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159: Biohacking with Ben Greenfield

Transcript of Episode 159: Biohacking with Ben Greenfield

With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Warren Phillips and Ben Greenfield

Ben:
Hey, what's up, you guys? This is Ben Greenfield from the Ben Greenfield Fitness show. If you hear a little bit of hubbub, it's because I am actually at this massive event called Cal Jam. It's like a health and chiropractic event.

Dr. Pompa:
Did you say cow like moo?

Ben:
No, like California. Cow Jam, the moo would be pretty cool too, like a raw milk convention. I'm actually waiting for myself to combust in a giant pile of explosive diarrhea because I've had in addition to multiple adjustments on my pelvis and my spine, LG, spirulina, chlorella, powdered bone broth, a few different bars from standard process.

Dr. Pompa:
I saw you laying on the floor a few times over there.

Ben:
About half a bottle of fish oil. I've been doing some foam rolling to my hip flexors using some fancy shaped foam rollers. Oh, I'm just detoxing all over the place.

Warren:
We're going to throw some detox drops down here.

Ben:
I don't think I can hold anymore.

Dr. Pompa:
I was going to say, let's see what we can do with him.

Warren:
I'm going in.

Ben:
The other voices that you hear here, I'm with a couple of my buddies. Warren Phillips and Dr. Dan Pompa. We're actually going to open the kimono for you guys because we had a blast at dinner last night talking bio hacking and detoxification and optimizing your brain.

Dr. Pompa:
We went over the top.

Ben:
We went a little bit over the top, a little bit fueled by wine. Warren just dumped a bottle of CytoDetox in —

Dr. Pompa:
It was a biodynamic wine I might add.

Warren:
I'm not blind though.

Ben:
Now, you may recognize Dr. Pompa from the podcast I did that you can access over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com/Pompa, but he's basically one of the world's foremost detoxification expert in terms of detoxing yourself without screwing yourself completely over from a brain and nervous systems standpoint. Then Warren here is his right hand man. Say hello, fellows.

Warren:
Hey, guys. Hey, Ben Greenfield family.

Dr. Pompa:
Welcome.

Warren:
I'm just a guy. That's what we say.

Ben:
That's right. Now, for those of you listening in, a couple of things. We're going to fill you in on some of the crazy stuff we talked about over dinner last night. Also, if you're interested in hanging out with us, meeting us, and having a good time down in Atlanta this May, then stay tuned for the end of this podcast because we're going to fill you in on an event that we're all three going to be speaking at along with our good friend, Dr. Joseph Mercola, who's also been on the show. The three of us are going to be jamming down in Atlanta in May.

Dr. Pompa:
It's going to be a blast.

Ben:
Stay tuned. At the end of the podcast we'll tell you how you can get into that. In the meantime, Warren, you said that you wanted to pick our brain about some of the stuff we talked about during dinner. Fill me in. What do you want to know? What do you want to share with folks?

Warren:
Well, it started off with showing up late. Dr. Pompa showed up late to dinner, and I showed up late to dinner. I just took a nap. I was up at 4:00 AM.

Dr. Pompa:
I didn't know you showed up late until this moment.

Warren:
Then I had to take a nap. East Coast, West Coast time, I was falling apart. I come up to Ben, you know, bio hacker, kind of down. I'm like dude, I can't look people in the eye right now. I'm like abnormal shyness. What's going on?

Dr. Pompa:
There's actually a name for that. It's called mercurialism.

Warren:
I was a mess, I was tired, I was fatigued. We've got to do something about that. You can't believe that. We can fix that. You can take pharmaceuticals, there's some herbs you were throwing down. You were throwing down some tapping things.

Dr. Pompa:
I didn't say pharmaceuticals.

Warren:
The lady that we freaked out at the booth —

Ben:
We didn't do any supplements or herbs. We did freak out the lady at the booth, though, who sat us because I don't know if any of you have ever tried tapping, but that's what I walked Warren through. It's one of my go-to methods for when you need to effect change. You have no coffee, you have no supplements, you have no giant kale smoothie that you can make, and it's very, very simple. There's actually a book written by [Nick Merto], and it's a book all about tapping. I've taught this to my children too.

The way that it works, and this is what I walked you through, Warren, is you find the point on your hand where you would normally karate chop somebody, kind of like the meat on the back of the hand underneath the pinky. You tap that multiple times. In your case you were groggy, and you were fatigued. We started off tapping that part over and over again saying I'm groggy, I'm fatigued, I woke up groggy from my nap. Then you work your way onto a few different points that you tap. The top of the head as you continue to talk; I'm groggy, I feel tired from my nap.

Then you go down to above the eyebrows and you continue to talk; I'm tired, I don't like the way I feel. Beside the eyebrows with both fingers; I'm tired, I'm groggy. We're hitting all these different meridians. Underneath the eyebrows, continuing to say I'm groggy, I'm tired, I woke up not feeling like I wanted to from my nap. Down to above the lip, and then you go below the chin.

Warren:
This is happening at our booth.

Ben:
We've got all this on video for you too. Then we go to the collar bone and continue to say I'm groggy, I don't like the way I feel after waking up. Then you go to the armpits, and at the very, very end after you finish tapping, you take a deep breath in and you say I deeply and completely accept myself.

Warren:
That hits you, doesn't it?

Ben:
You could do the center of the chest too.

Dr. Pompa:
I had the pleasure of interviewing an ex-Olympian who tapping changed and saved her life. It's actually on Cellular Healing TV. Are we broadcasting this on Cell TV?

Warren:
We're going to dual broadcast this on our podcast channel as well.

Dr. Pompa:
This will be on Cellular Healing TV as well.

Ben:
If people go to iTunes and they do a search for your show, they could access the video version of this.

Warren:
It's not a video. It would be online on our channel.

Ben:
I'll link to it on the show notes for this episode that you guys are listening to.

