Join Fundip and Crowder as they chat with Rob Wolf, founder of the paleo diet movement, about his journey to losing weight and getting rid of his Type 2 Diabetes. Fundip also talks about his recent trip to the ER and his struggle with prolactinoma.
00:00:48.000You're literally in a double window screen with Fundip Dan, so I don't think you need to be concerned with that.
00:00:55.000Okay, before we go into, I think it'll be interesting to have you talk with Fundip because he's in a diet now and he's making some progress, so I'm sure you can help him.
00:01:02.000Rob, you must have just gone bananas when the FDA changed officially their food pyramid chart.
00:01:08.000Well, I mean, it's gone through multiple iterations every five years.
00:01:11.000They have kind of a review, and there's a public review period where people can submit commentary and thoughts about the whole process, but it's really just kind of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
00:01:25.000Like, nothing comes of the scientific input other than...
00:01:29.000The folks on the back end of that story.
00:01:31.000So yeah, I mean, it's frustrating, but I think we're seeing a lot of changes happening from a market-driven perspective versus a top-down approach.
00:01:39.000So I think we'll have this war won, and then they will change the recommendations to reflect something reasonable.
00:01:46.000So are you saying that they are incorrect in telling me that six servings of Froot Loops is healthier than a sirloin steak and salad?
00:01:55.000Well, I mean, incorrect based off of...
00:02:02.000I think the system that's going on right now, then it's a great process.
00:02:06.000But if you really want to help people and avert the obesity type 2 diabetes epidemic that we have in our country and in Western societies, then it's probably not a great recommendation.
00:02:20.000Okay, well, so it's something we've been talking about for a while, obviously.
00:02:24.000And Fundip, I don't want to reveal anything.
00:02:27.000Obviously, this is your story, but Fundip right now is in the process of losing weight.
00:02:31.000So Fundip, why don't you tell Rob what it is that you're doing and what they have you doing right now, your dieticians or whoever you're working with?
00:02:38.000Well, the doctor today said I don't have any diabetes, which is good.
00:02:43.000My thyroid, now that I'm on meds for that, I am back on track.
00:02:48.000But I refuse to take the medicine for my prolactinoma because it makes me angry and cranky.
00:03:23.000So, but Fundip, you brought in, and this is where I think Rob is really, you know, and Rob and I disagree on some things, we agree on some things, but the diet they have you doing, you actually uploaded a video, so they had you eating, like, lots of carrots, right?
00:03:49.000So I'm like, I gotta wean myself slowly to where I'm eating nothing but twigs, berries, and raw meat.
00:03:56.000Just as an aside, when I was doing molecular biology research, we used cheetos as a standard for quantifying UV release in gel electrophoresis.
00:04:07.000So they have a multiplicity of uses, some of these food products.
00:05:06.000Firstly, by the way, Fundip, again, I'm not saying this to be insulting at all, but the fact that you don't have cholesterol issues or diabetes, I mean, you're like a...
00:05:14.000You said you're over 400 pounds, right, Fundip?
00:05:40.000Not everybody who becomes overweight becomes diabetic.
00:05:43.000Not everybody that's type 2 diabetic is overweight.
00:05:46.000And that's some of the difficulty in pinning this stuff down.
00:05:50.000There's a lot of unique genetic variation in there.
00:05:53.000And you know, there's some interesting studies where there's certain cohorts of people That are significantly overweight, but they never experience any of these metabolic deranging diseases, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, neurodegenerative disease.
00:06:08.000And so it becomes kind of complex ferreting out who has the real problems and what do we need to do to address that.
00:06:15.000From an orthopedic standpoint, we could make an argument that being lighter would be good.
00:06:20.000It'll be better on your hips, better on your knees.
00:06:56.000Like, you can pull—we've talked about this before—you can pull people out of the population— And different weights and all of them will have different problems.
00:07:03.000It seems like the crossover is very difficult to find.
00:07:06.000Okay, let's just go to a break real quick.
00:07:08.000That way we can let Rob dig in with us schlubs and actually teach us Louder with Crowder.
00:07:48.000So now they have you doing what some people would see as more traditional, right, Rob?
00:07:52.000Like more traditional dieting, calorie restriction, but not necessarily looking at the food groups.
00:07:56.000What would you do with Fun Dip to make him the best Fun Dip he can be?
00:08:02.000You know, the key with this stuff, and it gets a little geeky, but we need to find foods that you just really can't overeat with.
00:08:11.000And so we were talking about, you know, the majestic Cheeto here a minute, or just maybe we need to call them orange cheese puffs so that we don't have undue branding applied to that.
