hi folks this is Abel James and thanks so much for joining us on fat-burning man where we talk about real food and real results today we're here with the New York Times bestselling author also known as the paleo mom dr. Sara Valentine from a scientist perspective you're about to learn how the foods we eat interact with our gut barriers immune systems and hormones to influence our health before we get there here's one last reminder our online community the fat-burning tribe is having a meet-up in Austin Texas this weekend so if you're a tribe member come meet us at our first ever real world party I can't wait to see you there if you're not a tribe member yet here's what you're missing aside from an epic party our exclusive super support of Facebook group Q&A videos where Alison and I answer your questions and most importantly you'll never have to worry about what you're cooking for dinner again our new 30-day wild meal plans in the fat burning tribe are ready and they include waffles with scrambled eggs and bacon wild buffalo wings and even mini cheesecakes right now you can join us for a discount and get your wild meal plans at fat-burning tribe dot-com once again from any device just type in fat-burning tribe com2 join us alright onto the show with dr. Sarah ballantine you're about to learn how dr. Sarah lost 120 pounds by focusing on nutrition why eating paleo ish is backed by cutting-edge nutritional research how to cook for a busy family without losing your mind and much more alright let's go hang out with the doc all right folks Sarah ballantine PhD is the creator of the award-winning online resource the Paleo mom calm co-hosts of the syndicated top-rated the Paleo view podcast and New York Times bestselling author of the paleo approach the paleo approach cookbook and the healing kitchen just so you guys know dr. ballantine is a certified smartypants earning her doctorate in medical biophysics at the age of 26 she went on to write in my mind the definitive book on paleo it's a freaking textbook dr.
Ballantine thank you so much for coming on the show thank you so much for having me like how am I supposed to not be happy with that kind of introduction right you're buttering me up for something well I you're awesome and there aren't enough awesome people out there doing really compelling work that's backed by science but I would definitely get in it excuse me will definitely get into that but I want to talk to you first about where you kind of started from because you've always struggled not just with your your weight but also your health leading up to this massive change in your nutrition that that really changed your life so let's talk about where you started I mean I started having health problems at seven years old I had mono for six months in second grade and from there I just never had normal energy levels I started struggling with my weight then although I didn't start really putting on weight until I hit puberty um but I I was just always that tired kid who would fall asleep thirty seconds into the drive in the car and have to be you know shaken awake once we get there if it was a five minute drive right um and I um I just I as I got older and nerdier I also got less healthy so I by the time I was in my late teens I was morbidly obese but I also had terrible acne and really I had scalp psoriasis really dry hair my eyebrows were falling out I was having you know really terrible hormonal symptoms I was having migraines and as I progressed weirdly through my scientific education I just started being able to add more diagnoses okay well now I have this autoimmune condition called lichen planus and well you know now oh wait is my thyroid not working okay well just chalk that one up to add that to the pile Oh adult onset asthma so severe that I was apartment bound for three months because I was coughing up blood okay we'll add that one to the list and I started developing weird allergies I developed a topical allergy to cardboard so if I touched cardboard I'd get these giant red welts everywhere Brian touched it um acid reflux depression and anxiety I mean no wonder at that point right sure um tendonitis and carpal tunnel syndrome and I used to say like thank goodness for modern medicine because I'd be dead 200 times without it yeah and and I I wholeheartedly believed that it was you know my doctors and there was a number of times where I had life-saving interventions that you know were the reason why I was able to do this medical research career and I kind of felt like I'm giving back to this medical community by devoting my life to academics and you know academics was also really what resonated with me I really always wanted from the time I was five or six years old when someone would ask me what I want to do when I grow up I would say I want to make a difference yeah and so this was this was what I was I know it's like not the typical five-year-old then again not the typical thirty nine-year-old anymore so um I um so I pursued a career in medical research I was a very high level researcher and I was very very sick and I was working 8200 hour weeks routinely well and and a very high-stress very competitive environment I'm interestingly enough studying the immune system studying what happens when the immune system goes haywire in critical care Ward's studying I ended up migrating into some cancer biology and studying epithelial cell barriers these are scientific concepts that are so relevant to the foundations of the Paleo diet at the time there was no nutritional piece to what I was studying was all pharmaceutical development so understanding the mechanisms understanding the proteins and then figuring out how to develop drugs to manipulate them to save lives and um and it was fascinating and then I hit a wall I got pregnant my gestational diabetes when I was pregnant I developed preeclampsia when I went into labor had a ninety seven and a half hour labor just not not it's just not cool right come on I like to remind my now nine year old about how not cool that was frequently 97 hours um and I I just crashed you know I had this baby that didn't sleep she was colicky and I just realized I can't do both of these things you know I want to be the best mother in the world and I want to have this really high power academic career I can't do both at the same time so fortunately for for me I knew about a program that the National Institutes of Health runs it's