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, Ben, those of you who are watching, was on a past Cellular Healing TV show as well.

Ben:
That's right. We did one on ketosis.

Dr. Pompa:
Yes, we did. A fat adapted athlete and ketosis.

Ben:
This tapping thing, acupuncture is really good for hitting a lot of these meridians and opening up your chakras and effecting change in some of these areas that we tap. Let's face it, a lot of time we don't have somebody chasing us around with needles or the ability to drive in and sit for an hour at an acupuncturist's table. This tapping technique is something you can pull out while you're sitting in your car. It's free anytime, anyplace.

It sounds really woo, but before you judge it too harshly, grab the book. I'll throw a link to the book in the show notes for this tapping book by [Nick Merto]. Read it and learn how to do some of this stuff because it really works.

Warren:
Yeah, it just lit me on fire. It launched us into all these other things that we want to discuss today.

Ben:
We almost got arrested.

Warren:
Yeah, they did.

Dr. Pompa:
This is actually a true story. This week I was on with a client. She had thyroid issues. She recovered from most of the thyroid issues; however, she started getting some hair loss. She said, “Dr. Pompa, I watched the episode that you did, and I started doing the tapping.” She said, “My hair stopped falling out.” That's a true story. That just happened this week ironically.

Ben:
People use it for insomnia, they use it for physical pain, for mental issues, for relationship issues. Again, it sounds woo, but it does actually work. It's kind of like what you and I talked about a little bit when I had you on the show.

I think we mentioned the book “The Biology of Belief,” and we talked about this a little bit over dinner last night about how even our emotions and whether we have feelings of peace and love and joy or whether we have feelings of shame and anger, how that actually creates vibrational frequencies that effect people. That's why you can feel energy vampires. That's why I hate hanging around with you guys so much.

Warren:
I just watched a video on that. It was either this morning or last night. He was talking about the secret and that, the vibration. The frequency you vibrate, you attract that. If you're in a state of negative energy, you're going to attract negative energy. It's all about vibration.

It hit me so clearly because if your life sucks, you're going to attract a sucky life. You vibrate at a high level. If you can short-circuit that with tapping and start attracting the right frequency and the right people under your life, the guy blew it up. I think he was a Christian dude too. I'm like that's interesting that you would even believe in that. Maybe I thought that was more of a different philosophy. This guy was Bob something. Do you know his name?

Ben:
I don't know Bob. There's a Christian MD-PhD, Dr. David Hawkins. He has a book called “Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender.” He does a really good job marrying the spiritual to quantum physics when it comes to the actual mechanism via which by proton-based energy, our emotions can actually effect not only people and animals around us, but folks who are a thousand miles away. It's why you hear sometimes about one person will have a dream and the other person will have the same dream because they're on the same frequency. That's stuff is for real.

Dr. Pompa:
Listen, if you look at a mother and a baby —

Ben:
We're not wearing tie-dyed shirts, by the way, just so you guys know.

Dr. Pompa:
We don't know what's under here. If you look at a nursing mother and a baby, there's a communication. The baby could be in another building, and that baby will let mom know when it's time, and that let down will happen. The baby starts crying and boom, it's instant. They need to come together, and the mom knows, the baby knows. That's what you're talking about. It's crazy.

Ben:
We were fueled by wine, so that might have been part of it.

Dr. Pompa:
It was biodynamic wine.

Ben:
Tell us about that wine that you ordered.

Warren:
I can't remember the name. It was a —

Ben:
You know it was good wine when you can't remember what you had.

Dr. Pompa:
It was biodynamic wine. It was a healthy wine.

Ben:
Yeah, it was biodynamic.

Warren:
I checked my sleep. It was a good wine. If it was a bad wine, I wouldn't have had DREM, and I wouldn't have had a deep sleep in the REM. I slept short last night, but my REM was peaked. I can show it to you guys. My deep sleep was —

Ben:
Alcohol causes a release of gamma-aminobutyric acid. You get an inhibitory neurotransmitter release, but the problem is when you overdo alcohol, it tends to wear off very early in the night, which is why you wake up at 1:00 or 2:00 AM after you've had multiple drinks. Then you can't get back to sleep. This idea of drinking wine that uses microfiltration that gets rid of a lot of the sulfites that comes from grapes that weren't grown with herbicides. It's an old world wine method. I know you, Dan, drink dry farm wines.

Warren:
By the way, we're having a wine party at our event.

Ben:
Tonight?

Warren:
No, in Atlanta.

Ben:
Oh, in Atlanta. Stay tuned for more about the Atlanta event. We'll fill you guys in on that.

Warren:
We're going to have a wine party, just so you know.

Ben:
It's going to be nuts.

Dr. Pompa:
Dry farm wines.

Ben:
Anyways, whenever I'm at a restaurant and I'm going to order the wine, then I'll look for the organic. The other thing to really look for if you want to sound like a smart cookie but also go way above and beyond organic, which we did last night, is you ask for biodynamic. Organic wines aren't necessarily filtering out the sulfites and some of the stuff that gives you headaches or disrupts your sleep cycles that you were talking about. Whereas with biodynamic wine, you're drinking very, very clean wine.

Warren:
Biodynamic is actually better than organic.

Ben:
Most biodynamic wines are organic, but biodynamic is typically better than organic.

Warren:
I didn't know that.

Ben:
A lot of these old world biodynamic wineries are organic just by nature. That's just what they do. They're that into —

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, people listening and watching, there's 76 additives allowed in wine. It's not tested for. It doesn't have to be on the label. Even the organic wines, especially ones from Napa, which we love going to Napa, are finding glyphosate in it, which is a chemical that causes holes in the gut, leaky gut, and holes which I call leaky brain. This stuff is nasty. It's driving autoimmune in a lot of unexplainable illnesses.

