In this episode of the podcast, we have a guest on the show, Dr. Dom Lane. Dom is a PhD in Nutrition, a former Navy SEAL, a Natural Pro Bodybuilder, and an expert in the field of ketogenic diet and epilepsy. We talk about the benefits of keto as a military strategy, and how it can be used to treat and prevent epilepsy in the military. We also talk about how the keto diet can be beneficial for the Navy SEALs and other military personnel with epilepsy and other neurological conditions, and why it s a great option for treating and preventing seizures in those with epilepsy. If you're interested in learning more about keto and epilepsy in general, then you'll want to check out the Charlie Foundation, which is funded by the Office of Naval Research and the Department of Defense, to develop ketogenic strategies to enhance readiness, resilience, and performance and safety in military personnel. The Charlie Foundation is a non-profit organization that is dedicated to developing keto-friendly, ketogenic approaches to treating, preventing, and treating epilepsy in all areas of the military and law enforcement, including combat, law enforcement and other high performance environments. You can get all the information you need to know about the Charlie's work here. Thanks to Dr. Lane for coming on the podcast and being a part of the Keto-friendly community. We appreciate it! and look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Love ya! - Dom and Lane - Tom and Lane. Thanks for listening, Tom & Lane! Cheers, Cheers! - Mike Dancer <3. - Cheers - Tom & Dan (and the rest of the crew at the team at The Center for Epilepsy and Epileptics Inc. . . . Thanks to our sponsor, :D & Cheers. ~ CHECK OUT THE CHALLENGE! (Thank you for listening to this episode! - Tom, Dom, Dom and Dan, for being a good friend of mine, for supporting this podcast, for helping us bring awareness to epilepsy and epilepsy research, and for supporting us to the field, and supporting us in this episode, and helping us to get the word out there to the public to the world to the next level! - Thank you for supporting the podcast! Thank you all for listening and supporting the work we can do more of this podcast.
00:00:17.000Got into bodybuilding when I was young, and then did a BS in biochemistry, PhD in nutritional science.
00:00:26.000Kept lifting, did powerlifting, won two national championships, got silver medal at Worlds, set a then-world squat record, and did also bodybuilding and won a natural pro card.
00:00:37.000They actually have natural bodybuilding, believe it or not.
00:00:42.000You know, when I first got into it, one magazine said one thing, and even in the same magazine, they have an article one month, next month it would contradict it.
00:00:50.000So I was like, I'm just going to try and figure this shit out for myself.
00:00:53.000Which is the place that a lot of people listening are at right now.
00:00:57.000Yeah, and it's tough because it's kind of like, who do you trust?
00:01:00.000Because not everybody has the time or the energy.
00:01:31.000When I was doing it, I graduated my PhD in 2010. When we started, we actually both knew each other from the bodybuilding.com message boards.
00:01:41.000So those were back before social media.
00:02:42.000Tremendous benefits, I think, for military personnel, which is funded by the Office of Navy Research and the Department of Defense, to develop ketogenic strategies to enhance readiness, resilience, and performance and safety in military personnel.
00:02:59.000And why specifically does the ketogenic diet help military people?
00:03:04.000I know there's a thing with Navy SEALs, with preventing epilepsy.
00:03:09.000Yeah, so central nervous system oxygen toxicity, a limitation of that is, or a limitation of Navy SEAL diving is oxygen toxicity seizures.
00:03:18.000And anti-epileptic drugs are not really a viable option because they can, they're side effects, they can decrease cognitive resilience, physical resilience.
00:03:28.000A ketogenic strategy is something that's being studied now from a basic science mechanistic perspective to animal work to now human studies.
00:03:35.000So it's not, you know, out in the field yet, but some guys are actually doing it.
00:03:44.000So for people who don't understand what we're saying, for some folks who have epilepsy, the ketogenic diet has been shown to stop seizures.
00:03:53.000So that's how I actually got linked in.
00:03:55.000And actually I met a natural drug-free bodybuilder.
00:03:58.000His name was Mike Dancer and he had severe terminal epilepsy.
00:04:02.000Google Mike Dancer ketogenic diet and you'll find an amazing story.
00:04:07.000About a guy who used nutrition to manage his epilepsy when drugs failed and he used it to prep and win bodybuilding shows and compete in bodybuilding.
00:04:17.000And the rebreathers sometimes cause seizures with some of the soldiers.
00:04:22.000So, for example, just 50 feet of seawater using a closed circuit rebreather, like a Draeger rebreather, at 50 feet of seawater, your potential for getting oxygen toxicity seizure can occur in just 10 minutes.
00:04:35.000So that's a little bit of time, and that's not very deep.
00:04:37.000So there's no way to predict that, and there's no way as of now to prevent that.
00:04:42.000So we study physiological biomarkers that could warn people of an impending seizure, and we also develop countermeasures to mitigate oxygen toxicity seizures.
00:05:14.000And Lane, I've been paying attention to you online for a long time.
00:05:16.000One of the things you do a great job with is just calling bullshit.
00:05:21.000I mean, you love to call bullshit, clearly.
00:05:23.000But whenever people are overstating claims or people get ridiculous, and I think this is one of the things that is a problem with any diet where people get really enthusiastic about it.
00:05:33.000That becomes an ideology, whether it's the ketogenic diet or the carnivore diet or the, you know, fill in the blanks.
00:06:00.000One of the problems we have is nutrition is replacing religion for a lot of people.
00:06:04.000So you find something that you identify with and then people start to try to say because they identify with that movement or like for example vegans they identify with many of them protection of animals.
00:06:18.000Not my job to judge their ethics on that sort of thing.
00:06:21.000But then they kind of try to backtrack to find the science to support them as well.
00:07:57.000Now, if you have high carbohydrate, you will burn less fat, but you're also storing less fat as well.
00:08:02.000And again, the net caloric balance is going to be what determines how much you store, because you don't really store carbohydrate as fat for most people.
00:08:11.000They did a study overfeeding women, where they overfed them 50% above their caloric maintenance, and they found that of 282 grams of fat that they stored during a day in adipose, only 4 grams came from carbohydrate.
00:08:29.000So fructose causes, we think, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
00:08:33.000So that could be, you know, de novo lipogenesis is higher with fructose.
00:08:39.000Think about people consuming it in liquid drinks, 100 to 200 grams a day, which is not uncommon, even for my wife, not uncommon.
00:08:46.000So fructose does seem to have a little bit of different hepatic metabolism.
00:08:52.000But I was actually across the hall from a professor who was doing a lot of the research on fructose and obesity and fatty liver disease.
00:09:00.000And even he came to the conclusion that If you overfeed fructose and it creates a caloric surplus and you're overfeeding fructose, then you can have some wonky stuff start to go on.
00:09:20.000So if you're doing that, If you're creating that caloric surplus, what you find is when you're in net storage, when you're driving more nutrients into adipose and sometimes liver, depending on metabolism,
00:09:36.000but it takes a lot of fructose to do that and a caloric surplus.
00:09:41.000You start to create a lot of wonky stuff going on.
00:09:44.000The mitochondria starts to become dysfunctional.
00:09:47.000And, you know, people make a big deal about, oh, well, you have...
00:09:50.000We have claimed now that everything causes obesity and type 2 diabetes.
00:09:55.000For first it was fats, then carbohydrates.
00:09:58.000And there's actually professors out there who actually will claim that protein gives you diabetes.
00:10:14.000If you look at the research on obesity and diabetes, what happens is you have everything start to elevate in the bloodstream.
00:10:24.000So if you measure like, there was a professor who thought that branched-chain amino acids were causing obesity because they were elevated in the bloodstream during type 2 diabetes.
00:10:33.000Well, yeah, branched amino acids are elevated.
00:10:36.000So is fatty acids, so are triacylglycerides, so is glucose.
00:10:40.000So is it really those things causing it or is it possible that when you are overfeeding relative to what you burn, relative to that turnover, that mitochondria start to become dysfunctional, probably a lot due to inactivity.
00:10:57.000And the mitochondria is, as we call it, the powerhouse of the cell, as you probably learned in high school biology or whatever they taught it to you as.
00:11:06.000That is where everything fluxes through.
00:11:08.000So that is where you're creating ATP. That's where you're burning through lipids, carbohydrates, that sort of thing.
00:11:15.000If that becomes dysfunctional and you're not getting enough flux, enough pull through that mitochondria, what happens is you start to back up every part of metabolism.
00:11:25.000So all the metabolic byproducts, almost all of them, inhibit everything within the cell.
00:11:29.000There's a metabolomic signature for that.
00:11:31.000And an epiphenomenon, if you want to call it that, would be elevated branched-chain amino acids.
00:11:36.000It could be a consequence of that in some people.
00:11:38.000So these things start, these byproducts, these metabolic byproducts, because you're not fluxing enough through the cell, they start accumulating within the cell and start to inhibit the Krebs cycle, glycolysis, and so everything starts backing up to the point where you also start inhibiting the insulin receptor And now you have glucose,
00:11:56.000fatty acids, and amino acids also backing up to the point where they start to overspill into the bloodstream.
00:12:02.000And you see this accumulation of all of them in the bloodstream in type 2 diabetes.
00:12:10.000I actually think that, again, me going out on a limb, that obesity doesn't cause type 2 diabetes and type 2 diabetes doesn't cause obesity, that they develop in concert from the same problem, which is overfeeding underactivity.
00:12:26.000How much nutrients you're fluxing into cells versus how much energy you're creating, fluxing them through the cell and out.
00:12:32.000So when you're overfeeding, whether it be carbohydrate, fat, you're fluxing more energy in than you can dispose of, and now you have to do something with it.
00:12:42.000Well, when you run out of When you do that much to it and mitochondria start to become dysfunctional, you start to not have enough places to put it away and it starts spilling into the bloodstream and now you cause all kinds of problems.
00:12:56.000So, one of the things that we really wanted to talk about here is high-carb versus low-carb, because this is just a giant point of contention today in nutrition, especially in terms of athletes with performance in mind.
00:13:09.000It's a big factor, whether or not high-carb or low-carb is the way to go, and there's a lot of zealots on both sides, and there's a lot of bullshit, and there's a lot of online experts, and one of the great things about bringing you two guys in here is because you could really actually explain the science behind it.
00:13:26.000You've been great, Lane, at pointing out that it's not a magic bullet.
00:13:32.000And so many people like to sort of stress it that way.
00:13:37.000They like to portray ketogenic diet as, this is it, this is the end-all, be-all.
00:15:29.000And there's no difference in weight loss.
00:15:31.000There's no difference in blood lipids, even glycemic control.
00:15:35.000So there was a study where they met analyses of, I think it was 23 studies over 3,000 people, where they looked at, okay, if you control calories, so calories are equated, Does low carb versus low fat make a difference on weight loss, glycemic control,
00:15:54.000So by definition, we have an objective biomarker that defines the ketogenic diet.
00:15:58.000It's the only diet that actually has something that you can measure in your blood to say you're on this diet.
00:16:03.000And when your ketone levels are elevated, that confers many different benefits that I believe Can enhance adherence to the diet.
00:16:13.000Before we get into the woods here, I want to clarify one thing.
