Protein is Aging You! Sugar Diet for Fat Loss, Keto & Carnivore Diet Myths, Gut Health & Microbiome for Longevity | Sleep Optimization & Immunity Code with Joel Greene

0:04 This is the Fitness Wisdom podcast.

0:09 It's an absolute honor and pleasure to have you on the Fitness Wisdom podcast. I love your non dogmatic view when it comes to nutrition and health in general. You know, on your social media channels. I think it's so important these days. You know how with social media and these AI gurus, right? Because everybody these days is now a social media creator. We're living in a very strange era right now, where before people who really used to know their stuff were the people who are actually putting out the content.

0:38 But now everybody who is just anybody, it's just pumping out content. They're just asking AI for random things and then it's spitting out, you know, whatever, and people are just blindly trusting what it says. Of course, a lot of the information may be true, but there is also a lot of nuance and context missing from a lot of that information, wouldn't you agree? Yes, I could not agree more. It is, I kind of don't even know what to make of it at times. It's, it's interesting because there's this notion of like, you know, expertise or rather deep knowledge into a subject and what I'm seeing now and just a little background, I never wanted to be public facing.

1:25 I never wanted to put my face in front of people. That was never in the plan for me. I always wanted to be behind the scenes, just writing articles and stuff. That's kind of what I thought I would do. And just one reason led to another when I was doing my nutrition software and I wound up having to be the face of it because there was no one else and I couldn't afford to pay anybody to do it. But for me it was, it was a good 20 years of like actually studying stuff and and implementing and all that before I ever even said anything to anybody publicly.

1:54 And what we're seeing now is we're seeing that in mass people who have very short histories with things and even worse, have no history whatsoever with a given topic and read about it on with AI or, or somewhere and then just suddenly do a, a, a podcast on it. And they take the level of confidence and certainty and just kick it to the roof. Well, I mean, there used to be a word for that that was called a confidence man. And like if you watch Ocean's 11, that that's kind of what that's about is like if you just have supreme confidence, people go with it.

2:30 And I'm seeing that in mass. I'm seeing people who like talk about things like sprinting or, you know, all kinds of things that have never actually done them. They've never done those things. And I, I wonder, like, why is no one calling them out on this? I mean, like, I know for a fact so and so doesn't know anything about it. It's, it's just crazy. It's really. Crazy guys, if you haven't already smashed that subscribe button and the like button. Now back to the show. Yeah, I think we, what we're facing right now is information overload.

2:56 So many people online right now, I think it's a good thing and a bad thing at the same time. A good thing in a way that people are detaching away from social media because they feel so revolted by the fact that every single post that comes up is so is AI created. So you can kind of see that as well, right in the writing, the writing style. And then it just makes you feel like, oh damn, like another one of those posts. And then you just feel like, well, what's the point? It's just like all you know, it's nothing personal anymore.

3:24 It's lacking that that personality. Do you want to maybe for the audience who may not know you or I've never heard about you before? Who is Joel Green and how did you get into the work that you are sharing with the world today? Yeah. I mean, I'm just a consumer really at the end of the day. So I don't really think of myself that it's anything more than that. But I've been at this a very long time. So I grew up. I grew up. I was a kid in the 70s and I grew up kind of getting indoctrinated into pumping Iron and Arnold and, and just athleticism and fitness.

3:56 And there were a couple trends that converged when I was growing up. 1 was the running trend, the running craze. And so it's kind of forgotten now, but everybody was running and I, so I got into that like about fifth grade and I just started like kind of running a lot 1 summer and I could kind of see my like quads starting to come out and I was like, what's that? That's cool. And so I, I, I was into running and sprinting and, and also I was into, I was just into lifting like in the 4th grade, I didn't have a weight set.

4:27 So I just tied a bunch of metal bars together and I was doing curls and, and I was, I went to my high school was where Bruce Jenner trained. And so there were all these Olympic athletes there. And we would, we would do Olympic lifting. So we were doing queen and jerks and, you know, all kinds of Olympic lifts to get in shape. And I started early. I started like I was only 13 when I started, I think I started my growth, but I just, so I grew up in the, in the, I grew up in the commercialization to the public of, of bodybuilding from a fringe to the mainstream.

4:57 And so I was just, I was just a magazine reader and, and you know, I, Frank Zane was my hero and I would just devour absolutely everything that I could find. And so by the time I was, by the time I was like joining the workforce, I, I already had, you know, like, gosh, since I was a kid of just actually doing this stuff. And I went and I went into, I didn't go into, into being a full time person in the fitness world. I, I, I, my path was completely different. I was a consumer. And so, but because I was a nerd, whatever was new and cool, I was into.

5:33 So a lot of things came out very early in the 90s, like MCTS and you know, replacements and blacked up Barrett and all this stuff. And I was just into everything. So my first real, the reason I'm here today actually stems back from the early 90s. So what happened to me was I was always in pretty good shape. I was always doing a combination of track and field and, and bodybuilding. And I kind of, I kind of married the two into just training more athletically. And what happened to me was in my late 20s, I went on Metrox when it first came out and I've had a lot of talks with people who were who who did that used to be in two canisters.

6:17 For those of you that don't know metrics was a meal replacement. And it took the world by storm. And I just got up so freaking rudely peeled on that. I mean, I was, I was low, low digit body fat. I was between 5 to 7% for like 4 years. And I read an article by Corey Everson's husband, Jeff, who helped bring it to market, and he said that the way to do metrics was to essentially do OMAD. So I started doing that. I was just eating at night, one meal and doing metrics the rest of the day. And So what happened to that was the reason I'm here today.

6:53 I spent four years being super peeled and then I had so disrupted the homeostasis of food intake that out of nowhere, this sort of uncontrollable eating hit me. Where I had never had any issues with eating and all of a sudden I just, I was eating all the time and I didn't know what I'd done, but I knew I'd done something. So that led me down this road of just trying everything, literally trying. So I had, this was before the 2000s hit. I had my fresh whole organic macro phase. I had my calorie counting phase.

7:28 I had my, you know what you would call kind of paleo esque phase. I had, I just kind of did everything and it sort of culminated in very predictable patterns of I'd get, I'd get pretty lean and then I would sort of have a rebound effect. And it wasn't like I was being lazy because fitness was part of my life, but on a consumer level. So the big shift for me happened in 20000. And so about 2000, I started my first nutrition website called Monster Nutrition. I, I got laid off from my my.com asinthe.com boom.

8:03 So I get laid off and I, I go to work making websites for fitness models. So I'm kind of on the back end of the scene for fitness chicks and I'm a little closer to the inside of the industry. And so at this point I'm kind of learning that everything I believed in wasn't really true. Like I found out everybody was on gear every, you know, even the girls were on Glenbuterol and you know, Anavar. And so I just that was like, I was disillusioned, but I was like, wow, everybody's on gear. But you mean, you mean like, you mean like so and so is not natural.

8:34 Like what? So, so that was a big deal to me of being disillusioned. But then what happened was I went to work at A at a startup and it was in the tech industry and we were like all startups, you work a lot. So I was working 14-15 hour days and I eventually wound up running the company and I went into that job coming off a season of cutting. So I was really in great shape when I came into that. I mean, I was ABS 6 ABS I was really fit. And by the end of that run, three years later, I was, I was fat and huge.

9:08 So a lot of what you see. So I mean, I was probably close to 18 and a half 19 inch arms pumped like natural, but fat. I weighed like two, I weighed like 260. So I was like kind of like powerlifting fat, kind of looking, doing a lot of benching, but fat. So, you know, going from super lean to fat. And it was really because all of the things that worked had in fitness required time that I didn't have in the real world. And that changed my whole life because I, I just realized that most of the advice from the the bubble of professional fitness really poorly translates into real life over time for most people.

9:50 And by that time I kind of had AI had a, a master thesis statement that had taken me about 20 years to figure out. And it was that it was really was, it was really about the nature of weight cycling and how the act of getting lean primes a survival response that the body's hardwired to go into that makes you regain the weight that, that you'll see that now going, if you go look all the way back to the earliest stuff I began putting out like in 2006, that's right there at the forefront. So what happened to me was I, I left the tech industry in 2006.

10:24 By the way, the tricky little secret of biohacking today is everybody came from the same industry. I was in every like, and there's people that are very famous now in the biohacking or the, the health space that I, that were my clients, they were my customers, like, like we all knew each other. So it's kind of a weird thing people in tech migrate out here. So in 2006, I, I, I decided to do this full time and I really just wanted to tell the truth about things. And at the time, search engine optimization was huge.

