Quit running, and eat fat (here's why) | Ep82

[Music] welcome to the dr. Gundry podcast well by now you probably heard all about the keto diet maybe you've heard it can help you lose weight feel sharper and more or maybe you've read those articles saying that it's actually dangerous well my guest today wants to help you sort out fact from fiction and I couldn't have asked for a better guide he's Mark Sisson founder of primal kitchen former marathoner best-selling author and all-around impressive guy and Mark is out with a brand new book called keto for life and it has my endorsement actually on the back of the book and it's a great primer for anyone looking to try the keto diet so on today's episode Mark and I are going to talk about weeding through decades of diet myths some of our favorite subjects together the importance of adding fat to your diet and whether long-distance running is really good for you so all of you runners stay tuned because we're going to talk with one of the godfathers of running right here mark great to have you on the radio again Steve the last time we saw each other was San Joan Khafre what a treat that was to come around the corner and see you with your wife yeah it was crazy there we are you're going one way I'm going the other way and we did a double-take and then stopped you know a couple feet apart and then we'd pass them yeah arch are you yeah there you go so yeah great to have you so you and I have lived through the extremes of diet information high carb low fat guns and and more in your case what made you realize that you were doing everything wrong or maybe you never did anything wrong you know I didn't realize I was doing things wrong for a long time I was endurance athlete starting out in the 70s actually started in the 60s but competed well in the 70s in marathons got in you're doing that as I find out later it was a result partly result of the highly inflammatory diet that I was using the fuel all those miles transitioned to triathlon and did Ironman a couple of times and then I got the message that you know I didn't want to beat myself up that much to be fit anymore I had to retire from competition throughout my life as an athlete I'd always sought ways in which I could enhance my performance naturally legally and that meant some sort of dietary information or manipulation supplements if that was the case so I was always a student of the human body of human physiology of evolution of as as time went on of gene expression and how genetic science really factors into a lot of what we're talking about today and I started simply understanding that fats weren't necessarily the bad guide that they were made out to be in the 70s 80s and 90s so I started incorporating more fats into my diet and as I stopped training or you know cut way back on my training and I didn't need that many calories I was adding in a little bit more of the fat I was always eating protein I started to look at at you know the amount of sugar I was eating and I thought well this this isn't necessary anymore because I'm not running the miles I'm not burning the calories I'm not filling the glycogen stores and all of this and so I started to cut back on the sugar and I noticed I felt better from that and so I went for another decade writing books about training and writing books about optimizing your diet for training starting to write books for the general public about how to lose weight by using dietary manipulation however I still suffered my own set of maladies I still had irritable bowel syndrome that ran my life I had arthritis in my feet I had osteoarthritis my feet that I thought was partly result of my running career and partly just a natural artifact of being older but I couldn't grip a golf club and and that was like weird to me and so I had the the arthritis I had tendonitis on a regular basis at all these itis --is and and it just wasn't it just what that wasn't right for a guy was trying to be not just fit but now healthy and when we are a world expert on health and I'm a world expert on health and that's that that was and you see this a lot in our field you see experts who still you know behind the curtain their suffering and their they've got all the maladies that they write about and talk about so in my case when I was 47 my wife last year yeah really it's going on 20 years ago pal when I was 47 my wife said look you're writing about how how bad grain is for you because I'd done a lot of research on on gluten and gliadin and Zion and corn and and all of the other you know these anti nutrients he's fold tightly folded proteins and she said you're writing about all this grain stuff you still have grain in your diet what's that about I'm like well I'm defending my right to eat grain because I don't think that's the cause of anything that's going on with me she said well why don't you give up grain for 30 days well I gave up grain for 30 days and it absolutely transformed my life it was the most amazing transformation the arthritis in my feet went away the irritable bowel bowel syndrome that again was like running my life since the age of 14 went away the GERD that I experienced up you know weird places like sitting back in a airplane seat or something like that the wrong position that went away I had hemorrhoids for a long much of my life went away you know the sinus infections it would linger after a cold the stuffed-up head that would just wouldn't seem that went away it was like it was incredible this transformation from having given up this one food group that that I was told my whole life was an important part of a cornerstone the cornerstone of a healthy diet six to 11 servings a day well that was such an aha moment for me that I really shifted everything to looking at okay how if if I'm a guy who defended my right to eat grains in the face of all this evidence how many millions tens of millions of people are out there suffering the same sorts of things I am they may not be celiac they may not be you know gluten intolerant on a certain tests but there's something about their consumption of grains it's probably interfering with their their enjoyment of life to the fullest extent that became the impetus for my looking into the evolution of the human diet and how our genes you know turn on or off in response to certain inputs that we give them many of these inputs have to do with food the foods that we choose to consume and it really kind of opened this amazing world of of exploration that continues to this day so initially I started with creating the primal blueprint and that was sort of based on our ancestral patterns of not just how we ate you know plants and animals but avoiding toxic foods you know moving around a lot at a low level of activity not marathon running or triathlons lifting heavy things once in a while sprinting once in a while getting plenty of sleep using our brain engaging in play all these things I felt were sort of universal behaviors that we all not only would like to exhibit but our genes expect of us and if we don't give those inputs to our genes our genes don't manifest they don't rebuild renew regenerate recreate us the way we'd like to be to be rebuilt so started out with primal and that was when paleo was getting on I just grandma was my own brand and I got so dialed in with that I am so happy with my results and I got and I hundreds of thousands millions of people who were following my blog and and and reporting back about their incredible experiences I thought well I could leave it at that but you know I'm it maybe there's more and that's when I started looking at ketogenic diet as what I would call next-level stuff you know that's that was what got me ultimately to experimenting with now which is the basis for keto