How To Increase Energy, Lose Fat, And Prevent Disease The Paleo Way with Robb Wolf and Ari Whitten

in this episode we're talking to paleo and health expert Rob wolf on the true factors that drive fat game calories versus carbs and insulin and how to get your body composition back your health back and your energy back the Paleo way enjoy hey everyone welcome back to the energy blueprint podcast I'm your host Ari Witten and today I have with me a former research biochemist and - you're two times New York Times bestselling author and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of the Paleo solution and wired to eat which is the most recent book Rob Wolfe such a pleasure such a pleasure to have you on Rob a huge honor to be here thank you yeah so you are an expert in the paleo movement a health expert more broadly but you've been kind of a thought leader within the paleo movement for jeez a long time now what 15 years or something what it as of July of this year mark 20 years the first time that I put a paleo diet into this newfangled search engine called Google and then tracked down Loren Cordain and art Devaney and some of my mentors in that scene yeah awesome yeah so that's great one of the things that I'd like to talk about because I also kind of started following paleo geez almost 20 years ago at this point I I kind of first encountered paleo maybe when I was like 16 or something okay okay right before the 2000 some somewhere around there and I was like hardcore into paleo for for many years and it's still to this day even though I don't necessarily preach paleo and that's not sort of my my brand isn't built around that the paleo approach to things that naturalistic philosophy replicate the environment and the diet of our ancestors it has been a huge influence on my thinking right so one of the things that I think would be interesting to kind of start this is to talk about something you mentioned in your book which is the discordance hypothesis and you talk briefly about what that is all about as kind of an intro to this whole concept of paleo yeah dad that's great and often times you have to kind of drag people kicking and screaming to that thing instead of starting with kind of first principles and you know if an alien species came here or if we went to another world and we were observing organisms on a different planet one of the first things that we would ask is you know how do they eat nor what do they what type of like light-dark cycles do they adhere to or do they adhere to anything like that and so this is just kind of a exploration and an understanding of the natural history of an organism you know if we talk about cows eat grass and they live in herds and you know there's these certain kind of characteristics about them to kind of define them as a species and it's not where people get tripped up a little bit is this idea that an organism is somehow like perfectly matched for is it its environment and that's not necessarily the case but it because it's always dynamic the environments always changing organisms are always changing and it's always a little bit of a coin toss as to whether or not the adaptations an organism has is beneficial or not and it's this Corden's idea though comes in where if you see some sort of consistent problems in an organism particularly chronic degenerative disease that occurs after something has changed then there's a pretty good bet that maybe there's a mismatch between the genetics the epigenetics that define that organism and you know its current state of affairs and so this is some of the the you know it's hard to wrap our arms around in in some ways because it's somewhat soft in in science we can't do a really easily controlled randomized control trial where we feed a whole population a paleo type diet and have them live in accordance with the seasons and all that type of stuff but we do have a lot of information that's come out of the anthropological and archaeological you know kind of research and literature over the last maybe 200 years that is painted hunter-gatherers horticulturalists pastoralists in a pretty favorable light with regards to their their individual health and it's all observational but it's interesting that we have seen these transitions of people that say have lived a more pre westernized type of lifestyle and they begin adopting things like processed foods you know work saving devices and what what have you and we tend to see these folks begin to develop what we would characterize is the kind of Western degenerative diseases and in a few instances we've had situations where these groups that are kind of newly westernized go back to their traditional ways of eating or live and living which can't can't be emphasized enough people focus so much on the dietary part but the culture and the lifestyle and the social support are all critical to this too but these folks that have kind of become westernized they go back to living some of the more traditional life ways and these Western degenerative diseases tend to remediate or disappear altogether so this discordance idea is really just kind of looking at an organism or even a whole ecosystem and kind of asking a question is there something that has changed here and it's changed in such a rapid clip that it's causing some sort of really significant problems mm-hmm so with with that in mind what are the big factors and I know you just alluded to a few of them in passing there I also love that you're not diet myopic which far too many health gurus are but what are some of these big areas of discordance between sort of human biology and the environments we've evolved for or have been most of the through most of human evolution and versus the environment that we're now in yeah yeah that's a great question and I kind of look like I'm a lumper instead of splitter so I tend to throw a lot of things under under one one roof in in some ways but sleep in circadian rhythm is one major shift and I could maybe make an argument that that is shifted even more profoundly than our food has although it you can get people into a fistfight over that they're like no processed food is worse or no you know artificial lights are worse but they're both bad and the combination is is really pretty pretty terrible but when we look at you know there was a huge chunk of human and pre human evolution where we didn't have fire then there was a pretty good chunk where we had fire but it was sporadic and then we had the technology to create fire and then it was only very very recently that we had things like oil lamps and then you know at the beginning of the 1900s electric light bulbs where we could develop a 24-hour work shift or multiple shifts and and what-have-you so I would say that that sleep and circadian biology the change in the photo period that we are exposed to is a massive shift that we've experienced well let me let me interrupt you already and just say that you've already got the keys to my heart the fact that you mentioned that factor first because that that's something that I put a huge emphasis on as well and I I'm with you 100% that I think that is one of the biggest drivers of disease in the modern world and far too few people are talking about it a lot of people just kind of go hey get your eight hours of sleep and that's as deep as they go into that subject right and it's just not enough unfortunately and you don't like some of the work that I do I'm on the board of directors of a clinic here in Reno and we work with the general public but we do a lot of work with police military and fire personnel and we see really wacky disordered metabolism in the folks that are on shift work and you see this also in medical circles you see this in new parents too you know where they just can't figure out how their body is kind of like rotting away out from under them but it's basically the you know the lack of sleep the disordered circadian rhythms so to your point it's not just that eight hours of sleep it's when that eight hours occurs and the Centers for Disease Control now recognize shift work as a known carcinogen because of the alterations that it imposes in our immune system and pro-inflammatory State and what have you see Amanda in the same camp as you like I you usually lead with the sleep and and light part first and in part I I think that some of that it's almost a baton baton switch people are kind of expecting the food guy to talk about food but then when I talk about this other thing then I go to the second point which is you know the change in our dietary practices and and this is again a very contentious topic because within that kind of hunter-gatherer ancestral health framework we have examples of very high carb consuming cultures we have examples of low carb consuming cultures the one universal that we have is if these folks didn't really eat much in the way of processed food and then when we see the introduction of processed foods seed oils refined grains sugars then we see all kinds of problems from dental caries to a shortening of stature increase in in cardiovascular disease processes depression you know so that that's another piece that people get very religiously dogmatic about you know this particular protein carb fat ratio and I think that