10:57 And So what was happening was people with no history, no knowledge, nothing about health topics were dominating the conversation because they were good at search engine optimization. So I thought, well, OK, I've been around this thing a long time. I kind of like, and I know enough about search engine on, so I'll do that. So I started out with this goal to become the number one side on the web for weight loss. And I eventually became the number two side on the web, only behind WebMD. And I offered several thousand articles on just various topics.

11:27 In 2007, I published a series of articles on the microbiome and weight loss. And those were the very first articles ever published to the general public about this. And they were based on research from 2006 that had been published. What I ran into was I was promoting this thing called longevity based fitness, which really later became kind of what today is longevity movement. But at the time nobody really cared. No one cared. Everybody's all they wanted was that's great, just show me how to lose 10 lbs, that's all.

11:59 So I created a software for that over about three years and it was really based on what happened to me in 2007 where I, I had this, I had been doing all this research on the microbiome and I did this fat loss incursion using just roughage and, and egg whites and no fat. And I got absolutely peeled and completely changed my microbiome and went from 2:29 to 2:12 in seven days. Went, went and had it tested, went and had it measured. Mark Bell called me out on it. He's like, I don't believe you. So I actually pulled the actual document and showed it to him and I was like, I was like 7% body fat.

12:35 It was actually lower at the time. It was probably like in the sixes. And So what happened to me was I began doing corporate Wellness using this software for nutrition based on the microbiome. And this was early, this was 2009. And by 2013 I'd had over 16,000 people come through this system. And it was, it was all big cities and big corporations and hospitals. And so there's a lot of credibility because I had a software where I could harvest data and I could make changes immediately. And so I, I was about 2009 reading about these articles that were just coming out.

13:15 One of them was called Human gut communities are rapidly recolonized by cruciferous vegetables. So I, you know, I read that study and I was like, oh, great, let's make some changes. And then we were doing these massive engagements with like the city of Phoenix and with these huge hospital chains and people were getting these incredible results and I could just kind of see what was working. So by 2013, I had I had the largest body of outcomes ever targeting the microbiome. This was before there were even any, any microbiome gurus out there.

13:44 And all of that led to, for a lot of different reasons, doing some consulting with Quest Nutrition. In Quest, my friend Ron Penner, who's really the brains behind it all, had formed kind of a Knights of the Round Table where he brought in everybody that he thought was smart just to trade ideas. And my little point of expertise I would routinely share with all these other geniuses. I got so tired of sharing it because it would take me like an hour to explain. I, I that led to writing my first book called The Immunity Code.

14:15 And then that came out on Ben Greenfield's podcast in 2020. And and that basically broke the Internet at the time. And much of the modern era traces back to that book. If you look at like what is popular now, it's almost one to one what was in that book. So the thesis statement of that book was that controlling a very few things like acromancia and the fiddle bacteria, for example, you could create these massive shifts on in key systems in the body that create massive results with very little investment in time.

14:50 And so everything that that was in that book, influencers grabbed onto and popularized and it was things like sprinting. It was things like the, the gut reset, how to do that and using red phenols and what you're starting to hear more now, which is kind of immune centric health where we target interleukins and we target macrophages. But yeah, you can trace much of the modern era that we're in now biohacking to that look. And it really it's, it's sort of like the, the, the, the, the, the guy behind the curtains that it had a, it had a pretty massive influence.

15:23 So it's kind of a. Quick nutshell, imagine spiking your blood sugar without eating cake. Elevating course is all your stress hormone without being stressed and suppressing your body S most powerful sleep. Antioxidant and regeneration hormone which is your melatonin. This is why I make sure to wear my yellow daytime blue light blocking glasses every time when I spend time indoors under artificial lights and in front of screens to protect my eyes from oxidative stress and my entire body. And if I'm going to be exposed to artificial blue light, especially after sunset, I'm going to wear my red lens blue light blocking glasses to support my melatonin production and release.

15:58 So if you want to protect your energy levels, sleep, and biology from artificial blue light, head over to the description and you will find all of the links with a massive discount on my favorite blue light blocking glasses. I love it, I love it. Thank you for sharing your story. This is exactly why I've got you on the show today, because you bring this nuanced perspective to health and nutrition. You've walked the walk, so you know what you're talking about. I feel like the people who know really what they're talking about, they have experienced things themselves.

16:27 And you have definitely had your first share of experiences going through all of these personal struggles and transformations over the years, just like myself. You know, when I started training when I was 14 years old, I was overweight, I was obese. That was the reason why I got into fitness in the 1st place. And then that, you know, that dove me, you know, led me down to, you know, discovering different forms of training, bodybuilding, powerlifting, functional training, everything trying different types of diet, just like yourself, you know, veganism, keto, carnivore, animal based.

16:57 Now I'm, I'm more of an all-encompassing, just do what works for me kind of diet right now, right? But the issue is that a lot of people love to stick to specific diets because it's just easy to follow one specific thing, right? And that's relating to my next question that I actually want to ask you. Do you think there are any downsides to sticking to US one specific way of eating for a prolonged period of time? And what do you think the importance is of cycling different diets? I will frame that with with with the big idea.

17:31 OK, So I think if we introduce a big idea and then dovetail everything under that, it makes it'll make a lot of sense. The big idea is this the the entire modern movement about health seems to revolve around 1 idea, which is that nature seems to naturally optimize human biology. And that the farther we get away from nature so that we are stuck in concrete surroundings with EM bombarding our flesh and artificial light and all this stuff, the farther we get away from nature's natural patterns, the worse it is for our human biology.

18:12 So that's the big idea. So taking that idea and I, I think that's something most people don't have too hard a time accepting. It seems to make sense. Like it seems to actually like there's probably something to that, you know, So under that idea, there is a dietary aspect. There seems to be a rather easy to identify pattern dietarily of what happens in nature. And the, the big points about it seem to be that there's #1 some randomness that it's, it's not, it seems to be a bit of unpredictability.

18:46 And the word daily doesn't seem to apply in nature. So in nature you don't have a refrigerator and you can't go to it every day and do the same thing. So, and by nature, what I mean is living ancestrally like, like what you see on television shows, like Alone, for example. So the other thing that nature seems to introduce is 4 very specific modes of eating. One is feasting. So feasting means that you catch game and for a while you have an abundance of animal protein. That seems to hold true in nature.

19:20 Then there is a foraging and foraging happens when you don't catch game. It's in. It's the in betweens of catching game. Foraging seems to have some consistent things. There seems to be more roots in the diet, more foraging kind of foods like berries, things like that, more resistant starch, protein seems to go down a little bit. And also something I've never talked about is that there are benefits to that phase that have really never been discussed. The next is famine. So famine means you can't find anything, like you're just going hungry.

19:59 And that's different from foraging. So we have, we have famine. Famine is just there's no food and, and we call it starvation, we call it famine. But that that seems to happen in nature where you go long periods without actually eating. And then there is what we would call a season of abundance. And a season of abundance is not the same thing as feasting. You could think of a season of abundance as a prolonged season of no lack. So it could be like when the herd comes in or when the crop comes in.

20:27 But there's just a season where, you know, we seem to be provided for and we have these seasons of abundance. And that's contrasted with seasons where we don't have stock. Again, they're both happen pretty regularly. So none of that is difficult to accept. That actually makes sense. So if we take all that and distill it down into back into the big idea of nature's patterns seem to optimize human biology. If we take natures eating patterns and put them into a framework, what we come up with is there are periods where if I want to mimic what happens in nature, I probably should have less protein, more kind of foraging foods, and then periods where I should have more protein, less foraging foods, mimicking yeast and foraging.

21:06 OK. And then there may be even seasons where I want to have an entire season where I may be having more animal protein, more, more fat, and maybe a season where it looks less like that. So that makes a lot of sense. And when we look physiologically at well, why does that make sense there, There seem to be some underlying truths about homeostatic mechanisms of homeostasis in the body. And I'll give an example that's easy to understand. Something easy to understand is pathways and blunting. So everybody kind of gets that like that we have signal pathways and that if you over stimulate them, they can be blunted.

21:48 Easy example would be to think about caffeine. So caffeine with regular intake, you're going to blunt those pathways and then it just works less well. And this brings us into to an idea that is never, ever talked about. And eventually it'll it'll be the norm, but but right now it's just not even in the beginning phase. And it's the idea of rhythmic pulsing. OK, So rhythmic pulsing versus daily, that's kind of the big idea. We live in this era right now that is not driven by biology. It's driven by marketing.