Ben:
Speaking of Napa, I interviewed Dr. Cate Shanahan, the author of the book “Deep Nutrition” recently. She filled me in on how many of these five star restaurants in Napa use full-on canola oil in all their recipes because extra virgin olive oil is too expensive, even for these restaurants where you're paying $80 for a plate or they'll mix it. You have 50/50 mix of olive oil and canola oil.

Dr. Pompa:
Even olive oil in Whole Foods, most of its crap, most of its watered down, most of its oxidized.

Warren:
If it's clear, if it's in a plastic bottle.

Dr. Pompa:
Even the dark ones they're testing, I was like really? I was looking at the test — our friend Joe Mercola had an article, and they had the different ones that they were testing. I was shocked. You've got to get good oil. You better know who you're buying from.

Ben:
We ordered food last night, speaking of oil. Your wife did a good job. She asked the waitress a really important question. Do you remember what she asked?

Dr. Pompa:
Which part? She asked a lot of questions.

Ben:
She asked a lot of questions, but I was impressed.

Warren:
What are you sautéing those in? What's the glaze? Then she said, “We cook them in canola oil.” She said, “Can you do it in butter?” Actually, they said they would do it in olive oil.

Ben:
Then she had them switch to butter because she didn't know what kind of olive oil they were using.

Warren:
When they say olive oil, ask is it 50/50? They'll claim that it's olive oil. If you ask the third question, which is it mixed with canola oil, a lot of times they'll come back and say yes, sir, it is.

Ben:
We're not trying to be orthorexic here, but it really is true that vegetable oil is one of the worst thing, in my opinion, even worse than glucose, that you can do to your body. It's super simple at a restaurant to just say can we go with butter instead of oil? Just tell the kitchen I'd love to do this in butter or coconut oil.

Dr. Pompa:
Actually, you raised a good point. You can take in glucose sugar. Your body knows it's damaging. It burns it up, so it's gone. These fats don't burn. They stay in your body for months.

Ben:
They're what your body uses to create cellular membranes. If you're creating your membranes from poor construction material — your body isn't creating cellular membranes out of glucose. It creates some proteoglycans and some joint tissue, but ultimately unless glucose is staying elevated for a really long period of time or it's spiking very high after a meal, glucose is natural. We don't find high pressure, high heated canola oil in nature.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely not. With that said, America's spiking glucose far too much, but you're absolutely right. This stuff is poison.

Ben:
Which is another thing that you and I took into account last night when we ordered. You and I ordered the same meal, Dan. It was roasted chicken, and the menu said yukon mash that it came with and roasted vegetables. Both of us just said double the vegetables, leave the mash. That easy. I know you and I last night were doing the ketotic thing, so one glass of wine.

Warren:
I fasted all day. That's why that wine really worked for me. You can have your mic back.

Dr. Pompa:
You wanted the mic.

Ben:
I just wanted to make sure that you talked into the mic. We've got to collect your rich, wonderful voice.

Warren:
I just wanted to hold a mic. I don't know what it was. I don't know what to do with my hands. What's that racing movie? The first time he had an interview he was like what do I with my hands?

Ben:
Will Ferrell's Talladega Nights.

Dr. Pompa:
The camera guy just gave him a mic, so now he has a mic.

Ben:
That's a fake microphone you're holding, by the way.

Warren:
I want to hold something. Don't take that the wrong way. I just really want to hold something. Hold me.

Ben:
You can hold me, Warren. We also talked a little bit last night about invisible variables that are all around us. Again, not to be orthorexic, but what we're trying to do is optimize —

Dr. Pompa:
Every time you say that, I'm going to laugh.

Ben:
Yeah, we're trying to optimize our body and brain. We're trying to live life to the fullest.

Warren:
We're not trying to make it over the top.

Ben:
We're trying to live a limitless life. In a case like this, there are things that we want to take into account. I know a big part of what I talk about in Atlanta is going to be this whole invisible variable component where your air, your water, your light, and your electricity are all very important. For example, here at the conference upstairs there's an alkalinized, ionized, filtered water unit where these people are sampling water.

I've got a Berkey water filter back in my hotel room that I travel with so when I pour the water from the hotel room, it's all filtered, and its clean water. If I go up there, it's easy enough to go out of my way to go upstairs one story, skip the water fountain or to drop by any gas station or Whole Foods and grab a glass bottle of Gerolsteiner or Perrier or Pellegrino.
Many people dump poison into their bodies, and healthy people. They don't think about it. They check into the hotel. They don't plan ahead. They walk into the hotel, it's the middle of the night, so you pour yourself 16 ounce glasses of pharmaceuticals and fluoride.

Dr. Pompa:
No doubt about it. Chlorine, pharmaceuticals, fluoride, and a lot of unknown toxins and chemicals. Many of them, there's an epidemic of thyroid conditions right now, hormone related conditions. Those chemicals — fluoride, chlorine just to name the two — they go right after the receptors, block those hormones, drive inflammation, and cause a host of symptoms. People are wanting to take things to take care of the symptoms, but not get rid of the cause.

Ben:
Is it true if you use iodine you can knock the fluoride or the chlorine off those receptors?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, but you have to be careful, especially people with autoimmune. When you take iodine, you have to start slow and low because you can create what is called a thyroid storm where people go I can't take iodine. Well, they say that or they say they're allergic to it, but the iodine literally bind and compete for the same receptors as chlorine, fluoride. They're called halogen chemicals. Iodine knocks those off. Bromine's in everything new. You know the smell of that brand new computer? That's bromine.

Ben:
This thyroid storm, is it because you get all that stuff knocked off too quickly and it fills your body?

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely. It will redistribute, re-circulate, drives it.

