34. Robb Wolf Discusses The Paleo Solution 1

it's March 20th 2012 and we're here at the special with BA 3rd Rob wolf we're here with division chief city Rodino fire Tirana Tammy lurks and the police chief from the city uh Steve Pitts and today is gonna be a very special day we're gonna talk with Rob about his book the Paleo solution some of his views about human disease and and Rob we thank you we thank you very much for huge honor it was pretty cool showing up in Reno and finding a bunch of friends basically that were interested in all this material so it's been very cool well we were excited too because we were we were aware of your work you were living up in Northern California and we were aware of your work and we liked your work and then when we heard that you would move to Reno then we got really fired up we've met several times we like what we're seeing very much and so uh you know the feeling is mutual that's all that's for sure one of the things that I'd like to do just for starters this is I'd like for people who who don't know about paleo did you to give us an overview about paleo what that really means and I'd like to point out that Tanny the gave me an incredible article that you're mentioned in and our friend Gary Taubes is mentioned in and you and Gary your friends I know so things are fitting together nicely and the article is addressing the epidemic of obesity in the United States fire service this is this is a wonderful article it's it's it's it's an indication that I think things are changing things are changing in a positive direction especially as we address the the obesity epidemic and III just think that's desperately needed because of the last 30 years what we've seen in our country and now in the rest of the developed world is a disaster right with obesity increasing increasing increasing and type 2 diabetes following right along with it we're we're dis paleo fit into this issue and the solutions what's your you know the the whole concept is just this idea of genetic or evolutionary discordant you know that we have some genes that were forged living as hunter-gatherers that we've had some sort of a qualitative shift that is kind of antagonistic to the health that we had as hunter-gatherers it's kind of interesting if you go to a an anthropology department you ask them hey how you know what was the health of hunter-gatherers what was it like how long did they live and typically it was very very good obviously there was a lot of early death due to infection and injury and stuff like that but then beyond that both archaic and then contemporarily studied hunter-gatherers are very healthy and then when we start seeing this adoption of Agriculture and more grains and more refined carbohydrates changing in sleep patterns changing in activity patterns we start seeing disease and that that's kind of the the overall orientation is that any organism living anywhere you know I mean cows eat grass Chipmunks to chipping stuff you know and if you start moving them away from the the kind of genetically imprinted ways that they've become very successful doing what they're doing there's an opportunity that that could be beneficial but there's also an opportunity that that could be very detrimental and so for for us this kind of Paleo diet or paleo template is trying to look that for me the the most effective way to look at this isn't trying to look at hunter-gatherers and emulate what they did it's look at modern diseases and try to retro engineer what is the evolutionary discordance with this problem what is it that we're doing now there's potentially problematic like--we're we'll talk about sleep I know and we have certain populations police military fired that are and and medical obviously that are horribly impacted by sleep debt and historically we've just kind of said well you need to tough it out this is just part of the job and what we're discovering is that approach is incredibly costly both in human lives and in the amount of money that we deal with the collateral damage associated with that so for me it's it's taking this you know paleo is this opportunity to apply evolutionary medicine Darwinian medicine to creating a hypothesis why is this disease state happening can we look at the evolutionary history of an organism being being us in this case and then retro engineer what the problem is and then maybe offer a solution and the cool thing about is that these solutions are incredibly effective and inexpensive you when we deal with biological systems if we do things correctly it doesn't cost us a lot of money to fix it because we're dealing with things in a multifactorial fashion when we deal with sleep deal with exercise deal with food things kind of come into the rightness rather quickly are you with the idea that about ten thousand years ago that's when we stopped being hunter-gatherers per se and agriculture it depends you know if you look at the Native American populations of the United States it maybe was a couple of hundred years ago if that and we see this kind of time ordering northern Europe certain parts of northern Europe the Middle East if people eat in a more agricultural kind of way we don't tend to see metabolic derangement insulin resistance type-2 diabetes obesity and stuff like that we don't see that until maybe the fourth decade fifth decade when you start heading in to create Britain or or you know it basically you see a time when people adopted agriculture the the more early that they did they tend to have a little bit of you know buffering against the these metabolic effects Native Americans have absolutely no buffering against that at all we're seeing type 2 diabetes in children under 10 years old in these populations they're waylaid by this this problem so you know when this happened is a little bit variable on where you were on the planet and and then also some genetic factors from that and it's pretty clear from the archaeological record when agriculture hit an area there was a massive increase in infant mortality it was in evolutionary biology they call it a selection pressure it was not a healthy thing and it created it did force some genetic adaptation so we are different today than what we were 10,000 or 20,000 years ago because we you know evolution has been trying to push us into a net adaptive state but there's a lot of collateral damage with that and now that we're at a spot where we can intervene with medical practices we will not really see adaptation beyond where we are at we are just going to see problems so you're not gonna see somebody adapt to a 7-eleven you know 64-ounce big gulp and a bag of you know chips they're just going to get sick and we'll keep them long enough to reproduce and then their children will have problems something that we are seeing though is that we have a to two issues with genetics we had the genetic you know bag of tricks that we carry with it and then the phenotypic expression that we have a genome and then the epigenome the epigenome genomic part is how we interact with the environment and it looks like how mom and dad eat how mom and dad live changes the way that the chains get turned on and off so we we do have some adaptation that occurs more quickly but what we're finding is that if mom was type 2 diabetic kids are more likely to be type 2 diabetic and that is something that's a very very cryptic because we are it's not changing the genetics but it's changing how these little switches get flipped on and off and that is is feeding forward into multiple generations into subsequent generations you .