that's kind of silly humans should be very ideally flexible with what type of fuel gets thrown in and how they can respond but there is a reality that it's changed a lot yeah and I I definitely want to dig into a lot of specifics there with you yeah I'll wait till you kind of go through all the the rest of the factors here yeah yeah and then the the two remaining pieces are movement instead of calling it exercise I call it movement nobody likes exercise everybody likes to move so I can lump it under movement it's interesting or even not that far removed hunter-gatherer ancestors and even contemporary hunter-gatherers they have a lot of downtime they have a lot of time to relax but then on days where they're active they are quite active so they have a very periodized kind of activity pattern so they're not burning themselves out the way that people do say like trying to be an elite level athlete but at the same time they are not chronically couch bound either so there's this really interesting kind of punctuated activity pattern that looks the same way that animals express out in nature and you know so our movement has changed a lot and finally the last part I call community at large and that is our social connectivity like we we were you know theoretically evolved to be in these extended family groups humans are really good at keeping track of about a hundred and fifty people once our community groups get beyond 150 people it's hard to keep track of that it's called Dunbar's a number and it seems to track with all kind of primate brain sizes and then under again I'm kind of a lump or so under community I kind of throw our gut microbiota and our microbiome in general under that so the community is both our interaction with the micro organisms that have co-evolved with us but then also the greater kind of human and also ecological community that we are ideally a part of yeah yeah beautiful and I think you know I'll mention also that I think community the social aspect of things is also much neglected aspect of health among most health gurus and and it's just vital I mean there's there such impressive research there's as you know showing like loneliness social isolation is you know I forget the exact numbers but it's it's on par worse than you know being a smoker you know pack of a smoking habit yeah yeah which is amazing that's that's pretty stunning stuff yeah so one of the things you mentioned which I really like about your work when you talked about nutrition a minute ago is that we have examples of you know ancestral diets that are a very wide variety of macronutrient ratios I've I've also written a book related to this topic so I've done very very extensive research on the macronutrient ratios of basically all the different tribes around the world that have been studied one quick point I'll make in passing is a lot of people have this conception of Paleo diet is like it's speculation about people that lived 20,000 years ago and people often don't realize that there are tribes that exist today or have existed in the last hundred years that have actually been studied mmm-hmm or their their diet has actually been analyzed ken white yeah and we know exactly what they eat and that the macronutrient carbs fats proteins breakdowns of this and there are a number of tribes as you mentioned the you can list off that the two key senta the kiddo vans the c-money the odds a lot of different tribes that are either certainly not low-carb or are overtly very very high carb diets and their scenes you know these tribes are also renowned for their health for their life and cardiovascular disease lack of obesity lack of diabetes and so on you know all the same things as sort of the other hunter-gatherer tribes there doesn't seem to be any indication that those tribes are less healthy than the tribes that are lower carb and yet somehow the paleo movement kind of got married to this whole low carb movement right and and is also kind of to within a lot of different health gurus is kind of also married now to the keto movement does that become more popular and yet you know there's this weird disconnect there because people are preaching this idea that to eat paleo is to eat low carb or to eat keto and there are just as many instances of paleo people or hunter-gatherer people eating high carb and almost none and I think literally none of tribes eating keto diets right and yet like how do how do you make sense of the fact that paleo kind of became married to the whole low carb movement you know it it's interesting on the one hand eating paleo in general compared to the way that most folks are traditionally eating usually does raloo reduce the total carbohydrate load so it kind of just tends to head that direction I think that there's also on the the almost like a practical engineering perspective when people get in and start tinkering with this stuff be and this is where we get into a fair amount of speculation so there's not a randomized control trial that supports this this is kind of you know me me speculating but changes in our gut microbiome exposure to antibiotics which clearly antibiotics save lives but they're also a mitochondrial toxicant like they damage the mitochondria I remember in my undergrad biochemistry class when I was looking at how certain forms of antibiotics preferentially go after the ribosomes that are in bacteria and then I was thinking hey mitochondria are basically an endosymbiotic bacteria wouldn't this effect that my professor was like oh no no no and then I started researching it's like yeah that's a problem you know and so it's interesting because on the one hand if we're being really honest about what the composition of a an ancestral diet is it was quite variable it depended on latitude so like the more recent ancestry northern european versus say like my wife who's more from europe and the middle east there's probably gonna be some genetic differences there but more recent adaptations with regards to epigenetics and also gut microbiota may be a really big factor and i do think that that kind of starvation state or ketosis is almost kind of like a when you're when were little kids and you're playing tag there's like a home base it's kind of the safe place to go that fasting state seems to be kind of a home base if you go back to there all kinds of really cool kind of metabolic resets happen and I think to some degree the reason why this lower carb approach kind of got wed into the paper the interpretation of what paleo is is because a lot of us are kind of metabolic like broken I would actually put myself in that camp I just run better on lower carbon I mean I've tried everything and my gut is my gut health is so much better than it used to be 20 years ago but there's just kind of a reality that you know once I start cracking up above about a hundred 110 grams of carbs a day I just don't feel as well I get on kind of a blood sugar roller coaster I do Brazilian Jiu Jitsu I lift some weight so I'm able to maintain a very high activity level but for both genetic and epigenetic reasons I think I'm at this kind of far end of the spectrum that I definitely do better at a lower carb intake so one like my wife she can eat rice or she could fast a day and drop right into deep ketosis and she's incredibly metabolically flexible so weight you know to circle back to the original question where did these things come about I think again it's almost like an engineering problem where even though we had this understanding at least in theory that Paleo diet wasn't necessarily low-carb as people played with things a lot of folks found that they did indeed feel better when they kind of titrated the carbs down to that lower level but again I would say that that's more of a necessity based off of some potential metabolic damage that has occurred either in utero or while we've been you know living our lives and isn't necessarily reflective of the natural state that we should have we should be able to throw a big variety of different macronutrients down and just just you you know really thrive on that it shouldn't need to be a very pedantic you know forty thirty thirty type of breakdown or even more the exclusively fat centric breakdown that I I seem to do better on mmm-hmm excellent so there's a whole bunch of nuances there that I would love to get into but I think the best place to go right now is I'd like to dig a bit more into kind of the the biology of fat gain mm-hmm and a couple of the the two big paradigms and if you don't mind I'd love to actually read this little couple sentences from your book because I think this is a really nice way of kind of encapsulating the context of this so you said when folks read this book there will be those who say I'm an idiot for recommending low carb diets at all they will cling tenaciously to the calories in calories out model and largely dismiss the influence of hormones and the neuro regulation of appetite in the process of health and weight gain there will also be folks who say I'm a dullard for not recommending a low-carb diet to everyone they will say the whole story here relates to insulin control only and calories are inconsequential now let me ask you something how can I be an idiot about both of these polar opposite situations