Ben:
This is similar to what you and I talked about when I interviewed you about detox.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely. There's a big debate of whether you should ever use iodine for autoimmune. Some of the world's leaders and experts say absolutely, Brownstein being one of them. He says you can't fix autoimmune thyroid without iodine. However, you have this whole other side that says you can't give it. I agree. If you do it wrong, you'll come to the conclusion you can't give it. However, Brownstein, others, I coach a couple hundred doctors around the country, we have proven the opposite. You can't fix it without it.

Ben:
What about selenium for that? Do you have to take selenium in combination with iodine?

Dr. Pompa:
If your selenium is too low, you'll get an even stronger reaction. We want to make sure selenium levels are optimum. If you're just looking at a blood test, if you look at the range, we like them over 140 on a blood test.

Ben:
Selenium levels.

Dr. Pompa:
Selenium levels, yeah.

Ben:
If someone were to go into the doctor and test iodine and selenium, can you get both of those on a blood?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you can. Typically they're not on a blood. You'll have to maybe pay extra and maybe your insurance won't cover it. I don't know.

Ben:
You have to be that asshole who not only asks for butter instead of olive oil, but also the iodine and selenium, etc.

Dr. Pompa:
You have to be that guy, exactly. Doing an iodine serum, a blood test, it's one level to check. However, there's iodine spot tests that are $80 that are much better. Then even better is an iodine challenge where they actually see what your body's using and measuring it in the urine.

Warren:
What about that really cool test where you can just put iodine for the absorption? How does that work?

Dr. Pompa:
You just put some iodine and see how fast your body absorbs the iodine.

Warren:
Where do you get that iodine?

Dr. Pompa:
There's some other factors there.

Ben:
I've heard that test could be bull.

Dr. Pompa:
That's what I'm saying. There's other factors there.

Ben:
You would basically say thanks for the stupid question, Warren.

Warren:
Talladega Nights. I had plenty of time to think about it while you guys were thinking. Talladega Nights.

Ben:
I already said that like five minutes ago, dude. You missed it. You smear the iodine on your hand or your forearm?

Dr. Pompa:
Right. The theory is if it goes in quickly, you need it. Again, many other factors there.

Ben:
I raise an eyebrow at that one.

Dr. Pompa:
You should.

Ben:
We talked a little bit too last night because everybody is traveling and trying to get their sleep, we talked about relaxation compounds. For example, I was in pain because I worked out hard for the past week. I'm about to hit the road, and then I'm hunting down in Hawaii. I've got a spear fishing gun and a bow and camo and knives just all over my room. Housekeeping is going to freak out.

After that I'm going to speak in Portland at the Nutritional Therapy Association. I've got two weeks on the road. What I tend to do is just destroy myself with my workouts before two weeks on the road so that I super compensate and recover, and my body soaks up all that hard work. It also means yesterday coming down here, I was just beat up.

I got my final workout in on Thursday, and now it's time to R and R a little bit. I was feeling it. I was telling you guys I took an opioid painkiller called kratom yesterday, which induces euphoria, helps you to sleep. It's very interesting stuff, but then you talked, Dr. Pompa, about another relaxation compound that you like. Can you fill us in on what you were talking about there?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, when you say kava, people usually say I've tried kava. I mean, 99% of the stuff that's just out or in a product is not even real kava. It's processed out. They're growing it in the wrong soils. You know this as well. All of these herbs, growing them in the soils that they're meant to grow in brings up these flavonoids and these phytochemicals that make the reaction occur.

Ben:
I'm going to back up there. When you say soils they were meant to grow in, you mean growing plants —

Dr. Pompa:
Indigenous. We look at indigenous places where herbs are grown. That's where you want to buy your herbs from. Then, of course, they have to be handled correctly. I get clients from all around the world with massive sensitivities, whether it's chemical sensitivities, every food sensitivity, anxiety, can't sleep; kava is just magic for them. It really is.

Ben:
Some kava is better. You said Kava Kalm.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, with a K. It's calm with a K, so K-A-L-M. Kalmwithkava.com, they make a nano kava that works really well, a very good one.

Ben:
Interesting. I've used nano CBD before, so this is very similar.

Dr. Pompa:
You turned me on to some nano CBD before. Then the other one is gourmetHawaiinkava.com. Both really good kava, and these guys take their kava very seriously.

Ben:
I'll try to remember to link to that after the show. Kava, you have to be careful with regular use because it does get passed by the liver to a certain extent. It's not like one that you'd use every day.

Dr. Pompa:
You use it in those situations.

Ben:
The way that Warren drinks wine like it's going out of style.

Warren:
I love it. I'm going to throw out another one since I lost on my last bio hack with the iodine. It's good because you've got to throw it out there. You can't be afraid. Then I let you guys figure it out. I have another bio hack. Maybe this one is a good one.

Ben:
Coffee enema?

Warren:
Love those, especially when you hang yourself upside down and put your legs up.

Ben:
Your whole rectum goes numb.

Warren:
Yeah, I love that. It's perfect.

Dr. Pompa:
Where's Ben? He's hanging somewhere upside down to try to get his coffee enema to work better.

Warren:
Something I've been doing with CBD because CBD knocks me out. I love CBD. I go high dose CBD every night, love it. You have CBD on your site. I added I don't know how many milligrams, maybe you guys know. It's the tryptophan that we have. I don't know how many milligrams those capsules are. You would know. I take four of those tryptophan with the CBD. If you don't have to get up for work in the morning, you don't have children to look after, if you do that, it's guaranteed to knock you out, put you on your back.

Ben:
If you don't plan on your house catching on fire.

Dr. Pompa:
What I'm wondering right now is you always have work in the morning, you always have children around you. When are you doing that?

Warren:
I haven't done it for awhile because it's hard to get up.

Ben:
There's nothing coffee can't reverse.

Dr. Pompa:
Coffee's the antidote.

Warren:
Here's another bio hack that I do. I bring my stainless steel —

Dr. Pompa:
You're cracking the camera guy up.