22:23 And marketing pushes the idea of daily because it's good for, it's because subscriptions are good for the, for the bottom line. They're they're good for the return on investment. OK. It's not how biology works though. Biology doesn't work with daily in nature. You might have a season of daily for sure, but that season never lasts where rhythmic pulsing is very different. And I'll use the example caffeine again. If you take caffeine daily, talk too long before you're going to really blunt the effects.

22:51 You don't even feel it. OK, but if you rhythmic pulse caffeine, so maybe you do it 2 * a week here, once a week there, three times a week there or twice a week there. The effects never really drop. You don't blunt the pathways, you still get the same effect and so that you can apply to all of diet that idea that has to do with a thing called attenuation and attenuation is this force that works over time and everybody got it's not too hard to understand. There's other forces though. There's there's degradation.

23:19 You can degrade things like for example, if you're always doing fasting, you can degrade the gut lining. You can wear it down through work effectively starvation. There is compensation. So compensation is you do too much of one thing and you get a compensatory effect of another. So an example is you do too much, too much ketosis, too much keto, too much of that. The compensatory effect is your insulin sensitivity goes down. OK. And so there are these very easy to identify forces that work over time.

23:50 And so the answer to your question under this framework becomes why should you switch things up? Because that's what nature puts on you. And when you don't switch things up, there's any number of mechanisms we can go down and look at and identify where something is degrading, something is attenuating, something is something's happening to something that's shifting it out of balance and into imbalance. And this whole system we call the body works on balancing multitude of variables. So that's that's kind of the big answer.

24:21 Everybody knows about vitamin C, but have you ever heard about vitamin G? I'm talking about grounding. We know that oxygen is important for our survival, but what if I told you that grounding is just as foundational for our health? Your body is literally a battery and needs to be recharged every single day. Modern life, depleted fatigue, insomnia, brain fog, and restlessness. These all sound like a charge deficiency to me, you see. Grounding. Is not optional, it's foundational. This is why I make sure to get my bare feet on the ground every single day and to ensure that I stay grounded 24/7 like our ancestors did.

24:56 I use my favorite grounding sheet as I sleep to keep me connected to the earth at all times. Check out my favorite grounding mats and sheets that I use on a daily basis by heading over to the description below and make sure to use the promo code attached to get a massive discount on your entire order. So that was a fantastic breakdown. I wasn't expecting the answer. So thank you so much for that. And that makes absolute sense. It literally makes common sense to follow what would happen in nature.

25:22 And as you mentioned, the daily that doesn't exist. So because now with social media, there is many dogmatic views, right? And I fell into those dogmatic views as well when I tried different diets, unfortunately. But thankfully, now I can safely say that I'm able to see that there is a use case for different types of diets for different types of situations. And what you're even saying is those diets can be even incorporated or pulsed more frequently than what people actually think. So, for example, no one would ever, a lot of the people in the low carb and carnivore space would never advocate for a vegan diet, Right.

26:00 But what you're saying is that there is a time and place where you would want to do high protein and high fat and a time where you want to do like legumes and, you know, starchy, like vegetables or whatever and and leafy greens. And so that you're rotating between all of these different States and you're feeding different pathways in a way that you are not never suppressing one and never like neglecting another in a way. So they're all getting their fair share and then they're the body is more in this homeostatic state.

26:32 Is is that basically what you're saying? Yeah, so here there's an irony to what you just described. The irony is this. We've been sold on this idea by the carnivore community that that's ancestral, that it's closer to nature. But if you just think about it, it's the reverse is true because what? What what they're calling a diet, let's say a cardboard diet, does not work without a refrigerator. The only way that diet works is you have a refrigerator where you can store tons of animal based high protein foods in that would otherwise spoil and have access to that every day.

27:11 Take away the refrigerator, it doesn't work. So it only works in the modern bubble. The irony is what you just described, where you're pulsing between vegan and carnivore is actually much closer to nature because much closer to what you would see in nature where you have seasons of. Yeah, we don't have as much animal protein now. So I guess we got to eat these yucky roots. You know, I must be honest. I mean, my first pick is a, is a big old rib eye. OK, that's my first pick. I love. I love. Which by the way, there's another irony there under the umbrella that we've been sold that the, the, the, the carnivorous diet is more ancestral.

27:50 It actually, it's actually comprised of foods that are the product of the last 50 years. Like that's not what meat tastes like in nature. The meat only tastes like that because we have created diabetic cows that live on these sugar diets, OK. And we've created meat that is so rich in fat and rich in flavor. It's basically sugar proteins where the meat you find in nature, for the most part, really isn't that good. Like, like you got to, you got to massage it a lot to make, to make much of it even palatable.

28:20 It's not that desirable like a lot of meat you find in nature. It's so gamey. So that's another misconception with respect to that. But yeah. On this topic that we're going down this road now, I would like to ask my next question which is related to protein. And I've noticed that there is a massive protein craze going on right now with, you know, with muscle centric medicine as as you are aware of. And it's a great thing. But at the same time, I feel like it comes with many downsides due to the fact of this lack of pulsing like we just talked about.

28:49 I feel like what you just mentioned there about the pulsing is going to lay the foundation pretty much for our entire discussion because it pretty much always goes back to that. So, yeah, so there is this idea that we must consume 1g per pound of body weight every single day for the rest of of our lives. And I feel like that for some individuals, it can be a little bit more counterproductive, especially for people who don't work out. I feel like maybe you don't need as much protein, maybe you don't have as much muscle mass.

29:17 I don't know where what your opinion is on this, but I just feel that excess protein is actually aging us. Do you would you agree on that? Well, it's absolutely going to age you faster. There's no question about that. That's just pathways. So if you're looking at, you know, the IGF one pathway, the IIS pathway, there's even a theory of aging based on that. You can explain aging based on that one pathway. So if you're always shoving daily on a daily basis signals down that pathway and you're running through your cell, you're running through your, your allocation of cell cycles faster, you just are the other thing to consider.

29:55 So, so that's easy to see. The other thing to consider is that that ethos, which is let's call it muscle centric, is really a creation of the last decade or two. It it, it has never really existed prior to that. And it's the idea that, well, no, this is the amount of protein the body needs because that's what science tells us. But it just told us that in the last few years really if you, if you look at it and then it's based on bodybuilding, It's based on 1970s bodybuilding. OK, we've come so far since then where we can understand that the the limitations of that framework are so profound once you peel the onion back.

30:34 So first of all, I would ask, at what point in life, at what point in life do you need that much protein? You can make a case. I did this in my I made this case in my first book that that if you're a man between let's say the ages of 50 to 65, you 50 to 60, you need less protein. And then as you get over 60, you probably need more protein. If you're a woman, where do what phase of life do you need the protein? So, so that sort of makes us question, well, wait a second, is this is this one rule fits all thing really true?

31:06 And then when you begin to look at longevity as a goal instead of just muscle, you actually come up with what we need more of the opposite of that. We need periods where we have less protein. And then when you look at things that are not even talked about now, which is what is the effect of the foods eaten during the foraging phase, there actually is a muscle preserving effect to foods eaten during the foraging phase for reasons that no one talks about or really even understands. They have to do with activation of metabolites from bacteria that are spun up during that phase that preserve muscle loss, preserve again, protect against muscle loss.

31:42 So there's a much bigger equation and that is a simplistic bodybuilding based rule that once you begin to factor in all these variables minimally is going to make you question whether or not we've actually thought that through all the way. Me personally, I have periods where seasons where I'll have less protein, I'll have seasons where I have more protein and then within that every week I have days where I have much less protein and then days where I have higher protein. So again, you don't find daily in nature, you don't.

32:13 Nature doesn't give you daily. So I don't replicate that in my own life. I don't have daily. I have rhythmic pulsing, and rhythmic pulsing really becomes important when you begin to look at key mechanisms like the immune system, for example, because if you have daily pulsing on the immune system, you're going to want it, versus if you have rhythmic pulsing, it stays really sharp, so. Based on my research, this is the best Shilajit in the world. Here's why you need to know about Shilajit. Shilajit is a herbal mineral substance made from the decomposition of plants and bacteria.

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33:38 So if you want to experience this incredible ancient substance and find the one that I use on a daily basis, head over to the description below and use the promo code attached to get a discount on your entire order. Oh, wow. Wow, that's amazing. Yeah, I guess it would be ideal to talk about the sugar diet then, since we're on this segment of talking high protein and then like doing low protein days. I tried the sugar diet myself in the past summer and I've incorporated some of the aspects of it into my life ever since.

