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News Topic:

Blood biomarker profiles and exceptional longevity: comparison of centenarians and non-centenarians in a 35-year follow-up of the Swedish AMORIS cohort

Show Notes:

Winnebago Man (We’ve got flies Tony vid – nsfw – lots of F bombs in this)

Questions: 

OCR training and nutrition

Justin writes:

Hey Robb and Nicki, big fan love all that you guys do for your listeners! My question is if you were to put together the best training plan for running an obstacle course race such as spartan race or savage race what would that look like? I usually do the 10k to half marathon distances if that helps to clarify the distance. I currently attend orange theory fitness classes 4x per week monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday then long run on saturdays. I was hoping the consistency of doing orange theory for almost exactly 1 year would really help me get in OCR shape but sadly it just hasn’t made that big of an impact. I just started incorporating the long runs on Saturday back into my training and realized once I did the running from the classes really hasn’t changed how well I run and still feel my heart rate much higher than I’d like even at slower paces. Not sure if CrossFit would be a better option since I’ve never dived into that arena but I’m very open to any suggestions. Nutrition wise I try to get my body weight of protein daily, carbs around 220, and fat around 65. Those numbers were given to me by a nutritionist I did a consult with a few weeks ago. Again any tips you guys have are very much appreciated!

Salt intake

Darren writes:

 Hi robb and nikki. Listening to yiu from tasmania australia. I recently read salt fix and hearing alot about sodium intake. I have been having alot more salt recently and have noticed a dramatic improvement in all health perameters. Due to mainstream info i am struggling to accept that i should be taking extra salt. I eat a low carb whole food diet i run a busy cafe some cardio some weight training quite activevery lean 52 yoand my blood pressure is always around 100/70. My question is there any other long term problems with too much salt other than high bp. Thanks for keepin it real

Sponsor:

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Transcript:

Click for transcript PDF

Nicki: It’s time to make your health an act of rebellion. We’re tackling personalized nutrition, metabolic flexibility, resilient aging, and answering your diet and lifestyle questions.

This is the only show with the bold aim to help one million people liberate themselves from the sick care system. You’re listening to the Healthy Rebellion Radio.

The contents of this show are for entertainment and educational purposes only. Nothing in this podcast should be considered medical advice. Please consult your licensed and credentialed functional medicine practitioner before embarking on any health, dietary, or fitness change.

Warning, when Rob gets passionate, he’s been known to use the occasional expletive. If foul language is not your thing, if it gets your britches in a bunch, well there’s always Disney+.

Robb: Welcome back, everybody.

Nicki: Hello, this is Episode 167 of the Healthy Rebellion Radio. Yeah, we are here. We are here. We are motoring. It’s been kind of busy. I know. Singing to the choir, because I know this is the plight of all modern humans it seems, is just the never ending…

Robb: Bizitude.

Nicki: Bizitude. Especially those with children and other beings to care for.

But we’re here, we’re back. Sorry, we missed last Friday. We’re doing what we can. We do actually have one sick kiddo this morning who woke up under the weather, but I think that’s just par for the course this time of year.

She’s usually a pretty resilient kid, but she woke up this morning dragging, not feeling herself.

Robb: Well, she had a high motor weekend. We had one of her friends come over and all the girls were up pretty late, relative to what they usually do.

Nicki: Two nights in a row.

Robb: And then…

Nicki: Gymnastics for two hours on Saturday.

Robb: Came home, ate, and then did the trampoline park-

Nicki: Yep.

Robb: … For another two hours and might’ve dug a little bit of a hole.

Nicki: A couple late nights. So anyway, let’s see. We’ve also… Zoe found our first bear scat in our new-

Robb: The back 40.

Nicki: … Back 40 here. So that’s something that will be fun to keep an eye on.

Robb: The front chunk of the property is just pasture that you can see everything and then you cross a creek and you end up in super overgrown cottonwoods and berry bushes and all this type of stuff.

And you can’t see anything back there, so we were pretty emphatic that if they go scooting back there, they have to take the dogs with them. And that, I think sealed that.

Nicki: She said big, big pile of scat with berries or-

Robb: She said berries.

Nicki: … Berries or something in them. So anyway, we need to get our game camera up so we can-

Robb: Document all that.

Nicki: … And see what kind of critters we have perusing-

Robb: Indeed.

Nicki: … Mm-hmm. Let’s see, what else do we have upfront here? I’m trying to think. It’s already the end of September. It’s kind of crazy. Winter is coming. I feel it. Fall. Fall is turning.

Robb: It’s turning something. Oh, we will be glad when the first freeze happens because we are besieged-

Nicki: Oh, this is an interesting thing.

Robb: … With flies.

Nicki: Yeah.

Robb: We got flies, Tony.

Nicki: We got flies, Tony. And we mentioned that little clip before.

Robb: We mentioned it before. It’s probably worth plugging it back in the show notes.

Nicki: It’s a hilarious little clip, but boy do we have flies. This is a different situation than we had in Kalispell or anywhere else we’ve lived where there are always flies, especially if you live around anybody that has horses or anything.

But these are apparently called a cluster fly. They don’t lay eggs or larva in decaying food the way that a normal fly does. They actually lay them in earthworms outside, but then they try to get in to kind of stay warm and over winter.

These flies don’t have the standard life cycle of approximately-

Robb: 28 days.

Nicki: … 30 days that the standard fly does. These adults can live for one to two years, apparently. It’s a thing. So anyway, we’re trying to figure out what to do with our-

Robb: We have hundreds of them.

Nicki: … And you can vacuum and get rid of all of them and within minutes you’ve got… And they’re dying. They die on your window sills and on your floor, and then you’re just constantly vacuuming flies.

Robb: And a bunch of them don’t really die. They’ll be laying there all balled up and they look pathetic and you go to sweep them up or something and they burst back into life and take off.

Nicki: It’s crazy. And somebody was telling me it’s a Bozeman thing, it’s not a… They’re like, “It’s not just your house. It’s a thing here.”

But I’ve never, ever heard of a cluster fly. I had to Google it. I’m like, what is going on with these flies? So yes, we’ve got flies, Tony. And if you don’t know what, “We’ve got flies, Tony,” is referring to, please check the show notes. I will include a little video, which is quite humorous.

Robb: Not safe for work, but hilarious.

Nicki: It is quite humorous.

All right, hubs, what do we have for our news topic today?

Robb: Kirsten Johnson pinged me this, but I had seen it prior to her firing this off to me. But it’s Blood Biomarker Profiles and Exceptional Longevity: Comparison of Centenarians and Non-centenarians in a 35-year follow-up of Swedish AMORIS Cohort.

So a retrospective study, but it looked at all kinds of different things. Basically metabolic biomarkers of the very long-lived versus other folks. And it’s interesting. These centenarians tended to have fairly high total cholesterol levels, about 240 if not a little bit higher.

What they did not have, uniformly, was high blood glucose levels, high inflammatory levels, high urate levels. Basically, these folks were really metabolically healthy, had cholesterol and lipid levels that we would be potentially concerned with, but didn’t seem to be an issue for them.

Some folks have suggested that there’s a certain survivorship bias here, that maybe lots and lots of people with similar profiles end up dying and not making it, and maybe there is some sort of a benefit that’s conferred here, but maybe some people don’t make it through that aperture of time.

But I think it still makes a pretty strong case that, all else being equal, good metabolic health is probably pretty important for living into advanced age, living into advanced age well, and avoiding everything from cardiovascular disease to dementia to hosts of different types of cancer.

So it’s a pretty accessible piece and it’s open access. So we’ve got links in the show notes.

Nicki: Awesome. Very cool. Very cool. Okay.

The Healthy Rebellion Radio is sponsored by our salty AF electrolyte company, LMNT, and it’s getting a little cooler. Fall is upon us, and I had a timely email from an LMNT customer and a podcast listener this morning. And this is from Jenna.

She says, “Hi friends. Not a question. Just sharing. Chocolate LMNT plus canned coconut milk plus local honey plus hot water equals mind-blowing hot chocolate.”

I have not yet tried this because she just sent this in this morning, but it looks amazing. And we think… We have a neighbor that just brought us a jar of local honey right from her backyard-

Robb: And it’s incredible.

Nicki: … It’s incredible. So Jenna, I will be trying this. Thank you for sharing, folks. If you want to try it, share Jenna’s recipe, I think it will also translate quite well with the chocolate caramel that is coming out in just a few weeks.

So winter’s coming. No better way to enjoy your winter activities and stay hydrated than with a hot cozy beverage that includes LMNT. You can grab yours at drinklmnt.com/robb.

That’s drinklmnt.com/robb.

Robb: Cool.

Nicki: We have two questions for you folks today. This first one is from Justin on obstacle course race training and nutrition.

“Hey Rob and Nicki. Big fan, love all that you do for your listeners. My question is if you were to put together the best training plan for running an obstacle course race such as Spartan Race or Savage Race, what would that look like? I usually do the 10K to half-marathon distances, if that helps to clarify the distance.

I currently attend Orangetheory fitness classes four times per week, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. And then do a long run on Saturdays. I was hoping the consistency of doing Orangetheory for almost exactly one year would really help me get into obstacle course racing shape, but sadly, it just hasn’t made that big of an impact. I just started incorporating the long runs on Saturday back into my training and realized once I did, the running from the classes really hasn’t changed how well I run and I still feel my heart rate is much higher than I’d like, even at slower paces.

I’m not sure if CrossFit would be a better option since I’ve never dived into that arena, but I’m very open to any suggestions. Nutrition-wise, I try to get my body weight of protein daily. My carbs are around 220 grams and fat around 65 grams. Those numbers were given to me by a nutritionist who I did a consult with a few weeks ago. Again, any tips you guys have are very much appreciated.”

Robb: Just pretty straightforward training. What is it that said principles specific adaptations to impose demands and… Man, 10K to a half-marathon distance is a lot of running. And usually the obstacles themselves, at least, in these scenarios are not that strength dependent, not that technical.

They can be hard, but it’s something that ideally you would train. It’d be different than say like a Ninja Warrior type thing where they can be incredibly technical, like super grip dependent, super high degree of accuracy needed for these long land and stick jumps and stuff like that so you don’t fall off of items.

Obstacle course racing is just a grind, just got to keep grinding, and the bulk of it is running and so you really need to do more running. There’s just a certain amount of efficiency that comes about from doing that particular activity. If we really wanted to get good at rowing and setting the world on fire with the Indoor Concept2 rowing competitions, you have to do some amount of rowing.

You could be a tall, strong person with good general cardiovascular conditioning, say, from doing running or doing swimming or something like that. You could probably post a pretty good score for a beginner, but then if you want to start climbing the ranks and doing better, you just have to do more specific training.

And on that, there’s just so many different ways to slice and dice that stuff. That’s where finding either a group or an online coach that can assess where you are and be able to make a recommendation on volume and intensity, distances. There’s certainly going to be a need for tempo work. There’s going to be a need for sprint work. You’ll still in the background need to continue doing your strength and conditioning, your mobility work, so that you just function well and so that you’ve got that low gear for being able to do the more strength oriented activities.

But you’re just going to have to run more. There’s just no two ways around it.

Nicki: I think there are quite a few obstacle course race, like Spartan training groups-

Robb: Absolutely.

Nicki: … If you live in an area that’s got a decent population, I think. And then you’re with other people that have done them before that have… Maybe there’s a coach that can help progress you through your goal for your specific distance that you’re shooting for.

Robb: The Orangetheory stuff is nice because you show up, somebody else coaches you through the workout-

Nicki: In an hour, you’re done

Robb: … In an hour, you’re done, you’re in, you’re out. You usually get some warmup and some cool down. It’s awesome as far as that goes.

But if you want to specifically get better, you’re going to have to make the training more specific. The generalist approach, whether it’s CrossFit or Orangetheory or what have you, it will generally leave you pretty prepared to do something like this. But you just got to… Especially the running part is so critical, you’re just going to have to log more time on that.

Nicki: What are your thoughts on his nutrition?

Robb: If that’s fueling him, that seems fine.

Nicki: He doesn’t really say what his height and weight are.

Robb: Weight and all that.

Nicki: Yeah.

Robb: So it’s hard to tell if he’s getting adequate recovery on that.

Nicki: And how he’s feeling after training on this protocol.

Robb: Another plug for the Train with Morpheus platform. It’ll give you your readiness score each day. You can wear it during your training, log your volume and intensity. That will get factored into the overall algorithm.

I’ve just found that thing indispensable in better tracking and mapping what my training is mainly for jujitsu, but just generally for trying to stay in decent shape. And what I found is that I was doing too much low intensity stuff that I actually needed to step up a little bit more higher intensity here and there.

Nicki: It’s also great for the type of personality that’s always wanting to push, push, go hard, go hard. It does your heart rate variability. It just asks you how your sleep was and how you feel, muscle soreness, et cetera.

And it might say, “Today, you need to go easy.”

And, I mean, it can’t make you go easy. You could still train really, really hard. But I think for some folks that are just always want to put the car in gear-

Robb: Sweat angel or nothing. Yeah.

Nicki: … Yeah. It’s good. Your body does need recovery days. Everybody knows that. But sometimes seeing that number and being like, okay. Today I’m not going to go so hard or I’m going to stay within my bounds here.

Robb: There’s so many people like that and I think I was that person for a long time and broke myself to such a degree that then I was maybe a little bit geriatric in my approach after that. And it was actually pretty clear that I needed some. And I mean we’re talking about for my weekly training volume, 15 to 20 minutes total, in a conditioning zone where my heart rate is significantly higher. It punctuated points, so that’s spread out across the whole week.

And then I have about 180 to 200 minutes a week that I try to accumulate in that zone two level. It’s a lot of time, a lot of volume on that, but I feel really good. Things are going pretty well, but it’s interesting. I was just afraid of doing any amount of intensity and overload, but I definitely needed some. And as I’ve done it, my fitness has improved even though I’m not dead yet and I’m still getting older. So, yeah.

Nicki: All right, Justin, I hope that helps, but definitely look into… If this is your jam, you really want to do obstacle course racing, find a group of folks that are doing that and jump in with them. There’s probably multiple different groups depending on where you live.

Robb: For sure.

Nicki: Okay, our next question this week is on salt intake. Darren writes, “Hi, Robb and Nicki. I’m listening to you from Tasmania, Australia. I recently read The Salt Fix and I’m hearing a lot about sodium intake. I’ve been having a lot more salt recently and I’ve noticed a dramatic improvement in all health parameters.

Due to mainstream info, I’m struggling to accept that I should be taking extra salt. I eat a low-carb, whole food diet. I run a busy cafe. I do some cardio, some weight training. Quite active. I’m very lean. 52 years old, and my blood pressure is always around a hundred over 70.

My question is, are there any other long-term problems with too much salt other than high blood pressure? Thanks for keeping it real.”

Robb: It’s interesting when you look at the literature on this, one would believe that everything from cancer to loose morals to reading issues emerge from-

Nicki: Dyslexia?

Robb: … Dyslexia. Too much sodium. And it’s really hard to parse this stuff out because most folks probably do get too much sodium because they’re getting a bunch of refined food. And so, within the refined food, they’re getting a lot of sodium and no potassium. And I think that the bigger issue is the sodium/potassium ratio.

And without a doubt, from an ancestral health, like a hunter/gatherer perspective, we’re probably tuned to get far, far more potassium than what we were getting generally. That said, in many people have made the case that because salt sodium is relatively rare in nature, that we shouldn’t get more even on say a minimally processed like paleo type diet.

I don’t necessarily agree with that. I think that there’s… Interestingly though, I think there’s a really self-limiting aspect to that. There are some examples of the Hadza doing persistence hunts where these guys will run some sort of animal down over the course of eight hours and ultimately… Oh no.

Nicki: You clicked accept.

Robb: … Yeah, I clicked accept. Hopefully all this stuff is still working. I had a phone call go through to my computer. I got a new computer and usually I disable all that stuff and I haven’t figured that out.

Nicki: And it said spam, and so he clicked… I was watching him drive his mouse over the… There’s accept or decline, and he clicked accept.

Robb: Went to accept. Yeah.

Nicki: All right, back to the Hudza.

Robb: Okay. So, the Hudza. They’ll run these animal, kind of a deer type animal, down. A spring buck, something like that. Ultimately get it with an arrow, but the bulk of the hunt is this guy just running it down. And these spring bucks are extremely fast, but they’re good at sprints. So these guys will chase it, scare it from one spot to another, to another in the heat of the day, and just go after them.

And then oftentimes after the hunt, they don’t do much of anything for a week and they really rest and recover. And there’s cultural reasons for it, but I think there’s also physiological reasons. And I think one of the physiological reasons is that they do replete the sodium, but it’s slow because of the nature of the environment that they live in, that is relatively low in sodium.

We tend to, if you’re active, most people are probably more active than what their Paleolithic ancestors were, like getting out and doing Zone Two cardio every day and lifting some weights and going to CrossFit and doing jujitsu. It’s arguable that we end up having an activity level that’s higher than ancestral levels.

Nicki: Because we don’t have the leisure time that hunter-gatherers had.

Robb: Yeah. And hunter-gatherers… And it’s not just busyness. I’m talking about actual physical activity. And part of that necessitates a fueling that is different than what ancestral norms would’ve been, probably in total amount of calories and also with regards, I think, to sodium, particularly if you’re really high motor athlete, hot, humid environment. Tasmania I hear is fairly hot and humid and all that type of stuff. So those are all going to dramatically increase your individual needs for sodium.

So if we’re eating a minimally processed whole food diet, we’re doing really well in not overeating, not having a tendency to eat hyper palatable foods, and we’re going to end up getting decent micronutrients including potassium. And you almost certainly are going to benefit from supplemental sodium in that regard. And thinking back, I remember like Loren Cordain, a very brilliant guy and was right about many things and wrong about some things. He really hung his hat on the notion that modern humans, regardless of circumstance, should be consuming exceptionally low levels of sodium.

And I remember a ton of athletes, the paleo diet was pretty popular within the TrainingPeaks community, Joel Friel, who was also a fan of the paleo diet. But he also, in contrary to Loren’s recommendations, recommended pretty high sodium intakes for his athletes.

Even within mainstream medical circles, it’s understood that high motor athletes, heat, humidity, those sorts of things, their recommendation is seven to 10 grams of sodium per day. And again, if you want to only train once a week, then you could rely on the sodium that we just get background from our food. But if you’re going to train multiple times per week, to say nothing of potentially doing multiple sessions per day, and it’s hot and it’s humid and you need to get your work done, or if you’re a firefighter or a police officer or military or what we would call the industrial athlete, like a roofer-

Nicki: And you’re working in hot attics doing HVAC installation or repair.

Robb: … Yeah, you will need more sodium.

There’s caveats there, and this is one of the things that I struggle with. The more metabolically healthy an individual is, probably the more sodium that they need just as a baseline. Only 7% of the population is considered metabolically healthy, so that is a thing. But even someone who isn’t metabolically healthy and they’re working as a roofer or an HVAC person… And some of this HVAC stuff and roofers, the surface of these roofs can be like 160 degrees. It’s crazy how hot it is. And then the reflected heat and everything. They’re going to lose a bunch of water, they’re going to lose a bunch of sodium, and they’re going to need to replete that even if they’re insulin resistant and they’re tending to retain more sodium and water than what they need.

In some ways they’re arriving bloated like a tick to the event, if you’re metabolically broken because you’re just retaining sodium and water. But those are also the people who tend to pass out from low blood pressure because they get this massive fluid shift. So man, there’s just…

Darren, there’s a lot of moving parts to it, and I feel you on the… It’s conspicuous being involved with LMNT and damn near every piece of medical advice that one can consider is contrary to what our base message is. But we’re not telling people to just willy-nilly consume sodium ad nauseum. There’s parameters to it. We even released a sodium calculator and maybe we’ll remember to put that in the show notes too, and that helps you to zero in on potentially how much sodium you’re going to need in a given day.

But I think you’re okay. You got to monitor your own response to things. I remember when I was very sick and I was vegan and eating a ton of carbs and wasting away, I had a consistent 140 over 80, 140 over 90 blood pressure. And since I went low-carb and even while using LMNT, and sometimes I’ll get five to seven grams of sodium per day from all sources, olives and all that type of stuff, I’m like a 110 over 65 most of the time.

So that is me, though. That doesn’t necessarily apply to everybody. This is where we do need to do some tinkering and monitoring.

Nicki: And equals one.

Robb: One and equals one. My refrain has always been, how do you look? Do you feel? How do you perform? And then use some biomarkers of health and performance, or health and longevity really. And that’s where just a blood pressure cuff and managing how you respond to a meal or a supplement, whether it’s LMNT or something like that, or your own home brew or whatever, to just keep a track on that stuff.

Nicki: Mm-hmm. The medical, I think it’s hard for… As we’ve talked many times on this podcast, is just so much of our dietary recommendations have been wrong, so it’s really, really hard for folks to know when you read something like the Salt Fix and that’s completely at odds with kind of the mainstream medical recommendations.

So it’s all good stuff and it’s why we are here and why people just… You got to just keep reading and keep asking questions and keep digging.

Robb: Yep.

Nicki: This is kind of a short episode, folks, and mainly because it’s all we could get to this week.

Robb: We’ve been running and gunning, yep.

Nicki: But any final thoughts on your end, hubs?

Robb: Nope.

Nicki: Nope?

Robb: No.

Nicki: You’re good?

Robb: I’m looking at some sort of a kissing bug crawling through the window of my office. Fortunately, the ones in Montana are not like the Texas ones, so they don’t carry Chagas disease, so I just need to scoot them outside and not get bit by them. But, yeah.

Nicki: All right folks, thank you for listening to another episode of the Healthy Rebellion Radio. If you do have a question for us to answer on the show, you could submit that at robbwolf.com on the contact page, and then there is a dropdown menu where you can select submit a question for the podcast.

We’d appreciate that.

Please check out our show sponsor LMNT for all of your electrolyte needs. You can do that at drinklmnt.com/robb. That’s drinklmnt.com/robb and we wish you all a happy weekend. We’ll see you next time.

Robb: Bye, everybody.

Where you can find us:

Submit questions for the podcast: https://robbwolf.com/contact/submit-a-question-for-the-podcast/

Don’t forget, Wired to Eat is now available!

Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, iBooks

Please Subscribe and Review: Apple Podcasts | RSS

Submit your questions for the podcast here

News Topic:

What It Will Really Take to Restore Trust in the CDC

Paul Offit (72) is not getting a booster and neither should any healthy person who had COVID

The most important lesson of the 1918 influenza pandemic: Tell the damn truth

Show Notes:

How to Sleep Like Your Life Depends On it! 

Questions: 

What to prioritize?

Lacy writes:

Hi Robb and Nicki! I 1st want to thank you for all that you do, you are truly changing the world! I am a mom of 3 kids, ages 4, 3 and 5 months and I work full time. As you can imagine, I have a lot on my plate but am trying my hardest to be as healthy as possible: I do the best that I can with sleep (as best one can do with young children), usually infrared light, attempt to eat healthy/get sufficient protein, workout, etc. but feel like I am spinning my wheels getting nowhere. Each pregnancy has added pounds and with each additional child I find less and less time to get quality workouts in. I guess my question is, as parents who have “been there” what would you recommend prioritizing? I am currently at my heaviest weight but am breastfeeding (VERY successfully partly due to LMNT) and find that my milk supply suffers everytime I try to lose weight and I’m sure my hormones are absolutely jacked up due to being pregnant and/or breastfeeding for the past 5 years (&counting). Should i focus on protein? Sleep? Hormones?What’s a mom to do?! Thanks for the insight.

Masking

Mari writes:

Hi, long time listener here. Thanks for keeping on. Not a health related question-

I’m going to be attending massage school in CA in January. I’ve been living in Idaho and haven’t been paying attention to much but I heard on one of your recent podcasts that certain schools in CA are implementing ridiculous bullshit again. I called the massage school to confirm- they told me they will be following CDC guidelines (mask mandates if the CDC recommends). Is this still….legal? If I say no can they kick me out?

I would go elsewhere but other circumstances make this particular location and school the best option. Thanks for any advice if there’s any to give. – Mari

DEXA scan reliability

Cassie writes:

Robb & Nicki,

I hope your move is going well for your family!

First off I wanted to thank you both for having a significant impact on my health and wellness. I started training bjj over 10 years ago (when I still had braces) and it wasn’t until our gym started following you and the Paleo lifestyle that all the wounds in my mouth started magically healing and I could finally sleep through the night. I am amazed by how undereducated our society is about the importance of the food (and poison) we put into our bodies. I really appreciate the effort you two put forth to make better humans.

I recently started getting into podcasts so I apologize if you’ve already covered this: How reliable are DEXA scans? I just got one done and the results were shocking to say the least. I am a 34y/o female, 5’2, never had a child, I weighed in at 112 lbs, wear size 0 jeans and this thing marked me at 32% body fat. According to their chart, that puts me in the category of obese. Is this exactly what they mean by skinny fat? Like I’m just fat and bones, no muscle? *Mind blown emoji*

I will admit, in the past year I haven’t been training. I am active duty military, got promoted just about 12 months ago, and I feel like I have no time for myself in my life anymore. Do I cook, sleep, do laundry or finish my homework in my limited spare time? I would say, if anything, that I am definitely calorie restricted unintentionally, which worries me about training if I barely have time to eat as it is. I guess the other part of my question is how do I start over? Eating sufficiently? Training? Destressing? I have 4 more years before I retire, but until then I need to find small successes so that I don’t wreck my body in the meantime.

Thank you again! You’re my favorite podcast every week.

P.S. Are there any plans for flavored LMNT without sweeteners? I don’t consume added sweeteners during my anti-inflammatory elimination diet resets so I can only have raw. Now my bf forever refers to LMNT as “sweat water.”

Sponsor:

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Proper hydration is more than just drinking water. You need electrolytes too! Check out The Healthy Rebellion Radio sponsor LMNT for grab-and-go electrolyte packets to keep you at your peak! They give you all the electrolytes want, none of the stuff you don’t. Click here to get your LMNT electrolytes

Transcript:

Transcript coming soon…

Where you can find us:

Submit questions for the podcast: https://robbwolf.com/contact/submit-a-question-for-the-podcast/

Don’t forget, Wired to Eat is now available!

Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, iBooks

Please Subscribe and Review: Apple Podcasts | RSS

Submit your questions for the podcast here

News Topic:

CDC: New COVID-19 Hospitalizations Increase Nearly 16%

Vinay Prasad: Do not report COVID cases to schools & do not test yourself if you feel ill

Show Notes:

Early and late long-term effects of vasectomy on serum testosterone, dihydrotestosterone, luteinizing hormone and follicle-stimulating hormone levels

Questions: 

30 Day Reset – Loss of Appetite

Julie writes:

Some personal info:

I’m a 40 year old female. 5’3.” BMR is 1,542 (based on a calculator I found using the google machine). 199 pounds.

On September 1, I started the 30 Day Reset. During July and August, I was more conscious about what I was eating and lost 18 pounds. While doing that, I read Wired to Eat and decided to use September for the 30 Day Reset. Today is September 4, so this is just my 4th day on the reset.

Yesterday morning I woke up hungry (which is abnormal for me), but I waited about two hours before I ate breakfast because that’s what I’m used to. After getting my day started, I wasn’t feeling hungry anymore so it wasn’t a big deal to wait to eat breakfast. I typically wake up, I lift for about 30 minutes, some days I take a walk for 1-2 miles, then shower and eat breakfast. I don’t normally feel hungry until a couple hours after waking up.

Aside from waking up hungry, yesterday and today I have had almost no appetite. Because I lift, I feel like I should be getting a good amount of protein in my diet. Typically I would be eating 25-35g of protein per meal. I had a packet of salmon and some green beans for lunch today, and I basically forced myself to finish so I could get the protein I feel like my body needs. While I’m not trying to make any hardcore gains during the 30 Day Reset, I don’t want to lose any muscle mass while I go through this. It just seems like yesterday and today, after I take a few bites of my meal, I’m no longer hungry.

So, my questions: Is this loss of appetite normal or should I be concerned that I’m not eating enough? For the past three days, I’ve been eating 850 – 1,100 calories. Should I eat more even if I have to force myself because I’m not hungry?

Thank you!

DIM Supplement Causing Sudden Decrease in HDL

Susan writes: 

Hi Robb and Nicki,

Longtime listener… maybe since 2009 ~~ Paleo Solution w’ Robb and Greg. Good stuff.

As a spry 20 year old in about 2000, I started the Atkin’s diet and transitioned to clean eating around 2008. My total cholesterol has always been ~200 and split 50/50 – HDL/ LDL. I’ve had it tested dozens of times over the years.

I’ve been the same weight since my teen years immediately went back to that weight post pregnancy.

My body fat by hydrostatic testing has ranged from 17% – 21% throughout my adult life, with it being more near 17% in my later adult life (more self control about calories I think).

I lift weights with intensity 6-7 days per week and keep my calories between 1600-1900 per day.

Daily Supplements:

Magnesium

Vitamin D

Cheap little multi

Fish Oil

DIM

I am now 44.

I just got my fasting bloodwork done, and my HDL has dropped from 100-110 to 77.

My LDL has gone from 100 to 149.

Two things have changed in my lifestyle:

1. The addition of the DIM supplement last summer. Before taking DIM, I had horrible perimenopause symptoms. I was waking up in the middle of the night so drenched in sweat that I would need to take a shower. If I wasn’t drenched, I was nervous, stressing, mind-spinning and not sleeping. 100% of my symptoms are gone since starting 300mg of DIM before bed.

2. Simply in an effort to keep calories under control, I’ve entirely cut nuts out of my diet (I used to eat tons), and I eat a lot less red meat than I used to. I also have started to sometimes eat fake foods, like protein bars, which I never would have previously touched.

I’ve been feeling pretty good, crushing it at the gym, staying lean and mentally pretty clear. So, I was excited to get my bloodwork back. Low-and-behold my LDL is up and HDL is way down. It hasn’t been below 100 in the last 20 years. So, I consider this a sudden drop.

Also, my kidney function is looking pretty mediocre. eGFR = 81 (sodium and potassium are off too)

In any case, my family tends to drop dead like flies at a pretty early age due to cardiovascular disease (skinny little Irish smokers). So, this sudden fluctuation in cholesterol is pretty scary to me.

Dr. Google says that taking progestins may cause HDL to drop.

Dr. Google also says that DIM causes an increase in progesterone.

My question is….

Do you theorize a tie between the DIM supplement and my sudden drop in precious HDL?

As a very active person with a 90% clean diet, should I care?

The other 10% is protein bars and Chardonnay.

There is very little to be said about the long term affects of DIM out there on the interwebs. So, I’m interested to hear your thoughts on it.

Thanks!

Susan

Vasectomy Research

Trevor writes: 

Hello, my question harkens back to THRR episode 063. A question was asked about getting a vasectomy. Robb, you referenced someone you know who found research that indicated negative hormonal consequences (less testosterone) following vasectomy. I find myself in the same situation now as a 44 year old over-fat dude considering vasectomy for birth control. My wife has used hormonal birth control methods during our marriage. Now her functional medicine Doctor is encouraging her to cease her hormonal intervention to work on some health concerns. Before I run my business into a scalpel, I’d like to know the potential hormonal risks I’m facing.

I’ve done my amateur keyword searches on jama.org and pubmed, but I can’t seem to find the research you mentioned in that episode. The conventional health articles say lower testosterone is not a risk. Can you help me find the research you mentioned? Or some tips on “how to fish” and do better research on my own?

Thanks for all you two do!

Trevor

Sponsor:

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Proper hydration is more than just drinking water. You need electrolytes too! Check out The Healthy Rebellion Radio sponsor LMNT for grab-and-go electrolyte packets to keep you at your peak! They give you all the electrolytes want, none of the stuff you don’t. Click here to get your LMNT electrolytes

Transcript:

Coming soon…

Where you can find us:

Submit questions for the podcast: https://robbwolf.com/contact/submit-a-question-for-the-podcast/

Don’t forget, Wired to Eat is now available!

Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, iBooks

Please Subscribe and Review: Apple Podcasts | RSS

Submit your questions for the podcast here

News Topic:

Pots and COVID

Show Notes:

Web3 Working Group – DarkHorse Podcast

Dr. Aseem Malhotra – Joe Rogan Experience

Pharma: Not Their First Rodeo – Umberto Meduri & Paul Marik on DarkHorse

Effect of alirocumab and evolocumab on all-cause mortality and major cardiovascular events: A meta-analysis focusing on the number needed to treat

Questions: 

Death by lab work

Olivia writes:

Hey Robb and Nicki! Long time listener and strong endorser of the work y’all are doing. I wish more people and healthcare providers were on the same page, or hell even in the same book as this community! ANYWAY….I recently got my labs done and I have some concerns on the results I received. For context: I am a 30 y/o female, no kids, work out 3-4 x week (mostly weight training and average 8-10K steps per day) I work as a nurse, tend to focus my meals around 30g or more of protein (red meat, chicken, dairy, eggs, I eat it all), and drink plenty of water and LMNT :), avoid seed oils and other ultra processed garbage. I went through some hormone issues for 5-7 years (i.e very infrequent cycle due to too much exercising and under fueling). Since then, I have become so much more educated and I have recovered my cycle *naturally*; gaining probably 30-40 ish pounds from my low; currently sitting at 155 5’6. I feel great, but these lab results got me shook! Any and all advice welcome.

Total Cholesterol- 282

Triglycerides- 43

Non HDL- 169

HDL- 113

ApoA to ApoB- 0.41

ApoB- 113

Liver enzymes AST and ALT- slightly elevated

Total T3 – 68 all other thyroid values “normal”

Fasting BGL- 95

A1C- 5.0

Am I destined for an early death related to heart disease?? I’ve listened to Huberman on blood glucose control and will implement his ideas to lower my fasting number, but it’s hard to eat my last meal 2-3 hours before bed on days I work since I get home at 8. I hope this isn’t too long of question, feel free to cut out anything you’d rather not discuss and just give general guidelines. THANK YOU!!!

Stay salty,

Olivia

ApoB confusion

Marit writes:

Hi Robb and Nicki,

I’ve been listening to your podcast and following your work for many years and I’ve thrown some similar hard questions at you, which you were kind enough to try to answer (thanks!). I’m so frustrated that I can’t understand statistics enough to draw my own conclusion based on the literature on ApoB and statins. I listened to a Peter Attia’s podcast and he said (I heard it twice to confirm) that if ApoB were low in the population he “thinks” AS CVD would be dramatically reduced. His pushes alot for statin use. On the flip side, reading the breakdown of studies on statins on Chris Kresser’s website, I just can’t understand why Peter Attia takes this stance. It doesn’t add up! My gut feeling is risk for any chronic disease is never calculated on just one lab value (that’s just logical). but even if it was, why does Attia use statins when they don’t seem to reduce deaths, strokes or heart attacks by very much, in people without CVD? Don’t statins obliterate ApoB?

You’re the absolute best if you answer this question for me. I’d be forever greatful!

Thanks guys for all the work you do. It’s appreciated!

Cholesterol and Diet

Jay writes:

Hi Robb and Nicki,

One of your original six listeners here. (Can’t be wrong!) Thanks for all the good work.

Recent bloodwork revealed high cholesterol and LDL numbers (216 and 123, respectively), as well as non-HDL cholesterol (137) and apolipoprotein B (94). (HDL is 79 and triglycerides are 50.) For what it’s worth, my glucose is in the normal range, though slightly high considering my otherwise overall health, activity level, and diet.

My functional med practitioner has suggested the “Cardiometabolic Food Plan.” (for reference: https://www.allinahealth.org/-/media/allina-health/files/business-units/penny-george-institute-of-health-and-healing/2_ifm_cardiometabolicfoodplan_comprehensiveguide.pdf)

I’m reticent, considering the plan’s emphasis on soy protein, legumes generally, grains, and limiting saturated fat. I could modify it to eliminate those things, but then I’m back to basically what I do already. 

Quick background: male, 38, active (commute on a bike, strength train, chase kids), small business owner with two young kids (i.e., non-zero amount of stress, less-than-perfect sleep). I have a pretty good gluten intolerance (which is how I found your work right around when you published The Paleo Solution — thanks again!) and generally follow a paleo-primal-ish template, with some full-fat dairy and rice/corn, occasionally, mostly to coexist with my family without being a *complete* pain in the ass.

So: Would those lab numbers concern you? What do you think about the Cardiometabolic Food Plan, specifically? And generally, what would you suggest for diet or any other interventions to right the ship?

Thanks tons and keep up the good work!

Sponsor:

The Healthy Rebellion Radio is sponsored by our electrolyte company, LMNT.
Proper hydration is more than just drinking water. You need electrolytes too! Check out The Healthy Rebellion Radio sponsor LMNT for grab-and-go electrolyte packets to keep you at your peak! They give you all the electrolytes want, none of the stuff you don’t. Click here to get your LMNT electrolytes

Transcript:

Click for Transcript PDF

Nicki: It’s time to make your health an act of rebellion. We’re tackling personalized nutrition, metabolic flexibility, resilient aging, and answering your diet and lifestyle questions. This is the only show with the bold aim to help 1 million people liberate themselves from the sick care system. You’re listening to the Healthy Rebellion Radio. The contents of this show are for entertainment and educational purposes only. Nothing in this podcast should be considered medical advice. Please consult your licensed and credentialed functional medicine practitioner before embarking on any health, dietary or fitness change. Warning, when Robb gets passionate, he’s been known to use the occasional expletive. If foul language is not your thing, if it gets your britches in a bunch, well, there’s always Disney Plus.

Robb: Welcome back, friends, neighbors, loved ones.

Nicki: Hello, this is episode 164 of the Healthy Rebellion Radio. How’s it going, hubs?

Robb: Good.

Nicki: Good. I’m good too. I just have this persistent stitch in my left peck, anterior delt situation from Jujitsu I think

Robb: I was trying to do some unlicensed ART on you, and Nicki was howling like she was being put to the question.

Nicki: I do need some ART. I do need some ART. And your version that you provide was excruciating.

Robb: I’m gentle with you.

Nicki: No, you’re not. No, you’re not. Let’s see here. Where are we at? As you all know, in the middle of a move, this episode will go up and then we’ll probably have about two weeks where we don’t have one, so apologies for that. But just in the middle of getting internet set up and all the things.

Robb: Regretting all of her life’s decisions.

Nicki: There’ll be a little bit of a pause. But anyway, all that said, this episode is going to be a little bit blood work heavy because we’ve had several questions pertaining to blood work and labs, and so we’re just going to tackle those three together. But before we jump into that, I just wanted to share an episode that I’m listening to currently. I’m about halfway done. It’s a two and a half hour episode from Brett Weinstein, the Dark Horse Podcast. Super interesting. He has a couple on some friends of his that he’s known for a long time who are part of something called the Web3 Working Group, and I just feel like they’re doing a great job of explaining blockchain, Web3, many of the things that it solves for in a way that most people, like everyday people can understand.

If folks are really nerdy and into blockchain technology, nothing that they discuss will be overly earth shattering. But they do a great job of just breaking it down for the average person, and Brett really kind of does his nerd to English translation for some of these concepts. So one thing that I think a lot of people struggle with is when they hear crypto and they hear blockchain, they instantly think crypto and Bitcoin, whereas there’s lots of use cases for the blockchain that has nothing to do with cryptocurrency.

Robb: There’s so many different situations that we could imagine a untamperable ledger that helps to ensure authenticity. And it’s worth noting that the original blockchain was developed when some folks observed that there had been fraud in some biology papers.

Nicki: Are you listening to this episode too?

Robb: I am too.

Nicki: Oh, good job, hubs. We’ve had so many different errands to run. Often when we go to Jujitsu, we are in the same vehicle and we listen to the same thing. But we’ve been kind of each in our own-

Robb: World while driving.

Nicki: … world while driving. So I mentioned that I was listening and he-

Robb: So yeah. So how many of the situations say involving Covid could we have addressed? And really some sort of methodology like this could be applied to all of pharmaceutical development, all of vaccine development such that there is legit fucking transparency. And, “Oh, you started with 2000 people and whittled it down to 600 and you jettisoned 1400 people?” That all gets documented in there. None of that should be round filed. All of that should be transparent, particularly if any type of pharmaceutical development is being publicly funded. That should be absolutely transparent and it should be untamperable. And anybody who has pushback against that, they better have a good god-damn explanation for it. And that is just one of many use cases. Foodborne illness tracking is another use case. There’s so many.

Nicki: Just also just verifying the authenticity of somebody’s posts, like they talk about that image that went around of the Pentagon being bombed that had been AI generated. But before it became known that it was a fake, it impacted the markets significantly. So going forward, how can we trust that the things that we’re seeing are actually real and haven’t been manipulated anyway? It’s a great conversation and it’s I think very, very accessible. I’ll post a link to that in the show notes. And it’s just cool because there’s a lot of people doing a lot of great work in the background to help make this decentralized future, get us away from these big centralized players, this big tech world that we’re in, and hopefully guide us into this next phase which ideally is more decentralized and more trustless. We don’t have to trust a company to do what’s in our best interest. It just is because the protocol and the code underlying the thing makes it so. Anyway, again, I’m only halfway through. I don’t know. How far along are you, babe?

Robb: Maybe 40 minutes, 45 minutes.

Nicki: 40 minutes?

Robb: Yeah. Yeah.

Nicki: Anyway, I’ll post that in the show notes. And if you’re at all interested in that or maybe you’re like, “I have no idea about blockchain or any of this stuff,” but if you’re even the littlest bit curious, definitely give that a listen. Okay. News topic. What do you have for us?

Robb: I’ll be brief on the news topic because you snuck in another news topic. But it’s more of a newsy piece on POTS, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome and Covid. This is something that I’ve got to say on the back end of our LMNT team discussions, we’ve seen just massive adoption of folks using LMNT and just recognizing that this condition, POTS, which is an autoimmune condition, historically it’s been more in children than in adults, but Covid has kind of shuffled that around a little bit. But it’s a condition where you go from seated to standing and you can lose blood pressure such that you pass out and you could bonk your head, you could die. All kinds of bad consequences come from it. Within the POTS community, it’s understood that adequate sodium intake is really critical to properly manage the condition.