00:16:17.000The difference between someone being on a diet and being able to sustain it and not being able to sustain it and gaining all that weight back, isn't that a discipline issue?
00:16:26.000Well, partly, but we kind of have to start looking at, okay, if we go in...
00:16:36.000We have to find what requires the least amount of discipline for somebody to stick to because discipline is, while some people have more, some people have less.
00:16:48.000So when do we normally find that people kind of drop off whatever they're doing?
00:16:53.000It's when they're stressed out, work's stressing them out, they're going through a divorce, those kinds of things, right?
00:17:00.000That's where our discipline kind of wanes because we're trying to be so disciplined for this other thing and it's draining us.
00:17:06.000So what happens with diet is People who are busy, people who have a lot of stress in their life, that's where they really start overeating.
00:17:16.000So we have to find something that requires – I look at it as let's find something that requires the minimal amount of discipline for a person so that when your life goes to absolute shit, you can still stick to it.
00:17:28.000And so for some people, that is a very, very individual thing.
00:17:32.000And they see this in the dietary studies that what works for one person to create a deficit and sustainable – Isn't the same way for another person?
00:17:41.000And Dom even commented on this about his wife, Chilla.
00:17:44.000She does much better on a higher ratio of carbohydrates to fat.
00:17:49.000Yeah, I mean, early on it was obvious that she wasn't going to change her diet.
00:17:53.000The time that we met, like 10 years ago almost, I was really getting into this and I really felt that, for me at least, but she would stop at Checkers and get a burger and a sugary drink.
00:18:18.000The diet, low-carb, I feel, and ketogenic, putting it under that umbrella, works, I think, for up to 25% to 30% of people, especially if they're carbohydrate intolerant.
00:18:33.000And I believe that it does that by virtue of elevating ketones, shifting the neuropharmacology of the brain.
00:18:42.000For example, it works through ghrelin.
00:18:43.000There's new science emerging right now showing that Appetite regulation is influenced positively by nutritional ketosis in ways that we're just starting to learn now.
00:19:22.000And that has major implications for military personnel being keto-adapted, not just for performance, preventing seizures, and I think for...
00:19:37.000So if you're in austere environments where you have limited food availability, that becomes a major issue.
00:19:42.000And if you're working as a scientist and you're working with animals, you're doing experiments, you don't have time to eat...
00:19:48.000I need to maintain that cognitive function.
00:19:50.000I need to be sharp, you know, with limited food.
00:19:53.000So it worked very good for me throughout my professorship, you know, getting tenure and things like that, where I could just put more time and energy into my work without having to stop, prepare a meal, eat a meal, clean up.
00:20:04.000Like, I think I wasted a lot of time doing that when I was eating five to six meals a day.
00:20:10.000He said something that I think you've called bullshit on before.
00:20:51.000With carb intolerance, if you look at the benefits of like on blood glucose, blood lipids, it is almost 90 to 95% explained by weight loss.
00:21:03.000So you can take people, put them on a high carb, very low fat diet, their blood glucose and their blood lipids will drop, even with like higher insulin levels than people who are on a low carb diet.
00:21:16.000If they're on a calorie restricted diet.
00:21:48.000Like if you look at any Gaussian distribution chart, which is kind of how populations distribute based on a certain treatment, you have about 60 to 70% that fall into the average.
00:21:58.000Then you have another, you know, 10-20% that are kind of do a little bit better one way versus the other.
00:22:04.000And then you have 5% on either end that are, sorry, 2.5% on either end that are outliers, right?
00:22:09.000So just to frame this again, let's take weightlifting.
00:22:13.000We know weightlifting makes you bigger and stronger, right?
00:22:18.000There are studies that have shown that some people who are beginners where you should be gaining a lot of muscle very quickly, some people will go from the first time they walk in the gym, squat 185, 12 weeks later, they're squatting 400 pounds.
00:22:32.000There have actually been studies where over 12 weeks there's a few individuals who did not get stronger.
00:22:36.000So those are your outliers right there.
00:22:38.000So if we circle this back to ketogenic diet, I'm not sitting here and saying that somebody may actually physiologically do better on a ketogenic diet versus a lower fat diet.
00:22:52.000But when we start making recommendations for people, what we should start with is, okay, create a calorie deficit that allows you to lose some weight.
00:23:00.000Because if we look at the studies and we look at if we equate for protein, because that's a big thing.
00:23:05.000So if you look at some of the studies where Volek did, where he compared like your kind of food guide pyramid type diet to a ketogenic diet.
00:23:15.000The ketogenic diets were a little bit higher protein.
00:23:17.000That protein has a thermogenic effect and also an appetite suppression effect.
00:23:21.000When you equate for those, and there's been 32 studies, there was a recent meta-analysis done of 32 studies that equated for calories and protein.
00:23:31.000Absolutely no difference in fat loss when you equate for those two, calories and protein, because protein's a big one, because protein has a big benefit on thermogenesis and weight loss.
00:23:42.000Also lean body mass retention, which is huge, because one of the reasons people regain weight is because when they lose weight, they tend to lose fat and muscle, and when they regain it, it's almost all fat in the initial phase.
00:23:53.000That data may not have included data with the ketogenic diet.
00:23:57.000So I know when I did the diet, I've seen a lot of blood work.
00:24:00.000So for example, my hemoglobin H1C, triglycerides, HSCRP goes down, insulin goes down, blood pressure goes down.
00:24:08.000And all those changes happened without my body weight changing.
00:24:14.000So that would kind of argue against that you needed a calorie deficit.
00:24:43.000So that's what – and that's what I think a lot of people miss, okay?
00:24:45.000And I think that – What I'll say is – sorry.
00:24:49.000I'm just saying – so like I think that's very powerful too that these changes that I just mentioned can occur without changing your body weight.
00:24:58.000So they are just – you're fundamentally changing your metabolism when you do that from – and that has pretty wide-ranging implications.
00:25:07.000So I think that what I'm going to say is that if you – if we're going to talk about people getting healthier – The first thing we need to start with is let's not lose 50% arguing about 5%, right?
00:25:19.000So if I tell somebody, hey, find a diet you can stick to that's sustainable, and if you can lose 10% of your body weight, even for obese people, they get almost all the health benefits in the first 10%.
00:25:33.000Now, maybe some people like you or people who respond really well to a ketogenic diet, I'm not, again, there's outliers or people on the other sides of the Gaussian curve.
00:25:42.000If you do a little bit better on there, then great.
00:25:45.000But if you find a ketogenic diet is completely unsustainable for you and you're not able to stick to it, but you're trying to do it because you're trying to get a little bit better blood glucose regulation, you're...
00:25:57.000You know, you're kind of shooting yourself in the foot because if you could stick to, like let's say for the individual, a higher carb diet was easier for them to stick to, they could lose weight on that.
00:26:06.000Then that's the bulk of their health benefits they're going to get from it.
00:26:09.000I'm having a hard time with these terms, easier, because I don't know exactly why it would be easier or wouldn't be easier.
00:26:16.000And I always wonder, again, is this a discipline issue?
00:26:22.000It comes down to food preference, but I believe that When you follow low-carb, not even ketogenic diet, the variability of the fluctuations in your insulin and blood glucose, the postprandial dip in blood glucose that you get after you eat,
00:26:38.000that's virtually abolished or significantly attenuated.
00:26:42.000And then you have, you know, ketones are working through ghrelin, for example.
00:26:47.000You could eat a normal diet and drink ketones and it's actually suppressing your appetite through ghrelin.
00:26:57.000So these changes sort of are happening, but my sister, for example, followed the ketogenic diet and found it easy to follow, but she gained weight because she was eating all these fat bombs that she was making.
00:27:15.000And a lot of people don't necessarily need a nutritionist to tell them what to do, but they need like a nutritional psychotherapist or something.
00:27:22.000You know, their relationship with food is really – and I think that's what Lane has a firm grasp on.
00:27:57.000You want to just stuff your face with cupcakes every now and then, and then you feel like it's too much torture to keep yourself on this narrow path of high-fat, low-carb, moderate protein.
00:28:07.000But, you know, five years ago, ten years ago, that was the case, but now there's ketogenic brownies, there's ketogenic cookies, there's many different food companies.
00:29:31.000If you look at people that think they're addicted to sugar or that sugar is a lot, if you look at things like cookies and cakes, it's actually – they have more calories from fats than they do sugars.
00:29:40.000It's – sugar and fat together is hyperpalatable, right?
00:29:44.000So we – one of the things I was going to bring up is this idea that sugar is so inherently bad and you said the cookie.
00:29:52.000We view that as an inherently bad thing.
00:29:55.000But what if I told you that there were certain people, not everybody, everybody's different, but there were certain people who, if you tell them, hey, you can have that cookie every once in a while, if you track it, work it into your macronutrient intake, that that's fine, that that actually improved their adherence to diet.
00:30:16.000Because increased flexibility actually usually improves adherence.
00:30:21.000So we see this actually with training too.
00:30:24.000Athletes, when you do a flexible training model where they have to get in a certain amount of training but they kind of can pick and choose their self which days are hard and which days are a little bit...
00:30:36.000So now you always have to sacrifice something.
00:30:40.000In order to, if you want to lose weight, right?
00:30:42.000So if you're doing a ketogenic diet, what you're sacrificing is saying, well, I like the spontaneous reductions in appetite, so I don't mind eating not these foods so I can get that.
00:30:52.000If you're doing like kind of what, I don't want to say I popularized it, but myself and some other people on the message boards popularized something called flexible dieting, where you can eat essentially whatever you want as long as you hit your protein, carbohydrate, and fat targets.
00:31:06.000Now what you're sacrificing is, okay, you're tracking every day.
00:31:39.000I mean, if I'm over here saying, it's hard for me to sell what I do, because I'm saying, well, everything in moderation, and you've got to be diligent, and you've got to have these behaviors, and that doesn't sound sexy when there's another guy over here saying, nah, bro, it's just carbs.
00:31:53.000I know metabolism's complicated and everything, but it's just carbs.
00:31:57.000You know, when I started working with people, and I've worked with over 1,500 people coaching in nutrition online over the past 13 years, which actually probably taught me more than my PhD did, what I found was is that people were so different individually in terms of what made them tick,
00:32:47.000I mean, we all have different SNPs, you know, that, you know, some people have suppressed fatty acid oxidation pathways, others are like screaming fat metabolizers, you know, or fat or sugar metabolizers.
00:32:59.000So, but if you look at, like, I remember I had a conversation with the researcher, Dr. Nakamura at Illinois, who was doing some of that fructose stuff.
00:33:11.000When I was a first-year grad student, I said, well, it's this high fructose corn syrup.
00:33:16.000This is what's causing obesity, right?
00:33:49.000You're not talking about, in the context of a calorie surplus, a surplus amount of fructose, which kind of explains the state of the United States.
00:34:51.000Because that took over in many of the products.
00:34:54.000So if there's an increase in obesity, but a decrease in sugar consumption, but you're not saying a decrease in high fructose corn syrup consumption.
00:36:04.000I think it's due to an excess surplus calories, and those surplus calories being high fructose corn syrup.