34:07 Now, I don't do it continuously. Like I tried it at first by doing, you know, a week or a month on end by trying it, you know, to, to get lean, which absolutely does work. By the way. Maybe you could explain the mechanism for us of why that works. But before we get into that, again, it fits into the idea of what you mentioned that, you know, you're doing something low protein and somehow I didn't actually lose muscle mass. I got leaner and I even felt like my, my muscle was very well preserved. Like, how does this actually work?

34:38 You said, you mentioned it was about the bacteria, the different bacteria that are, you know, being up regulated or something like this. Is that the reason why we we don't lose the muscle mass? Because I feel like there's so much fear as well from people who are used to eating 1g per pound of body weight to actually go a little bit lower some days or maybe even 0 some days. Are you there? Yeah, so there's several reasons that explain why try. To, you know, pulse like you mentioned and we were talking before we, you know, we went offline, we were talking about the sugar diet and you know, me trying that and my experience with that was a very positive experience and some crazy things that I actually witnessed since I actually did that was before I used to be a very thirsty person.

35:24 I used to always drink a lot of water naturally, like I always listen to my body and I always just drunk as much as I felt like because I don't like the idea of forced drinking water because I used to do that in my bodybuilding days. And basically that, that really like made me feel like crap, you know, had low energy levels. I was all the time urinating, going to the bathroom made me feel very weak in my training. But now I only drink to thirst and I feel just 1000 times better, probably because I'm not depleting my minerals.

35:54 But since during the sugar diet though, something crazy happens. I don't know what it was, but something changed in my body since then and I haven't been thirsty ever since. Like I, I feel like I'm never thirsty for water. Do you do you know what's actually happening there? I don't want to speculate because it it could be several things, depends on the version of the sugar diet that you did. I think there's two versions. One of them is basically essentially identical to what I've been doing with what's called the commensal push in my fat loss course for many, many years.

36:30 And that's where you're going low to no protein and you're very high in fruits. Yes. And and what you do is the reason you're seeing this uptake in mineral utilization is you're increasing the Fido bacteria as a result of that. And the Fido bacteria will actually stop phytates in the gut from binding minerals. So you have more mineral availability from that. It's also going to increase the acidification of the colon, which is going to help minerals. And so it's really the bacteria in the gut acting as a mediator for mineral metabolism.

36:59 Wow, that's amazing. And do you want to do you want to dive into the mechanism of action of how and why the sugar diet is actually such a powerful tool in for fat loss in general? Why are people seeing such incredible results by doing? Because before I'll tell you a bit of a story, I was doing the carnivore diet and then even with a carnivore diet, like I was gaining like a lot of weight. My thyroid was, you know, slowing down. Everything was kind of slowing down, right? A lot of these things that no one tells you from chronically doing low carb diets.

37:32 Like I ended up with a whole host of symptoms of hypo like thyroidism, you know, and then I was like pounding like a bunch of coffee to be able to, you know, like operate on a daily basis. Like my hair was starting to fall out. I was starting to get a little bit like fat around the midsection as well. And as soon as I started adding carbs back into my diet, all of a sudden all of the swelling around my stomach had totally gone down. And then when I tried the sugar diet, that totally took me to the next level and got me totally jacked.

38:00 So do you wanna explain to people like how that works? Yeah, so there's two ideas that we need for this big idea tent, big framework we've been building here. 1 is just simply that it's not the diet, it's the change in the diet, the fact you change the diet. And that takes us back to the ideas we talked about upfront, which is attenuation, degradation. And so this introduces the second idea, which is been missing completely. And it, and it's really absolutely mind boggling stunning, like why it's been missing because it's so obvious, which is time.

38:29 And it's the understanding that that diets don't work the same at all points in time. And I've been on this bandwagon forever. It's starting to finally get some traction because I'm hearing other influencers start to mimic that. But yeah, it's we when we analyze and talk about diets or really health protocols in general, there's never, they exist outside of time. And the way we talk about them is sort of abstract, like, well, it's this thing and it's going to do this thing. And that's the way it is always.

38:55 That's not how things are when you examine biology. Biology is based on homeostasis, and homeostasis is dynamic because you have all these variables that have to keep constantly adjusting. So just just based on the fact that there was a shift in the diet without without even getting into any of the mechanisms of the sugar diet, you should expect some change. And that also explains why people can come from the reverse. They can come from high carb diets, going to low carb diet and see these incredible results.

39:20 But then the longer they do it over time, then they start to see what you saw. And all of that should make perfect sense. When we come back to one thing, which is homeostasis is how biology works. It works on homeostasis. So that's been missing all of these experts, all these pH DS, all these geniuses when they talk about this stuff, they never incorporate this most basic reality. And I'm often quoted as as saying this one thing 10 years ago, nutrition, because they're, they're stuck in in a way of explaining things that isn't just 10 years ago.

39:47 It's it's 100 years ago because they haven't incorporated the truth of biology, which is it's, it's a homeostatic mechanism and homeostatic mechanisms with lots of variables create shifts over time explains everything right. But then specific to the sugar diet, it depends on the. Flavor. So if it's if it's more or less leaning towards sucrose and table sugar and more leaning towards fruits, then what you're going to see is exactly what happened to me in 2007. What what's really going on is 2 things.

40:15 Number one, you're creating a massive, massive shift in the microbiome and it's happening very rapidly. And as a result, you're producing a very specific protein. It's called fasting induced adipose factor or ANGLANGL PT-4. And fasting induced adipose factor is a essentially it's a starvation response and the microbiome actually potentiates you making much more of this. So as you're going into providing substrate, you're increasing the fiddle bacteria, you're increasing acromancy and then these are potentiating the human body to make more of this key protein.

40:48 And what this protein does is it stimulates fat loss and the more fasting induced adipose factor that you make, the more rapid the fat loss is. That's exactly what happened to me in 2007. I saw this incredible never in my life drop fat that fast. The thing you also notice at the same time is your bowel movements smell better, OK? They don't, they don't stink as bad. And, and so that is directly telling you that you are recolonizing the tax in the gut because what's coming out is fermenting different substances.

41:18 The other thing that's going on, I know some, a lot of people have pointed out, well, it must be FGF 21. So FGF 21 I've been writing about going on 10 years now. I'm very familiar with it and I can tell you it's not FGF 21. FGF 21 is a stress protein. You will see FGF 21 increase with either starvation or feasting, fat loss or obesity your way. You'll get the same thing. So this brings up the question, wait a second. If we see it on either side, is it a cause or is an effect? Is it a cause or is an effect?

41:45 When you look at fat loss and obesity, the one commonality is they're both stressful. They are both extremely stressful on the body. A lot of people don't know this, but for women of a certain age, rapid fat loss is a is a risk factor for for death, sudden onset because it's it's highly stressful on the body. I, when I first released my My Immunity Code book back in 2019, I went on a very famous podcast that they refused to air because I was speaking exactly to this, that fat loss was inherently stressful, that you're creating microcellular injury when you do fat loss.

42:21 And that involves the immune system that was so heretical to them, they wouldn't even air it. So what you see is that fat loss is inherently stressful. And so as a result, you should expect to see a compensatory factor, which is the increase of stress proteins, which is FDF 21. So that means it's not a cause, it's an effect. But when you look at what will the cause be, it's pretty simple. It's glycolysis. So when you provide substrate for when you look at glycolysis and when you look at increasing glycolysis across the body, you're going to get lean, very lean.

42:50 You see this in cancer patients, they get they get ripped, right? Why? Because they're just doing massive amounts of glycolysis. They're conscripting tons and tons of cells into more glycolysis. So when you go from no substrate to glycolysis, like on a low carb diet to massive substrate for glycolysis, you're going to get more glycolysis and then glycolysis will make you lean. So those are kind of the low hanging fruit of why it's working. And then the other factor is just simply that you're increasing the lean microbiome.

43:15 So you're increasing acromancia and bifidobacteria, which collectively works synergistically to improve insulin sensitivity. Sir, insulin sensitivity shooting through the roof. And so when you increase insulin sensitivity, everybody gets leaned. Connect with the like minded community. Get ad free episodes. Submit your burning desire questions to the guests of the show to just topics and guests that you would love to see on the show. Get access to my programs, protocols and blogs as well as exclusive discounts on my one-on-one coaching programs.

43:41 Get access to the Fitness Wisdom Podcast community starting from just $2.00 a month. The link is in the description. I look forward to seeing you in there. I hope everybody can wrap their head around what you just said there, because this totally boosts the myth that carbs actually make you fat. Like, what a crazy idea that, you know, I feel like this has been thrown around because of the idea that carbs cause insulin resistance because they increase our blood sugar and all of this. But what you're basically saying is that when in the right context, it can actually do the opposite.