Within our paleo keto low-carb space, I think it’s pretty obvious that anything that has an autoimmune piece to it, we are probably uniquely positioned to provide some valuable insight there: gut health, vitamin D, photo period, immunogenic foods, on and on and on. But the news piece goes out of its way to make the case that both COVID, the viral exposure and the vaccine can produce this situation although they say that the vaccine is far, far, far less. And if you really dig in and look at the way that they’re categorizing that, I don’t know that it’s exactly true, it doesn’t really matter, either way it’s affecting millions and millions of people. And I think lots and lots of people are walking around with some of this kind of long haul feel and just feeling like garbage in some of this hypovolemic response from seated to standing while they’re driving. Different things like that. And although addressing the longer ranging autoimmune conditions may be a little bit more challenging, simply addressing electrolytes will absolutely deal with symptomatology and at least keep you from passing out.

Nicki: Cool. So that will be also linked to in the show notes so folks can check that out in further detail. The Healthy Rebellion Radio is sponsored by our Salty AF electrolyte company, LMNT. Summer temps are high, especially if you happen to live in Texas as many of our friends do. But even if you aren’t in the south, if you’re hiking or working in the summer heat, if it’s humid where you are, make sure you’re staying salty and getting the electrolytes you need. Same goes for if you eat a low carb or ketogenic diet, if you’re an athlete, if you have muscle cramps, if you’re a breastfeeding mom, if you have POTS like what Robb was just talking about, or even if you’re just feeling a little tired and need a natural energy boost without the caffeine, element is a game changer. And if you buy three boxes, you get the fourth box free at drinklmnt.com/robb. That’s drink L-M-N-T .com/ R-O-B-B. Okay. We have three questions today. As I mentioned up front, they’re all blood work lab work related. This first one is from Olivia, and her title is Death by Lab Work, which-

Robb: We may adopt as a podcast.

Nicki: … I really like that podcast title. “Hey, Robb and Nicki, longtime listener, and strong endorser of the work y’all are doing. I wish more people and healthcare providers we’re on the same page or hell, even in the same book as this community. Anyway, I recently got my labs done and I have some concerns on the results I received. For context, I’m a 30-year-old female, no kids. I work out three to four times a week, mostly weight training, and I average eight to 10,000 steps per day. I work as a nurse, tend to focus my meals around 30 grams or more of protein, red meat, chicken, dairy, eggs. I eat it all and drink plenty of water and LMNT. I avoid seed oils and other ultra processed garbage.

I went through some hormone issues for five to seven years, i.e. a very infrequent cycle due to too much exercising and under fueling. Since then, I’ve become so much more educated and I have recovered my cycle naturally, gaining probably 30 to 40 ish pounds from my low. I’m currently sitting at 155 pounds at five foot six. I feel great, but these lab results got me shook. Any and all advice welcome.” So her total cholesterol is 282, triglycerides of 43, non HDL 169, HDL 113, apo A to apo B, 0.41. Apo B, 113. Liver enzymes, AST and ALT slightly elevated. Total T3, 68, and all other thyroid values are normal. Fasting blood glucose 95, A1C 5.0. And she asks, “Am I destined for an early death related to heart disease? I’ve listened to Huberman on blood glucose control and will implement his ideas to lower my fasting number. But it’s hard to eat my last meal two to three hours before bed on days I work since I get home at 8:00 PM. I hope this isn’t too long of a question. Thank you so much. Stay salty, Olivia.”

Robb: Man, there’s a lot to unpack with this and because all three questions are kind of apo B cholesterol related, I may end up being a little bit redundant on this. And the other questions actually get into asking about statins and stuff like that. So I’ll try to maybe stage this stuff out. Olivia, from what I’m looking at here, the apo B is maybe a little higher than what we would want. It’s higher than what Peter Attia would want. There’s so many moving parts with this stuff. And I think I’ve said this before, and maybe this is just like the classic Dunning Krueger admission on my part. I feel like 15 or 20 years ago, I had the cholesterol heart disease thing figured out, which was so long as you keep insulin low, then everything is good. And then it looks like it’s a little more complex than that.

It’s interesting. Folks like Peter, who I think is quite smart on this, and he’s very, very smart, great at analysis, and he also has a really vested interest in getting this right because he doesn’t want to die. He wants to live as long and effectively as possible. And so I put some pretty good truck in that. I think that we all want this. But I think Peter, I had a conversation with him a few days ago about some of this stuff, and he’s highly motivated on this, possibly to the point of neurosis. And I think that he would fully admit that. He will also admit, because this is what the literature really tells us, that apo B or the LDL portion mainly of what we’re talking about in this potential atherosclerotic story and heart disease story, it’s necessary for cardiovascular disease, but not the whole piece.

And this gets kind of weird because at the margins, at the edges of the cholesterol apo B story, we see some things that I think in some ways do kind of point a finger in a particular direction. One is that people with a type of inherited trait that results in very, very low cholesterol and lipoproteins, these people effectively get no cardiovascular disease. They smoke, they drink, they can do damn near whatever they want to do, and they die from something. And one of some things that they die from not infrequently is sepsis. So the trade-off with very low lipoproteins is that if you have a septic event, if you end up with a nicked bowel or a surgery that goes weird or something like that, the likelihood of you dying because the lipoproteins have a molecule on them that help to clear lipopolysaccharide, and lipopolysaccharide is this incredibly inflammatory agent that’s found in the cell membranes of gram-negative bacteria, that shit will kill you.

So there’s trade-off there. These people appear to punt on developing cardiovascular disease potentially because their lipoproteins are so incredibly low, but it also ends up manifesting in other disease susceptibilities. And sometimes you see some signal around elevated cancer rates and some things like that. So that’s a piece of this thing. Another piece to the story is the endothelial damage model, which Malcolm Kendrick has really championed. And there’s some interesting pieces to that.

So he points out that children who typically have very, very low lipoproteins and should see virtually no atherosclerotic plaquing or disease development, although that’s starting to change because kids are starting to develop worse and worse lipoprotein profiles earlier and earlier. But he has pointed out that children with really low lipoproteins, really low apo B end up dying from effectively occlusive cardiovascular events because they are sickle cell anemia carriers genetically, and they end up with the sickle cell anemia phenotype, which is these red blood cells that are oddly shaped. It buys you some buffer against bloodborne parasites like malaria. But the downside is that because of the odd shape of these red blood cells, they don’t move through the tiny little vascular beds the way that they should. And they’re in fact pointy and kind of jagged, and they end up damaging the vascular endothelium. And these children can die at age 10, 12. And putting them on statins or other lipid lowering drugs doesn’t change that. There is so much vascular endothelial damage occurring that they end up succumbing to the disease from basically cardiovascular disease.

And then the other side of the spectrum is familial hypercholesterolemia, which shows people who phenotypically end up having very, very high lipoprotein and cholesterol levels, they end up with really early, pretty severe atherosclerotic plaquing and they usually end up having a pretty rough go of living into their thirties. It’s fairly clear that lipid lowering drugs end up extending the lifespan of people in these scenarios, but it’s a lot of moving parts. And again, I know we have some other questions, and so I’m thinking about stuff that I’ll probably say in some of these other things. You could look at some lipid lowering approaches. You could look at a really thorough investigation into your thyroid.

Although that T3 looks okay, within the Bernstein diabetes community, they really go after elevated lipoproteins, elevated cholesterol as a thyroid dysregulation issue. Most of those folks look at the lean mass hyper responder population as people who basically have subclinical hypothyroid. And if you address the thyroid insufficiency, it’s going to address the elevated lipoproteins. And before we had statins in some of these other things, one of the treatment methods that was tried and didn’t really work that well was putting people on thyroid because elevated thyroid… or saying it the other way, low thyroid will definitely lead to elevated lipoprotein, specifically LDL.

So Olivia, you’re in a similar boat as I am where I have to eat the way that I eat to address a host of different things going on. I have some gut issues. I have some blood sugar dysregulation that makes things kind of dodgy. I have some autoimmune conditions that I need to eat in some specific ways. And it makes it kind of tough to navigate all that stuff. Where else do I want to go with this? Maybe we’ll leave this one here for now. And Olivia-

Nicki: We can circle back.

Robb: … some of the other questions that we have asked specifically about statins and stuff like that. And she didn’t ask specifically about that. But I think what you’re doing is great without a doubt.

Nicki: Definitely working on the fasting blood glucose levels.

Robb: Yeah. An A1C of five is not terrible, but you could maybe budge that down just a little bit, make sure your vitamin D levels are good. As you get older and you head towards perimenopause and menopause, then you’re probably going to want to look at donating blood so that you don’t end up with iron overload, which is when these oxidative stress inducing scenarios that can worsen all of these types of conditions. But I think when we look at the risk profiles, you’re not a smoker, you’re not diabetic even if your blood sugar is just a hair-

Nicki: Her triglycerides are great.

Robb: Yeah. Her triglycerides are great. Bill Cromwell makes the case, he has a really interesting study where he makes the case that absolutely diabetes is this major risk factor for cardiovascular disease, stroke and heart attack. But he also, he’s kind of convinced me that there’s a bifurcation there where at some point you can be quite insulin sensitive, but still at a risk for cardiovascular disease because of these lipoproteins and whatnot. And I know there are a lot of people that don’t want to hear… I don’t want to hear that. I’d like to just hear, “Keep your insulin low, keep your inflammation low when it all is good.”

I forget who it was. There’s this refrain that goes around if you buy into the vascular endothelial damage model, which I think it has a lot of laudable characteristics to it. Some people will say, “Just keep your inflammation low and everything’s good.” That’s fine. But our endothelial lining gets some amount of damage all the time no matter what. Our skin gets some amount of damage all the time no matter what. And it’s got to replace itself. And there’s perfect and imperfect features of all that stuff.

But the theory is that the higher the lipoproteins amidst some amount of vascular endothelial damage, you just have a higher likelihood of something going sideways and then developing that atherosclerotic plaque, which can then progress into an unstable plaque, and that thing can pop. And then you release this pro-inflammatory cytokine storm into circulation and you get a clotting cascade. And that’s where you can end up going from a mildly occluded cardiovascular system to where you throw a huge clot and and either plug something in the brain or in the heart or even in the lungs. So let’s leave that at that one for now. And then Olivia, listen to these other questions because we’re going to end up talking more about treatment and trade-offs and all that type of stuff.

Nicki: Okay. So our next one is from Merit on apo B confusion. “Hi, Robb and Nicki. I’ve been listening to your podcast and following your work for many years, and I’ve thrown some similar hard questions at you, which you were kind enough to try to answer.” Thanks. “I’m so frustrated that I can’t understand statistics enough to draw my own conclusion based on the literature on apo B and statins. I listened to a Peter Attia podcast and he said, I heard it twice to confirm, that if apo B were low in the population, he thinks-“

Robb: Atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease

Nicki: … yeah, “ASCVD would be dramatically reduced. He pushes a lot for statin use. On the flip side, reading the breakdown of studies on statins on Chris Kresser’s website, I just can’t understand why Peter Attia takes this stance. It doesn’t add up. My gut feeling is risk for any chronic disease is never calculated on just one lab value. That’s just logical. But even if it was, why does Attia use statins when they don’t seem to reduce deaths, strokes, or heart attacks by very much in people without CVD? Don’t statins obliterate apo B? You’re the absolute best. If you answer this question for me, I’d be forever grateful. Thanks for all you do.”

Robb: Well, Jay, I will take-

Nicki: This is Merit.

Robb: This is Merit, Merit. I’ll take a stab at this. But again, this stuff is… I don’t know, maybe it’s straightforward for other people. But it makes my head spin. I devote a fair amount of time to staying up on this, and it still just kind of makes my head swim a little bit. One thing that I think is valuable to dig into all this is the number needed to treat for a given… How do I want to say this? There’s a risk reward with anything. And when we’re talking about statins specifically, they have a non-trivial risk profile. There is some neurodegenerative disease that’s associated with them. There’s muscle damage that’s associated with them. It is crystal clear that they worsen your likelihood of type two diabetes, basically insulin resistance. So it’s not like there’s a free lunch. Again in this story, we are wanting to hopefully not die from cardiovascular disease. But what are we trading in the process of hopefully mitigating that?

And something that’s interesting to me in all this story is the generally accepted number needed to treat with statins, and this depends on the person and the drug and a bunch of different factors. But the more mainstream accepted number is that you need to treat about 150, 130 to 150 people for five years to prevent one death from cardiovascular disease. So you’ve got a group of people, and this usually is within people that already have a cardiovascular disease. But what Peter’s point is, this medicine 3.0 position that he’s taking, and I don’t think he’s wrong in this regard, is what if we got out earlier and did more sooner so that we flattened that disease vector, we flattened the curve? God, it just gives me heebie-jeebies even saying that. But it makes sense. Why wait until there’s something already brewing when we could maybe modify the disease burden?

Well, one of the challenges there is that let’s say, I don’t know what this number is, but let’s say most people go on a statin in their fifties. Let’s say then that most people live till they’re 80, we’ll be generous on that. That’s 30 years of statin use. What we’re suggesting is that potentially people go on a statin in their twenties. So now we’re talking about 60 years of statin use. What risks does that present with regards to neurodegenerative issues, muscle damage, recovery, neurodegenerative issues? And it’s kind of murky getting in and figuring all this stuff out. And when we look at the efficacy of these things, and I got to pull this up on my phone because I-

Nicki: It’s been a long time since I listened to it. It was probably two or three months ago. But when Dr. Aseem Malhotra was on Joe Rogan, he talked a lot about statins and his conclusion was there was no-

Robb: Net benefit.

Nicki: … net benefit to using them.

Robb: Absolutely.

Nicki: So that’s another variable to kind of weigh. Peter has his view, and then there are other cardiologists that have an opposing viewpoint.

Robb: Malcolm Kendrick, Mike and Mary Eades, Aseem, yeah. Yeah. So I’ll ping this to Nicki so that this gets into the show notes, association of lowering apo B with various pharmaceuticals. And the weighted meaning absolute reduction in apo B across all the interventions was 21.1 milligrams per deciliter for statins. Non-statin therapies, PCSK-9 inhibitors was a 45 milligram per deciliter reduction. And then there are some of these other things like binding cholesterol in the feces and some things like that that are really fib rates, niacin. They’ll move it five milligrams per deciliter, six milligrams on average. But it’s really modest moves. So with Olivia, she had 113 apo B. Peter doesn’t want to see it over 60. And I think that 60 was like the 50th percentile. He would like to see it in the fifth percentile, which is getting it down around 20 or something like that. Maybe even a little bit lower.

You’ve got to be a shockingly good responder to the pharmaceuticals to get it there. So the PCSK-9 inhibitors, which are really cool, what they end up doing is blocking the expression of the PCSK-9 protein, which tends to bind to the LDL receptors on the liver, and it prevents the LDL cholesterol being cleared. So the PCSK-9 inhibitor basically keeps the LDL receptors on the liver active so that it pulls LDL out of circulation and it gets reprocessed. And the PCSK-9 inhibitors are really cool. I got to say, when I poke around and look at the side effects, they don’t have any of the risk profile of statins. The thing is is that you can get a generic-

Nicki: Statins are cheap and PCSK-9 inhibitors are not.

Robb: Oh dude, a generic statin, you could probably do five bucks a month or something like that. It might be a little bit more than that. PCSK-9 inhibitors have come down in price. They’re only injectable. They are close to getting an oral PCSK-9 inhibitor. At least it’s in research right now. But these things are about $6,000 a year and generally insurance won’t pick them up. Sometimes they do. You’ve got to get pre-authorization on them and stuff like that. The insurance company would rather you just die than maybe address this stuff.

Nicki: Not the life insurance company.

Robb: Not the life insurance company. Which side of the insurance story are you trying to play? So let’s just look back at Olivia really quickly. She had a 113. If we put her on a PCSK-9 inhibitor, let’s say she responds beautifully to this, she can shave 45 points off that. So what are we at? Like 65-ish then. If she does well on a statin, then we can get another 25 points off of that. So we’re down in the forties. So you can get some non-trivial lipid lowering. But that’s if everything works well the first time. And not everybody responds the same way as far as lipid lowering, particularly as it relates to statins.

And this is one of these interesting things too, is that although some people will claim that… Let’s say Aseem is on one side of the aisle saying that statins do not overall provide a net benefit, we’ll say that that’s there. Then there are other people who say that it does provide a net benefit. But to get to that net benefit, you need to get an efficacious dose. And what we know is that a lot of people get a really modest reduction. Some people get a great reduction in apo B and lipoprotein. Some people get a really piss poor reduction.

And there’s this thing called the law of sixes with statins. You get whatever you get out of the first dose, the first therapeutic dose. Let’s say it drops you by 20 points, which would be a pretty, pretty good response. You have to double the statin dose to get an additional six points reduction in the lipoprotein. So it really bogs down. And not surprisingly, when you double the statin dose, you really worsen the risk profile of side effects. So you start getting into a little bit of a weird scenario in which, depending on what your lipoproteins are, you could throw the fucking kitchen sink at this stuff and you’re really not going to be budging these things all that much.

And so this is in my mind… I had a chat with Peter the other day. And again, he understands this stuff far better than I do, at least I think he does. So I tip my hat to him in many regards. And he made this case that if you’ve got the means, use a PCSK-9 inhibitor because the risk profile seems to be really, really non-existent. In the drug trials, there appeared to be more side effects within the placebo group than the main testing group. And I say that with a big shit eating grin on my face because as time has gone on, I trust these results less and less and less. When I look at what has come out of the testing around the Covid scenario, around vaccines in general, the fact that they don’t use controls with a bunch of this stuff, the fact that they cherry pick people-

Nicki: The people that are participating in the trials get omitted if they have an unfavorable response.

Robb: … if they do have an unfavorable response.

Nicki: Which circles back to our original point about the whole future of-

Robb: If we had a hundred percent transparency in this, science is still tough to do, but… And it’s so funny. This guy from high school was giving me hell on Instagram because, “Oh, you’re a conspiracy theorist,” and everything. I’m like, “Tell me what I’ve got wrong.” And he wouldn’t do it. He just wouldn’t do it. His politics are different than mine and they clearly are, and he just… This is kind of a side diversion. But the last thing that I said to him was, “You live a bitter life. And because I’m a white male who’s at a modicum of success, you feel entitled to jump on me with both feet without justifying your position at all.” And that was kind of the last interaction that we had. But I kept asking him, “Tell me one thing that I’ve gotten wrong here.” And I say this because I am feeling more and more just a complete conspiracy theorist. You just can’t trust anything.

Nicki: It’s like Brett can’t mentioned at anything the beginning of his thing. If we don’t find a solution, you either end up with people who are completely bitter and cynical and don’t trust anything, or you get the opposite of the people that believe everything that’s coming down their feed that is manipulated and it’s like, “Squirrel, squirrel.” You’re constantly embroiled in the latest thing. And so we don’t want either of those scenarios. We definitely don’t want people to be so cynical that they can’t trust-

Robb: Anything.

Nicki: … anything. I’ve been seeing in my Twitter feed a little more this term, there’s defi, decentralized finance. And I’m now seeing desci, S-C-I like decentralized science.

Robb: Decentralized science.

Nicki: And I haven’t dug into it. But I feel like people recognize this need. People recognize that there’s this massive distrust for all of our major institutions, particularly our health institutions after the past three years.

Robb: And I know we’ve kind of diverted a little bit, but here’s the opportunity there. If you’ve got people who, because of captured financial interests, want to control the narrative, it’s like, “Okay, I got that. That’s fine.” But if they’re lying about the nature of reality and then people are able to squeeze through the cracks and do science that ferrets out the real answer, the only thing that they’ve got is censorship. And that is in part I think why the censorship piece of all this is so hot and so heavy because, and this circles back around to another Dark Horse podcast recently with Umberto and-

Nicki: Paul Marik.

Robb: … Paul Marik. The use of corticosteroids for ARDS, acute respiratory distress syndrome, looks like it would’ve potentially reduced like 50% of the fatalities, would’ve kept people off ventilators and all this other type of stuff. And Umberto just in passing threw this one out there. And I was like, “Oh, shit.” But he was like, “All those statins, do you know what statins work on? They work on the glucocorticoid receptor and the macrophages. And that to the degree that they have efficacy is what’s doing it. It’s not lowering lipids.” And he also said, “But we can’t study that because this is being blocked at every level because glucocorticoids are off-label and they’re generic-“

Nicki: Not patented.

Robb: … “and not patented,” and all that type of stuff patented. And this again circles back around to this, how are we 60 years, 80 years into this discussion around lipids and we don’t have a real firm handle on it? How is this possible? How many fucking papers have been done on this stuff? And granted, biology is complex and all that. But even on let’s say the type one and the type two diabetes management story, it is crystal fucking clear that if you have a condition in which glucose management is challenged either from insulin resistance or because of the loss of the ability to produce insulin because of damage to the beta cells or the pancreas, if you reduce carbohydrate load, that dramatically simplifies the process of dealing with that.

Now, there may be other side effects, including elevated lipoproteins because you’re eating a higher fat diet and some things like that. But it’s interesting that there is still this… Let’s say Aseem is nuts. Let’s say that Malcolm Hendrick is nuts.

Nicki: Kendrick.

Robb: Malcolm Kendrick. How are they that nuts? How do these smart people get it that wrong? And I know smart people can get wrong, but it’s like how do you get it that wrong? And the more that I nose around this stuff, it just feels like we don’t want the right answer. We want treatments. And we want treatments that are marketable and patentable and all the rest of that shit. And I know that this is kind of spinning out off of what our main thing was. So this is-

Nicki: This is Merit.

Robb: … Merit. Merit, we may end up punting on this one a little bit.

Nicki: All three questions kind of layer-

Robb: They all layer together.

Nicki: … and that’s why we decided to do them together.

Robb: And so Merit, I know I’ve covered a lot of stuff. At the end of the day, I think there are pluses and minuses to the treatment story. I too am perplexed by the use of statins because we generally see a very modest improvement in lipoproteins. You have to really kind of divine the tea leaves to see where a net benefit is had. The industry accepted numbers is this like 130, 150 people treated for five years to get one life saved from cardiovascular death. That’s a lot. That’s a lot of involvement and there’s some type of risk profile there. The PCSK-9 inhibitors seem to work far better at lowering-

Nicki: And what’s the situation with the cost on them? They’re just still under patent?

Robb: They’re injectable and they’re patented. Yeah. But they are definitely still under patent.

Nicki: And what’s the timeline for something to come out?

Robb: Seven years I believe.

Nicki: So seven years. So these are relatively new.

Robb: Pretty new.

Nicki: Okay.

Robb: Yeah, yeah. Seven years, 10 years. I think it’s seven years though. But yeah, yeah.

Nicki: Okay. And then so theoretically after that seven year mark elapses, they’re still injectable so they might be more expensive than your average-

Robb: Yeah. But any pharmaceutical company could spin up their version of it and then you have some price competition.

Nicki: But you could potentially get a generic one for 20 bucks a month or 50 bucks a month instead of 600.

Robb: Absolutely.

Nicki: Okay.

Robb: Yeah.

Nicki: All right. Let’s move on to our last question and then maybe you’ll have some overarching thoughts on-

Robb: Yeah, we tie it all together. Yeah.

Nicki: … all of it. This one just came in yesterday from Jay on cholesterol and diet. And again, because it all tied in, it made sense to put them all together. “Hi, Robb and Nicki. I’m one of your original six listeners. Can’t be wrong. Thanks for all the good work. Recent blood work revealed high cholesterol and LDL numbers 216 and 123 respectively, as well as non HDL cholesterol of 137 and apo lipoprotein B of 94. HDL is 79 and triglycerides are 50. For what it’s worth, my glucose is in the normal range though slightly high considering my otherwise overall health, activity level and diet. My functional medicine practitioner has suggested the cardiometabolic food plan,” and he includes a link to that.

“I’m reticent considering the plan’s emphasis on soy protein, legumes generally, grains and limiting saturated fat. I could modify it to eliminate those things, but then I’m back to basically what I do already. Quick background: I’m male, 38 years old, active, commute on a bike, strength train, chase kids, have a small business. Small business owner with two young kids, i.e. non-zero amount of stress and less than perfect sleep. I have a pretty good gluten intolerance, which is how I found your work right around when you publish The Paleo Solution. Thanks again. And I generally follow a Paleo primal-ish template with some full fat dairy and rice/corn occasionally, mostly to coexist with my family without being a complete pain in the ass. So would those lab numbers concern you? What do you think about the cardiometabolic food plan specifically? And generally what would you suggest for diet or any other interventions to right the ship? Thanks tons and keep up the great work.”

Robb: Good questions. And some of the stuff that we at least have something of a grasp on is very low carb can elevate lipoproteins in people. When you look at the enzyme pathway in which cholesterol is synthesized, ketosis has kind of a back feed mechanism in which in some susceptible people, it just drives up lipoproteins like crazy. Just the state of ketosis drives up lipoproteins. Some people, just simply consuming saturated fat of any variety will drive up lipoproteins and there’s certain types of saturated fats which tend to elevate lipoproteins more. Palm oil, palmitate, some of the longer chain fats found in coconut. Stearate, which is in beef and also in chocolate, seems to be kind of cardio neutral. It might bump up LDL a little bit, but it elevates HDL and it seems to have some other benefits. So it tends to be kind of cardio neutral.

And then for whatever reason, dairy proteins do in at least some people seem to dramatically elevate lipoproteins. Like again mentioning Peter Attia, when I was chatting with him when he was on that really like a three to one, four to one ketogenic diet, like pretty low protein, very high fat, he said that fully 25% of his calories came from dairy in one form or another. He really leaned on full fat Greek yogurt, butter, cream. It was just impossible to get 4,000 calories a day to maintain his activity level through 3,500-4,000 calories without the dairy inputs. And that’s a lot of what I find myself out because the solution for some of this on the lipoprotein front is putting in a little bit of carbs, which it sounds like he’s doing some of that with the rice and corn and whatnot, avoiding dairy, and just checking to see if we get a benefit there.

Nicki: It seems like instead of jumping onto the soy protein legume ship, maybe sticking with your paleo template, but just dropping the full fat dairy, just dropping the dairy and just running with that for a few months and then retesting and seeing if that moves the needle enough.

Robb: And one can find 90 and 95% lean beef. You can find very lean cuts of pork, poultry. Which I’ll eat poultry, but it’s-

Nicki: Shrimp.

Robb: I like shrimp if you can get some wild caught shrimp and some fish. But you can really do kind of a, “Paleo Mediterranean,” version of this thing. I wish I could just crush nuts and seeds all day. I do okay with macadamias. But if I get too high a percentage of my calories from nuts, it just kind of blows me out. I don’t digest it well. The funny thing is that digestively at the gut interface, I do great on dairy. I feel good with butter and cream, but my lipoproteins go up. And this is one of these things where I’m like, “Fuck. Okay. Do I manage all this other shit?”

Nicki: You plug one hole in the dyke and then another one sprouts open and then you’ve got-

Robb: Then like six other ones open.

Nicki: … all your fingers plugging the holes.

Robb: But many people have found that if they put a little bit of diligence, so you could emulate some of what they’re trying to do with this cardiometabolic food plan without soy protein and a bunch of legumes and stuff like that. I think that you can very easily have a low glycemic load involved with that. And if you want to do a little bit of beans and everything, if you digest them fine, go for it. I would soak them, sprout them, do the traditional methods like the Weston A Price type stuff to improve the digestibility on those things. But I think it’s relatively easy to turn this thing into a little bit more of a Mediterranean flare, reduce the total saturated fat, and I would just test. And I would see how you look, how you feel, how you perform and then track those biomarkers of health and disease. Does it even move the needle? Do we see improvements in the lipoproteins? I would get apo B checked, either apo B or LDLP.

Nicki: He got the apo B.

Robb: He got the apo B before, so I would just keep doing that-

Nicki: 94.

Robb: … that apo B and just kind of track that. It’s so cheap compared to the LDLP and it is very easy to get and whatnot. So that’s a way to tackle this. And again, when I had a conversation with Peter, just trying to wrap all of this stuff. So for his questions specifically for Jay, I think that it would be easy to make this more of a paleo med approach, Mediterranean approach. Do more nuts and seeds, do more olive oil, try to reduce the saturated fat.

Nicki: Ditch the dairy.

Robb: Ditch the dairy for the most part and just see. If it takes it from an apo B of 94 to 89 and it’s a complete pain in the balls, I don’t know if I would continue doing that. And then wrapping this whole thing back around, one thing that is fairly clear, unless you’re a smoker, unless you’re diabetic, in general the cardiovascular disease process takes a long time. And I do really Peter’s idea around Medicine 3.0 where we get out in front of this stuff and try to do something to really prevent things.

And he’s really of the opinion that if you can get your lipoproteins, that apo B down into the range that you had when you were 10, that you’re going to probably be golden. And he had tracked his CT angiogram 15 years ago and he had some calcification, some plaquing. And he has tracked that I think bi-annually ever since then because again, he’s kind of neurotic about that stuff. He has done a variety of different interventions, mainly pharmaceutical and I believe including a little bit of a statin and then using the PCSK-9 inhibitor. And he’s seen no worsening of the CT angiogram since he did it. So it seems to be doing something.

It’s interesting, you look at some folks like Sean Baker who eats a carnivore diet, but he has wonderful lipoproteins eating a high protein, zero carb, high saturated fat diet. McKayla Peterson had wonderful lipoproteins doing it. Not everybody does. It fucking sucks. It’s like some people do great on that type of thing. And here’s the thing, we still don’t really know what the full story is. Maybe they look great, but there’s some other fucked up thing that’s brewing and you’re going to die from that. You just don’t know about it. But I think for a little bit of peace of mind, if my lipoproteins looked a little bit better just naturally, I’d be probably happy with that. It’s just one less thing to worry about. Maybe there’s something lurking below the waters, but at least you can kind of accept that.

But I’m still perplexed about statins. PCSK-9 inhibitors. When I first heard about them, I’m like, “Why would anybody use statins?” It’s like, well, when they first came out, they were $18,000 a year. That’s why not everybody uses them. They’ve come down in price. They will continue to come down in price. They will go off patent at some point, in which case the price should really drop. There might be an oral administered option sooner as opposed to later. And I think that that would come at a markedly reduced price.

And I think that so long as one looks at this stuff through the lens of understanding that there’s a risk to just about anything that we do, and this would be an interesting thing to run by Peter, it’s like, “Okay. So you’ve knocked your lipoproteins down really low. Are you concerned about sepsis? Are you concerned about an infection that could kill you because your lipoproteins are so low?” And I would suspect he would say no, because modern medicine being what it is. And he lives in the Austin area with great hospital care and everything. The likelihood of him ending up in a scenario where he goes septic and doesn’t get immediate medical care is probably pretty low. So that’s a thing. But I think that all of this needs to be looked at through the lens of a risk reward story. And the statins are still really perplexing to me.

You look at, again, the industry accepted numbers of 150 people, five years to reduce one death. It’s kind of like, “Well, okay.” And it’s also pretty obvious. So something that I didn’t mention around the statins, used to doctors administered statins and would keep doubling down on the dose, doubling down on the dose to hit lipid targets. They don’t have lipid targets anymore. This is what’s interesting. To the degree that statins work… And Aseem would say that they don’t work at all, Malcolm Kendrick would probably say that they don’t work at all. But let’s say that they do. To the degree that they do, it’s via a mechanism not actually most likely related to lipoprotein count. It’s due to modifying some other inflammatory process or some other immunological process that’s going on. So what else could we do that might be modifying that other parameter and whatnot?

But Peter, it was interesting, when I was chatting with him, he was just like, “If you can afford it,” I don’t know why, “don’t use nutrition to modify your lipid risk. Use nutrition to modify gut health, autoimmune disease, neurodegenerative disease.” We have shit options for managing that. But if you can afford a PCSK-9 inhibitor and you get that 40 point drop on it, use that. And I think it’s compelling. It’s an interesting angle. It’s an expensive angle. If I went on that right now at 51, let’s say I live to be 81-

Nicki: 30 years of-

Robb: It’s going to be 100-

Nicki: Well, but it’s not going to be $6,000 a year forever.

Robb: It’s not going to be $6,000 a year forever. That’s a good point. That’s a good point. It will come down. So who knows? And I might end up doing some tinkering with that stuff. I have not done the CT angiogram and really mapped, where am I at? Do I have any cardiovascular disease progression right now? Hopefully not. But if I do, it’d be interesting to see where that’s at. And then maybe I do some more aggressive interventions to try to put a halt on it and then monitor it from there. But I appreciate everybody’s questions and hopefully this was helpful. I know that it was all over the place and I really wish I was more like either Aseem or Malcolm or Peter in that these people seem to have some crystal clarity on some things.

But for me, all that I see are kind of risk reward profiles in this and options. And I think that there’s a lot to be said about individual risk appetite and tolerance and what you’re trading, the devil you know for the devil you don’t know. I do think that it’s worth doing some advanced testing. I think it’s worth maybe getting in and doing some of the CT scan, coronary calcium. Get some benchmarks on that, especially if you’ve got a little bit of means, you’ve got some resources. You’re 40 plus years old. Go in and get a benchmark on that stuff. Get your full hormonal profile done.

And the hormonal profile, I would love it if people would do that in their twenties, both males and females, so that as you enter into later age and maybe we have to do some augmentation of our hormonal profile, we actually know what we’re shooting for. What does youth look like for you? Because once you start down that path, and you know we’ve talked about this in other shows, you put somebody on testosterone and their DHT looks like it’s really high. But is that where their DHT was all the time before and it’s fine or no, it’s three times higher than what we would want and we want to do things to modify that? But anyway, I think investing some time in that to assess it is worthwhile. And yeah.

Nicki: Just before we close here, I want to make a comment. This is separate from blood work. This is related to your essential tremor. You’ve been saying that you feel like you’ve been doing more thiamine and you’ve been feeling like it’s less. And I just want to comment because it’s only been like a week since you’ve really upped your dose. And normally when we record, when Robb’s answering the question, it’s slight, but I can see it in his face-

Robb: Just my face.

Nicki: … in your head. And I’ve been kind of scrutinizing you this whole time and I haven’t noticed it at all.

Robb: Yeah. And I will do an update on that. I know this thing has run long. But I think it was Amy Peikoff pinged me something about the high dose thiamine.

Nicki: I think it was Jack Reston.

Robb: Or maybe it was Jack first.

Nicki: It was Jack.

Robb: It was Jack. But both of them I think jumped in and mentioned it because there was a paper that had mentioned injectable thiamine and it dramatically improving essential tremor. And then there was a YouTube guy, and I’m blanking on his name, but he seems really credible and he does a really nice balance of, “Here’s some paid stuff,” but all this information is available for free. You just kind of piece it together. So he seems like a pretty credible dude. I watched this thing. I got a bunch of different thiamines because there’s the thiamine hydrochloride and the thymine nitrate, and then there’s benfotiamine and some other varieties, like four or five main varieties titrated up. Did it for a good month, maybe longer, maybe three months.

Nicki: You didn’t really notice anything at all.

Robb: I didn’t notice anything with it to be honest. I just didn’t notice anything with it. And I haven’t taken any phenibut today. I’ve been using phenibut. If I do anything out in public, including going to jujitsu, it’ll take generally the worst kind of gnarliness off the edge of the essential tremor. Haven’t had any of that today. But I kept just taking some of the benfotiamine timing every other day, something like that. And then I watched another piece on this and it was really dramatic improvements in Parkinson’s and a bunch of these different things. I’m like, “Fuck, man.”

Nicki: So you just weren’t taking enough?

Robb: I just upped it again. And I’m not even taking that much relative to what a lot of people take. And so what I should do is reach out to this guy and do a consult and be like, “Tell me exactly what to do,” and then do it. But I got to say, shockingly improved. Just even things like shaving, brushing my teeth. It’s awesome when you’ve got a nose hair trimmer and you’re like, “Am I going to slice my nose off?” because your hands are shaky. And I don’t know if we mentioned it on here, but we were at the LMNT event at the PBR and I stood up and was introducing one of our folks and doing kind of a short presentation and I had to sit down and stop because my tremor got so bad I couldn’t talk. I was rattling around. It was I can’t even describe how frustrating.

So anything that can move that thing forward and improve it was pretty amazing. And this is another one of these things. What other health issues were percolating because the essential tremor was happening because of some sort of neuroinflammation. There’s damage happening to certain GABA related neurons. And if I’m addressing that, what else is working? Is my gut improving? What other things are theoretically improving? Because this high dose thiamine protocol seems to help type two diabetes dramatically, peripheral neuropathy. There’s a bunch of different things. So that’ll definitely be something that we’ll circle back on. And maybe we just do a show where you maybe Q&A me about it and we go through it.

Nicki: Cool. Sounds good. All right, everybody. Thank you for joining us. Be sure to check out our show sponsor LMNT for all your electrolyte needs. You can grab your LMNT at drinklmnt.com/ R-O-B-B. Wishing you all a wonderful couple of weeks.

Robb: Wish us an easy move, please.

Nicki: Easy move and we’ll catch you in a couple of weeks.

Robb: Bye, everybody.

Nicki: Take care.

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News Topic:

The irony of protein corporations

Show Notes:

Questions: 

Is caffeine harmful for long term health? 

David writes: 

I recently quit caffeine. Initially, I felt awful but over time have noticed an improvement in how I feel, energy levels, mood, motivation, sleep quality, etc.

My caffeine-addicted friends are (I think) in denial, and insist it’s not necessary to quit. They point to studies showing health benefits of taking caffeine every day. Some even insist it’s completely harmless in moderation, but I’m skeptical.

Searching the Internet, it’s nearly impossible to find anything negative about long-term use of caffeine. This makes me even more skeptical. How can this be the only addictive drug with zero (or near zero) side effects and no long-term impact on health?

Did I give up my caffeine addiction for no good reason? Is there something I’m missing? What’s the real story with caffeine? Is it a net benefit or net harm for most people? Have caffeine addicts found the holy grail of drugs, or are they in denial?

Help me understand this better.

TRT

Greg writes: 

I am a 64 year old male. I work out 5-6 mornings a week and bike 25-30 miles a week My natural testosterone levels average 650-800. I am not on TRT but do take several supplements including tongkat ali. I’ve asked my friends who are on TRT what their plan is in the event of a major catastrophe Either man made or natural. Of course they have none. What would happen to the millions of males dependent on their weekly or monthly TRT when none is available? What would you suggest as a back up plan?

Jiu Jitsu

Rob says:

Robb Wolf, it is another Rob Wolf.  I started training Jiu Jitsu at age 64 and I just got my purple belt.  Would love to learn more about how you train.

Sponsor:

The Healthy Rebellion Radio is sponsored by our electrolyte company, LMNT.
Proper hydration is more than just drinking water. You need electrolytes too! Check out The Healthy Rebellion Radio sponsor LMNT for grab-and-go electrolyte packets to keep you at your peak! They give you all the electrolytes want, none of the stuff you don’t. Click here to get your LMNT electrolytes

Transcript:

Coming soon…

Where you can find us:

Submit questions for the podcast: https://robbwolf.com/contact/submit-a-question-for-the-podcast/

Don’t forget, Wired to Eat is now available!

Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, iBooks

Please Subscribe and Review: Apple Podcasts | RSS

Submit your questions for the podcast here

News Topic:

Type 1 diabetes and low carbohydrate diets—Defining the degree of nutritional ketosis

Show Notes:

Association of Immune Thrombocytopenia and Celiac Disease in Children: A Retrospective Case Control Study

Questions: 

Diet and Digestion

Andrew writes:

Hi Robb! I’m loving the podcast! Just started listening and got your information from the lady who started the Debug Your Health blog which goes over diet and parasite elimination. She recommended for diet just doing grass fed meat and veggies. I did that for a few days but had severe leg cramps and sleep disturbances. Also, I’ve been constipated for awhile now and just can’t seem to find the right diet for addressing this issue. I will go to the bathroom once every three days and my gut just doesn’t feel right whatsoever. Also, I have A- blood type so I should be having more frequent bowel movements but that is not the case. I am only 21 years old and want to live my life. My suspicion is that it may be related to parasites, heavy metals, and maybe nutritional deficiencies. Any suggestions on how to get rid of this constipation with diet, parasite cleansing, or even enemas? Keep up the great work and I am excited to hear your response!

Immune thrombocytopenia ITP

Allen writes:

Hello,

My wife has an immune system disorder called Immune thrombocytopenia ITP. It is triggered by pregnancy. Her platelet count drops, which means she is at greater risk for hemorrhaging. The underlying cause of ITP is unknown according to our doctors and what I’ve read. For her first pregnancy, the doctors prescribed two treatments to ameliorate the platelet count: prednisone and IVG (this is standard treatment AFAICT) but these treatments had minimal/no effect. As the disease is evidently related to immune system health, I wondered if there are any dietary or environmental things we might look at which could help. Any advice getting pointed in the right direction would be much appreciated. Thank you!

eGFR results while on a high protein diet

Richard writes:

 I went to the doctor for a full feeling in my throat that was affecting my voice. Nothing was found but some of the bloodwork results have me a little worried.Creatinine 1.3, Total bilirubin 2.1, GFR 60. Should I be concerned with high meat intake? I follow a ketovore diet that averages less than 20g of carbs per day. Protein falls between 150 and 250 per day. The day of the test I had about a pound of meat for breakfast 6:00AM and nothing else before the bloodwork at 2:00PM. The doctor didn’t express any concern over the results but a GFR of 60 is kidney disease according to all the charts on the web. I’m going to get retested but I’m wondering if my diet makes these tests unreliable. How would you prepare for the second test to insure that the results are accurate?

Sponsor:

The Healthy Rebellion Radio is sponsored by our electrolyte company, LMNT.
Proper hydration is more than just drinking water. You need electrolytes too! Check out The Healthy Rebellion Radio sponsor LMNT for grab-and-go electrolyte packets to keep you at your peak! They give you all the electrolytes want, none of the stuff you don’t. Click here to get your LMNT electrolytes

Transcript:

Coming soon…

Where you can find us:

Submit questions for the podcast: https://robbwolf.com/contact/submit-a-question-for-the-podcast/

Don’t forget, Wired to Eat is now available!

Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, iBooks

Please Subscribe and Review: Apple Podcasts | RSS

Submit your questions for the podcast here

News Topic:

why progress is environmentalism

Plasma Arc Recycling

Show Notes:

Decouple: Mining Our Way To Net Zero

Questions: 

Elevated Prolactin

Steven writes:

 I’ll start off by saying I love the podcast! I’ve been a listener since day one. The Paleo Solution was a real eye opener in regard to noticeably feeling different after eating “clean”.

I’m turning 40 next year and thought it would be a good idea to get a snap shot of where my Hormone levels are. I like to think I do a good job of being cognizant of eating well, sleeping, and training.

My recent hormone bloodwork:

LH 4.2

FSH 2.9

Testosterone 724

Prolactin 24.5

Need I be alarmed about my prolactin? From what I understand it can indicate a serious problem or just be due to endurance training.

Over the past 2 years I’ve been running a lot. I trained for and completed a 50 mile Ultra Marathon and a Marathon. As of late I am lifting (squats 2x a week deads 1x a week). My running mileage is low comparatively to a few months ago. Some pull ups and push ups every day. Besides just being fatigued from training at times I feel and think I perform pretty well. All though I don’t notice it work is a stressor and I’m certain that the shift work I do isn’t helpful.

I plan to follow up about my blood work. Should I be asking for a thyroid blood work? Is it dumb to just attribute the high prolactin to endurance training and low carb eating?

Omega 3’s

Amy writes:

To omega or not to omega? That is the question. Kresser is going to try & sell me some tomorrow. Barry Sears says they’re the answer to whatever ails you. But Masterjohn says they’re basically poison, and we need more arachadonic acid, in fact. In the last podcast of yours I heard, you mentioned them briefly. What are you doing about them lately? (Feel free to use this for a podcast question if you like )

Alternatives to Phenibut for Mood/Well Being (if necessary)

Matt says:

I currently average 1 gram of phenibut a day to lift my mood & prevent anxiety and have played with periods of abstaining for 1+ months. I find only a little withdrawal symptoms so its not untenable however my baseline mood is not nearly as social and happy as I am with the small to moderate phenibut usage.

My question to you both is do you see a problem with it as most of the “research” out there is N=1 examples of people abusing and experience rebound anxiety. Are there other anxiolytics like ashwaganda? others? I should try and what are good sources as I am reluctant to grab off a random amazon wholesaler.

For context my sleep is dialed in at 7-8 hrs per night, daily 10 min meditation, yoga and fitness, and eat a paleo (+rice) diet.

Sponsor:

The Healthy Rebellion Radio is sponsored by our electrolyte company, LMNT.
Proper hydration is more than just drinking water. You need electrolytes too! Check out The Healthy Rebellion Radio sponsor LMNT for grab-and-go electrolyte packets to keep you at your peak! They give you all the electrolytes want, none of the stuff you don’t. Click here to get your LMNT electrolytes

Transcript:

Download Transcript PDF

Nicki: It’s time to make your health an act of rebellion. We’re tackling personalized nutrition, metabolic flexibility, resilient aging, and answering your diet and lifestyle questions. This is the only show with the bold aim to help 1 million people liberate themselves from the sick care system. You’re listening to The Healthy Rebellion Radio. The contents of this show are for entertainment and educational purposes only. Nothing in this podcast should be considered medical advice. Please consult your licensed and credentialed functional medicine practitioner before embarking on any health, dietary or fitness change. Warning, when Rob gets passionate, he’s been known to use the occasional expletive. If foul language is not your thing, if it gets your britches in a bunch, well, there’s always Disney+.

Robb: Howdy folks.

Nicki: Hello. Hello. This is episode 161 of The Healthy Rebellion Radio. We’re back, and where were we, Hubs, where did we go?

Robb: Went to a better place, a much better place.

Nicki: We were in… We spent, gosh, five days almost, in Big Sky.

Robb: Five days, four nights.

Nicki: In Big Sky, Montana, with the LMNT team. We do an annual team retreat there in Big Sky, and LMNT sponsors, this is the second year in a row where we’ve sponsored the PBR there, and last year we, as a team, or the company, purchased a little bull.

Robb: He’s not so little anymore.

Nicki: He’s not so little. Well, he’s still young.

Robb: Although he is still growing.

Nicki: He’s still young and growing. His name is Ridin’ Salty, and this was the first year that we got to see him actually come out of the bucking chute, and it was really fun. We had a really great time. The first night… It’s Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and we attended Friday and Saturday, and Friday night, he was the highest scoring bull of the night, so we won a little award there, which was really fun for the team. Gosh, we’ve got just over 30 people now on the LMNT team. Anyway.

Robb: It was just super cool.

Nicki: Super fun, super fun all the way around. Good times. And now we’re back.

Robb: I had a little bit of post-event let down depression, not unlike having a house full of family, and friends at the holidays, and then everybody piles out at the end of it, and you’re kind of like, “Damn, it’s a big empty house.”

Nicki: Other news, Griz is totally fine. He has recovered from his Pike diarrhea experience. So…

Robb: Pikarrhea?

Nicki: Pikarrhea. We’re back to normal on that front also, so life is good.

Robb: Indeed.

Nicki: Let’s see. You have…

Robb: Hey, you took my news topic stuff.

Nicki: No, you didn’t put them in the right section. You put them at the top of the document.

Robb: Oh, I did.

Nicki: Scroll up, scroll down. There you go.

Robb: Oh.

Nicki: That’s your fault, not mine.

Robb: Oh, okay.

Nicki: You must own your mistakes.

Robb: I’ll own something.

Nicki: All right. What do you have for news topics?

Robb: The first one is a piece from the Bad Gato, Boriquagato, and it’s titled Why Progress is Environmentalism. I’m always casting around for what I can do that actually helps, and moves the needle in the world, just helps make things better. And I know historically, my purview, I guess, has been kind of health and fitness, and it’s over time, grown into including some, I guess still health related things like talking about grass fed meat and all that is health related, but there’s really significant environmental, kind of ethical considerations that underpin all that type of stuff. I wouldn’t consider myself an expert, but I definitely consider myself an educated lay person on the energy environmental topic. I mean, I wrote a book that has done reasonably well that covers it.

And when you look around for critical reviews of Sacred Cow, what’s interesting is you don’t find much in the critique area. And I don’t think that that’s because it did so poorly that nobody even… It just didn’t hit any radars. I think it’s because we were so on the mark and we did such a good job of making our case that it’s very, very difficult to get in and critique the thing. Anyway, that’s all my justifications for this stuff.

But the Bad Gato basically makes the case that with progress, the environment tends to get cleaner. And this is something that folks really push back against, and it feels intuitively not true. But if you really dig into things like general water quality, and stuff like that, energy rich nations, energy rich areas tend to be much cleaner, much healthier, much more sanitary than places that are low energy.

He makes the case that there are no low energy wealthy countries, period. Full stop. And it just tracks beautifully with the access to total energy per capita, relative cost of energy per capita, will give you a pretty good sense of how wealthy a nation is, and how clean It’s. Like there are places in, particularly Scandinavia, that one can fish in the downtown areas of their capitals, and still eat the fish, because the areas are so clean, and they still have industry in these places. Oftentimes they still have manufacturing and whatnot.

But we were listening to an episode of the Dark Horse podcast this last weekend, and Brett made the case that pollution is an indicator of inefficiency. Like if one is dumping something into the environment, usually that something still actually has some sort of value in some way. It’s just figuring out how to extract that value, versus poisoning the waterways and stuff like that. But anyway, the Gato makes a beautiful case around all that.

And then I have another article on plasma arc recycling. And the plasma arc recycling is this interesting technology that… It’s a way of effectively incinerating garbage, but be before the garbage makes it into this thing. It would be well sorted, and things that could be composted, would be composted. Recycling is a whole interesting deal. We talked about this a little bit from the Decouple podcast. What was the title of that? Mining Our Way to Prosperity, I think was-

Nicki: Something like that. Yeah.

Robb: The rough title. And it was an eye eyeopener.

Nicki: I’ll put a link to that also in the show notes for folks.

Robb: Yeah, yeah. It was an eyeopener, in that a lot of things are difficult to recycle because of the increased entropy of the material. Well, the plasma arc recycling is interesting, in that it operates at such a high temperature, it doesn’t just burn things. It reduces them to largely their constituent atoms. Like a plastic is made up of carbon, and usually some chloride like polyvinyl chloride, and not much else, but it’s just those things stitched together. And if you just burn it, you get kind of this gnarly mix of hydrocarbons. You get some carbon monoxide, you get carbon dioxide.

In the plasma arc recycling, the flame, “flame,” it’s not really a flame, but the ignition medium is so hot that you can reduce things to their constituent elements, for the most part. There is still some… Salud.

Nicki: Excuse me.

Robb: There is still some pollution left over with that. This isn’t an entirely perfect process, but it’s remarkably good. And what’s interesting about it too, it still requires a net energy input to do it, but you do get some energy back out of it, because in the process of rendering it down to its constituent elements, you do release a lot of energy, and you can hook that up to a boiler, and run an electrical generator, and generate some of the electricity for the plasma arc thing itself.

Nicki: Is this a new technique, this type of recycling?

Robb: I wouldn’t say it’s new, but it’s up and coming.

Nicki: Sorry.

Robb: Real quick. I wouldn’t even say that this thing is the panacea. It still is in process. What’s interesting about this technology is it works best when you’ve got a lot of extra energy.

Nicki: Gotcha.

Robb: And it’s a really elegant way of dealing with all the shit that we’ve got, instead of landfilling it, instead of dumping it in the ocean. Most of the places… I think people might be aware, the bulk of the plastic that ends up in the ocean comes from two nations out of Asia. It’s like 85 or 90% come comes out of that. And it’s largely because the folks in those areas, they’re poor enough that there is not any type of landfill, or garbage collection, or anything like that, and they still have dodgy access to potable water, and so they do lots of bottled water.

Nicki: I just remember in that decoupled podcast, and I think even when we talked about it, you described… You used the analogy of a cup of coffee, and you have the coffee, and you have some cream in there, and some sugar, and the problem with recycling some of these things like solar panels, and these other kind of green technologies is that once it’s all in there, it’s really hard to get those individual constituents back out. But it sounds like with this plasma arc recycling, maybe that cup of coffee analogy, you would be able to extract out… Or it would heat it such that at the end you’ve got your pile of ground coffee, and your pile of dairy proteins?

Robb: Well, the analogy is difficult there, because of the temperatures. So, if we had a solar panel that was up for recycling, the silica would be the silica, the silver would be the silver, for the most part. It’s not 100%, but it is an energy intensive process. But you do get some stuff out the back end. At a minimum, you are in a situation, say if you had heavy metals or something like that. At a minimum, we are in a situation where you could do something like what they’ve done with spent nuclear fuel, which should actually be used in next gen reactors, but that’s a different topic.

But what they’ve done in the past is take this stuff and mix it with molten glass, and then turn it into these glass nuggets, effectively, because they’re so hardy and difficult to degrade and break down. So, toxic heavy metals like lead, and arsenic, and stuff like that, you could conceivably, with enough energy, and with the temperature inputs, get them amalgamated with this, the glass beads or glass nuggets, and then this stuff doesn’t poison water, it doesn’t destroy groundwater.

Nicki: It sort of seals it off into a little…

Robb: A glass teardrop effectively, or like a glass hockey puck.

Nicki: Interesting.

Robb: The stuff is energy intensive. If we want a cleaner, better planet, we need more energy. And I was thinking about then plugging in a link to one of the many, many green energy pieces. I’m like, “Well, why fucking bother?” I think at least with our listenership, people are pretty savvy that this is what’s going on. And again, similar to that Decouple podcast, I’m not saying that wind turbines don’t have their place. I’m not saying that solar doesn’t have its place, but it is not… I will absolutely, emphatically say, as an educated layman, I would not call myself an expert in this. But, it’s also one of these things that if you’ve got enough thermodynamics under your belt, and I’ve got a fair amount of that, you end up auguring into the right answer.

Like Diana and I, there were no studies emphatically saying that lab grown meat was going to be significantly more energy intensive than conventional meat. They didn’t exist at the writing of the book, so it was somewhat speculative, and we were absolutely spot on. That Sacred Cow book has stood the test of time like nothing else that I’ve written, because we are really careful, and we had evolution, economics and thermodynamics as the underpinning exclusively. We weren’t trying to sell anybody on a particular type of diet, other than a nutrivore approach, which is, let’s just look at the most nutrient dense stuff, and build our diets around that.

So, I wouldn’t call myself an expert in the energy field, but I’ve been pretty bang on with a lot of this, and the little bit that I’ve had wrong, which usually, a nuance, not like the grand brush strokes. So, I feel like if I’ve got anything to offer as we go forward in trying to make our world better. It’s stuff like this. There is so much fear porn, and drama, and just try… Attempts to terrify people into this notion that our world is all but lost, where we’re going to heat up, as per Venus, and have an inhospitable planet, and I don’t think any of that is remotely accurate. Even when you dig into the most extreme of the climate modeling scenarios out there, it’s not that bad.

Nicki: But all the graphics I’m seeing, they’re all red.

Robb: I know.

Nicki: Like really red, like we’re getting hot.

Robb: I’ve posted a few little things here and there on my Instagram timeline, and generally well received, generally, I think that my attempt at being thoughtful with it is well received. And I guess I need to be glad for the pushback that’s there, because these are the folks that if I am correct, we need to have a discussion, and move the conversation forward.

But there have been some folks that are very concerned. “Oh, we’ve got these record high temperatures and these different…” Okay, yeah, every single year for all of our recorded history, and as long as we’ve been keeping track of this stuff, there are record high temperatures every single year. There are record low temperatures every single year. It doesn’t, in total, mean much of anything beyond that you do have outlier weather at the edges. And I’m not going to dig too much further into that, because I think it’s good to have some more meaty, substantive support for those things. But anyway, check those things out. And once again, I’m not suggesting that the plasma arc recycling is the answer, but it’s a really interesting solution. And again-

Nicki: Well, as we know with most things, there’s not a single answer to all problems It’s usually a multi-

Robb: Multifactorial, yeah, yeah.

Nicki: Yeah. Many approaches that can solve a given situation.

Robb: Right, right. But it is interesting, and it is predicated on adequate energy. And overall, when you look at the health of a country, a society, it directly relates to the energy it has access to.

Nicki: Cool.

Robb: And they’re trying to make our access to energy less, not more.

Nicki: All righty. Healthy Rebellion Radio is sponsored by our salty AF electrolyte company LMNT. If you follow a low-carb or ketogenic diet, electrolytes matter. If you’re active and have a physical job, electrolytes matter. If you live in a hot or humid environment, electrolytes matter. If you find yourself getting muscle cramps, or feeling fatigued throughout the day, you guessed it. It might just be that you need more electrolytes, particularly sodium. LMNT makes the tastiest no sugar electrolytes on the market, with all the electrolytes, and none of the crap that you don’t need. You can grab yours today at drinkLMNT.com/robb. That’s drink LMNT.com/robb.

Robb: Wonderful.

Nicki: We’ve got three questions today, Hubs. The first one is from Steven on elevated prolactin. Steven says, “I’ll start off by saying I love the podcast. I’ve been a listener since day one. The Paleo Solution was a real eye-opener in regard to noticeably feeling different after eating clean. I’m turning 40 next year, and I thought it would be a good idea to get a snapshot of where my hormone levels are. I like to think I do a good job of being cognizant of eating well, sleeping, and training.

So my recent hormone blood work looks like this. Luteinizing hormone 4.2, follicle stimulating hormone 2.9, testosterone 724, prolactin 24.5. Need I be alarmed about my prolactin? From what I understand, it can indicate a serious problem, or just be due to endurance training. Over the past two years, I’ve been running a lot. I trained for, and completed a 50-mile ultra marathon and marathon. As of late, I’m lifting, squats two times a week, deads one time a week. My running mileage is low, comparatively to a few months ago. Some pull-ups and pushups every day.

Besides just being fatigued from training, at times I feel, and think I perform… Oh, sorry, I kind of read that with the wrong cadence. Besides just being fatigued from training at times, I feel, and think I perform pretty well. Although I don’t notice it, work is a stressor, and I’m certain that the shift work I do isn’t helpful. I plan to follow up about my blood work, but should I be asking for thyroid blood work? Is it dumb to just attribute the high prolactin to endurance training, and low-carb eating?

Robb: So the low-carb eating long as calories are adequate shouldn’t really be a factor in this. And it’s interesting. People will shit talk low-carb diets for a variety of reasons, but the literature is pretty clear that if we’re just talking over training syndrome, and what’s interesting is the papers on this are, again, pretty clear, independent of macronutrient ratio, calories are where over training syndrome starts happening. And I’ve kind of seen that personally, with my own blood work, or not blood work, but my HRV that I-

Nicki: Your recovery scores, yeah.

Robb: Track all the time. So, that’s a piece of it. I do think that elevated prolactin goes kind of in lockstep with over training, but it can be an indicator of cancer, it can be an indicator of some other stuff. So, I would get in and do a little bit more diligence on it, just to make sure that you don’t have something else occurring there.

Nicki: So, he doesn’t talk really about his food other than he eats paleo and clean. But if he is training a lot, and if he’s not eating enough, it could be-

Robb: It could exacerbate it. But there is a reality that at a sufficient volume, and intensity, you’re going to end up with over-training syndrome almost regardless of how much he eats.

Nicki: And you’d think that if somebody had over-training syndrome, he would feel pretty shitty. I mean, he’s saying he feels fatigued from training at times, but otherwise feels like he performs pretty well. So he is 39, he’s about to be 40.

Robb: It’s tough. I see folks… I mean, we’ve motored along for ages, just… You still have that little… Just a whiff of youth.

Nicki: You push yourself hard because you always could, and you feel like you still can. And…

Robb: Yeah, you can keep running and gunning. And also, I think over training long term is interesting in that it’s a little bit like sleep deprivation, and that’s an interesting thing, because he mentions just peripherally that he’s got some shift work there. Doc Parsley has talked about how with a couple of days, a couple of weeks, you habituate to the miasma that is shift work, and you’re just kind of like, “This is my new norm.”

And especially if you’re kind of a mentally tough go-getter type of person, unlike myself, who doesn’t whine, and bitch, and complain, and micro scrutinize every bowel movement and everything, but if you’re just kind of a tough go-getter, you don’t even notice that there are cracks in the foundation. Like, “Oh, this isn’t a big deal.” And you just keep kind of charging along, charging along, until things break in a pretty epic fashion. So, there’s different pieces to it. He may still feel pretty good, because the wheels haven’t fully fallen off.

Nicki: But his pretty good may not be…

Robb: May not be as good as… Yeah.

Nicki: What he would be if he had a reduced training volume, and was sleeping better, and all that.

Robb: He was using something like Morpheus, and tracking his HRV, and his recovery, and kind of modifying volume and intensity appropriate to that. It is worth mentioning that anything that takes you above anaerobic threshold dramatically alters the neuroendocrine response, with regards to heading you towards over-training. And it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do things that take you above anaerobic threshold, but you really should recognize that the dose response curve is potent, and if you want to over-train, that is a remarkably good way to get yourself there.

It makes me shudder a little bit about our CrossFit years, both doing it, and the training of people. And we long, and early, had a sense that we needed to keep people more in the aerobic zone, and largely got kicked out of the organization for the heretical suggestion of that, and time and science has only supported our position on that.

Nicki: His final question, should he be asking for thyroid blood work, or just revisit with the doc, and-

Robb: Never a bad one to look at, just if for no other reason, simply to have a baseline on that.

Nicki: Okay. All righty. Question two is from Amy on omega-3s. She says, “To omega or not to omega? That is the question. Kresser is going to try and sell me some tomorrow. Barry Sears says they’re the answer to whatever ails you, but Master John says they’re basically poison, and we need more arachidonic acid, in fact. In the last podcast of yours, I heard you mention them briefly. What are you doing about them lately?”

Robb: This is our good friend Amy from the…

Nicki: Oh, this is a Amy we know?

Robb: Yeah.

Nicki: Okay.

Robb: Yeah, from the Healthy Rebellion, and other places. It’s a really good question. This is another one of these things where I have been, I feel like, around, and around, and around on this topic, and I would throw out there that I think that this is a little bit of a situational story. I think as somebody has eaten a pretty pro-inflammatory standard American diet, there might be some non-trivial benefit to the inclusion of some additional omega-3s in the diet, or as a supplementation.

They are really prone to oxidation, and this is one of the interesting kind of side observations about the Inuit. They eat this very… Historically, they ate this very low-carb diet, although they weren’t necessarily specifically in ketosis and whatnot, but because of the marine animals they consumed, both mammalian and otherwise, they consume a really high proportion of omega-3 fats. And although they do pretty well on the aging side of things, it’s not spectacular. There’s some historical examples of them not doing spectacularly well long term, and there’s some thought about just the oxidative stress that they’re under from this high omega-3 intake scenario.

I think it’s worthwhile to get a red blood cell omega-3, omega-6 test, and kind of see where one is in that story. I do think that there is a reasonably compelling case out of the Loren Cordain paleo type model of approximately an equal omega-3 to omega-6 intake from the diet. I think that there’s some reasonable support for that. But it is worth mentioning that amidst all of the Barry Sears excitement around omega-3s, and the funny thing is Rhonda Patrick just had a guy on her show that was extolling the virtues of omega-3s, and the anabolic effect of omega threes and whatnot, particularly as we age, but there is kind of a reality, the arachidonic acid, which actually comes out of the omega-6 pathway, is completely non-negotiable in building muscle, in perpetuating that some element of the pro-inflammatory process that would be necessary in both wound healing, and muscle mass accretion.

So, you really do need a balance. I do think that a good place to start in this story is some basic blood work that looks at your red blood cell ratio of omega-3 to omega-6. If you do supplement, I would probably caution against, even though we’ve recommended high doses in the past, and I think that there are punctuated situations where that makes sense, I think it probably makes sense to do a lower dose of omega-3s, and just kind of stretch it out over the longer haul, because there is actually a rate limiting step of the inclusion of omega-3s into various cell membranes and whatnot.

So Amy, I don’t know if I perfectly answered that, but I think it’s going to depend a little bit on the individual. I would say that if you are generally eating mainly pastured meat, and I am not actually as remotely as much in the camp of the seed oils being the root of all evil, and I’ve got a lot of good friends in this scene like Brian Curley, he is the seed oil disrespecter on Twitter, and they have some really compelling stuff.

But there’s something about this that just doesn’t add up to me, and I’m just not entirely sure. Again, I do think that a roughly balanced omega-3 to omega-6 intake, being mindful of the oxidative stress that these polyunsaturated fats can bring to the body. I think all of that’s legit. But then I think some of it gets a little bit weird. I think that freaking out that your steak might’ve been cooked on a griddle that they put some canola oil on is ridiculous, if I’m being honest. I guess if you want to ask about that stuff, that’s fine, or you want to ask them to use butter, or something. But, I’m just kind of wandering now, but I’ll talk more about the fats later. But Amy, apologies if I didn’t cover it. Hopefully I did. I do think get some blood work.

Nicki: Getting the testing done.

Robb: Figure out where you are, and then we can ease into what direction you want to go from there.

Nicki: Cool. Okay, final question from Matt. He wants to know if there are alternatives to Phenibut for mood and wellbeing. He says, “I currently average one gram of Phenibut a day to lift my mood and prevent anxiety, and have played with periods of abstaining for one month or so. I find only a little withdrawal symptoms, so it’s not untenable. However, my baseline mood is not nearly as social and happy as I am with the small to moderate Phenibut usage. My question to you both is do you see a problem with it? As most of the research out there is n equals one examples of people abusing, and they experience rebound anxiety. Are there anxiolytics like ashwagandha, or others that I should try? And what are good sources, as I’m reluctant to grab off a random Amazon wholesaler? For context, my sleep is dialed in at seven to eight hours per night. I do a daily 10-minute meditation, yoga and fitness, and I eat a Paleo plus rice diet.

Robb: It’s a good question and just maybe for a little bit of background, Phenibut is a blood brain barrier permeable form of GABA. It’s interesting stuff. I use it to help manage my essential tremor, and it’s really effective. It helps the symptoms pretty significantly. But because it acts on the GABA receptors, this is also where alcohol primarily interfaces, to some degree. Things like Valium have some GABAnergic activity, and Phenibut can make you feel kind of high, because it is a anxiolytic. Really high doses of it, multiple gram doses at a time can make you feel pretty good. And then there’s… Can be a really gnarly downside to it.

And I am similar to Matt, in that I’ve used the Phenibut for a couple of years now, at varying dosages, and I’ll go with it, I’ll go without it, and it’s not that profound of a difference as far as anxiety, or depression, or something like that, but there are horror stories of people coming off of it, and it’s as bad as getting off of benzodiazepines, which there’s a…

Nicki: Like Jordan Peterson’s experience.

Robb: Like Jordan Peterson’s story, which is just horrific. Yeah. So it’s a non-trivial thing. People rightfully have some concerns around it. Oftentimes people who have had substance abuse issues in other arenas can inadvertently end up abusing Phenibut, and some people who have had substance abuse issues in other arenas get rid… When they find out what Phenibut is, and what it can do, they’re really, really concerned about it. So, I mean, there’s a lot of moving parts around the substance.

Nicki: Right.

Robb: Matt, my sense is that because you’ve kind of snuck up on this, and you’ve been careful, and observant, I think you’re probably okay, and it sounds very similar to my own situation. Doesn’t mean I guess it couldn’t change, but for me personally, the improvement that I get in my essential tremor symptoms is valuable enough that personally, the juice is worth the squeeze on this.

Nicki: And you mainly take it before you’re going to be in a speaking situation, or-

Robb: I use it before I go to Jujitsu, because for good or ill, I’m often the guy that they pick to demo on. And while I’m sitting there, and they’re describing what’s going on, my head will shake, and my hands will shake if I haven’t used this. And even with the Phenibut, sometimes I’ll get a little bit of that, but it’s dramatically improved for the most part. And then yes, when we were at the LMNT retreat, I tried introing one of our speakers, and I had to sit down, because I hadn’t taken it that day, and I just fucking melted down.

And so, anyway, that’s a side thing, and we can do a show talking more about that. But Matt, I think that that’s all legit. I think you’ve snuck up on this. I’m seen some benefit with ashwagandha. You’re really talking about a very different dose response thing here. And this next part, I’m going to deeply regret suggesting it because it means that I’m going to have to step my own game up on this, but cold water immersion is shockingly effective as an anxiolytic. Maybe not so much because you’re fucking anxious about getting into the water, but beyond that-

Nicki: But when you survive it-

Robb: When you survive it.

Nicki: You feel this sense of calm, like…

Robb: And the research on it is really good, and it seems to have no downsides. And here’s the thing, it doesn’t have to be an ice bath. You don’t have to go do this whole song and dance of dumping bags of ice into your bathtub, and doing all that. About 70 degrees is cold enough. And part of this is you may just need to be in there a little bit longer. The colder it is, the bigger the delta between your temperature, and the water temperature, the less time you need in it. But it’s also that much more not fun.

Some people do really well with this. I used to do well with this, and this is probably an indicator of the reason why I should be doing this, is that I am so cold water adverse at this point, that it’s kind of ridiculous. But, multiple different angles have suggested that I need to be doing more of this, so by hook or by crook, I’m going to figure out how to make this happen and I would highly recommend it.

Nicki: Who were we talking to recently that shared this idea? And I was like, “That is brilliant.” Because you think about cold water baths and you’re like, “Okay, I’m just going to go through so much ice, I’m just going to be buying bags of ice.” And they were saying that if you get gallon milk jugs, and fill them with water and freeze them, and then you can just float those in the tub, so it’s basically like an ice block, and then you can just take it out, and put it back in the freezer so you can reuse it over and over again. And I just thought it was such a…

Robb: It’s a good idea. It’s not going to work remotely as quickly or as well as just putting ice in the water, but it’s a good idea, for sure. Yeah.

Nicki: Just seems kind of easier, and you’re not constantly… You don’t need a separate freezer in your garage that just contains ice.

Robb: Right. Well, if you live where we live, even in the summer, the water comes out of the ground at 47 degrees.

Nicki: This is true. This is true. Yeah.

Robb: Yeah.

Nicki: Yeah. Okay. All right. That was our third question for this week. Any closing thoughts, Hubs?

Robb: I don’t think so. I mean, just circling back around to that energy topic, and all that, I just really encourage people to be savvy consumers of information around the energy thing. And by all means, get a variety of perspectives on there. But the doom porn around… Well, even me saying that, see? I’m setting it up for failure. I’m really trying not to do that. And that shit-

Nicki: Doom porn?

Robb: Calling it doom porn.

Nicki: Right.

Robb: That’s a value judgment on it, I’m really trying to be better about that, but clearly I’m exposing my bias on that, and I will endeavor to be better. But don’t believe all the negatives. When we really look at the past 100 years, yeah, we had a period of time when industrialization poisoned waterways, and made them undrinkable, and catch on fire. And then people were like, “Hey, that’s not cool.” And we enacted activity to change, and modify that stuff. And I really like to point out the West, particularly the United States, went through a period of leaded gasoline, which was horrible, and it was super fucked up, because we had an alternative to it, and it’s a interesting story, why the leaded gasoline won out.

But China, and India, and a bunch of the rest of the world, because they industrialized so much later, they never went through a leaded gasoline phase. And it’s a little bit like even… The United States still has millions of miles of copper wire hung to carry phone signals over. And there’s maybe good or bad features to having a solid landline thing with that. But in a bunch of the developing world, they just never even went down that road. They just went directly to cellular towers and whatnot.

So, this whole chunk of infrastructure never happened, because the technology developed in such a way that you would never think about mining copper to spin it into a long strand, and run it all over the country to carry phone messages, when you can carry phone messages so much more effectively via cell tower. And again, there’s pluses and minuses to all this stuff, but progress… The Gato’s piece, Progress is Environmentalism, it sounds crazy, and you sound like a crazy person suggesting it, but god damn it, if you get in and really research it, I think that you find that thesis borne out.

And I just want to throw that out there to folks, that this energy topic is going to be arguably more important than battling for our food, and all the rest of that, because similar to some of the de-banking that just happened recently, they control your money access, they control your energy access, they control every single thing about your life. And this is kind of the direction that this stuff is going. And if we’re going to push back, you got to understand the way this stuff works so that either we individually can push back, or we can lean on our representatives in government to do a better job of stewarding this in a way that makes sense.

Nicki: All righty.

Robb: Don’t you regret asking me if I had more?

Nicki: I will put, again, those links to that Bad Gato piece, and that plasma arc recycling in the show notes. If you want to check that out, you can find that at robbwolf.com on this podcast episode, which is 161. Thank you all for joining us. We’ll be back next week. Remember to check out our show sponsor, LMNT, for all your electrolyte needs. You can grab those at drinklmnt.com/robb. That’s drinklmnt.com/robb, and we’ll see you next week.

Robb: Bye everybody.

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News Topic:

Fatigue and Pain Sent Her to the ED: Medical Mystery Solved

Show Notes:

Dr. Michael Ruscio

Aglaee Jacobs M.S., R.D.: Digestive Health With Real Food

Questions: 

Intestinal Methane Overgrowth

Keri writes:

Gluten tag from your old home of New Braunfels! I really appreciate you two and your no nonsense, but super informative podcast. It always hits home for me. I have gone back and forth between keto and carnivore since 2019. Felt great at first, but the last 18 months have had weight gain, bloating and constipation. Never really had a weight issue before. I’m 5’7” and have averaged 135 pounds pretty consistently. I was referred to a gastroenterologist, did the breath test, and tested very high for intestinal methanogenic overgrowth (IMO). The doctor gave me a two week dose of xifaxin and that was it. No other protocol or follow up. I just finished the antibiotic with no relief. I am an active 52 year old, weight train 3 to 4 days a week, take my dog for a hour walk almost every day, gets lots of Texas sun, drink only water with LMNT of course. My two part question to the both of you is how in the world was I blessed with this lovely methane bug and is there any way to rid myself of it? Any supplements? I am taking berberine. I also have hypothyroidism and take desicated thyroid for that. The more I research, the more confused and overwhelmed I get. It seems it’s a little different from your standard SIBO. I’ve heard some doctors say to follow fodmap and others go all the way to carnivore. Any suggestions would be super appreciate, as I value your insight greatly.

All the knowledge, how to implement it

Tracie writes:

Hey Robb and Nikki, I’ve been listening to your podcast since my first rebel reset back in 2021 and have greatly appreciated the work that you do and the community I have found here at the healthy rebellion. I feel like I have all the knowledge that I could ever need to optimize myself, but I’m still not implementing it in the right way to improve my body composition. I feel like I’ve been doing B+ work since 2021, and A+ work for the past 3 months but I haven’t seen any results. I’m a type A personality but I’ve learned to forgive myself for not being perfect, and have added a little meditation in my life. I’ll lose 5-10 lbs and then it always comes back. I’m 33, female, 5’4″, and 175 lbs. I was 125 lbs when I was vegan in college at 20 but of course had no muscles and mild anemia, I figured that was still a healthy target weight for me. I don’t even care what the scale says, I just want to look good naked! I slowly gained weight over the last decade due to burritos, pizza, beer, stress, and smoking. I really was a hot mess until 2020. I’ve been approaching my failure through the lens of Boyd Eaton’s evolutionary discordance hypothesis. I’m wondering if it’s appropriate to tackle body composition issues using the old evolutionary discordance hypothesis, and if there have been any recent updates to it? 

I figure I’m not losing weight because my nutrition/exercise regime is still too much of a departure from the ancestral model but I’ve been eating paleo since 2021 and feel like I have balanced my 4 pillars. I’m taking Chris Kresser’s Adapt Natural bundle to cover the declining nutritional quality of our foods. I use 2-3 sticks of LMNT a day, sometimes an extra to compensate for the hot and humid east coast summer. I Started doing Paul Saladino’s animal based thing in August 2022 and it was great post gut dysbiosis (that was October 2021) but I also feel like the fruit and dairy are not helping the body composition. I hate to not eat them since they are nutrient dense and I do like how I feel.

I went to see Dr. Ruscio for the gut dysbiosis and feel fully recovered but my relationship with vegetables has never been the same and Paul caters to that. I see people rocking the vegetables in the healthy rebellion though and I sometimes wonder if I could do keto, although I do suffer from hypoglycemic episodes and get really lethargic when I try to get down to 25 grams of carbs. I have taken the Keto Masterclass. I feel like my electrolytes are on point though so I should be lethargic, and I love salting my food and eating salty olives/pickles. I only drink 12-18 ounces of coffee day, so that doesn’t seem like the culprit. 

What really annoys me and why I decided to write to you is because I am now exercising the most I ever had in my life and still not slimming down. I still just look puffy all over. I hike 5-7 miles a week with a 10-15 lb backpack, and one of those hikes is up a small east coast mountain. I get 5 miles of walking in most days a week, I run 3-4 miles a week 1-2 miles a day on top of the walking, and am now adding BJJ 3-4 hours a week, I don’t lift weights and know this would be huge but I don’t know how and cant afford a personal trainer yet. Hoping the BJJ does the trick, my training load is high but its enjoyable. I have used chronometer to track what I’m eating periodically, so I know I get 125+ grams of protein, 120 from animal sources (lots of steak, chicken, and pork) but I do eat 2300 calories easy. I’m doing 120-150 grams of carbs from mostly fruit, an ounce of maple syrup sometimes or a few tablespoons of honey also contribute. Diana Rogers suggests 1500 on her sustainavore course as a starting point. How many calories should I go for? That’s got be my issue, I’m eating enough calories to maintain weight and I got to go into a comfortable non-lethargic deficit. Advice would be much appreciated!

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Transcript:

PDF of transcript

Nicki: It’s time to make your health an act of rebellion. We’re tackling personalized nutrition, metabolic flexibility, resilient aging, and answering your diet and lifestyle questions. This is the only show with the bold aim to help one million people liberate themselves from the sick care system. You’re listening to the Healthy Rebellion Radio. The contents of this show are for entertainment and educational purposes only. Nothing in this podcast should be considered medical advice. Please consult your licensed and credentialed functional medicine practitioner before embarking on any health, dietary or fitness change. Warning, when Robb gets passionate, he’s been known to use the occasional expletive. If foul language is not your thing, if it gets your britches in a bunch, well, there’s always Disney Plus.

Robb: Welcome back.

Nicki: Folks, welcome to episode 160 of the Healthy Rebellion Radio. As you know, this is coming out on a Monday. Normally we release our episodes on Fridays, but it’s summer-

Robb: Life happens.

Nicki: … and life happens, and we just have some stuff going on. So this episode is Monday. We won’t have one this coming Friday, but we will be back with our regular Friday schedule on July 28th. So this Monday one feels, it’s like-

Robb: It’s like a filler.

Nicki: It’s like a hybrid. It’s like a filler doesn’t seem like the right word.

Robb: It’s the iceberg lettuce of the meal.

Nicki: Yes.

Robb: Or perhaps you want something more.

Nicki: It’s bridging the gap of the Fridays. Yeah, something like that.

Robb: You’re much more inspirational with it-.

Nicki: No, I don’t know that that’s inspiration, but it is what it is do we want to share with everybody?

Robb: Hell, yes. Why should we not?

Nicki: Part of our morning today and just what we’ve… Yeah.

Robb: Did we talk about-

Nicki: We never did. So let’s start at the beginning.

Robb: The beginning is always a fantastic place to start unless you’re one of those artsy filmmakers, in which case you start at the end and then work your way backwards. But we’re not going to do that.

Nicki: We’re not going to do that. We’re not going to go back in time. Well, we are going to go back in time to talk about the beginning.

Robb: Fuck. We’re off to a good start.

Nicki: So as I think we mentioned, my cousin and her family came and visited us from Texas the last week of June, I believe. And her oldest son, Jackson is 13, and he is like Daniel Boone reincarnated, fisher-

Robb: Hunts, fishes.

Nicki: … hunter. All the things might end up being a contestant on a loan one day. Who knows? Anyway, so we, behind our house in Kalispell, there’s lots of water, lots of lakes, and we have in our neighborhood, behind our house, there’s a little kettle lake with fish in it, and the kids love fishing. Whenever we have cousins and family and friends over, that’s always a popular thing. So Jackson, and actually all the kids, all of my cousin’s kids, even the five year old, were out there fishing and catching fish to their hearts galore. But we have these pike in the lake, so mainly-

Robb: Which are invasive. Somebody introduced them in the lake a couple of years ago, and they grow enormous and-

Nicki: And they eat-

Robb: … absolutely crush everything else.

Nicki: … all the bass.

Robb: Yeah.

Nicki: Yeah. Mainly there’s bass, some perch.

Robb: Perch.

Nicki: And then these giant pike, which are just super destructive. So anyway, and they’re huge. And so Jackson wanted to catch one of these giant pikes. So he rigged up this jug line, which I’d never heard of it or seen it before, but basically it’s-

Robb: Because you’re not a redneck, babe.

Nicki: Yeah.

Robb: You’re just married to one.

Nicki: I grew up in Redneckville.

Robb: Somehow the state off the radar.

Nicki: I just was never exposed to a jug line fishing. Anyway, imagine a gallon jug, milk jug, and you tie a fishing line to it with a hook and a bait, and it floats out there, and-

Robb: It’s a passive fishing-

Nicki: … it’s like a giant bobber. So you see the jug line go down or move, then you know you’ve got something on the line. So he rigged that up, and it was early in the morning. I’m sitting, my cousin Nina and I are sitting having our coffee in the morning and looking out at the lake, and lo and behold, that jug just plunged under the water and then bounced up and zigged across, and we’re like, oh my God, there’s something on the jug line.

Robb: It was reminiscent of the scene in Jaws when the shark yanks the float underwater and just starts dragging, it was… And when you think about it, a gallon of water is eight and a half pounds, something like that, eight, nine pounds. To yank that thing underwater, the fish had to displace more than eight pounds. And it’s squirrely, yanking something under like that. And man, it just snapped under, went probably six or eight feet and then popped up, and then it just took off across the lake.

Nicki: And then it just stayed in one spot. So it was like the fish was trying to get away and then resting a little bit. Anyway, clearly our exclamations roused everybody. And so Jackson’s out there in the rowboat rowing towards it with his dad, Andrew, with the net, to try to see what they had. And Andrew grabs a hold of the jug and they can see this fish under the water. It’s giant, and it’s one of these pike. And as he’s holding it and trying to scoop it with the net, the line, it didn’t break-

Robb: The fish just took off.

Nicki: … the line just… I don’t know that Jackson tied it tight enough onto the jug handle, but the line came off of the jug handle and the fish was gone, which was clearly a big disappointment. And he attempted to catch it again, but that did not happen during… That happened on the second to last day of their stay.

Robb: Yeah, yeah.

Nicki: Okay. So there’s that. We were out of town for last weekend, and we come back and we noticed all of these, you notice some buzzards.

Robb: Tons of them on the lake.

Nicki: Down on, just on the shore. And then we noticed this bald eagle that was just camped out eating on something. And-

Robb: It’d go away, it would come back, it’d go away, it would come back.

Nicki: It was just standing right there in the shallows, in the marshy sandy spot, just eating on something. And I really wish I would’ve gone down and checked it out sooner. But we waited a couple days and I’m like, finally, what is this? So walk down there, and lo and behold, it is a giant pike that has been picked over. The head is still there, the teeth-

Robb: It was incredible-

Nicki: … the whole skeleton.

Robb: … the whole skeleton was still intact.

Nicki: … the tail.

Robb: And it had a lot of animals work in it. But these pike are like dinosaurs. They’re really tough.

Nicki: They’re teeth like… Yeah.

Robb: Yeah. Yeah.

Nicki: So Sagan and I we had gone down to look at it and I was like, oh, we got to go get the camera and get the measuring tape. So we measured this thing. It was 42 inches long. And just-

Robb: God only knows what it weighed-

Nicki: Who knows?

Robb: … probably weighed 30 or 40 pounds. Yeah, it was a big fish. Yeah.

Nicki: Who knows? And you look in close and in the eye socket and part of the facial cavity that had been all eaten away, and flies are all over it. And you can see these swarming, baby maggots just everywhere. So just imagine this gross, stinky fish.

Robb: It’s at least four or five days old by this point.

Nicki: Yeah.

Robb: It’s been sitting out there in the sun, multiple animals picking at it, the flies doing their magic. This would be a pretty good story if we left it here. And we said, okay, let’s get around to our questions. But there is more.