and you go on therefore there you go on from there but I think that's a really nice way of encapsulating these two kind of predominant paradigms that are out there so one of the things that I appreciate about your work is that you're not religiously in one of these two camps and you understand the territory and the science around this so can you explain both of those paradigms to be dogmatically hardcore in either of those paradigms is flawed and kind of what how this all maps out oh man yeah and you know I so wish that the insulin hypothesis had been right and then it's like cool control insulin when I was a teenager and I got into paleo and I was actually doing keto when I was like 17 I read a book by I think his name was Rob Fagan oh yeah yeah natural hormonal enhancement yeah really good but I was reading that when I was I think maybe 15 or something I was still in high school this was over 20 20 years ago yeah so I was doing keto experiment you know drinking cream after my workouts right you know basically eating zero carbs all the way back then and it's interesting that it's become popular again but I was hardcore into this idea and I was teaching my clients you know as a personal trainer in my 20s hey kind of control insulin insulin is the thing that drives back in so this idea has been around for a long time there's a lot of people who still believe in it but what's what's your take on how this all mounts out you know first trying to unpack this I say that part of the reason why the insulin hypothesis gained a lot of traction is because even if the the nuts and bolts of that recommendation or that idea are not correct if you follow the recommendations that are consistent with mitigating insulin levels then you get 10 you you tend to get really good results um but the primary result I would argue is that when we eat more protein in particular and then we're not on kind of a blood sugar roller coaster we tend to spontaneously reduce caloric intake which also reduces insulin load and reduces total caloric intake and so it's tough you have elements of the interwebs like the if it fits your macros folks and they produce some really jaw-dropping results we would say like figure competitors and what my and daily pop-tarts for their carbs and a lot for the the fad and these people are you know motor long are reasonably healthy at least for a while and you know so long as they are able to control that portion element then that you know thing work for them and then there are other people that would be more like myself where if I don't have that carbohydrate control and I don't know if this is gut driven or a hyper responsiveness to insulin release but I will get on kind of a blood sugar roller coaster and then I will tend to overeat but again I think that the the the results of a low carb diet support many elements of the claim within the insulin hypothesis even though it ultimate like the science doesn't really get or an all out all that well there was a recent new C study that really put this thing to the test where they they fed folks both high carb and low carb diets calorically matched protein matched which was really really important and what they found is that there really wasn't any difference in the weight loss between the two groups um some people gained some weight most people lost weight and there was a very big Delta a very big difference between their relative insulin levels in these folks the higher carb folks had higher insulin levels and if that insulin hypothesis was 100% accurate then we should have seen no weight loss effectively in that higher carb group but then another paper that came out maybe two years ago that came out of the Weitzman Institute it was looking at the personalized glycemic response that folks have two different foods and there is a reality that again my wife and I did some interesting kind of self experimentation and this is just two people doing something it's not a scientific study or anything but you know I'm about 175 pounds and I would eat a 50 gram amount of white rice my wife is about 130 hundred and thirty-five pounds she would eat a 50 gram amount of white rice affective carbohydrate and just based off the difference in size between the two of us you would assume that Nikki would have a higher blood glucose response than I would but my blood glucose topped off about 190 and hers barely got above 120 it was like 115 120 something like that and immediately after this experience I would be kind of dull lethargic hungry wanting more and Nikki was kind of like unfazed it really didn't have any any influence on her and so even though on the one hand insulin hypothesis doesn't ultimately hold water over the long haul with the claim that as long as insulin levels are low than then we can't gain body fat is really kind of the crux of the whole story there is a reality though that depending on what your individual glycemic response and insulin responses to a meal you will tend to then either be more or less likely to eat more food which is really where this thing ultimately ends up having a lot of impact so someone like me who has these really nasty blood sugar highs and lows I will tend to get on that blood sugar rollercoaster and if I eat at a carb level that's not you know healthy for me I will get in this kind of feed-forward mechanism where the you know the meal I'm eating I'm thinking about the next meal because I'm already kind of in the throes of this kind of carb rollercoaster where someone like my wife she can kind of take it or leave it she could go high carb she could go low carb so she's pretty metabolically flexible so between those two studies I think it allowed us to kind of triangulate in a little bit on what's going on on this story and I think that in the folks that you know like in that if it fits your macros crew I think there's some selection bias there for people who are pretty metabolically healthy pretty metabolically flexible their guts are probably pretty healthy and this approach works really well for them because they're just practicing that that portion control specifically and the macronutrients aren't as important but then other people who are either due to genetic or epigenetic issues or combination they maybe have to have tighter control over carbohydrates in particular just because of that roller coaster but it's not it's not specifically about the insulin it's about the the kind of overall hormonal cascade that leads into the neuro regulation of appetite and and so man it's a it's a tough thing to unpack because there's a lot of different moving parts and also I think part of the problem is that people are different you know depending on who you are your responses will be different enough from someone Elstad a recommendation it works for me may very well not work for you mm-hmm yeah I want to dig into the the sort of diet personalization aspect of things that you've you've talked about with blood sugar but I want to also try to recap something and and dig into one aspect of something you just mentioned so basically that the carbs insulin theory of fat gain you know has been pretty much debunked as far as that being the the driver insulin being the driver of fat game there's been a number of lines of evidence you mentioned the one from Gary Taubes institute new C there's also been a number of others and that one's consistent with the previous metabolic ward experiments then but you know the basic idea is like this there's a pretty easy way and simple way of testing the hypothesis put people on equal calorie diets they'll say 1,500 calorie diets ones super high carb super low fat one super low carb super high fat they're exactly equal calories ideally if you match for protein also that's even better which thing one and if two diets of 1500 calories that are they're exactly the same as calories but very different hormonal profiles the people eating higher carb are going to have much higher levels of insulin and vice-versa Laurinburg and have lower levels of insulin you can see very clearly does this does insulin is that the thing that's actually controlling fat loss right and basically the studies have shown conclusively that it's not however there's this other aspect which is that in a real-world setting when you actually like when people who are overweight actually implement sort of the low carb diet principles or eat a paleo diet that's low carb or eat a keto diet or something to that effect implementing those strategies may get them more success than they had with like let's say just trying calorie control or portion range rule so what are the specific mechanisms that are actually causing that weight loss if it's not specifically the insulin you know so there is what it and I'll dig up this study for the the shownotes and all fire it off to you good friend of mine Dan party who's who's a sleep expert nor a regulation of a latex third and on the show and he was a friend of mine as well brilliant guy brilliant guy and he made me aware of a paper maybe five years ago where they looked at kind of hypothalamic signaling in folks who've been obese for a significant period of time and I forget what the cutoff was five years ten years but they've been overweight for a significantly overweight