44:14 Keyword in the right context, yes. So again, we have to come back to not talking about these things in the abstract, talking about them in terms of how biology works, which is you have to include time because this is a homeostatic mechanism chasing in equilibrium with lots of variables. So this brings us into the the big tent. Again, the word carbs is a big tent. And within that tent there's dozens of substances that act very differently. So certain types of carbs are inherently insulin sensitizing.

44:44 Pulse crops, for example, resistant starch, they inherently sensitize insulin. Other types of carbs, quote UN quote, can have a sort of a short term effect and then a long term effect, which is the opposite. So we're talking sucrose, table sugar.

45:03 You're increasing substrate for glycolysis. You're going to get more glycolysis. The body's actually going to get more insulin sensitive in the short term. But then long term, what's happening is you're actually feeding immune cell populations the wrong direction because you're providing substrate for immune cells and those immune cells feed on different types of sugar. So if you're providing too much sucrose in the excess, long term you're going to see a shift in in different types of cell populations.

45:29 You can see macrophages shift towards the inflammatory phenotype. T shell T cells are going to shift their ratios and then you can see the reverse start to take place. So then you'll start to see a little down regulation of insulin sensitivity. So that would be a more accurate picture. So, so again, like the rotation and the pulsing would be very important there. So for example, you don't you personally don't see an issue with the sucrose or the table sugar itself, but it's more the fact that you want, you don't want to be doing it all the time.

45:59 If you want to rotate between those high protein days, the medium protein days, low protein days. And I think what you mentioned previously, which was totally mind blowing is that actually eating carbs alone in isolation induces like a fasting or like a starvation like steak. But that's, that's just totally mind blowing, right? Well. So what happens is this was, this goes all the way back to the 70s. You can look up Mike Mensner talking about this in the 70s. Bodybuilders in the 70s knew that if you take anyone macronutrient to 0, doesn't matter which one, you're going to get fat loss.

46:35 So this generation has lost that understanding. People will readily agree that's true if you take that to 0, of course. That's true if you take carbs to 0, of course. But as soon as you say, well, that's true if you take protein to 0, so then you're gonna get triggered tribal responses like the sons and daughters of Greta Thunderbird, like, how dare you? How dare you? That goes against the religion. But it's true of protein. If you take protein to 0, what you're going to see is cysteine depletion, and some interesting things happen.

47:05 When you take just a very few key aminos below 40% of intake, you start to see very interesting things happen. Simply protein depletion alone is going to drive fat loss. Just taking protein zero. And that is counterintuitive to this age. But we have to account for the fact this age has lost touch with things people once knew were true. And so anyone macronutrient going to 0, you'll see fat loss. Wow, very very useful insights. I'm sure the audience is absolutely loving what you're saying here. Is there any other muscle building and protein myths that you're aware of that you want to enlighten the audience with?

47:39 There's a lot of things we can talk about. One thing that you had asked about was the muscle sparing effect of what seems to be starvation or rather foraging. And we can explain a little bit. Yeah, part of that we can explain through adiponectin. So adiponectin is an adipokine. It's a it's a signaling hormone produced by your body fat. And like a common experience we all have is that when you get really lean, two things happen. You, your energy goes up, you feel very energetic when you're lean and then, but also it seems to be like your, your, your, your some of your best workouts come when you're really lean, like you can really feel the muscle.

48:22 Well, it turns out that there's a, there's a muscle growth, muscle synthesis component to adiponectin, which is secreted in the lean phase. What adiponectin does is it works as a as a rate limiter on muscle growth and it works by allowing muscle myo fibers to attach to one another. It sort of works as the coupling between them so that in the lean phase you're making more out of connecting and then that creates the raw material necessary for more muscle synthesis. So that's, that's really pretty crazy and it's never been talked about.

48:57 Nobody really understands that. But what you see with old people is sarcopenia start to kick in. It's because they're out of connecting levels are going down. One of the reasons, not all, but one of the reasons is that they're losing the right types of adipenactin. There's low molecular weight, bimolecular weight, and the adiponectin serves as raw material for muscle protein synthesis. So if that raw material is not there, muscle protein synthesis is going to go downhill. There's other reasons. One just has to do with your recycling urea and you're going to get more amino acids.

49:25 And on that topic, there's a there's a guy that's a an Englishman good good friend of mine, Joe Binley actually just wrote a book on that. He's got some great things to say on the protein sparing effect. He'd be great for you to interview. Very knowledgeable guy. I don't want to take his did. He do the did he do the sugar diet as well? He's one of the main guys behind it, yeah. I think I saw, I think I saw him on Mark Bell's page, yeah. I can connect you. He's a very good friend of mine. And he's a brilliant guy.

49:52 Really knows a lot. Yeah. We'll make it happen. Yeah. So all that's to say, the more we dive into this, there seem to be a lot of conventional ideas that don't hold up scrutiny about sort of the daily thing of I, I need to send out a protein daily. And that gets us more into when we look at rhythmic pulsing, there seems to be like some really good reasons to look at like, wow, you know, marketing has convinced us that daily is the way to go. But biology seems to work on rhythmic pulsing. And in those pulses and in the in betweens, there's all these other mechanisms we've never really talked about that seem to be very interesting and make a lot of sense.

50:29 Oh. Wow. Yeah. Fantastic. And that would tie into my next question, which is about the what's the best diet for longevity? I feel like you've been answering this question pretty much the entire time here, right. But if you were to, if you were to summarize like everything that you said in like in one sentence or in one paragraph or like what would be the ultimate diet for longevity? How would it look like? The way Hands down, not even close, isn't even a contest. It's not even close. The way so I, the way is the immunity code diet.

51:04 And so my confidence, they're just shot through the roof, which I cautioned everybody on earlier, but I want to give you some good reasons why I'm so confident about that. So reason #1 the mechanisms of the way are so far beyond anything we're talking about. One of them is 7 day rhythms. So there, there is no diet you can name that's based on 7 day biological rhythms. 7 day rhythms is called circus septum rhythms. And it's an idea that is true that there's massive resistance to accepting, but it doesn't matter because whenever something is true, eventually everybody has to come around.

51:43 And when you look at the science and seven day rhythms, it's quite compelling. In fact, when you look at immunology, it's based on 7 day rhythms like like drug companies, they've figured this out. They're like, wow, you know, we want to administer these medications on Thursday and Friday because that's when DHA to cortisol ratio is highest or we or most of the heart attacks are going to happen on a Monday. So here's what we want to do here. And so the way is based on the notion that that different days of the week actually are unique nutritional events.

52:13 Like there are different pressures based on different days of the week and Sunday is kind of the the biggest and most glaring example we can look at. So the body does really seem to be designed to work in a cycle of seven days. In fact, all biology itself, when you look at this, it goes beyond, it's sort of easy to think, well, this is just social pressure, but it's not like when you look at the science on 7 day rhythms and, and granted, I'll say there isn't a ton, but what there is points to all biology seems to run in a seven day cycle.

52:43 And if that's true, let's assume it is for a second. If that is true, if all biology runs in a seven day cycle, then seven day or circucept in biology should be the very foundation of anything we're talking about. So the conversation should begin with how do you eat on a Sunday? That's how it should begin. Because we recognize that, wait, that's different. That's different because the body needs much more rest. We need to spin down cortisol levels. We need to sort of satiate fullness hormones so we don't overeat during this is all this whole.

53:15 We could make an entire podcast on eating on Sunday, how it's different and then that's very different from say midweek. It's very different from when it's very different from Monday. Monday we know that cortisol levels are the highest Monday and Tuesday stress levels are the highest. So we need dietarily to account for that. This begins to really, the more you go down this rabbit hole, it doesn't become something you shirk off easily. It becomes something that grabs you more and more and more and like, wait a second.

53:41 Oh wow. Now we got to think about Friday and Saturday. Where does most of the weight gain occur in a week? Friday and Saturday, right over a lifetime to all the wake. In fact, this is scientific and you can go rock this right now. Most of the weight gain is going to take place Saturday night. That's where it takes place for most people. So wow, now we need to account for that. We need to account for Friday and Saturday, and then Sunday day offset Sunday rest, and then Monday stress. Whoa. Suddenly you have an entirely new picture of diet that floods your brain.

54:07 It's completely different from the one we've been given now, where everything is the same every day. That becomes 50 years ago nutrition and a much more advanced conversation is what does Monday look like? What does? And then we layer it on top of that. Now, how do we make this look like what happens in nature where there's randomness, where there's where there's origin, where there's species? How do we do that? So that's the that's the beginning level of the way. That's just the very start. And that just that nothing else is 20 years ahead of anything else out there.