Nicki: There’s a little more. We have this puppy, well, he’s a year and a half old named Griz, and he loves to go down to the water and swim at all the most inopportune times. And so he was down there.

Robb: And if he finds himself some goose poop, he’ll eat it or roll in it. And same with deer poop and other stinky nasty things.

Nicki: So we hadn’t been, I don’t know. We looked out and there he was down by this pike carcass and eating some of it. And so we’re like, Griz here, get him back up. He smelled awful. Gave him a bath, still smelled awful. Smelled like a rotting fish.

Robb: Rotting Fish smells bad. And apparently pike, I haven’t ever caught one or dealt with them, but our neighbor told us, if you catch one, absolutely do not process it inside, apparently pike are just-

Nicki: Don’t prepare in your kitchen, apparently. It’s so stinky.

Robb: … so stinky. Yeah.

Nicki: Yeah. So anyway, this dog smelled so bad, so bad. And so bath won the first day. Second day, more baths. Was it yesterday that he first ate it?

Robb: Yeah.

Nicki: Yeah, it was yesterday. Okay. So just the first bath yesterday. Go to bed last night. And he was so smelly, often he sleeps upstairs with Zoe in her room, but he smelled so bad that we decided to just crate him. And the crate is in our bedroom. So he’s in his crate and I wake up hearing him panting, just so, he’s roasting, and it’s not that hot in our room. And so it’s strange. I’m like, okay, what’s going on here? And I try to go back to sleep, but it’s so loud that at this point I’m not going back to sleep. So I’m like, maybe he’s really thirsty.

So I grab his water. I didn’t want to let him out. So I grab his water, put it in inside his crate with him, and he just stares at me and he’s just panting. He didn’t want any, I tried putting some on my hand and putting it to his mouth, he didn’t want anything else. So I’m like, okay, fine. Screw you. I’m going back to bed. And I put the water back and closed the crate, and I’m laying there and it’s like, just this incessant panting. I’m like, okay, there’s no way I’m falling asleep. So maybe he needs to go outside. But he wasn’t whining or anything. There was no whimpering or nothing other than the panting. So I put his collar on and head out, and he’s like right at the door, he really needs to go out. I open the door and he proceeds to have explosive diarrhea in three different spots around the yard, rushes over, it just squirting out, then finds a new spot, circles around, does it squat three times. And I was like, oh, okay.

Robb: The revenge of the pike.

Nicki: The revenge of the pike. But you would’ve thought that he would’ve whined or something. So anyway, then he seems fine, I put him back in his kennel. No panting at all. He falls right to sleep. Great. Two hours later, we repeat this process, the panting starts, wakes me up. I know what’s up. So I take him straight outside. He does it again, makes it through fine to the morning. And so then morning seemed fine. He spent the morning outside. Then we needed to go do some errands, Costco, all that kind of thing today. So we crated him and I didn’t think about it would’ve been smart had I put some forethought there and moved the crate away from the corner in which it is currently, in which it normally resides in our bedroom, but I didn’t. So we come home from Costco and I walk into our room and I just smell the stench. And then, so I let him out and then I see the mess at the bottom of the crate and on the wall and on the carpet. And let him outside.

Robb: And Griz had walked in it and he got his tail slattered with it.

Nicki: Somehow his tail was on it. And so as he’s running out the door, his tail hits the wall and there’s like a paint, a brush. If you had a paint brush and a nice top color.

Robb: And if you were doing the paint flick.

Nicki: There were some of those.

Robb: And it was about waist high, basically between the bed and the wall all the way on his way out.

Nicki: The revenge of the pike.

Robb: The pike had its last laugh. That is for sure. Hopefully it’s last laugh. Hopefully we’re done.

Nicki: I’m really hoping that it’s… So we gave him some activated charcoal, hoping it helps. Yeah. So we spent a couple hours this afternoon scrubbing-

Robb: The room a stiff up anyway, but-

Nicki: … cleaning carpets, cleaning walls, spraying out the crate. Yeah. Anyway, long story, all of you with pets who have experienced similar experiences with animal bodily fluids will appreciate this one. Probably not as good as the lady, I remember it was a New York Times article about the lady that bought the Roomba and the dog pooped, and then the Roomba zoomed all around the house-

Robb: … all over the house.

Nicki: … and the left. So definitely not, doesn’t rank as high as that story.

Robb: But it was pretty good though. It was pretty good.

Nicki: It’s pretty good one. Yeah. Okay.

Robb: Goddamn, that was a long intro. Apologies.

Nicki: It was a long intro. Yeah.

Robb: Yeah.

Nicki: All right, hubs, we are ready for news topic.

Robb: Okay. This is a med page today piece, which is usually garbage. But this one was interesting. It’s a gal who’s manic, but she is talking about a medical mystery that they uncovered. And it was a gal who ended up with, she was training for a 5K run and then started experiencing a lot of pain and edema and had a weird rash on her leg. And they went through all this testing and differential diagnoses and everything. And it’s interesting and it’s good medicine. The good doctors that think and think critically, God bless them, we really need them. And we don’t have enough of them out there. But what was interesting is as they narrowed this thing in, they just couldn’t figure out all of the usual stuff just wasn’t fitting the lab work and just wasn’t coming together. But when the doctor went back and talked to this woman again that she had mentioned that she had been developing a number of food intolerances, and so it had been limiting her diet more and more and more. And so then they started thinking about, well, could this be a vitamin C deficiency, and basically scurvy?

And when they checked for that, that ended up being the case.

Nicki: Oh, interesting.

Robb: So this was a documented case of scurvy in the modern world. And I just thought it was interesting because it was a beautiful medical investigation story. It was diet related. I find it interesting too, and it’s really unfortunate that they didn’t, at least in this piece, it would be really interesting to follow up with this gal and know exactly what did she pull out of her diet. And in part because so many people in this space that we’re in do carnivore, and they don’t do fruits, they don’t do vegetables, and they don’t end up with scurvy. And this is something that has been talked about quite a lot, but I thought it was interesting. It’s worth checking out. Again, the gal’s pretty manic. It’s about a 13 minute video. If you put it on 1.5 speed, it makes it more tolerable and it’s worth checking out.

Nicki: Interesting. All right. The Healthy Rebellion Radio is sponsored by our salty AF electrolyte company, LMNT. And as you all know, everyone needs electrolytes. And especially if you’re an active person or on a low carb diet, then you really need electrolytes to feel and perform your best. Whether you are training for strength endurance, or just trying to make it through a grueling workday, don’t skip the electrolytes. Coffee or a caffeinated energy drink might seem like a good idea, but it won’t sustain your energy levels the way that adequate sodium will. Believe me, your body and your brain will thank you. From citrus salt to raspberry, watermelon and grapefruit salt, LMNT has several amazing flavors that you can add into your rotation to keep you hydrated, energized, and ready to perform at your best. You can grab yours at drinklmnt.com/robb. That’s drinklmnt.com/robb. And hubs, you actually have an LMNT concoction that you’ve-

Robb: Oh, yeah.

Nicki: … been enjoying of late.

Robb: So I’ve known the folks that founded Mammoth Creameries. It’s a, I guess technically it’s not an ice cream, it’s a custard. And I don’t know what the distinction is.

Nicki: It doesn’t have any of the dairy proteins that cause you to-

Robb: Yeah. Yeah. So a lot of these low carb ice creams I used to enjoy every once in a while, but almost all of them have a little bit of milk protein in them and it just fires up what I believe is probably the rheumatoid arthritis that I have, and if I stay largely dairy free with the exception of cream, I can handle bovine cream, then I’m okay. And so Mammoth is one of the only things out there that’s in this kind of low carb, ice cream space that it’s just cream natural flavors, which I have a natural flavor blog coming out for element related, but people lose their minds over natural flavors and it’s ridiculous. If it’s vanilla flavored, it’s probably from vanilla. If it’s raspberry flavored, it’s probably from raspberries. It’s just ridiculous the stuff that goes on there.

Anyway, I took this vanilla Mammoth and I put a chocolate salt with it. I probably had two, two and a half servings from the Mammoth container, mixed it all up. So it was, the chocolate salt doesn’t really dissolve. It’s speckled, it looks almost like cookies and cream type deal. Phenomenal. Absolutely blew me away. And Todd, the founder of Mammoth, I had tagged them in it. He’s like, I got-

Nicki: You posted this on Instagram, yeah.

Robb: … I got to try this. And he did it and he’s like, life changed. Yep.

Nicki: Yeah. Yep. So anyway, if you can get your hands on any Mammoth creamery ice cream or another vanilla of your choice, if you tolerate dairy, you can try the Robb Wolf LMNT chocolate salt, vanilla ice cream summer.

Robb: Oh, this would be good. Any-

Nicki: Anytime of year.

Robb: Anytime of year. Yeah.

Nicki: Okay, moving on. We have two questions for you today. The first one is from Carrie on intestinal methane overgrowth. She says, gluten tug from your old home of New Braunfels. I really appreciate you two and your no-nonsense, but super informative podcast. It always hits home for me. I have gone back and forth between keto and carnivore since 2019. Felt great at first, but the last 18 months have had weight gain, bloating and constipation. I never really had a weight issue before. I’m five foot seven and have averaged 135 pounds pretty consistently. I was referred to a gastroenterologist, did the breath test and tested very high for intestinal methanogenic overgrowth, which is abbreviated IMO. The doctor gave me a two week dose of Xifaxin. It’s X-I-F-A-X-I-N. Not sure how you pronounce that. And that was it. No other protocol or follow up.

I just finished the antibiotic with no relief. I am an active 52 year old. I weight train three to four days a week, take my dog for an hour walk almost every day, get lots of Texas sun, drink only water with LMNT, of course. My two-part question to the both of you is how in the world was I blessed with this lovely methane bug and is there any way to rid myself of it? Any supplements? I am taking berberine. I also have hypothyroidism and take desiccated thyroid for that. The more I research, the more confused and overwhelmed I get. It seems it’s a little different from your standard SIBO. I’ve heard some doctors say to follow FODMAP and others go all the way to carnivore. Any suggestions would be super appreciated as I value your insight greatly.

Robb: Well, thank you for that. And it’s an interesting question. Just as an aside, these tests can be helpful, but mine was different. I’m just going to share a little bit of my background, but you can have sulfuric acid producing bacteria or hydrogen producing bacteria. This is another test. And what’s interesting with that, and I always get it confused. One of them tends to produce constipation, one of them tends to produce diarrhea. I was a little bit overgrown with the one that’s supposed to produce, and it was just barely so, but in theory, I should have constipation, but I don’t, I go exactly the opposite direction, which was super perplexing. I ran it by Kresser and Ruscio and all kinds of people, and it is just perplexing. They’re like, none of your stuff, none of the testing fits the clinical outcomes. And I find a lot of people end up in that spot.

It’s like this testing is great and sometimes it directs one to a good solution and not infrequently a round of antibiotics can fix this stuff. And this is an interesting aside. I’ve had alternating gut issues for the last 25 years basically. And a weird thing that I noticed, I have no doubt that the multitude of antibiotics I took as a kid, and even that I’ve taken later are probably part of my problem. But every once in a while I would end up with a really bad sinus infection when I was traveling and things like that. And I would go on a round of antibiotics and for a period of time my digestion was better. It seemed to knock back whatever the problematic stuff was and then it would slide back out and get worse. And so it’s one of these weird things. Are antibiotics good? Are they bad? It’s so situational.

There are natural antimicrobials like olive leaf extract, and there are folks out there, I believe Ruscio details some of these protocols in his book. Any and all of this stuff is worth doing. The FODMAP specific carbohydrate diet, even shifting a little bit more carnivore can… I think any of these things are beneficial. The goal in my mind is to just figure out a way of being in which you are not sick, in which you don’t show clinical signs of the weight gain and maybe foggy headedness and the things that go along with that. And then once we get to that stabilized spot, then we start tinkering with what type of latitude you have. And there is the weed and seed protocol, which is using either prescription or more natural antibiotics to try to knock back ideally the bad bacteria, although it can knock down the good bacteria too. And then you start seeding with something like the product seed or some of these really hoity-toity prebiotic, probiotics using fermented foods, a host of different prebiotic fibers, potato starch, green bananas, on and on and on.

Nicki: Where would you start though, if there’s a lot of different approaches and she’s going to need to do this N equals one to figure out what actually works for her? Where would you start?

Robb: So it’d be great to work with someone directly so that they can be the brains behind this and help you do this stuff. Mike Ruscio folks can work with him. Agley Jacobs is also phenomenal and folks can work with her. I think that they also have practitioners that they’ve trained that you can work with or people who’ve gone through the Chris Kresser adapt program that you know could check their database and see someone who specializes in dealing with this. You could also use Agley or Dr. Ruscio’s books if you want to just run this thing on your own and they walk you through a protocol. And so definitely having a game plan is critical in this. I do recommend doing a specific carbohydrate diet or something like that first makes sense to me because it’s just less onerous. It’s not that full investment of full on carnivore and whatnot. Just gives you a lot more latitude. But you need a game plan.

Ideally, you’ve got somebody who can objectively look at this stuff. You might benefit from some additional testing. But man, the more I’ve gone along this testing is helpful, but I think a couple of shows back I posted another med page piece that was talking about how the microbiome changes hour by hour. And this is where we’re taking a snapshot of something that is a movie and it changes constantly. And I guess it may be helpful when we see something overtly pathogenic and this thing ostensibly like the excessive methane production, that is a sign of pathology. Okay, what do you do? Do you weed and seed? Do you do it with over the counters? Do you do it with prescription? What type of dietary alterations do you do? Usually minimizing the fermentable fibers can be helpful, but man, it’s a lot, it is definitely a lot to unpack all that stuff. And that is where I think finding somebody who’s a good practitioner who has some success in this arena. And then you just got to get in and be willing to go wherever the clinical outcome takes you.

So if the specific carbohydrate diet approach isn’t addressing the clinical symptoms, then you may have to go a little more restrictive, a little more restrictive. We’ve seen numerous people in the Healthy Rebellion that they did a carnivore type reset for six months and then started reintroducing foods and did really well with that. I think about Denise and some of the other people that really remarkable. And there are other people that have done it multiple times and it just doesn’t work. And those are people like me. And I think Jack is in that camp to some degree. I think he’s developed a little bit more latitude than what he used to have. But there are some people, SIBO I think is similar where there’s just, if you’re going to be relatively symptom free, you just end up having these fairly narrow lane lines that you operate in. And she asked what could have gotten you there? I have no clue. I don’t know. I don’t know.

It could have gotten exposed to a bad bug. It could have been just bad luck. Maybe your diet slid for a little while and we started getting just some shifting and because there’s definitely a relationship between loss of metabolic health and a change in gut health. And I think that both of those can push, pull on that. The gut can be altered and then it can affect your metabolic health, or metabolic health can slide and then it can alter the gut health. And it’s just this multivariate calculus problem that maybe somebody smarter than me has this all figured out, but man, I bump into so many people that are just so sure about what to do with this stuff. And I think for certain cross sections of people, the standard deal, just cleaning up sugar, just doing this, just doing it, just making sure vitamin D levels are adequate. It addresses most of the issues for some people and then for other folks, it’s a big gnarly puzzle to unravel.

Nicki: It’s almost like human beings are complicated.

Robb: Yeah. Yeah.

Nicki: Complex. I will put links to Agley Jacobs and Dr. Ruscio’s books and websites in the show notes for anybody that wants to check those out.

Robb: But if you tackle this, if you get into it, I’d love to hear follow up, good, bad or otherwise. It’d be really interesting to know what you do with this because these are, again, these N equals one data points to know again what the outcomes are of just anything that you’re doing.

Nicki: Cool. All right. Our next question today is from Tracy, all the knowledge, but how to implement it. Hi Robb and Nicki, I’ve been listening to your podcast since my first rebel reset back in 2021 and have greatly appreciated the work that you do and the community I have found here at the Healthy Rebellion. I feel like I have all the knowledge that I could ever need to optimize myself, but I’m still not implementing it in the right way to improve my body composition. I feel like I’ve been doing B plus work since 2021 and A plus work for the past three months, but I haven’t seen any results. I’m a type A personality, but I’ve learned to forgive myself for not being perfect and have added a little meditation in my life. I’ll lose five to 10 pounds and then it always comes back. I’m 33 female, five foot four and 175 pounds.

I was 125 pounds when I was vegan in college at 20, but of course had no muscles and mild anemia. I figured that was still a healthy target weight for me. I don’t even care what the scale says. I just want to look good naked. I slowly gained weight over the last decade due to burritos, pizza, beer, stress, and smoking. I really was a hot mess until 2020. I’ve been approaching my failure through the lens of Boyd Eaton’s evolutionary discordance hypothesis. I’m wondering if it’s appropriate to tackle body composition issues using the old evolutionary discordance hypothesis and if there have been any recent updates to it. I figure I’m not losing weight because my nutrition/ exercise regime is still too much of a departure from the ancestral model. But I’ve been eating paleo since 2021 and feel like I have balanced my four pillars.

I’m taking Chris Kresser’s adapt natural bundle to cover the declining nutritional quality of our foods. I use two to three sticks of LMNT a day, sometimes an extra to compensate for the hot and humid East Coast summer. I started doing Paul Saladino’s animal-based thing in August of 22 and it was great post gut dysbiosis. That was October of 21. But I also feel like the fruit and dairy are not helping the body composition. I hate to not eat them since they’re nutrient dense. And I do like how I feel. I went to see Dr. Ruscio for the gut dysbiosis and feel fully recovered, but my relationship with vegetables has never been the same and Paul caters to that. I see people rocking the vegetables in the Healthy Rebellion though, and I sometimes wonder if I could do keto, although I do suffer from hypoglycemic episodes and get really lethargic when I try to get down to 25 grams of carbs.

I’ve taken the keto masterclass. I feel like my electrolytes are in point though, so I shouldn’t be lethargic. And I love salting my food and eating salty olives and pickles. I only drink 12 to 18 ounces of coffee a day. So that doesn’t seem like the culprit. What really annoys me and why I decided to write to you is because I’m now exercising the most I ever have in my life and still not slimming down, I still just look puffy all over. I hike five to seven miles a week with a 10 to 15 pound backpack. And one of those hikes is up a small East coast mountain. I get five miles of walking in most days of a week. I run three to four miles a week, one to two miles a day on top of the walking, and I’m now adding BJJ three to four hours a week. I don’t lift weights, and I know this would be huge, but I don’t know how and can’t afford a personal trainer yet. I’m hoping the BJJ does the trick. My training load is high, but it’s enjoyable.

I’ve used Cronometer to track what I’m eating periodically, so I know I get a 125 plus grams of protein, 120 from animal sources, lots of steak, chicken and pork, but I do eat 2300 calories easy. I’m doing a 120 to 150 grams of carbs for mostly fruit, an ounce of maple syrup sometimes, or a few tablespoons of honey also contribute. Diana Rogers suggests 1500 calories on her sustainable course as a starting point, how many calories should I go for? That’s got to be my issue. I’m eating enough calories to maintain weight and I’ve got to go into a comfortable non-lethargic deficit. Any advice would be appreciated.

Robb: Do you want to jump in on this?

Nicki: I will. And I think Tracy, you hit the nail on the head at the very end and I was experiencing much the same thing. So we train jiu-jitsu-

Robb: Two days most week, sometimes three.

Nicki: … two to three days a week, an hour of class, and then a full hour of open mat, which is pretty-

Robb: Pretty frisky.

Nicki: … intense. Yeah. And then have been doing a strength training program through our friends. Sarah and Grayson of Basis New York. But in our house, Robb does all the cooking and I’m a good eater, I like to eat. And so I think you may have heard us mention that we were weighing and measuring our food, me particularly because that was something I hadn’t done regularly in quite some time. And turns out that it’s pretty easy to eat far more calories than is appropriate for one’s frame and activity level.

Robb: Particularly with this carnivore esque, the Saladino flavor of carnivore where you’ve got enough palate options between meat, dairy and fruit and even the honey and stuff like that. There’s some pretty good tasting foods and it’s remarkably easy if your digestion accommodates that to overeat. Part of the problem that we ended up in is that my digestion is dodgy enough and my activity level is high enough that I struggle to get enough food most days. I love a good steak, but I just can’t do two rib eyes back to back like Sean Baker. I just can’t. I’ll do part of one and then I’m done, but I still need to get some calories from somewhere else. And it’s funny, even a handful of macadamia nuts or something, just something else will go down, but cooking some suet and eating beef fat, I’m just maxed out. I just can’t do it. So my cooking has shifted ever more towards this calorically dense, carnivore esque thing, which works for me and was getting Nicki into trouble because it’s really easy for someone with healthy digestion to overeat on that.

Nicki: And I love protein. So Robb would make, even if it was just hamburgers, I would have two of them, two of the patties, well, once I started weighing and measuring if they’re 85%-

Robb: Lean.

Nicki: … lean then you enter it into Cronometer or whatever you’re using. And so then those two patties were a significant amount of calories. And so a lot of what I was learning was a lot of my protein sources were really like, we would do pot roast or we would do, what was another cut back? Lots of stew meats in the slow cooker.

Robb: Back in the winter.

Nicki: Back in the winter. And when you start actually looking at the caloric load of some of these cuts of meat that carry more fat and then I’m eating the fruit or some nuts and whatever else I ate during the day and I was easily at that 2300 calories, even more. And so when I started really tracking it, that actually made a little bit of a difference. So I did the keto gains calculator and that had me at 1,750 calories. I’m five foot seven, I like to say I’m five foot eight, but I’m really five foot seven if I’m not wearing shoes. And I was hovering right around a 150 pounds, which is a little heavy for me. I run great at 140.

So I was a little bit on, little heavier than I wanted to be. And so doing the keto macros at 1,750 calories, I noticed a little bit of a difference, and I’m not sure why this is, but we had our, it was April, end of April, our former jiu-jitsu coach, Ray Price from Reno came up to do a seminar in Kalispell and we were talking about nutrition. He was talking about-

Robb: Renaissance periodization. Was it that app?

Nicki: It’s the RP app.

Robb: Yeah.

Nicki: Yeah. And he had been doing that and his wife and his wife’s mom and everybody was leaning out amazingly. And so I was super curious. So I just put my, and it’s a paid app, but I just plugged it in to his just to see how did it compare the calorie-wise with what I was doing with keto gains. And lo and behold, it was exactly the same calorie count right at that 1,700, 1,750. It was just a different macro ratio. So still had the 135, 140 grams of protein, only 60 grams of fat and a 150 grams of carbs, which I was before doing under 50 grams of carbs. And that really works for me. I ran with that. I’ve been eating that way.

Robb: And I would say that it was slow to kick in. It was-

Nicki: Because the thing that was bothering me is that since November I’ve been doing zone two cardio with Robb in the mornings-

Robb: Most mornings. Yeah.

Nicki: … two, three days a week are the days that we don’t do jiu-jitsu. And I still wasn’t noticing any body composition change, nothing significant. My clothes fit the same, nothing was changing. So it’s similar to what Tracy’s relaying. She’s doing all this activity, but nothing is changing physically for her. And I was in the same boat. And then I don’t know why, I know that I do fine with carbs. I don’t have any kind of GI issues from carbohydrates, I don’t get-

Robb: … hypoglycemic. Yeah.

Nicki: … hypoglycemic. And so I just started shifting. I was leaner protein, and I think I mentioned this on a previous podcast, but if the main cut of protein that Robb is making has more fat in it, I’ll have some of that, less of it and then add shrimp or some things, or another protein source-

Robb: Lean protein. Yeah.

Nicki: … that’s lean. So I get my protein, but I’m keeping that fat on the lower side of things. And then I’m having sweet potatoes, I tolerate rice. So I’ll have some of that. I’ve actually thrown in some oatmeal here and there, fruit and I haven’t weighed myself in two months because we don’t have a scale at the house, but I definitely, my tight pants test, we talk about the tight pants test in the keto masterclass and in rebel resets that we’ve done in the past. And so, you put on a pair of pants and you see how they look. And my tight pants test is definitely much improved. So I don’t know, I don’t know why that is, but it works for me.

Robb: So even at a given caloric load, there’s a reality that… And it’s so interesting because you get the very, say Gary Taubes esque insulin is the driver of weight gain. And I think insulin’s a really important hormone to control. I think it’s important for hunger in particular, but there is a reality that fat is the easiest calorie to store, there’s like, it just is. And it’s not in and of itself the most satiating, protein is arguably the most satiating, arguably plain boiled potatoes is the most satiating food apparently, it’s the hardest food to over overeat or something like that.

So there’s these non-linearities with all the food theories out there. Do I think controlling glycemic load is important? Yeah, it’s super important for a lot of people. And then for other people it’s way less important. And for someone like Nicki who is metabolically healthy, metabolically flexible, interesting thing. She’s been keto off and on for years just because of eating the way that I eat. Because the way I cook didn’t really see a massive performance change with jiu-jitsu by reintroducing the carbs, you still performed well and your zone two cardio was really important. You just did your Iron Man and you had good gas for that. You didn’t get crushed with it. But it was probably due more to training that-

Nicki: It was definitely the zone two. Had I not been doing that, I would’ve died.

Robb: So that’s all interesting because you have people who are like, you can’t perform without carbs. Well that’s not necessarily true, but we have these sacred cows out there with different things. And then you just have to get down to the person and be like, well, what is working and what’s not working? And for you, I do think that there’s something about the somewhat less efficient storage of calories around eating some carbs like you do, yeah, you can have de novo lipogenesis and all that, but you got to really overeat. And it’s still, even in that scenario, the thing that I remember way back when Gary Taubes and Stephan Guyenete, who I like both of these people a lot, but Stephan will cite some stuff about people will go back and forth over this stuff. Are we eating more carbs? Are we eating more fat? We’re definitely eating more calories than what we did in the past. When you really look closely at things, it looks like we’re eating more fat than what we did in the past in addition to just generally more calories.

But the thing is that people aren’t oddly enough, with the exception of extreme keto and carnivore, they’re not eating just rendered liquid fat except for these weird things. What they’re doing is they’re eating refined foods that have a matrix of both fat and carbs and flavorings and all this stuff that it makes it really easy to overeat. So at the end of the day, I think that this is where… The one thing that’s interesting, whether you look at the keto gains approach to this or the Renaissance periodization, they ended up giving a calorie prescription that was virtually identical. They had a protein-

Nicki: The protein was identical-

Robb: … virtually identical.

Nicki: … and the only thing that was different was the calories from fat went into carbs for the RP diet and versus keto, you’re having more fat and fewer carbs.

Robb: Yeah. And so she has-

Nicki: And when Tracy’s eating, she’s getting her protein, she’s doing 120 to 150 grams of carbs. So the question is, what is the fat and what is the fat content of that protein? I’m not seeing that she’s adding extra fat anywhere. I don’t see that, but if-

Robb: If she’s doing some whole fat dairy, it’s going to be really easy to-

Nicki: So Tracy, I think you’ve used Cronometer periodically, use it religiously for a couple of weeks. You’ll get a really good sense of, okay, wow, because I put in my numbers and I’m like, oh wow, what I just ate was 600 calories at breakfast and I’ve only got seven. It’s an eye opener if you haven’t been tracking pretty consistently. Weigh everything. Try to find the cut of meat or whatever it is that… Cronometer has a really extensive food list, which I love. I tried using that RP diet thing and I know some people love it, but they didn’t have half-

Robb: Had a very limited-

Nicki: … half the things that I-

Robb: … database.

Nicki: Yeah.

Robb: Yeah.

Nicki: Yeah. And it was frustrating. So I just took that macro prescription and put it into Cronometer and that’s what I do.

Robb: And probably use the keto gains macro calculator. It’s free, it’s very spot on. It will email you your results and then what I would do is find your protein from that, find your calories from that, and then you can adjust in that macro, your macronutrient ratio. So I would maybe top off your fat at 60 or 70 grams of fat per day.

Nicki: Probably 60 or… Compared to, I don’t know. Obviously we’re different bodies, but she’s five four, I’m five seven. It has me at 60 grams of fat, maybe a little bit less.

Robb: Maybe a little bit less, but the thing is, is it’s going to adjust the carbohydrate-

Nicki: Accordingly.

Robb: So you’re going to boost the carbohydrate, it’s going to automatically adjust down the fat. And so maybe 60 grams is a good place to start. But I would religiously weigh and measure your food and stick to those macros. And it’s probably what you’re going to find is that you’re going to need to shift to leaner cuts of protein. If you do dairy, it’s going to be sacrilege, but you may find that you’re doing some non-fat dairy. I remember Diana Rogers followed Marty Kindle’s program, and I’m blanking on it right now. It’s really, really good, the data driven fasting and some of the other stuff that Marty Kindle does. He’s a genius with this stuff, but it’s all very, very similar. But what she was finding was that for her breakfast she would do one egg yolk and then three additional egg whites. And she was like, this seems crazy. But she needed the protein, she didn’t need that much fat. And she leaned out really, really quickly with it and it was super effective. Are egg yolks good? Yes. Is butter good? Yes, all that stuff’s good, but it’s easy to overdo it.

Nicki: But sometimes if something… And if you’re at the spot where you’re like, gosh, I’m trying all the things, it seemed counter to me having been relatively low carbon, and a 150 grams of carbs is still on the lower carb absolutely side. But-

Robb: Particularly with your activity.

Nicki: … but having been more low carb, it was, okay, I’m going to try this. I couldn’t see how it was going to make a difference, but it actually did. So it’s like if you are hitting the wall and you’re trying all these things and your body composition just isn’t shifting, A, you’ve got to track pretty religiously and weigh in measure so you actually know what you’re getting. But I think you hit it on the head Tracy in the beginning with, it’s got to be the calories. I’m not sure if the 1,500 that Diane that’s-

Robb: I wouldn’t use that as a start. I would go into keto gains or something like that and get a custom made-

Nicki: Plug it in based off of your height and your weight and your activity level and all that stuff.

Robb: … your activity level. Yeah.

Nicki: Yeah.

Robb: Yeah.

Nicki: And then let us know how it goes. I think your activity, you’re doing a ton of movement, which is great. You didn’t say how sleep was, but I… Did she say anything about sleep?

Robb: Not sure, but clearly she said that she has balanced her four pillars really well.

Nicki: Yeah. Okay.

Robb: So we’ll assume that’s pretty buttoned up.

Nicki: Yep. Yep. Anyway, let us know what you change and how it works. I definitely feel a lot better. I know I haven’t weighed myself, but I’ve…

Robb: Well, and your dad hadn’t seen you for four months-

Nicki: Couple months.

Robb: … And he was like, oh wow, you’ve really leaned out.

Nicki: Yeah.

Robb: So yeah.

Nicki: Yeah. All right. We only had two questions for you today folks.

Robb: Because they were long.

Nicki: Because they were longer on, yeah, on time.

Robb: And we had to tell the story of the pike.

Nicki: And we had to tell the story of Griz and the pike and the bodily fluids. Anyway, wishing you all a fabulous week, two weeks. We’ll be back on July 28th with a new episode for you then. In the meantime, be sure to check out our show sponsor LMNT for all of your electrolyte needs. You can do that at drinklmntcom/robb. Robb, any closing thoughts?

Robb: Don’t let your dogs eat rotting pike. That’ll go on my tombstone.

Nicki: Yeah, that could be us. We could make a song out of that.

Robb: [inaudible 00:50:39] be good.

Nicki: All right. We’ll leave it at that before we derail this thing further.

Robb: Take care everybody.

Nicki: Bye everybody. See you later.

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Questions: 

Rae Lynn writes:

 I’ve followed you for years, I’ve read both the books and I’m a huge fan of the Podcast, keep up the good work of getting the news out there to us who are hungry for the truth. I have recently done a GI Map test and the results showed that I had Giardia, h. pilory and a parasite. I’ve heard Robb mention that he had Giardia in the past and if i heard correctly that he still has issues with it. I’m working with a functional medical doctor and they have me on several supplements to correct the issues, just wanted to get another insight on what I can expect in my healing journey, any sage advice to my treatment and what possible ongoing issues I should be looking out for. Thank you!

Physiological insulin resistance

Jada writes:

Hi Robb and Nikki,

I’m hoping you can help me with a question I have about physiological insulin resistance. I know that this condition is a natural adaptation to long-term carbohydrate restriction, and it’s been my understanding that it’s not necessarily something to worry about. Do you have any evidence to confirm or deny this? Is physiological insulin resistance good, bad, or neutral?

Thanks,

Jada

Confused on what to eat

Ann writes:

Thanks for all the work you do to keep us all informed. I have a question. I should start with that. I am 5’9” 165 pounds. My journey began in 2014 when I weighed 290 lbs and started a bulletproof diet. I did that for about four years and then I started a carnivore diet. I did that for four years also. I’ve lost the weight but now I just want to eat a balanced diet. I now eat about 140-160gr of animal/fish protein about 80 gr of both fat and carbs. Carbs consist of fruit and veggies and the fat consist of butter,ghee olive oil,olives and avocado. Should I take electrolytes? Or should I just do Redmond real salt in water? I had to when I was a carnivore, but do I have to take anything now? I am also I think I kind of had an eating disorder and now I feel really straightened out but Everybody’s talk talk talking that you need to eat this are you might die you need to eat that or that’s wrong or you have to eat this to be healthy. Can I just eat normal? Or is the way I eat not normal? I am very confused. Can you help ?

Sponsor:

The Healthy Rebellion Radio is sponsored by our electrolyte company, LMNT.
Proper hydration is more than just drinking water. You need electrolytes too! Check out The Healthy Rebellion Radio sponsor LMNT for grab-and-go electrolyte packets to keep you at your peak! They give you all the electrolytes want, none of the stuff you don’t. Click here to get your LMNT electrolytes

Transcript:

Coming soon…

Where you can find us:

Submit questions for the podcast: https://robbwolf.com/contact/submit-a-question-for-the-podcast/

Don’t forget, Wired to Eat is now available!

Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, iBooks

Please Subscribe and Review: Apple Podcasts | RSS

Submit your questions for the podcast here

News Topic:

Mathew Liao Director for NY Center for bioethics

Great Moments In Unintended Consequences

Show Notes:

Train with Morpheus

Questions: 

Red Meat and aging

Alicea writes: 

I have been carnivore for almost 3 years and eat mostly red meat. I feel absolutely amazing and have ultimate health. I recently heard a podcast with a guest saying that Red meat is dangerous. I usually roll my eyes and ignore these statements but for some reason I listened and wanted to get your take on what he said. He said red meat ages people and causes inflammation. His reasons were because saturated fat along with carnatine, lethathin, and choline (I may have mispronounced those – sorry) change our gene function of bacteria and this causes inflammation. Thoughts? I do not plan on changing my red meat diet by the way.

Too much cardio?

Lil writes:

Hello! I have written in a few times. Thank you so much for your knowledge and your willingness to help.

2 unrelated questions:

1) could a trend in increasing resting heart rate be related to overdoing cardio?

I am a chronic over-exerciser. I feel emotionally better when I hit cardio in addition to weights. I know the sciences says too much cardio is a stressor AND my personal experience is that I feel anxious without serious cardio.

If you think cardio is contributing to a  higher heart rate, how do you suggest weening off overtraining with minimal negative side effects?

2) In addition to correcting daily posture while using devices and such do you have any specific exercises that can cure or lessen “tech neck” or the start or a dowager’s hump?

Thank you!!

Fruit and non alcoholic fatty liver disease

Andy writes: 

Robb and Nicki,

Thank you! Thank you for persisting in fighting the good fight! What you say and how you say it both are vital now more than ever. The coconut farm can wait. The world needs you. Haha. I read Paleo Solution back in 2010 ish and caught the podcast probably on episode 2 or 3 and haven’t missed one since. Being a chiro and a strength coach, I’ve shared your rational and sound advice (and book) with hundreds of people over the years. Thank you for helping me help the people around me. Could not have done it without you.

Question: in the past I’ve avoided fruit due to the fructose and its potential for liver problems, namely non-alcoholic fatty liver disease due to the fructose content. Recently though, I just can’t seem to convince myself it’s a problem given that, humans have eaten fruit for… well, probably ever. We must be tripping over our own mechanistic shortsightedness, no? For the past 16 months, my diet has consisted of mainly meat, fruit, egg yolks, butter, and liver and I’ve never felt better. Can fruit really cause NAFLD and, thus, should it be avoided?

Thanks for all you do and like a previous listener said, an abundance of health, laughs, and sunshine to you and your family.

-Andy, listener number 6.

P.S.- Any thoughts on the enzymes in fruit and whether or not you think they might aid in digestion of meat in particular?

P.S.S.- LMNT is amazing! Cheers!

Sponsor:

The Healthy Rebellion Radio is sponsored by our electrolyte company, LMNT.
Proper hydration is more than just drinking water. You need electrolytes too! Check out The Healthy Rebellion Radio sponsor LMNT for grab-and-go electrolyte packets to keep you at your peak! They give you all the electrolytes want, none of the stuff you don’t. Click here to get your LMNT electrolytes

Transcript:

Coming soon…

Where you can find us:

Submit questions for the podcast: https://robbwolf.com/contact/submit-a-question-for-the-podcast/

Don’t forget, Wired to Eat is now available!

Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, iBooks

Please Subscribe and Review: Apple Podcasts | RSS

Submit your questions for the podcast here

News Topic:

Gut Microbiome Varies Hour to Hour, Month to Month

Show Notes:

New Chapter Saw Palmetto Prostate Blend

Reducing NF-κB Signaling Nutritionally is Associated with Expedited Recovery of Skeletal Muscle Function After Damage

Questions: 

Red Meat and Prostatitis

Hey guys,

I’m a 45 year old male. I’ve had a couple bouts of prostatitis over the past few 4-5 years. Symptoms usually linger for 2-3 weeks and with antibiotics and supportive care they generally get better. Things flair up about 1-2 times a year. I’ve been to a urologist and had a CT scan and they are not worried about cancer (PSA is also normal). They say some guys just have ‘chronic prostatitis’. If you read online, one of the main recommendations is to avoid excessive red meat, alcohol and caffeine. I was curious to your thoughts about the red meat claim (and the caffeine). Is there a legit concern here or is this another propaganda push that red meat is the root of all evil?

Personally, I’m try to focus on reducing other sources of inflammation such as limiting Omega- 6 intake, limiting alcohol, etc.

I do eat meat based and paleo’ish. I have 3 sons, so the diet is not always perfect. I do CrossFit 3-4 x a week and I would say I’m moderately fit for being 45. Although I still could lose about 10-15lbs of fat. Sleep is good.

Oh, I’m also on testosterone injections twice a week so I get my PSA checked regularly. My levels are well with normal physiologic parameters.

Thanks for all that you do!

David

Feed a cold, starve a fever

David writes:

Rob and Nikki, I’m a long time listener, first time caller. I read “The Paleo Solution” many years ago and became an instant fan. The book really helped me make some huge changes in my health. Many thanks for all you do.

Often clichés are worth nothing, but sometimes they contain a grain of truth, or else they wouldn’t have become a part of our mythology.

“Feed a cold, starve a fever” is one I’ve wondered about, especially recently. Or, more specifically, are there general eating patterns that are better when someone has a viral or bacterial infection?

I’ve had COVID 3 times, and each time it was an absolute nothing-burger. I intermittent-fasted through much of the day, stuck to low carb, got lots of sun and sauna, and never missed an exercise day. I bounced back with minimal symptoms. I thought I had the key

Then, about 3 weeks ago, I picked up some kind of virus (2 negative covid tests) and got HAMMERED. The sickest I’ve ever been in my life, truly. Many of the COVID symptoms, but magnified times 10. I stuck to my COVID regimen, but got no relief. One thing I noticed is that I craved carbs. Bread, ice cream, rice (but not chocolate, my favorite treat!)

Meanwhile, while sticking to my normal low-carb diet, my fasting blood sugar each morning was 20-30 points higher (stress?)

Bottom line after this meandering: do you think there is an advantage to fasting, and or low carb/keto, or does one follow the cravings when one sick? Thoughts?

Peptides:

Len wants to know:

What’s your view on taking peptides for better health?

Sponsor:

The Healthy Rebellion Radio is sponsored by our electrolyte company, LMNT.
Proper hydration is more than just drinking water. You need electrolytes too! Check out The Healthy Rebellion Radio sponsor LMNT for grab-and-go electrolyte packets to keep you at your peak! They give you all the electrolytes want, none of the stuff you don’t. Click here to get your LMNT electrolytes

Transcript:

Coming soon…

Where you can find us:

Submit questions for the podcast: https://robbwolf.com/contact/submit-a-question-for-the-podcast/

Don’t forget, Wired to Eat is now available!

Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, iBooks

Please Subscribe and Review: Apple Podcasts | RSS

Submit your questions for the podcast here

News Topic:

Comparison of the DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) diet and a higher-fat DASH diet on blood pressure and lipids and lipoproteins: a randomized controlled trial

Show Notes:

Questions: 

Downside of coffee

Steve writes:

What do you think about coffee? I hear a lot of talk on coffee. Mainly about sleep cycles and blocking adenosine. And then the usual worship of loving coffee.

I have a stressful job and I find that giving up coffee does wonders for anger management, stress, burnout, and all around negative feelings. I do occasionally use it when I have a morning of zero motivation as I think it increases cortisol. I usually stick to gunpowder green tea, it doesn’t take me to dark places.

I wonder how many people have kept drinking 5 cups a day and then got on Lexapro or something like that without taking stock of the situation. Should there be more talk around the negative aspects of coffee on mental health?

Chron’s

Hi Robb & Nicki,

I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the work you have done over the years.  I’ll jump to the punchline that last year (at the age of 54) I was diagnosed with Chron’s.  The Chron’s is under control with biologics infusion and I’m just trying to get back to health and fitness and I was wondering if you had nutrition recommendations in living with Chron’s.  Are there resources you recommend?

I live in Vancouver Canada, 55 years old (6ft, 215lbs) have been reasonably athletic in my life, playing football, hockey, lacrosse, boxing into my mid 20’s and then got into running, then with young kids took a break from fitness and then got into road cycling, started playing lacrosse again and finally got into powerlifting 10 years ago.  I’ve been doing keto off and on since 2016 and bone broth fasting.  I’ve never been sick then the wheels fell off last year when I got sick and was diagnosed with Chron’s.  The Chron’s is under control with medication and I’ve resumed powerlifting and road cycling (I have a 100 mile bike race in July).  Apologies for the long message and thanks again for the years of great information you provide. 