called the re-entry grants for women and it allows women to take time off of their academic careers once they've hit that doctoral level of research for whatever reason it's not just for motherhood it's for whatever reason women take time off you know we take on a lot of these caregiving rules we can take up to eight years off so I said okay I am going to take this time off use this program to go back into academia in eight years I'm going to have my kids and I'm going to get them to elementary school age and then go back to work so that space of okay now I'm just doing this one really really hard thing of being a mother gave me the what I needed in terms of time and lower stress level and just the ability to focus more on my own health it gave me the opportunity to really sort out what was going on in my body and it took about five years I lost a lot of weight following a low carbohydrate diet but got sicker and sicker and sicker as I got lighter and lighter and lighter yeah so it took having to really dig deep and finally start taking this scientific background that I had and applying it to my own health and going okay I should be able to figure this out there's got to be some kind of links and I started looking at food sensitivities and whether or not that could play a role and really sort of happened on of loren cordain's articles about the paleo diet that had a more scientific lien and went okay well this sounds really intimidating yeah and hard right but this the science really pulled me in and so I dec
ided to try it four and a half years ago and I just okay I'm gonna get home from vacation on August 30th I'm gonna start this diet on August 31st and within two weeks I was able to go off six prescription medications yeah and it was like revolutionary and it was such a huge like eye opening experience for me that oh my gosh look at how powerful food is and that became the beginning of my transformation from somebody who was taking time off of academic research to to this whole other purpose that I've found which is to take the academic research that other people are doing that's amazing research and actually bringing that to the public right with uh you know descriptions of what that means that's not dumbing down the research right giving the entire picture and then also distilling it into what's actionable how does that research actually inform our choices what what does it tell us what does it not tell us what are the limitations of our knowledge how do we incorporate this new you know piece of information into everything that we already know right and that's something that I feel very passionately about it's or at sin the concept of scientific literacy and public health education but it also is something that I feel there aren't very many people doing right ah taking beating that bridge between academia and the everyday person and really like there's so many of studies that inform us as to what the best food choices are why it's important to sleep why stress management is so critical you know why living in sync with the Sun promotes better hell right these things are phenomenally well understood scientific concepts where you understand this at the cellular molecular level and yet that information is not brought to the public or it's it's brought in this very like oh you wouldn't understand this so let me create an an analogy that has to do with garbage trucks and Lego right like it's just and I welcome to the media okay I want to say okay I'm going to take five minutes instead of 30 seconds and actually explain this yeah and and empower people with the education so that they can make the best choices for themselves within their own lives yeah and it's become to me then I mean this was the year this was the year I had to go back to research if I was going to go back and I didn't because in that period of time when I figured out my own health I also found this this other purpose in life that's still hitting that desire as a five-year-old to make a difference in the world but is I think a path that there's certainly - certainly less less trodden path and it's I think in many ways much more challenging yeah but it's also exceptionally rewarding and that's what brings me here to this blogger author resource creator health advocate tight I don't I don't I don't know what to call myself well say I think it suits you I really do and obviously a lot of other people think the same way because what you do is is very unique you often don't see people who are able to bridge that gap like you said between the actual research and coming to looking at your plate and saying well this is what you eat because there's there's a chasm between those things for most people right so how do you do it mm-hmm that's a hard question so I think that part of why I'm really good at bridging that gap is because of how thorough my scientific background is so I have a bachelor's degree in physics and then I did my PhD in medical biophysics and then I went into a cardiology lab for my first postdoctoral research fellowship and then a cell biology lab and in that process I had to go basically from a physicist to a biologist yeah which involved teaching myself a lot of things that I would have learned if I had done my bachelor's degree in microbiology or cellar biology or something that would have made a lot more sense for the research that I did at the end so part of it was that person when I started my PhD I was reading papers to understand the background behind the project that I was given and I had to read those papers with a medical dictionary because I didn't understand the jargon so part of it was that experience of really being hyper aware of what words are like you could say leukocyte or you could say white blood cell I say white blood cell people are gonna be like oh okay I say leukocyte people are gonna be the what right so part of it is really understanding like where where you can use a word that's still an accurate accurate word and not lose the meaning but suddenly make that language approachable and then part of it is that I have been very passion about scientific literacy for well since I became aware that it was a thing in high school and so I have volunteered in various different capacities tutoring doing these sort of inspirational talks to young kids to encourage them especially women to encourage women in science public speaking volunteering in high school science