Warren:
I just want to be a part of this bio hack thing. I've got this coffee pot. You can tell me if it's cool or not. It's stainless steel. It's not the nickel-free one, but whatever. I got over it. It might scratch a little nickel into your life on the way down. I grind my own coffee, and I bring it with me. I bring a stainless steel hot water pot to fill up with plastic water bottle stuff. Sorry, Ben. I did the plastic. I'm feminized right now. It's probably why I'm a little nervous. My testosterone dropped.

Ben:
Your areolas are quite large today.

Warren:
Are you attracted to me now because I'm a little more feminine?

Dr. Pompa:
No.

Warren:
I didn't think so.

Dr. Pompa:
Another miss.

Warren:
That's what I do. I make the coffee right there. You were looking for coffee this morning.

Dr. Pompa:
I was.

Warren:
Running around.

Dr. Pompa:
I passed two Starbucks because I won't drink it. It's a whole other thing. The point being is I was looking for organic coffee. It's really important. Coffee can hold a lot of pesiticides.

Ben:
You guys need to get these little packets I travel with. They're mushroom coffee. It's coffee with Cordyceps and Chaga. The other one I travel with is coffee with Chaga and Lion's Mane, which is a nootropic. These little packets, and you can either order coffee from a restaurant, and it's notoriously weak, and you can dump this coffee in it to actually make the coffee muddy and strong.

You can also take a couple packets of this and go down to the hotel restaurant and find yourself some hot water, preferably filtered, or you can take a Berkey water filter, fill that up from the hotel sink, then put that through the Berkey straw into your coffee maker in the hotel. That will pour hot water, and you'll just dump the hot water over these coffee packets. They work really well for traveling compared to bringing your giant ass stainless steel grinder.

Warren:
I always get mad. You put it through the little pots that they have, and I get scared.

Ben:
It is plastic.

Dr. Pompa:
We should talk plastic.

Ben:
Dave Asprey is wandering here somewhere. I'm sure he has an even more advanced fix for this. We'll have to hunt him down at some point.

Dr. Pompa:
You've been walking around. What are some of the little cool things?

Ben:
There was an extremely high frequency vibration wand. Get your mind out of the gutter, fellows. I show up there, and I sat down in a chair. I'm kind of fiddling around with this wand, putting it on my shoulder and my chest, seeing what it feels like.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, I know the wand.

Ben:
The lady up there grabs it and says, “Let me show you how this works.” Before I know it, I had three people, each holding a wand, I'm laid out on the massage table, and they're doing my legs, my stomach and chest, my shoulders all at once. I got up, and I was floating. I must have been on the table for 30 minutes.

Dr. Pompa:
I knew I'd find you up there.

Ben:
That was called a rapid recovery wand.

Dr. Pompa:
You probably bought one. If not yet, tomorrow.

Ben:
I'll probably buy one, yeah. The LG people are upstairs, the spirulina, chlorella, ENERGYbits. I have them on my podcast. Those are really good. I had those this morning for breakfast along with my mushroom coffee and my ENERGYbits. They always tell you to swallow them, but I like to chew them.

Dr. Pompa:
I know, but they get all through your teeth.

Ben:
I just rinse it.

Dr. Pompa:
I tell you what, it is amazing energy. You know what, the good thing about this probably is it's clean. A lot of them are contaminated.

Ben:
It's cracked cell wall, 100% organic.

Dr. Pompa:
It's crack for your cells.

Ben:
It's technically a filter of the ocean. Probably a lot of these popular companies get their algae from Klamath Lake, which is a really clean form of algae. They're here.

Warren:
They're going to be in Atlanta, the wand people are coming to Atlanta.

Ben:
They're going to be in Atlanta too, okay. We'll fill you guys in on Atlanta here in just a second. The other one that's really interesting is upstairs they have The Clear Mind, which is flickering lights and auditory beats for neuro feedback for everything from insomnia to ADD. It's very similar to what I did with the Peak Brain Institute in LA except it's more visual based. You don't actually attach electrodes to your head.

It's really interesting because Steph Curry, the basketball player, there was just an article about him that I tweeted where he's using kind of a similar system. These special goggles that he wears that flicker light, and it entrains his visual system as these lights are flickering. If you're listening right now, just Google Steph Curry goggles, and you'll see what kind of goggles he's wearing. It's super-duper interesting. They're like LED flicker light based goggles that entrain his visual system and his reaction time.

This whole article goes into how he swears by those plus float tanks, and then he also does the TDCS, the trans direct cranial stimulation. Even these NBA players are realizing, Tom Brady is even doing this, the importance of not just being mildly orthorexic like us, but also how much more efficiently you can get results if you do some of these little bio hacks. It's better living through science

Dr. Pompa:
That's kind of that invisible stuff that's around us, man. When you do light stimulation in the eyes, the thalamus is your antenna for a lot of that stimulation from the body, but also that stuff that's around us that you don't know. That changes that. You can change those neuro pathways with that.

Warren:
Is it bad to wear sunglasses?

Dr. Pompa:
No, not bad. It changes light.

Ben:
I have a very fashionable set of Ray-Bans over in my bag over here. I'll wear them to the 80s party. Is that tonight?

Warren:
That's tomorrow.

Ben:
I don't wear sunglasses unless I am skiing in the snow where you can get snow blindness for two reasons. Light is a circadian cue, so by blocking out blue light in the morning, you look really cool, but you F up your sleep later on in the day because you shut off one of your body's primary mechanisms for knowing that blue light is present. That's one reason.

The other reason is that when your retina get exposed to blue light from the sun, you up regulate your production of melanin from the skin. You tan better, your skin gets more toned. When you put on the sunglasses, not only do you burn more easily, but you tan less easily. You don't get all that beautiful swimsuit ready sunshine exposure you want.
Warren:
That's true because my wife wears sunglasses. We were just in Cabo, and I'm very pink. She has an olive skin. She usually gets really dark. I spent probably less time in the sun, and I was way tanner than her. I did not wear sunglasses the whole trip.