With kindest regards,

Fred

Seed Oils

Mae writes:

Hi Robb and Nikki, I love your guys podcast-it’s always the highlight of my week to listen. You both have such a balanced view on health issues I wanted to ask about seed oils. I know they are not good for us in large amounts (or am I wrong about that?) but what about small amounts here and there? Like if we go out to eat a couple times a month or have a few tortilla chips here and there? Is that still super damaging to health? I see so many health influencers talking about how bad seed oils are and how we shouldn’t touch the things with a ten foot pole. Wondering your views on occasional seed oil ingestion?

Sponsor:

The Healthy Rebellion Radio is sponsored by our electrolyte company, LMNT.
Proper hydration is more than just drinking water. You need electrolytes too! Check out The Healthy Rebellion Radio sponsor LMNT for grab-and-go electrolyte packets to keep you at your peak! They give you all the electrolytes want, none of the stuff you don’t. Click here to get your LMNT electrolytes

Transcript:

Click for transcript PDF

Nicki: It’s time to make your health an act of rebellion. We’re tackling personalized nutrition, metabolic flexibility, resilient aging, and answering your diet and lifestyle questions. This is the only show with the bold aim to help one million people liberate themselves from the sick care system. You’re listening to the Healthy Rebellion Radio.

The contents of this show are for entertainment and educational purposes only. Nothing in this podcast should be considered medical advice. Please consult your licensed and credentialed functional medicine practitioner before embarking on any health, dietary or fitness change. Warning, when Robb gets passionate, he’s been known to use the occasional expletive. If foul language is not your thing, if it gets your britches in a bunch, well, there’s always Disney Plus.

Robb: Welcome back, everybody.

Nicki: Hello. Hello. Good morning. This is episode 156 of the Healthy Rebellion Radio, middle of June. Little bit of a cool, cloudy rain here in northwest Montana.

Robb: Mixed with a hint of sun.

Nicki: Mixed with a hint of sun, thankfully. Yep. A lot of good feedback on last week’s episode with John Welborn, so thank you for that. Before we get in, I have something I want to read from a listener that wrote in with another resource for folks. I want to share that, but before we go there, I thought we would give a little update on Baby Bird, just because I know people might be curious.

So Baby Bird passed away on day seven, so it was a very emotional and tough time here in the Wolf-Letti household. Zoe understandably was completely crushed. It appears that he may have had something called gapeworm, which are these little worms that can kind of attack the trachea in birds.

They’re common like turkeys and they can get into chicken flocks, but Starlings apparently are notorious for having them also. When we first got him and not knowing any better, one of the first things we fed him was a worm. And apparently that’s a big no-no. They can carry parasites, but then reading the timeframe for, from eating a worm to developing this gapeworm problem is longer than we had the bird. So I think if it was that-

Robb: I think he arrived with it.

Nicki: Yeah. If that was in fact what he succumbed to, then he most likely arrived with it.

Robb: But God damn if we didn’t try, the little guy gained weight for the first three days, the first four days.

Nicki: First four days, and then he went from… So he was 28 grams and then 29 grams and then 30 grams, and then he got up.

Robb: Got up to 31.

Nicki: Got up to 31 grams, and then it was back down to 29 grams. And that was kind of a sign that something was wrong. And then he kept throwing his head back, both shaking it side to side, but then also throwing it back. And Zoe was like, “I think he’s trying to get air,” and he stopped peeping as much, so it was just sort of this protracted or just stepwise downward trend.

Robb: Well, and you found an old forum that talks about all this stuff, and so it took a couple of days to figure out what the gapeworm was, and then it appeared that Ivermectin could be a treatment. We poked around to see if there was any veterinary options on that and there wasn’t-

Nicki: Again, nobody will take… It’s an invasive non-native bird that people are trying to eradicate typically, at least here in North America. And we’re not going to go spend hundreds of dollars to-

Robb: Right.

Nicki: This bird was, I wouldn’t say this in front of my daughter, but we didn’t expect it to live anyway.

Robb: But we did have some Ivermectin and it took me about-

Nicki: You did.

Robb: … an hour to figure out how to-

Nicki: We have take a friend in Texas who’s a veterinarian because Robb was searching for the dilution conversion.

Robb: Well. I needed to know what the milligram per kilogram dose was.

Nicki: So our friend-

Robb: And I couldn’t find it anywhere.

Nicki: It wasn’t online, but our friend in Texas who’s a vet, pulled out a textbook and sent us a screenshot of that.

Robb: So then once I had that, I was able to work backwards from what we had currently and I had to figure… It was a massive dilution because I was dealing with something that’s usually given to cattle and sheep, and I had delude it to a 31 gram bird. And usually in the birds, you’re dealing with a one or two kilogram bird at least. And so there was-

Nicki: Some math going on.

Robb: I had a solid front and back page of conversions to get this thing there, and we got some down the little guy, but he didn’t make it.

Nicki: It was a little late. And again, we don’t know that that was for sure what he was dealing with, but it seemed from all of his behavior lined up with what that looks like online. So anyway, so lots of discussion about grief and loss and all of that.

Robb: But she’s so impressed with that kid. She not once wavered from the duty that she set before herself and things like that are really intense. Death in general is intense, caregiving something that is dying or newly born either side, some of the most intense stuff that you can ever experience in your life. And she got a heap and dose of it really, a week of during the waiting hours-

Nicki: All the intensity of a newborn and all of the…

Robb: And none of the joyous upside ultimately of success there. But super impressed with her. It was a lot.

Nicki: Yep.

And then we buried the little guy next to our cat that we lost a couple years ago. Okay, so moving on. We had a listener named Joey who wrote in, and I wanted to share this because it’s a resource that his son found very, very helpful, and they’ve also shared it with other people who found it helpful and I know some of you are dealing with post-concussion syndrome and whatnot, so this might be an additional resource for you all.

Hey, Robb and Nicki. I’m a longtime listener and I thoroughly enjoyed the Salty Talk podcast with John Welborn. John’s experiences and recovery from TBI were very helpful. My now 16-year-old son struggled with the effects of post-concussion syndrome in middle school. Before diagnosis, he regressed lost weight and practically withered before our eyes. We had him evaluated by essentially all types of pediatric specialists without any diagnosis.

I’m a physician, so I know how to navigate the medical system for better or worse, with no answers and no results, we sought evaluation with a functional medicine doctor. She quickly zeroed in on his history of concussions as the cause of his symptoms. After doing further research on our own, we found a place in Provo, Utah called Cognitive FX. We registered our son for two weeks of therapy there and it was completely life-changing.

He has his life back. He will not be able to play contact sports in high school, but he is functional again. I don’t have a question, but I just want to mention that as a resource for people suffering from chronic post-concussion syndrome, I don’t work for CFX, I don’t have an ownership interest in CFX, but I cannot recommend them highly enough.

We have referred five other families to treatment there with positive results as well. So Joey, thank you so much for sharing that and I’m sure that will be helpful to somebody out there who’s listening, so thank you for that.

Let’s see. I don’t think we have any other stuff at the top here. Do you want to jump into your news topic?

Robb: Sure, sure. Yeah. Pretty basic for, compared to what we’ve been dealing with, it’s a paper comparison of the DASH and DASH stands for dietary approaches to stop hypertension diet and a higher fat dash diet on blood pressure and lipids and lipoproteins randomized controlled trial. The conclusion, the high fat DASH diet lowered blood pressure at to the same extent as the DASH diet, but also reduced plasma triglyceride and VLDL concentrations without significantly increasing LDL cholesterol.

Basically the DASH diet is this very low sodium, typically low calorie, very low fat diet, and what they did was a comparison with high fat dairy and some other high fat sources to just see what the delta would be between them and the higher fat, higher saturated fat DASH diet seemed to work better on pretty much any lipid parameter health parameter that you would care to consider. It’d be interesting, usually in the standard dash diet, they do allow dairy products, but it has to be low fat or no fat dairy products. And so if you were to look at vitamin D, vitamin A and some of those things that you would get from these higher fat dairy sources, almost certainly would be better in this other diet, but worth taking a peek at, nothing earth-shattering, but pretty good.

Nicki: So fat’s not bad.

Robb: Not in this context, no.

Nicki: Okay. All righty. The Healthy Rebellion Radio is sponsored by our salty AF electrolyte company element, and the truth is everyone needs electrolytes, but if you’re an active person or on a low-carb diet, you really need electrolytes to feel and perform your best. Whether you’re training for strength endurance or just trying to make it through grueling workday, make it a point to put electrolytes in your water, your body and your brain will thank you. And as you know, it’s still grapefruit season, which means there’s another awesome element flavor that you can add into your rotation to keep you hydrated, energized, and ready to perform at your best. Get yours, excuse me, at drinklmnt.com/robb. That’s drinklmnt.com/robb

Robb: Wonderful.

Nicki: You ready for questions?

Robb: Let’s do it.

Nicki: All right. This one is from Steve on the downsides of coffee. He writes, what do you think about coffee? I hear a lot of talk on coffee mainly about sleep cycles and blocking adenosine and then the usual worship of loving coffee. I have a stressful job and I find that giving up coffee does wonders for anger management, stress, burnout, and all around negative feelings. I do occasionally use it when I have a morning of zero motivation as I think it increases cortisol. I usually stick to gunpowder green tea because it doesn’t take me to dark places. I wonder how many people have kept drinking five cups a day and then got on Lexapro or something like that without taking stock of the situation. Should there be more talk around the negative aspects of coffee on mental health?

Robb: Yeah, it’s an interesting one and coffee in particular, I guess we could look at maybe two angles on it, the caffeine angle and then the immunogenic angle. Cyrex Labs has a screen for folks who potentially have gluten cross reactivity with regards to coffee and also chocolate and some other things. And this is one of those things that I’ve never done because I was just kind of like, frankly didn’t want to know one way or the other. But that is kind of an aside, but I think the Steve’s question mainly is related to the kind of stimulant effects and when you look at… We’ve been to Italy together and my sense is that the bulk of the coffee consumed there is in relative calm and peace and downtime, in contrast to the American way of consuming coffee, which is the more Mach 10 hair on fire, you are the harder, you’re pounding the coffee and you’re doing a double espresso and then moving on and whatnot.

We drink coffee by the gallons here, literally the 20 cup Mr. Coffee and people consuming that throughout the day. As a baseline, in talking with Dr. Kirk Parsley, for most people, the therapeutic window of caffeine is about 50 to 60 milligrams every two hours, and you want to do it earlier in the day, not later in the day because later in the day can and will affect sleep. We’ve talked about this before, that the half-life of caffeine, it varies massively from person to person like, Luis is a fast metabolizer, which people at the very, and even on his 23andme, it says likely a fast metabolizer, but physiologic or phenotypically, this is obvious because the guy can shoot down a giant pot of coffee.

Nicki: 10:00 PM and go right to bed. Yeah.

Robb: And he’s not adrenalized and burned out. And so just on the half-life clearance, somebody like Luis has a half-life of about four hours. There are other people that can be as long as 36 hours, and that’s a completely different experience of a cup of coffee, one person versus another. So by and large, we consume way more than what we need for the therapeutic dose. We consume too much too often. Almost certainly there’s some negatives to the amount and variety that we take down in that regard.

Nicki: And if adding a bunch of sugar or other things to it that also can affect-

Robb: Yeah, God, I didn’t even think about that. I mean, coffee in the United States in particular is really just a case-

Nicki: It’s like water that people put flavorings and sugar into.

Robb: It’s basically a case for liquid dessert.

Nicki: Yeah.

Robb: Which is a whole other angle I hadn’t even really thought about. So interestingly, you mentioned gunpowder green tea, like green tea messes me up worse than coffee does. Black tea messes me up less bad than coffee or green tea. So I think that there’s… And it’s anxiety type stuff, and so there’s theophylline and theobromine and all these different stimulants from teas to chocolates to coffee, and it all has different effects on folks and I think that this is where you just have to pay attention to your individual response and then modify from there. I will say this, that interestingly, I think that the more stressed out people are, the more sleep-deprived people are, ironically kind of the less-

Nicki: Coffee they should have.

Robb: The less good the coffee is doing them, and coffee in particular, caffeine in particular is really good if you’re doing movement. It’s really kind of an inappropriately utilized drug if you’re… And I’ve done it plenty of times of probably thousands bordering on millions of times where I sit down to do work and I drink coffee or have some tea and I’m doing cognitive work.

And it can help in that regard to some degree, but it really is best suited towards augmenting physical activity. So if you’re going to get out and go on a walk or a run, and again, a little bit of caffeine goes a long way, like the half a cup of coffee versus the full 200 milligram Starbucks type coffee, much less goes further. So there’s ways to optimize its utilization. I guess in wrapping up though, it is worth noting that the epidemiology on coffee and tea consumption seems to show this linear correlation between improved health, reduced all cause mortality and intake level. So there is something interesting to that, but I think the hidden calories, when you dress them up, the disturbances-

Nicki: If you’re already stressed and-

Robb: … and if you’re already stressed. Yeah.

Nicki: And not sleeping enough, then it… Wonder if there’s been a study on that. People who are doing the five to 10 cups a day and only sleeping five hours a night, and I’m sure there’s lots of people in that category.

Robb: I’m sure there’s a lot of moving parts there. We just know that short sleep is bad news, and so I think it’s going to be start getting really difficult to decouple-

Nicki: What is really impacting-

Robb: Poor sleep plus no coffee, poor sleep plus coffee. How does all that play out? I just know for sure that in that sleep-deprived scenario, additional caffeine, it’ll give you a little boost initially and then it craters you sooner. Yeah.

Nicki: Okay. Let’s see. Our next question is on Crohn’s from Fred and he says, Hi Robb and Nicki, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the work you’ve done over the years. I’ll jump to the punchline that last year at the age of 54, I was diagnosed with Crohn’s. The Crohn’s is under control with biologics infusion, and I’m just trying to get back to health and fitness, and I was wondering if you had nutrition recommendations in living with Crohn’s. Are there resources you recommend?

I live in Vancouver, Canada. I’m 55 years old, six foot tall, 215 pounds. I’ve been reasonably athletic in my life, playing football, hockey, lacrosse, boxing into my mid-twenties and then got into running. Then with young kids, took a break from fitness and then got into road cycling, started playing lacrosse again, and finally got into power lifting 10 years ago. I’ve been doing keto off and on since 2016 and bone broth fasting. I’ve never been sick. Then the wheels fell off last year when I got sick and was diagnosed with Crohn’s. The Crohn’s is under control with medication and I’ve resumed power lifting and road cycling. I have a hundred-mile bike race coming up in July. I apologize for the long message and thanks again for the years of great information you provide.

Robb: Man, Fred, it’s interesting to have this kind of come out of nowhere and so would be worth digging into, was there a precipitating event that triggered this viral infection? I mean, usually, there’s some precipitating event and sometimes that can help to steer things towards better resolution. Just having an idea of what caused the initial insult, sometimes it’s not that helpful. I know for a fact that my exposure to Giardia ages ago was kind of the thing that took me down at the kneecaps with celiac and my overall gut health. And so it’s worth noting that, but it hasn’t played-

Nicki: A significant role in [inaudible 00:19:41] type of resolution.

Robb: Yeah. So I guess if that’s a thing. And man on this chron story, there are people like Dr. Ruscio, Agley Jacobs, that both of them have their specific gut protocol books, which are both outstanding. I would get in and take a look at what they have going on, and all of it typically boils down to some type of an elimination diet. And I would make the case that the ultimate elimination diet is fasting, but clearly, we can’t do that forever. And then secondary to fasting is some iteration of carnivore and I guess one cut carnivore ala Jordan Peterson might be the most extreme version of this. And then clearly there’s all kinds of different iterations of car carnivore, whether you do or don’t include dairy, whether you do or don’t include poultry and kind of on and on from that. And then there’s gaps, specific carbohydrate diet, autoimmune paleo, which are less restrictive arguably than basic carnivore.

And I’m also not entirely sure that they’re more efficacious. If the goal were to get your Crohn’s to a spot where you’re off the biologics and also asymptomatic, not suffering any of the deleterious effects, then it’s one of these moving targets as to how fastidious, how tight you need to be on this. But that’s really the spectrum. There’s all kinds of other stuff, we need to consider vitamin D levels, stress levels, sleep, the usual, broad ranging, health considerations, meditation, mindfulness, all that type of stuff are all generally helpful for these situations. Stress definitely seems to worsen gut related issues, but at the end of the day, I think the primary driver usually is some sort of a environmental insult, typically coming from food, and we have to figure out how to address that. And again, some flavor of the sliding scale of a elimination diet is kind of where we go.

Nicki: Do you think it’d be interesting, Fred, to note how you’re feeling right now, and clearly you’re training a lot for this race, but how do you feel after this race? Because that’s a big race, and again, that volume of exercise can be a stress, so I’m not saying don’t do it, but I’m just saying pay attention to that because that might inform whether you do-

Robb: Continue doing stuff.

Nicki: Big races like that in the future or shorter duration type things.

Robb: Yeah, yeah, it’s a great point.

Nicki: Okay, final question this week is from May on seed oils. Hi Robb and Nikki. I love your podcast. It’s always the highlight of my week to listen. You both have such a balanced view on health issues, and I wanted to ask about seed oils. I know they’re not good for us in large amounts, or am I wrong about that? But what about small amounts here and there? If we go out to eat a couple times a month or have a few tortilla chips here and there, is that still super damaging to health? I see so many health influencers talking about how bad seed oils are and how we shouldn’t touch the things with a 10-foot pole. Wondering your views on occasional seed oil ingestion?

Robb: I am definitely on the occasional exposure is, in my opinion, not a big deal. And there may be folks for whom it is a bigger deal, maybe they have more complex health issues and they need to be that much more fastidious. But I think if you are generally getting some pastured meat, getting some cold water fish so that we’re well addressed on the Omega-3s in our diet, I just don’t see this as being that big of an issue. And there’s still pieces to this that I just don’t get because olive oil is… Olive oil’s great. And it’s all these benefits. Olive oil can range in Omega-6 content from as low as 3% to as high as 20%. It can be much higher than out of the box, just like high oleic safflower oil or something like that. And so I’m still… I get it, it’s this pro-inflammatory thing, Omega-3, Omega-6 balance.

Lauren Cordain talked about this stuff back in the day. I think that there’s something to it, but it’s still, there’s perplexing pieces to it. It still doesn’t feel like a super unified theory. And I’ve seen some folks like Paul Saladino where, and I’ve heard that he’ll be out dining with a group of people and he’ll completely shake down the kitchen staff about, do you use seed oils on the grill? And stuff like that. And each person do whatever the fuck you want to do, but that just seems ridiculous to me. You might make a request, “Hey, could you use butter when you cook this steak instead of…” And that’s fine. But making this big scene around that stuff I find kind of personally ridiculous. But again, each person to their own on that.

Nicki: It seems to me like if somebody has an inflammatory condition, maybe they’re autoimmune, maybe they are struggling with an inflamed joint from some sort of injury, maybe then, you’re a little more fastidious and careful with the types of pro-inflammatory foods that you’re eating. But if you’re otherwise healthy, maybe you are as lean as you want to be and you don’t have any kind of health issue that would benefit from specifically excluding them, then I think going out to dinner and if you have some chips, okay, so be it. Don’t stress about that.

Robb: Absolutely. Yeah. And I still have health issues that I’m tinkering with and I will until I die apparently. But I’ve been uber mega strict on this stuff. I’ve been more loose with it and I haven’t really noticed that big of a difference. My sleep quality, my stress levels, how I interpret distress, am I doing some mindfulness stuff? All of that has had a much greater impact than if I filch a handful of corn chips when we go out to Mexican food or something like that. I just haven’t noticed all that much of a difference.

Nicki: I think it’s definitely the poison is in the dose. If you’re eating chips every day and you’re having trail mix that has a bunch of nuts that have been sitting in the package for… Potentially oxidized nuts that have been sitting in the package for two years and you’re doing a variety of things like this day in and day out then I think, again, the dose is-

Robb: Much more than-

Nicki: The dose is important here.

Robb: Yeah. But May, good question. And that’s just my take on this stuff. There are people that are clearly much more adamant and certain of how horrible these things are, but I still have… I have questions around this stuff and I have serious annoyance around, again, it’s like Melissa Hartwig, she had her whole 30-

Nicki: Salad dressings.

Robb: Salad dressings that came out. And I like Melissa, I don’t agree with all the shit that she’s up to all the time, but I generally support what they’re doing on the dietary side and all that type of stuff. But they came out with these salad dressings and she was just getting savaged by people because they use this high oleic safflower oil.

And I popped my nose in there and I’m like, “Okay, what’s the problem with this?” And the peanut gallery would say, “Well, it’s got Omega-6s in it.” It’s like, “Okay, is olive oil okay?” “Well yeah, olive oil’s great.” “Well, olive oil has more fucking Omega-6s than this stuff does.” And so it’s serious annoyance that there’s just this religious cult mentality around this stuff. And people don’t actually know what the fuck they’re talking about. They don’t know high oleic safflower oil actually has fewer Omega-6s than olive oil most of the time. And does that even matter? Again, when we back up a little bit when we look at some of the health associations of just nut consumption, and I know that nuts are this no-no, within certain bands of the carnivore scene, but it’s like, there’s a pretty good signal there. It’s not super ambiguous. There’s a pretty good signal that seems to suggest some sort of healthful benefit with consumption of nuts.

Nicki: In moderation.

Robb: Well, yeah. I guess, but it’s like-

Nicki: Well, I’m just thinking of the client that I had that was eating the entire container of Costco cashews in it.

Robb: We’ve told that story. Yeah. Yeah. But was the Omega-6s in that thing of cashews the problem or was it the 4,000 calories in a dose that was the primary problem? Yeah.

Nicki: Okay. We done there?

Robb: We’re good. We’re good.

Nicki: All right. Thank you everyone for your questions this week. Have a wonderful weekend. Hopefully you have some sunshine where you are. Happy Father’s Day to all the fathers out there. And remember to check out our show sponsor element for all of your electrolyte needs@drinklmnt.com/robb. That’s drinklmnt.com/robb. And I think that’s all. We’ll catch you all next week.

Robb: Bye everybody.

Nicki: Bye-bye.

Where you can find us:

Submit questions for the podcast: https://robbwolf.com/contact/submit-a-question-for-the-podcast/

Don’t forget, Wired to Eat is now available!

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Please Subscribe and Review: Apple Podcasts | RSS

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In this episode we talk with John Welbourn — NFL veteran, Power Athlete Founder, Dad, Husband, and Kick-Ass Friend, about his experiences with traumatic brain injury and what he’s done to reverse the damage and essentially de-age his brain. We also talk about his newfound passion for jiu jitsu and the strength and conditioning work he’s doing with several world class BJJ players. 

Show Notes:

Power Athlete Radio episode 488 Hyberbaric Hype Man, Joe Dituri

Power Athlete Radio episode 572 Hyperbarics Part Deux with Dr. Joe Dituri

Dr Joe Dituri on Instagram @drdeepsea 

Dr. Tom Incledon

Dr. Phillip Yoo – Non-Surgical Pain Management

Sponsor:

The Healthy Rebellion Radio is sponsored by our electrolyte company, LMNT.
Proper hydration is more than just drinking water. You need electrolytes too! Check out The Healthy Rebellion Radio sponsor LMNT for grab-and-go electrolyte packets to keep you at your peak! They give you all the electrolytes want, none of the stuff you don’t. Click here to get your LMNT electrolytes

Transcript:

Coming soon…

Where you can find us:

Submit questions for the podcast: https://robbwolf.com/contact/submit-a-question-for-the-podcast/

Don’t forget, Wired to Eat is now available!

Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, iBooks

Please Subscribe and Review: Apple Podcasts | RSS

Submit your questions for the podcast here

News Topic:

IgG4 Antibodies Induced by Repeated Vaccination May Generate Immune Tolerance to the SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein

Effectiveness of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 Bivalent Vaccine

Show Notes:

Sustainable Dish recipe for Salty Grapefruit Limeade

Emily Fletcher: Stress Less, Accomplish More

Questions: 

Apeel Fruit Coating

Ann asks:

Hi Robb & Nikki I’ve listen to you since the beginning and I’ve been a fan of Robb’s since he was with Loren Cordain. I have a question that is really bothering me. I try my hardest to do everything as healthy as I can afford and can physically manage, but lately, there’s a lot of conversation about the new Fruit and vegetable coating that’s called Apeel. I feel that this isn’t safe, but what are you supposed to do if the only fruit and vegetable that you can find has that on it?? Have you researched this at all? I’d be interested in what you’d have to say

Type A personality and High-ish fasting glucose

Kelly writes:

Hi Robb! I’m a fairly new listener (just started listening a few months ago – thank you for your super interesting range of topics!). I had a question after reading one short line in your book Wired to Eat. You mentioned that being Type A or “wound tightly” can lead to higher readings of fasting blood sugar. I personally would describe myself as Type A and always wake up with a rush of energy in the morning and an urge to “get things done” immediately. I also have a history of anxiety, although it’s been amazingly managed with switching over to zero added sugar, zero grains and by getting great sleep.

Recently I’ve been experimenting with my blood sugar to get a sense of where I’m at. I test after meals (usually 1.5 hours) and my blood sugar is always around 77-100, depending on if I went on a walk after the meal or not. Typically it hovers on average at 86-90 postprandial. And from my understanding, the goal is to be under 120 by two hours. So these results seem great! But every time I test my fasted blood sugar around 6am, it’s on the “higher” side of normal – 89-95. Could this be due to my Type A personality as you mentioned in your book?

For reference: I’m a 5’5” 30 year old woman. I’m very active (walk about 13-15,000 steps per day), go to the gym 4-5 days per week for resistance training. I eat lower carb, I don’t eat grains, I get about 130 grams of protein per day (around 90-100 of that being from complete sources), I eat 1-2 servings of low sugar fruit per day, I’m not shy on eating whole fats (but I don’t track, so not entirely sure on what I eat per day – but I always eat until satisfied). In the past, my triglycerides were well under 100, usually around 70 ish and my blood pressure is about 100/65.

Thank you for your insight! I appreciate the way you reason things out.

Sponsor:

The Healthy Rebellion Radio is sponsored by our electrolyte company, LMNT.
Proper hydration is more than just drinking water. You need electrolytes too! Check out The Healthy Rebellion Radio sponsor LMNT for grab-and-go electrolyte packets to keep you at your peak! They give you all the electrolytes want, none of the stuff you don’t. Click here to get your LMNT electrolytes

Transcript:

Where you can find us:

Submit questions for the podcast: https://robbwolf.com/contact/submit-a-question-for-the-podcast/

Don’t forget, Wired to Eat is now available!

Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, iBooks

Please Subscribe and Review: Apple Podcasts | RSS

Submit your questions for the podcast here

News Topic:

EU Parliament COVID Conference. Dr David Martin

Show Notes:

The evolutionary origin and significance of menopause

Questions: 

Anti nutrients

Lee writes:

Hi.

I hear a lot about anti nutrients and want to make sure that I get as much from my diet as possible. Is there a time you should allow between eating something known to have anti nutrients follows by something like beef or liver to get the full amount on nutrition from the food. I generally try to leave an hour between having a coffee before then having breakfast which is usually eggs with beef.

Purpose of negative menopause symptoms?

Casi writes:

I could listen to your podcast every day, in fact you are the ONLY podcast I have set to automatically download every time, and I listen to a lot of podcasts. Can you guys just talk for a couple hours?? K Thanks.

My question… as my 45th year around the sun approaches, I am very much not looking forward to the negative symptoms of pre-menopause and menopause. Seems every person during these times has one or many negative side effects. So, why would this be, evolutionarily?? What’s the point in women feeling like shit for years? Just nature telling women they are past their usefulness?? Thoughts?

Thank you for all you guys do!!

Eat too little or too late

Eric writes:

What’s your opinion on eating too little protein per day or eating it too late?

Outside of some injuries I’m still working through from a getting hit by a car while on my bicycle 16 months ago, things are going well: stable weight at 170#, feel good, ~11% body fat, 23 BMI. I’m 47, eat paleo plus high-fat dairy, and resistance train, zone 2, or similar all week. My goal is to maintain or gain muscle so I can keep playing with my kids and/or get back up if I get into another accident. I aim for 1 g of protein per pound of bodyweight everyday, split into three servings at least 2 hours apart. I try to eat my last meal of the day at least 2 hours before I’m asleep.

A couple of times a month, due to work or play, I’ll miss or forget meals and find myself with only two hours before bed and still ~110 g of protein to eat. How you would rank 1) eating all 110 grams at once, 2) eating only 60 g (assuming that’s about the max I’m going to be able to absorb), 3) eating another meal in two hours right before going to sleep, or 4) eating an additional protein serving the next day?

Additional info:

– I tend to lose weight pretty rapidly when I travel and don’t get my regular protein and resistance training.

– Prior to the accident I was eating one meal a day, which is why it’s so easy for me to forget meals. Weight was stable if a little lower than now, and it was difficult to gain any weight.

– I’ve been choosing 3) eating another meal in two hours right before going to sleep — interested in what you would choose!

Thanks,

Eric

Sponsor:

The Healthy Rebellion Radio is sponsored by our electrolyte company, LMNT.
Proper hydration is more than just drinking water. You need electrolytes too! Check out The Healthy Rebellion Radio sponsor LMNT for grab-and-go electrolyte packets to keep you at your peak! They give you all the electrolytes want, none of the stuff you don’t. Click here to get your LMNT electrolytes

Transcript:

Click here for PDF of transcript

Nicki: It is time to make your health an act of rebellion. We’re tackling personalized nutrition, metabolic flexibility, resilient aging, and answering your diet and lifestyle questions. This is the only show with the bold aim to help 1 million people liberate themselves from the sick care system. You’re listening to the Healthy Rebellion Radio. The contents of this show are for entertainment and educational purposes only. Nothing in this podcast should be considered medical advice. Please consult your licensed and credentialed functional medicine practitioner before embarking on any health, dietary, or fitness change. Warning, when Robb gets passionate, he’s been known to use the occasional expletive. If foul language is not your thing, if it gets your britches in a bunch, well, there’s always Disney+.

Robb: Welcome back, friends, neighbors, loved ones.

Nicki: Hello, everyone. This is episode 154 of the Healthy Rebellion Radio. Morning, hubs.

Robb: Morning. You had adventures in Hound-dom?

Nicki: I did. I did. Took Grizz, the now one-year-old Labrador, to the vet for his… He got his three-year rabies vaccine and his distemper, parvo.

Robb: Awesome.

Nicki: Yep, it was exciting. Now we’re back. Now we’re recording this episode.

Robb: Man, this one’s starting off as a barn burner of an episode.

Nicki: And I was going to ask you this. She was telling me about lepto-

Robb: Speridium.

Nicki: Speridium, yep. Apparently it’s a thing in this area, so she wanted to give me all the information so I could make an informed decision. Apparently if raccoons or skunks urinate in a puddle or a lake or anywhere and a dog comes behind and drinks it, then they can get it and it’s a kidney problem and it can be passed along to humans. She’s from Minnesota and they don’t have it there, but it is a thing here apparently. So I said-

Robb: Is there a vaccine for it?

Nicki: There is a vaccine for it. That’s what she was trying to-

Robb: There’s a vaccine for that.

Nicki: There’s a vaccine for that. So I said, “Thank you for the information. Let me think about that and talk it over with my husband.”

Robb: Well, we’ll have to dig into it, but I think we’ve mentioned on the show, DarkHorse did kind of an analysis looking at all-cause mortality as it relates to different types of vaccines and they made the case, from a study that supports this, that the attenuated vaccines, where it’s like a weakened form of the pathogen, seem to overall generally have a net beneficial kind of profile. And then these things that rely heavily on adjuvants to mount an immune response, not super surprisingly, end up, according to this data, having net negative all-cause mortality. So not only is it the net positive of whatever it’s protecting you from not that great, it might have some other untoward effects. And it’s interesting that things like polio and yellow fever and some really nasty stuff tend to be these attenuated viruses.

Nicki: Yeah, I have no idea what type of-

Robb: Lepto was a bacterium.

Nicki: Okay.

Robb: Yeah, yeah.

Nicki: Well, anyway, we can discuss that later, but-

Robb: Interesting nonetheless.

Nicki: Interesting nonetheless, yep. I’m trying to think of what else we have up front here in the show. We are going to spend the weekend in Missoula for a little-

Robb: Picks and locks.

Nicki: Picks and locks seminar, ankle picks and wristlocks. So our coach, Travis Davidson here in Kalispell is traveling to the SBG gym in Missoula to do this seminar and Travis is notorious for wristlocking any wrists he can get a hand on, and Robb also can be that asshole who tries to wristlock you every moment he has a chance. Sometimes in the morning I wake up and I go to give him a hug and if I put my hand on his chest, he tries to wristlock me.

Robb: I go slow.

Nicki: Yeah.

Robb: I go slow.

Nicki: Anyway, so I’m excited to learn a little bit of this magic so that I can retaliate only on the appropriate people who deserve it of course, because-

Robb: Which, clearly I am At the top of that list.

Nicki: Wristlocks are mean and dirty and I don’t know if I call them like good Jiu-jitsu. Assholes do them and yes, that means I’m calling my coach an. Sometimes, not all the time.

Robb: I think he would own that. I think he would own that.

Nicki: Yeah. Anyway, so that’s that. Let’s see, I have a note here from Jack, Jack Rustin, one of our moderators inside the Healthy Rebellion who had a comment on our question from Jason last week regarding his blood glucose situation, and we did have a couple of people that wrote in with different thoughts, but this one from Jack was pretty good, so I wanted to read that to you all. He says, “You guys alluded to this, but what I’m thinking about specifically is a situation where those high carb meals are also the ones that include dairy, some butter on the potato, cream or yogurt with the fruit, et cetera, et cetera. If there’s a reaction there, it certainly could provoke a stress response mediated glucose surge. I’ve seen this in a recent client with gluten. Even tiny amounts of bread would elicit a huge spike in subsequent reactive hypo.” Hypoglycemia. “Might be worth trying an experiment with pure glucose powder added to a known good meal to see if that behaves in a different way.”

Robb: Great idea.

Nicki: Yep.

Robb: And this kind of hearkens back a little bit to how and why I set up the seven-day carb test the way that I did is to be able to ferret out if maybe the carb source or even just foods in general produce a glycemic load in and of themselves or that immunogenic kind of response.

Nicki: So something else for you to tinker with, Jason, and thank you, Jack, for that. Okay. Are we ready to dive into this bombshell of a news topic that you got?

Robb: Sure.

Nicki: All right, it’s all you.

Robb: This is just a link to a YouTube video, EU Parliament Covid Conference, Dr. David Martin. And Nicki, you mentioned remembering David Martin from early in the-

Nicki: Early on in the Covid run up, I remember seeing some… He did some video pieces, some YouTube pieces talking about how the Covid… I don’t know if it was specifically like this. The protein or something about… It wasn’t the vaccine, but it was something about the virus itself had been patented prior to the actual pandemic and he did multiple videos. And again, this is three years ago now, so I don’t remember them clearly, but then I remember seeing some people saying, “Oh, well, this can be disproved here, this can be disproved here.” I think he’s an attorney, right, by-?

Robb: I think he’s a physician also.

Nicki: Okay. Again, this is just memory from many moons ago in Covid years. And so when Robb received this video from a friend of his in Portugal and he was playing it this morning and I was like, “That’s the same guy.” He’s got a shaved bald head and very articulate, very eloquent, very passionate on the topic, but now he’s presenting in front of the EU Parliament regarding all of the history prior to COVID-19 that deals with the Covid strain.

Robb: And he has citations for all this. And one of the opening citations is that he was sitting in the same chair in the same panel 10 years earlier and warning against the weaponization of biological substances in general and these coronaviruses were part of the topic and it’s really a tour de force because it pulls… It’s funny, somewhere along this whole story, I just kind of had to step off the train. I was pretty dialed in on, “Okay, EcoHealth Alliance got this funding here and this happened there,” and then at some point it was just like, “Oh my God, it’s so much.” It was a full-time job to stay just on top of that stuff. And he does a really great… Like my friend, he said this is, what I call, Covid for Dummies, history of Covid for Dummies because it goes on to detail that… And this is one of the things that was really concerning for me and when the red flags started popping up for me when we were told that our one way out of this situation was a vaccine and this was before-

Nicki: And a vaccine in a class of viruses that had never had a successful-

Robb: Never had a successful vaccine.

Nicki: Vaccine ever before.

Robb: And they had fucking tried and tried and tried with both SARS-1 and MERS, and actually in this video he makes the case at the SARS-1 popped up suspiciously around some patenting of genetic material related to SARS-1 and even some commentary around there will be a release of this pathogen and the main way to get people motivated by this is a shareholder return for the pharma side and a proper application of force via both political and media means. It’s really a fucking jaw dropping piece and if a 10th of what this guy is saying is true, it’s like holy shit.

Nicki: If he was a total whack job, he wouldn’t have been speaking in front of the EU parliament 10 years ago and he wouldn’t have been invited back.

Robb: He had a standing ovation from the parliament.

Nicki: And he wouldn’t have been invited back in recent weeks.

Robb: God, I don’t even know what to make of it in some ways because he made the point in there that many people have been bought off and I don’t know if… A little bit like the US having the reserve currency status, we really benefit from that relatively, and the rest of the world gets a dose of inflation and people are getting tired of that and maybe folks that have historically been pretty politically aligned with the US, they’re just growing weary of the shenanigans and maybe there’s some pushback around that, but it’s an interesting piece. He speaks clearly and succinctly. It’s a 20-minute video. I listened to it on 1.5 speed and it was good. You can understand everything and it takes you about 10 minutes to get through it and it’s kind of jaw dropping and he does offer citations and resources for the claims that he makes in there, so it’s worth taking a peak at.

I know that in many regards, Covid is largely in the rearview mirror now, but there was a fair amount of warning apparently if you were in the know, I wasn’t in the know, but if one was in the know, that something like this was on the horizon and as Covid was even winding down, we were warned by people in that Fauci echelon of government and media that there’s another one on the way. And so I think it’s important for us to be really well-educated on what the playbook is on this story so that we can be ready if there is something like this again. And goddamn, some people need to be held to account, like wow.

Nicki: That’s the problem. It seems like the people that need to be held to account are never held to account.

Robb: It’s like the 2008 financial-

Nicki: I read something this morning that some of the people, the investigation that they did into the Clintons, they’re trying to pull those files, but the FBI has said that they have been… I’m going to botch this because I don’t remember the exact phrasing, but it was something like irretrievably damaged.

Robb: Right.

Nicki: They were destroyed, and so there’s… And who knows what has gone on? Clearly some nefarious things have happened, but if you can’t even access the evidence because the evidence has been tampered with or irretrievably damaged, then again, going back to the thing where people need to be held accountable, we have a long track record now of lots of heinous things happening and people not being held accountable, and so what message does that send? “Oh, we can just get away with whatever we want as long as we are…”

Robb: As long as you far enough up the food chain.

Nicki: “As long as we have a certain stature.”

Robb: We don’t hold that stature.

Nicki: No, we don’t. No, we don’t. Okay. Moving on. Anything else?

Robb: No.

Nicki: You’re good there?

Robb: I won’t mention the other thing right now. I’ll just hold on to it.

Nicki: Okay. Well, I don’t even know what you’re talking about so we’ll just move right along.

Robb: Right.

Nicki: All right, folks. It is officially grapefruit season. As you all know, the Healthy Rebellion Radio is sponsored by our salty AF electrolyte company, LMNT, and grapefruit salt is here, which means there’s another awesome LMNT flavor that you can add into your rotation to keep you hydrated, energized, and ready to perform at your best. Whether you’re training for strength, endurance, or just trying to make it through a grueling workday, make it a point to put electrolytes in your water. Drinking electrolytes can really improve how you feel and perform. Who doesn’t want that? Grapefruit salt is one of our most popular LMNT flavors, even for folks who don’t like actual grapefruit, the fruit itself.

Robb: I’m one of them.

Nicki: You can now order grapefruit salt directly from drinklmnt.com or log into your account and add a box of grapefruit to your subscription. The truth is everyone needs electrolytes, but if you’re an active person and/or on a low-carb diet, you really need electrolytes to feel and perform your best. You can get yours at drinklmnt.com/robb. That’s drink-L-M-N-T.com/R-O-B-B. i love grapefruit season. It is my favorite flavor.

Robb: It’s up there for me and I don’t like grapefruits as a standalone item.

Nicki: I do like grapefruits.

Robb: Yeah.

Nicki: And the girls both like grapefruits.

Robb: I don’t know what to say about that.

Nicki: Yeah, well, we’re better, superior in all ways.

Robb: You’ve failed me for the last time.

Nicki: Superior aways. Okay, so I’m going to sneak in a quick LMNT question here because it’s a question we received, we’ve answered it before, but I want to answer it again because we have new people listening and popping in and it’s a quick one. This is from Alicia. She says, “I’m carnivore and I love my lifestyle. I’ve been using LMNT for a couple of years, both hot and cold, but recently a friend said, I may be using too much. Is that possible? I use between four to six a day. Wondering your thoughts. Thanks. Love your podcast.”

Robb: I always love these things where it’s like, “You’re using too much.” Well, why? “I don’t know. It just seems like a lot.” It’s like, “Geez, okay.” But the most telling thing for the vast majority of people is some GI upset or disaster pants. And I have to say we were tinkering with LMNT pre Jiu-jitsu, during Jiu-jitsu, and I had tinkered with doing two packs and then three packs in a given amount of water. And the three packs in the given amount of water absolutely sent me to the can.

Nicki: It’s kind of self-limiting.

Robb: Yeah.

Nicki: So if you’re using four a day and you don’t have an issue of being loose in the stools, then you are probably fine. And again, it is also really relative to what activity are you doing. You are a carnivore. Are you highly active? Do you live in a really humid or hot area? Are you training in a hot environment? When we were in Costa Rica for a Jiu-jitsu camp when it was 90 degrees-

Robb: 90 degrees.

Nicki: And super high humidity and we were doing three hours of constant movement and literally drenched in sweat, you better believe we were doing quite a bit of LMNT on those days. So a relative question, but again, as Robb mentioned, there’s a pretty obvious tale-tell sign.