classes I mean a huge of judging science fairs like a huge range of different roles in that time but rules that are very much geared at making science more accessible to people and so I can kind of draw on that experience and I only think it just it really matters to me it really is important to me to be that bridge and to not dumb things down because I respect the public's intelligence and I know that people want to understand this science and they're not given the opportunity so I want to provide that opportunity and you know certainly some people will think that my writing is too technical and it won't resonate with them but that's that's fine they've got dumptruck and lego analogies written by other people to go to I want to bring that real science to people because I feel in my life it's so motivating in my life really understanding the detailed you know cellular biology of what happens if I eat that food versus make this other choice that helps me make the better choice and so I want to provide that information for people so I just I think part of how I'm good at it is because I want desperately to be good at it it's just that is what I feel I have to contribute to the world I totally hear that let's let's take a step back because I think some people who are listening you're uniquely able to answer this from a personal perspective you know they might be thinking I have a dry itchy scalp or I feel a little bit rundown or I might you know I just have acne that's me or whatever but what what you were able to show through your own personal transformation with food is that these things are actually linked to a systemic problem within your body autoimmunity so can you talk about the mechanisms of that and and what you did to change how you were eating in order to come up with the results you had yeah so the DBR off most of us are familiar with the immune system right we at least understand it as you get a cold you get the flu and it's your immune system to the rescue so our immune system is incredibly complex it involves cells and hormones and these sort chemical messengers called cytokines so it's a huge variety of chemicals and cells and how they interact with each other it's it's probably the most complex system in our bodies maybe short of the nerve you know central nervous system right but pretty complex - yeah um and its job is to protect us and it were what it's typically protecting us from is some kind of foreign invader so that poorn invader can be a bacteria a virus a parasite dirt right a sliver it protects us from an open wound so it's part of the healing if you if you cut yourself it's your immune system that is responsible for making sure that infection doesn't spread to your body and that it you know heals that wound and you end up maybe with the scar maybe with nunn depending on how bad it was right so immune systems job is to protect us and part of how it does that job is it has a whole pile of different ways of recognizing that foreign invader so lik
e AHA there's this flu virus and now we have to attack this flu virus and what happens in autoimmune disease is that our ability to know the difference between a foreign invader and our own body we lose that you and what's fascinating is there's this accident that happens in everybody's bodies and it's called Auto antibody formation so one of the ways that our immune systems use to recognize a born invader is antibodies and antibodies are an incredibly specialized protein we make few million different ones of them and each antibody recognizes a specific protein so what you're looking for is an antibody that recognizes this protein in a bacterial cell wall and can say AHA you're that bacteria that I fought off two years ago you're not getting me this time I know how to I'm how to beat you right so then what can happen is every once in a while we make an antibody by mistake that binds to protein that's a natural protein for our bodies so I have Hashimoto's thyroiditis which is an autoimmune disease and my body is making antibodies against thyroglobulin it's a protein that's involved in thyroid hormone production in my thyroid gland yeah so that's an accident whoops I made an antibody against something that I shouldn't have done right so literally just to do a lego analogy for a second your body is literally attacking your own thyroid right yes that had nothing to do Flegg oh yeah thank you yeah so my immune system is basically decided that my thyroid is the same is the same thing as a virus or parasite right it's got to go it's a bad thing and we got to get rid of it but that an accident happens in everybody and we have several different failsafe mechanisms for knowing when we've made this accident whoops made an antibody that recognizes me instead of a virus yeah and we shut that down it's what happens in autoimmune disease is the fail-safes fail so we have this accident and then we don't know that it's happened right and then you combine that with triggers of the immune system so something that's going to turn on the immune system and get it really revved up and that can come from a variety of sources that can come from toxin exposure hormones diet it can come from lifestyle factors not getting enough sleep being really really stressed and people with autoimmune disease will start to hear these words that they go oh flare oh flare oh yeah I get a flavor when that happens um but those can be those are the start and for me I think the start was mono at 7 years old by epstein-barr actually is a very well understood trigger of autoimmune disease Wow so you kind of go okay so there's this thing that's going to ramp up the immune system I've made this accident that made this accidental antibody I've lost the ability to understand that I did that by accident now I've got my immune system revved up to attack and what am I going to attack well this thing I've already decided is a foreign invader my thyroid or my skin cells or my brain or my joints right all the different that's what's different between different autoimmune diseases is exactly what tissues being attacked but everything else is breakdown of the immune system is the same between all autoimmune diseases so what do you do about it so one of the things that we can do is support this part of the immune system like the fail-safes the failsafe part so we can support that part of the immune system doing its job and we can support the part of the