00:36:12.000So if you're used to eating a certain amount of calories, and back when we were actually maintaining our weight back before the 60s, we were eating about 2,200 calories a day.
00:36:34.000Now some people, yeah, that's a whole other rabbit hole.
00:36:38.000If you start adding sodas in, which aren't satiating at all, they don't positively affect your hunger hormones, but you continue your same normal food intake, boom.
00:36:50.000I mean, you can start to store, right?
00:36:52.000But I can't tell somebody, hey, there's no way you can lose weight and drink a soda.
00:37:56.000The lower glycemic group had just a little bit better improvement, probably because they were eating higher fiber, which can bind cholesterol and you excreted.
00:38:04.000I would like to see what happened if they equated.
00:38:06.000So again, it's creating that calorie deficit.
00:38:19.000So I always tell people, your diet is like a budget if you're practicing something like flexible dieting, right?
00:38:25.000So if I've got somebody like myself who has above average muscle mass, hopefully I can say that, and people on the internet are probably going to knock me.
00:38:55.000So, if you make $100 million a year, is it a big deal for you to go out and buy a $500,000 sports car if you can still pay your mortgage and pay all the other requirements that you have?
00:40:01.000So it's more about people saying, hey, I can still eat these foods I enjoy and I'm still losing weight because I'm in a calorie deficit and I'm hitting my protein, carbon, fat targets.
00:40:11.000But if you're somebody with a slow metabolism and you're not exercising very much and maybe all you're eating is 100 grams of carbs a day, should you spend 75 grams of those carbs on two Pop-Tarts?
00:40:29.0004,000 calories, like an Alberto Nunez friend of ours, if you're eating 4,000 calories a day and losing weight, is it a big deal if he has two Pop-Tarts?
00:40:38.000Not really, because I actually had one competitor, again a competitor, who had such a fast metabolism that He was actually having a lot of GI dysfunction because he was eating like 700 grams of carbs and 200 grams of fat per day just to maintain his weight.
00:40:55.000And he said, I feel bloated all the time.
00:40:58.000And I said, well, what are you eating?
00:42:30.000Before you do that, why do you think that it would be an issue?
00:42:33.000What would be the issue with sugar and with Pop-Tarts and junk food?
00:42:37.000What would be the negative effects biologically?
00:42:40.000I think the accumulation of the postprandial spikes in glucose and insulin over time, especially in the context of a calorie surplus...
00:43:00.000I think it's even more important, almost, to actually stick with foods, carbohydrate sources that Our lower glycemic, you know, you can only tolerate so much fiber, but I think if you are running a calorie, if you are doing a ketogenic diet and you have a calorie surplus,
00:43:21.000So you are putting too much fat in the system and that...
00:43:24.000But it would go up on a higher carb diet.
00:43:26.000It would go up on a higher carb diet, too.
00:43:29.000So, I mean, I kind of would stay along the lines of maybe protein, but you just, you know, you titrate it in a reasonable amount.
00:43:35.000But I just think that the negative, you know, that could come out of that is that you're, you know, I'm following a blood glucose curve, right?
00:44:34.000But I think we can, for type 1 diabetics, which I think we can apply that data to the population, if they control their glucose levels, that pays big dividends in the long run.
00:44:49.000You actually touched on a couple of the points I was going to bring up, but I want to address one thing first, which is the higher postprandial insulin and the negative effects on health.
00:44:59.000So, if you have – they've done studies on this, on BMI versus insulin.
00:45:03.000Now, BMI is a – we can debate about how useful of a measure it is, but in general, it reflects body fat in the average population.
00:45:09.000Not in lifters, but in the average population.
00:45:11.000BMI, by the way, for people who are listening, is a ratio of your height versus your weight that generally reflects obesity.
00:45:38.000They look at you and say you're obese.
00:45:39.000Some insurances will do like a waist chest measurement, which helps.
00:45:42.000But anyway, so postprandial insulin, they've looked at the relationship between people who have their BMIs and postprandial insulin.
00:45:51.000They find that people with higher BMI have higher postprandial insulin.
00:45:55.000But the opposite relationship does not hold true.
00:45:57.000People who have higher insulin do not necessarily have higher BMI and they've done this in meta-analysis.
00:46:03.000So what that says is again that if you are obese, type 2 diabetic metabolic syndrome profile, that you will have elevated levels of insulin because your body is becoming insensitive to it because of all the dysfunction that we talked about.
00:46:17.000But just because you secrete higher insulin doesn't mean that you're going to have more body fat.
00:46:22.000And there was a study done actually by one of the proponents of the carbohydrate-insulin hypothesis that looked at what's called Mendelian randomization, where basically the idea is you have different gene variants like we were talking about.
00:46:38.000And if, for example, like they've done this with LDL cholesterol – or sorry – Yes, LDL cholesterol.
00:46:46.000Most people believe that LDL cholesterol has some contribution towards heart disease.
00:47:37.000I mean, we have hemoglobin H1C for like, you know.
00:47:40.000So there was another meta-analysis where they looked at higher carb versus lower carb diets.
00:47:49.000Equating calories, looking at HbA1c, and saw that the differences in weight loss were no different, like we've discussed, when calories are equated.
00:47:58.000But also the differences in HbA1c reduction weren't different.
00:48:02.000Now, you asked about health and, you know, consuming some of these quote-unquote bad foods, if you do it in the...
00:48:09.000But you said in the context of a caloric surplus, right?
00:48:13.000Which is the important thing, because they help to create a surplus.
00:48:17.000But in a deficit, what's the downside?
00:48:19.000Because kind of when you talk to people who are not ketogenic necessarily but proponents of quote-unquote clean eating, which again has no real objective definition, when you say, okay, well, a Pop-Tart, maybe you can lose weight on it, but it can't be good for you.
00:48:34.000Okay, well then we have to have some objective measurement to show this by, right?
00:48:38.000Because otherwise it's, do you believe in magic?
00:49:18.000If there was a ketogenic Pop-Tart and it was made with almond flour, we know that if we eat almonds, we're probably – or other nuts or things.
00:49:57.000It's not only calories, but creates a hormonal response and also from the brain perspective can change the neuropharmacology of your brain.
00:50:06.000I mean, that's how I got into the ketogenic diet because it fundamentally changes neurotransmitter systems and reward systems and things like that.
00:50:17.000And if you look at the research data, it just doesn't support it, like with insulin and whatnot.
00:50:22.000Now, in terms of losing weight and what happens with leptin and ghrelin and all those kinds of things, that is a huge...
00:50:29.000One of the things we talked about before the podcast started – we had about a 30-minute podcast before we actually – Yeah, we did a podcast outside.
00:50:36.000You know, people say things like – one of the reasons people are really mistrustful of kind of the calories in, calories out model is because it is viewed as a – Two isolated variables.
00:50:49.000Calories in and calories out are separate.
00:51:42.000It can answer some questions, other questions it can't.
00:51:45.000Animal studies can be helpful, but you don't want to do an insulin study in cows because cows are ruminants and they don't care about insulin.
00:51:53.000Anyway, they took rats, they took them through two diet cycles.
00:51:56.000Okay, so this is kind of back to the yo-yo dieting thing.
00:51:59.000And they looked at, okay, when they took obese rats, dieted them down to a kind of normal level, then they basically gave them as much food as they wanted, let them eat back to the original obese level.
00:52:12.000Dieted them down again to the previous level and then let them re-eat back up.
00:52:16.000What they found was absolutely astonishing.
00:52:18.000Their food efficiency went so far up because their metabolic rate became suppressed every time they dieted down.
00:52:24.000Your body has this self-defense system that you activate every time you diet.
00:52:27.000I talk about this in my Shameless Plug book.
00:52:31.000So the first time they dieted, if that's the kind of one times rate that they lost fat at, When they let them regain it, they regained it twice as fast as they lost it.
00:52:41.000Then the second time they tried to lose it, they lost it at half the original rate.
00:52:46.000Then when they regained it the second time, they regained it three times as fast.
00:53:15.000Because every time you diet, and we see this with yo-yo dieters who spend, how many people do you know that seem to be perpetually on a diet, but they just have that short overfeeding period in between diets.
00:53:27.000It really does, because every time you diet, you're activating your body's self-defense system.
00:53:31.000How many fighters do you know that every time they diet, it gets harder and harder for them to make weight?
00:54:21.000So your body creates much tighter self-defense system there.
00:54:25.000So when you diet, your metabolic rate slows way down.
00:54:29.000I mean, if you've ever, these guys who cut weight, so by the time they're ready to get a fight, for example, their metabolic rate's really slow.
00:54:39.000They eat a crap ton of food because their ghrelin is way up, leptin is way down, insulin is way down, and they regain it really fast.
00:54:49.000I think it's safe to assume, just to interject, that if you diet for 16 weeks for a show, for example, or a contest, that what you actually educated me in like 10 years ago, and I thought there was this like post-contest rebound and in two weeks there'd be this anabolic window or whatever.
00:55:06.000It actually, if you diet hard for 16 weeks to make weight, it takes an equal amount of time to get your metabolism back up to that level again.
00:55:22.000We want to study this with metabolic chambers in rats and use a variety of different approaches to determine how fast it actually takes to bring your metabolism back up and if different strategies can be used to ramp up your metabolism.
00:55:35.000Well, because when you regain it, You regain fat really quickly, but your metabolic rate is more sluggish to return.
00:55:43.000So they actually did a study with the biggest loser participants.
00:55:46.000And this is why I'm so big on what is sustainable.
00:55:57.000I can't remember the exact numbers, but they lost a bunch of weight over the 30 weeks because they starve them and they exercise the crap out of them.
00:56:03.000And they saw that their metabolic rate dropped 500 calories more than you would predict just by the amount of body fat and lean body mass they lose.
00:56:15.000This is what's called metabolic adaptation.
00:56:17.000When you define metabolic rate dropping, what do you mean by that?
00:56:24.000So your overall total daily energy expenditure, your TDEE, is made up of your basal metabolic rate, which is what you burn, like what we're doing right now, just sitting around doing nothing.
00:57:28.000Then your exercise activity, which is intuitive, that's how many calories you burn exercising.
00:57:32.000And then there's what's called the thermic effect of food, which we already discussed, how much energy required to get energy out of food.
00:57:38.000And all those add up to your total daily energy expenditure.
00:57:42.000And we can predict, based on equations, what your metabolic rate should be.
00:57:48.000So these people, their metabolic rate was 500 calories a day lower than it should have been just based off the weight they lost.
00:57:54.000Because if you lose muscle and you lose fat, You have less weight to carry around, right?
00:57:59.000So your metabolic rate goes down just from that, but it goes down way more than it should.
00:58:03.000That is the first prong of your body's self-defense system to stop you from starving yourself is to become more efficient.
00:58:10.000We hear the word efficiency and we think, wow, that's a good thing.
00:58:13.000Think about if your body fat levels were a gas tank And you had a car, okay?
00:58:19.000You would not want to be efficient, right?
00:58:21.000You wouldn't have one of the old Suburbans that was like half a mile per gallon, right?
00:58:24.000You don't want the Prius, because you can go way longer.