for life developing what I call metabolic flexibility so you can live your life without ever having to think about counting calories or portion control or meal time or any of that other stuff I'm gonna stop you and I'm going to point out that why is it that your wife and my wife are usually so intelligent and that if we would just listen to them like you have and yeah I certainly have yeah it's amazing no it is kicking and screaming by the way I lifted I listened to her kicking screaming but it was quite the eye-opener yes yeah and so I had to give a shout out to sheriff to wives because everything good that happens happens because of my wife yes dear so alright so yeah I mean you really and I called you a grandfather of the kedo movement but you know Mark daily Apple and you know the primal blueprint really you know kind of set the stage for a lot of what you know we now do in the ancestral movement or paleo movement so a lot of people are confused by all these names what what's the difference between a paleo primal diet and an Aikido primal diet right so it's uh it's it becomes nuanced at this point it's really all of these diets that that tend to work mostly work because of the things you're not eating yeah okay so when you eliminate the offending foods when you eliminate the sugars the sugary drinks the pies cakes candies cookies sorry people the breads the pastas the cereals and you come down to this list of natural real food meat fish fowl eggs nuts seeds vegetables a little bit of fruit some starchy tubers that's real food that's what the body is is equipped to handle so paleo really looked at that cornucopia of foods as basically as much as you want as often as you want because you're not eating the toxic frankenfoods that society has created for us primal kind of looked at that and said well maybe there's some things that we can add because paleo tended to to think in terms of like dairy being off-limits because until we started hurting animals ten thousand years ago our ancestors didn't consume dairy with you into a whole discussion about why I think dairy is appropriate under certain circumstances but all these foods exist on a spectrum too I mean any food that you talk about I can I can give you exceptionally great versions of those foods and horribly toxic versions of those foods so we talked about dairy for instance you know 2% skim homogenized pasteurized forget it it's nasty stuff it's a one casein which is a completely different casein from which most of us evolved to digest easily on the other hand you've got it that you've got ghee and butter and and artisanal cheeses and I think they're great raw milk if you can get it for some people it's it's great so Dairy became one of those little touch points where paleo said we're not gonna do dairy and I said primal I said look if you're not lactose intolerant then I think dairies fine a little bit of chocolate once in a while a little bit of red wine I mean I wanted to be as inclusive as possible with the primal blueprint I want to create a list of foods that people didn't feel like they were giving up they were that they were sacrificing in large quantities all the foods all the comfort foods that they they'd eaten over time now as paleo and then primal sort of became more mainstream we start talking about keto and what is Kido Kido the ketogenic diet and it's it's a little bit of a laborat but the body runs on fats and and carbohydrates mostly and the three macronutrient we talk about are fast proteins and carbohydrates are largely structural so we want to consume protein just rebuild our bodies but fats and carbohydrates have been sort of the fuel that we've used we were born with this amazing default setting that would allow us to derive most of our energy from that from stored body fat in the absence of food or fuel historically over millions of years which was generally the case for most people you didn't have three square meals a day you'd go you'd miss meals you'd miss days what you go days without eating and you had to maintain energy and you had to maintain maintain muscle mass the body evolved in a credible system to take some of the stored body fat combust that as fuel in the muscles take other parts of that fat send it to the liver and make another fuel that we call ketones most people don't even know about the existence of keto ketones are as they say were born this amazing ability to create these ketones the liver under the right circumstances the liver can make 750 calories a day worth of this fuel worth of ketones so the idea behind the ketogenic diet was let's get away from this dependency on carbohydrate let's get away from this having to eat carbohydrates every couple of hours and have our blood sugar go up because the carbs convert to glucose and that causes insulin and then an insulin takes the glucose out of the bloodstream because it wants to get rid of it and our blood sugar drops and we get hungry again and we have to eat more carbs and you go on this roller coaster all day long and I want to say all day long I'm talking for decades most people start with the first meal their parent the first solid food their parents give them as carbohydrate based so we we lose this ability to burn fat we lose this ability to to make ketones and use ketones efficiently we become carbohydrate dependent for most of our lives so the ketogenic diet and and and what we call keto in general is a way of training your body to get back to this this flexibility this metabolic flexibility where the body can extract energy not just from carbohydrates which most people do but from fat on your plate of food the fat on your hips and thighs and belly the carbohydrate on your plate of food the glucose in your bloodstream the glycogen in your muscles the ketones that your livers making and you become metabolically flexible to the extent that you don't you you don't really ever run out of energy because you always have an energy source your body knows how to take if there's no food immediately available the body just goes hmm I think I'll take it off my thighs and combust it the muscles I'll send some of the liver I'll send the ketones that are made there to fuel the brain we won't eat carbohydrates we'll go as long as you want a couple meals a couple days we don't care we got this handled so the body we train the body to become metabolically flexible this way the other thing and I think the most important aspect of this is that hunger appetite and cravings dissipate or go away in many in many cases so where most people who are carbohydrate dependent are living one meal to the next like okay we just had breakfast what time's lunch and we get better have a snack before lunch gotta have a snack a mid-morning a coffee break in the morning you know or a pick-me-up because I'm gonna feel like taking a nap at 2:30 or three o'clock in the afternoon if I don't have a bagel or an energy bar that's the latest one you know and then go home and have dinner and and then maybe have a snack watching TV this is not only antithetical to health it's also a pattern that that the product like most people in this country engage in we just wait too much food and the problem is it's driven by hunger you know people actually feel hunger because it's a hormonal dysregulation that they're causing by their choices of food and so if I can in you know it and instruct people on other choices of food that would have a different effect and would and would cause their bodies to to up regulate enzyme systems that take fat out of storage and combust it that would up regulate enzyme systems that help in the conversion of us other fats into ketones to use as fuel that would improve what we call mitochondrial biogenesis actually increase the number