immune system that whose job it is is to turn off the immune system so when you look at the immune system if people break it apart into different roles in different ways I like to think of it as the attacking part of the immune system which can be specific or nonspecific and the micromanagers right the people who say hey look job's done everybody go home right so there's this whole part of the immune system whose job it is is to reign everything in turn off the immune system once we've you know finished fighting that flu virus off what happens in autoimmune disease is that part of the immune system is not working very well in fact that actually happens in all chronic disease so all chronic illness has sort of rampant inflammation as part of the disease whether it's like part whether it causes the disease or not it's a component yeah and if you can turn off the immune system then you reduce symptoms and you mitigate disease and in autoimmune disease often there's additional challenges to actually getting the immune system to turn off and a lot of those challenges come from sort of a genetic predisposition to a hyperactive immune system but it's totally possible and it turns out that some of the things that we can do to rein in the immune system are completely within our or so the immune system is a tremendous nutrient hog it uses nutrient resources to perform its functions like no other system in the human body and it uses the full range it uses pretty much every mineral every vitamin whole pile of different amino acids and fatty acids and it needs all of those things and it turns out that the stuff that we are most likely to be deficient in like vitamin D retinoic acid the animal form of vitamin A zinc magnesium iron calcium those are the things that the regulatory arm of the immune system needs to work so when you're following a standard American diet or deficient in those things then oh by the way we're not getting enough sleep not getting enough sleep but is inflammatory in itself being stressed is inflammatory in itself being sedentary living inside all the time and not spending of time outside those things are inflammatory they cause inflammation and then you throw in nutritional deficiencies which means we don't have the nutritional resources to turn off inflammation and then it's like this perfect storm of like of course we're so sick so we can we can take back that control by following a very nutrient-dense diet by avoiding foods that are inherently inflammatory by choosing foods to support optimal gut health because we know that the gut microbiome plays a really critical role in how our immune systems are functioning right by getting enough sleep by improving our resilience to stress which is a little bit different than reducing stress right so it's really providing our body with the mechanisms to respond in a more reined in way when we have a psychological stressor so that things like adding meditation to our lives or yoga or going out for a walk or getting enough sleep and having a nutrient-dense diet those things right not relying on caffeine to keep us going throughout the day all of those things play a role they're being active but avoiding really high strenuous high-intensity activity because when you push it too hard that's inflammatory and pulling all those things together and suddenly you've created the opportunity for your immune system to go oh wait a minute what am i doing yeah No Oh silly me and so what happens when you start pulling all those things together you you can actually turn off the attacks depending on how long you've had your disease how aggressive you can your disease has been you know exactly how well you're implementing all of these great beneficial strategies some people will put their diseases in a complete remission some people will just slow it down you know there can be scar tissue right so if your my oh my autoimmune disease went undiagnosed for about three decades so that means my thyroid was being attacked for about three decades I will never be able to live without thyroid replacement hormone because my thyroid is just too damaged to be able to now work at 100% right but my disease isn't progressing right so I'm not I'm not continuing and one of the really important things for people with autoimmune disease to know is once you have one you have a very high likelihood of developing another one about once every ten years that's about on average once you've developed one expect one every ten year
s for the rest of your life yeah so for me I'm like I don't want another one right okay that's that's that's the big motivator I'm good I'm gonna marry trees trees enough okay it's maybe for that but either way that's that's because I have was diagnosed with fibromyalgia which is a suspected autoimmune disease mm-hmm okay I'm good I'm good I've reached I've reached an excellent limit I think I'm think I'm done for my life I don't want another one in ten more years like that's so to me these types of strategies then become about not just regaining health but then maintaining that health for the rest of our lives which is why to me I always think of it as the paleo lifestyle yes rather than the Paleo diet in part because it incorporates actual lifestyle strategies but in part because I'm a lifer I have discovered how powerful the strategy is and while there's plenty of room for me to tinker and experiment and really find that line between what my body needs to thrive versus what my body will tolerate right and finding that space in between those two extremes but I I don't intend on ever like reverting back to something like this is okay this is pretty amazing off of medications feel you know have energy that I've never had in my life have focus that I've never had in my life you know I just feel comfortable in my body I'm getting super strong like all these amazing things that are coming together not going to give that up yeah so you talked about inflammatory foods what did you do you said originally you lost weight going low-carb but it wasn't until you really dialed in your diet that it started to work for you and you got off those those prescriptions so can you talk about that a little bit so um so there's a bunch of different aspects of that conversation I think one of the major things was really understanding the difference between a health promoting food and a food that can undermine my health and understanding nutrients