00:58:26.000So going back to that study on rats, they became so much more efficient with their food, and this is the second prong of your body's self-defense system, is to not only slow down your metabolic rate while you're dieting, but to start activating systems that deal with re-storage once you actually start overeating again.
00:58:44.000Have you ever done a long diet or known somebody who did it and then they start eating again?
00:58:55.000Well, water doesn't stay around for six months, so it's not water.
00:58:59.000That is your body preparing all these systems.
00:59:02.000So even like enzymes that deal with fat storage while you're dieting actually go up because it's preparing your body for restorage.
00:59:09.000And then even probably the most interesting thing is...
00:59:12.000So this all falls back on the importance of tracking macros, which is completely ignored with guys coming off of a fight or fitness competitors and things like that.
00:59:23.000Right, you don't just want to let yourself blow up really quickly.
00:59:26.000It's a myth that your body is set up to be anabolic or to gain muscle.
01:00:09.000And then if you started, if you were in a caloric deficit, you were losing weight, it just gave up some of its nutrients, you know, like the guy who fasted for 365 days and didn't die because he had so much fat.
01:00:22.000We now know that body fat fits every definition in the endocrine system.
01:00:52.000Unless now you can create more fat cells if you become so obese that you literally can't stuff any more fat in there, right?
01:01:00.000So obese people have fat cell hyperplasia a lot of times.
01:01:05.000What's really interesting is people at the end of a diet, when your thyroid hormone is lower, your sympathetic nervous system tone is lower, this unique hormonal milieu, if you overfeed too rapidly, there's a researcher named McLean out of Colorado that showed that you can actually increase your fat cell number if you overfeed too rapidly right after a diet.
01:01:26.000Now this was in rats, full disclosure, but it was fascinating stuff.
01:01:31.000So now you're increasing your bodies, but it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective.
01:01:36.000Your body's like, shit, we had this famine.
01:01:39.000We don't want to deal with this shit again.
01:01:40.000We want to make sure that we can store as much stuff as possible.
01:01:43.000So we're going to create some new, this dude is rapidly overfeeding.
01:01:47.000We're going to create some new fat cells to make sure we're not going to miss any of this energy.
01:01:50.000We're going to capture every single bit of it.
01:01:51.000I like what you're saying, and it makes a lot of sense.
01:01:54.000You're talking about weight loss and weight gain, but you were specifically discussing hormonal changes in the body due to the ketogenic diet that are beneficial, and that these hormonal changes and the changes to the way that the brain functions would be a benefit of following that diet versus just working on calories.
01:02:13.000Yeah, I mean, it's that book I gave you, The Complete Book of Ketones by Dr. Mary.
01:04:08.000And I can go kind of on and talking about the different applications of the ketogenic diet, which I did on the first podcast.
01:04:12.000But from a perspective of someone dieting to lose weight, dieting as a lifestyle, doing intermittent fasting, the ketogenic diet makes intermittent fasting much easier because your brain's adapted to it.
01:05:17.000Now for people that are thinking about gains, trying to gain weight, they would think that the ketogenic diet, that 80-90% fat, would not be enough protein.
01:05:25.000I believe that the ketogenic diet shines when you are in a calorie deficit.
01:05:31.000My mentor for the cancer work, Tom Seyfried, had published a study showing an unrestricted ketogenic diet can actually promote cancer growth in a brain tumor model.
01:05:41.000Unrestricted meaning too much calories?
01:05:43.000Yeah, they were feeding mice a sugary ketogenic formula that was on the market at the time.
01:08:30.000Isn't that an issue, though, with powerlifters, though?
01:08:32.000A good percentage of them carry around a lot of body fat.
01:08:35.000It's not as much as you would think anymore.
01:08:37.000Like, in the super heavyweights, yes, because, for example, the IPF, which is kind of the IOC-recognized powerlifting federation that I compete in, their cutoff for super heavyweights is 265. So if you're going to be a super heavyweight, He might as well just be 350, you know?
01:09:39.000So people, not to make too much of a side tangent, but people look at DEXA, Dual X-ray Absorption Technology, and they say, oh, that's the gold standard.
01:09:56.000And sometimes you have, like, differences just dexing the same rat twice.
01:10:00.000It depends on the machine, your hydration status, because water, if you want to gain, you know what the best way to gain eight pounds of lean body mass within five minutes?
01:10:09.000Go do a dexa, then drink a gallon of water, go back, do another dexa.
01:10:12.000You'll be eight pounds lean body mass heavier.
01:10:39.000But the change, like if I'm calibrating consistently at 10% and then it drops to eight and then seven, I can be relatively confident that I'm losing body fat.
01:10:49.000Same thing for DEXA. But you have to do it the same time of day, same hydration status, all that kind of stuff.
01:10:55.000And I don't really use Dexa because people, in order to get it accurate, you'd have to use it like every day for it to be actual relative.
01:11:34.000So that separates the competitors from the bros online.
01:11:39.000You're really fighting evolution at that point because your body is trying to – you're close to starvation, literally.
01:11:44.000Your body is trying to keep you from doing that.
01:11:46.000So like you think about food all the time.
01:11:48.000You actually become – so a friend of mine, Chris Foss, he's a professor now.
01:11:53.000He was doing his PhD at the same time as me.
01:11:55.000And him, my other friend, Dr. Jeremy Lineke and Dr. Lindy Rousseau, Chris's wife – Chris was doing a contest prep and I prepped him for the show.
01:12:55.000There's some good ones out there, but some of the stuff I've seen, I'm like, God, I wish I could talk to somebody in that realm because it's so much pro-science.
01:13:03.000It's so dangerous, too, and it's really, you can only do it three or four times, and then your body starts to reject it, and these guys have to go up and wait, like you were talking about.
01:13:17.000His testosterone, right, went and plummeted, but his basal requirements, his caloric requirements, was like 1,200.
01:13:25.000The crazy thing is, so there have been some critics of my kind of view of metabolic adaptation in the body's self-defense system, full disclosure.
01:13:36.000They say, well, if you look at metabolic adaptation, it's only a 15% adaptation relative to the whole adaptation.
01:13:45.000But if you look at Chris's numbers, I think on average that's probably right, on an average diet with an average person.
01:13:50.000You take somebody trying to get really lean, or somebody who yo-yo diets, or somebody who crash diets, and now, again, it's proportionate.
01:13:58.000If you challenge your body with something extreme, it's going to respond in an extreme fashion.
01:14:03.000So every case study we have on natural bodybuilders, and there's about 10 of them now, who look at their contest preparation and coming out of it.
01:14:10.000And I use them just because this is the realm I grew up in.
01:14:13.000Shows that they're hypogonadal by the time that they're at stage.
01:14:17.000Hypogonadal mean their balls are shrinking?
01:14:19.000No, their testosterone is clinically low.
01:16:10.000But the question shouldn't be what we were doing.
01:16:12.000The question should be what makes sense and what is healthy now.
01:16:16.000If you look at studies on dairy, almost all studies show people who take in dairy are healthier, better bone density, more lean body mass, lower body fat.
01:16:26.000But are there a lot of people that think that dairy is bad for you?
01:18:23.000The epithelial cells, the tight junction is a little anchor that holds them and that gets loose.
01:18:28.000If something's dysfunctional with that, I think?
01:18:47.000Going back to the paleo thing, what I was going to say is, even though I disagree with their relevance, if you told me, okay, you take their general recommendations, limit sugar, eat more whole foods, eat higher protein, I think in general that's pretty good recommendations for most people.
01:19:05.000I just, as you said, I'm anti-bullshit, so I'm not going to let you make claims about why something works when that's not why it works, right?
01:19:13.000So when we look at Like, the differences in diets.
01:19:17.000Like, I think what I would say generally to people is...
01:19:22.000As far as fat loss goes and health markers.
01:19:26.000If you want to lose weight, if you eat...
01:19:29.000If you control your calories, so you eat in a calorie deficit, you eat enough protein because protein helps spare lean body mass and is thermogenic, so it increases your energy output.
01:19:40.000Then you can kind of do whatever you want with carbs and fats and whatever you prefer and you'll still lose the same amount of weight and get about all the health benefits.
01:19:48.000But it has to be something that you can sustain because if you can't sustain it, you're going to put all that weight back on.
01:19:57.000Sustaining it meaning having a balanced diet that you can stick with versus some sort of calorie deficit that's really only a temporary thing to lose weight.
01:20:25.000The behavior you use and the style of dieting you use, you have to continue that if you want to maintain it.
01:20:31.000So if you like ketogenic, like you like ketogenic, you like ketogenic, and I think you're a big fan of meat.
01:20:39.000If you can sustain that, you know, like people out there say, oh my God, people probably tell you, you're going to get cancer and you're going to do this and you're going to do that.
01:20:47.000Most of those health benefits are just from not having excess body fat.
01:20:52.000Excess body fat and the metabolic dysregulations of a metabolic type syndrome, that's what caused 90% of these problems.
01:21:01.000Which is why I get crazy when people say that fat is healthy.
01:21:59.000When your body gets to a fat-burning stage and then on top of that you pile on carbohydrates, then your body wants to store those carbohydrates as well.
01:22:18.000So I talk about this in my book because people will go too far to each direction to say, well, you said you hardly store any carbohydrate as actual fat.
01:22:27.000Why don't we eat zero fat and mostly carbohydrate?
01:22:35.000You didn't get here today and get through evolution and tens of thousand years of hard living by your body being stupid.
01:22:43.000So your body can ramp up de novo lipogenesis so that you can create fat from carbohydrate if fat gets low and carbohydrate intake gets high enough.
01:22:52.000There was a research study or a meta-analysis done by Kevin Hall, who's an NIH researcher, And they showed that if you equate calories, you get a small extra benefit from fat restriction versus carb restriction on fat loss.
01:23:09.000So you get about 26 grams extra fat loss per day, calories equated, protein equated, if you restrict fat versus carb.
01:23:18.000Now, before everybody goes crazy, that's probably due to a little bit of inefficiencies in ramping up de novo lipogenesis because it takes energy to move that system.
01:23:29.000But 26 grams of fat loss per day, to me, is not a physiological, like, I don't care about that.
01:23:34.000That's nothing compared to, okay, if you like low carb better, don't worry about losing an extra 26 grams of fat.
01:23:41.000If you like low carb better and you can sustain that, then do low carb.
01:23:44.000One of the things that we seem to be getting into here is the difference between losing weight and optimal performance and then optimal performance mentally and hormonally versus optimal performance physically in terms of like athletic pursuits.
01:24:01.000And the type of person, whether it's, you know, you don't want to put a teenager that's, you know, playing football on a ketogenic diet necessarily.
01:24:36.000So I think as we age, I would say our carbohydrate tolerance decreases with age because our metabolic machinery is not as hungry for glucose.
01:24:47.000I mean, we're set up, and hormonally, our insulin sensitivity is not as high, glycolytic pathways are reduced, things like that.
01:24:55.000So it makes sense that as we transition into age for longevity and for health span, maybe not lifespan, but health span, So carbohydrate restriction makes sense.
01:25:05.000And even in some cases, the ketogenic diet makes sense.