of power plants in the cell where the fat burns improve the efficiency of those power plants of those mitochondria you literally repattern reprogram your body to become fat adapted and keto adapted and it is such a sense of freedom for everybody who does this Wow so how does somebody sign up for this you sign up you go to the store and buy primal kitchen Mayo well that's all well I'm doing this purpose yeah this is fat yes this is I mean how 2% fat yeah I mean yeah it's basically fat yeah and you're telling me that one of the ways to get this yes is you should eat fat yes but fat makes you fat come on look good look at you you guys well god bless Susan Powter remember her act fat makes you fat I'm like all right I bought into that too by me and I know as well I did it made sense right it made sense that doesn't make you fat and in fact in order to burn fat you have to provide some typically some form of fat to stoke the fire so it's really the absence of carbohydrate that prompts the body to go into this ketogenic state this and by ketogenic we mean the genesis of ketones were making ketones because typically we don't make ketones if we're living on a carbohydrate based carb dependency state most of the time there's no need to the body says I got plenty of fuel I've got this glucose in the bloodstream you're going I know you're gonna eat every two hours that's cool or even every four hours you know the brain is happy with the glucose insulin which is higher because of all the carbohydrate sorry insulin locks fat into the fat cells so you can't combust that fat yeah you just become you and over time excess calories then get converted to stored body fat which historically is awesome imagine you know to a million years ago or 500,000 years ago or whatever you come across some food and you go okay I'm finally finding some food after a couple of days and you don't just eat til you know you're done you keep eating your brain is wired to overeat that food and we evolved the system and it's so elegant a system that takes the extra calories from that food that we over ate and converts them into energy that we instead of carrying five gallon buckets around with us all through the woods and everything we store this on our hips on our butt on our thighs right around the center of gravity so that we can carry it with us and have access to the fuel whenever we run out of fuel it's a beautiful system it's a beautiful system as long as you also have the ability to take that fuel out of storage and burn it and that's what most people have lost so in order to in order to get there you have to withhold carbohydrates you have to say okay I'm gonna I'm gonna cut back on my intake of sugars and sweets and sweetened beverages and pies cakes candies cookies and and this doesn't mean you have to like vegetables are basically free on a keto diet it doesn't mean you have to sacrifice I tell people when you start keto do not let yourself go hungry the first three weeks you're just to train your body to burn fat I don't care what happens I don't care if you don't lose weight I can pretty much guarantee you won't gain weight but I don't care if you don't lose weight that first three weeks I want your body to adapt to this knowledge that they're not going to be that many carbohydrates available it's going to be a different situation in terms of the environment and and as a result and it doesn't happen in a day or a meal or a day or whatever but over a couple of days a couple of weeks the body says oh that's what's going on so I'm gonna up regulate I'm gonna start building more of these mitochondria I'm going to the brain starts to understand how to use ketones better and more efficiently the liver starts pumping ketones out and everything's running quite smoothly and at that point about three weeks in when I say you're fat and keto adapted and that's three weeks of having restricted carbs to say 50 or fewer grams a day we could talk about what that looks like and you're basically there and and from from that point on it's really how how closely can you adhere to a program that's within reason I'm not saying you have to eat 50 grams of carbs the rest of your life in fact what I strive for with metabolic flexibility is what I call the keto his own once you've done the work once you've built a metabolic machinery once you become metabolically flexible then I can have a day where I eat nothing feel fine I can have a day where I eat a lunch and a dinner feel fine I can have a day where I eat a hundred and seventy five or 200 grams of carbs and feel fine what's the difference there's no difference I feel fine that's all that matters all that matters is I'm able to go about my life without any conscious knowledge that oh my god I screwed things up because I was supposed to be keto and then I wasn't and I felt like crap if you feel like crap after that you're not keto adapted so give me an idea most Americans are not keto adapted they don't have metabolic flexibility right they can't turn from sugar burning to fat-burning and people hear about the the keto flu or the Adkins flu how do you get people through that transition phase so their number of ways to do that in my previous book the keto reset diet yeah we talked about a six-week induction phase if you will six weeks of transitioning stair-stepping to mostly a primal primal blueprint type diet which is just basically cutting out breads and pastas and cereals but but you could still have starchy tubers you could still have you know peas and beans and and and things like that that we're natural but would still keep you at around 100 120 grams of carbs a day and that just gets your body used to having fewer carbs most people eat 3 4 500 grams of carbs a day no come on I'm telling you no you absolutely know that it's it's it's scary how much the world depends on carbohydrate so when you but if you eliminate all the toxic foods and you come down to this list of you know healthful foods that are all-natural that around the perimeter of you know the store you can pretty much eat what you want so my first rule of thumb is I say don't let yourself go hungry this is not about you struggling and suffering to get to a certain point it's about you with grace and ease transitioning your body to a point where it's first of all okay with not eating a lot of sugar and not eating every couple of hours and then once you get to that point then all you do is find 50 or 60 grams of carbs per day that you cut from that and then the transition becomes quite easy then it's there's there's really no pedo flew a lot of people who claim to get a keto flu and this is a this is a sense of like a little bit of malaise a little bit of dizziness a little bit of of lightheadedness because the brain hasn't yet gotten used to the lowered glucose and hasn't really gotten the message that it's fine to be burning ketones all the time the brain actually thrives more on ketones than it does on glucose but that transition takes a while any of these things that we do to the human body you know evolution created that this amazing system as I said and one of the aspects of the system is it is that it it likes the status quo until you prove to it that the status quo is no longer gonna be so if if you do think Emil one for one meal or two meals the body goes now I'm resisting that because that's not enough time for me to even think about changing because if I'm going to use resources if this body's gonna use resources to build more enzyme systems to make more mitochondria to increase bone density to increase my those are all are expensive resource using things you got it you've got to figure out how to trick the body into doing that by giving the genetic signals that caused genes that to turn