rather than macronutrients really understanding micronutrients yeah so part of it was focusing my food choices on vitamins and minerals and not worrying so much about carbohydrates and fat and protein grams um so that was that was a huge part of it I mean II know that especially women can have very negative tired reactions and I had hypothyroid disease very negative sex from one reactions very negative stress cortisol reactions to very low carbohydrate diets and especially when they're prolonged yeah and I can see as my health was deteriorating the evidence of that happening in my body so very low carbohydrate diets or not they're not for everybody and women especially tend to have these sort of counterproductive reactions like it's great that you're losing weight but it's at the expense of your immune system functioning your sex hormones regulating themselves so it's expensive fertility and your moods and if you look at you know if you do take an evolutionary biology approach you do look at where you look at hundred gap times of fasting that's not a good time to get pregnant right right so you kind of go okay like suddenly that adaptation makes that yeah so using low carbohydrate diet as a way of mimicking some of the biological effects of fasting which also means then you're going to get the biological effects of fasting right so so so I can see that a lot of those things were why my health was continuing to deteriorate even while I was losing weight and I would you know it was actually probably that frustration that was one of the major turning points in my life because it forced me to think of the words thin and the words healthy as not being the same thing right I thought up until that point in my life I'd always assumed that it my only problem was that I was fat and as long as I could lose the weight well then I would be healthy and not be nutrition right yeah so for me it was about getting healthy to get thin rather than getting thin to get healthy and having to to turn that on its head and change the focus of what I was eating for that effect was a major part of it and then understanding that there are compounds in foods that don't promote our health that can undermine it that can negatively impact our hormones negatively impact our gut health so they can feed the wrong types of bacteria they can impact how the gut barrier is functioning and so our gut barriers phenomenally important it is what's inside this is this is one of those weird ones for people to think of what is inside our digestive tracts is technically outside our body right you can think of if we just had a straw right if you just had a straight tube from mouth to the other end yeah you could go okay well so like it's opening air here so I open the air on the other side and so everything that's inside is out connected to the outside right it's not connected to inside our bodies and so our gut barriers have this really phenomenally important job they their job is to let in what we need from what's inside our digestive tract which is the nutrients and not let in what we don't need like all of those bacteria that are in there toxins and food things that aren't nutrients and food we also use our digestive tract as a way of eliminating toxic byproducts from our bodies so for example as our liver is processing that's you know things like heavy metals and pesticides and whatever that we get exposed to but it's also the toxins that we produce is just part of being aerobic your organisms and using oxygen for our metabolisms we make toxic stuff because of that I mean and we get to be multicellular and have brains so there's you know there's some benefits right um one of the downsides is we make a lot of toxins and so our liver will actually shuttle after it processes those toxins that'll shuttle it into our digestive tracts for elimination so if we reabsorb it that's counterproductive right so we have this incredibly smart barrier that is supposed to know what to bring in and stop you know stop everything else from coming into our bodies and there's compounds and foods that actually can remove the ability of the barrier to actually control whether or not it's going to be open or closed and then isn't it it's just a Kuenn it's scary yeah it is yes perhaps so when you think about um so you think about the word leaky gut that's exactly what that means it means that we've eaten something or stress can do this not getting enough sleep can do this really strenuous exercise can do this it basically hampers the ability of the digestive tract to to be selective and it creates doors that just stay open and lets things leak into the body that's where that term comes from I know that many medical professionals hate that term better it's it's very descriptive of exactly what's going on I mean you can be technical say increased intestinal permeability right and then all of a sudden you'll get taken seriously by your doctor but but that's what's happening so you're letting stuff that's not supposed to be in the body come into the body and that's toxins it's bacteria we just discussed how the immune systems job is to protect us from bacteria and even if they're good back to your their good bacteria in our gut they're not good bacteria inside our bodies and so when that happens then you're stimulating the immune system about 70 to 80% of our immune system resides around the tissues that surround the gut because this barrier is such a important entry point for pathogens yeah and so that's why we have our our immune system is there because we know this is you know it's a semi permeable barrier that means this is a place where things can get in so we better we better set up our centuries here because this is this is the war front and so when toxins leak in or even things like an incompletely digested protein is a toxin we're supposed to let in we're supposed to break apart that prot