Dr. Pompa:
That's a big deal.

Warren:
I thought it was cool.

Ben:
There's a time and a place for them at night. You can wear your sunglasses at night.

Warren:
I did eat tuna. We went fishing.

Ben:
I don't know what that has to do with skin.

Warren:
I don't know either.

Ben:
DHA maybe a little bit.

Dr. Pompa:
The issue is the unopposed blue light. At night when you're just getting this blue light and not the other frequencies you would get from the sun, it's unopposed blue light.

Ben:
You can mitigate some of that because the sun contains both blue light and infrared. If anything, you can at least in your house have some infrared light set up so you're getting both the blue light as well as the infrared. My wife and I in our bedroom, we have the red lights. In my office I have the red lights. When I go in there at night I've got a RubyLux Bulb. There's another company called Lighting Science that makes what are called biological LED bulbs.

You can choose which room you want red light, and you can choose which room, let's say a gym or an office by day, that you can have blue light. The trick is to have both, although blue light can still be, even if you get exposed to large amounts of it during the day, carcinogenic. It's very, very hard on the eyes too. What you can do is literally in your office set it up so you've got a whole bunch of these biological blue light based bulbs.

Dr. Pompa:
You just spit on me.

Ben:
Then at the same time — sorry, I'm getting excited. I spit when I talk about light. You can also have an infrared bulb, like a Joovv light or RubyLux or something else so you're getting infrared and blue light at the same time. That's the best of both worlds. One other thing I wanted to chat about with Atlanta is you and I talked, Dan, about doing a little bit more of a higher-end brain bio hacking for your elite doctor group. Now, tell me a little bit about what the elite doctor group is and what they're doing in Atlanta.

Dr. Pompa:
These are people we call our platinum group because they've done cellular healing, they're trained in it, they're very good in it. Really, all of the protocols that I teach they're very good at.

Ben:
They've sat under you, and they've learned how to do your detox protocols.

Dr. Pompa:
They go beyond just true cellular detox. They implement what I call a multi-therapeutic approach.

Ben:
The general public can go to this Atlanta event too?

Dr. Pompa:
Friday we're bringing the general public in. Me, you, and Joe are speaking Friday night. We're bringing the students in as well as the public.

Warren:
Most of the events are going to be for practitioner training, how to implement true cellular detox like you did with your clients so the practitioners can do like what you did.

Ben:
I'm right in the middle of this detox right now. I took all the supplements and all the stuff you just spray in your mouth.

Dr. Pompa:
You know what's funny, we're here at this event. There's amazing speakers here. I mean, Robert Kennedy Jr. just got off stage. Those of you who realize, he just got appointed to the Vaccine Safety Committee. Trump put him in this position because he puts himself — I'm not against vaccines. I am for getting clean vaccines and exposing the truth, real science. He just got up on stage and just exposed how much of a cover up there is in the government, in politics with this issue of vaccines. He talked about how this mercury goes into the brain.

They used to say the mercury in the vaccines is safe mercury. It doesn't go into the brain. They found out on studies that it was leaving the blood so fast, that's why they thought it was leaving the body. It wasn't leaving the body. It was going into the brain, and that's where it locks into inorganic mercury. The true cellular detox, the most important phase — there's a prep phase, there's a body phase, and there's a brain phase. That's why we need multiple brain phases. That's where it's locked. The brain phase is key.

Ben:
I'm in the body phase right now. When I go through the brain phase, basically what I'm expecting to feel is clearer thinking, less brain fog, more focused.

Dr. Pompa:
Maybe not at first.

Ben:
Initially my brain is going to be dumping metals out. I tested high in mercury and lead and stuff like that.

Dr. Pompa:
Listen, it will. It's locked in the brain. People get their amalgam fillings out, and they do these things. They think oh, I'm fine. No. The mercury is locked, and there's inorganic mercury, which is more oxidative, more poisonous. It's the most toxic of all mercury.

Ben:
Inorganic meaning it came from sources like dentistry and brake dust and stuff like that.

Dr. Pompa:
Dental fillings that contain 50% mercury, they cause what is called mercury vapor. It crosses the blood brain barrier, and then it turns into inorganic mercury. There it's locked. It is locked in your brain.

Ben:
I've never had dental fillings, but I do like to break open those mercury thermometers and sniff them.

Dr. Pompa:
I wouldn't sniff it. You can play with it, but don't sniff it. The organic mercury like methylmercury that's in fish, I would say that's the more toxic mercury. It has the ability to cross membranes, which it does. The problem is when it turns to inorganic mercury. That's really where the problem starts.

Ben:
Organic mercury from something like fish can turn into inorganic mercury?

Dr. Pompa:
It will go into tissue and eventually oxidize into an inorganic mercury.

Ben:
When it gets oxidized. The worst thing to do then would be to eat fish and also have a lot of these oxidizers that we talked about like high blood sugar or vegetable oil or other things that cause tissue oxidation.

Dr. Pompa:
It happens even faster. By the way, a lot of those things can take an elemental mercury — an elemental mercury is like you've just swallowed —

Ben:
You've just solved a mystery for me. This is why body builders look so horrible. They do the protein powders, which we know most of the protein powders have a bunch of heavy metals in them, and then simultaneously they beat up their bodies with a whole bunch of oxidation in tanning salons. They're basically building up a whole bunch of this inorganic metal in their body, most likely.

Dr. Pompa:
No doubt about it.

Ben:
God bless body builders.