Robb: And LMNT does have a pretty cool thing that we’re spinning up. We’re still kind of beta testing it, but it’s kind of a quiz to help you figure out where you are in this story. In general, the evidence-based story is that most people see best health lowest all-cause mortality at between four to six grams of sodium intake per day from all sources. Highly active people can easily see that double. People eating a low-carb diet can double the baseline needs. So if you’re both low-carb and active, you could see easily a 10 grams per day need, again, from all sources. This is all food, supplemental things like LMNT, olives, et cetera, et cetera. But that thing’s pretty cool and it’ll be ready probably within a couple of weeks and that will give you at least some solid lane lines to ask you some questions. It’ll help you dial that in.

Nicki: Cool. Okay. We have a question from Lee on anti-nutrients. He says, “Hi, I hear a lot about anti-nutrients and I want to make sure that I get as much from my diet as possible. Is there a time you should allow between eating something known to have anti-nutrients followed by something like beef or liver to get the full amount of nutrition from the food? I generally try to leave an hour between having coffee before, then having breakfast, which is usually eggs with beef.”

Robb: Great question, Lee, and probably about an hour is fine on this. If one is doing something like corn tortillas at every meal where the phytate load is so high that we’re going to be sucking up every little bit of zinc and iron and all that stuff, I would be way more concerned about this. Coffee can block the absorption of certain nutrients, chocolate can block the absorption of certain nutrients. Again, it’s totally up to the individual how geeked out you want to be on this. If you poke around and look at coffee or black tea, there usually are some decent kind of kinetic studies looking at how much binding occurs with a standard serving of coffee or tea and what type of inhibition you’re getting of iron absorption and stuff like that.

So if you want to do it, you could dig in a little bit further and just kind of look at the specific items and see what types of things you might get some interference from. I really don’t think that generally it’s that big of a deal, but if you want to have that extra bit of diligence in your diet, I think an hour is more than adequate on that, particularly for a liquid.

Nicki: Okay. Cassie wants to know what the purpose is of menopause symptoms. She says, “I could listen to your podcast every day. In fact, you are the only podcast I have set to automatically download every time and I listen to a lot of podcasts. Can you guys just talk for a couple hours? Okay, thanks.” That’s awesome. “My question, as my 45th year around the sun approaches, I am very much not looking forward to the negative symptoms of premenopause and menopause. Seems every person during these times has one or many negative side effects. So why would this be evolutionarily? What’s the point in women feeling like shit for years, just nature telling women that they’re past their youth usefulness?”

Robb: The use by date.

Nicki: “Thoughts? Thanks for all you guys do.”

Robb: So I have a link to really a fascinating paper that digs into the evolutionary biology of menopause and clearly it’s a theory-based paper. We don’t have randomized controlled trials on this, so I guess in Layne Norton world, this thing doesn’t exist at all, but I think it’s a wonderful theoretical piece and there’s a couple of things that I’m going to pull from the paper and a couple of things that are kind of my opinion and I’ll try to delineate some of that. Some of what comes from the paper, and it kind of touches on some of the symptoms around menopause, there’s this concept of antagonistic pleiotropy, which is that a gene that may be beneficial or a phenotype that may be helpful in youth may be antagonistic later in life. And people have mentioned things around that. People with Huntington’s disease tend to have exceptionally higher fecundity.

They’re usually quite fertile, but then they have a higher likelihood of developing Huntington’s disease later in life. Interestingly though, in just about every case that I’ve seen on the antagonistic pleiotropy story, when I really dig into it, what I’m finding is that modern lifestyles typically end up being an epigenetic trigger that takes the Huntington genetic scenario of the DNA based pair repeat and may actually… They say that genetics load the gun and epigenetics pulls the trigger. I think that a lot of these things are still epigenetically triggered by modern diet and lifestyle. So a lot of what gets floated for antagonistic pleiotropy I think is kind of wrong because they’re still not applying this evolutionary biology template and they’re ignoring that within a hunter-gatherer, more ancestral life context that we may not see these problems. But that said, and this is a little bit different than antagonistic pleiotropy, a lot of the symptoms that women experience with menopause are similar to what they experience postpartum.

So the changes in body temperature where women will get hot flashes, this is a normal kind of occurrence when women are breastfeeding because when women are breastfeeding and postpartum, their estrogen levels are lower and there’s evolutionary adaptation to that because you don’t necessarily want to get pregnant immediately again. And again, this is an interesting part of digging into traditional cultures. There was on average a 4.5 year birth spacing in traditional cultures, which is very different than what we see now, but the thoughts around the hot flashes is that it actually creates a warming surface for the baby and minimizes the amount of food energy that the baby needs to be able to grow and thrive. And so there is kind of evolutionary advantage with some things like that. And so part of what’s happening is that menopause is a bit of an artifact of adaptations that go into and make things happen for the pregnancy, postpartum kind of environment.

Now I’ve got a little bit of a speculation, and this is an opinion piece. If we look at that birth spacing and what happens within traditional cultures and we also look at average lifespan, I don’t think that in general more traditionally living women experienced remotely as much of what we consider to be menopausal type symptoms, and that’s because they probably died before menopause really became that big of a deal because if you have low frequency of births, then you’re not having nearly as many menstrual cycles of what you would normally have within a modern context. If you have a couple and then you get pregnant and you don’t have one during the pregnancy and then you don’t have one for almost five years in between because of the relatively low body fat levels and chronic breastfeeding, not curtailing breastfeeding when the kid is a year old or two years old, that they may breastfeed up into four or five years old, then we end up seeing a lot fewer total menstrual cycles.

So there may be more eggs present and so you may be able to get a woman closer to an old age and still able to have some degree of a menstrual cycle. That is super speculative on my part. Could be complete bullshit so I would put a rather large asterisk on that. I had one other thought around… And then in the paper, it makes the case that… They didn’t make that case in the paper. This is something that I’m speculating about, but the point that they did make in the paper is that relative body mass index and physical fitness dramatically influenced the severity of menopausal symptoms. So syndrome X, metabolic syndrome, dyslipidemia, all that type of stuff tracks really powerfully with the worst severity of menopausal symptoms.

So I think that the reason why women get these symptoms at all is that it’s kind of a hangover from the hormonal changes that occur with pregnancy and postpartum, just namely the reduction in estrogen levels. I think that there may have been a case to be made that the lower frequency of menstrual cycles could have maybe pushed out the total number of years that a woman could have had a viable menstrual cycle. And then finally, if an individual’s physically and metabolically fit, then the severity of these symptoms are much, much, much less in general.

Nicki: So another case to lift some weights and be strong.

Robb: Do a little cardio. Yep.

Nicki: Yep, okay. Interesting. Yeah, I was going to ask if in hunter-gatherer cultures, if anybody had researched whether or not women experienced menopause-

Robb: And there does seem to be-

Nicki: But I don’t know…

Robb: It is in the anthropological literature, but it’s not super well researched.

Nicki: Okay.

Robb: There’s not a ton there. This paper is actually a great resource for other places to go look for somebody living with the huts and interviewing them and talking to them about that.

Nicki: Seems like a great topic to study for any young anthropologist out there that is-

Robb: Absolutely.

Nicki: Curious about this. Okay, our final question this week is from Eric on whether he should eat too little or too late. “What’s your opinion on eating too little protein per day or eating it too late? Outside of some injuries, I’m still working through from getting hit by a car while on my bicycle 16 months ago. Things are going well. I’m stable, at a weight of 170 pounds. Feel good, 11% body fat, 23 BMI. I’m 47, eat paleo plus high fat dairy and resistance train, Zone 2, or similar all week. My goal is to maintain or gain muscle so that I can keep playing with my kids and/or get back up if I get into another accident. I aim for one gram of protein per pound of body weight every day, split into three servings at least two hours apart.”

“I try to eat my last meal of the day at least two hours before I’m asleep. A couple of times a month due to work or play, I’ll miss or forget meals and find myself with only two hours before bed and still 110 grams of protein to eat. How would you rank, one, eating all 110 grams at once, two, eating only 60 grams, assuming that’s about the max I’m going to be able to absorb, or three, eating another meal in two hours right before going to sleep or, four, eating an additional protein serving the next day?” And then he has some additional info. He tends to “lose weight pretty rapidly when I travel and I don’t get my regular protein and resistance training. Prior to the accident, I was eating one meal a day, which is why it’s so easy for me to forget meals. Weight was stable if a little lower than now, and it was difficult to gain any weight.” And he says, “I’ve been choosing option three, eating another meal in two hours right before going to sleep. I’m interested in what you would choose.”

Robb: Man. So one thing is, I think the one meal a day, if you’re traveling, if you just get super busy, I think it’s something that’s cool as-

Nicki: An option if you need had to pull it out.

Robb: … To a stressful life situation. And I see damn near zero benefit to anything in the rest of our living. I’m really finding that breakfast, lunch, dinner is pretty damn good, particularly for hitting these protein minimums. And so I guess if we’re just talking pure theory, a couple of times I’ve come in and we’ve had a particularly busy day and I’m kind of behind on things and I too can contend to lose muscle mass fairly easily, and so I’ll do a mainly protein meal, go to bed. I know that in Huberman world and circadian biology, this is a total no-no, I don’t do it that often. Although I have to say when our kids were younger, we had a pretty legit schedule. I mean we were complete blue hair hour, we ate dinner at like 4:55 and we were all buttoned up and we had our long run before bedtime where we didn’t have food in our belly and all that, and we really had that pretty buttoned up.

Nicki: Once you throw in ice skating lessons in Jiu-jitsu and all the other activities that kids like to do-

Robb: That goes out the window.

Nicki: Your evening routine gets pushed a bit.

Robb: And the main thing that I’ve been looking at is does that later eating seem to negatively influence my sleep? By and large, when I go to bed, I put on some blue blocks, I read on my Kindle with the light really dialed down, and it’s usually 10 minutes and I’m out cold. 10, 15 minutes and I’m done. And I tend to sleep through the night pretty well. I don’t have a ton of problems on that, so I would think about that with regards to… I would really be concerned about this if it was negatively impacting your sleep. I would really wonder about just front loading some of that protein. If the second meal is difficult sometimes and you’re oftentimes forgetting it, I would try to identify just structurally what your day is looking like and try to front load some more calories and protein earlier in the day. There is definitely a case to be made that we don’t have to eat in a completely static fashion. Sometimes we can make things up on a later date, but you can’t always do that. You can’t always be eating fish-

Nicki: Catch it up.

Robb: Day after day after day. There has to be some degree of consistency there. So yeah, I’m trying to think of what else.

Nicki: I’ll also just share the magical food of shrimp. Shrimp, it’s so protein dense, low in calories, and no fat. For anybody who’s struggling to get in their protein allotment, throw some shrimp in with your lunch and your dinner. It bumps up your protein nicely. It doesn’t really affect your other macros. As you all know, we’ve mentioned that we’ve been weighing and measuring and whatnot, and I’m just in awe at the magic of shrimp.

Robb: Well, it’s nice because you can get some good quality shrimp that’s frozen and so it’s in the freezer, you throw it in a pan, you do some olive oil-

Nicki: It’s really quick.

Robb: Add some olive oil. It’s really quick. You could throw some bone broth with it and make a quick little soup out of it. You can do skewers. It is remarkably fast and easy, and Nikki has been using that.

Nicki: It’s mind-blowing how… If you’re short on protein and you’re good with your carbs, you’re good with your fat, shrimp is the answer. It’s like 42. 42 equals shrimp.

Robb: I like it.

Nicki: The answer to the universe.

Robb: The universal answer to all nutrition problems, shrimp.

Nicki: Yes.

Robb: Because it’s some protein, some iodine-

Nicki: Provided you’re not allergic to shellfish.

Robb: Shellfish.

Nicki: Yeah. Okay. Sorry, I derailed you. What else are you going to say?

Robb: No, that’s it. I mean the big things that I would be concerned about is disrupting sleep. I would also try to figure out how to just consistently at least get two meals a day in and maybe that two meal and a snack, three meal a day type thing.

Nicki: Two meals and some shrimp.

Robb: Two meals and some shrimp.

Nicki: The whole Forest Gump… We need to watch that movie again because that whole shrimp boat sequence and all the shrimp has a whole new meaning to it-

Robb: Pretty good.

Nicki: Now. Yep, yep. Okay. So you would choose?

Robb: I guess I didn’t really-

Nicki: You would choose what he’s choosing, eat right before going to sleep potentially-

Robb: Probably, yeah.

Nicki: As long as this wasn’t a frequent thing.

Robb: Yeah.

Nicki: He’s saying it’s a couple of times a month.

Robb: Yeah, yeah, a couple of times a month, no big deal. And really any of these options are fine.

Nicki: Yeah.

Robb: If you just get behind the curve, only having a low protein day is not the end of the world. Eating an additional meal a couple hours before sleeping, if it’s mainly protein and it doesn’t seem to negatively disrupt your sleep, that’s fine. And then if you want to front or overload a little bit the next day, then that’s fine too. All of that’s going to work. We do have a good stable nitrogen pool the way that we maintain muscle mass and it sounds like Eric’s active, and so that anabolic stimulus of just being physically active is going to help offset the loss of muscle mass and everything. But there does have to be some degree of consistency there.

Nicki: Cool. All right, that’s our questions for today. Any other parting thoughts, hubs?

Robb: Got nothing. Just cross your fingers for more sun for us. It’s been a little cloudy, little overcast. Getting some rain, which is kind of good, but goddamn, the weeds grow fast.

Nicki: Which reminds me that I need to go tackle some weeds. We did find some melons that theoretically do well in our growing season, which is very short. I have a Blacktail watermelon and a couple of… Oh, what are those little cantaloupes called? There’s another little melon that has a unique name that apparently-

Robb: It’s like a personal-

Nicki: It’s maybe a large softball sized melon that apparently does well in this climate too. We went to this little plant sale in the community and these have done well for folks that grow things around here, so fingers crossed that we can actually get them all the way to ripeness.

Robb: Ripitude.

Nicki: Ripitude, yep. All right. That’s all I’ve got. I got to go pull weeds.

Robb: Okay. Bye, everybody.

Nicki: Thank you all for listening. Be sure to check out our show sponsor LMNT for all your electrolyte needs. Remember, grapefruit salt is back, so if you love it, you can get it now. If you haven’t tried it, you should try it. LMNT offers no questions asked refunds on all of our flavors, so nothing to lose. Give it a shot. You can grab some at drinklmnt.com/robb. That’s drink-L-M-N-T.com/R-O-B-B. Have a fabulous weekend, everybody. Next week, I will be more dangerous with my wristlocks and ankle picks, and I’ll see you then.

Robb: Live in fear.

Nicki: Bye.

Where you can find us:

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News Topic:

Lab Meat. The $1 Trillion Ugly Truth

Show Notes:

Questions: 

MCT oil

Liz writes: 

Hi guys, one of my clients was told by a previous health coach to never have MCT oil because it is highly processed. I know it is fractionated, but I can’t see how that would damage it. Another process is “lipase esterification” which I think involves heat to rearrange the molecules?

You recommend MCT oil often so I can’t imagine it’s up there with hydrogenated oils, if you could please clarify it would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

How to Improve My Carb Tolerance

Jason says:

Hi folks,

I love the show including the non-health stuff

You guys are a treasure.

Now my question.

My carb tolerance is poor even though my fasting insulin is low.

Been using a CGM which matches a finger prick within 5-10 points

My fasting glucose is typically 97-105.

Just 100g rice (30g carbs) as a morning test spikes my BG to 180+, though it comes down quickly: 110 by 90 minutes. Same with potatoes, and fruit. If I eat a big meaty restaurant meal with mashed potatoes and a medium dessert, 200!.

Then during the day even if I eat no carbs, my BG will hover from 100-110.

I’m 6-pack lean (12% fat as per DEXA) and fit, 145 lbs 5’7″. I eat carnivore-ish with dairy and fruit. I eat 3x a day (usually just a protein smoothie for breakfast after working out). I do 30 minute daily heavy band workouts, and just started doing daily 20 minutes zone 2 in addition.

No health conditions other than this. I sleep very well most nights.

Am a bit stressed with life recently though.

My TG are typically 70+; HDL 60+. Liver numbers good.

A1c was 5.2, fasting insulin 3.5. This should mean my insulin sensitivity is good.

I seem to have “lost the plot” as a year ago my morning BG was usually 83-89, and my BG would only spike briefly to 125 after a small potato as a morning test. One change is that I used to drink homemade kefir every day. I just re-started again, but so far no improvement.

Some more clues:

– I tested Acarbose and 50 mg reduces the BG spike a lot

– I tested a mountain of carbs and 200 mg Acarbose, and… almost no spike but … HOLY GAS BATMAN!!!!! I’m not doing that again unless I want to annoy my wife and co-workers!

– If I eat a bunch of carbs and I see BG rising rapidly, I do 3-4 minutes of HIIT on my air bike and it brings my BG way down in 15 mins.

– If I have half a shot of Brandy with 4 oz ice cream, my BG spikes less than with ice cream alone… wuuut?

– I tried metformin slow release, 500 mg for 2 weeks and it didn’t seem to help

– I tried berberine for 2 weeks and it didn’t seem to help. I’m now trying dihydroberberine and after a week, no change.

Why is my carb tolerance poor even though my fasted insulin and A1c are low?

How do I improve it? I want to eat the occasional carby meal without my BG spiking to 200.

Thanks so much and may you and all the listeners have the blessing of vibrant health.

Cheers,

Jason

Kids and Food

Lindsey writes:

Hi Robb and Nicki! It’s been a year- you both helped me tremendously last spring (2022) when I was diagnosed with GD during the last trimester of my pregnancy. You pointed me to Lily Nichols and her books and videos and I was able to manage my blood sugar through food alone. My doctor was skeptical (surprise, surprise), but humored me for a few weeks until she saw it was working (side note: for any other pregnant moms out there- if you fail the first glucose test, just ask if you can skip the second one and go straight to the glucose monitor. It saved us a lot of time and expedited stopping any potential health issues with the baby… I also didn’t have to have a redo on that nasty drink.). Post-partum, I gave myself a year to try different eating plans, watching my glucose, and by far the most helpful for my milk supply was paleo with lots of water and LMNT.

Last week’s episode- episode 150- was really motivating for me. My husband and I just turned 40 with a 10, 8 and 1 year old. We are in the throws of business in career, kids activities, homeschooling, etc. all while trying to fit in our workouts and eat healthy. We both have weight to drop, but we aren’t gaining, which is a bit of success I guess? With health problems in the past, primarily hormone related, my doctor has always pointed me to a grain and dairy free diet with extremely minimal sugar and alcohol and no coffee (sad but for sure helps me stay healthier than SAD- ha). I’ve been able to get my husband on board after talking to him about Wired to Eat and watching my results. He tried whole 30, then a strict Paleo diet and slept so much better, among other benefits.

The children are the tricky part now. I have no problem telling them what to eat, but I’m curious, what limits do you set for your children with eating and what are some good ways you’ve explained why you eat this way as a family? I see how truly addicting our American food culture is. I didn’t really begin paleo until 2017, and because my husband is just now getting on board, the big kids basically ate the same way as dad- starchy, sugary breakfasts, sandwiches for lunch and paleo dinners unless they felt the need for a tortilla which they would grab on their own. I’ve gotten to a place where grains and sugar are almost completely out of the house now that we are on the same page. The complaints from the big kids are not lacking and the baby flips out if there is even a hint of tortilla, bread or cookie anywhere (he’s grabbed bites and now wants them all the time too). Ideas please!

Lindsey

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Transcript:

Where you can find us:

Submit questions for the podcast: https://robbwolf.com/contact/submit-a-question-for-the-podcast/

Don’t forget, Wired to Eat is now available!

Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, iBooks

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Submit your questions for the podcast here

News Topic:

kitten corner: testable predictions

The Joe Rogan Experience: #1979 Dr. Aseem Malhotra

Show Notes:

Questions: 

Soaking Liver in Milk? 

Laura says: 

Hi Robb & Nicki,

First, I want to say thank you so much for your work. I was a mostly vegetarian for 20+ years before reading (and watching) Sacred Cow. After adding red meat and more protein into my diet, I feel renewed energy in my workouts and in daily life. I’m now an avid listener to your podcast and love the refreshing tell-the-truth approach that you both have on diet, health, and LIFE. Encouraging people to THINK rather than just follow the status quo.

Now for my question…BEEF LIVER. The food we know we should eat, but most people don’t find palatable and therefore, don’t eat often. After lots of experimentation, I finally found a way to make it that I find palatable (and dare I say, even enjoyable?!)… I soak the liver in raw milk for at least an hour, then discard the soaking milk and pulverize the liver in a blender. I freeze it in small portions in silicone muffin cups. Then when I want to eat some, I thaw the 1-2 oz. portions, and fry it in coconut oil, chopping it up with a spoon so that it is the consistency of a very soft ground beef. Add a little salt and it tastes great!

BUT I shared this method with a friend recently and she thought I was depleting the liver of its iron by soaking it in milk first. I consulted Google but got conflicting answers to this question. What say you, biochemist Robb? Am I making the liver “not as good for me” by soaking it in milk first? And a follow-up question: would raw milk or pasteurized milk make a difference in this scenario?

Thanks,

Laura

P.S. I also just bought my first box of LMNT and I’m HOOKED. My husband calls it my afternoon “cocktail” every day. Raspberry Salt is my fave thus far…but I’m hoping Chocolate Mint comes back in the future!

Steps per day vs zone 2 cardio:

Sam says:

Hey Robb and Nicki, Every day I clock in between 10k and 18k steps at work. (Dead serious, no exaggeration) Work is 5 days a week and 8-12 hr shifts. Usually it is in 100 meter bursts and a fairly quick pace. It definitely burns sufficient calories as in the past before i committed to the paleo diet, I would maintain my weight dispite having a bad diet and huge portions. Granted I was very overweight at the time and am still, however much less so since switching to paleo. I’m dropping weight like crazy. Anyway I have heard in the past that zone 2 cardio “gently” burns calories and helps maintain cardiovascular health. So my question is, does my activity level and amount of steps per day qualify as zone 2?

Thanks for reading my question. Sam

Unresponsive gastritis and IBS

John says:

Hi Robb and Nicki,

I seem to have come to a dead end in solving my health issues and wanted to see if you might have any ideas.

In March 2020 I was given an antibiotic (Pen V) at the same time as I may have had covid. Overnight my digestive system was wrecked, I had non-stop severe stomach burning and a churning intenstinal pain. Fast forward three years and the symptoms have not stopped, only calmed down slightly after the initial weeks when it started.

After numerous investigations including scopes, blood/stool tests and scans, I have only been diagnosed with mild ‘chemical type’ gastritis (no h.pylori), slightly elevated calprotectin (around 100-150) but no visible intestinal inflammation, and a small hiatus hernia.

Standard gastritis medications like PPIs, H2 blockers and sucralfate do absolutely nothing and I was quickly spat out the other side of the medical system after they didn’t know what to do with me.

At various points over the years since I developed tinnitus, minor muscle twitching, migraines and also a c.diff infection after starting a PPI, but that was successfully treated with vancomycin.

To keep the word count down I’ll just say that I found the functional medicine world and worked my way through a self compiled list of diets, supplements, probiotics, herbs and alternative treatments but have made zero progress. I have probably done most things on the usual list for gastritis and IBS. I have even tried a capsule FMT and a 7 day water fast, both of which just gave me a headache.

I tried strict carnivore a couple of times, up to about 3 months each time, but unfortunately it wasn’t quite the magic bullet that it seems to have been for others. It has made minor improvements but not enough to say it is resolving my issues.

Today I am still eating mostly carnivore as I feel the least bad on it but I am left with all my symptoms. I am out of ideas, the frustrating part is that the pain seems to be completely static. I know how to make it worse but it never improves, almost as if the set point of my nerves has moved. Can you think of anything I could look for or try?

Thanks a lot for reading and for the podcast, John

Sponsor:

The Healthy Rebellion Radio is sponsored by our electrolyte company, LMNT.
Proper hydration is more than just drinking water. You need electrolytes too! Check out The Healthy Rebellion Radio sponsor LMNT for grab-and-go electrolyte packets to keep you at your peak! They give you all the electrolytes want, none of the stuff you don’t. Click here to get your LMNT electrolytes

Transcript:

Click for Transcript PDF

Nicki: It is time to make your health an act of rebellion. We’re tackling personalized nutrition, metabolic flexibility, resilient aging, and answering your diet and lifestyle questions. This is the only show with the bold aim to help 1 million people liberate themselves from the sick care system. You’re listening to the Healthy Rebellion Radio. The contents of this show are for entertainment and educational purposes only. Nothing in this podcast should be considered medical advice. Please consult your licensed and credentialed functional medicine practitioner before embarking on any health dietary or fitness change. Warning, when Robb gets passionate, he’s been known to use the occasional expletive. If foul language is not your thing, if it gets your britches in a bunch, well, there’s always Disney+.

Robb: Welcome back friends, neighbors, loved ones, and people with digestive issues of all kinds.

Nicki: What made you say that?

Robb: Because it looked like you were trying to suppress a belch or something right before [inaudible 00:00:57].

Nicki: No, I just, you know how you get a little tickle in your throat and I was just like doing my pre-recording throat clearing, but thanks for bringing that up.

Robb: You’re Dolores Umbridge.

Nicki: For those of you who don’t know who Dolores Umbridge is, she is one of the most…

Robb: Hateable characters in all…

Nicki: Hateable but fabulous characters in all of the Harry Potter series and the…

Robb: I would say in all of the literature.

Nicki: That’s a big…

Robb: It’s big one, but she’s-

Nicki: That’s a big claim but she’s…

Robb: So onerous.

Nicki: Yes.

Robb: So horrible.

Nicki: And the throat clearing thing that Robb was referring to, the audiobook narrator who narrates it, at least for the United States, I know there’s a different narrator that does the UK version, maybe other parts of Europe, but Jim Dale does a fabulous job with her and she does clear her throat a lot. Yeah, thanks for that tangent, Hubbs.

Robb: Sure.

Nicki: Let’s see. What are we kicking off with today? I don’t really have anything upfront pressing news. We spent a wonderful week with my dad. He came to visit and that was really nice. The girls got to spend some quality time with grandpa, played-

Robb: He was here for their piano recital.

Nicki: Piano recital-

Robb: Which was cool, the girls did quite well.

Nicki: And Zoey’s birthday. Played lots of Monopoly, lots of life lessons in Monopoly, lots of frustrations when you have a hotel and you can’t pay your $900 bill. And the girls, they learned a few things, so it was good. And it rained a ton while he was here, so it was just perfect Monopoly weather. But anyway, what do you have for us for a news topic?

Robb: Just a little quickie from the [inaudible 00:02:48].

Nicki: Our favorite Boriqua Gato.

Robb: What is the title? Kitten Corner: Testable predictions. We learned in kindergarten that in science you make testable predictions, test them and then we see how well your hypothesis lined up with the data that you gathered. And this guy Stinson Norwood, COVID pandemic, early 2020 to date and it’s comparing age standardized mortality rate. And in this particular instance it has Norway, Sweden, and South Korea with Sweden being the least of any of three compared. And then this guy James Surowiecki, so Stinson Norwood and other people were making the case early on that Sweden, which had very little in the way of lockdowns, very little in the way of mask mandates, very elective in vaccine rollout and whatnot, could make the case they didn’t lose their ever-loving minds in dealing with COVID, but everybody kept waiting, or I wouldn’t say everybody, but many made the case that this was just early, that the other shoe would fall, that they would end up being the worst example of anything.

And this guy, James Surowiecki, made the case, “When Sweden’s death rate gets close to Norway’s, let alone South Korea as you can say, you were right.” And this was back in September of 2020. So we were right. And this just seems to keep coming up again and again and again. But I am so struck by… there are literally two worlds existing here and there’s no interface at the membrane between them. I stay signed up on the MedPage Today updates, even there it’s kind of interesting because it was a PhD immunology researcher that was making the case that we were relaxing certain elements of vaccine requirements too early. It was basically making the case, we don’t need more boosters, get a single one, call it good. And he was just making the case. Now, we can’t really say that.

And it was fascinating the number of people that were taking this guy to task, that were themselves MDs and PhDs, and actually I guess you could say he had been red pilled. They were like, “What the fuck are you even talking about?” What planet are you on to suggest that these things are efficacious really at all for anybody under any circumstances to say anything of the multiple boosted track and whatnot. But yet the powers that be still have this agenda. I guess I’m enough not a narcissist that I’ll see this shit from MedPage and whatnot and because I’ve really stepped away from just the day-to-day grind of following some of this stuff, I’m like, I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong, maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about. And then you get in and really start digging in again, it’s like Aseem’s recent thing on Rogan and all that.

Nicki: Which we should mention that. And I’ll also put a link to that in the show notes. Aseem Malhotra, I think is-

Robb: Malhotra.

Nicki: … last name. Robb wants to call it Malhotra and he’s a cardiologist. And so I kept saying it’s not Aseem Malhotra, is Malhotra. Anyway, we’ve been jousting with that one, but definitely put a link to that one in the show notes. It’s one of the best Joe Rogan episodes I’ve heard in a long time, funny enough, because Joe does very little talking, so there’s not like the random tangent left field directionality that happens. Aseem is an extremely articulate, well-spoken individual.

Robb: Non-sensational.

Nicki: Non-sensational. And he just, starting with statins because that’s where he started with his career digging into…

Robb: He was an intervention-

Nicki: Over prescription of statins and what that was doing to folks and then leading into COVID and all of the COVID interventions. So anyway, fabulous, fabulous episode. Highly recommend. Lots of people have been sharing that with us and recommending it and we finally gave it a listen and definitely second their push for listening.

Robb: Yeah, and I could have, should have probably picked that for one of the news topics. But he’s interesting. I’ve been on the same low-carb practitioner’s email list that Aseem is on for quite some time and so always have appreciated his thoughts and insights, but he’s interesting in that he was still a junior interventional cardiologist. He was like adjunct professor at that point, so he wasn’t fully done. He had earned all of his wings. He was still in training, but started asking some questions around the efficacy of statins. Numbers needed to treat the real story around side effects and the reality that within the side effect pool, when they start the intervention, they’re able to exclude the first chunk of people that have the most severe side effects and then those people are not included later. And so all kinds of chicanery with that, which is interesting that so many people within say low-carb paleo type circles are very board with this notion that there’s been something very hinky with the statin story.

Bunch of name brand people sign off on that. And then what was interesting is that Aseem started off fully on board with vaccines. I would say similar to me. I have historically looked at vaccines broadly as this miracle, and I know a lot of people don’t buy into that. But surgery, penicillin, antibiotics and vaccines I think transformed the 20th century and there is risk reward with all of that stuff and we can never forget that. But he went into the COVID thing expecting this to be a real boon, miracle drug and then started detecting signal that was contrary to that claim and has just motored forward on what the real data is. And he is now of the opinion that there is no risk reward story amenable to the use of the mRNA vaccines for anyone under any circumstances, which was-

Nicki: Not even elderly people.

Robb: Not even elderly people who are sick and obese and everything else. He is of the opinion that the complications risk reward story is not ethical for them to be used at all, which is even more aggressive than where I was at. But I also, like I said, I stepped off.

Nicki: And that we’ve pulled other vaccines for-

Robb: Far less issues.

Nicki: … far less side effects.

Robb: Literally, two or three orders of magnitude lower or less frequent issues.

Nicki: And we still have states in the United States that are mandating this for kids to attend school and university and all of that. So anyway.

Robb: Didn’t intend this to be a diversion into that.

Nicki: No, but I think it’s important, and again, he’s just so measured and it’s worth a listen whether your interest is in the statin piece or the COVID piece or both. It’s a great episode and I am thankful that Rogan had him on because I think this needs to get out there. We are so beholden to these corporate interests and big pharma and Robb was just telling me, I didn’t read the article, but you mentioned that Amazon is now going to have Amazon pharmacy, and I was like, [inaudible 00:11:28], awesome. On the one hand how convenient, you want your drugs delivered right to your door under one account umbrella. But I’m like, at what point do we have an antitrust situation here? We just played Monopoly, at what point is there a legitimate situation where these corporate interests have become so powerful and they are able to fund different facets of the government such that there’s not really a voice of the people, the citizens are not represented by their elected leaders because they’re being bought out by powerful corporate interests?

Robb: Well, I don’t even think I told you this, but this last weekend I was invited to go out to one of our friends who owns a grass-fed meat operation, Montana Longhorn, and it’s kind of a long story, but they ended up meeting a guy who has a Discovery Channel show kind of travel related, and this guy came out and interviewed them and also interviewed me about the regenerative ag side of things, but one of the folks there is a gal who works as a pharmacist, and historically she’s been a night shift pharmacist and she was like, I did 10 years of that and it was killing me. And so she got a different job at a local compounding pharmacy. I’m like, oh, you’re a compounding pharmacist now. And she’s like, yeah, it really dust off some unused skills because before it was literally just slide pills into a bottle and check for contraindications and stuff like that.

I’m like, so what are your thoughts around that? And it kind of probed into the COVID thing a little bit, and she was like, these compounding pharmacies are the last bastion to be able to get something like hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, because they’re independently run, there’s a much higher likelihood that if you had this kind of weird totalitarian thing or you happen to be a person who just seems to respond favorably, like I’ve been doing some poking around on off-label rheumatoid arthritis treatments and hydroxychloroquine happens to be a drug used for that, but it’s kind of hard to find the right doses. The appropriate dose is quite low, and so you usually need to find a compounding pharmacy to be able to do it. If all of our pharmacies are closed or they’re either like Costco, Walmart and Amazon-

Nicki: Amazon.

Robb: … pharmacies, you have no fucking option-

Nicki: No.

Robb: … for anything else.

Nicki: Especially if it’s a medication that the powers that be don’t want you to have access for it-

Robb: Particularly that.

Nicki: You just won’t get it.

Robb: Yeah. So it’s interesting, and again, this wasn’t remotely kind of the direction that I thought that we were going to take the opening of the show, but Nicki and I have been talking about that. I remember over 10 years ago there was a… God, it’s got to be close to 15 years ago now, there was discussion about when is Google a monopoly? When is Amazon a monopoly. And Google, I don’t know what the numbers are now. Clearly they’re a monopoly in search, but they’re not necessarily a monopoly in advertising. So this is kind of the way that they can squirt through the loophole. And then not to overly politicize this, but they clearly [inaudible 00:14:57] accept Twitter now at this point in some of the alternatives like Rumble and stuff like that. But the big players are clearly heavily influenced by the government and one branch of the government currently or kind of one flavor-

Nicki: One party.

Robb: One party of the government disproportionately seemingly, although I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to find out that that’s not as accurate as what we think. But of course, nobody wants to go in and do the important reset that keeps the capitalist engine actually kind of functioning, which is allowing things to reach an optimized point of monopoly and then break them up and start them over competing again. But there’s no will to do that because they’re complete. They appear to be remarkably controlled and manipulated by the government and media all colluding together. So anyway.

Nicki: Anyway, there we go. That was our…

Robb: That’s the show folks, we’ll catch you later.

Nicki: Yep. All righty. Well, the Healthy Rebellion Radio is sponsored by our Salty AF, electrolyte company, LMNT. Increasing electrolytes, particularly sodium, makes a huge difference in performance across a wide range of domains. We’ve mentioned this before on the show, but people who work in hotter humid conditions or who have physically demanding jobs, those who eat low-carb keto, athletes of all stripes, breastfeeding moms, and people with pots, getting enough sodium is critical for people with POTS, which is Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome. In fact, folks with POTS, if they have inadequate sodium, they can end up with catastrophic events including fainting and potentially a resulting head injury.

So wanted to share a message that one of our LMNT team members received from one of our customers who wrote in who has POTS and wanted to share her experience. So she says, “I received the shipment and oh my goodness, I am completely obsessed with LMNT. Usually I drink it throughout the day and it has significantly lowered my POTS symptoms. My mind is blown. In the past I would drink either…” and she lists two other brands that I’m not going to name, “but they do not taste as good as LMNT. To add, they also never really helped my immediate issues, within a few minutes of drinking LMNT, I feel significantly better, which is really, really cool.”

And we’ve met several people with POTS in person who have shared similar stories, like it’s just critical for how they feel and throughout the day just the ability to function well. So if you’re feeling low on energy, don’t reach for more caffeine. You also might just need a little more sodium. And I wanted to share too, we’re just a couple of weeks out from grapefruit season, literally two weeks out, so I know a lot of people are counting down the days for that. You can grab your LMNT at drinklmnt.com/robb. That’s drinkL-M-N-T.com/R-O-B-B. All right, we’ve got three questions for you all today. This first one is from Laura on liver, particularly soaking liver in milk.

“Hi Robb and Nicki, first I want to say thank you so much for your work. I was mostly vegetarian for over 20 years before reading and watching Sacred Cow. After adding red meat and more protein into my diet, I feel renewed energy in my workouts and in daily life. I’m now an avid listener to your podcast and love the refreshing tell the truth approach that you both have on diet, health, and life, encouraging people to think rather than just follow the status quo. Now for my question, beef liver, the food we know we should eat, but most people don’t find palatable and therefore don’t eat it often. After lots of experimentation, I finally found a way to make it that I find palatable and dare I say even enjoyable. I soak the liver in raw milk for at least an hour, then discard the soaking milk and pulverized the liver in a blender. I freeze it in small portions in silicone muffin cups.

Then when I want to eat some, I thaw the one to two ounce portions and fry it in coconut oil, chopping it up with a spoon so that it is the consistency of a very soft ground beef, add a little salt and it tastes great. But I shared this method with a friend recently and she thought I was depleting the liver of its iron by soaking it in milk first. I consulted Google but got conflicting answers to this question. What say you biochemist Robb? Am I making the liver not as good for me by soaking it in milk first. And a follow-up question, would raw milk or pasteurized milk make a difference in this scenario? Thanks, Laura.” She also adds a PS., “I also bought my first box of LMNT and I’m hooked. My husband calls it my afternoon cocktail every day. Raspberry salt is my fave thus far, but I’m hoping chocolate mint comes back in the future.”

Robb: So good question. Let’s see here. There’s several questions here and then I had some kind of peripheral thoughts, but the raw milk or pasteurized milk is not going to make a difference. Dairy in general, like casing has a tendency to bind to iron and this is where… gosh, Diane Rogers did some breakdown on this for Sacred Cow looking at say like vegetarian children maybe getting adequate protein due to say like significant dairy intake, but oftentimes ending up being iron deficient because the dairy can block iron absorption. For example, vitamin C can facilitate iron absorption and then some things end up competing with it or blocking the iron absorption.

If you were to take the liver and homogenize it with the milk, then I could see it being… made a liver milkshake, then you might run into some problems there, but you’re really mainly getting milk on the exterior of the liver. There might be a little bit of percolation through the liver with the milk, but you’re probably inactivating a pretty small amount of the iron just as a thing. So raw milk or pasteurized milk is going to be about the same either way with that. Some people might make some case if there’s some enzymatic activity with the raw milk, that’s fine. It’s just more expensive and seems to me more valuable for other stuff.

Nicki: For drinking than just-

Robb: For drinking.

Nicki: … discarding it after-

Robb: [inaudible 00:21:12]. But man, some of the Weston A Price people can get crazy on that topic. I’m actually in the camp that I don’t know that folks need to eat liver and organs. I’ve done long tracks of time with, I’ve done long tracks of time without and I haven’t really noticed any huge difference there. If you like dropping them in, that’s great. I don’t know that it’s really 100% necessary too to do so. I know that that’s kind of heresy these days around nutrient density circles and all that type of stuff, but it’s just where I am with that.

Gosh, one other thought. We’ve ground the liver and we’ve had this pre-made before where they will mix some of the liver with ground beef and that ends up working out really quite nicely, is an easy way to hide some of the liver in there. And then the always handsome and stunningly insightful Jack Ruston of Rustons Boneyard and oftentimes moderator of the Healthy Rebellion, he made the case that if you can find liver that is super freshly processed like they butcher the animal, pull out the liver, and if you can flash freeze it, that you are likely to have a much more tasty piece of liver because it’s the mild aging process.

Nicki: Normally it was eaten…

Robb: Immediately, yeah.

Nicki: Immediately. And these days, you look at the little cartons of liver in the grocery store and who knows how long they’ve been sitting there.

Robb: Good until next month, yeah. And it’s like, well, good is relative. And I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the off flavor that occurs there is due to the high iron content in the liver and probably some oxidative activity that’s going on with some of the constituents in there. So awesome that you’re doing liver, I don’t know that you absolutely have to do liver. There are other ways of sneaking liver into things. If you’re liking the way that the milk worked out, that’s great. I don’t think it has to be pasteurized milk and-

Nicki: Or raw, it doesn’t have to be raw.

Robb: Yeah, it doesn’t have to be raw milk.

Nicki: Great. Thanks Laura. Okay, this next question is from Sam on the number of steps per day versus zone 2 cardio. “Hey Robb and Nicki, every day I clock in between 10,000 and 18,000 steps at work. Dead serious, no exaggeration. Work is five days a week and eight to 12 hour shifts. Usually it is in 100 meter bursts and a fairly quick pace. It definitely burns sufficient calories as in the past before I committed to the paleo diet, I would maintain my weight despite having a bad diet and huge portions. Granted, I was very overweight at the time and am still however much less so since switching to paleo, I’m dropping weight like crazy. Anyway, I have heard in the past that zone 2 cardio gently burns calories and helps maintain cardiovascular health. So my question is, does my activity level and amount of steps per day qualify as zone 2?”

Robb: Sam, it does not most likely, but it doesn’t mean it’s not great for you. Zone 2 is at a level of activity where we’re going to get some mitochondrial biogenesis. We’re going to get some peripheral heart activity where the enough blood is loading through the body that we get that left ventricle really preloaded with a big bolus of blood, which helps the left ventricle to stretch and then rebound and that will cause some beneficial hypertrophy of that left ventricle in an athletic fashion. It improves angiogenesis both in the working muscles and around the heart. What you’re doing is a lot of what’s called zone 1 activity, which is great and it’s very good. And when we look at… Peter Attia talked about this, his book Outlive is really quite good in this regard. When we look at just going from couch bound, no activity to doing anything, that doing anything, just going on a walk is where we arguably get the biggest bang for our buck.