ein into amino acids and then let in the individual amino acids you bring in a protein and that's not supposed to be there but proteins can be active right and if that's a protein that's supposed to be active in wheat we don't want it doing what it doesn't meet inside our bloodstream right so as soon as you remove the ability of the barrier to function properly you cause problems and it turns out that a lot of the foods that were introduced to the human diet with agriculture that are these foods that when you take this evolutionary biology approach to to diet to create the template of the Paleo diet when you take this approach or just really understanding how the compounds and those foods are interacting with human body you come up with the same set of rules yeah and it turns out that grains especially wheat soy is terrible peanuts are terrible these have compounds in them that cause a leaky gut and they also tend to have compounds in them that are incredibly inflammatory so there's we see this in legumes we see this in grains and we also see this in vegetables of the nightshade family which are typically considered paleo but are not considered autoimmune protocol friendly right and they have these compounds in them that have been investigated in scientific studies for use in vaccines to stimulate your immune system so that you will develop immunity against the dead virus in that vaccine Wow so these are compounds that are so good at turning on inflammation and turning on the part of the immune system that is typically the major culprit in breaking down in an autoimmune disease like it's really targeted at we're going make antibodies now and we see this in really high concentrations and grains legumes and things like tomatoes and so under starting for me you know really starting to evaluate foods in terms of what do they have in them that's good yeah so that's you know my nutrients right what will the raw materials that my body needs to make more of me and the you know the raw materials are all the chemical reactions that are happening in every cell in every moment and then what is in foods is bad so things that are gonna cause inflammation that are going to not be good for my gut health that are gonna feed the wrong kind of bacteria my gut that are going to mess around my hormones yeah and then put every food on a scale so I go okay how much good stuff how much bad stuff okay lots of good stuff not very much bad stuff great food to eat other way around I'm not going to touch that food with a ten-foot pole oh wait there's this whole world of grey in the middle and I like to describe the automating protocol as you know paleo we make the cut off here yeah maybe here an ottoman protocol we make the cut off here so we want more good stuff less bad stuff and we just kind of go with like look we've got a genetic predisposition that means we're more sensitive so it's not fun yeah but it's reality and it just means that we need to be more careful and what's really fascinating to me is where lifestyle changes the formula so we're gonna be more sensitive to a food that's here if we're sleep deprived or for stress or if we're sedentary right and we're going to respond better to it we're going to be more resilient to it if all of those other things are in place which is why the Ottoman protocol incorporates lifestyle aspects right into it right so it's not you're not saying no tomatoes ever you're saying get your lifestyle in order and all of a sudden your body will be able to tolerate foods that might be slightly inflammatory exactly and it's one of those things you give your give your body the opportunity to start healing right give your immune system the opportunity to start regulating itself get these other you know ducks in a row mm-hmm and then play with those foods see what happens and some people will do very well reintroducing them and some people won't so for example when you look at the extra eliminations on the Ottoman protocol compared to standard Paleo diet it also eliminates eliminates nightshades it also eliminates nuts and seeds eggs all dairy yeah um alcohol sadly you know for me the the foods that I have not ever been able to successfully reintroduce our nightshades and eggs and it turns out I'm actually have a food intolerance to eggs which explains that yeah um but nuts and seeds and the occasional glass of wine I'm fine my and so for me part of my health journey was really figuring out what I needed to do to heal um what I need to do to maintain that yeah um and for me it was always about understanding why like out I don't want to just know that eggs don't work for me I want to understand why eggs don't work for me and so getting that base of knowledge in my head and then sharing it with everybody because why hold that just for me yeah um and then and then starting to play and figuring out right for me what are the lines I can't grasp turns out Tomatoes one of those lines yeah and I've come to terms with it most of the time yeah it's so interesting no I I can't believe it but we are coming up on time I know you've been saving up a rant on sleep so go so you know I've alluded to it already a few times just how important lifestyle factors are oh and it's one of the things that I'm seeing really strongly within the paleo community is you know we're calling it the paleo lifestyle in part because we don't want to just do this to lose 10 pounds for a wedding this is how we want to live the rest of our life and a part because we're recognizing how important things like activity are so think about paleo now you think about an active lifestyle with a specific you know way of guiding food choices um and we're starting to kind of talk a little bit about stress management and sleep but we're not doing it and when you look at it's sort of Western culture as a whole we're getting about two hours less sleep every single night than we did 50 years ago that's Emmys is that quite so huge difference it's a math because mmm nerd and um it actually works out to be a full month of continuous sleep every year that we used to get and we don't get anymore yeah so something like sixty percent of us do not even hit eight hours and I ever I'm using of like eight hours as being like this you know golden number that we're all supposed to aim for um most sixty percent of us get seven hours or less yeah and seven hours is a bare minimum and you look at hunter-gatherers you look at our understanding of sleep what's happening in our bodies sleep is when our brains detoxify sleep is when all of these toxic metabolic products that build up in our brains our brains are working all day use our brains use 25% of our calories right just just here 25% of our calories go to our brains doing all the great amazing things maybe 20% some people but no it's all it's all the amazing things our brains do all day yeah but when we use calories we produce toxic byproducts we produce waste because of the magical blood-brain barrier our brains can't eliminate the waste the way the rest of our body can so the 80 percent or 75 percent of calories that are being used by the rest of the body the toxic byproducts just get into the bloodstream and then they get eliminated in the brain it gets stored up all day and then when we sleep it actually that our brain cells shrink by more than half and it allows this flow our cerebral spinal fluid increases flow and it allows this flushing out of our brains of all these toxic byproducts during the day when you don't sleep enough you don't flush those out and you cause inflammation in the brain information the brain causes problems everywhere right everywhere and so when we start to understand like what sleep does all the effects of if you don't get enough sleep so regulatory arm of our immune system more active when we're sleeping hormones are regulate when were sleeping growth hormone is produced while