on that build muscle to caused the genes that turn on that make mitochondria or that make bone stronger or that's support the immune system all of these are well within our control as humans based largely on choices we make with the foods that we choose to eat how much sleep we get how well we control stress the types of exercise we choose to do you know you choose to do one type of exercise you become long and skinny and and gaunt you choose to do another type of exercise you become you know larger and more muscular and and stronger so my life's work has been really about identifying these hidden genetic switches that we all have and exposing them to people and saying here's here's something you might try if this is your goal cool you mentioned this already but I want to get back to this should you your book is Kido for life should I always be in ketosis so that's kind of a bait and switch I guess because well it's also you've worked with publishers and so you come up with a we come up with a title and and you like your title and they like yours and you wind up put them together this is this is a longevity book so this is yeah this is this is a book about how to live a longer happier healthier more productive loving life and so keto for life was and because keto was my last book they needed the transition it's great but what what I'm talking about and when I talk about keto and here's a good a good segue to make that distinction so keto is a way of eating a way of living that embodies this low-carb methodology but it doesn't just require or involve or necessitate low-carb you can go keto just by not eating so if you if you don't eat for three days you're in ketosis you prompt the body to create these ketones now it's a lot easier if you don't eat for three days if you become keto adapted if you are a sugar burner and you don't eat for three days you know that's where you have the visions that's where you see Elvis and Jesus and I mean you see the whole the whole thing right so and the crash and burn the crash and burn and that's the crash and burn so to ease your way into this this keto way of eating has as much to do with how often you eat the choices that you make when you eat the fractal nature of eating so as I talk a lot about in in the book and I and I talked a lot on podcasts I don't know if you know a guy named art Devaney oh yeah so so art you know he's always been ahead of the curve on everything and and one of the things he started 10 years ago was this he just says I eat fractally some days I eat a meal some days I don't eat some days he three meals somebody's a big meal a small meal and and he changes it up because that's the human experience historically humans didn't have three portion-controlled meals a day plus two snacks you know plus a bedtime pick-me-up or whatever so keto for life is really about adopting this way this this keto eating strategy that allows you to maintain metabolic flexibility whether you go off keto for a couple of days and say I'm gonna have you know I'm going on vacation when have pasta you know and suffer the consequences but like I went you know I moved to Miami and my wife and I found this restaurant and you know I hadn't had pasta firt seriously for fifteen years and and we found a pasta dish that's got this amazing you know truffle alfredo sauce and it was a gluten-free pasta and we like you know so once a week we would go there and order salmon and in the pasta and split both and that would be our meal but I love to eat I love food I want every bite of food I put my mouth to taste great so I I'm not advocating for sacrifice and discipline and I'm just a you know I'm advocating for mindful eating and ultimately arriving at a place where you are so intuitively tuned into your own body that you don't need to think about it you will go you know I'm I could eat the whole cheesecake but you know that I know that's not gonna serve me so I'll have a bite that'll serve me you know like I can I can go without eating this next meal because I don't have time to eat and I've got some things to do and I'm confident that my body will have zero negative consequences from that and I won't be hangry and I won't think about not eating I'll just it's such as I say it's such a level of freedom that most people never get to experience we think about how much of your life is tied to eating and regular mealtimes and being hungry and feeding the hunger in most most cases unnecessarily like you're not really hungry you just like your mouth is watering cuz it's 12:30 and it's lunchtime that's a you know you bring up a good point so many people become hangry when they start a diet yeah that's the low blood sugar yeah so not having become fat adapted yet and that's why diets don't work if you just count calories if you're if you're just saying well I'm gonna s keto sounds good but I don't think I could go without eating carbs I think I'll just count calories the discipline works as long as it does and then it stops and and most people who are carb centric eaters who start to cut back on all their calories they get hungry they get hangry now they're fighting it the whole way typically they have this entirely different physiology that when they don't eat instead of the body just going hey I got this I'm gonna burn fat I'm gonna make ketones it's all gonna be great love what you're doing the body goes wait I'm used to carbohydrates what's going on the brain starts to get panicky sends signals to the liver though I mean to the adrenals the adrenals secrete cortisol cortisol then goes out and and literally tears down muscle tissue to find a couple of amino acids that can send to the liver to become glucose and it becomes a very destructive process and that's the experience that most people had dieting in the 70s 80s and 90s and when you used to watch The Biggest Loser while you didn't watch it but you know you see these people lose 200 pounds in a season 150 150 200 pounds then you hear about them three years later they're back to where they were before and worse and bigger yeah because they they lost muscle mass and their metabolisms got all screwed up and now it took fewer calories to fill them and yet they still had the hunger thing it's horrible so the the keto lifestyle really sort of fixes all that and and does so without necessitating that you be ketogenic your whole your whole life you know the term ketosis is an interesting term because OSIS means in excess of something mmm so ketosis basically means you have an excess of ketones in the bloodstream well when you first start eating this way delivers like I can do this and the liver starts pumping out ketones and because you haven't built the metabolic machinery to burn them you you you can take a blood test and you go oh my gosh I'm four millimolar I'm six millimolar yeah I'm I'm in ketosis well that doesn't mean anything to me that you're in ketosis I mean that's you're making ketones but if you're not using them you're not good you're not getting the benefits of this lifestyle so you have to build a metabolic machine or in there's it takes it it takes a little bit of time and a little bit of there's an area where you you have to be disciplined about it but and there's certain workouts that you can do that will enhance the effect more quickly but there's a point at which you become so keto adapted that the liver which started out going frantically pumping out ketones and you'd pee them out and that's why you show purple on these P strips and you dad read them out and that's why your friends would stay away and now the livers going see I know what you're doing here you're not gonna you know you're not gonna fool me I want to save I want to conserve energy because that's a human that's the human