01:25:17.000But if you look at longevity data, the actual longevity data, people who restrict fat versus carb live longer.
01:25:23.000Like that's what a new study that came out showed.
01:25:26.000But again, there's a lot— I'm describing it as also a means of—because people put on weight as they age with a low carb and with a ketogenic diet.
01:25:35.000That becomes a practical strategy to create a sustainable calorie deficit.
01:25:42.000For losing weight, sustaining that, and also if you elevate ketones over time, a lot of the new research that's coming out over the last five years, ketones is not just a superior source of energy metabolically, but it also has epigenetic effects on the body.
01:25:57.000It activates gene pathways that can confer resistance against oxidative stress, the longevity pathways, anti-inflammatory pathways.
01:26:32.000That's linked with many age-related chronic diseases and autoimmune pathways.
01:26:37.000It decreases the activation of the NLRP3 inflammasome.
01:26:42.000When you're talking about people living longer, you're talking about that epidemiology study that was like a questionnaire of people, what they ate over a long period of time.
01:27:31.000And everybody will say, you know, eat carbs, you live longer, low-fat diets are going to kill you, and then it just gets crazier.
01:27:37.000Here's why some of the animal work, I mean, Lane and I both did animal work, I think some of the animal work is almost more reliable because you have an inbred strain of animal and you have very tight control.
01:28:04.000I read some of the human studies and become more confused.
01:28:07.000But going back to the animal data, I'm almost more comfortable with some of these outcomes for animal studies.
01:28:14.000So one thing I want to bring up that I think is really important...
01:28:18.000Is we have – I think we're all getting to this point and people out there think that there's like this perfect diet that's going to cure everything and all of our ales.
01:28:27.000The fact – the uncomfortable truth and the fact of the matter is that if one diet is – and I don't know this specifically but my guess is if one diet is better for cancer, it might be worse for heart disease.
01:28:38.000Or if one diet is better for insulin resistance, maybe it's worse for cancer.
01:28:42.000One diet is better for cognitive performance, it might be worse for cognitive performance.
01:29:44.000So if you can get to a normal weight and maintain it, or sorry, normal body fat and maintain it, or if you're a high body fat, if you can get to a lower body fat and maintain it, That's 95% of the battle.
01:29:58.000All this other stuff is 5% that we're worrying about, that we're going back and forth about.
01:30:03.000And that's why I don't want to miss the context because when people like – I'll pick on him because he was who I asked for.
01:30:17.000When people like Gary Taubes say things like carbs are causing obesity, just carbs.
01:30:24.000You create this problem where if people don't like eating a high-fat diet or a low-carb diet and they can't sustain it, they just feel like they're a big failure and they just quit.
01:31:18.000Well, I think a diet strategy that controls your appetite and does not have your appetite controlling you...
01:31:27.000Which I think is accomplished with a ketogenic diet.
01:31:30.000That's also, you know, one that's a well-formulated one that controls, you know, that has fiber and adequate protein, is a strategy that allows you to be far less fixated on food.
01:31:44.000And you could decrease your meal frequency.
01:31:45.000So I know there's people out there that are probably busy people, CEOs of companies, students or whatever, that simply do not have time to prepare and eat meals when they get hungry.
01:32:00.000So by reducing meal frequency, you can increase your productivity.
01:32:04.000And I think you're kind of coaching your body to be a better fat burning.
01:32:54.000I'm fasting and most days that I want to be as productive as possible, I will not have my first meal, which would be typically a ketogenic meal around 4 p.m.
01:33:05.000I will start, I'll do a small meal like at work and then I'll eat my big meal at about 7 o'clock, maybe 7 o'clock and then snack throughout the night and maybe eat within, you know, I start eating at 4 p.m.
01:33:27.000And I didn't even know this was possible back 10 years ago.
01:33:31.000I didn't know it was possible to have that amount of control over my appetite and actually feel as lucid and as energetic and be able to get with Lane and do deadlifts with him and actually maintain my performance and my strength in the gym.
01:33:46.000I don't feel like I'm an outlier either.
01:34:37.000Well, if you look at some of the things that I'll disagree with are the idea that insulin has these big fluctuations and you become hypoglycemic and that causes overfeeding.
01:34:45.000In some people, that's the case, but most people, if they're eating, especially with a higher protein diet, that doesn't usually happen.
01:34:54.000I want to add that the population, most people are not bodybuilders, and the population of people that Lane mostly communicates with are on the border of being metabolically elite and also have a very high carb tolerance.
01:35:09.000If you're a bodybuilder with a large amount of lean body mass, you are pretty much metabolically set up to have a high carb tolerance.
01:35:18.000The general population is not like that.
01:35:20.000So let's talk about carb tolerance because that's one thing that we'll disagree on.
01:35:24.000I don't think that people are more or less carb tolerant.
01:35:28.000I think that people have slower and faster metabolic rates.
01:35:32.000So if you have a faster metabolic rate, you'll be more carb tolerant by default because you can just tolerate more calories.
01:35:37.000And a bodybuilder that's 220 pounds like you is going to be… If you look at somebody who's on a ketogenic diet, they're actually, by definition of carb tolerance, they're carbohydrate intolerant.
01:35:50.000Because if you challenge them with a bolus of glucose, they can't clear it.
01:35:55.000But that's just because of what they're adapted to, right?
01:36:01.000So I actually, the first experimental biology we ever went to, this is why, you know, even scientists get this shit so wrong sometimes, because they get so in their echo chamber, they don't bother to look outside of it.
01:36:12.000Going to the gym, when we first met and went, Lane stopped and had a huge meal, which to me, I was like, what are we doing?
01:36:19.000We're going to stop and eat before we go to the gym?
01:36:21.000I'll eat a whole pizza before I go squat.
01:36:22.000He eats a really heavy, fatty meal on the way to the gym.
01:36:25.000I've got to visit the bathroom about five times, but you know.
01:37:32.000That they see that performance isn't worse and that you don't – like there's no – There's not a limitation of blood flow because you've eaten something to the muscle.
01:37:44.000There's not a limitation of blood flow to the muscle.
01:38:36.000If I go in in a fed state, I'm just not as focused.
01:38:39.000My vision is not as acute right after a big meal as if I'm fasted 16 hours.
01:38:45.000But this is the hard thing with anecdote because we can't tease out whether or not that is an actual physiological thing or whether you just feel better and you think you'll do better, so you do better.
01:39:11.000Over half the people reported their symptoms got better and 30% actually physiologically got better because their brain was telling them get better.
01:39:23.000So that's part of probably the best diet for you might be the diet you can stick to and just feel real positive about, right?
01:39:30.000Because you feel like this might be some what's going on with a lot of this low carb stuff that people say they feel so fantastic because there's some sort of a placebo effect?
01:40:09.000One of the number one characteristics of cancer survivors is that they have a belief in God.
01:40:17.000They believe that they're going to make it through.
01:40:20.000Now, some people, cause or effect, some people may argue, religious people may argue, well, they believe in God and so God is helping them.
01:40:27.000The other argument to that is they believe that they are going to make it through there and so they have a better likelihood of doing it.
01:40:43.000They have remarkable – I believe that – well, I'm a person of faith, but I also believe that if you have faith in the methodology too, the patients that have communicated with me that actually believe that this approach is going to work and then they reach that actual therapeutic state of ketogenic diet have results that kind of defy what you would expect scientifically.
01:41:06.000So I believe it's working – Physiologically and also psychologically, there's immunopsychotherapy, right?
01:42:28.000Going back, that so many scientists miss is that context, like most people miss context, but scientists even miss context.
01:42:35.000So the first experimental biology symposium we ever went to, there was a poster where they fed people a ketogenic diet or they fed them a high-carb diet.
01:42:46.000And then at the end of six weeks, they challenged them with 100 grams of glucose and looked how long it took for them to clear that glucose.
01:42:54.000The ketogenic diet people would have been worse than, like, type 2 diabetics at clearing glucose, okay?
01:43:01.000Whereas people eating a high-carb diet cleared it just fine, right?
01:43:04.000Now, if you just looked at these numbers as a doctor, you'd be like, oh, my God, you're a diabetic.
01:43:22.000If you had fed a high-fat meal to these people, you would have seen the same thing in reverse.
01:43:28.000If you would have fed a high-fat meal to people who are out of the ketogenic diet and then a high-carb diet, you would have seen really elevated triacylglycerides, LDL cholesterol, VLDL cholesterol, chylomicrons, and people who were carb-adacted because it wasn't being cleared,
01:43:44.000because that's not what you're adapted to.
01:43:48.000Lane has a good analogy in his book, that book, where if you have a military factory that's making planes and then it has to switch over to making ships, right?
01:43:58.000So it takes a lot of time to change sort of all the processes that take place.
01:44:04.000And the same thing is sort of happening.
01:44:07.000I mean, you're giving your body a different fuel source.
01:44:18.000Yeah, and a misunderstanding of that, or at least an ignorance, is one of the more frustrating things online when I hear, like, nonsense people, these internet Air quote experts talking about the negative aspects of the ketogenic diet that they tried it and they felt weak.
01:44:41.000When you review a study and I think you have a study in your book actually that shows in the gym you basically say the ketogenic diet can hurt your performance in the gym.
01:44:53.000And you reference a race walking study.
01:44:55.000Where I think they did the ketogenic diet for like three weeks or something like that.
01:45:00.000I think we came back around and said that it's probably fine once you're adapted to it.
01:46:58.000Popcorn is great though because it actually has higher protein and higher fiber.
01:47:02.000But if I was going to commit to it as a lifestyle, then that would be fine.
01:47:09.000But unless you're willing to, again, if that's not something you're willing to stick to for life, You have to rethink if you want to do it or not.
01:47:17.000But there is some benefit in going on and off ketogenic diets, correct?
01:47:22.000So if you do a ketogenic diet and you want to stay in a state of ketosis, the days that I do intermittent fasting now, which I didn't do like five years ago, I don't necessarily do the ketogenic.
01:47:33.000I do a higher protein, low carb, but my macros are not ketogenic.
01:47:52.000I actually think it's a little bit better to be metabolically flexible.
01:47:55.000So I'll throw in – I tend to eat a lot of vegetables and then throw in some fruits too a few days a week.
01:48:02.000Where it may kick me out of ketosis, but during the middle of the day, when I need to be at my best, I pretty much always, I'm running low to moderate ketones during the day.
01:48:11.000And I can do that with different strategies now, you know, with my body.
01:48:15.000How much does that kick you out of ketosis though?
01:48:21.000I might eat half of dark chocolate, one or two things of dark chocolate, which is maybe 15, 20 grams of carbs and maybe a half cup of blueberries and then a big salad and some vegetables, typically green vegetables.
01:48:35.000So when you say it kicks you out of ketosis, so if you measure your blood, your ketones drop below what level?
01:48:41.0000.5 and I typically don't even measure at night, but I wake up in the morning and I might be about 0.5 and then that goes up throughout the day.
01:48:49.000So middle part of the day, I'm typically running one, between one to two, sometimes three millimoles.
01:48:55.000Is there another, the urine strips are only effective in the early stages of ketosis, is that correct?