Dr. Pompa:
That elemental mercury, that silver stuff we'd roll in our hands when we were kids, you could swallow that and potentially bring it right out. However, some of it could oxidize into methylmercury, and then you start absorbing that. Then it turns to inorganic mercury, and now you have double trouble. Don't swallow it. You're swallowing it when you have fillings in your mouth. That's what people don't understand. You're swallowing mercury everyday you have a filling, a silver filling in your mouth.

Ben:
I've never had fillings.

Warren:
I was an environmental consultant, have a master's degree in it, did it for eight years. We had these little meters. Those meters, if you stuck it in your mouth with hot coffee and you have amalgam fillings, it would peg it 100 times higher than what the EPA allows for air quality.

Dr. Pompa:
We actually had a gentleman bring in what they have in submarines. If mercury is in the air in a submarine, people get very, very sick and die. They have these mercury vapor testers in submarines. He brought one in, and we were testing people. People that had fillings, you'd see it go off the chart. Literally, the mercury vapor. You give the same person some hot liquid, and you see it go even further. Give them gum to chew, even further. Silver fillings leech mercury for the life of the filling into your brain.

Ben:
I know we're going to talk about this more in Atlanta. The other thing that you and I discussed last night is more of an advanced brain bio hacking clinic for a lot of the folks who are going to the Atlanta event, meaning we want to talk about increasing neurogenesis and neuroplasticity using more than just silicide and mushrooms, which do work for that, but there are other things that we can use as well. It doesn't have to be just shrooms.

We're going to talk about increasing the integrity of the blood brain barrier, stabilizing neurotransmitters, stabilizing the HPA axis. Basically, all the little things that you can do without necessarily having to go out and buy fancy neuro feedback computer equipment to actually increase your IQ, your cognitive performance. There's a lot that you can do. I think it will be really cool to actually put together a how to on how to do that.

Dr. Pompa:
It's going to be great. They're going to love it.

Warren:
The way that we set up and design the seminars, it's called live it to lead it. A lot of the things that you're going to be teaching, we're actually going to implement there. We're going to do blood ketosis testing. You have to live these strategies, these bio hacks yourself, take yourself to the next level. Just like what you've done over the last 15 years, now you're taking others to the next level.

Ben:
You don't want to be the fat kid with the neck beard in your mom's basement blogging about enemas.

Warren:
Probably not.

Dr. Pompa:
Yelling, “Mom!”

Warren:
That could be me. Until I met Dr. Pompa and you guys, I could be that guy.

Ben:
Your beard doesn't quite go down to your neck right now. It's well shaven. I know we set up a special URL for people listening in now to this podcast.

Warren:
This is a special discount, and then our Cellular Healing TV people that are watching that, share it with your doctor and practitioner friends. We do have that Friday evening — do you know the times on that? It will be on the site.

Ben:
First of all, what are the dates?

Warren:
May 4th, 5th, and 6th.

Ben:
May 4th, 5th, and 6th in Atlanta. To register you go to BenAtlanta.com.

Warren:
We have special pricing. It's essentially our flash sale pricing. The seminar is normally over $1,000 for you guys. It's more than half off. We want to do that for your audience. I know that you have chiropractors, natural health practitioners; you have a huge following. Obviously, you're teaching high-level stuff. Those guys can come, then if you have followers in Atlanta.

Ben:
Zoo keepers, soccer moms, CEOs.

Warren:
A lot of CEOs.

Ben:
All are welcome.

Warren:
A lot of CEOs in Atlanta, so you can come see Joe, Dan, and Ben.

Ben:
Dr. Mercola, Dr. Pompa.

Warren:
I won't be teaching. I teach on marketing, microphone hand holding, and how to hold a microphone properly, and vino. Love that vino.

Ben:
How to order spendy biodynamic wine.

Warren:
I did not hesitate on the price, though.

Ben:
BenAtlanta.com. If you guys have questions or comments, leave them in the show notes here where this podcast is at. You can access the podcast show notes at BenGreenfieldFitness.com/CalJam2017. That's BenGreenfieldFitness.com/CalJam2017. I'll link to everything that we talked about, including the video version of this, the conference in Atlanta, and then leave your questions. I'd love to hear what kind of questions you guys have. Dr. Pompa or Warren or me will hop in, answer your questions. Since it's about lunch time, I figure we should just go pop open another bottle of biodynamic wine.

Dr. Pompa:
I have to speak.

Ben:
Dan's got to go speak.

Warren:
Fifth, sixth, and seventh they're saying. Friday, Saturday, Sunday the crowd is telling me. Our team is here at Cal Jam. They're letting us know.

Ben:
May 5th, 6th, and 7th, BenAtlanta.com, or go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com/CalJam2017. Grab the show notes for this episode. Thanks for listening in, you guys.

157: Diet Variation

Transcript of Episode 157: Diet Variation

With Dr. Daniel Pompa and Meredith Dykstra

Meredith:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m your host, Meredith Dykstra, and this is Episode No. 157. We’ve got our resident cellular healing specialist, Dr. Daniel Pompa, on the line. Today, hey, it’s just you and I. We don’t have any guest experts here, so you’re back to being the expert.

Dr. Pompa:
I’m all you have. I’m all you have.

Meredith:
I am excited about that. It’s funny. It’s been a while that it’s just us, but Dr. Pompa, you had asked me to schedule this show because we have a pretty important topic that we want to discuss today, and we’re going to be delving into diet. Now, as all of you know, there are lots of diets out there that are tooted to be the best diet for your health. There is the vegan diet, the Paleo diet, macrobiotic diet, which I had subscribed to in the past. Oh, my gosh, there’s so many diets out there that are telling you they have the answer to fixing all of your health challenges. We’re going to delve into maybe what is the answer today. What the solution is to finding the right diet for you. Dr. Pompa, you have some pretty interesting answers, so I’m excited to delve into this topic a little bit more.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. No doubt. Yeah, when we look at the debate, which diet is best? I mean, the vegan people would say the vegan diet’s the best, right? The Paleo people, the Paleo diet is the best. What if they’re all right? Look, I coined something called “diet variation,” and I’m going to say aka feast-famine cycles. It’s really something that grew into something even more than I had thought, meaning the importance of it to people’s health.