00:08:22.000You know, lean meats, fruits, vegetables, even things like a baked potato plain versus a baked potato with a bunch of ranch and sour cream and butter on it.
00:08:33.000If we move towards simple meals, simple plates, then it becomes very difficult to overeat on that.
00:08:42.000The things that we find is that people say that they become bored and kind of woven into our genetics is this thing called palate fatigue.
00:08:48.000Like we just get bored with the stuff that's in front of us.
00:08:51.000And we now live in an environment where we have an infinite variety of foods, an infinite variety of flavors and textures and whatnot.
00:08:58.000And if you look at the strategies that professional food eaters employ, like a guy will be on a contest to eat 10 pounds of ice cream in like 15 minutes or something.
00:09:08.000And the guy is eight pounds in and he bogs down and the guy will order a plate of salty French fries, eat some French fries to get a change in the flavor.
00:09:18.000And then he's able to eat the rest of the food, which is really kind of counterintuitive.
00:09:22.000You know, you figure that once your belly is full, that you're completely full.
00:09:26.000But a lot of our appetite is driven by our brain and the flavors that we send to the brain and whatnot will determine how much we eat or if we eat within kind of reasonable parameters.
00:09:37.000So what tends to be successful, and this is regardless of if you eat low carb or paleo or vegan or whatever, it tends to limit food.
00:09:50.000I don't have the warm snugglies for me either, but, you know, there's a reality that you can pick almost any eating plan and it performs better than the American dietetics recommended plan, which is take any food that's available.
00:10:03.000And food is very strongly in quotation points, like a Twinkie is considered a food, and you're just supposed to limit the portion sizes on that.
00:10:10.000But when you have these foods that have been cooked up by a chemist to be hyper palatable and taste really good and have this amazing, you know, kind of mouthfeel, It's very, very difficult.
00:10:44.000So it's interesting that almost any dietary approach that limits food options to some degree will tend to be more successful than what the government is telling us to do, but yet then the government dieticians tell us that we have orthorexia or eating disorders by limiting certain types of food.
00:11:02.000So it's an interesting rope-a-dope where...
00:11:05.000Let me ask you this, not to get political, but it is a political show.
00:11:22.000But they're increasingly getting involved in an area where they've been wrong.
00:11:25.000It would seem that if they want to help people, they would hire someone like you or more biochemists, right, to do medical research and nutritional research, as opposed to just, ah, eat 12 servings of grains a day.
00:11:39.000Well, I'm going to make some folks angry because there are a number of people who tend to be more conservative-leaning that live in states where farm subsidies are kind of part and parcel with their existence.
00:11:53.000And we really didn't see this issue emerge until around...
00:11:57.0001970, 1971, when we aggressively subsidized the production of food in the United States.
00:12:04.000And we had a couple of years where food was just rotting in warehouses.
00:12:08.000And so people said, well, we can't just increase food production and let it rot.
00:12:12.000So they started encouraging food manufacturers to figure out ways of making this food long shelf life and stable.
00:12:20.000And that really was the beginning of, you know, snack wells and all the junk food that we see today.
00:12:26.000So we have a really complex food system.
00:13:32.000And, you know, interestingly, I don't know if you guys talked about this on the show, but after 60 years of demonizing dietary cholesterol, the government did a complete retraction on that story.
00:13:43.000And part of that story said that – and I'll paraphrase it and I'll totally butcher it – In the future, we need to be much less arrogant about the assumptions that we make and let the data really stand for itself.
00:13:55.000And that was kind of a bold statement to come out of an institution like the folks that put that report out.
00:14:02.000Well, that's what I was bringing up initially, and I misspoke.
00:14:04.000I meant the cholesterol, the cholesterol dietary guidelines.
00:14:08.000I mean you must have just been through the roof happy about that because people have been saying that for years.
00:14:12.000And it's like doctors have been slow to get on board because they're still afraid of cholesterol until finally they said, hey, this is just the reality.
00:14:19.000Yeah, you know, there was never any data to support the idea that cholesterol caused heart disease in the beginning, that dietary cholesterol caused heart disease in the beginning.
00:14:26.000And we spent 50, 60 years and billions of dollars trying to prove something that never had really a scrap of evidence right from the get-go.
00:14:36.000Why were they trying to prove it, though?
00:14:58.000And so that's where it really all started from.
00:15:03.000You know, there was a committee that sat down to write these reports and they were vegetarian.
00:15:07.000And there is some reality in the research world that if you feed rabbits cholesterol, that they will develop atherosclerosis.