01:49:01.000Yeah, because in the beginning, you spill out a lot of ketones in your urine, but as you increase ketone transport and utilization over time, less of them end up in your urine.
01:49:13.000Depends on the person, but after about two or three weeks, you may see less of a color change on the urine strips, even if you didn't change your diet.
01:49:21.000Is there another effective method other than the pricking the finger?
01:49:24.000Yeah, well, I think the blood, you know, Abbott Labs makes the Precision Extra.
01:49:31.000There's the Keto-Mojo, which I also use, we use in the lab.
01:49:34.000Keto-Mojo is a blood measurement and glucose measurement device that's...
01:49:40.000Essentially, because Abbott cornered the market, they basically allow you to check your ketones for a dollar strip instead of $3 or $4 or $5.
01:50:09.000And the Siemens Multi-Stick SG will measure ketones and then nine other things like that measure kidney function and, you know, your blood glucose and things like that.
01:51:04.000I know that if you drink alcohol and do a breath ketone meter, you can kind of pin it, depending on what meter you're using.
01:51:12.000If you're using a breath, that's for a breath ketone meter.
01:51:15.000If you have a breath alcohol measurement and you're in a state of ketosis, I have not seen that, depending on the device, that you'll have a false positive, if that's your question.
01:51:31.000So one thing I'll bring up because you said, well, you work with these kind of metabolically elite people.
01:51:37.000So one of the problems, I say what you're doing where you kind of take yourself up to the point where you're sort of getting out of ketosis and then going back in, that's probably fine.
01:51:46.000But most people aren't going to do it that way.
01:51:49.000They're going to be like, oh, I had a cheesecake or, oh, I couldn't take any more and I had some pizza or whatever.
01:52:04.000Actually, I wanted to bring up intermittent fasting too because I think, again, like if you – So the studies on intermittent fasting show that if calories are the same, you lose the same amount of weight, same amount of fat.
01:52:17.000Maybe you might be at risk for a little bit more lean body mass loss just because you're triggering protein synthesis less often.
01:52:24.000But you do have a little bit lower insulin levels, it seems like.
01:52:29.000Now, whether or not that's, again, beneficial based on the research that we talked about...
01:52:48.000So if you just calorically restrict, you increase autophagy and you decrease inflammation.
01:52:54.000Yeah, but you don't get – and autophagy is dependent upon the decrease in certain amino acids, glucose and insulin and you achieve – Those biomarker states at a more significant level doing intermittent fasting than you would.
01:53:11.000And they are the autophagy regulators.
01:53:13.000Can you send me the research for that?
01:53:52.000And if you have a fast metabolism, you're overshooting, and those calories have to go somewhere.
01:53:57.000So the point being, over 24 hours, you don't see differences in fat loss or fat gain, intermittent fasting versus non.
01:54:04.000I would be interested in the inflammation stuff and the autophagy stuff, because again, caloric restriction in and of itself decreases inflammation, increases autophagy.
01:54:13.000Interestingly enough, one of the sugar studies they did with higher sugar, with still calorically restricted, they showed decreases in inflammation.
01:54:20.000So it's inflammation is largely an issue of caloric restriction or the reduction of inflammation.
01:57:25.000So don't take my word as medical or nutrition advice.
01:57:29.000We do, our research is funded not only by the Department of Defense and Office of Navy Research, but also by companies that actually develop ketone food products and also exogenous ketone supplements.
01:57:41.000And our university owns the rights to those patents.
01:58:56.000We all have things that we think work better than others.
01:58:57.000But I think the fundamental, if you meet a scientist, and hopefully I equip myself well in this, and I think Dom does as well, is that, one, you have an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out.
01:59:09.000And two, you care more about getting the right answer than being right.
01:59:13.000When I went to do my PhD, I was eating eight meals a day.
01:59:17.000I was eating 300 grams of protein a day.
01:59:19.000I was looking for more reasons to eat more protein and eat it more frequently.
01:59:23.000When I left my PhD, I ate four meals a day and I ate a little bit less protein and less frequently.
01:59:31.000And you're becoming refractory to the amino acids.
01:59:34.000I was eating 500 grams of protein a day.
01:59:37.000I was eating like two or three two-pound London broils and washing it down with a product metrics with HMB in it, like in between meals, like back in the mid-early 90s.
01:59:57.000But I looked at the research data and I'm like, either I believe this or I don't.
02:00:01.000And if I believe this, I can't justify XYZ. Right.
02:00:05.000Can I go back to the epidemiology studies in regards to colon and rectal cancer?
02:00:10.000There really haven't been any studies on people that just eat meat, though, right?
02:00:14.000You're talking about people who eat meat on a regular basis, and that usually is the standard American diet, a lot of other bullshit in there, sugar, buns.
02:00:41.000Now again, if it's allowing them to create a caloric restriction, and somebody says, you know what, I've tried every other diet out there, I've tried to eat high fiber, and I've tried to eat enough vegetables, but I can stick to this, and I can lose some fat, then I'm going to say,
02:00:57.000okay, well maybe that's the best diet for you.
02:00:58.000Well, I just know so many people that are benefiting from it.
02:01:01.000And not just the people that have been on the podcast before.
02:03:51.000You could look at PubMed, everything from polycystic ovary syndrome to acne...
02:03:56.000Type 2 diabetes, type 1 diabetes now, that's a little bit controversial.
02:04:01.000Genetic migraines, a whole host of neurological disorders, simply because beta-hydroxybutyrate is, I believe, there's an objective truth that it's a superior metabolic fuel.
02:04:14.000And if you have millimolar levels in your blood, that's a significant amount of energy in your blood that your tissues can use.
02:04:21.000How are you defining severe metabolic fuel?
02:04:39.000Yeah, so you're more metabolically efficient potentially, but I don't think in the context of fat loss.
02:04:45.000But it's also enhancing insulin sensitivity and simply feeding ketones independent of carbohydrate restriction increases fat oxidation in the muscle.
02:05:20.000When I used to give talks, I would say for these things, but if you're type 1 diabetic, you want to avoid the ketogenic diet as much as possible because there's something called diabetic ketoacidosis.
02:05:32.000But like my student, Andrew Kutnick at USF... That's if you've also got...
02:05:53.000So you used to say that if you were type 1 diabetic, you wouldn't...
02:05:56.000I did, because it was very controversial territory.
02:05:59.000Describe what diabetic ketoacidosis is.
02:06:01.000Yeah, so if you're type 1 diabetic, you make little or no insulin at all, right?
02:06:08.000And I guess maybe just going back to a normal person, when they fast or they do the ketogenic diet, it increases fat oxidation in the liver, and that fat oxidation actually accumulates acetyl-CoA, and that creates ketones, acetyl acetate and beta-hydroxybutyrate.
02:06:22.000And it occurs in the context of insulin suppression.
02:06:25.000But you still have normal insulin, but it's very low.
02:07:24.000It creates an acidotic state and electrolyte imbalances and coma and death.
02:07:29.000Which is not going to happen in people who are healthy who are just doing a ketogenic diet.
02:07:33.000But with type 1 diabetes, if you, for example, my student, using his example, because I think maybe he was using 20 or 30 IUs of insulin a day, right?
02:07:45.000And then starts carbohydrate restriction and even a modified ketogenic diet and can reduce that insulin requirement.
02:07:56.000So literally knocking it down, you know, to 20% of what he was taking before.
02:08:01.000So what has changed in your perception when you did not recommend it?
02:08:04.000Well, there's a Harvard study that basically looked at a group called Type 1 Grit on Facebook.
02:08:09.000There's a group called Type 1 Grit, and it's got thousands of people who use a low-carbohydrate approach, not necessarily a ketogenic diet approach, some are, but it's very carbohydrate-restricted in terms of Of what a doctor,
02:08:26.000an endocrinologist, would prescribe for a type 1 diabetic.
02:08:28.000It would almost maybe look like suicide to some people.
02:08:31.000And low carbohydrate dramatically decreases your insulin requirements.
02:08:36.000And if you look at your continuous blood glucose recordings over the course of a week, those numbers are much, much tighter.
02:08:43.000And that's going to pay huge dividends in the long run when it comes to Longevity and health span and, you know, the potential for going blind or decreasing your kidney function, you know, by these huge postprandial spikes.
02:08:56.000Essentially, if you're type 1 diet, you're always chasing your glucose with insulin injections, right?
02:09:36.000That is not going to happen because by definition, if your ketones are high and you're relatively healthy, not type 1 diabetic, your blood glucose is low.
02:09:44.000It's when both are elevated that it's dangerous.
02:09:47.000And if you're a type 1 diabetic, like Andrew, who you're just using a little bit of insulin to get that baseline, to get your glucose levels down to a baseline level, and then you're using a carb-restricted diet that creates ketones while your blood glucose is at a normal basal level,
02:10:10.000Now, over the years, because he's a power lifter and he's a super big dude, he's like 250 pounds, like when he goes to the gym, he has learned that he can pulse a little bit of insulin and maybe ramp up his protein or maybe even take a little bit of carbohydrates.
02:10:23.000But, you know, the next day, he's still doing low carb throughout the day.
02:10:26.000But he's learned to leverage, you know, as a type 1 diabetic, you have that advantage, right?
02:10:32.000Because you can manipulate insulin for body composition alterations and things like that.
02:10:36.000So he has learned to adjust his protein to maximize his sort of gains and performance in the gym.
02:10:44.000But nonetheless, he went from a strategy...
02:10:48.000He transitioned to a strategy that would be...
02:10:53.000Would look to be almost suicidal from the perspective of an endocrinologist doctor managing to do that level of carbohydrate restriction.
02:11:02.000And now we actually have hard science to show that that not only can be done, That dramatically decreases the variability of your blood glucose fluctuation throughout the day from a weekly perspective and your requirements for insulin.
02:11:17.000Whenever you could use less insulin to manage your blood glucose, that's a good thing.
02:11:21.000It's very hard for a doctor to argue against using less insulin and keeping tighter numbers.
02:13:01.000And it got to a point where for some people their calories get so low if they have slow metabolic rates that the level of fat restriction it would take them to is probably not great for hormone levels.
02:13:12.000So I tended to pull a little bit more carb relative to fat.
02:13:16.000And so we didn't start out targeting them as ketogenic, but by the end they were.
02:13:20.000So you had to resort to something that actually works.
02:13:58.000My theory is that when you do that and you carb restrict and you calorie restrict rather and get down, once that shit's over, you just want to reward yourself as often as possible.
02:14:09.000So when someone comes along with something like a ketogenic diet and go, no bread, no pot, fuck you.
02:15:14.000I don't want to talk about people who aren't disciplined.
02:15:16.000I really have a giant hard problem with that because I know so many disciplined people and I just feel their momentum and vibration and I'm like, I just want to concentrate on what they're doing because all these people that can't do it, I feel like that's contagious.
02:15:30.000You start thinking about people that can't adhere to diets and fall off.
02:15:33.000I get it for you because it's something that you do professionally.
02:16:54.000It's in the 30%, 40% people just quit, give up, don't do what they're supposed to do, don't do as many reps as they're supposed to do, don't work out, take days off just because they're lazy.