experience is to not use resources waste resources and and the body recognizes that once you get keto adapted and fat adapted most of the work you do throughout the day can be fueled by fat so your muscles are now you're not burning glycogen and a little bit but they're not they're mostly burning fat and you can do 85 90 92 percent of all your work just burning fat and that's a beautiful thing so now you're as you're just walking around the day or you're doing you know minor tasks and even going to the gym you're mostly burning fat now the brain doesn't burn fat the brain is using the ketones so you got the muscles using the fat the brains using ketones you don't need glucose very much at all a little bit for red blood cells and a few other things but your body actually makes glucose it's it's again it's so elegant Steve so you got the triglyceride that the the three fatty acids get combusted the glycerol becomes part of a mechanism that makes glucose right it's it's so elegant it's almost like a closed loop so your liver just goes oh I see what you're doing when you go to the gym and you do all this work your legs you might do a leg day and your legs require 30 times as much energy to go through that work while you're doing your legs how much energy does your brain require same as you same as usual so the brain just goes like this all day long right and and if all you're doing is supplying ketones for the brain the liver gets it the litter goes I'm just gonna pump out enough ketones to the brain I don't need to waste these resources and pee them out or or you know exhale them or sweat them out and so what you find is that people who have been in a keto lifestyle for a long time don't even register as in ketosis on these monitors because they're so well adapted the body's just got it dialed in it's it's a it's such a beautiful thing this body that we have that's great information because I have a number of patients as you know and in all my books I have a chapter of the the Quito plant paradox system and a ton of my patients will come in and say I'm in ketosis and you know my my strips and ketosis or my breath machine or my blood says I'm really in ketosis I'm in huge ketosis and I haven't lost an ounce this doesn't work yeah and I think your explanation is incredibly good you know that just because you're pumping out all these ketones doesn't mean you're actually using them no and in some cases people will use the sort of the the dirty keto or the shortcuts and they'll say okay am i heard MCT oil is a is a great substrate to make ketones so they drink MCT oil it's you drink too much and you and you have some digestive upset by that I'm true or ketone salts and because they think what they're doing is they're chasing the ketones and you gotta chase the results yet you don't it I don't care about the ketones I want the results and the fact that I know what's going on below the surface I know that you're making ketones that's all like that I care about so if you show me that you're in ketosis that's great I think that's an awesome first path for you in a first couple steps but do the work do the you know workout in the gym and and then what you will find and I bet this is happening with with your patients we don't need to eat nearly as many calories as we think we do I amaze and almost scare myself on how few calories I eat some days and I'm still carrying a little bit of you know mass here you know muscle mass and it's it's amazing to think that this system that we evolved can become a closed loop if you think about it this way all right you don't eat four so you don't eat for three days what happens a body goes well if your keto adapted which you already are if you're an ancestral human or keto now okay the body will take fat out of fat stores and you know I'm ten percent body fat and I have enough fat on me to walk three hundred miles without you know last a long time lasts a long time so the body takes a fat out of out of fat cells and it uses it for daily you know for daily movement and getting around it sends some of that fat to the liver to become ketones and as I said the liver can make up to 750 calories where the ketones a day it takes some of the glycerol from the tribe triglyceride molecules uses that as a substrate to make that whatever little glucose for 40 grams a day or something like that that it needs and then a whole new set of variables enters and I think this is amazing there's a there's a genetic response an epigenetic response to these changes that causes protein to be spared so whereas on a normal day we probably eat too much protein and certainly from one meal to the next if we eat too much protein it's easy we've just deaminated and pee it out but now the body tends to spare protein and if you're not burning protein because you're not supposed to combust protein proteins supposed to be for structural or better repair then you've got this system that is burning fat creating ketones a little bit of glucose sparing protein and so when you see people who do who've been good at this well fast for five days and and not lose much in the way of muscle mass a pound pound and a half which they get back as most of that is glycogen and in water and they're burning off fat and I suspect most of the fat they're burning off is visceral fat which is another major reason to do fasts once you get keto adapted and get metabolically flexible but this closed loop is so cool because if you think of well how many calories do I need to get by in a day and you probably don't need that many if your livers cranking out five six hundred enough for the brain and your and your body is combusting fat for energy and you're sparing protein you probably didn't need that many calories to get through a day in the first place it might be 1211 hour 1200 calories for some people some people thought up until now they did the math online oh I can have 1875 calories a day well you can and you make maybe you can get away with it but that doesn't mean it's good for you I want to take a little bit of a diversion here and say most people tend to see what they can get away with so most people in life are like and it's human nature and I'm not by doing I'm not judging but you know like how little work can I do at work and still get paid and not get fired right and and you know how how easy can I do this workout and not get caught by my trainer or what but but one of those things is how much food can I eat and not gain weight what's the biggest amount of this meal I can eat and not feel like a pig what's the biggest piece of cheesecake I can have and and not feel guilty about having had that and so we tend to ask permission like okay they fill my plate up that must be a serving it must be okay or they gave me a you know Cheesecake Factory gave me a slice this big they call that one serving so as long as I only have two servings I'm good to go meanwhile you're you know your granny might have made you with cheesecake and she cut you a little slice like that well that's what granny thinks is a serving so the idea really is like people will say well how much of this can I eat and what can I get away with I a couple years ago I just thought you know that's a it's a strange way of looking at it I go to the gym and I see people on a treadmill 45 minutes 50 minutes on the treadmill why you running so much oh because I love to eat wait a minute you're doing all this work struggling and suffering and sweating and groaning just so you can have a few more bites of something you probably shouldn't have in the first place like that is so you realize how just bizarre that is and yet people do that I'll I exercise because I'd love to eat I drank eight diet cokes a day so I could have more to eat I mean no