00:15:17.000But rabbits are herbivores, they're not omnivores like we are.
00:15:20.000And so we react to dietary cholesterol very, very differently.
00:15:24.000And there is a genetic disease, familial hypercholesterolemia, where folks tend to die young.
00:15:30.000They die from coronary artery disease.
00:15:33.000They have exceptionally high blood cholesterol and lipoprotein levels.
00:15:38.000And so they had a genetic disease where they saw it very rapidly advancing cardiovascular disease.
00:15:44.000And they had an animal model that seemed to say that dietary cholesterol was a causative factor.
00:15:50.000There's some correlation there, but even in the early iterations of this story, that was very weak science and the science that was really trying to implicate dietary cholesterol as being causative in cardiovascular disease.
00:16:04.000But there were some kind of red herrings out there that directed people in a false direction and created a story that was palatable to people.
00:17:30.000Get some blood work done at the end of it.
00:17:32.000And if your cholesterol looks better and you feel and perform better, then we're on a good track.
00:17:36.000If things are looking goofy, then we have...
00:17:39.000Some really simple other templates that we can use.
00:17:41.000Again, whether it's vegetarian or vegan or what have you, let's really let the outcome-based medicine drive that story.
00:17:48.000It's funny you say that because, full disclosure, Rob and I have worked together behind the scenes a little bit, really just kind of some advice.
00:18:01.000And actually, it was always pretty good.
00:18:02.000My cholesterol was 219, LDL 140, HDL 60.
00:18:06.000Triglycerides were a little higher than ideal at 94.
00:18:10.000And that was when I was doing a lot of green smoothies, kind of more, not vegetarian, but limiting the meat because that's what I was told.
00:18:15.000Then I said, okay, started eating more eggs, meat in the morning.
00:18:19.000Not no carb, not paleo, full disclosure, but...
00:18:22.000More focused more on on meat and didn't bother with fat and eliminating a lot of refined carbohydrates cholesterol went from 219 to 178 LDL went from 140 to 115 HDL stayed about the same it went to 54 triglycerides dropped from 94 to 59 Yeah.
00:18:40.000And the triglycerides are the indicator of how insulin resistant you are.
00:18:44.000And so you went from heading down the road towards diabetes to completely pulling that back and you're never going to become diabetic from that.
00:18:50.000And every well-controlled randomized control trial that's compared like a little bit higher fat, higher protein diet with a higher carbohydrate diet, particularly refined carbohydrates, we see this again and again.
00:19:02.000When people eat more protein, more fat, their blood lipids tend to go in a favorable direction.
00:19:07.000They tend to spontaneously eat less, which it's funny.
00:19:11.000researchers will then add more food to try to keep the calories even because in science, you do want to compare apples to apples.
00:19:19.000But the irony is that if you just simply eat more protein and fat, you tend to eat fewer calories overall.
00:19:25.000And that's the problem ultimately is people overeat.
00:19:28.000And that was kind of my point earlier about the neuro regulation of appetite.
00:19:31.000If we eat certain foods, they tend to tell our brain, hey, we're good.
00:19:37.000We've eaten enough and then you're satisfied and you don't feel hungry.
00:19:40.000And it has all these great metabolic benefits too.
00:19:42.000So probably the best thing would be to eat the nuts, eat the hot dogs without the bun, eat more steaks, eat more chicken, and then got to have some greens I would imagine.
00:19:57.000My My two favorite greens are broccoli and Brussels sprouts.
00:20:32.000If you sleep better, you will be healthier across the board.
00:20:34.000So they did recommend today that I need to take a sleep apnea test, and I'm really leery of that because of all the things glued to your head.
00:20:44.000I don't know how I would even survive it.
00:20:57.000We work a lot with police, military, and fire.
00:20:59.000And those folks, because of their shift work, even if they eat well, even if they exercise a lot, they become very insulin resistant and can look like a type 2 diabetic.
00:21:07.000So if you have sleep disturbance, there could be an argument for using like a CPAP machine to help you sleep better and you use it for two or three months until your weight drops and you're – but they said that you weren't insulin resistant though.
00:21:21.000I think that they thought, well, he's a fat guy.
00:21:24.000Clearly we need to get him a CPAP. Right.
00:21:27.000You know, you – I know it's strange, but it's true.
00:21:32.000I'm just trying to figure out how to tactfully transition to the next topic.
00:22:08.000But, you know, there's some really cheap, inexpensive things that can give you an idea if you're just having terrible sleep.