for a significant period of time and some of the brain imaging when they looked at the hypothalamus it wasn't quite the same as you know non obese individuals and when they tried various dietary interventions on these folks generally didn't get a lot of success except for a ketogenic diet ketogenic diet seemed to work disproportionately well for these folks now if there's anything there's you know people turn the ketogenic diet man on this big a fan in the world that you can find for ketogenic diets but people turn it into like Chuck Norris here it's like it's gonna cure everything and it's a tool it has specific applications and other applications it's not as beneficial for but I think an area that it absolutely shines is for various neurodegenerative conditions it was developed originally as a as a therapy for epilepsy so if we perhaps have some sort of a metabolic damage that has occurred to the hypothalamus and this is maybe entrenching folks in an inability to have the energy regulation and the appetite control to maintain on other diets but they can on a ketogenic diet I think that there's may be some brain energy issues that are being addressed under that ketogenic state so that's a really specific slice of folks and then the and I think that we can hang our hat pretty well on that like there's a cross-section of people for whom that definitely applies but is there then a spectrum of folks that depending on where you're kind of carbohydrate sweet spot is is there kind of an inflection point there where if protein is adequate because there's a concept of protein leverage hypothesis that kind of puts this idea forward that virtually any organism that moves to get its food whether it's it's you know grass-eating critters or carnivores but whether we're talking about vegetable matter or you know protein that runs around if you eat to a protein minimum protein rich foods tend to be very nutrient dense so if you figure out a nutrient sensing process in our body or in just in an organism's body and in general if you hit an adequate level of protein you have hit the general nutrient requirements that you need vitamins minerals antioxidants all that type of stuff so if you take that protein leverage hypothesis idea and just feed an organism adequate protein and then don't overly perturb that that kind of blood glucose element maybe there's something going on there with that that brain energy regulation and it doesn't necessarily need to be full on ketosis but there definitely seems to be something going on between insulin leptin ghrelin our sense of our overall fat mass and whatnot and so you know again on that that very extreme situation of long-term obese individuals I think we could make a case if there's some alteration I don't want say damage but maybe it's some alterations and the hypothalamus that makes it very difficult for those folks to stick to caloric restriction over the long haul which is ultimately what we we need to affect but then maybe everybody else maybe they're on a sliding scale with regards to that kind of hypothetic or appetite dysregulation and there's kind of two things that would influence that protein intake and then also maybe some critical threshold of a mount or or qualitative nature of carbohydrate but again a lot of that is pretty conjecture based we don't have a ton to hang our hats on with that but it kind of clinically makes sense because for a lot of people if you find that kind of qualitative and quantitative level that of protein and a mountain type of carbohydrate they tend to do pretty well subsequent to that mm-hmm yeah interesting that you brought up the importance of protein and the protein leverage hypothesis I am of the opinion that you know we've kind of unrightfully hyper focused on carbs and fats mm-hmm mm-hmm decades now and have neglected protein and we're uniquely focused on its fat that's driving obesity no it's carbs that's driving obesity and we need to go low-fat no we need to look a low carb and and it's really we're uniquely focused on that and I think that there's enough research at this point to yeah I agree with you that there's definitely some advantages for keto in certain respects or me in the context of treating certain diseases there's also this there's some research as you mentioned indicating maybe it benefits appetite control at least in some people for sure but you know we also have long term real-world studies in addition to those calorie-controlled metabolic word studies these long-term real world studies the best one that's ever been done just came out maybe six months ago something like that that was a year-long study with over 600 people and it was an eight million dollar study low carb low fat they even looked at you know genes related to low carb genes quote-unquote people who were had genetics that they thought they would do better on the low carb diet at the end of a year people who and and there was one more there one more aspect of this that was really well-designed which is that they actually got good nutritional advice to it here and they recommended high quality foods to both groups exactly yeah and at the end of the year basically no difference right and so I think there's just been enough layers of evidence at this point that just we can know that the carb to fat ratio of the diet is not the critical piece Whole Foods versus processed foods huge piece of the puzzle like getting the hyper palatable processed foods out replacing them with whole unrefined foods protein certainly a huge component and then the carb to fat ratio seems honestly at the end of the day if you're doing an intellectually honest analysis of the science like the carb to fat ratio or the diet doesn't seem to make a huge difference if I adhering to that outside of you know the specific context that you're mentioning if you have an Irvine it's a disorder for example or epilepsy or something like that but we've been neglecting protein yeah kind of like remarkable that everybody's fixated on carbs and fats people aren't talking enough about the protein leverage hypothesis well you know the the really unfortunate thing from my perspective is now we're both in the let's say the kind of vegan camp and even in the keto camp are attacking protein because of fears around mTOR and igf-1 and it's some super short-sighted in my opinion certainly overeating is a bad idea for health and longevity but man if you want to see somebody decline rapidly and have high morbidity and mortality help them be Sarka Pennock have them lose a significant amount of their muscle mass and you know a fall and a hip fracture no no muscle mass to buffer the immune response when you get sick no resilience and it's fascinating to me there are sections of the ketogenic diet camp okay so there's this there's this idea out there of 30 bananas a day you know like there are some people that have popularized eating 30 bananas a day a banana has about a gram and a half of protein in it now it's not whole complete proteins and all that sort of stuff but 30 bananas a day ends up being about 40 you know 45 grams of protein there are folks in the ketogenic diet world that are recommending all fewer than 40 grams of protein per day for grown men and women so you have folks that are so fearful of mTOR and igf-1 and being kicked out of ketosis that they're like recommending a lower protein and take them what you get from eating 30 bananas a day so from my perspective if you have skewed things such that all banana diet is a more protein rich diet than the one that's recommended things have gone so horribly wrong you know and again it's a little bit like vilifying insulin itself yeah super at chronically elevated levels of insulin are not good and they it brings about all kinds of different you know Bad's problems um we don't want mTOR we just don't want that gas pedal pegged out all the time but man when you look at things like muscular dystrophy and just the loss of mTOR signaling with a you really don't want to just you know do a gene knockout of em Tori that's gonna be a really nasty situation and again this is where I think that a little taking a little playbook from the ancestral health model which is periodicity we have sometimes a feast and sometimes famine and and by all means have some days have some weeks where the protein intake is low but then have some days in some weeks where the protein intake is pretty vigorous and your resistance training is really on on point you know and and I think that we have some great power there I love this segue and this is a topic that I wanted to cover some glad you got into it just for people who are not familiar with the concept of an mTOR who maybe are lost with everything you just said what what is so - basically there's this whole mTOR cascade of signaling in our bodies we have a lot of dietary camps you mentioned it's very common in vegans but even as you mentioned in some Quito camps there are people who are very fearful of protein so kind of big-picture context we've we've now talked about benefits of protein to satiety - facilitating weight loss and and as a result of that improving metabolic health in various ways in insulin insulin resistance and so on but we have all that research kind of showing benefits