54:37 So I'm not confident that's the way. Light is the instruction manual for your body and there are specific frequencies that modern human is deficiency in these days, red and infrared light is specifically known for improving mitochondrial function. Boosting ATP production supports collagen production, so skin health and joint health. And my personal favorite is the cellular melatonin production. Melatonin is not just a sleeping hormone, it's one of your body's most powerful antioxidants. Let's face it, nothing beats the sun.

55:04 But if you can't get outside, you need to find a way to supplement red and infrared light back into your life. This is why I love to use my Megalin Red Light Therapy mat every time when I do my daily mobility routine. It speeds up my recovery from my workhouse, improves my blood flow, makes my skin glow, and most importantly, leaves me feeling regenerated. You see, light isn't optional, it's foundational. If you want to check out the red light therapy mat that I use on a daily basis by Megalin Head.

55:29 Over to the description below. And you'll find all the details. Wow, wow, that was absolutely fantastic. Thank you for that. And that was actually the very first time that I heard about this concept and it absolutely does make sense. And also the fact that what you're saying is that the body has different demands on different days of the week. And this is just literally like absolutely incredible information and very also relieving to to hear because it makes people realize, oh, This is why my body craves these certain foods at this time, this time of the week, for example, or this time of the day.

56:07 And because clearly the body has different demands on different days of the week. And we're going through these cycles just our like our circadian rhythm on a 24 hour cycle. You're saying we have this seven day cycle with our diet and basically our basically our bacteria and our whole biology is following this rhythm and that we have to honor this. And So what would actually happen if you actually don't honor this? What's actually what are the downsides of not honoring this seven day cycle? You can get the number one thing would be that you can get into these patterns of destructive eating that you're not even aware while you're doing them.

56:42 So an example would be just simply stressing cortisol and snacking, late night snacking. So the body needs one day a week to come down and rest and repair. It needs one day where that's the central focus. And then it also needs on that day, it needs, it needs incredible sleep on that day. It needs a really good night of sleep. Well, if you don't do that, if you ignore that dietarily, what's going to happen is you're going to have sort of accumulated levels of cortisol as you begin Monday to start kind of in a, your, your Physiology is started in a depleted state, meaning that your nervous system instead of having more capacity, starts the week with less capacity.

57:23 And then what you see in not in non fitness circles is very prevalent is that the day is managed by anxiety and stress. So, so your, your whole day, it revolves around managing anxiety and the way you relieve anxiety is late night. So as Monday night rolls around, the way most people get their anxiety down is through carbohydrates and often a glass of wine or two. That's how they manage their cortisol and stress press levels. Well, that becomes habitual and destructive. And we can say that, well, that's just willpower.

57:54 That's just choices. To some degree that's true, but there's also a biological component that you can't ignore. And, and so just just that explains a lot like, well, what? And, and so I would offer an incentive, which is, hey, what if there was a way to eat on Sunday? It mitigated cortisol levels, set you up for the week to, to actually follow the diet that you want. That's that's a huge problem. You know, you can say that the problem with all diets is plan never survives the first meal. That's the problem problem.

58:28 You make a great plan, but then your biology is telling you to do something else because the homeostasis of of stress management is out of whack and it's trying to bring it back into balance through snacking through carbohydrates. And you can say, well, that's just choice. There's a biological component, I hate to say it. OK, And So what if there was a way to eat on Sunday that did three things. It, it overcompensated for fullness and satiety so that during the week is just easier to eat tight, eat strict.

59:00 It drove maximum depletion, renewal and recovery. And three, guaranteed a great night's sleep. Would you be interested? Every single person has their hands up every single person, right? And I've just asked the most basic fundamental stupid question that somebody should have asked 50 years ago, which is based on a natural biological rhythm that 24 hours circadian biology sits under in the hierarchy. It sits under that. So if you look at the hierarchy, there's seven day rhythm and then under that is 24 hours.

59:29 Everybody should be talking about this. Yes, yeah. I mean, circadian rhythms are are foundational to our health, right. And what you mentioned there is absolutely important. And the way you said there about the willpower and the discipline, I think that a lot of people don't realize that when your body is working against you, it's or not rather working against you. But like, you know, you know what I mean? Like you think that it's working against you, but it's always working for you. But we think that it's working against us, but we go against our bodies signals and intuitions.

59:59 Our body's telling us one thing and we're doing another thing like you mentioned with a specific diet or a specific way. And then we're not ready. Our body's not ready. It's not in the right state hormonally or microbiome wise or or stress wise. And then therefore we fail because we're not able to stick to a specific plan. But we're not setting up our body because we are not addressing the foundations first. Of the rhythms and the pulsing and the rotations and all, everything that you mentioned before, actually trying to introduce something new into our life.

1:00:33 So I think yes, it's so important for people to realize that if your body is healthy and it's working well, it's so much easier to make changes in your life. But the more disconnected you are from your body and the more you stress your body and the more you like sabotage it through every, you know, daylight daily life stressors, then it's going to be way harder to reach our goals. Let's move into carbohydrates a little bit because we talked a little bit about the protein myths. Let's move into some carb myths that you're aware of.

1:01:04 I'm sure you heard online that, you know, carbs are the roots of all evil and all of our all of our health problems, right? And that would also include glycation as well. So maybe we can talk a little bit about glycation and what is glycation exactly and why does it actually happen? Yeah. So glycation is, there are reactions in the body that are called enzymatic mediated, they're mediated by an enzyme, OK. And then there are reactions in the body that don't require an enzyme. And the thing to understand is that the reactions that don't require an enzyme will always out compete the reactions that do require an enzyme.

1:01:47 And when you look in the theories of aging, you sort of see this idea begin to pop up everywhere. Like the the old free radical notion of aging stated succinctly is that aging is non UN enzymatic mediated lipoperoxidation and superoxide overproduction of the inner mitochondrial membrane. That's aging right? Well, what's the keyword in there? Non enzymatically mediated damage to lipids. OK. When you when you look at superoxide overproduction, the problem is that there is an enzyme required for superoxide, which superoxide dismutase to neutralize superoxide overproduction, but it gets out competed by the non enzymatic reaction, which is peroxin nitrate.

1:02:34 OK, So when you look at glycation, we have what are called glycotoxins, which are reactions between sugars and protein that create these toxins that don't require an enzyme. And so those reactions have sort of a mathematical advantage. And so they, they, they can take place and what they do is they can, they can basically Dr. accelerated aging. So that's that's kind of the, that's kind of what they are. And what would actually be the 'cause then like, well, let's say, because people love to blame one specific macro food group, right?

1:03:10 But then I was writing an article previously, not that long ago, I did some research and I actually found that it's not only carbs that induce, you know, advanced glycation egg products, but it's also proteins and fats as well. Is it? Would that be correct? Yeah. So I mean, it's as simple as cooking methods. I mean, you can, you know, introduce that just by cooking your protein like, you know, getting getting carbonization and so or fats they they readily and easily can oxidize. So you know it, Yeah, that's that, yeah.

1:03:42 It's not fair to just sort of blame carbohydrates in that. Do you think that if you spike your blood sugar like frequently that contributes more to the advanced glycation and products or glycation in the body? That's a subset of a discussion about the nature of glucose and insulins. Glucose by its very nature is inflammatory, and that's why elevated glucose is so damaging. I mean, it is. It is really the worst thing possible because the surface of the endothelium, the inner lining of the vasculature, this is one of those parts of the body that reaches non negotiable status.

1:04:17 Inner lining of the endothelium is responsible. It kind of has a lot on its shoulders. It's responsible for the ship not sinking by virtue of the fact that that's what's that's how we get oxygen into tissues. OK. And so if you begin to damage the endothelium over time, it can't do its job as well. And once that begins to happen, the whole ship sinks. Like that's where you see accelerated aging. And that can happen from a lot of different things. But one of the key drivers of that is, is, is continually elevated glucose levels.

1:04:46 And that can come from low carb diets. I mean, some of the worst measures you see are from guys who do low carb and they look pretty diabetic and they're, well, that is catastrophic. How bad that is for you because insulin is anti-inflammatory. A lot of people still don't know this, but in the emergency room, the single greatest life saving drug of all time is insulin. Wouldn't call it a drug, but I mean substance insulin. Insulin is anti-inflammatory. It it clears glucose and it clears inflammation.