00:22:14.000If you're having terrible sleep, demarcated by your waking up multiple times a night and whatnot.
00:22:20.000Then you could go in, get a sleep study, possibly use the CPAP to get you over the hump so that if you sleep better, you will absolutely become less insulin resistant and you will lose weight more effectively.
00:23:16.000When I go on bulking cycles, I always notice.
00:23:19.000I mean, I don't go on bulking cycles, but when I'm like, hey, it's winter and I'm lifting heavy, so I'm not concerned about it, and I put on maybe 10 pounds, I always notice I have to get up to the bathroom.
00:23:28.000So, I mean, that is one of the sneaky side effects of carrying excess body fat is that you will convert testosterone into estrogen.
00:23:36.000And biology played a really interesting trick on men.
00:23:39.000The part of the brain that regulates testosterone levels responds to estrogen.
00:23:44.000So your estrogen levels go up, and then the brain gets this feedback loop, and it sees high estrogen levels, and then it says, well, we have adequate testosterone, so it actually down-regulates testosterone production.
00:23:55.000And you get in this very vicious, feed-forward kind of situation with that.
00:23:59.000Yeah, that's exactly what the prolactinoma does.
00:24:02.000It's on the pituitary gland, and it's this growth, and it reduces the testosterone, and it increases the estrogen, and I end up liking art, French films, and cats.
00:24:41.000You know, something I would throw to your doctor, and some docs freak out about this, but while you're trying to lose weight, while you're in that process, seeing if the doctor would be willing to get you on a Remadex, which is an aromatase inhibitor, you could make a very strong argument for that, improving your...
00:24:58.000Prostate function and also helping to naturally raise your testosterone levels.
00:25:03.000Although with the prolactinoma, there may be some contraindications with that.
00:25:07.000But that might be something to run up the flagpole with them.
00:25:09.000The prostate thing is called a RIMA what?
00:25:11.000A RIMADEX. A RIMADEX. And it originally was a cancer drug for breast cancer that responds to estrogen.
00:25:18.000But what it does is it prevents the conversion of testosterone into estrogen.
00:25:22.000Trevor Burrus And then there's also like clomiphene citrate, Clomid, I know, but it acts differently, right?
00:25:26.000Where it's – is it like an estrogen?
00:25:31.000Aaron Ross Powell Clomid actually stimulates the production of testosterone.
00:25:34.000It produces luteinizing hormone and actually causes the release of testosterone.
00:25:39.000And so that would be if somebody due to metabolic issues or inflammation, like they've basically taken their testicles offline and you need to – Trevor Burrus Fondep's wife has done that.
00:26:24.000What should he be doing to make it sustainable and just lose weight and not be – like you said, not be longing for stuff, the Cheetos?
00:26:30.000You know, the point there about sustainability is really the key.
00:26:33.000And usually what we need is enough variety so that we stick on a reasonable plan, not so much variety, that the variety becomes cheese puffs.
00:26:42.000So, you know, like the Hebrew National in the morning with a...
00:26:47.000A couple of handfuls of nuts, do a couple of ounces in a Ziploc bag.
00:26:52.000Lunch could be salmon with a bunch of veggies.
00:26:57.000Epidemiologically, the coffee seems to be the more you drink, the longer you live.
00:27:01.000So I wouldn't have many issues with that.
00:27:19.000You know, so within that framework, just get as much variety as you can, but keep the meals relatively simple, like one or two items per meal.
00:27:28.000And then maybe you run a week or two with basically the same breakfast, lunch, dinner.
00:27:55.000Like I don't – the problem is you have like these nutritionists who go out there and they're giving Fun Dip advice based on, like you said, the FDA guidelines, which are outdated already, and they're even acknowledging now.
00:28:05.000So Fundip, I think you'll be happier with this.
00:28:08.000You'll be able to eat the stuff you like.
00:28:09.000And, I mean, I think it'll just, I think it'll work.
00:28:12.000That's why I wanted to have an intervention with Rob and bring him on.
00:28:16.000Basically, he was throwing you under the bus to die by bringing you on.
00:28:19.000Well, as long as it's a red double-decker bus, I'm okay.
00:28:38.000Since you're going to do that, let's let Rob get his plug-in.
00:28:41.000Rob, if people want to find you and learn more about sensible diet, health, nutrition, where should they go?
00:28:49.000Well, now that I'm on parole, they can usually find me at robwolf.com, two B's, R-O-B-B-W-O-L-F. And then I have a podcast that, oddly enough, is in the top five on iTunes, The Paleo Solution.