of protein and yet we also have people who are warning against protein consumption based on the idea that it's going to accelerate aging and potentially lead to cancer and increase igf-1 and mTOR signaling and and basically make you disease so it's almost at this point you know you can find research villainizing fad and showing that fat leads to fat gain and insulin resistance and all kinds of problems you can find it's showing that refined carbs certainly do all the same things and you can also now have a legitimate reason to villainize protein the problem is those are the places that calories come from right and if you villainize all three of those nutrients there's nothing left to eat except my baby greens and water so what what's what's your take and I know you just kind of went over some of it but what's your take on you mentioned that you think it's short-sighted to to demonize protein so why why do you think protein is not something to fear so you know in the chronically overfed state we we end up up regulating this this mTOR pathway and protein can ramp it up insulin can ramp it up insulin like growth factors can ramp that up and if we have agreement on anything it's the chronically overfed individual is going to have a greater likelihood of problems like there's probably no hood virtually no you know disagreement on on that point but then what what happens is somewhat similar to the insulin story just because say like the type-2 diabetic who's aging faster than normal okay they have high insulin levels and some of those elevated insulin levels are without a doubt feeding into that accelerated aging process so if we just suppress insulin as low as possible then we'll age slower well that's a type one diabetic we its own basket of orrible you know things to deal with so it's not a story in that situation that we want to like stamp it down as low as humanly possible we want some sort of cyclical element and periodicity and we just don't want to overeat and when I say just don't overeat that's what the full understanding that in a modern world full of hyper palatable foods that's hard to not do but you know it's at the end of the day in general if folks are just not overeating the enormous health benefits tend to occur you know just relative you know all other things considered that mTOR piece is interesting because again when when that signaling is kind of stuck in the on position we do definitely see characteristics consistent with accelerated aging increasing cancer rates but something that's kind of lost in that mix is that periodicity thrown in to say like an exposure to a carcinogen with or without adequate protein if you're consuming adequate protein and you're exposed to a carcinogen like aflatoxin that comes from various types of you actually have a longer period of time where you can detoxify that substance and avoid genetic damage but once you finally and we've kind of seen this born out with animal models where they would feed high protein and and uh aflatoxin to a critter and then low protein and aflatoxin to a critter the low protein critters get sick and die faster the high protein critters take longer to get sick but once they get sick the type of sickness they develop is cancer and if you have cancer and you are overfed still the cancer is gonna go like crazy so then we conflated this cancer development with protein being causative to cancer when in fact higher protein intake it's actually part of our detox pathways and so it's this a story again that we don't want these things turned on all the time we don't necessarily want to eat eight meals a day we should definitely have some periods of fasting we should turn these things on and off it would be great to have some things like resistance training to kind of um for lack of a better term tune the mTOR activity to be specific in the areas that we want instead of just kind of globally turned on but at the same time some end-stage failure processes like congestive heart failure mTOR signaling and IGF signaling insulin like growth factor signaling have dropped off and this is part of the the end-stage process of a heart finally dying um in muscular dystrophy oftentimes these folks just lack the appropriate expression of mTOR throughout their life and so they're never able to develop normal musculature and they have all kinds of you know illness and increased likelihoods of death associated with that and some of the gene therapies that have been targeted there it's to try to turn the mTOR activity back on which would be a net win for these folks so you know it's all circumstantial and again it's trying to kind of triangulate in on this story from different directions but oh in our understanding that overeating is bad we've just like you to your point we've thrown everything out protein don't eat carbs don't eat fat but it at the end of the day we need to eat something and again circling back around one thing that we definitely see is as folks age if they have good amounts of muscle mass they age better the folks that tend to consume more protein tend to have better muscle mass and so even though the you know in that mix there may be some cost benefit analyses somewhere um without a doubt sarcopenia is something that you don't want as you aged this this really low muscle next state and to your point resistance training also stimulates m2r activity yeah and that is decidedly linked with health benefits and extensionists longevity so in this kind of idea that these this signaling cascade is vital it's not something to fear and avoid all the time it's something to period eyes and you don't want it chronically active due to chronic chronically overeating exactly yeah yeah that's a that's a nuanced position and mansell a nuance is a tough thing like people want a a black or white you know it's kind of like when you take kids bowling and the the bowling lanes come up so the ball can't go in the gutter like it's one of these really tight Lane lines and the reality is most of life exists outside those Lane lines like you try to get people going with a simple story so that they don't need to become a nutritional biochemist to just like navigate their eating but at the same time there's a lot of individual needs and nuance and if you follow this stuff at all like people paint some very compelling pictures around like oh man you shouldn't eat more than maybe 40 grams of protein a day and stuff like that and but uh empirically I don't think those folks are thriving very well like I look at people like Arthur Devaney who's 80 years old now and still like 205 pounds like sub 10% body fat and he's kind of used this periodized eating strategy for the last 40 years and now granted that's one person and I think art has some very laudable genetic characteristics but he's also leveraged that with some smart eating and some smart strength training yeah absolutely so I before I mean there's probably a hundred other questions we could get into here and there's a lot I want to wanted to cover with you but one thing I want to make sure to cover is is Kido and you're an advocate for Kido I want to talk about the specific context where you advocate it a couple things that I want to mention as context one you mentioned that you know kind of talked about it earlier as kind of a home base like this of ketosis which I love and I completely agree with you that there is you know a number of health benefits associated with being in that state Valter long ago I don't know if you're familiar with his work I interviewed him recently on the podcast he's the researcher behind the fasting mimicking diet and has done a lot of research around the benefits of fasting which coincides with ketosis but he's not necessarily a huge advocate of nutritional ketosis and one of the things that he says is you know that it's he he talks about it almost as mixed messages that nutritional ketosis is not the same as the ketosis that you get from fasting and that to be in a state where you have lots of ketones in your bloodstream but to be in a well-fed state he talks about that as kind of like mixed metabolic signaling because we're evolutionary design evolutionarily designed to get into that state during fasting having said that there are certainly studies that support health benefits of nutritional ketosis in certain contexts there are also studies that show for example decreased exercise performance and there's kind of a mixed bag in some areas but what's your take on where keto diets are best for people oh man you know for sure I think that we have a pretty safe spot that anything and that kind of neurodegenerative story and even like traumatic brain injury and whatnot like anything dealing with brain energy metabolism I think you could really quickly make a case that the cost benefit story of doing a ketogenic diet for those very you know Parkinson's Alzheimer's epilepsy but potentially a post concussive therapies there's probably a pretty good argument for that being beneficial um if somebody is type 2 diabetic insulin resistant overweight and we are able to use a ketogenic diet or say like a modified Atkins high-protein low-carb appropriate moderate fat I think that that's gonna be a net win once we get beyond that it gets a little bit murky