind of like why would you this isn't for lean people but what we got was we also got some other people in the keto community or whatever are pushing back on us saying protein spirit by fast are dangerous dangerous but but the same people say don't eat for three days if you don't do a three-day fat that's fine yeah that's completely ridiculous we're saying at least hit your minimum for protein and enough fat for your gallbladder and all of that and a lot of people are like um even someone here is saying why don't you speak to autophagy and we're like well work out that's better for it yeah it's way better for you absolutely so that's actually one of the questions here and i'll throw it up there but uh asking uh what about autophagy so you know you get into this fasting realm and the one of the main thing that they talk about about extended fasting is tafaji autophagy one of the things i'd like to point out is the the nobel prize winner for autophagy i can't say is he's a japanese fan i can't say his name i can't remember it uh but he he actually estimates that every one to two months we turn over all of our protein cells through autophagy all of them and you know and that's that's no fasting that's not that's just normal human beings living so my question is why do we have to speed that process up if we're going to turn them all over in one or two months anyway well okay first of all autophagy is honestly a totally bs buzzword that has no actual real meaning like no one can actually measure this most of the studies that were referencing this were done outside of the body in extraordinarily artificial conditions with extraordinarily artificial measurement systems and there's really like nobody really knows what autophagy is you can't really tell when you're doing it this is like it's almost purely theoretical so it's kind of garbage to even use this term at all so anyone who's really talking about like they know what the hell they're saying is literally filled with crap so it's kind of like a fake buzzword to begin with but it really comes down to uh mtor signaling and it comes down to like either your hypocaloric or hypochloric if you got plenty of energy or not enough energy and the idea is that you kind of want to balance out the times when there's uh too much energy with times when there's not enough energy and things that reduce energy availability theoretically are driving this autopsy process and that's under eating calories or expending more calories so you can either do it with uh just eating less calories uh eating higher satiety per calorie foods so you're eating less calories exercising more to expend more energy any time you're in a low energy state you're going to theoretically be driving this process forward and that could be intermittent fasting or just eating less or just being thinner or doing more cardio or all of these things and so it's kind of a garbage term uh for just like managing your energy and not being in a surplus all the time yeah there's lots of studies that i've shown one specifically looked at 36 hour fast versus strength training and the strength training the empty again they can't measure it but the signals for autophagy the markers that they look for were higher from strength training than the 36 hour fast nobody wants to work yeah but and guess what you're doing instead of losing muscle by eating nothing you're gaining muscle so i mean win-win right but i also heard you say about the whole extended fasting they don't touch on healing like what you actually are putting in your mouth so after you don't eat for three days then you just you're so hungry you eat a bunch of junk exactly you're just going to refeed with higher and higher energy density foods because that's how your body's wired so it's not really optimal so another interesting question here and this is related to the kind of the minimum fat and why not but uh one about pe diet and negative possible negative effects on women's hormones because there's a lot of people that believe you know women have to eat more fat for hormones can you talk to that well okay so like big picture i i'm not a huge fan of like extreme protein sparing modified fast or extreme extended fast or extremely low calorie or you know 100 protein zero percent fat i don't like any of that i like i think everybody should eat now the way they're going to eat forever and what you do is you drive you tweak your protein up a little and you're carving your fats down a little so that you're at a slight caloric deficit maybe 300 calories a day and you're just gradually cruising down to your ideal body weight and stay there and you're you're leveraging higher protein and lower energy so that you're just slowly improving body composition more lean mass less fat mass and you're doing it in a sustainable way in an enjoyable way in a way that you're not starving out of your mind in a way that you're not tanking all your hormones and so take wherever your diet is now track it so you know actually what the hell you're eating and then get your protein percent higher and your refined carbs and fine fats lower but not insane don't go straight to egg whites and whey protein and that's it you want to do this in a sustainable way so that you will slowly gradually go down your ideal body weight and enjoy the process the whole time and feel good you know what i mean like everyone's super extreme so they're like oh if proteins good and carbon fats are bad i'm just going to eat 100 whey powder you know that's my diet now that's not going to work you can't do like everyone goes just all or nothing it's like okay carbs are bad now i'm keto now i'm carnivore uh i basically can't eat plants or it's like you know protein's good okay egg whites it's my only food from now on let's see how it goes and so i the pe diet is more about finding where you're at and then raising the protein energy ratios slightly