Video Description:

The Paleo Solution Book Revisions - Q5 - Q&A 23 - Ep 430

okay final question for this week is from Mike on the Paleo diet mike says going back to your first book what are the main things you would revise or add if you ever did a revision well funny thing is we did do a revision there is a volume to reversing - it's a paperback version lately the Maine yeah I mean there wasn't a massive amount that we tweaked so I had some pretty aggressive fish oil recommendations in the first book which I modified over time thank you for the people that burn me at the stake about getting that one wrong I was largely following people like Barry Sears and other folks that the that information seemed credible at the time on that fatty acid omega-3 profile in grass-fed beef yeah so - - that fatty acid topic Diana Rodgers and I have been working on the sustainability book and movie called sacred cow and it's interesting because we've had pretty massive pushback from the vegan community that begins which is not surprising at all but I tell you one of the more surprising places that we get a shocking degree of pushback and very vigorous and very ill informed and unfortunately is kind of like the the really go go getter paleo ancestral health crowd that insists that grass-fed meat is the only grass-fed grass-finished is the only way to go and Diana and I tackle this in the book and we're also going to be doing a series of blog posts and other support material where I really dig into the literature on this but the reality is that so it as a baseline the bulk of ruminant animals whether it's cows sheeps sheep goats Kaimal whatever you know they're grass-fed for the most part there is some green finishing now the thing is is that I probably am suffering is what do they say like when you raise kids you know like you you get back when you were as a kid and so like I'm sure I sewed a lot of the seeds of my frustration on this now because early in this story there was a sense that the Fanning acid profiles of grass-fed meat were remarkably better with regards to the omega-3 omega-6 balance than grain finished me around 2009/2010 though mat well and really did a deep dive into this stuff and he was like nah man that's not the case at all there's very little difference when you get right down to it and I got into a pissing match on on the interwebs on social media shocker with a woman who is a master's degree in chemical engineering and she insisted that there was a difference in the protein and I grass-fed versus green finished um meat and I said show me one paper and she went through all of this light magic and mysticism and like flailing and all kinds of Appeal to odd authorities but could not produce one thing that suggested that the protein content nor really the fatty acid content was significantly different between grass-finished and green finished me now from a sustainability perspective there's a great argument for doing as much grass finishing as possible but even in that story there's a reality that like to the degree that we do continue to grow wheat or corn or or rice or whatever the the leftovers in that scenario is not technically grass but it is something that animals can be finished on and it is used that way and it's a very smart utilization of resources because otherwise that that is cellulosic material just builds up and it degrades very slowly it maybe oxidizes instead of compost and all that type of stuff so there's really compelling reasons to have a middle ground in this story and not be complete zealots about it there is no compelling case from a health perspective that the the fatty acid profiles are are different and so that's a big one from the book that I probably sewed a lot of erroneous info really advocating for grass-fed meat but the reason why been advocating for grass-fed meat even with the knowledge about there is not that big of a difference from a health perspective there is a significant story there from a resource management sustainability perspective so that's gonna be a fun one to unpack over the next 10 years in grass-fed versus green grass finish versus green finished beef anything else nah otherwise like why paleo solution was pretty on point you know making recommendations around sleep getting out in the Sun lifting some weights doing some sprinting not letting your your kind of internal dialogue you know kind of kind of eat you up that whole stret the the stress chapter like the finance piece and everything so that stuff's kind of stood the test of time and honestly it got recycled and updated significantly and wired to eat like it's still those those things are kind of I would argue Kenny universalities in this story yeah okay is that it I think that's our last question for this week yeah thank you guys again for your questions you can submit them at Robert calm on the contact page at dass Rob wolf for Instagram which is about the only place I'm hanging out these days these questions out there also on YouTube this episode is sponsored by drink element the electrolyte drink mix that has the sodium that you need if you're on a low carb or ketogenic diet that's what plants crave so thanks guys .

Video Description:

5. Paleo Diet

Mike says:
Going back to your first book - what are the main things you would revise or add - if you ever did a revisions?