to be to be honest you know I just seem to feel better and this is one of the things it could be really nasty confirmation bias it's kind of like well I feel good there so the insulin hypothesis works and you know all this type of stuff but looking at the if the research you you know it clearly there's a lot of different tools out there i I don't dismiss Longo's notions around this idea that we may be sending some mixed messages under these situations I think and the one of the problems that has occurred within the the ketosis world and it's so cool because it's it's a specific biomarker you know we somewhat arbitrarily say okay if you're above 0.5 millimolar you know then you're in nutritional ketosis and then we have these kind of benchmarks along there so it's kind of cool because we have a concrete thing that we can play to Verta health is a venture capital back to outfit using a ketogenic diet for type 2 diabetics specifically and it's kind of cool because you look at blood glucose levels you look at blood ketone levels if you're in ketosis you're on a ketogenic diet and typically everything that we want favourable to happen to these people goes in a favorable direction one of the challenges are downsides I think though is that it became a little bit of a weenie measuring contest with people in bed well hey man what's your Tito you know 0.5 well I'm a 1.2 so therefore clearly you know I'm ketogenic Lee superior it's like how much do you bench type thing and the reality is one quick very quick story I'll mention on this I was at a health event a few months ago and bulletproof Davis breeze company was there sponsoring the event and they had a little stand where they were handing out bulletproof coffee and I went up to get a cup of coffee one morning and and by the way this I'm not advocating bulletproof coffee or saying that I do this or anything like that but it just happened to be there I felt like having a cup of coffee it was free so I got one I went over there and asked him if they could just put make me a cup of coffee with just a little bit of the MCT oil and without the butter and he asked me how much MCT oil I wanted any and he goes how kedo are you bro I'm Sookie dobro it's gonna blow your mind bro [Laughter] interrupt you just made and there you have it you know and so you know circling back to that Valter Longo observation that typically high in the evolutionary story elevated ketone bodies were occurring when we were offloading net energy balance okay no arguments there like very rarely was was that not the case so if we're then in a situation where we eat low protein which is oftentimes recommended on on keto for a variety of reasons one of them being that for some people will bring down ketone body levels at least somewhat and there's also fear of em torn a host of other things so that's a situation where even when somebody is eating low carb if they're eating low protein they will tend to over consume calories and we have somebody eating what is arguably like the most satiating diet you you could potentially imagine apparently other than like the the boiled white potato diet is apparently the most satiating thing that's ever been found but you have a situation where people do have high ketone levels and they're over consuming calories I think that that's a serious problem now it may in net be better than a type-2 diabetic who's over consumer in calories and some of those calories are coming from refined carbohydrates but there's kind of reality that if we get to that protein level up just just in definian bollock recommendations which is consistent with what i recommend what the keto gains guys recommend about that gram of protein per pound lean body mass um we tend to see moderate ketone levels and over the course of time we actually tend to see those ketone levels drop and there's thought there that the the body has become much more efficient at using free fatty acids directly so we just don't need as many ketone bodies we may actually be relying on a little bit of gluconeogenesis coming from that protein but what we tend to not see is overconsumption of calories and so tooth agree that I would be really a in agreement with a long goes concern there it would be that individual that is purposefully doing things that would tend to cause him or her to overeat while in ketosis I think that that would be a really bad situation when we have looked at even long term interventions of a well formulated ketogenic diet of modified Atkins I'm just not seeing scary stuff you know with regards to telomere degradation inflammatory State if anything like you could you could make a case that say if somebody's like a bodybuilder or something like that they should maybe modify the ketogenic diet at various points to get an inflammatory response so that they get more muscle mass gain out of it like it is so effective at suppressing the inflammasome that I'm really I'm left wondering how that over the long haul is is a net negative so that would be one point of distinction that I would have with with long goes a certain there and and I will fully admit that a ketogenic diet is not necessarily in its purest terms an ancestral diet and I hate the term hack but it's kind of a hack like it's it's purposefully eating in a way that we almost certainly did not eat like in the past but you know we're getting some benefit out of that I think if people ate just a more paleo type diet but did a compress feeding window so they ate the first meal at 7:00 a.m. last meal at 2:00 p.m. everyone smile they didn't eat at all they did some physical activity they would be in and out of ketosis quite frequently and probably get very similar benefits on this subject there's also another issue related to this which is exogenous ketones mm-hmm what's your take on that and I'll mention I've seen a pretty comprehensive review of litter of the literature on this kind of comparing the literature versus a lot of the claims being made by the manufacturers of these of these exogenous ketones basically concluding that for almost all of the claims the research really does not support yeah but but I'm curious what your take is I I think exogenous ketones have really interesting therapeutic potential in some extreme environments like the hyper oxygenated environment that Navy seed seal divers would experience and it may be really powerful in mitigating some of the seizure potential that they have there does seem to be some potential benefit for a low oxygen environment like people going to extreme altitudes what one thing that I would not be surprised I'll make a little little prediction 10 years from now every youth sports medical kit will have some exhaustion as ketones in it and when a kid heads a soccer ball and gets up and is it really bell rung that kid might be administered a dose of exogenous ketone may end up at a dock in the box clinic and may be given a you know take one of these every five hours for the next three days again for that brain energy metabolism and because of the suppression of inflammation so for like acute traumatic brain injury I'll honestly be shocked if these exogenous ketones aren't used aggressively in those situations maybe not the science has not been done but when I just think mechanistically I would be surprised if that didn't there itself that and I see almost no further application for them I I use a little bit before I do jiu-jitsu but it is just I use some MCT and some a little bit of beta hydroxy butyrate salt but it's just used that when I am hungry and if I wasn't keto adapted I would have had a piece of fruit it's not because those things are magic it's because I'm hungry and I need a little bit of fuel before I go work out you know and um if there is some half-decent literature that suggests that if an individual is eating a mixed diet that contains some starchy carbs and they add a decent whack of MCT oil to that meal that subsequent meals they will tend to spontaneously reduce caloric intake and there's some pretty good science around that you know it's a modest amount it's maybe ends up being about a hundred calories a day that they would spontaneously reduce caloric intake but that adds up over time and so there's there's some I think some laudable characteristics there there's also been some studies that suggest that a low glycemic load diet not necessarily super low carb but low glycemic load plus MCT oil may be as effective as the very stringent four to one ketogenic diet for epilepsy and some other conditions because you get a modest level of ketones from that but it tends to be still again more the MCT oil so going through that process of actually getting hepatic ketone production there appears to be something going on with that versus just kind of dumping in exhaustion excu you know the beta hydroxy butyrate specifically so I think there's a few applications but it's really unfortunate that I think lots of people or a few people have made enormous sums of money selling these things as weight loss tools and I think that that was reasonably unethical and the science did not support those claims at all yeah well so and I really wish that wasn't the case because I could have made a mint selling those things but the the way that they were broadly