in a sustainable way so that you're driving just a moderate caloric deficit of maybe 300 calories you don't want to go extreme with it or you are going to screw up your hormones absolutely you have your opinion diet book because we only have the ebook can you show us your book do you have it i don't have it oh man everybody pick her book here's a link thank you definitely check it out um we'll put the link in the notes too as well when we uh speaking of the pe post this but uh another question kind of related to that uh where did it go um so this question is uh so do the total calories matter if you're not hungry for example if you're getting high protein low carbs and lower fat and say 1200 calories but you're satiated is that okay for you know doing day after day that's totally okay and what happens is the fatter people are the longer they can go with low calories you know i mean if you're like 500 pounds overweight you could do a protein sparing modified fast and just eat 800 calories of protein you know like you could do that for weeks without being that hungry but as you get leaner and leaner leaner you're just going to get hungrier and hungry you're going to have to up the calories more and so it really scales up or down to how over fat you are i will say that in people who are dangerously over fat and dangerously energy toxic like if you have raging out of control diabetes and you're so awash with energy that your a1c is super high uh yes you should actually be on a protein sparing modified fast where you just eat the protein and you probably won't be that hungry and you will be able to do that for longer than most people and you are just going to steadily burn off that extra energy so it scales up or down with how over fat and energy toxic you are and the worse off you are the more you can get away with protein sparing modified fats we had a client this last uh just gonna bring that up tyler um he's doing his stuff on youtube also but he was six hundred and thirty six hundred and forty five pounds forty five pounds and he lost a hundred pounds in two months basically doing mostly protein sparing i mean you know not every day but you know around that um what was really interesting about him though is that uh his a1c at four 645 pounds was 5.6 yeah i think his fasting glucose is like 90 something and i was trying to tell my mom just amazing the personal fat threshold do you think you would just had a lot of fat cells or do you think genetically maybe he could because for background here personal fat fat thresholds basically you have certain number of fat cells on your body uh most people after a certain age when they're young don't create new fat cells they just fill them or shrink them and do you think in his case he just had a lot of fat cells to fill or do you think uh he genetically maybe can make more new fat cells i i think he's actually manufacturing more fat cells in fact i know that so these people literally have the ability to perform adipocyte hyperplasia where they sprout new baby fat cells from stem cells and so they're literally just growing more and more and more and more adipocytes adipose tissue and that's very genetic and some people cannot do that genetically like like you guys like like if i if i told you guys i will pay you one billion dollars to get to 300 pounds you couldn't do it you literally couldn't do it you just leave that million dollars did you see i'll go 300 300 i don't know okay most people don't know i am half my size that i was i'm about 50 pounds less than i was but yeah i was just before and afters but i i guess i i maybe i mean 500 pounds but there's there's a there's a point where you physically couldn't do it like for all the money in the world you couldn't get fatter and so that's super genetic that's what that's all i'm saying and on that contrary of that you know we've had clients 105 pound woman type 2 diabetic you know off the charts she'd let it go go so long because she didn't gain weight you know that's your body's natural hey i'm gaining weight i should probably change my diet she never did she ate sugar just junk she burned out her beta cells now she's basically with type 1.5 now she can't milk insulin either and i mean that's even the other end of this i'll never forget her because she said maria i we live in a vain society and i wish that i would gain weight when i cheated because i don't really care because i don't gain weight but she was having strokes i think she had her second stroke and she was only like 30 years old but we want to respect your time though ted um do you want to tell us where everybody can find you oh yeah well i mean you know i'm on twitter at ted name and um i'm the probably the best thing i have is the book which you can get the pe diet.com uh and yeah those are probably the best place to find me and we'll have the link to your book in the show notes for everybody to check it out it's it's wild it's great oh thank you thank you but just thanks for the time ted uh everybody please check him out he's got a youtube channel too we'll link that below he has a funny cats puts out some funny videos that are really uh educational really uh some of the best explanations of energy metabolism out there so i encourage everybody to check it out oh well thanks a lot you guys and you guys keep up the good work i really appreciate what you guys are doing thank you dr ted we hope to see you in the future at some events sounds good

Channel: Maria Emmerich

Views: 44,950

Keywords: ted naiman, metabolic health, high protein diet, ted naiman interview, intermittent fasting, fasting, keto, carnivore, low carb diet, energy metabolism, biology, nutrition, personal fat threshold theory, energy toxicity, insulin resistance, insulin, pe diet, pe diet ted naiman, pe diet explained, pe diet vs keto

Id: aeGzc8IgP-Y

Length: 54min 14sec (3254 seconds)

Published: Sat May 08 2021