1:05:13 So again, this brings us to the question of time and you know, we have to look at kind of these surgical insertions with high insulin sensitivity. So the issue is not necessarily did you spike your glucose, the the issue is did you effectively clear glucose. That's really more the issue. And so a, a metabolism and the components of a metabolism that are fine-tuned through rhythmic pulsing will be very efficient, meaning that you haven't taken it too far either way. So there's the regular introduction of insulin sensitizing carbohydrates in the diet.

1:05:50 And then there's the regular introduction of Glucagon sensitizing foods like proteins, animal foods. And so they work in a balance. And so body's pretty efficient at clearing glucose. But when you take either one too far for too long, it gets then we see all the stuff we talked about the beginning. We see homeostasis begin to take place, One team begin to take place. And through daily see basically this diet dogma daily we see destruction. We see like, oh, well, I just did low carb every day, daily.

1:06:18 I did it all the time. What happened? Oh man, like my glucose has gone up. Why? Because you're getting insulin resistant or the converse. Yeah, I just, I heard carbs weren't bad. So then I just did, you know, I did carbs every single day, non Italian carbs and American carbs. And yeah, it didn't it worked great at first, but then over time, then a little insulin resistant. So the, the bigger conversation becomes how does the biology work? And it's the biology is always seeking homeostasis, trying to trying to balance out all these different variables.

1:06:50 And so the issue becomes not did you spike your glucose? The issue becomes what are you doing on a regular basis? Are you introducing diversity into the diet, which helps Dr. homeostasis, or are you overdoing? One thing I talked about in my first book, I called it the era of imbalance, and it's this widely adopted idea that cannot be true, which is that the way to health is to imbalance homeostasis through imbalanced inputs. Therefore, if I imbalance protein input, if I just go low carb, that's the way to help.

1:07:25 Or if I imbalance carbohydrate intake through veganism, that's the way to help. But that's not how the body works. That's not how homeostasis works. If you when you imbalance anything, imbalance water, you're going to see pathology anything. Most people chase energy, performance and good cognitive function through stimulants, but that only gets you so far and depletes your system overtime as it doesn't address the foundation of cellular energy, which is your mitochondria. One of my favorite tools to boost cellular energy, mitochondrial function reduce inflammation, and is also a potent antioxidant that's methylene blue.

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1:08:26 Yes, yes, I guess the reason why people love to stick to specific ways of doing and dogmatic views on. Nutrition and and is because it's convenient, right? For example, if you think about a carnivore diet, a low carb diet, it's so simple, right? You've got a limited set amount of foods you know that you can eat on a daily basis. You eat those things, you throw away your responsibility about energy intake entirely. And you just think that just because you are experiencing some leanness at the beginning and maybe some water loss that you know it's the be all end all for metabolic health and insulin sensitivity and all that.

1:09:03 But what what you're explaining to us here throughout this entire discussion about the importance of cycling and pulsing is that in order for the body to get everything that it needs and all the pathways to be stimulated and everything to remain in balance and no over stress something or under stress and other factor, we have to cycle, We have to rotate all of these different things. And so the issue with the blood sugar in itself wouldn't be necessarily the spikes, but it would be the time that the blood sugar would be elevated, right.

1:09:36 Everybody loves to blame the spike, but like how fast that comes down, I guess is, is where it all matters. If it stays elevated chronically again, I would, I would 100% agree that it causes inflammation causes, you know, damage. It's going to damage all kinds of things because we know that. But The thing is that a lot of people associate carbohydrates with the chronically elevated blood glucose when it when there is 1000 different things which actually elevate, you know, keep glucose chronically elevated.

1:10:05 For example, you've got stress, you've got artificial blue light, you've got non-native EMF's, you've got lack of sleep. You know, you can keep going down the list and then you can create all of these different states in the body even with no carbohydrates present. So all of these claims are sort of, you know, they all just get destroyed when you realize that biology is so much more complex than you know, than what you actually think. So do you want to move into the microbiology a little bit? So let's talk about the importance of the microbiome.

1:10:36 You already touched on a few bacteria throughout this entire podcast and how important those are in terms of our metabolic health and our even our weight management. So how important do you think the gut microbiome is to health and overall well-being? But it's it's foundational, it's absolutely foundational. And the more data that comes available in terms of the interplay between not one but three different metabolisms, we are, we now have the foundation to understand what's true. And that's all we're after.

1:11:12 We're just after what's true. We just want to know what is true, right? So the idea we've been fed that's less true is that you have a metabolism, OK, your metabolism. What's more true is that you have 3 metabolisms within you. That, and they're all important. One is your human metabolism, what happens with inside cells, how they get their energy. A subset of that that's equally important is the metabolism within immune cells. That's not in the picture right now to discuss, but it should be. It should be actually, the first thing we talked about.

1:11:43 The reason is immune cells have a disproportionate weight on metabolism in general. So the immune cells act as traffickers, OK? So as immune cells shift in certain directions, it takes the whole body and then it takes metabolism with it. And the final piece is the metabolism within bacteria in the gut, because the metabolism within bacteria makes metabolites and those metabolites are identical to human metabolites. And so and but there's just more of them. So for better or for worse, we can impact human metabolism through microbial metabolism.

1:12:16 And then when you take in the big picture and you take in the interaction between all three of these metabolisms and now you're really talking. Now we have a very complete picture as far as we can know today of what metabolism is. So that it's the interplay between microbial metabolites with human metabolism. Example things like butyrate, for example, which is a metabolite, alpha ketoglutarate, which is the metabolite, and then the interaction with those metabolites with immune cells and how immune cells steer the ship of the body.

1:12:46 That's a very accurate picture and it's sort of foundational. The whole thesis of my book, The Immunity Code was that that's the foundation is this interaction between human metabolism and immune cell metabolism and microbial metabolism, 3 metabolisms, and that you could affect that dramatically, powerfully with just focusing on 2 bacteria. There aren't a lot. Like the one thing you hear a lot with health and nutrition is make it simple. Make it simple, please make it simple. The problem is biology is not simple.

1:13:20 Biology is the most ridiculously, unbelievably, mind bogglingly complex thing I can that I know of. There's nothing more complex than by, you know, maybe like in quantum physics there's, you know, protons, not as a proton and maybe that's more complex, but but for practical purposes, biology is so ridiculously complex that there's very few things that actually are simple. But one of those is that by focusing on just two bacteria, which are very easy to increase, you can get these profound effects.

1:13:49 And I would argue that's what you're seeing in the sugar diet. You're actually just through substrate shifting the bacteria that that have the disproportionate weight, that's acromancy, that's bacteria. And then you're seeing these profound shifts across the entire body in energy metabolism, in water retention and you know, all its fat loss, all these different things. So yeah, I would say it's foundational. Wow, wow, absolutely mind blowing. I never knew about those three different types of metabolism.

1:14:16 Of course we all know the cellular metabolism, right? But you just brought another piece to the puzzle. So I really want to thank you for that, that, that was absolutely fantastic. And I also need to buy your book because now I really understand that, you know why your book is called the immunity code because as you mentioned, you know, it's like the foundation of all these three metabolisms together and how like the that's the basis of the foundation of why you write your book, right? So thank you that, that was fantastic.

1:14:45 How important do you think fiber is for our our diet? And do we need this at all because the carnivores say that we don't need fiber? They don't know what they're talking about. They have absolutely no idea what they're talking about. I mean, they're just, they're all new. They're all new to the space. And you know, like if you look back at where were they 20 years ago? They weren't here, they weren't in the space. They're they're all on a learning curve of 10 years or or less. And I mean, you've already seen Salvino walk away from it and rebrand into animal based.

1:15:12 Yeah, so fiber's a big tent word. It's really 60-70 different substances as we go down this road. And I, I, I got into this in my debate with Sean Baker.

1:15:23 When you begin to look at like, well, are there, are there rate limiting things that we can't live without? You know, butyrate becomes one of those things. And then the carnivore guys argue, well, you can make butyrate through amino acids, but what they haven't done is trace those pathways down. So I'll just start high level, the very best way to make butyrate is through what's called saccharolytic fermentation. And it would take an entire podcast to break this down for the audience. But just suffice to say, that's the only way that you get the correct ratios of butyrate, acetate, propionate, and the antioxidants required to go along with that.

1:16:02 What you get through amino acid fermentation is you get a much less desirable profile. You get. So there are different butyrate synthesizing pathways, 1's called the ketogenic pathway, 1's called the lysine pathway. And you know there's several, there's about 5 different pathways.