being marketed I didn't feel comfortable getting into that scene at all because there was no way for me to control the messaging around it and I didn't really want to be associated with that other the other messaging which was hey if you ate a cheesecake just take some misogynist ketones and you'll be right back into ketosis and then going back to that Walter Longo thing when do we ever in history see high blood glucose and high ketone levels only in type one diabetes and that's when everything has gone to hell for us so yeah yeah yeah yeah all set and one little layer to this story that that I'll add is in within some of the most vocal advocates of the exogenous ketones and even some of the researchers involved with some of the research claiming some of these benefits there's some real serious conflicts of interest and have emerged in some cases of scientific fraud and there's just some some issues where some of these people saying hey here's this amazing research that we conducted in my lab well those people also have you know equity and they're part owners and companies that are selling some of these that's exogenous ketones so right there's some questionable factors behind at least some of the research that's come out so anyway I definitely appreciate the perspective you're sharing here I wanted to cover some non dietary stuff but there's so much within this dietary stuff that maybe well I would love to do a part two with you because I really appreciate your being honored to do that any time yeah you know be great but if you have another five eight minutes something like that one aspect that I'd like to ask you about is the your approach to to personalization of nutrition which we haven't covered yet it's you talk about it in your book wired to eat which revolves around kind of blood sugar responses and figuring out your person's unique card tolerance can you talk a bit about how you do that sure sure and maybe even to set up some context there like I I will and I'm sure you get these questions too hey should I does coffee break my fast does MCT oil break my fast um should I fast you know so there's so around that customization story which includes questions like that I always ask the person what do you want to do like what what's your specific goal because absent that that goal well you know maybe coffee stops you're fast or maybe it doesn't it you know but what is the ultimate goal well I want to stimulate cellular odda ofhd okay well coffee actually accelerates at and so does lifting weight so have a coffee and go lift weights and yet even even out of that so all of this customization really for me has to start with what do you want to do and what we then have is where you are what you want to do is where you went end up and then we've got the potential for building a roadmap out of that and then from there then we can start asking some questions around okay well maybe body composition changed like you want a little more muscle you want a little less fat so where has the person been hung up in the past well um I tend to eat you know kind of spontaneously late at night okay well we can do some strategizing around that and oftentimes a lot of what comes out of that is the blood glucose monitoring and and so I have a seven-day carb test where we pick a battery of foods and we try to eat the the same amount of carbohydrate about 50 grams of carbohydrate and if I was really detailed I would set up an algorithm based off of your height and your weight and if you yes that gets crazy so it's just kind of 50 grams of carbs across the board try to do the same time a day the same stuff happens beforehand so that we're all set up in a favorable situation but ideally after you consume that 50 grams of carbohydrate we don't really see your blood glucose go much above about 115 milligrams per deciliter at both the one hour and the in particular the two hour point that's are hard and by hard it's it's very objective because the blood glucose monitors have a pretty high error with them but that's our more objective measure then we have some subjective measures how do you feel what's your digestion like you get hungry immediately do you have any kind of like GI upset or what have you and based off those responses if we're getting good blood glucose response and we're generally not getting any kind of like systemic responses like foggy headedness or anything then we have probably an amount in a type of carbohydrate that works well for the individual and if we're kind of maintaining that pretty even keel on blood glucose levels then it's typically easy to affect a little bit of caloric restriction so that we can get some body composition change reduce inflammation and all that type of stuff but again probably the most important feature of all that is really figuring out where is the person currently where do they want to go and then use that to build the roadmap and then we have some tools like the the seven-day carbon test to really get things dialed in to figure out what their they're doing best with like some people have eaten a lot of folks that followers say like the key to games protocol they are crushing things they've made wonderful results and then they ask me should I do the seven-day carb test and I'm kind of like well are you reaching all current goals and they're like yeah I'm like set and pr's everything's going great I'm like right that pony till it dies and then let's revisit this stuff you know and if we and it may be a deal where maybe a tweak in the diet is is what's gonna get you to the next effort maybe the diet isn't really where we look we need to look somewhere else like a lifestyle piece or something like that so for a lot of folks if they are motoring along on a protocol that's working really well for them I always encourage experimentation but also it's not broken don't don't necessarily need to fix it actually on that point I think this is an interesting segue to to one other thing I was going to ask you there are some notable keto advocates Dave Asprey joe mercola being a couple and and there are a number of others who are really warning now against even as much as their fans of keido's and the keto diets and they recommend that they're warning against long term keto and talking about the necessity of doing it cyclically and cycling off that seems at least on the surface I'm interested to hear your clarification but it seems on the surface to not mesh very well with what you just expressed about kind of like if you're doing it it's working just keep doing the same thing so how do you make sense of that you know I recommend that folks use keto as as reset and then if they want to start mapping what their responses are to other food so I would generally like a more flexible dietary approach if if you can get away with it and again like that that keto should be used in kind of a contextual format if we're not really seeing problems and I think if people address electrolytes effectively like I two years ago I would have been much more nervous about things like adrenal HPT a-axis dysregulation thyroid issues I think almost all of that is because folks aren't getting enough electrolytes in particular salt and and not not uniformly but I think that a ton of the problems arise from that and so I am it's kind of funny because I'm talking out both sides of my face and it by saying this but if people are motoring along pretty well and they've got something that's working well they you know maybe once a year every two years they do kind of an advanced lipid profile like that LP I our score LDL P some some cool things like that um some markers systemic inflammation and things look really good I'm really hesitant to mess with that but if they just they're curious and they want to kind of see what type of latitude they have and I think that we have some really cool strategies to make it a little bit more concrete more quantifiable instead of just kind of flying by the seat of the pants and that's where the the seven-day carb test comes in um I I don't I don't think that keto is going to be a magic bullet for like a super slowed rate of Aging relative to just not eating a super high inflammatory diet you know so again if you're not overeating and all that stuff I don't know that there's gonna be a really big spread with that stuff other than in in you know kind of specific individuals like myself that just seem to do well there so it's funny because again you know I encourage that that experimentation and latitude but at the same time if if things have worked pretty well for someone like I would be inclined to kind of motor along with that until they you know maybe they figure out a situation in which they really want to do something different but you know I just had a reach out from a gal who's a very high-level Brazilian Jujitsu competitor she's a three stripe purple Bell almost a brown Bell competing right at the the highest level of national and international competition and she's been keto fueled for like four years and she was asking me like hey should I try introducing some carbs like well if you have you done this in the past and she said yeah like what happened I felt really bad like my blood sugar wasn't good have you tried titrating it in slowly like