It’s the biggest delta going from completely sedentary to just doing anything and then all this other stuff is really good, but I could make the case that we’re wanting that zone 2 cardio more for specific cardiovascular benefits, for building an aerobic base that we want to hedge as we age. And again, even doing what you’re doing, you might intermittently dip into some zone 2 activity, particularly if you really put your mind to it, you’re kind of really boogie along the floor for those hundred-meter pitches and whatnot. Might look a little bit goofy doing it.

Nicki: It might depend too on how… what’s the interval, right? You do a hundred-meter burst. I don’t know what your job is Sam, but for whatever reason, I’m channeling UPS delivery like you drive and then you, a hundred-meter bursts to the door, drop off a package, come back and I could be completely wrong. Anyway, how long of a rest in between those bursts would be the question because if there’s like 22nd rest, 42nd rest, you could still be in zone 2 potentially.

Robb: Potentially if you are hustling.

Nicki: But if it’s longer than… I could see you dropping down. One interesting thing if you want to track this would be to get some sort of a heart rate monitor.

Robb: Like the Morpheus, we like train with Morpheus.

Nicki: We like the Morpheus platform, but again, at work you might, I don’t know, I’m almost thinking a Garmin watch might be easier depending on his job, just so that you could set it as you’re at work and you can just see where’s your heart rate. The Garmin watch goes like gray, blue, green, red, so gray would be below zone 2. Blue would be zone 2, I don’t know actually-

Robb: Low end of zone 2.

Nicki: Low end of zone 2. Green, and you can just kind of see where does your heart rate go over that eight to 12 hour shift, but to get the benefits that you’re describing from zone 2, are you saying that it needs to be more… you need to be maintaining that heart rate within 30 to 30 minutes to 60 minutes, a dedicated chunk where it’s in that zone the entire time?

Robb: I’m not totally sure. I think so, there is some benefit there, but then the flip side is I don’t think people are really studying this.

Nicki: Sam’s life. Yeah.

Robb: There’s a whole different thing. When studies have been done of just kind of total work output, then there’s great benefit to this. This is the person who gardens aggressively or something like that. The only time I’ve had steps of this number is when we’re moving our house or something, or when your dad was having me help him move pavers and you’re busting hump all day long and you’re knackered at the end of the day, it’s a lot of work output, but again, from some of that cardiovascular development side, it just has to reach a certain threshold. This is a little bit similar to you lifting weights. If you want to get stronger, a really lightweight lifted a lot of reps just isn’t really going to do that. You may build some endurance with it. You may build some localized muscular endurance. It may be a really good thing for soft tissue, connective tissue because you’re flushing a lot of blood through the area, but as far as building some muscle and building some strength, recruiting the [inaudible 00:29:09]-

Nicki: Right, to lift heavier.

Robb: It’s just not the same stimulus, yeah.

Nicki: Okay. All right, Sam, hopefully that helps some. Let’s see. [inaudible 00:29:19] and five days a week, so if you did want to add some zone 2 maybe on your off day if you wanted to do a little.

Robb: I would lift weights. Honestly, I feel like he’s probably getting a lot there or maybe a day of a dedicated zone 2, if you just want to garner that cardiovascular benefit, but otherwise he didn’t mention what else he does, but as much activity as is going on there, I would stick in two or three days a week of strength training and goose things that way.

Nicki: Cool. All right. Our final question this week is from John on unresponsive gastritis and IBS. “Hi Robb and Nicki, I seem to have come to a dead end in solving my health issues and wanted to see if you might have any ideas. In March of 2020, I was given an antibiotic, Pen V, at the same time as I may have had COVID. Overnight my digestive system was wrecked. I had non-stop severe stomach burning and a churning intestinal pain. Fast-forward three years and the symptoms have not stopped, only calmed down slightly after the initial weeks when it started. After numerous investigations including scopes, blood, stool tests and scans, I’ve only been diagnosed with mild chemical type gastritis, no H. pylori, slightly elevated calprotectin around 100 to one 50, but no visible intestinal inflammation and a small hiatus hernia.

Standard gastritis medications like PPIs, H2 blockers and sucralfate do absolutely nothing and I was quickly spat out the other side of the medical system after they didn’t know what to do with me. At various points over the years since I developed tinnitus, minor muscle twitching migraines and also a C. diff infection after starting a PPI, but that was successfully treated with Vancomycin. To keep the word count down, I’ll just say that I found the functional medicine world and worked my way through a self compiled list of diets, supplements, probiotics, herbs, and alternative treatments, but have made zero progress. I’ve probably done most things on the usual list for gastritis and IBS. I’ve even tried a capsule FMT and a seven-day water fast, both of which just gave me a headache.

I tried strict carnivore a couple of times up to about three months each time, but unfortunately it wasn’t quite the magic bullet that it seems to have been for others. It has made minor improvements but not enough to say it is resolving my issues. Today I’m still eating mostly carnivore as I feel the least bad on it, but I’m left with all my symptoms. I’m out of ideas. The frustrating part is that the pain seems to be completely static. I know how to make it worse, but it never improves, almost as if the set point of my nerves has moved. Can you think of anything I could look for or try?”

Robb: Man, I’ll be honest, I almost passed on this because there’s so much going on here that it’s kind of overwhelming and this sounds a lot like me, to be completely frank. Some of the things that come to mind are low dose naltrexone, any of these kinds of interesting anti-inflammatory, nerve reset type things like CBD, CBG, some breathing techniques, maybe Wim Hof, maybe some of these different breathing techniques. That vagal nerve activation is really interesting in this stuff. Some of the transcranial therapy that’s used for Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, in theory, it may also benefit the essential tremor, and so I’ve been looking into that, but that has some interesting… some of the side effects that people report is, oh, I also had all these GI issues and those things ended up improving with this also, so what have we got there? Low-dose naltrexone, CBDs, breath work, and then some of this transcranial magnetic stimulation.

If you look for transcranial stimulation, Parkinson’s or essential tremor, then you can find these outfits that do this. They’re kind of all over the country, different locations on that. I’m in kind of a similar spot, John. My health is way better than what it would’ve been had I continued eating a standard American diet or vegan diet or whatever, and I’ve kind of migrated ever closer to kind of carnivore and I will do stretches of carnivore, but I honestly just get really bored and I’m one of those weirdos. I like steak, but I also salad, even though I don’t really do much in the way of salad anymore-

Nicki: You hardly have any, yeah.

Robb: The past couple of months, if folks have been following us for a couple of years, they’ll know that I had a really gnarly rheumatoid arthritis flare about two years ago and I managed to get on top of that. Well, it’s been kind of acting up again and I have absolutely no dairy. I cut out nightshades. I know for a fact now those things are problems and so I started doing some other digging and I’m actually going to ramp up my fish oil. I’m going to start doing a low dose baby aspirin every other day and just doing some other anti-inflammatory things that seem to have some activity on my particular issues, which I know are still also gut related issues. I wish I had more for you. I’ve met people who do the fecal transplant and they’re just great. They do paleo and they’re great and I have no… clearly, if I was still eating a standard American diet, I’d probably be about dead, between wheat and dairy and tomatoes and everything.

Nicki: You would either be dead or you would be on 20 different medications.

Robb: Trying immunosuppressants and all that type of stuff. So I think the upside for both of us is that to some degree we’ve at least got a handle on this. The situation may suck, it may be not optimized, but it also could be so much worse if we weren’t as savvy to what we have going on here and that some crazy people several years ago said, hey, maybe we don’t want to eat any plants at all, and this carnivore thing popped up, so we’d start seeing some examples of that and could kind of kick the tires on it, but I’ve never just sat down and accepted my situation. I’ll go months where I don’t really put a ton of thought into it, but then I’m like, well, I wonder about this, I wonder about that, and we’ll get in and start thinking about and looking at different things. I’ve done the full run of all the probiotics, prebiotics and everything, colostrum. I’ve kind of done it all. Sunlight helps. We don’t get a ton of sunlight here, so I do my spurty lamp and whatnot.

Nicki: So this transcranial thing that you haven’t done it yet but you’re looking into it to do for your essential tremor. I know it’s beneficial for people with Parkinson’s and essential tremor, but it also is good for gut situations?

Robb: Well, it seems that so much of the gut activity, the vagal nerve has, that’s kind of what controls it, part of that parasympathetic response, and so this is also where I think some really good breath work, some meditation, things like that. Again, I have a feeling that for people like John and I, it’s probably not going to solve it, but it may end up just dialing the intensity down several clicks hopefully, and maybe it does solve it, but I think that you just keep tinkering and ideally you tinker one thing at a time and kind of see what the results are and make sure it doesn’t make things worse. Make sure that in addressing the one issue, you don’t create another issue and just keep fighting. And this is, again, it seems kind of trite to say that there are some things I think out there.

Again, the transcranial stimulation, low-dose naltrexone, CBDs, breath work, and God, there’s so many different types of breath work. Maybe even the hot cold water exposure too. The contrast hydrotherapy can really reset that vagal nerve activity and get you into more of a parasympathetic state and then doing that with breath work can also get you into more of a parasympathetic state. When I think about gut pain and there’s not overt… if they’re not on histology and blood work, they’re not just seeing inflammation in and around the gut, then it makes me think nervous system a little bit.

Nicki: That makes sense. John, hopefully something in there is something you haven’t yet tried and bring some relief and keep us-

Robb: As always, keep us posted.

Nicki: Keep us posted.

Robb: Yeah.

Nicki: We’d like to know if you find anything that helps. Let’s see, Hubbs, that was our final question. Any other closing thoughts for this week?

Robb: I don’t think so.

Nicki: Don’t think so. All right. Well, we are definitely looking forward to our seven days of upcoming sunshine here. We’ll be outside soaking up as much of that UVA, UVB as we can.

Robb: This podcast is still going to be spinning down and I’m going to be outside with my shirt off, I think in the sun.

Nicki: Yeah. Sounds good. All right, everybody. Hope you have a wonderful weekend.

Robb: Hopefully you will be too.

Nicki: Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers out there and yeah, if you haven’t yet stocked your electrolytes, you can do that at drinklmnt.com/robb. That’s drinkL-M-N-T.com/robb. Remember just a couple short weeks and we will be announcing the release of grapefruit salt again. That’s it, have a wonderful weekend everybody.

Robb: Bye.

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News Topic:

Eat like a Pig to Combat Obesity

Show Notes:

Questions: 

Blood Type Diet

Matt says:

I have a friend who’s done his blood work and claims his health advisor (not sure of their role) suggested they steer away from ruminants because of their blood type. Allegedly, “beef and venison causes inflammation, my recommended proteins were chicken Turkey rabbit squirrel and fish.” Do you have any literature on the blood type diet, and is there anything to it? I’m almost exclusively beef + fruit, but I’m curious for my friend.  -Matt

Vitamin Capsules and additives

Question from Ralph:

hi robb and nikki – love your show

What do you think about veggie capsules and additives added to them like sunflower lecithin (from seed oil) and microcrystaline cellulose etc.?

I have read that hypromellose veggie capsules are like plastic or glue and can lead to headache, poor nutrient absorption, dehydration, constipation and fatigue. Small amount per capsule, but can the accumulated effects be negative if taking a number of capsules over a long time? thanks. Ralph

The Road Not Traveled

Mark says:

Hi both,

Love the show. You’ve helped me in many ways. Thank you.

Listening to a few older episodes, as a passing comment, Robb has mentioned a few times that he once considered joining the military / having a crack at becoming a SEAL.

(Though I appreciate this was never _deeply_ explored, it seems to have been a back-of-mind consideration.)

Robb having turned 50 last year, how does he look back on this life decision / counterfactual?

Any regrets not exploring it?

I’m asking as someone who’s recently turned 30, and is considering (with what feels like a closing window of opportunity) joining the military as a reservist.

Many thanks for any thoughts shared on this,

Mark

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Transcript:

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Nicki: It’s time to make your health an act of rebellion. We’re tackling personalized nutrition, metabolic flexibility, resilient aging, and answering your diet and lifestyle questions. This is the only show with the bold aim to help one million people liberate themselves from the sick-care system. You’re listening to The Healthy Rebellion Radio.

The contents of this show are for entertainment and educational purposes only. Nothing in this podcast should be considered medical advice. Please consult your licensed and credentialed functional medicine practitioner before embarking on any health, dietary, or fitness change.

Warning, when Robb gets passionate, he’s been known to use the occasional expletive. If foul language is not your thing, if it gets your britches in a bunch, well, there’s always Disney+.

Robb: Welcome back friends, neighbors, loved ones.

Nicki: Hello, hello. Welcome to another episode of The Healthy Rebellion Radio. This is episode 151. We’ve got sun in Montana.

Robb: Can you tell it in our voices?

Nicki: Yes. I think a lot of people that we know got sunburned over the weekend, because it’s been the first two days of beautiful sun, nearly 80-degree weather. The girls went horseback riding with some friends and their cheeks got a little pink.

But yeah, good times. We, unfortunately, despite the beautiful weather, were inside all weekend. We had our-

Robb: Well, fortunately and unfortunately,

Nicki: Fortunately and unfortunately, yes. Unfortunately, because we missed out on all of the sun opportunity. But fortunately, because our former jiu-jitsu coach from Reno, Ray Price, was up here in Kalispell visiting and hosted a seminar here. And so we learned a lot of good stuff.

Robb: All things cross side top for the most part. Which means, as a partner you get to be on cross side bottom. And our sternums may never be the same again.

Nicki: Which means it’s three hours, Saturday and Sunday, we were subjected to lots of pressure and our bodies are feeling it today.

Robb: Indeed.

Nicki: Mm-hmm. Let’s see. What else is coming up? It’s May. Well, we’re recording this on May 1st, so it is May.

Robb: Mayday. Mayday.

Nicki: It is May. Our oldest daughter is turning 11 this week, so that’s crazy. I can’t believe it.

Robb: If you don’t die, then you keep getting older.

Nicki: Yeah, yeah. Yup. All right. Let’s see. I don’t think I have anything else to lead with upfront.

Robb: Housekeeping?

Nicki: No housekeeping. What do you have for us for a news topic today?

Robb: I’m actually stealing this one from the handsome and smart Ryan Baxter of The Healthy Rebellion, he had posted this in there. It’s a study, it’s called “Eat Like a Pig to Combat Obesity.” And it sounds like kind of a ridiculous paper, but what’s interesting about it is that pigs have a pretty natural, innate ability to sense when they are overeating and becoming insulin resistant.

And the main place where this goes awry, is when pigs are fed a diet that is overtly nutrient deficient. So they will tend not to overeat if receiving adequate nutrition, being basically built around vitamins, minerals, and essential fats. But if they’re deficient in any of those things, then there is a tendency to overeat.

And this is kind of taken a page out of the protein leverage hypothesis, that if one eats to a protein minimum, then in general what they’ll find is that you’re pretty well nutritionally covered. So it’s just interesting, and it’s kind of nice every once in a while-

Nicki: Well, it kind of ties into the, what is the saying?

Robb: Overfed, undernourished.

Nicki: Overfed, undernourished. A lot of people in Western societies are eating a lot of calories via junk food, which aren’t providing adequate nutrition. And so then the tendency to overeat, and it ties in with the hyper-palatability of stuff too. But if you’re not getting the nutrients, then you’re kind of always hungry.

Robb: Yeah, and to me there’s this battle between the… Clearly calorie restriction works, counting works. Like Nicki and I have been weighing and measuring our food more of late.

You’ve been wanting to lean out a little bit. And because I do all the cooking, or 85%, 95% of it, and because I have all kinds of gut issues, things are very oriented towards caloric density in my meal prep. There’s not a ton of veggies. I can’t really eat them all that much.

Nicki: He doesn’t tolerate them.

Robb: I don’t really tolerate them, and our kids don’t really like them.

Nicki: And you have a hard time getting enough calories, so there tend to be more fat in our meals. Which works for you, but I was like, gosh-

Robb: Doesn’t work for everybody else.

Nicki: … my activity level’s been much, much higher since, you guys know, we’ve been doing Zone 2 cardio in the morning, and we lift a couple days a week. And we do jiu-jitsu, which is very, especially the open mat, is very demanding physically. So I’m like, I should be leaning out.

Robb: Leaner than… Yeah.

Nicki: But then when I actually started putting my stuff in Cronometer, low and behold, I am getting a lot more calories via fat than I thought just because of the nature of the foods that [inaudible 00:05:34].

Robb: I’m generally fixing. And so again, I don’t want to overly dismiss the power of just doing some basic weighing and measuring of food. And knowing how much you’re eating can be beneficial on both sides of the equation, folks undereating and overeating. But there is this notion out there in the It Fits Your Macros world, that it doesn’t really matter what quality the food is, you just need to stay within certain caloric boundaries.

And yes, but when we look at some big-picture data, like this study looking at pigs, and also just thinking about a host of other things like the longevity studies looking at primates fed lower versus higher-quality diets. And the higher-quality diets always end up playing out and benefiting the organism more and better.

I just can’t help but wonder what the longer term consequences are of, okay, yeah, you can live by this food scale kind of process, within the weighing and measuring of… What was it? Like the CrossFit Journal, when they were really off the rails with this? It was…

Nicki: Was it something like Pringles or Doritos or something?

Robb: It was like pretzels.

Nicki: Pretzels, yeah.

Robb: Jerky and…

Nicki: Wine.

Robb: Something like that. It was just ridiculous. And it’s like, yeah, okay, for a meal, calorie control on that is going to make sense. But as a lifestyle strategy, this really isn’t going to work.

Nicki: Well, and it’s not just… Body composition too. It’s like, what does your skin look like? Your hair, your sleep. How well are you aging? All of that kind of is tied into the food quality piece.

Robb: For sure. For sure. Yeah. So anyway, interesting find. Hat-tip again to Ryan Baxter for tracking that down and sharing it in The Rebellion.

Nicki: Mm-hmm. All right. The Healthy Rebellion Radio is sponsored by our salty AF electrolyte company, LMNT. And it turns out that electrolytes don’t need to be brightly colored and full of sugar. In fact, the brightly colored and highly sugared concoctions on store shelves often contain very few electrolytes, the sodium, magnesium, and potassium that your body needs to perform at its best.

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Robb: It’s a good thing this is an audio-only podcast. You guys would not believe the hand English going on over here.

Nicki: Okay, we have three questions today. First one from Matt on protein types for your blood type. Matt says, “I have a friend who’s done his blood work and claims his health advisor, not sure of their role, suggested they steer away from ruminants because of their blood type. Allegedly beef and venison causes inflammation, and his recommended proteins were chicken, turkey, rabbit, squirrel, and fish.”

Matt wants to know, “Do you have any literature on the blood type diet, and is there anything to it? I’m almost exclusively beef plus fruit, but I’m curious for my friend.”

Robb: Man, I’m just-

Nicki: I wonder where this guy’s sourcing his squirrel from.

Robb: Right out in the back forty.

Nicki: I mean, last time I checked, they don’t have squirrel at Costco or Safeway or Super 1.

Robb: No, they have it right your… The tree rats are outside virtually every door. I’m assuming that this is the D’Adamo Blood Type Diet. God, this thing popped up…

Nicki: Which is from the ’90s. It’s an old, old book.

Robb: Yeah, it’s from the ’90s. It was pre-Zone, or right around The Zone. It was The Blood Type Diet and The Zone Diet. There’s a tiny bit of reality to some of the blood type stuff. Early on with COVID, it looked like people with A blood type fared less well than folks with O blood type, and other blood types.

So these antigenic markers, you can’t say there’s absolutely nothing to it. There are some immunogenic consequences to it. But when you really dug into the book… So I’m an A blood type, A-negative, and I should be vegetarian to the nth degree, and should avoid animal proteins at all costs.

And clearly that’s not the way that things empirically worked out for me at all. Then when you dig into the book, it’s fascinating. I forget which specific blood type this was, but it was like, “For this blood type, you don’t eat peanuts, but you can have peanut oil.” And there were all of these weird-

Nicki: Contradictions. Yup.

Robb: … contradictions. And then what was interesting is, within the Blood Type Diet, O blood type, which is supposed to be this ancient blood type, and you are the hunter-gatherer still. So the Paleo-type diet was appropriate for that person.

Then the A’s were more of a vegetarian going towards vegan. And I forget what AB was and all that. But what was fascinating is, when you would poke around on the blood type forums, which I did, the O blood types outnumbered people like eight to one.

Nicki: And those people were having success,

Robb: Those people were having success. And really, markedly, jaw-dropping success. “Oh, my cardiovascular disease parameters improved, my autoimmunity improved,” on and on and on. And then rest of it was kind of like, “Well, yeah, I’m eating better.” But it was not that kind of, what the fudge thing around… Just kind of like an autoimmune Paleo protocol, or something like that.

Or somebody like me, who has never really done that well with carbs, but were told to eat a lot of carbs. And then the first time you do like an Atkins, you’re like, “Oh my God, this is what feeling normal actually feels like.” So that was something that I thought was kind of interesting.

And in my one-year stint at Bastyr, the naturopathic school, I think it’s Peter D’Adamo, he’s a naturopath by training, I got to talk with him a little bit. And this was really early in my, just as I had been kind of red-pilled with the Paleo diet thing.

He was an interesting guy to talk to. He was congenial, and all that stuff. But really felt strongly that the lane lines for these different processes were the way that people should be. I have no doubt that there is some individual variability from the way that people react to different foods.

Nicki: Well we know people who don’t tolerate chicken at all.

Robb: We know people who don’t tolerate chicken. I was just going to say that. And my health stuff, I used to do okay with eggs. I don’t really handle eggs anymore. I used to okay with bovine dairy, and I don’t really do that well with it anymore.

And I’ve got to say, as time has gone on, we’ll have chicken occasionally. Actually fairly frequently. I feel kind of hollow afterwards. It just doesn’t top me off the way that… Even seafood. If I ate a lot of seafood, I just feel better. It’s kind of a weird thing with that.

So I can’t remotely doubt that there’s not some individual variation with that, in that. I think that there might be some more broad, say, genetic components that predispose to, can you do better with nightshades, and do less well with wheat or whatever.

I remember Dallas Hartwig, he did fine with wheat but he was one of the first people that I met… Even though I talked about nightshades being a problem, I had never really met anybody, nor at that time did I really experience problems from nightshades. But Dallas was like, “Dude, they crushed me. Gut issues, kind of psoriasis,” all this stuff. I thought, “Oh, okay. There’s our N-of-1 on that.”

So I wouldn’t doubt that there’s variation within this stuff. But when we look deep into ancestral history, red meat is kind of… There weren’t very many peoples that within hunter-gatherer parameters survived just on squirrel. Or whatever. Turkey rabbit squirrel and fish. I mean, maybe in the context of a transitional like hunter-gatherer to-

Nicki: Is there… I’m sorry. I’m totally interrupting you here, but it’s sticking out to me. How does this health advisor… Is he doing C-reactive protein to measure the inflammation from this?

Robb: I’m really glad you mentioned that, because this was it in the back of my head. This was something that I wanted to bring up. Which was just, it’d be easy to test this stuff, and look at things like C-reactive protein.

And even within that story though, any time we eat, it’s an inflammatory process. Like blueberries, salmon, the most anti-inflammatory foods you could think of. The process of eating is an inflammatory-inducing experience.

And this is where Barry Sears really got a lot of The Zone wrong, where he was of the opinion that if you ate 16 blocks a day, you should have 16 one-block meals. So you were just titrated through the day.

Nicki: Constantly inflaming yourself with every bite.

Robb: And the linchpin that I have for that, or the backing I have for that, was a study that looked at caloric restriction, which should reduce inflammation across the board. But it was calorie restriction with intermittent eating. I mean it was breakfast, lunch, dinner, or something like that. Versus almost constant eating. It was a once-an-hour type feeding.

And the constant-feeding group, and I do think this was an animal model, but I think that this would be supported within humans. If you’re not a grazing animal, you’re not meant to graze.

So all of the benefits of calorie restriction, which I’ve talked about a lot. I think that that’s just masking the problems of a shitty diet, and it’s not really the best way to go. But the constantly-eating, calorie-restricted group kind of felt like shit, performed like shit, and then still had the same inflammatory markers of an overfed diet. Because they were eating all the time.

So that’s a whole other interesting thing. It would be like, “Okay, this is inflammatory.” What exact inflammatory markers are we talking about? And then run that. And I’m cool also with just more of a subjective thing of, do you have brain fog? Do you have gut issues? Do you have kind of non-localized joint pain?

That’s all fine. That’s totally fine. This is another part of the evolution of medicine. Maybe Peter Attia would call it Medicine 3.0, where there’s a lot of the mast cell over-reactivity. You can find it on blood work, but it kind of lodges halfway between a histamine response, like an allergy, and an autoimmune response.

There’s clearly some heightened immune activity, but it doesn’t nicely fit with any of those categories, because it’s a separate issue. It’s mast cell activation. If you don’t have a name for it in medicine, it doesn’t exist.

So again, I acknowledge that there may be some details and some nuance within all this stuff. But also, damn, there’s a lot of pseudoscience. Like, go see Madame Ruby and get your palm read or something like that. And similar impact as a lot of this stuff.

Nicki: I wonder what blood type, like if there was to be a reprint, what blood type would get the exclusively crickets protein source.

Robb: Right, right. Whatever Greta Thunberg is, I guess.

Nicki: Okay.

Robb: Moving on.

Nicki: Moving on. Okay, we’ve got a question from Ralph on vitamin capsules and additives. “Hi Robb and Nicki, love your show. What do you think about veggie capsules and additives added to them, like sunflower lecithin from seed oil and microcrystalline cellulose, et cetera?

“I’ve read that hypromellose veggie capsules are like plastic or glue, and can lead to headache, poor nutrient absorption, dehydration, constipation and fatigue. Small amount per capsule, but can the accumulated effects be negative if you’re taking a number of capsules over a long time?”

Robb: This is a great question. And Ralph, I like stuff like this, because… So I just did a piece for LMNT talking about natural flavors? Yeah, yeah, what’s the deal with natural flavors? Because people get all spun out about natural flavors like, “Oh, there’s something nefarious about this, and why don’t you guys just be transparent about it?” And I actually explain that stuff pretty well.

So as a celiac, I do need to be concerned about natural flavors in some circumstances. Because more savory-type foods, like if I saw a seasoning packet and it said “Natural flavors,” I might be a little bit concerned, because it might be wheat-derived. Because some of the stuff like tamari sauce, and things like that, can have wheat, and can be fermented wheat, because you get some stuff out of it that has an umami savory flavor.

And it’s great if the food labeler mentions that stuff, like this is in fact gluten-free, or this is in fact not gluten-free. But it’s also a little bit on the individual to take some responsibility around that. But there’s this sense that, because something has chemicals in it, it’s dangerous. Well, all of known reality is chemicals. Like there’s matter, and energy if it’s matter, it’s made out of chemicals.

So kind of unpacking some of this stuff. Like sunflower lecithin, Ralph said it’s from seed oil. No, it’s not from seed oil. Lecithin is an emulsifier that is part of things like sunflowers. Lecithin is in eggs, you get a little bit in some other foods. And it’s basically this constituent that happens in natural systems that acts like a soap.

And then when you say, “Oh, it acts like a soap,” people freak out. They’re like, “I’m eating soap.” But no, just chemically, it acts soap in that it’s got a hydrophobic part, that basically doesn’t like water, but it does like oils. And it’s got a hydrophilic part which does water and doesn’t like oils.

This is a beautiful way of allowing something, like egg yolk or something like that, to help to emulsify and blend together fats and non-fat items. And this is one of the primary constituents of baking, and all kinds of kitchen chemistry stuff.

So I personally have no issues with sunflower lecithin. People will freak out about, “Oh my God, it’s from sunflowers and omega-6.” Well, it doesn’t really have omega-6, because it doesn’t have sunflower oil in it. Or if it does, it’s in, my God, small amounts.

This is another one of the things, and I never did an article on this, but I did a lot of social media hammer and tonging. I remember when Whole30 came out with their salad dressings. And people were giving them what for, because they used high oleic sunflower oil. The high oleic sunflower oil has 3% omega-6 in it. Most olive oils range from 6-20% omega-6.

And so I would just ask people, “So are you okay with extra virgin olive oil?” “Absolutely.” Well, you’re a fucking moron.

Nicki: No, just unaware. Just unaware.

Robb: You are unaware. And this is where you create these Procrustean beds, where you’ve got to better educate yourself on this. Which I guess is part of the role of this show. So calling people morons is probably counterproductive in that regard.

Nicki: Yeah, five demerits for you.

Robb: Yeah. But there’s some frustration there, where people become religious zealots about this stuff. And that’s a problem. You’ve got to back up a little bit and have a little bit of context.

And again, if you individually don’t want to do sunflower lecithin, great. Don’t use lecithin at all, use a different form of lecithin. For me, I don’t care. If I saw a piece of dark chocolate, and it had some sunflower lecithin in it, I have absolutely no issues about that.

Somebody might pop up and say, “Well, the remaining health issues you have are caused by that.” And it’s like, “Well, I’ve tried going with it. I’ve tried going without it. And then just chemically, it doesn’t make any sense that this thing’s a problem.” So I’m not concerned about the sunflower lecithin at all.

The microcrystalline cellulose is somewhat plastic-like. But plastic is describing a chemical feature. So polyvinyl chloride is not benign stuff for biology, and it’s hard to break down. There are some microorganisms that can break it down. But this is just describing a chemical structure.

And there are also plastics, like there are corn-derived plastics. Oh my god, corn. “Corn oil, ah.” No, they’re not there. I guess the sun is out. I actually feel halfway decent today.

Nicki: You’re kind of peppy today.

Robb: Somewhat peppy today. There are plastics that are much more amenable to being broken down, either dissolving in water, dissolving an acidic medium, enzymatic activity. So again, it’s more a structural concern.

And then how does the body deal with that? Microcrystalline cellulose is fairly soluble in water. It dissolves in water, which is kind of what you want a veggie cap to do. So what… “The hypromellose veggie capsules…” Yeah, it is plastic-like. It is glue-like. But it doesn’t mean that it-

Nicki: But it’s not like you’re eating plastic or drinking glue.

Robb: No, no. Elmer’s glue, at least it used to be glues that, were made out of, it had a collagen backbone. It’s like, “Well, you’re taking the old nag horse to the glue factory,” because the bones and tendons and everything would be rendered down and turned into glue. And glues like that are more amenable to biological breakdown.

So for me, you would definitely need to look at this stuff. Some people, again, don’t respond well to these things. Some people, their digestion is so compromised that, he mentions poor nutrient absorption and stuff like that. I don’t see how it remotely causes dehydration or constipation, fatigue. Maybe, I guess in some roundabout ways.

But again, these things are kind of designed with the intent to deliver these items. And for some individuals, maybe they’re not the best option. Maybe you just need to do a powdered version.

I use some tribulus terrestris every once in a while, because it kind of elevates dopamine. I don’t do it all the time, but I’ll do a month on, a month off, and kind of cycle through it. And the stuff tastes like Satan’s taint. It is so bad, there’s no way you could do a powdered form of it. So if you’re going to do it has to be in a capsule form. There’s no two ways around it.

And you do, I guess, just need to pay attention. How do you feel it performed with all that stuff? But just from a chemical perspective, I can’t see how this stuff is anything other than 98% benign. Which I guess, is Ralph saying, is there some accumulation or something? I don’t really see how. It’s not like they’re sneaking in Glad sandwich bags into this stuff on the down-low to augment the effects.

Nicki: Okay, good question.

Robb: It is. It is. And if I came across as a dick, my apologies. I should have a better attitude about it, because some of that basic science education is really one of the important things [inaudible 00:27:18].

Nicki: Got to be more like Mark Rober.

Robb: Yeah. Well, if I’d been an engineer instead of a chemist, then I would feel better about myself.

Nicki: You could be the chemist version. For all of you with kids, if you don’t know who Mark Rober is, or even those of you without kids. Our girls are absolutely enamored with his YouTube channel.

He is a former NASA engineer who worked on the Curiosity Mars Rover. And he does a whole host of crazy experiments and things, and it’s really fun to watch. And he explains the physics and the engineering behind it all.

Robb: And he gets into a lot of statistics, which is cool. He does breakdowns of video games and arcade games, like going to a carnival.

Nicki: What’s your likelihood of winning the balloon dart versus the basketball shot. And then if you really want a good one, look up the three-part series of the squirrels.

Robb: Yes. But the point there for me is, one of the greatest services that I think Mark does is this basic statistical analysis around the likelihood of winning various games. And I think that then if people think about it a little bit, it starts extending into basic risk analysis.

Nobody is scared about going and sitting in their car and driving, even though that’s the most likely thing to kill you, on kind of a day-to-day basis. But people will get nervous about getting on an airplane and doing a host of other things.

And similarly, this basic science literacy around, what is a chemical and what does that mean? And just because something is natural doesn’t mean it’s good. Just because something’s artificial doesn’t mean it’s bad, within the flavor world. And there’s a lot of nuance and a lot of detail.

We have the population level bell curve thing, that I think is important to consider. And then you auger down to the individual level, and there are going to be some people that don’t do well with any given item. That’s where we need both the macro and the micro picture on this.

Nicki: The N=1. Our girls take piano, and we just learned their piano teacher apparently can’t do any vitamin C of any source.

Robb: Because all of it is-

Nicki: She breaks out in hives and blisters around her nose and her mouth. And then leads to headaches and other things.

Robb: Like she can’t do citrus fruit and everything.

Nicki: No, she can’t even put lime juice in bubbly water.

Robb: Yeah.

Nicki: Yeah. Anyway, N=1. All right, last question today is from Mark, on the road not traveled. “Hi, both. Love the show. You’ve helped me in many ways, so thank you. Listening to a few older episodes. As a passing comment, Robb has mentioned a few times that he once considered joining the military or having a crack at becoming a SEAL.

“Though I appreciate this was never deeply explored, it seems to have been a back-of-mind consideration. Robb having turned 50 last year, how does he look back on this life decision / counterfactual? Any regrets not exploring it? I’m asking as someone who’s recently turned 30 and is considering, with what feels like a closing window of opportunity, joining the military as a reservist.”

Robb: Man, that’s a great question. I read Marcinko’s Rogue Warrior ages ago, and he was one of the guys that founded Dev Group, SEAL Team Six. I was pretty young, God, high school, early high school. May have been grade school when I saw that. And it really was intriguing to me.

Then I was super, super close to entering the military, going into the Marines. There was an option, I was still powerlifting at the time. So they had a competition team that I could be on. And there was the Marine sniper school, and there was all this stuff that was really interesting.

For some reason I didn’t do it. Literally, last minute. I was hand going towards the paper to sign, and there was something in the back of my head that was like, “This is going to be a bad fit for you.”

I actually think for me, the military would’ve cut a decade off of sorting out a lot of junk I had in my head. But clearly it would’ve set up a potentially completely different vector in my life. I do have a feeling I would’ve still ended up in some sort of a medical circle, maybe engineering kind of circle, and stuff like that.

And it was only later, when I was in my mid to late twenties, that I started hanging out with some SEALs, and being around the Naval Special Warfare scene, that the whole SEAL team concept really got back on my radar. I was really intrigued by it.

Some of the oldest people that have ever made it through BUD/S were like 31 or 32. It is not an old man’s thing. And 30-year-olds usually, within the SEALs, are old. Within the rest of the military, depending on whether… Even different special operations communities, you can get in there.

You can get in as a reservist. And particularly if you’re in really good shape, and you have somebody who can write a letter as an exception, you can get in there and do that.

One of the things that I’m glad about not doing that line of work, is it has about a 99.8% divorce rate. Marriages don’t last. It’s very hard on the families that are attached to those folks, and it’s literally a 98% divorce rate.

It’s hard on the folks. We know a lot of people who’ve been SEALs. Done anywhere from five to 20-plus years, and there’s a lot of wear and tear that goes with them. It’s very difficult to get in. It’s very difficult to make all the selection criteria.

And post 9/11, the deployment schedule has been so demanding. The U.S. military has leaned so heavily on the special operations community, that the kind of CTE and then just the concussive syndrome, which happens from parachute deployment, from riding a Zodiac across choppy water, from firing a 50 cal gun.

It’s like everything they do other than sneezing practically causes low-grade traumatic brain injury. Then they stay up all night to do night ops and then sleep during the day. And they go to sleep using Ambien, and they wake up… Which isn’t really sleep, it’s unconsciousness. And then they wake up with as much Monster and energy drink-type items, and other items occasionally.

So it’s like stimulants to get up, sedatives to go down. Really, really hard on their physicality. And when I look at the health issues I have now, I could’ve probably got into a community like that, and then I would’ve been one of the people that the wheels just absolutely blew off the wagon.

Nicki: Blew off the wagon.

Robb: I would’ve exploded in a spectacular fashion.

Nicki: You also are… You have this persistent need to speak up and speak your mind. So I’m wondering how you would’ve done in that kind of authority situation.

Robb: General military would not have been a good fit for me. And this is where special operations communities, there is a command structure. But because of the team-type nature, you speak your mind, but it’s within the context of the team more. Now there’s politics, and there’s bullshit, and you’ve got to mind your p’s and q’s and everything.

Nicki: Do you think you could have navigated the bullshit?

Robb: I could have navigated that. Because, if you were a good performer and you had good ideas, you put your idea out or you question something, and it proves itself out, then you gain rank and status within that.

It can also, if you’ve got somebody above you who is less competent than you, it can end up being a threatening deal. But from what I’ve heard from our close friends who’ve been within special operations community, that is where the rogue element, questioner, can find a place in the military and probably succeed. You still have to figure out… My younger self was not as diplomatic, not as good at navigating these things.

Nicki: More of a dick.

Robb: So that could have been a problem. More of a dick. And so that could have been a problem. I think general military service could be more challenging in that regard.

But also, this is the interesting thing. Mark, you’re turning 30, you’ve got some life experience. So even if you are a questioner, you’re also not an idiot 20-year-old who is just going to go headfirst into things. You have some emotional dexterity and stuff like that.

So I think that it could have been not great for my health. It would’ve almost certainly set up a very different vector. But one of the things that’s really fascinating to me about communities like that is, when people get out of the military, even if it’s really onerous and there’s a lot of stuff that they didn’t like, the camaraderie is often something that they never, ever experience again.

Other, interestingly, than finding a solid jiu-jitsu community, is about the closest thing that people report finding. Because it’s hard stuff, which makes hard people. And the kind of reliance on one another, it’s kind of one of the only things that I’ve seen people who get out of the military, particularly special operations folks, kind of report something like jiu-jitsu being that thing that really plugs a gap for them.

I’m trying to think of anything else. So Mark, I mean, 30 years old is not too old to do most of the stuff within the military. I’m sure if you’ve investigated this, you understand this, some of the selection processes for certain groups, 30 years old is going to be a challenge.

If you’re a stud athlete, and you’re really in good shape, and you’re really mentally tough, it’s not impossible. But for a lot of the selection processes, 30 years old is knocking on the door.

Nicki: On the cusp.

Robb: But being a reservist, and being able to contribute to your country, and having that sense of accomplishment of serving your country and everything, I think that that’s still definitely within the realm of possibility there. It really depends kind of what you want to do and what the specific goals are.

Nicki: Awesome.

Robb: Cool question.

Nicki: Another good question.

Robb: It’s nice to talk about something other than protein, carbs, fat. Yeah.

Nicki: Yeah. Yup. Awesome. Those are our questions for this week. Any closing thoughts, hubs?

Robb: No, just very glad the sun’s coming out at least a little bit. Trying to think. Anything else? No, I think that’s it.

Nicki: Thank you. I did get a couple of emails from folks who are planning on trying the Bison Chili Colorado that we mentioned in the last episode. Our friends at Go Roam Free Ranch have that in some select Costcos.

I did get a question on what area of Costco that would be in. And it’s actually in the deli. Deli department D19. So I just wanted to share that for any of you who might also be wondering.

Because I didn’t specify that before, and I know it could be confusing. Is it like canned? Is it frozen? But it’s in the deli department, D19. So if you are in one of those regions, I don’t have them off the top of my head, but-

Robb: It was Arizona, Las Vegas, New Mexico.

Nicki: San Diego.

Robb: San Diego, yeah. The previous show we detailed all that.

Nicki: We laid that out at the beginning. But yeah, if you are in one of those areas and you want to check it out, it’s in the deli department. We appreciate you supporting our friends.

And remember to check out our show sponsor LMNT for all of your electrolyte and hydration needs. You can grab your LMNT at drinklmnt.com/R-O-B-B, as I mentioned before. It’s May, which means later this month we have Grapefruit Salt coming back.

Robb: Woo-hoo.

Nicki: So something fun to look forward to. Anyway, hope y’all have a fabulous weekend, and week and we will see you next time.

Robb: Bye, everybody.

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News Topic:

Incident type 2 diabetes attributable to suboptimal diet in 184 countries

Nina Teicholz twitter thread

Show Notes:

Precision Health Reports

Train with Morpheus

Questions: 

Weight gain, inflammation, cholesterol, cardio

Becky writes:

I am SO sorry about this length, I truly tried to whittle it down. I think I’m giving you too much information. I hope I don’t disqualify myself over the length and also THANK YOU in advance for your help!