perfect example a perfect example you kit you carry this you audit your your day you know and you carry this little tally pad with you okay I can have this tonight because I didn't have that for lunch and it's crazy so I thought it's at one point I said you know let's let's flip this on it's on edge and say what's the least amount of food I can eat maintain muscle mass maintain energy not get sick not get cold and most importantly not be hungry because hunger ruins everything hungry hunger is the Great destroyer of any of these programs so I started looking at what's what was the least amount of food I could have and it's a and it's a it's like half of what I used to think I needed yeah so much to get by in a day it's not much and I think so I think when people are consistently you know some people use Kido as an excuse to eat more food because they're eating a lot of fat right now you think what because I'm glad you said that yeah how often do you think that is happening in the in the Kido mood I think less so now because it got called out a bunch of a bunch maybe a year or two ago I was one of the people calling it out but it you can't you can't hide behind that some of the early studies on keto diets ketogenic diets would show that you could eat 4500 calories a day and not gain weight and you will like how could that be well how that is is if you're eating mostly fat a little bit of protein and no carb you don't create any insulin and insulin is a nutrient storage hormone so you're not storing fat your body is figuring out a way to combust it by Thurman thermogenesis and a number of other probably unhealthy ways in which to dispose of this excess energy but because you're not creating insulin you can't you can't really store it I mean protein is a does have an effect on insulin but but no high fat really high fat like 90% fat you know 10% or 15% protein diets yeah so but that was interesting because because people read that study and thought well okay I can eat 45 out of couch today I'm not gaining weight but you're not gonna lose weight because the idea behind losing weight is you want to lose fat you want to burn fat you want combust the stored body fat and so when you get good at when you get keto adapted and you're in that keto is what I call the keto zone and metabolically flexible then you can play around with eating smaller smaller smaller quantities food and that's really when you're like every time you think you need 500 calories to get through the next six hours you think well I could eat a meal or I could take it off my butt or my thighs and and my body won't know won't care won't won't you know have any negative consequences either way so I may as well choose not to eat this meal and and and lose that and burn combust that body fat but mark aren't you gonna get hungry as I said that it's it's so crazy what happens to your appetite when you develop this metabolic flexibility the reason you have an appetite for the most part is this these you know leptin and ghrelin balance and and insulin is involved there and glucagon and there's these hormones in the body that are sort of trying to keep you homeostasis and we scrote we screw it up and throw it off with this high carb diet once you get you eliminate the carbs and you get to the point where you're eating quality fats and quality proteins and a little bit of vegetables and well or a fair amount of vegetables for that matter you you get to the point where the body always has energy like the first thing that happens with with people who go keto is they they they sort of like they can't eat three meals a day because it's just too much food so most people wake up in the morning and I promote this I say well just see how once your taquito dappin see how long you can go without being hungry in the morning and most people within a couple of days ago I made it to noon no problem I have a cup of coffee myself at seven o'clock in the morning and then I don't eat till 1:30 some days I don't eat lunch and it's and I work out in the morning I work out fasted I don't eat after the workout I don't feel compelled to I recognize that there's a there's an effective working out fasted and then not eating afterwards that causes the body to release a pulse of growth hormone and testosterone and if you eat a post-workout meal right after say doing a heavy leg session or a heavy training session if it's a high carb meal then the insulin in that meal will blunt the the growth hormone and the testosterone yeah spike yeah and that's what I used to do my whole life was I would you know again back in the 80s and 90s the mantra was eat a post-workout meal that was 10% or 20% protein if four to one carbohydrate to protein protein and you'd you take advantage of the glycogen recent window which your body makes Lika gin anyway even when you don't eat any carbohydrate at all all this does is speed it up and why do you want to speed it up well theoretically in the old days you want to speed it up because I gotta go run 15 miles again tomorrow and the next day and the next day which is as we know ludicrous since you brought that up many of our listeners don't know this but yeah you were an incredibly accomplished enduro endurance athlete I mean incredibly don't be modest you had a lot of serious health problems yeah can can you talk about that for a moment well so the as I said the the when I was a runner exclusively I ran a hundred miles a week on average some we said we're 120 in some weeks I only ran 80 for years at a time and that's when I developed osteoarthritis in my feet which I presumed was a result of all the miles that's when I had the worst of my IBS my irritable bowel syndrome that's when I had the itis and in fact it wasn't even the the arthritis my feet the cot that prompted me to quit becoming a leat marathoner it was tendonitis in my hips that just would not resolve and that's really I think as I look back on it it's the diet the highly inflammatory diet certainly not helped by by the pounding you know of a hundred plus miles a week on a body that was probably only designed to do 50 or 60 miles a week so those were very frustrating times for me because I finished fifth in the US National Championship in the marathon in 1980 qualified feet Olympic Trials of course 1980 was a the year that we didn't send a team to the Olympics and and then I two years later I finished fourth in Ironman in Hawaii and you know so I had I had a certain level of of expertise and prowess and endurance petition and later on I said you know the versa climber that that no J I set the world record for the mile climb in that 5,280 feet 22 minutes and 40 seconds and I said I don't think it's been broken since I know yeah so anyway so I was chasing you know performance my whole life and forted it turns it seems at every turn by my my diet which I only discovered after I had long since retired people would say well if he had to over again would you would you go back and change your diet and I'd say no because actually the way I got to where I am now was so profound I probably wouldn't have appreciated it if I'd started out that way so well I suppose you had a perfect day you know I wrote in my last book about the dangers of marathons and long-distance training got an opinion look at me I wrote a book a couple years ago called primal endurance and it was basically my capitulation it was my I had enough friends who said I don't care what you say mark you had you ran marathons you enjoyed it you got a lot of it I want to run a marathon damn it how do I do it and I'm like alright if you couldn't run a marathon I'll show you how to do it with the least amount of pain suffering sacrifice and so on and and so I would certainly train what we call Train low