ten add 10 grams for each day on day you know for one week and then 20 grams each day too you know for the second week yeah I've tried all that stuff I just feel better low carb both my parents develop type 2 diabetes in their 30s I was always overweight and then I went low-carb and everything was magic and and she actually did some 23andme and then put that through protease and she has a bunch of these gene polymorphisms that would suggest that she's really good at fat mobilization like really really good yeah I'm kind of like man I don't know I don't know that I would mess with that you know and she's four years in crushing people at Brazilian Jujitsu looks amazing skin looks great no no menstrual irregularities she's totally dialed in on her electrolytes so I would you know if she just heals worse and now the flip side of this is I've had people that so wanted to do ketosis because it's this magic thing and their cholesterol skyrockets their lipoproteins go to the moon and they feel horrible right and I'm just like well okay we can tweak some things we can go a really low saturated fat version and see if we get some reduction in cholesterol and lipoproteins but even if that changes if you still don't feel good I don't know that ketosis is a net win for you at all you know and I find that they have some gene polymorphisms that ketosis just isn't that good maybe their sweet spot is more of a compressed feeding window so to the degree that they experience ketosis it's from the cyclical nature of eating and a little bit of exercise and not necessarily a specific protein fat carburation show right I don't to keep you too long but there's one thing I can't resist not not mentioning here which is I think there's one more flip side of this which is that some people sometimes once they're in a particular type of eating and sometimes even a very extreme way of eating they will feel bad they will feel worse with any deviation hmm so as an example like the carnivore diet which I know you're younger with I think you had some doctor on who's doing that podcast recently I forget the guys name but you know I know people that are like I've only been eating ground beef for the last three months and nothing else and zero plant foods and I feel great and as soon as I reintroduce any plant foods into my diet I feel terrible and a terrible gas and bloating well you know there's also this period of several weeks that it takes the gut microbiome to adjust any new food and there is a period of discomfort so I think when people judge the right way to eat based on hey I ate this and I felt worse right like just that initial short-term reaction I think that can be misguided alone yeah yeah but yeah and it's funny I'm working on a huge piece on the carnivore diet and I'm very curious about it because we have some people like Michaela Peterson seventeen years old had two joints replaced due to a form of rheumatoid arthritis that developed in in her infancy and she had like 35 joints affected that could have faced some degree of replacement at some point and she appears to be in a hundred percent remission and it appears to be healthier than she's ever been in her life so it's another one these things where it may be a really powerful tool but to your point it may be also a cul-de-sac that you drive down that you don't get to drive back out of me so alter your gut microbiome that there may not be a comeback from that but this is the risk/reward story like if you are crippled from an autoimmune condition and now you've got a lot of kind of like young guys or just wanting to be jacked and and be like Sean Baker and everything and and that's you know kind of whatever it is but when you really dig around the forums of the people that end up at the carnivore diet this was like their last stop they did everything else that went low-carb they did autoimmune paleo and usually it's kind of a stepwise saying it's like yeah I got a little better but it wasn't great and then they went carnivore and there's all kinds of interpretations on carnivore some people do snout to tail some people include seafood some people they can get away with some coffee green tea ginger extracts and stuff and other people it's what I call one cut carnivore they eat a porterhouse and that's it you know and again it that's some really powerful medicine and I would encourage people to do everything prior to that you know work with gut microbiome experts look into a fecal transplant low dose naltrexone like i would turn over every other stone before doing that but then that said if the person is really sick and they're able to to reverse that you know I mean Michaela you could argue probably wasn't going to live that long due to all these complications going on and she had been crushed with depression throughout her whole life so in those really extreme situations I think we also need to keep an idea okay that tool is powerful but it may be appropriate for these people but just from a due diligence perspective man I would do everything first not land it carnivore alley your first stop in tinkering with diet and lifestyle yeah yeah absolutely well said and you know I think overall I'm just very impressed with how you've talked about every topic we've covered in this interview I've really enjoyed this and I think your nuanced answers just display a lot of knowledge and wisdom in this territory and really really enjoyed this and I hope we can do a part two where we talk about non nutritional stuff circadian rhythm and and community and all kinds of other non nutritional lifestyle factors I would be honored to bring down property values on your show any time so awesome and so where can people go to find more about your work where do you want to send people uh Rob wolf calm is where I keep most of this material I'm really curtailing all of my social media activity like Instagram seems to be where things are happy and non-controversial so I'm at dass Rob wolf over on Instagram and I've just about abandoned everything else so that that's where I do most of my my tinkering in people were kind of shocked when they asked a question on one of these social media platforms it's actually me that answers it so I that's I take this as a job and so I do my best to help as many people as I can awesome man well this has been great and I'll be reaching out to you for part two I wasn't on or thinking it and thank you again for hanging out with me a little over time I appreciate you hanging out and giving me a little extra of your day there's investor Rob wolf calm highly recommend that you follow Rob's work he's doing as you can tell based on this interview an excellent job of portraying the science with intellectual honesty and I really appreciate that so thank you again Rob and have a great rest your day thank you - hey there this is Ari again one more quick thing before you go just make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel the energy blueprint and also make sure to subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast platform whether that's iTunes or stitcher or anything else hope you guys enjoyed this interview and I will see you again next week .

Video Description:

For full transcript, go to: www.theenergyblueprint.com/the-paleo-way-robb-wolf/

Sign up for our free masterclass on how you can double your energy levels: www.theenergyblueprint.com/masterclass 
Are you looking to increase energy, lose fat, and prevent disease? Then the Paleo way may be an option for you.
In this episode, I’m with Robb Wolf, a former research biochemist and two times New York Times best-selling author and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of "The Paleo Solution" and "Wired to Eat." Robb has been ”Paleo” for the last 20 years, and he has dedicated his life to helping people adopt a lifestyle that promotes health.
In this episode, Robb will uncover what is really means to go Paleo and how you can find the best lifestyle for your bio-individual situation.
In this podcast, Robb Wolf will cover
• What is the Discordance hypothesis?
• The role of lifestyle in your overall health (and specific factors that influence your lifestyle)
• Are Paleo and Keto really the same?
• Why a bio-individual approach to diet matters
• What does fasting do?
• The main drivers of fat gain
• What is the best diet if you are overweight?
• Why Robb says the protein leverage hypothesis is essential when wanting to lose weight
• Should we be afraid of protein consumption because of fear of mTOR and IGF1?
• Are there nuances to the best diet, or are things black and white?
• Robb’s approach to personalized nutrition
• Robb’s take on the carnivore diet

HOW TO INCREASE ENERGY, LOSE FAT, AND PREVENT DISEASE THE PALEO WAY WITH ROBB WOLF – SHOW NOTES
The concept of Paleo (2:02)
The discordance between human biology and our environment (5:51)
Why Paleo and Keto got ”married” (12:17)
The biology of fat gain (18:38)
The importance of protein for health and fat loss (33:13)
Potential dangers with protein consumption (38:25)
Robb’s take on the ketogenic diet (46:40)
How blood sugar figures in to your personal carb tolerance (01:01:10)
How to identify if you long term keto (or another restrictive diet) is healthy for you (01:05:49)


AriWhittenEnergyBlueprint