we're sleeping you must wear pair happens while we're sleeping memory moves I mean it's everything it sleeps washing it is amazing and we don't get enough of it and what I'm actually seeing in the community is that you know like I'm talking about the autoimmune protocol here which is a phenomenal change in in food choices for most people yeah it locks you in your kitchen it right it's it's phenomenally limiting and restrictive for a lot of people yeah don't get too scared cuz once you get used to it it's fine my wife is doing it right now and it's yeah it's it's a commitment but you can see the results right away which is amazing yeah but you're we're putting so much effort into changing the foods on our plate right we're changing where we're shopping we're spending all this extra time cooking we're making our own freezer meals for those busy weeknights we're making our own very jerky and all these portable snacks we've taken on that responsibility for ourselves and then we stay up on Facebook or we watch you know we watch all those amazing addictive television shows that are by the way really scary and dramatic and get us all worked up before we go to bed and we won't shuffle around our priorities to make sure that we're getting enough sleep and meanwhile the correlation between lack of sleep and the increases in diseases is far stronger than any food-related correlation and when we look at the mechanisms we can see why that's happening so sleep is is absolutely a essential input to our health so diet of course I'm not saying diet not important but I'm saying can't work on one and not the other and expect to get healthier or maintain your health and so I have decided that this is this is the the message that I really want to focus on within the paleo community right now is just how phenomenally important sleep is um and that there are so many different ways that we can really simply increase our sleep increase the quality of our sleep and what happens when we focus on that as we end up being more productive and more efficient during the day and so you see this right like Arianna Huffington is really into the sleep thing she had a massive crash a few years ago started getting eight hours sleep a night and she talked endlessly about as soon as she started getting sleep she could work less get more done right and I have certainly found that for myself like it's it's there's a transition period in which your body goes oh wait we're paying down some sleep debt okay we're gonna work on that right now and all of a sudden you can't stay awake because you're bought I'm gonna hike yes sleep right but then you get to the other side of it and you're like I have energy all day - improves moods and improves immune function hormone regulation regulates appetite regulates cravings and cravings tend to disappear it helps promote weight normalization so people who are underweight they sleep more they'll gain weight people who are overweight they'll sleep more they lose weight and it does amazing things for things like if you get more sleep you have a better chance of surviving cancer for example like it's just it's across the board phenomenally important so I created a program called go to bed the reason why it's called go to bed is because from my perspective the number one barrier that people have to getting enough sleep is taking their bodies and putting it in their bed turning out the light and turning off the television alright there's a lot of other nuances for things right entrenching circadian rhythms and in providing a relaxing sleeping environment sleep hygiene hormone regulation there's inputs from diet there's inputs from activity right there is a lot of other things that goes into sleep I'm an especially sleep quality but the number one thing that most of us can do to get more sleep is decide to yeah so I've created this and 250 page ebook side-table receiver right now I'll review the scientific literature without in terms of sleep and health because I believe in providing that science because that for feed that's my motivation and then tons and tons of practical how-to and then a 14 day challenge which is designed to be an iterative implementation kind of ease you into what I think are the the most important habits for supporting better sleep so it addresses routine having a bedtime but it also addresses hormone regulation and circadian rhythm entrenchment so it's the bait it's the big players from that side with the idea that by the end of 14 days most people are seeing a pretty tremendous improvement in their sleep and they're starting you get a taste for how it feels because we know that 14 days isn't enough time for habit formation 21 days isn't that habit formation average takes 66 days and it varies it can take up to about 8 months before edit of Lee performing a task becomes easy and you don't have to think about it so that two weeks is basically its ease you into these habits so you can get a taste of why this is important to continue and we've created Facebook and Instagram accounts that are hosting group challenges every month so that you can be part of a group of people who've all decided to put sleep up on their to-do lists and what we're seeing already is people are losing weight they're seeing they're they're seeing their appetites regulate they're feeling more energetic they're seeing their moods improve like it's such a short period of time yeah what I'm hoping will happen is a similar thing to how you know for me I went off six prescription