Hi Robb + Nikki, I have been bingeing your podcast lately and as it turns out, I have a question (actually more than 1) for you. I am going to be 46 in June. I have worked over 25 years in restaurant kitchens, so a lot of physical work + standing on my feet all day. My husband and I reside on Cape Cod which is hot and swampy in the summer, therefore the kitchen environment is hot and swampy and depleting in every way. At age 34/35 I began going into perimenopause, and I have officially been in menopause since June 2022, at age 45. I tried for years to get my period back. I had been vegetarian/sometimes vegan for about 6 years and then I switched to Paleo intermittently for a few years. Plus Acupuncture, TCM, Plant Paradox, Medical Medium, dozens of Whole 30’s, etc. I’ve tried it all, though none for more than a month or two. The past few years have found me 60 + pounds overweight (I am 5 3 1/4 and currently weigh 188-190.), sore, stiff, weak, with thinning hair, lack of mobility, and feeling depressed. I have sleep apnea and am going on one year with my magical C Pap machine though lately that has seemed to level off and I am waking up tired again. I had bloodwork done on January 31 that revealed high cholesterol and stagnant liver function, with glucose on the high level of normal which my doctor seemed to think was fine, 93/99. (TC 206; HDL 41; Trig 83; LDL 146; liver: AST 40; ALT 80). Also higher blood pressure than I’ve ever had, 138/80. Usually doctors exclaim over how great my blood pressure is! Determined to get my health and vitality back on track I re read your two books, Robb, (Wired to Eat and The Paleo Solution.) I decided to dive back into Paleo but cut out all carbs, and I had already been booze free since December. I started IF most days, started lifting weights a bit, but still avoiding cardio which I DESPISE When I increase the animal protein though, I tend to stop pooing regularly. I was vegetarian for a few years and had no problem moving things out but I feel that is what precipitated my descent into metabolic haywire. I have been supplementing lately with magnesium, minerals, Vitamin DAKE from Dave Asprey, some TCM herbs for liver support, and I’ve been on the lookout for a good digestive enzyme. I had given up coffee for nearly a year because it was making me hot and anxious, and I thought it was a factor in my hair shed, but lately I started mixing a little coffee back in to my Rasa along with collagen, which I just started using again. I started eating a lot of full fat cottage cheese for more protein, the only dairy that doesn’t seem to make me phlegmy. Then the past few weeks, some wine here and there. I got my second round of bloodwork done on April 4 and my cholesterol went UP, though my liver improved.

(TC 246; HDL 49; Trig 85; LDL 178; liver: AST 30; ALT 39). She didn’t test my glucose again. I do have heart disease and high cholesterol in my family. Did my cholesterol go up from wine, even though my liver improved? Cottage cheese? Not really exercising? All of the above? After I read your books again I asked my doctor to authorize tests for my A1C, LDL-P, and CRP but she refused. Something about coding for insurance and blah blah blah. I see her again at the end of this month and I am hoping she will agree to the other tests after seeing my cholesterol jump.

I have always been a giant ball of stress and nerves (don’t ask me why I chose the worst possible career for that). I know I need to meditate and breathe better, and sometimes I do. I used to be stronger and fitter. My other issue is I tend to reject routine after a while. I have a terrible, terrible sweet tooth as well. I am my own worst enemy! My weight has yo-yoed constantly over my life, but this is the heaviest I’ve ever been. I gained 10+ pounds last spring, then jumped another 10 pounds between September and December. (In 2008 I was 130, right before going veggie.) A lot of my dilemmas ramp up next week as I return to work full time: 

I work from 1-2 pm to 10-11 pm 5-6 days a week. Eating on the job is a no-no, although we all graze on the down low. I could take a break, in theory, but simply don’t have time. Most shifts I don’t have time to drink out of my water container right in front of me (I bring a gallon of water with 2-3 LMNT packs in it to work.) An average shift leaves me hot, sore, sticky, thirsty, and anxious. So in terms of IF and exercise:

If I wake at, say, 9 am (and feel like absolute road kill, btw, and both feet are on fire from pinky toe bunions) and need to be clocked in at work by 1:30 or 2, that leaves me 4.5 hours to get all my meals in, exercise, AND spend time on soul fulfilling hobbies. I try very hard to not eat or have a drink when I get home from work, but sometimes I’m ravenous. (Or am I just dehydrated and anxious? They kind of feel the same.) And then as we slide into the busy summer season I’m having a drink every night…

What, when, how much do I eat during the day? If I am going to eat after work, what type of macro situation should I have? I’ve thought about bringing meat sticks or homemade collagen gummies in to work, but then I’m snarfing them in the corner between tickets and I am most definitely NOT in a parasympathetic state, so in that case is it better to just be hungry?? Also the siren song of the bowl of salty french fries beckons all night, which we all pick out of.

I feel like HIIT 3-4 days a week, heavier weights and less reps, with maybe a yoga class or two or three mixed in is what I need (although I need to actually DO it) but my husband thinks I need to jog for an hour 5 days a week and lift lighter weights with more reps. He says I need to do so much cardio that I puke. I’m not liking the sound of that. Is there a happy medium somewhere or am I just a whiny baby? I keep hearing you mention “zones” for cardio and I’m not sure what that means.

You had a question regarding cholesterol a few weeks back, a man named James I think who cut out carbs and his cholesterol jumped as well. You recommended him adding a few more carbs. But I thought cholesterol came from dietary carbs? I miss fruit and potatoes and winter squash. I really miss the vibrant and energetic person I used to be, also.

**Some reference points that may or may not be useful for you that you don’t need to add to my question, or read out loud, but just in case you need more info along with the novel I’ve already written:

• We work in a seasonal restaurant so we have winters off, which is when I try to wrangle my health back in line before the slow slide into the madness of summer. I’m TIRED of this merry go round. I want to be healthy and sustain my vitality all year long.
• I have really good work shoes and orthotics only available at my podiatrist’s office. Interestingly I had bunion surgery in 2001 for both my big toes. My newest bunions started paining me in late 2019.
• 2017 I had 4 menstrual cycles all year, then 2 each in 2018 and 2019, then my last one in May 2021. My cycles have been irregular throughout my whole life. I have never been pregnant. When this all began an older male doctor bullied me onto the pill. I stopped after a month because I felt WEIRD.
• I’ve not had Covid that I know of, but I did fall for the 3 jabs: April and May of 2021, and January 2022. Never again though. When I was very little I reacted badly to the DTP shot (lower body paralysis for a day after) so I was hesitant to get the C shot but didn’t seem to get anything but a sore arm, knock on wood. I guess only time will tell with that situation.
• Did I mention tong-itis (the kitchen version of tennis elbow) in both arms? In 2017 it was so bad I couldn’t shift the gears in my car. Basically I am just inflamed, stiff, tight, contracted. I know I need to stretch more or roll on my foam roller or fascia balls but then I think so much about what I need to do I don’t do anything and I end up sitting in my chair all day, dreading work

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Transcript:

Click for Transcript PDF

Nicki: It is time to make your health an act of rebellion. We’re tackling personalized nutrition, metabolic flexibility, resilient aging, and answering your diet and lifestyle questions.

This is the only show with the bold aim to help 1 million people liberate themselves from the sick care system. You’re listening to the Healthy Rebellion Radio. The contents of this show are for entertainment and educational purposes only. Nothing in this podcast should be considered medical advice. Please consult your licensed and credentialed functional medicine practitioner before embarking on any health, dietary, or fitness change.

Warning, when Robb gets passionate, he’s been known to use the occasional expletive. If foul language is not your thing, if it gets your britches in a bunch, well, there’s always Disney+.

Robb: Howdy folks, welcome back. Howdy, wife.

Nicki: Hello. Welcome to episode 150 of the Healthier Rebellion Radio. 150. It’s a milestone.

Robb: It is like a milestone. Only, not a milestone. No. Yes, it is.

Nicki: It’s a nice healthy number. We thank you all for tuning in again for another episode. Let’s see, we had an interesting day yesterday. We did a bunch of yard work, kind of burned some fallen debris from trees and kind of just cleaned up the yard a bit, which was nice because we had a beautiful sunny day. But throughout the entire day, Robb kept singing this song. Do you want to share your dream that you had the night before?

Robb: I had kind of a wacky dream in which the National Salmon Institute…

Nicki: Is there a National Salmon Institute?

Robb: No, there is not. I checked. There is no such thing. But in my dream, there was a National Salmon Institute, and because of my work in protein centric diets and regenerative agriculture, they wanted me to be part of their next AG campaign. And so they basically came to me and said, “Dance, monkey, dance.” And so the thing that I came up with was a remake of Bob Marley’s, Jamming. Only…

Nicki: With salmon.

Robb: With salmon.

Nicki: And so all day yesterday.

Robb: We hope you like salmon.

Nicki: Salmon in the name of the Lord.

Robb: All day.

Nicki: The whole day. It was something else.

Robb: I wouldn’t recommend it.

Nicki: I had weird dreams that night too. I was dreaming about scorpions for some reason. Scorpions that carried all their babies on their back and they all hatched out and were screwing across the floor.

Robb: John Boone made us drinks the night before.

Nicki: I don’t know what was in…

Robb: He roofied us or something.

Nicki: Those beverages, but something. All right. I did have an announcement today. You all have heard us mention our dear friends, John and Brittany at Go Roam Free, they’re the folks that did the big bison roast that we mentioned on a couple of occasions. They actually have a product in Costco, in some select Costco locations. It’s a bison chili Colorado, which is amazing. And it’s hitting the shelves in San Diego, Arizona, Colorado, Albuquerque, and St. George, Utah, as well as Las Vegas.

So Costco does these things where they’ll put something on the shelf for a few weeks, kind of see how the customers respond to it, see how sales are, and if sales are good, then they will choose to expand regions and keep it on the shelves for longer. So if you like bison, that’s been regeneratively raised by our dear friends, John and Brittany, and you live in one of these areas, San Diego, Arizona, Colorado, Albuquerque, St. George, Utah, and Las Vegas, it would be wonderful if you would were to try their bison Chili Colorado.

I guess it’s going to be on the shelf from now until mid-May. So they just have about one month to prove to Costco that their members love it. So if you’re so inclined, grab some and give it a try.

Robb: I’m trying to think. Our girls have loved their bison chili.

Nicki: They have a bison chili that they had in the winter, more in the winter months, which was excellent. And then this one’s Chili Colorado,

Robb: Which is green.

Nicki: The Chili, is it green? I don’t think so.

Robb: Yeah, Chili Colorado is green.

Nicki: Traditionally it’s green, yeah. We actually haven’t tried it yet. We’re getting some this Saturday.

Robb: No, no. I’m thinking of Chili Verde, Chili Colorado is red.

Nicki: Yeah, I don’t think it’s, because I saw the pictures and the images she sent me.

Robb: It’s red.

Nicki: They’re not stocking it in Montana, so we can’t go out and grab it here yet anyway. They did keep the bison chili here in our Montana, Costco. So if this goes well in these other regions, then I expect that we’ll see it here. But we’re going to see them this weekend and she’s going to bring us some to try.

Robb: And, again, that’s in St. Diego, Arizona, Colorado, Albuquerque, St. George, Utah, and Las Vegas.

Nicki: And Las Vegas. Yep. Okay. Any other things up front before we jump in, hubs?

Robb: Nope. It’s all outback. Nothing up front.

Nicki: Is that like a mullet?

Robb: Something like that. Business up front, party in the back.

Nicki: Okay. So let’s see here. Our news topic today, it’s a paper from, is it Nature? Is that right?

Robb: Yes, I believe so.

Nicki: Yeah, nature.com titled Incident Type Two Diabetes Attributable to Suboptimal Diet in 184 countries. You want to dig in there, hubs?

Robb: And so tip to Nina Ty Schultz, I think she was the first person that I really saw put some analysis onto this. And in the paper, we’ll go back to that paper. It was, again, one of these kind of food frequency questionnaire type things. So potentially fraught with some problems. But what they see here, largest type two diabetes burdens were attributable to insufficient whole grain intake, excess refined rice, and wheat intake and excess processed meat intake. These are the things that according to their data, were the primary…

Nicki: It’s so funny, they lead with this, “The global burden of diet attributable type two diabetes is not well established.” When they say that, are they saying where it’s coming from or just?

Robb: The exact mechanism, they’re claiming.

Nicki: Which seems like it is fairly well established.

Robb: There’s still uproar. If you really get into the very… I’m trying not to have a disparaging term here, but there are sections of the low carb world that insist that it is only carbohydrate intake that the driver. There’s the Lipotoxicity Model, which I’m more a fan of, which is overall excess eating is going to be the primary driver. We lose insulin resistance as we start basically sticking fat in every tissue of the body, including the pancreatic beta cells and in the liver. And we end up with insulin resistance. And then that’s where things really take off.

The thing about that is refined, and people will point out that we’re definitely eating more calories than we have in the past. They will mention that we’re eating more fat than we have in the past. It’s true, but people generally don’t just spoon fat into their pie hole of some sections of keto and carnivore land.

Maybe you see that. But this is where it’s kind of funny because it’s like, okay, the total caloric burden is probably at least partially or primarily attributable to increased fat intake, but that’s always on some sort of a processed carbohydrate. And this is where this shit just gets kind of silly. And it’s funny because they’re saying, “Insufficient whole grain intake, yet excess refined rice and wheat intake.”

It’s like, who doesn’t eat? I guess some people eat brown rice, but when you look at the glycemic load of brown versus white rice, it’s virtually indistinguishable.Even when you get into eating the pearled barley and stuff like that, the problem that people really run into is when we get hyper palatable, complex meals that are easy to overeat. So anyway, and then they’ve got to get their little dig in there on process meats.

And Nina had a tweet, which we’ve linked to the original Nature paper, and then also some of Nina’s analysis on this. The paper uses a Gates Foundation database from the Global Burden of Disease, which had an inaccurate findings on red meat before. For example, they said that, “No amount of processed red meat was safe.” The authors admitted this finding was incorrect, yet they did not retract the paper.

So this is just a rehash of that original dubious scientific publication. And in some ways for our crowd, this is kind of pedestrian and passe, but it’s always worth having these things and a bit of analysis because there are always new people coming into the fold. We always have family members and friends that say, “Hey.”

Nicki: The latest headline, like

Robb: Did you see this latest headline? And all that stuff.

Nicki: Yeah, meat’s going to give me diabetes even though it has no…

Robb: Well, and Nina in that thread went on to show overfeeding studies with meat specifically and protein more broadly, and it consistently improved glycemic response, improved blood glucose levels. If you have a macronutrient of interest, protein generally and kind of meat more specifically is probably not the place that you want to look for the big problems.

Nicki: Okay. We will link to both that paper and Nina’s tweet thread in the show notes. And the Healthy Rebellion Radio is sponsored by our salty AF electrolyte company, LMNT when you’re feeling tired or in need of an energy boost, most people reach for more caffeine, but your body could be telling you that you’re dehydrated and in need of electrolytes.

Esther, who’s a member of the LMNT team, shared a text she received from a friend who recently started drinking LMNT and the text reads, “I am on day four of two to three packs of LMNT a day. Today my mind is wanting a second cup of coffee. I normally jump from adrenal boost to adrenal boost via coffee all day, but my body is totally disinterested. Did I just give up my coffee addiction for being properly hydrated? Because that’s fine, but I didn’t get to say goodbye.” I thought that was so funny.

So if you are like Esther’s friend, you too can stop jumping from adrenal boost to adrenal boost with coffee. Don’t grab more coffee. You might just need more electrolytes. Give your body what it needs. You can grab your element at drinklmnt.com/robb. That’s drink L-M-N-T dotcom slash R-O-B-B. And Robb, did you know that it is T minus four weeks to grapefruit season?

Robb: Couldn’t happen quicker.

Nicki: Fasts enough, I know. I’m down to my last five pack packets. So today we are going to tackle a single question. This is a very long question.

Robb: Well, it’s a lot of stuff from a single person.

Nicki: Yes, that’s what I mean. This question came in from Becky. She prefaces it with, “I am so sorry about the length. I truly tried to whittle it down. I think I’m giving you too much information and I hope I don’t disqualify myself over the length. And also thank you in advance for your help.”

So we’re going to answer just this one question for this one inbound inquiry we got from Becky. It touches on a whole host of things from weight gain, inflammation, cholesterol…

Robb: Perimenopause.

Nicki: Perimenopause, cardio. So we figured, even though it is a big meaty question, there’s probably something in here that a lot of people will get something from some portion of this giant question. So that’s why we decided to tackle it. So we’ll start here and I’m going to chunk it up. I’m not going to read the whole thing at once because, again, it’s quite long. So I’m going to read one long section first and then we’ll dig into that and then I’ll read the other long section.

She says, “Hi, Robb and Nicki, I have been binging on your podcast lately and as it turns out, I have a question, actually more than one for you. I’m going to be 46 in June. I have worked over 25 years in restaurant kitchens, so a lot of physical work and standing on my feet all day. My husband and I reside on Cape Cod, which is hot and swampy in the summer. Therefore, the kitchen environment is hot and swampy and depleting in every way.

At age 34, 35, I began going into perimenopause and I’ve officially been in menopause since June of 2022 at the age of 45. I tried for years to get my period back. I’d been vegetarian, sometimes vegan for about six years, and then I switched to paleo intermittently for a few years plus acupuncture, Traditional Chinese Medicine, plant paradox, medical medium, dozens of whole 30s, et cetera. I’ve tried it all though, none for more than a month or two.

The past few years have found me 60 plus pounds overweight. I’m five foot three and a quarter and currently weigh 188 to 190 pounds. I’m sore, stiff, weak with thinning hair, lack of mobility, and feeling depressed. I have sleep apnea. I’m going on one year with my magical CPAP machine, though lately that has seemed to level off and I am waking up tired again.

I had blood work done on January 31st that revealed high cholesterol and stagnant liver function with glucose on the high level of normal, which my doctor seemed to think was fine. It was 93/99, total cholesterol, 206, HDL 41, triglycerides 83. And then some liver numbers also. also higher blood pressure than I’d ever had, 138 over 80, usually doctors exclaim over how great my blood pressure is.

So determined to get my health and vitality back, I reread your two books. Robb and I decided to dive back into paleo but cut out all carbs and I had already been booze free since December. I started intermittent fasting most days, lifting weights a bit, but still avoiding cardio, which I despise.

When I increase the animal protein though I tend to stop pooing regularly. I was vegetarian for a few years and had no problem moving things out, but I feel that is what precipitated my descent into metabolic haywire. I’ve been supplementing lately with magnesium minerals, vitamin D, A, K, and E, some TCM herbs for liver support, and I’ve been on the lookout for good digestive enzyme. I had given up coffee for nearly a year because it was making me hot and anxious and I thought it was a factor in my hair shed. But lately I started mixing a little coffee back into my Rasa along with collagen, which I just started using again. I started eating a lot of full fat cottage cheese for more protein, the only dairy that doesn’t seem to make me phlegmy. Then the past few weeks, some wine here and there.

I got my second round of blood work done on April 4th and my cholesterol went up though my liver improved.” And then she says, “She didn’t test my glucose again. I do have heart disease and high cholesterol in my family. Did my cholesterol go up from wine even though my liver improved? Cottage cheese? Not really exercising? All of the above?

After I read your books again, I asked my doctor to authorize for A1C, LDLP, and CRP, but she refused. I see her again at the end of this month and I’m hoping she’ll agree to the other test after seeing my cholesterol jump.”

Okay, so we’re going to stop there and dig into this section here.

Robb: You had some prompts down there.

Nicki: The first thing that sticks out to me clearly with the early onset of perimenopause and menopause is, I’m not sure, Becky, if you are working with someone regarding hormones, but that seems to be the weight gain. A lot of this stuff could be tied into the hormonal profile that you have right now.

Robb: It just makes it so tough. If the hormones are off, man, you’re just swimming upstream with regards to leaning out, good sleep, hunger control. It really does make things more difficult.

Nicki: Inflammation, everything.

Robb: Yeah, inflammation, the whole nine yards. We have some people in the Healthy Rebellion, they’re quite knowledgeable on that hormone side. There are other good folks out in the functional medicine space. It is not something that generally is picked up by insurance, although that will vary from situation to situation. But I would definitely do a deep dive on that. I think Nicki is spot on with that, looking at the hormone situation first to get a baseline of what’s happening there.

Nicki: So that seems like numero uno. Figure out who you can find that will actually do a full panel look at everything. And, again, we do have some people in the rebellion that do that so if you want to ping me for some referrals, we can do that. The other thing that stuck out is the lack of pooing regularly with the increased protein.

Robb: I forget what the exact spread was, but there’s a paper that looks at normal human pooing frequency and it’s anywhere from three times a day to every three days is considered normal. And what’s normal is basically what’s normal for you.

I do know that as people increase protein, that can decrease peristalsis to some degree in the gut. Sometimes you’re just not eating as much fiber which moves things along. And I guess the way that I would look at this is are you feeling backed up, impacted, constipated? That’s something to definitely keep an eye on and sometimes that will just takes a certain amount of time to change.

I remember when Joe Rogan went carnivore, he actually had diarrhea for three weeks and then day 21 of his tinkering, everything normalized and he ended up pooing once every two days or something like that, which is very typical for people eating carnivore because there’s effectively no plant fiber. Technically there is some fibrous type stuff that’s part of animal material and you do form a wee little nugget every once in a while with that. But I guess I wouldn’t necessarily say that the decreased frequency is a problem specifically just because it’s decreased frequency. I would go more by are you feeling bad as a consequence?

And then a thought around trying to triangulate in on what’s going on. Precision Health Reports, which we’ve done work with in the past, I can’t recommend them enough. They will provide a really deep insight into your metabolic health when you go through their program. It will give you a sense of your 10 year risk for developing type two diabetes as well as cardiovascular disease. It includes an A1C, it includes an LDLP. People can do an APO B in lieu of the LDLP, but I just really like this material because it gives you a great snapshot into your metabolic health.

Again, this is going to be out-of-pocket stuff, but for brevity, I think Nicki didn’t read above, but Becky asked her doctor to order some of these other tests and the doctor refused because of insurance and coding. You can still get things like this. It’s you have to pay out of pocket for it and sometimes the doctors are a pain in the ass to help you do that. So the Precision Health Reports, you can go directly to a Lab Corp, get a blood draw, and then they can help you get that done. And so I would recommend doing the Precision Health Reports and then finding somebody within the functional medicine space to do a comprehensive hormonal profile too.

Nicki: What was I just going to say? Oh, one thing I was going to mention too on this cholesterol, because she got her first round of testing in January and then this most recent round on April 4th, and she does have an increase in her total cholesterol by, let me go up, 40 points and HDL dropped by eight.

We were just talking to someone a couple of days ago who had pre kind of intervention blood work and then at the three month mark had it again, and you’ve said this time and time again, sometimes at the three month mark things don’t look markedly better. They don’t look the way that you’d expect.

Robb: If the person’s leaning out and whatnot. I don’t know if she’s doing enough to warrant. Usually when we see that it’s when people are losing non-trivial amounts of body fat. And it’s disheartening because the person gets initial blood work. They have this come to Jesus moment where everything looks really bad, they modify their diet, they sleep better, they start exercising, then at three months they get their blood work done again and now it looks worse.

And then they’re kind of like, “What the fuck?” And within the clinic in Reno, we ended up punting on the three month checkup in lieu of the six month checkup. And typically things have kind of normalized and stabilized by that point. And then it’s not kind of a gut shot in that regard.

Nicki: You made a good point. This doesn’t seem to be the same case for Becky because she’s still struggling with the inability to lose weight. So it’s probably not the same thing going on.

Robb: She asked about could the wine increase the cholesterol? Not usually. We have seen dairy fat increase cholesterol in some people and kind of markedly so. I don’t know if the full fat cottage cheese is a driver of that, but it is a thing. The dairy fat in some people does drive up cholesterol numbers and whether or not that is at the end of the day, a total increase in risk profile is up to whether or not you buy into the purely lipid driven, gradient driven atherosclerotic process. Or if you’re more got a foot in the vascular endothelial camp or if you’re kind of like me and you think it might be a bit of both.

Nicki: Okay. So those are the first things that jump out at us. So finding somebody to help look at your hormones, you can retest your blood work with Precision Health Reports. The pooing is probably just going to have to have to monitor that monitor and see if that’s a constipation issue or it’s just not as regular as what you’re used to. And that’s what kind of throwing you off. Definitely trying to shoot for one pound of protein per…

Robb: One gram of protein.

Nicki: One gram of protein, sorry. Yep. Reversing that there. One gram protein per pound of lean body mass. So definitely want to prioritize that. We’re going to jump into another section of her lengthy question. This part deals with when to eat and how to train given her crazy work schedule.

So she says, “I work from around one to 2:00 PM to 10 to 11:00 PM, five to six days a week. Eating on the job is a no-no. Although we all graze on the down low. I could take a break in theory, but simply don’t have time. Most shifts, I don’t have time to drink out of my water container that’s right in front of me. I bring a gallon of water with two to three LMNT packs in it to work.

An average shift leaves me hot, sore, sticky, thirsty, and anxious. So in terms of intermittent fasting and exercise, if I wake up at, say 9:00 AM, and feel like absolute roadkill by the way, and both feet are on fire from pinky toe bunions and I need to be clocked in at work by 1:30 or two, that leaves me four and a half hours to get all my meals in, exercise, and spend time on soul fulfilling hobbies. I try very hard to not eat or I have a drink when I get home from work, but sometimes I’m ravenous or am I just dehydrated and anxious? They kind of feel the same.

And then as we slide into the bus busy summer season, I’m having a drink every night. So what, when, and how much do I eat during the day? If I’m going to eat after work, what type of macro situation should I have? I’ve thought about bringing meat sticks or homemade collagen gummies into work, but then I’m snarfing them in the corner between tickets and I’m most definitely not in a parasympathetic state. So in that case, is it better to just be hungry? Also, the siren song of the bowl of salty french fries beckons all night, which we all pick out of.

I feel like HIT training three to four days a week, heavier weights and less reps with maybe a yoga class or two or three mixed in is what I need, although I need to actually do it. But my husband thinks I need to jog for an hour five days a week and lift lighter weights with more reps. He say, “I need to do so much cardio that I puke.” I’m not liking the sound of that. Is there a happy medium somewhere or am I just a whiny baby? I keep hearing you mention zones for cardio and I’m not sure what that means?”

Robb: You had a pretty good sense of how you wanted to dig into this.

Nicki: This one’s the tricky part and it might be more of a tough love part. First of all, she says she could take a break in theory but doesn’t have the time. What you’re describing is on your feet in a hot, sweaty, bustling kitchen with no time for a nine hour chunk of time and inability to eat or even drink, which is not sustainable.

And what you’ve described with what’s going on physically, if your body were a house, there’s some smoke signals happening here, there’s stuff that’s not optimized, not working well, you’re inflamed, you’re achy…

Robb: Some hair loss.

Nicki: You’ve got hair loss. Lots of stuff is not working the way it should. So it’s your body’s way of saying, “Hey, we got some shit going on here and we need you to focus on this stuff.” And I get that that’s what you’re doing and that’s why you’ve reread Robb’s books and you’ve written this question.

But I guess my tough love thing here is this, and I know you’ve done this work for a really long time and is and job you’ve had for forever, but you might consider that it might not be really congruent with your health right now. And I’m not sure what that means. I’m not sure if it’s feasible, but I was just kind of reflecting on if you had something really serious happen in your life, you might have to make a change. And that’s not here yet, but you’ve got a lot of this stuff kind of bubbling to the surface and so it might be something to consider.

And/or, if absolutely this is, you love this job and you’re not open to considering doing something in a different field or just doing something differently with a better schedule that would allow you to prioritize your health, then you absolutely need to prioritize taking a break. You have to be able to hydrate in this hot humid environment. You have to be able to get in some amount of food so that you’re not getting home near midnight and then trying to decide whether to eat or not to eat before you have to sleep and get up and do the whole thing again.

Robb: Totally agree and I know that that’s a lot. And saying this with nothing but love for you and understanding that these work situations can be really challenging. I’ve worked in a lot of restaurants and I know that it can turn into this scenario where there’s not really a good place to take a break because you’re either line of sight with customers or you’re line of sight with coworkers and they’re kind of looking at you like, “Well, shit, we’re buried here and what are you doing?”

Nicki: If you were a type one diabetic and you had to go give yourself insulin injections.

Robb: And food.

Nicki: Or you had some other situation where you had to medically give… It’s almost the work that you’re doing in your 20s charge it, right? You can typically handle this type of work, but you’re now in your mid 40s and you’ve got these health issues that are bubbling to the surface. So it’s sort of like, “Okay, I either need to prioritize how I’m going to get what I need, which is food and water and rest during my shift, or, “I need to figure out if there’s some other type of work that I can do in lieu of this.”

Robb: So again, if you choose to maybe head into a different line of work that would maybe be a little more amenable to your health, that’s great. Might take time to transition, it might not happen. So in lieu of that one consistent thing that I’ve seen is the inconsistency in application of these interventions. You mentioned starting and stopping lots of Whole 30s and things like that. This is super common. This is not a dig on you at all, but we have to find something that you’re going to stick with long term. And I don’t know what that is.

Nicki and I have been getting up and our garage is kind of cold and kind of dark, but we have a TV in it and we’ve been getting up and watching some spy shows and stuff like that and doing some zone two cardio. And I do have a resource for being able to track that that I’ll mention here in a minute, but if you want to lift some weights, that’s great. If you want to do some body weight calisthenics, that’s great. There are a zillion different resources online for getting training.

The main thing is that you’ve got to look within yourself and decide what is it that you’re going to do. And for a lot of people the drive to a gym can be freeing, it’s liberating. You have some time to yourself, you can shower, you can sauna and get your workout in and you get it all done in one spot. And for other people it’s just the 13th thing out of the 12th things you need and you can’t do it. It ends up making it a problem.

So that’s where you need to convert a part of your garage, part of your living room, whatever little, I think, Pavel Tsatsouline calls it the Courage Corner where you’ve got some kettlebells and TRX and you get your workout in, but you’ve got to figure out what that is that’s going to work for you. I think some zone two cardio.

Nicki: Talk about that.

Robb: I really, really like the Morpheus Training Platform. I don’t have any type of financial relationship with them. It’s a trainwithmorpheus.com. When you buy this thing and it’s 130 bucks, 140 bucks, something like that, you get a monitor that you check your heart rate variability score in the morning and it gives you a readiness score. And then you’ve got a chest strap heart rate monitor. You have an app that you put on your smartphone and this thing will tell you how recovered you are and it gives you a sense of how hard to go on any given day

Nicki: And you’re not doing so much cardio that you puke.

Robb: Not at all.

Nicki: That piece you can just, it doesn’t have to be, especially in the beginning, right? You’re going to be getting into shape and you’re going to be… It’s just getting moving, getting your heart rate up for a sustained period of time, and incrementally doing that day by day.

Robb: And clearly that’s going to be probably an early in the day thing. So we would ideally figure out a schedule that you’re going to keep, whether it’s doing some cardio one day, some strength training the next day, and then just rinse, lather, repeat. Maybe it’s some mixed modal stuff, a little bit like CrossFit. But again, I think the nice thing about using that Morpheus Training Platform is it will tell you when you’re going too hard, your heart rate gets up into the red zone and it basically tells you to back down. So it’s very handy in helping to regulate so that you don’t burn yourself out and it becomes miserable and you want to stop doing that stuff.

Then you would have a really, really good breakfast. And ideally then you, and not ideally, it just has to be a non-negotiable feature. You get a lunch at work and ideally your breakfast is pretty sizable, your lunch is pretty sizable and you might be able to get by with that. But then if you want something after work because you’ve had a decent stretch there, this is where a salad or some veggies with protein is fine, we would prefer not to eat right before going to bed, but you’re getting off work at 10 or 11:00 at night and this is where we’re just going to have to be tighter on this stuff. If you have a drink, try to make it intermittent. Try not to make it every day because it does…

Nicki: Impact your sleep.

Robb: And there’s just no two ways around that stuff. But we need to figure out a plan for your exercise. And, again, this is keeping in mind all the stuff that we mentioned before with checking hormones and all the rest of that, but ideally looking at maybe a career change, short of a career change or in lieu until that can happen, getting up, getting some exercise in, getting a really good breakfast.

Nicki: Prioritizing protein.

Robb: Prioritizing protein.

Nicki: Especially if you’re maybe only going to do two meals, that breakfast needs to be 50, 60 grams of protein.

Robb: Well, and this is where looking up your energy needs on the keto gains macro calculator and we can put a link to that and then grabbing something like the free version of chronometer and really input what you’re reading so that you get a sense of if you’re in the strike zone hitting your protein minimums, not going overboard on the total caloric load.

Nicki and I have been doing some tracking with that and it’s super helpful. It is easy to overdo it, unfortunately. And then for somebody as busy as you can under eat generally, and then when we rebound off that, then we go crazy with the plate of french fries or whatever is handy.

Nicki: So she’s talking about intermittent fasting, but given her schedule, are you thinking that and just generally?

Robb: She’s intermittent fasting anyway because she’s just busy and this is where get up, do some fasted cardio but we’re not doing it. Or fasted workout if you’re okay, or maybe just a quick protein shake or something like that. We’re not doing it specifically for the sake of being fasted. We’re just doing it for time expediency. It’s get in, get that workout in, get that first meal in. And it’s going to be a sizable meal.

If we could rig it up so that you only have two meals or maybe it’s two meals and a snack, maybe the first meal is 40% of your calories for the day. The second meal, your lunch, is 40% of your calories for the day. And then we only have 20% of the calories left for the day for that small before bedtime meal.

Nicki: So it might be twos sizeable hamburger patties with some shrimp.

Robb: Veggie wrapped and all the rest of it.

Nicki: The tricky part is getting that much protein in it once you’re, you’re not going to want it to all be the same thing.

Robb: Usually.

Nicki: Most people kind of struggle with that. So having two different protein sources can help make that a little bit easier to get down.

Robb: And I think those are the biggies.

Nicki: Those are the biggies here.

Robb: It’s a lot.

Nicki: It’s a lot. And if you didn’t have these kind of underlying kind of signals that your body was giving off, it’s like, “Okay, this is tough. Here’s how we’re going to work with it.” But the reason why I went that tough love route and was like, “Maybe you might consider something else?” Is because you have your sleep, you’re struggling with your sleep, you’re waking up super tired, you’re using a CPAP, all of this stuff is only compounding on top of each other. And so it’s like we got to get to the root cause-

Robb: We have a great opportunity to intervene here.

Nicki: … of all that stuff before something just gets worse. Let’s see, I’m just seeing if there’s anything else I wanted to share here in her… So normally, so this is seasonal work and so she has winters off, so she usually tries to wrangle her health back in line before the madness of summer. So it’s kind of this merry-go-round of it gets dialed in during the winter, craziness in the summer. But she says, “I’m tired of this merry-go-round. I want to be healthy and sustain my vitality all year long.” Which props absolutely 100%. That’s what we all want.

A little bit about menstrual cycle irregularity. Again, finding somebody to really work with you on hormones. She said, “Did I mention tongitis, the kitchen version of tennis elbow in both arms. In 2017 it was so bad I couldn’t shift the gears in my car. Basically I’m just inflamed, stiff, tight, and contracted. I know I need to stretch more or roll on my foam roller or fascia balls, but then I think so much about what I need to do, I don’t do anything and end up sitting in my chair all day dreading work.”

One thing, if you find yourself in this paralyzed spot of, “It’s too overwhelming, I don’t know what to do.” Put your sneakers on and just go for a long walk. Just get outside whatever time of day it is. If it’s raining, pouring down rain, put on a rain jacket, put on a hat and go for a walk. Walking can be so good for just clearing the mind. And it’s also helping move your body, which is paramount. We have to move our body. So that’s definitely way better than sitting in your chair dreading work. You can think about it while on your walk, but go for a walk. The tennis elbow stuff again, a lot of that inflammation could be related to just dietary stuff.

I would definitely work. There’s definitely some mobility stuff that can be done. Robb had an elbow situation for a while and the Basis folks at Basis Health and Performance, Aaron Grayson helped a ton with that. You can look up on YouTube, actually, I’ll put a link in the show notes for a car’s routine. There’s elbow cars. So some just a really basic movement you can do without any equipment. Or if you want to eventually progress to using a band or weight, you can, but I think there’s some stuff that you can tackle to kind of help that.

But overall, decreasing your inflammation, improving your sleep, decreasing your stress levels will help in that regard also.

Robb: And we could go on, but that’s a lot to unpack and a lot to implement from here too. But again, I can’t emphasize enough. You just need to find what the strategy is that you’re going to do and then you just, come hell or high water, you stick to it.

Nicki: And, again, think about if you were newly diagnosed type one diabetic or you had something. We have a friend whose son was just recently diagnosed, and so they have this whole new life, they’ve got to check blood sugar and they’ve got to give insulin shots and certain dietary and it’s the thing.

You have a lot of smoke signals going on. It’s sort of like, “Okay, here’s my plan and I’m going to stick to it because otherwise what’s the cost if they didn’t do this for their son?” If they didn’t track everything carefully and didn’t give him the insulin, it’s not a good outcome. So you’ve got to… I’m not exactly sure how to say this, but when I was vegan and I didn’t want to eat something because it had animal food in it, I always thought, “Okay, that’s toxic or that’s bad for me.” And I just stuck that in my head that I’m not going to touch that. And it’s almost like you need to do a similar thing for yourself.

It’s mentally kind of trick yourself into, “I’m doing this because this is a must for my body and I’m not going to touch that because that’s only going to contribute to me feeling how I don’t want to feel.” And so really, I don’t know, I guess using whatever mental model mind tricks that you can come up with to help move you in the direction that you want to go.

And again, that just for today, thing that we’ve all learned from Coach Cinnamon Prime and we’ve used in our resets in the Healthy Rebellion. It’s just for today, I’m going to take a walk and just for today, I’m going to make sure that I drink my gallon of water at work, even if I feel crazy and stressed every time I walk by this counter, I’m going to take a sip or I don’t know, whatever kind of little markers you can use to remind you that this is a thing that I have to do.

Robb: Keep us posted, circle back, and let us know how you’re doing. We really want to see you succeed here.

Nicki: Absolutely. And again, we’ll put links in the show notes to that Precision Health blood work that you can get. It’s actually pretty, I can’t remember the pricing.

Robb: It’s 150 bucks.

Nicki: It’s under $200 and it’s all the testing that you need to figure out what might be going on there. And then the Morpheus Platform, and what else did we mention? All those things will be in the show notes.

Robb: Yep.

Nicki: Okay. That was a big question.

Robb: It was a lot. And a part of the reason why Nicki wanted to tackle this one is we feel like a lot of people are in situations like this where they’ve got a lot going on and the health is kind of coming unraveled at the seams and it’s not a simple thing to unwind. And we can oftentimes have years of patterns with what we’ve been doing and our bodies are incredibly resilient and it can take an ass kicking until it can’t.

And I think that that’s a lot of Nicki’s point too, is that the gift here is that there’s a lot of early warning signs going on, but nothing is egregiously broken yet that we can’t pull this back from the edge and get you in much better shape and have a much better quality of life. But stuff has to change. It has to happen.

Nicki: And a lot of people make really hard decisions on stuff like this and they just come to the point where, “I’ve done this work for 25 years, I enjoy it. I’m good at it.” When you’ve done something for so long, it’s hard to imagine doing anything else, but it can also be really freeing to change gears.

We know my brother-in-law, we know lots of people who have come to a point in their career where it’s like, “This isn’t serving me. This is too much stress, anxiety. I’m not the person I want to be with my family because of the stress, because of this workload. I’m not able to train and do the exercise the way that I want to because of the demands of this job.”

And I think we get so used to being like, “Well, this is my job, this is what I do.” But I don’t know. You know, made that comment, “You want to be healthy and have vitality all year round.” There might be some soul searching here and I would just, I’d be open to it. I know that can be really scary and unknown, but we’ve got one life. What can you do to just really live the way that you want to live now for the rest of your life?

Robb: Cool.

Nicki: Okay. That’s enough. We’re rambling on that one. Becky, best of luck. Please keep us posted. I think that’s it. Any other parting thoughts, Robb?

Robb: I think I dispensed so much wisdom and was in the presence of so much wisdom that I have nothing left.

Nicki: Okay. Must be because you were channeling Bob Marley in your sleep the other night.

Robb: Could be.

Nicki: All right everybody, thank you for joining us. Remember to check out our show sponsor, LMNT, for all your electrolyte needs. We’ve got a flavor for every taste bud. And you can grab that at drinklmnt.com/robb. Remember, if you buy three boxes, you get the fourth box free. That’s drink L-M-N-T slash R-O-B-B. And we’ll see you next week.

Robb: Bye, everybody.

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News Topic:

Decouple: Mining Our Way To Net Zero

How Much Mining To Power The World With Wind And Solar

Show Notes:

Chris Martenson of Peak Prosperity: Crash Course

Questions: 

Protein/Leucine vs body size

Mike says:

Hey Robb,

Quicky: We always hear 30-35g of complete-protein as the minimum threshold for obtaining 3g of Leucine and the anabolic magic that occurs with this sort of meal. Is this body size dependent? Seems like it would have to be? Run with it Robb!

Second Quicky: Everyone parrots ‘don’t get in the cold plunge immediately after your strength workout, it’ll blunt hypertrophy!’ What percentage of lifters are gaining ANY size anyways, after their first several years of lifting? I lift for health/enjoyment/maintenance as I imagine 90% of people do, no matter what they tell themselves about ‘getting huge’. In that sense, is everyone fearful of cold plunge after lifting for no reason?? (In shape, 38 years old, 165, been 165 for 10 years and will likely be 165 til I’m 80 and croak)

You the man!

Perfect Aminos

Sam says: 

Hi guys! Like so many others, I have followed you from the early days of CrossFit and remain a loyal follower. I’ve been a CF gym owner for about 13 years now – 11 years with a “normal” affiliate and the last three as a “seniors only” affiliate – over 100 members ages 55 to 93! My challenges are very different, specificall with diet with these guys. This is generation of some normal “from farm to table eating” and some “margarine over butter believers”. Some days my head explodes from the things I learn they believe!. Recently I was challenged by a new athlete with a bevvy of medical conditions. Our first attack with these people is their protein levels. I know was people age their appetite for physical chewing dietary protein wanes so we try to get creative. But this one stumped me. I’m familiar with BCAA’s and EAAs but have never used this addition as contributing to dietary protein intake. In other words if someone consumes 10g of EAAs in a powdered supplement form 2-3 times a day, I would not have counted that as 20-30 grams of protein from our dietary goal. Am I wrong? I’m currently being challenged on a supplement created by a local physician called “Perfect Aminos”. (link: https://bodyhealth.com/products/perfectaminoxp-drink-powder )

I’d love your read on this. My fear is what I’m hearing them claim is “I’m getting my protein with no calories”. Maybe I’m too old school for this new age stuff!

Thanks again for all you guys do to bring sanity to the ever-changing world of health and nutrition!

Micro dosing testosterone

Jeannie says:

First i absolutely love your podcast. You recently mentioned micro dosing testosterone on your podcast. My husband has been on monthly iM testosterone for the past 12 years. He works out 4 days a week (weights). Just would like a little more info on that.

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