02:17:04.000And those are the people that get off the diet.
02:17:06.000It's a discipline issue more than anything.
02:17:10.000So I think various foods that are emerging on the market right now, app-based systems, Virta Health actually has a great app-based system that actually coaches you through that, and I think that's very helpful.
02:17:21.000So I think new technology is foods and we'll make it Well, increase adherence.
02:17:26.000Also, when you have a person who knows and understands all the health benefits associated with nutritional ketosis or just low-carb, I think that can be a motivating factor to make them stick to the diet.
02:17:37.000Yeah, but for a guy like you who's rational and disciplined, but people that are self-destructive and weak, they're going to, oh, I can't do this anymore.
02:17:48.000But then kind of, what's the point of the whole conversation then, though?
02:17:51.000Well, the problem of their conversation is to avoid those motherfuckers because they're going to drag you down to their mediocre level.
02:17:56.000I think you need to sympathize with them a little bit because I think the market and I think this is a fruitful area for entrepreneurs to create technologies and foods that can actually enhance adherence to eating strategies we know about.
02:18:13.000I feel like so much of it is what you're willing to accept from yourself.
02:18:17.000If you're willing to accept this seesaw obesity thing that so many people get on, on and off this yo-yo effect, if you're willing to accept that, that's fine.
02:19:43.000It's not sustainable over, if you look at the general population and you get a bunch of weak bitches and you get them together, how many of them are going to keep it together?
02:19:50.000How many of them are going to run every day?
02:19:51.000How many of them are going to work out every day?
02:20:18.000I feel like that shit is worse than carbs.
02:20:21.000That's why we talk a lot in the book about behaviors.
02:20:23.000Because if you change your behavior, that's what I think there's not enough research focused on.
02:20:29.000Let's look at the people who actually achieve weight loss.
02:20:33.000And if you look at people who achieve it and keep it off, they do it through many different methods, whether it's low carb, low fat, whatever it is.
02:20:39.000But let's look at the behaviors that they make, and those behaviors can tell us a lot about people.
02:20:44.000One thing we know is they weigh themselves very often, so they're accountable.
02:20:51.000They practice some form of cognitive restraint, whether it's weighing food, recording macros, ketogenic, fat restriction, whatever it is, and also they exercise regularly.
02:21:03.000And one, there's physiological benefits to that.
02:21:05.000Exercise lowers the body fat set point that your body will defend.
02:21:09.000So it actually has a physiological benefit.
02:21:11.000But also just mentally, like you said, I mean, I never, if you took me back 30 years ago and you told me...
02:21:18.000When I was 10 years old and you said, hey, when I was bullied and picked on and had no self-esteem, you're going to fucking squat 668 pounds one day on your back at 201 pounds and set a, it's been broken since then, but a world record.
02:21:33.000I would have been like, there's no fucking way.
02:22:18.000Because I think that the mental state in which you approach anything, a workout routine, a lifestyle, the way you decide to live your life, that is critical.
02:22:25.000And here's one of the things that people are cynical about that's probably one of the best sources of fuel is inspiration from other motivated people.
02:22:33.000Go to David Goggins' Instagram page every day.
02:24:08.000Well, and part of that is like, you know, it's hard to get – that's a lot of money that's going to be spent to get that data for an individual.
02:24:15.000So part of it is going to have to be what do you feel good on and what do you feel like is, again, most sustainable for you because no matter what – people want a diet.
02:24:26.000What people really want is they want – I don't want to have to track – And I don't want to sacrifice anything.
02:24:45.000I had a post on Twitter that was one of my most popular Twitter posts.
02:24:48.000I said, you know, health improvements are largely driven by caloric restriction and weight loss.
02:24:54.000But if you like vegan, if you like keto, if you like carnivore, and I just listed a bunch of different diets, and they help you create a restriction and it keeps you at a healthy weight, then fuck yeah!
02:26:34.000My co-writer for the book, Peter Baker and I, we spent chapters talking about when you go and transition into, okay, we've lost the weight we want to lose, we're healthier.
02:26:45.000You have to have the same amount of discipline and intensity to then maintain that loss.
02:26:51.000Because if you let up, if you let your foot off the gas, now you don't necessarily have to be at the same caloric restriction level.
02:26:59.000But if you just let yourself, well, I'm going to vacation.
02:27:51.000Yes, and ghrelin is in opposition to leptin.
02:27:53.000So this is your body like a thermostat.
02:27:56.000So if you're on a thermostat, if you sit at 75, goes too low, kick the heat on, bump it back up, goes too high, kick the cooling on, go back down.
02:28:04.000Leptin acts that way with your metabolic rate and your hunger.
02:28:08.000When you get down to a low body fat, leptin's low.
02:28:11.000Your body, you have a drive to regain that weight.
02:28:19.000Leptin still stays low even years after a diet in people who have kept the weight off.
02:28:27.000So you would think there'd still be a biological drive to regain the weight.
02:28:32.000That said, and I'm going to go out on a limb here, so any of my scientists who are listening on this, feel free to call me out on the carpet if you think I'm wrong.
02:28:41.000But just like obese people, obese people actually have high levels of leptin.
02:28:45.000They have high levels of leptin, but they become leptin-resistant.
02:28:51.000There is evidence that if you stay at a reduced body weight for one or two years, that that can become your new set point that your body defends.
02:29:00.000I think what can happen is even if your leptin doesn't go up...
02:29:18.000I think one of the things that happens is probably your body becomes more sensitive to the leptin you have because you're leaner.
02:29:23.000Now, I want to talk about performance because this is a big thing with athletes and particularly in my field with fighters.
02:29:31.000Many of them are reluctant to try a ketogenic diet initially because the first few weeks are pretty rough and it really inhibits training and you get that keto flu feeling and I've experienced that too.
02:29:46.000Overall, is the ketogenic diet a good strategy for someone that's involved in some sort of a brutal athletic pursuit like football or wrestling?
02:30:00.000And it will be dependent upon being keto-adapted over time and actually training in a state of ketosis so you force those adaptations over time.
02:30:10.000We know the ketogenic diet is glycogen-sparing.
02:30:13.000Over time, glycolytic pathways will be decreased over time.
02:30:17.000So that may impair anaerobic power output initially.
02:30:22.000But I think that most people, I think a good amount of people could adapt back to, especially if they're taking things like creatine monohydrate and taking various supplements that can kind of fill that gap to meet the glycolytic anaerobic energy demands.
02:31:19.000Yeah, he uses those gels and, you know, take hundreds and hundreds.
02:31:23.000Probably relatively sparingly compared to a person that's already, like, very carb-adapted.
02:31:28.000So, right, so you just want to, especially a hundred mile race, you titrate in small, instead of drinking 50 or 100 grams of carbs, 20 grams of carbs every hour or two, maybe more than enough.
02:31:41.000But say, Zach, tweet us if you need to correct us.
02:31:50.000I mean, Zach's diet consists of mostly like ribeyes.
02:31:53.000So he's fully keto and he's using glucose.
02:31:55.000I think glucose, and this may aggravate some of the keto people, I think glucose is one of the most powerful performance enhancing substances out there.
02:32:26.000Well, I mean, you're going to get glycogen replenishment.
02:32:28.000And actually, there's research out of Lehman's lab years ago that showed that actually sucrose replenishes glycogen in muscle faster than pure glucose, which is interesting.
02:32:38.000Probably because the fructose gets taken up by the liver, so the glucose you do eat, the liver doesn't steal any of it, and your glucose is going to muscle.
02:33:36.000If you were doing nutritional consultant for, say, someone who's a UFC champion, and they said, you know, I want to get on the optimal diet for performance, you don't think that a ketogenic diet is the optimal diet for performance.
02:34:04.000But the problem is you don't necessarily get an off-season because if they call you with a fight, it's not looked nicely upon if you turn it down.
02:34:16.000I think based on the research I've seen, I think you're hard-pressed to convince me that a ketogenic diet is worse than a non-ketogenic diet on endurance.
02:34:26.000I think that's pretty clear and there may actually be some benefits depending on the individual.
02:34:33.000As far as repeated sprints or things where you need that anaerobic system, I am not ready to say that a ketogenic diet is going to be as good.
02:34:42.000I think that a non-ketogenic diet Now, this is where ketone supplements may be actually the best thing possible, because you could be using glucose, so you're getting that fuel source, and taking a ketone supplement where you're getting that fuel as well.
02:34:59.000So not on a ketogenic diet, but taking ketone supplements.
02:35:13.000I mean, just basically trying to leverage all the various substrates that your body can use, especially if we're talking about anaerobic power output.
02:35:25.000You want to have a suite of different fuel sources, you know, and not rely, like the term metabolic flexibility, which is kind of used quite often.
02:35:34.000But I think if you train and get your body fat and keto adapted, that provides benefits for recovery.
02:35:41.000It provides benefits if you're getting, you know- Enhanced, you know, lower inflammation, lower chronic inflammation over time.
02:35:49.000You know, chronic inflammation can contribute to insulin resistance, poor, like, neuroinflammation if you're getting concussions or even sub-concussive events over time can actually cause a lot of damage.
02:36:02.000What is the mechanism that decreases inflammation with the ketogenic diet as opposed to a non- A number of mechanisms.
02:36:08.000I mean, just simply lowering insulin spikes and glucose, but the NLRP3 inflammasome is something that we looked at.
02:36:17.000There was a study where actually we used the ketone ester, and it was published in the Journal of Nature Medicine, showing that in response to LPS, which is kind of like a very powerful inflammatory stimulant, that it reduces that and suppresses inflammatory pathways for a particular pathway.
02:36:57.000So in the context of being in a state of ketosis, it reduces...
02:37:03.000An inflammatory pathway, think of it as a hub.
02:37:05.000And when that's activated, you have a host of inflammatory cytokines that flow throughout your body and your brain and cause this persistent, low-grade neural inflammation and inflammation in the body that can impede recovery processes over time.
02:37:20.000And I think that really contributes to brain health, too.
02:37:24.000So I might be getting a little far ahead of myself because that is – it's animal work, but it's convincing animal work looking at a particular pathway that's pretty well defined.
02:37:33.000And before you get to this, is there one – is there a variation between low-carb – Versus ketosis?
02:37:40.000An elevation of ketone levels in your blood.
02:37:43.000Right, but I mean in terms of, is there a benefit to the ketogenic, to being in a state of ketosis with this reduction of inflammation versus low carb?
02:37:53.000I believe there is just by elevating the metabolite beta-hydroxybutyrate, but I do think even low carb has some anti-inflammatory effects.
02:38:07.000Like I said, I don't think it's going to be optimal for everybody, but I know there's going to be benefits to maintaining low to moderate levels of ketones for neurological health and also for recovery and maybe performance.
02:38:22.000Lane, you were wincing at the mention of inflammation.
02:38:26.000More so that – so we mentioned recovery from exercise, inflammation.
02:38:30.000And calorie deficit is a very powerful anti-inflammatory.
02:39:48.000And so the part of growing muscle and recovery is actually inflammation.
02:39:55.000Macrophages and all these sorts of things are involved in that process.
02:39:58.000Now, if it gets run away, if it's too much, It's not a good thing.