race I would train low carb I would race with my carb tanks more full I would make my long slow runs longer and slower and I would make my short fast runs shorter and faster I would do much more strength training in the gym I developed what we call maximum sustained power over time so I'd be much more methodical about about breaking the component parts of competition down into their essential elements when you're an endurance athlete particularly runner you just run and and typically and the the reason I talk about making my longer runs longer and slower is we we talked about this maximum aerobic function that we have and so we use the number of 180 minus your age so if you train it 180 minus your age the lab results across thousands of people have shown that that's the heart rate at which below which you're using mostly fat so you're using a lot of oxygen and mostly fat above that heart rate you're starting to burn more glycogen and you're tapping in the glycogen stores now why is that important well if you want to run long distance you want to get as much energy from fat as possible you don't want to happen your glycogen stores but people will come back to me and say well wait a minute if I if I train it 180 minus my age and I'm you know I'm 30 years old or whatever and I'm training 150 mark I can race it 165 or 170 I can train all day at 170 175 and I'm going so slow at 150 and my answer is well okay you're going slow because you suck at burning fat you're good at burning sugar I was great at burning sugar I mean I was you know I ran how I ran burning but burning mostly sugar but I also did a number on my heart from having done that I ran in what we call the no-man's land for the longest time a black the black hole of training where you're not going slow enough to improve aerobic capacity and you're not going fast enough to improve anaerobic threshold you're just beating yourself up you're practicing hurting literally and that's what so many runners do in this black hole of training at you know heart rate of one of like 80 to 87 90 percent of their of their max and they spend 50 percent of their time training in that black hole with no appreciable benefits and that's why I see these guys like well how many marathons you do this year I did eight marathons this year oh really well okay well I did three forty three forty two 345 346 and three forty okay well that like you're doing that much work you should really improve but they're just practicing to run that same speed the whole time so there's a way to do it but and I and this way I tell people Steve I as I say all right if you want to run marathon let you run too you run one to finish that's great that's a belt buckle thing that's a life a bucket list thing if you're really like if you really liked it I'll let you run one more to see how fast you can go and if you haven't broken three hours as a man you're not a runner find another sport that's that's pretty much the way I look at it all right good advice from the guy who need to piss anybody off their hose avid marathoner but okay so you know your book is not just about eating it's it's an amazing exercise program what should your listeners who want to get more exercise but you don't want to go or do a marathon you got give me a couple things like me walking is still the best thing anybody can do like you know I saw you and your wife and we were out doing a hike around San John cap Verano if you did the whole oh yeah we do okay that think is weak because we rarely do that small cap where we saw you but walking is spectacular it's it's what it's it's the most human of all activities we're bipedal by the way how do we not fall over every just like we're like a Segway that you know how we maintain this upright position walking of course you know swimming and easy cycling with an occasional hard session thrown in but if all you ever do is walk you're 80% where you need need to be and I'm talking you know walking and appreciate about walking thirty to thirty minutes to an hour a day on average so some days can be an hour and a half and some days nothing that's really the best and then I stand I think two days in a week two days in the gym per week is all you need in terms of lifting weights any more than that and you're kind of you're either not doing it hard enough when you're doing it or you're you're not going to the gym for the right reasons you just want to chat it up and see people which a lot of people - oh yeah yeah yeah so alright you do recommend a few supplements I want to talk about three of them collagen so collagen should be the fourth macronutrient in my mind we have you know fat protein and carbohydrate I think collagen should be a separate category because I think it's it's critical component of its collagen in our body skin hair nails connective tissue tendons ligaments fascia is all collagen so the most prevalent amount of protein in our body is of collagen in nature it's it's it's collagenous material and there's certain collagen peptides that we need to get in order to keep up with the turnover of collagen and we don't get them in the standard diet today until two hundred years ago or a hundred years ago you know we ate all parts of the animal we ate nose-to-tail c8 you didn't eat just eat the choice cuts of meat the prime rib and the t-bone but you ate the knuckles and the and the gristle and the organs and if it was chicken or fish you ate the skin and if it was after all of the nether parts of the animal were consumed you took the carcass and boiled it down and made a stock and everybody did that and so we all had access to collagen over the years as that sort of fell by the wayside at least in the 50s and 60s your mother my mother they took knocks gelatin for their nails gelatin and then we had jello we had jello which was you know give it whatever assign it whatever value you want it was a source of collagen it's gelatin gelatin collagen pretty much the same thing so kids got collagen in their diet from gelatin well after gel jello had a little bit of a falling off because of sugar and sweetness and stuff like that in the last 10 or 15 years there's no source of collagen in our diet for anybody and so we're seeing like among elite athletes in you know basketball players who are tearing MCLs ACLs and Achilles tendons and the surgeons will say geez I used to be able to like have to hack through these these sinewy parts now they cut like butter it's because people don't get enough collagen in their diet so I'm a huge fan of consuming college and I take my company makes a collagen supplement that's how much I liked the results i got when i started taking collagen i do anywhere from 15 to 25 grams a day but you're not telling our listeners to go eat jello look somebody's gonna hear crap jello is jello is look if you're not eating if you're not eating collagen in any other source jello is a great source gel is a good way to get it so I'm just saying - the sugar well they make it with that you know they make a low sugar jello no all right so I have to say that go ahead how about vitamin D so vitamin D Steve why do they call it a vitamin ought to be hormone it is a hormone but it's got classified a long time ago and that's science for you the science is settled and it's a vitamin vitamin D is probably the most important single vitamin have all of them in you know it's it's it integral part of the functioning of cells it's you know we our immune system depends far more in vitamin D than on vitamin C for instance oh yeah you know absolutely and you know critical component in the body's ability to recognize precancerous conditions and make the repairs to them and typically if we're out of the Sun we have this again we have this design system that says