medications in two weeks on paleo like what can two weeks of better sleep do yeah and and try and bring this into our awareness as a really important input to our health so when we say paleo lifestyle we're going to start saying oh here's this template for how we eat here's why it's really important to be active and why we all love CrossFit and I also go to bed at 9:30 at night right like I would just all of those things become part of the definition of paleo so that is my my big a big new project that I'm really excited about that's fantastic well you have one hundred and ten percent of my support because I have a secret weapon and it's getting sleep pretty much every night and that it's like going to bed early imagine right and it's something you know I I sometimes say like often when we're trying to work on health we have to choose between the fun choice and the good choice so what I love is when all of a sudden a good choice becomes the fun choice yes that's what I'm talking about and with when you actually are finally starting to get enough sleep and you can feel that like all the sudden those part Dirty's merge yeah and it's the same way like when you've been on Paleo diet for long enough like walking through the bakery section at the grocery store suddenly doesn't feel tempting there's this moment where like all sudden it kind of smells vaguely of urine and you're like did it always smell vaguely if you're in because it doesn't smell it doesn't smell like something I want to put in my mouth right but it takes a while to hit that that point but then all of a sudden the priorities align and you go okay fun choice equals apple yeah right and thanks all of a sudden all of a sudden I am so happy to be in the produce section in the grocery store instead of that stinky bakery section and the same thing happens to sleep where all of a sudden you're like I can't wait to go to bed and be in sleep because that's what I feel like doing right now and I know I'm gonna feel amazing tomorrow totally and it's um you know nothing good happens after 9:00 p.m. anyway you know for most people right now you're watching zombie TV shows just wasting your time with it's just a lot of a lot of blood on TV after 9:00 p.m. it really is and but b
ut if you wake up like I watched the sunrise this morning and like that might not seem fun at first right but if you get in the rhythm of doing that it's just like the best thing ever every single day and so like you're totally right about what the way that you define fun changes especially when you get in the habit of acting in your future best interest which is really what it's all about one feeling good becomes so much more rewarding than anything else right like what can compete with feeling good nothing nothing exact so then all of a sudden you go well this makes me feel good and this is what I'm gonna do so I to me I feel like we need to incorporate a lot more focus on lifestyle factors into the paleo movement in order to really achieve what the whole goal of this movement is yeah is optimal long-term health exactly awesome but we're out of time but please tell folks where they can find you what you're working on now you can find me and everything I do at WWF I am um calm and from there you can link to go to bed you can link to the pale approach the pale crypt cookbook healing kitchen my podcast the paleo view a television show pilot paleo bites all of my social media sites and any new projects I ever take on awesome and you still get sleep and still get dr. Valentine thank you so much for coming on this has been awesome you're welcome back anytime I would love that thank you so much thanks again for listening to fat burning man don't forget before you go check out fat burning tribe com if you have a question for me that you want answered about how to improve your performance what to eat for dinner how to drop fat quickly how to improve your overall health or anything else we answer all of your questions there so quickly you can get the first month for just $1 for a limited time check it out at fat-burning tribe dot-com all right I'll see you there thank you so much for joining us on this episode of fat-burning man if you liked it don't forget to hit the subscribe button on iTunes stitcher YouTube the podcast app or wherever else you might be listening to or watching this show got a second please leave me a quick review on iTunes I always love hearing from you and if you think someone else might like and benefit from this free show please take a second to share it with a friend or with a family member you can get in touch with me on twitter at fat burn man and facebook by typing in abel James where fat burning man drop me a line any time did you know that I've recorded over 150 episodes of fat burning man winning four awards and independent media and hitting number one in more than eight countries here's some more good news you can download and listen to every single episode for free all you have to do is type in fat-burning mancom will give you a second to type of in fat burn calm and you'll get all the show notes and video and audio versions for all the past episodes of fat burning in better yet enter your best email at fat-burning mancom sign up for my newsletter and I'll even send you a QuickStart guide to start burning fat right now and a few of our ridiculously tasty recipes as a special thanks for signing up once again just go to fat burning mancom right now enter your best email to get your free fat burning download straight to your inbox and make sure that you never miss a show again this is Abel James signing off thanks so much for listening and have a great week and all sorts of stuff you can do but at the most part it's like you know just constantly figuring out the more information you have the healthier and better you can be since I spent so many you're so sick and miserable and just so bloated and fat I I'm I'm into it you know .
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Although Dr. Sarah Ballantyne earned her doctorate at 26, she was 120 pounds overweight and had a litany of health conditions.
That all changed when she discovered the destructive - and healing - powers of the food we eat.
As a scientist, Dr. Sarah Ballantyne is deeply interested in understanding how food interacts with our gut barriers, immune systems, and hormones to influence health.
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