1:16:20 The problem you get trying to create an entire lifetime synthesizing butyrate through amino acids #1 is that you're going to create ammonia as a byproduct. So you're going to have different ratios of propionate, acetate, butyrate. They're not the same. They're different, and they're not ideal. Then you're going to get an increase in ammonia, which is not desirable at all. Then also you're going to get an increase in the alkalinity in the colon. Now, a lot of people have been brainwashed to think, well, alkalinity is only good.

1:16:49 But that's, again, that's just a nutrition myth. Alkalinity is body compartment specific. It depends on the compartment. The last, the last place you want alkalinity is in the colon. That's the very last place you want it, particularly in the distal colon. So as you begin to increase alkalinity in the colon, you get what are called alkylated carbonyls. These are mutagens. They are destructive cancer promoters. And what you're getting then is you're increasing ammonia. You're also feeding amino acid fermenters like Fusobacteria, so you don't want to feed Fusobacteria.

1:17:25 Fusobacteria is a cancer promoter. You can run a microbiome test on someone if they show up with fusobacteria. It's not if they're going to get cancer, it's when. It's just when you're going to get cancer. And so this idea that you can make a lifetime of trying to trying to produce butyrate through the amino acid fermentation pathways, it's completely flawed. It's easy to see. It doesn't take a genius like once I point it out once I go, no, it doesn't work that way because here you're increasing ammonia production, you're increasing fuse of bacteria production, you're increasing alkalinity in the colon, you're decreasing production of antioxidants, you're decreasing ratios of prenatant acetate, butyrate.

1:17:59 It doesn't work. It works for a short time, but it doesn't work long term. It's it's less ideal. So yeah, I mean, yeah, sorry you got to re center me here, otherwise I'll just keep ranting. No, no, I love it. I love it when you go down these rabbit holes. It's fantastic. You're enlightening us so much today. Yeah. What you mentioned there about the alkalinity and the acidity, I think is also a very important discussion because, you know, there is a, you hear a lot of people about the Living Diet, right, which is like a raw vegan diet and this idea that it's an alkaline diet.

1:18:29 But what you're basically saying is that kind of diet makes your colon more acidic, and a high protein carnivore diet makes your colon more alkaline. Is that correct? Yeah, that's correct. Yeah. Yeah, it's the reason is about it. So yeah. So as you increase ammonia, ammonia will alkalize. So I once heard a very famous carnivore guy talking about, he was trying to debunk the myth of that more protein intake makes you acidic. And he went so far as to say actually it can make you more alkaline. And I had to point out to him, yeah, that's the problem.

1:19:05 That's the problem. OK, so you don't want again, alkalinity and acidity depends on the body, body compartment. It it's different in everybody compartment. But the one, the one place you don't want alkalinity is in the colon. It needs to be slightly acidic. It needs to be about 6.7. And and that's, that's the crazy irony of how complex the body is, is that when you're feeding it amino acids, acidity, you're feeding it more acidity, yet as a byproduct, you're getting ammonia and then ammonia will alkalize.

1:19:35 Yep, so, so many important things that you busted here on this on this podcast episode. Do you have any more time on your hands? I want to be respectful of your time. I. Have 20 minutes. OK, Actually I have about 10 because I got to just, yeah. No problem, no problem. So last last question would be related to sleep. Of course, this is like a really, really big area where people have struggles with. On this podcast in general, we talk a ton about circadian biology and circadian rhythm. So everybody's aware about the importance of light and dark cycles for our sleep.

1:20:05 But let's say that they're doing that already and they're having difficulty still. What are some of your favorite compounds or things to do to help people induce nice and deep and restorative sleep? Yeah. So there's a concept that no one talks about or really understands. I call it sleep burden. And sleep burden is easily understood sort of by comparing a young person to an old person. OK, So if you take a 20 year old and then you take a 70 year old, the 20 year old doesn't really have much in the way of cenolytic cells, OK?

1:20:40 They don't really have systemic inflammation. They don't really have all of these things that, that, that on a daily basis are present that they're asking the immune system to clear while they're sleeping. They don't have that. An old person has all that and more so an old person, you know, their bodies loaded with cenolytic cells, their, their SASP's secretory associated senescent phenotype is F-10. You know, their immune cell ratios are wonky. They're all these issues that the that at night as they're going to bed, the immune system's got this impossible job in front of it.

1:21:20 It's got to try and bring all that down, OK? Whereas the young person, the immune system can just focus on repair and recovery, OK? And so in your 20s, you're not really aging very fast, right? In your 70s, you're aging like a friggin truck going downhill, you know? And it's because the restorative power of sleep has been lost because the immune system is oversubscribed, trying to fix problems that it can't fix. It's just overwhelmed. So as you begin to look at that problem, the more that you help the immune system down that road, begin to eliminate its task and get it as close as possible to a 20 something, the better you're going to sleep.

1:21:59 And that's a, that's a long list of things, but I'll just give you a couple. So top of the list is to look at very specific sugars around bedtime. So one of those would be Treylos. So Treylos helps the the evidence seems to mostly be now it's been Treyolis is one of these sugars. It's an autophagy sugar and it's been on a 10 year climb of it works, it doesn't work. Oh, I guess it does work. It's been, you know, we go in the science of like treyolis is good. No, it's bad. Now it's good again. OK.

1:22:29 But all that's to say is that our understanding this thing is always incomplete. And so we should always use words like probably, maybe, most likely. So the way it seems now is that Treyolos most likely initiates autophagy if you give sufficient amounts of it. So you need a lot of it. You need, you know, 20 grams plus, you know, to because you have an enzyme in the gut trailase that breaks it down. But you can overwhelm that enzyme and then it'll get to the serum. OK. So with a decent dose of it, 20 grams worth 25 grams, you're giving substrate for a topagy.

1:23:03 You're helping shift cells into a topagy while you sleep. And that's a huge problem. You know, as we age, that's the problem like brain cells, astrocytes, all these different cells, they're not going into autophagy. So we get a little bit of help there. Another, another one would be that we want to help the body shift its T cell ratios while you're sleeping. And so another sugar is Manos that can help with that. Manos helps shift T cell ratios. Now there would be some possible argument there that, well, wouldn't treelos interfere with the absorption of Manos because Treelos seems to impair the GLUT 4 receptors.

1:23:40 And you kind of get into that discussion. But what I've found to be true over time is that tissues that need what they need pick up what they need. And, and so as you, and you see this with ketosis, you see this with a topic, you see this a lot, a lot of different places that when you flood the body with opposing substrates, the tissues that need what they need seem to take it up. So, so that's just two quick examples of two different types of sugars that we can use to steer immune cells and induce A topology.

1:24:06 And by doing So, what you're doing is you're decreasing the sleep burden, the burden on the immune system during sleep to do work. So that's kind of an area that nobody's really thought about. It's it's outside the realm of we'll just take, you know, more melatonin or just take D sip or you know, so. Wow like that was absolutely mind blowing. So P again. Another thing that probably blows people's mind is like what sugar can induce autofagy? Of course, you there are specific type of sugars like you mentioned, but at the same time, people just can't grasp the idea that you can go into autofagy when you are consuming something.

1:24:40 People think that you have to be starving your body, you know, in a, in a fasted or a chaotic state, you know, in order to induce autophagy. So this is very mind blowing and very, very useful information. Thank you so much, Joel Green for coming on the Fitness Wisdom podcast. This was absolutely enlightening discussion. I really, really enjoyed it. And of course, I would love to have you back on in the future because I'm sure there's so much that we can talk about and you're really a wealth of knowledge and I love everything that you share on social media.

1:25:08 I will make sure to put your links in the description below, but just in case people don't check the description, where can people find you, connect with you, work with you, and buy your book? Yeah, my Instagram is a great place to start. My my link in my bio actually will take you to I've created a GPT that's Joel GPT and I've uploaded some, I've uploaded both my books and then I've uploaded my vault of private notes to it. So it's it's pretty attuned to things I would say. And that's a really fantastic place to start because it can, it can be like me sitting next to you, walking you into the whole immune centric universe just kind of bit by bit and you just keep asking questions while you go.

1:25:45 And it just, it's just like it's this incredible thing to have now through AI and I would just say start there. Amazing. Amazing. Yeah. I love it that I managed to sit down and talk with you in real person instead of your AI bot. And then, yeah. But then of course, you know, like this human connection is so, so important. But thank you for everything that you do. And let's do it again. Really. If you guys enjoy the topics and guests I bring on the show, I would really appreciate if you left me a five star review on Spotify and subscribe to Fitness Wisdom Podcast on YouTube as well.

1:26:15 This helps to spread the knowledge and wisdom with the world. Until next time.