we get 20 minutes of Sun time a day on unprotected skin and the body takes cholesterol you know the much-maligned molecule in the skin converts to the vitamin D and we're good to go most people don't spend time out in the Sun most people have been scared away from the Sun by their dermatologists people in northern climates who don't have access to Sun for most of the year because of where they live like those people should all be taking vitamin D and you ask which form you know ergo calluses for all cholecalciferol mushroom based I like I like a blend of all three of those to some people absorb different versions of it better than others and you know you might have a different opinion on that but I like to have people have if you're not getting any Sun like even like I'm 10 most of the time but if I'm not in the Sun for a couple of weeks I start down on the vitamin D it's that important to me I want to have high levels of vitamin D throughout my body me too you need to all right so we've got a couple of primal kitchen plant paradox compatible products here tell me all about primal kitchen so when you clean up your diet you get rid of the sugars and and the industrial seed oils again you get rid of corn oil and canola oil and soybean oil and processed hydrogenated oils and trans fats and you come down to this list of healthy choices vegetables eggs chicken fish meat it could get a little boring unless you figured out a different method of preparation or sauces and dressings and toppings and things to put on these foods to give them variety so that you would eat them and want to consume them on a regular basis so I've been writing about food for 15-20 years and I recognize that nobody was making the kind of sauces and dressings and toppings and condiments that I would like to have exist the kind that you could use with reckless abandon throughout most of our lives well this is the you know use mayonnaise sparingly it tastes great but it's bad for you you know or as Oprah used to say we'll take your fork and go dip a piece of lettuce and then go show it to the salad dressing and then you know and then and then eat it or snip your tongue if that's right if your fork and the salad dressing then goes stab some lettuce please I'm like you know I want to have I want something to taste great and is good for me and the more I put on my food the better it is so we launched primal kitchen with that exact that that mission statement which is to make you know healthful eating exciting and fun again and our first product was this promoting Mayo which is made with avocado oil organic eggs from cage free hands organic vinegar from non-gmo beets no sugar it is it and it took off it's the you know it's been for years then the biggest selling condiment in all of Whole Foods and we're now in 20,000 stores throughout the country with this and that sort of begat a whole new we have four flavors of mayonnaise we have 14 flavors of salad dressing and the dressings all use avocado oil as as the only oil in the dressing an avocado oil is recognized as the highest heart-healthy you know it's got the most monounsaturated of any of the oils that you can get typically well so you you've recently sold this company to a big food company yes I take it you're actively involved yeah 100% that's my face on the label racing man that's me so how how do you prevent what's happened to other people when big food takes a really good company over I don't know what you know what you hear about other companies recently because it's not happening recently recently what happens is big food goes wow these guys are really crushing it they know what they're doing we've sort of lost touch with the marketplace so they bought us because of what we bring to them and we bring so-so and by the way they bought us and then they're like ok we're not going to touch you go do what you do so we still have our offices in Oxnard we still have everybody that was you know with the company when it got acquired everybody's going about their business we still have great R&D sessions what what Kraft Heinz has done is given us resources so we have more distribution we have deeper pockets to sort of do some R&D and stuff but no we will not be changing this at all and if we do it's because I say I found a better way not a compromise and and I think that's you're gonna see more and more of that that big food is now acquiring the you know the the better what they call the better for you category mm-hmm with an eye toward not toward diluting it and making it worse but an eye toward like learning like okay this is clearly where the consumer wants us to go and some of the brands we have can never get there because they're iconic and we can't change those so this is the face of the future that's great to hear yeah yeah cuz I have some friends who are sad richer but sadder and wiser because their products had gotten change that I ban food but okay so that covers a lot that's really good and we've you dazzled people with your knowledge that been thankful enough to her for years so where as if anybody really needs to know where can they find oh you know Amazon Barnes & Noble everywhere books are sold Kito for life yeah and your products are everywhere yeah they're there you know we have the Mayo and some of the products are in Costco or in you know target whole food Safeway Kroger Publix but you know on down the line pretty much everywhere now and Instagram blogs where so I'm mark Sisson primal on Instagram it's just a fair amount of just shirtless shots of me so you don't go there then I've got marks daily Apple on Instagram and marks daily apple.com is the blog yeah now in our 13th year 14th year and going strong you know an article every day for 14 years yeah and I think that's it all right cool great to see ya you too man all right we'll see you in the South of France thank you very alright time for an audience question Janine Jackson on YouTube ass I am wondering if there is a way to prepare corn that removes the lectins it is quickly mentioned on one of your videos that the process used to make corn masa may do this I am hoping to return corn tortillas and grits to my diet I'd also love to add polenta and plain tortilla chips I bet you would there there's no human need for corn corn is one of the most mischievous molecules that you can eat and quite frankly if you are gluten sensitive or gluten intolerant 70% of you will react to the molecules in corn as if it was gluten so yes the Indians were smart enough to treat corn with lye to produce hominy I can tell you the stories of what happened when corn was introduced to northern Italy and look up the word sometime and you'll find out the horrors of introduced in corn that was not treated with lye so I mean millet makes a great polenta makes a great oatmeal makes a great grits you know need corn and your diet just stay away from it that's all before you go I just wanted to remind you that you can find the show on itunes google play stitcher or wherever you get your podcast because I'm doctor Gundry and I'm always looking out for you [Music]

Channel: The Dr. Gundry Podcast

Views: 221,322

Rating: 4.8731246 out of 5

Keywords: dr gundry, dr. gundry, steven gundry, gundry md, gundry, plant paradox, the plant paradox, plant paradox diet, diet, the dr gundry podcast, podcast, interview, mark sisson, mark sisson primal blueprint, mark sisson diet, mark sisson keto, keto diet for beginners, is coffee good for you, mark sisson primal endurance, keto reset diet mark sisson, mark sisson net worth, mark sisson reset, mark sisson podcast, fat won't make you fat, keto, ketogenic, primal, ketogenic diet

Id: 61FgYNALjs8

Length: 67min 8sec (4028 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 02 2020