02:40:02.000But if it's too little, it's also not a good thing.
02:40:04.000Andy Galpin did a great job on your show of talking about recovery versus adaptation, right?
02:40:10.000So one of the things he said, if you do ice baths, you do these sorts of things, you're in the short term allowing yourself to recover faster, but you're also limiting how much adaptation you're going to incur.
02:40:21.000And I love that because people miss this.
02:40:25.000If you're somebody in the off-season, if you're trying to get more lean body mass or trying to get better at something, it's probably good to let your body...
02:40:35.000For lack of a better term, have some inflammation and not in the long term, but in response to that training session.
02:40:42.000But then if you're in a camp, again, this is where it's context dependent.
02:40:45.000Or like I'm a powerlifter getting ready for a meet and I'm supposed to be squatting four times a week.
02:40:59.000Recovered enough that I can go do my next training session because that is a lot more important for my competition coming up than having that little bit of extra muscle.
02:41:11.000Yeah, I mean, unless, again, it's all contextual dependent, right?
02:41:14.000Like if you start getting so sore that you can only train like twice a week, then maybe a certain level.
02:41:20.000But that points back to that there's an optimal range of inflammation that your body probably should be in that's optimal for health as well.
02:41:28.000Now, I don't think like doing a ketogenic diet for somebody, it's going to take them out of that necessarily.
02:41:33.000But I always want to give context because people hear these things and they always think it's a positive, like in terms of recovery.
02:41:40.000I believe that it can enhance the adaptive process associated with recovery.
02:41:44.000And I also believe that being in a ketogenic state will enhance your readiness, your resilience, and your recovery.
02:41:53.000So from a military perspective, too, I believe that.
02:41:57.000And that needs to be validated and studied, but it's something that we study.
02:42:01.000I'm sorry to interrupt you, but when you advise this to the military, do you put them on a specific meal plan too, or do they have consultants that know how to do that?
02:42:10.000It's more like in grants where this is being studied at a very fundamental, very controlled level from cells to animal models to human clinical trials going on and where the data is being collected now.
02:42:22.000And some of it is taken empirically and anecdotally from the field or just from various exclusive channels, I guess I would say.
02:42:30.000So that, I am coming at it as a bias, and I'm kind of speaking ahead of the science.
02:42:35.000But I do think that science already exists, showing that you have a greater adaptive effect just by virtue of lowering inflammation over time in athletes.
02:42:47.000Especially, this probably pertains more to endurance athletes.
02:42:50.000So it really needs to be studied in MMA fighters and things like that.
02:42:55.000So there was a recent study, and I can't remember the researcher's name.
02:42:59.000I had a lot of criticisms of it, but they did show that ketogenic versus non-ketogenic diet in people who were lifting weights, trying to get bigger, that there was actually slightly less muscle mass using the ketogenic diet.
02:43:13.000Would you think that would be because of the less protein?
02:43:30.000So, again, I could be wrong, and so I'll go back and look, and I'll send it to you if you want it.
02:43:36.000But it is possible, like, again, for every give-me, there's a gotcha in certain things, right?
02:43:40.000So, like, these things that activate different pathways, well...
02:43:45.000Part of what ketones may signal is a deficit, because usually you don't have them in a surplus, right?
02:43:50.000So, you know, we don't know if you can, like, for example, like autophagy, right?
02:43:57.000Like, if we're talking about performance in muscle, everybody hears autophagy, and that's a very, by the way, that's such a weird way to pronounce that, because it's auto and phagocytosis, so it shouldn't be autophagy, but anyway.
02:45:44.000Depends on you, and in the case of MA, depends on your opponent as well.
02:45:48.000What your goals are, and your strategies, and your tactics.
02:45:51.000I think what we were trying to really emphasize is that Individuality dependent, but also what I really want to emphasize today's show is calories matter.
02:46:01.000Even if you're eating low carb, you can't just eat as much as you want.
02:46:07.000And low carb is a very viable option to induce and sustain a calorie deficit that can contribute to body composition.
02:46:17.000But even like you brought up Floyd Mayweather earlier, which I thought was great because you said he drinks a Coke after training.
02:46:23.000Well, it's hard to argue with his results, but then again, sometimes elite athletes can get away with a lot of really dumb shit because they're so genetically superior that they were going to do well no matter what.
02:46:34.000Didn't Michael Jordan eat a Big Mac before every game?
02:47:10.000So we wouldn't recommend like somebody – like if somebody is sitting at home and they want to become the greatest boxer ever, don't go – probably drinking Coke isn't the first step, right?
02:47:19.000But this is what we do with nutrition because we pick out people that we follow and we go, oh, I'm just going to do that.
02:47:26.000And it's so – It's on the sidelines of marathons.
02:48:08.000A lot of people eat those honey waffles, you know, like when they're doing hikes and stuff.
02:48:13.000But again, at the end of the day, if his carbohydrate intake, and I don't know what it is, but if he's eating 500-600 grams of carbohydrate a day, is it really hurting him to have 40 grams of sugar from a Coke?
02:48:24.000If he's maintaining his body weight, performing optimally?
02:49:01.000How many times have you seen two guys in the octagon and just looked at their bodies and gone, this one guy is going to smash this other guy?
02:49:08.000Like just in the primal part of your brain because he was built like a tank.
02:49:12.000And then the other guy who looks like nothing just goes out and completely obliterates him.
02:49:30.000I mean, again, I'm known as a carb guy, and I had this powerlifter one time telling me, he's like, don't you think you should carb load the night before powerlifting me?
02:49:37.000And I was like, dude, you're doing nine reps.
02:49:40.000So you get three attempts on each lift, squat, bench press, and deadlift.
02:50:03.000Or doing, you know, prolonged, you know, resistance training, two or three hours.
02:50:08.000But even then, it's probably not optimal to go in fasted to go through a strength and athletic event.
02:50:13.000But, you know, you have to pick the context, the individual.
02:50:18.000And honestly, people probably aren't going to want to hear this from a scientist, but we don't know enough about this stuff yet to really say for each individual person what's best for them.
02:50:26.000And that's why we kind of got to go by...
02:50:28.000We know you don't have to go drinking Gatorade throughout your one-hour workouts in the gym, typically.
02:50:34.000I'm drinking ketones, but it's not going to offer you any advantage.
02:50:40.000And I did that for many years, actually, and I think guys still do it now.
02:50:46.000You've got to make your shake in the gym and drink it intra-workout.
02:50:49.000One of the things that drove me nuts was I kind of got a little bit back and forth with Tim Noakes on Twitter.
02:50:55.000And he kind of made it out to seem that people were dismissing some of his research because people in academia or that peer review is broken.
02:51:56.000So it's, well, low carb is better compared to what?
02:52:01.000And what's the cost on performance or any of these other things?
02:52:05.000And then where's your hard evidence, right?
02:52:07.000So this is why, like I said, science, over time, yes, you can have industry influences, you can have muddled data, and some scientists fake data.
02:52:18.000We've both come across this, scientists who have fake data.
02:52:24.000In fact, I won't say anybody by name, but I used to be in business with somebody who I found out that I had no hard evidence, but I had a lot of circumstantial evidence that they were faking data.
02:52:37.000Trevor Burrus This even happens in cancer research.
02:52:39.000It's a huge problem, even in cancer research.
02:52:41.000And I took this person out to dinner and I told them, I was like, we're done.
02:52:48.000And thank goodness I did because it came out later.
02:52:51.000People started replicating, trying to replicate this data and nobody could replicate this data.
02:52:55.000And and the still had a pretty big following even now.
02:52:59.000But, you know, it's it's one of those things that it makes me so mad because then people get so frustrated because they feel like if they feel like scientists are just an industry's pocket, why are they going to believe anything any of us say, you know, it's so frustrating.
02:53:17.000If a company is funding you for a particular supplement and you come out consistently with negative data, what's the incentive for them to keep funding you?
02:53:26.000But if you're always showing positive results on supplement studies, Some companies will want to fund you, of course.
02:53:42.000I keep reminding people, like people who say things like, we found the cure for cancer and the government is suppressing it and all the scientists are just in the...
02:53:52.000What you're saying is you're saying that every scientist on the planet who does cancer research is an immoral, unethical piece of shit.
02:54:09.000And that's the other big – I'm a small government guy and I'm, like I said, a libertarian.
02:54:15.000But one of the things that makes me cringe about libertarians sometimes is these big elaborate conspiracy theories that come up around science and whatnot.
02:54:22.000Like you realize like a senator can't even text a dick pic to his side chick – Without like it winding up all over Twitter.
02:54:29.000You think they constructed these big elaborate theories?
02:54:31.000They can't even tie their shoes in the morning without spending $10,000, you know?
02:54:35.000So the idea that like all this research is being suppressed by the government, I'm not saying it's never happened, but I think it's pretty darn rare.
02:54:45.000Well, gentlemen, we just did three plus hours.
02:55:02.000And I think we could do a hundred of these shows and we'd never cover all the topics or all the issues or all the details.
02:55:08.000And I think it's so incredibly difficult for people to find the right diet and program that works for them.
02:55:13.000I'd like to add one thing, that the science is rapidly emerging, and the Metabolic Health Summit, which is happening in the end of January, beginning of February, next year, 2019, will be bringing in the leading scientists that are talking about all the different topics right now,
02:55:31.000including weight loss, and that's going to be in LA. It's actually, there's a flyer in your book there, if you look inside there, giving you a flyer.
02:55:47.000It's going to be a very comprehensive group of basic scientists, clinical scientists, entrepreneurs, and people, everyday people that are just interested in this space.
02:56:13.000So we definitely want Lane there too, and I think it would be great to have a panel discussion that addresses this with a couple more experts and personalities in that.
02:56:22.000It's amazing how much information you have to absorb.
02:56:27.000I've done so many diet podcasts, and I'm still a moron.
02:56:31.000Well, that's why I always say to people, It's hard because if you're not going to do a degree yourself or do research yourself, it's so hard to know.
02:56:40.000You kind of have to pick people that you trust, right?
02:56:43.000And it's so hard to know who to trust because there was something that Greg Knuckles, a really smart guy, said that I think kind of ties things together nicely.
02:56:51.000He said, people are really good at knowing when somebody has more knowledge than them about a subject.
02:56:56.000Like you talk to somebody for a little bit and you really can get an impression pretty quickly if they know more or less than you or about the same.
02:57:02.000What they're really bad at doing is figuring out amongst two people who know more than them, who is the more knowledgeable of the two.
02:57:09.000They are very bad at picking that out.
02:57:11.000So you kind of got to pick people who you trust.
02:57:14.000Now, if you're looking for people to trust, notice the three magic words that me and him both sit on here today at one point.
02:57:29.000They don't say things like best, worst, never, always.
02:57:33.000They're usually putting context to everything, and they're providing you with information that helps illuminate you that everything is nuanced.
02:57:42.000And that's why, like, I'm sure, again, I'll relate it to MMA. If you talk to anybody who's an expert in any different discipline, and you ask them a broad question, you're going to get a really broad answer.
02:57:53.000And if you ask them a specific question, give them a lot of context, then they'll give you a specific answer.