Just as where this fits in, we talk about a multi-therapeutic approach, and this is what a growing number of doctors are doing now. I always like to put it into context of the three-legged stool. You have certain genes that are getting turned on. That’s why we don’t feel well. That’s why we’re developing certain diseases, and a lot of my cellular healing work applies there. Then the other part is is that we have certain stressors that turn on our genes, and the cellular detox work applies there. Certain chemical stressors turn on genes. We know that.

Then the last leg is the microbiome that we hear so much about, right? We’ve learned how much this applies to health. I always say, you’re not going to fix a microbiome or a gut just by adding probiotic, if it were only so simple. When we look and we utilize these ancient healing strategies that we can learn from from ancient cultures, that’s really how as a growing group of doctors we’re fixing this microbiome issue and the gut issue, so today’s topic applies in this leg of the stool of the microbiome. How diet variation, when I say that word, Meredith, most people think I’m talking about eating a variety of food. That’s what they think, all right? It’s not that at all.

Meredith:
That could be a variety of food, yeah, of course.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah. That could be diet variation, right? I mean, that’s so far—but it really is more important than that. It’s utilizing things that we don’t have to do anymore. Meaning today we don’t have to go into times of ketosis, but moving in and out of ketosis is key.

Now, I’m going to make some ketosis people angry. I did this weekend. I had the privilege with Joe Mercola and myself speaking at the Low Carb USA event. I’ll tell you, if I didn’t have Joe go on ahead of me and say how much diet variation changed his life, okay—because it did. Joe was in ketosis, and him and I went on a walk. He said, “I’m losing muscle,” and some other things were happening. I said, “Oh, here’s the answer.”

Meredith:
How long had he been in ketosis and was not getting results?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. No. He was getting results, but what happened was it started going the other direction on him. He started to, like I said, lose some muscle, etc. Just some things were happening. I explained to Joe that, basically, it’s because your insulin is getting so low, and a couple things happen. When insulin goes low, you actually can fire up gluconeogenesis in the liver. Insulin, actually, what it does is one of its most important functions is it actually stops glucose production in the liver. When insulin goes really low, you can actually increase insulin, but actually, people don’t understand that.

That’s one thing. However, I also explained that the body can go into almost a starvation mode because the insulin goes so low, and therefore, that can affect thyroid hormone. That can affect other hormones. It could affect a lot of things in the body. By throwing in a carb day, a higher feast day as we call it, higher carbs, higher food in general, higher caloric intake, you can change that dynamically or dramatically. Sure enough, it worked.

We were at Low Carb USA. Joe told that story. He said in his new book, Fat for Fuel, which is coming out in the spring—I was blessed to be one of the editors, peer reviewed. It’s a peer-reviewed book. There was eight really bright people that were able to peer review that. I’m not putting myself in that category with these guys, but I was blessed enough to be one of the peer reviewers of the book. I talked in the chapter, and we talked about feast-famine cycling. Joe gave me credit on that. We were there and the low-carb people and the ketone people, man, they didn’t want to hear it.

Meredith:
You’re at the Low Carb event telling them to eat carbs once in a while? Uh-oh!

Dr. Pompa:
They were a little up in arms about it. Needless to say, we knew what we knew, and we stuck to our guns.

Meredith:
The proof is in the pudding, right?

Dr. Pompa:
What’s that?

Meredith:
Yeah. I just said, well, the proof’s in the pudding. If you’re eating a very low-carb diet for a long period of time and stop getting results, then we have to reassess the situation. Think, okay, if I keep doing the same thing and I’m not getting the results that I’m looking for, then something is amiss. I need to change my strategy.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. You’re right, exactly. There was a remarkable amount of people there who struggled to be in ketosis, or they were in ketosis, and they weren’t losing weight anymore or at all, even though they were in. I talked even about how toxicity plays a major role in why you don’t lose weight or why you can’t get into ketosis. I actually started it by one of the ways how I discovered this. I talked about some of these people that are in ketosis, or they’re struggling to get into ketosis, or they’re in and out, and they’re not getting the result.

I said, well, let’s just go back to a regular Cellular Healing Diet. Let’s bring your carbs up to a 100, 150 grams of carbs. That’s still a low-carb diet, but it’s not ketosis by any means, right? In today’s standards, it’s definitely considered a low-carb diet. In my world, I would say it’s a really normal moderate-carbohydrate diet at least. Anyways, we put them back in on it that way, and all of a sudden, they start losing weight. It’s like, well, that’s odd. I had them on that diet, and they weren’t losing weight. I tried to move them in ketosis for three or four months. It really wasn’t happening.

Moved them back into the same diet they were on. All of a sudden, they start losing weight. It stops though, and then we realized, okay, it stopped. Let me shift them back into ketosis again. Let’s see what happened. Lo and behold, this time around they were fat adapted in two weeks, very efficient now using fat, losing weight again. I repeated that a few times. Then I had some of our doctors do a similar thing, and they got the same results.

What I had determined was the magic was in the switch. Certain hormonal things happen when we have those major dietary changes that creates—the body’s trying to adapt. Through that adaptation, things happen that we don’t even clearly understand yet, hormonally, etc., that we saw this amazing change. That got me curious, and it led down some other roads. That really is monthly diet variation where we’re changing diets, or here’s another way of putting it, seasonal diet variation. What if we put someone in ketosis for three months, and then moved them out for three or four months. Is there anything else that substantiate that? That’s called seasonal diet variation.

Maybe we can lay it out. Take them through. I’ll you do it, the different ones. Then you can ask me questions around it, but that’s what got me thinking in this area.

Meredith:
To explain and define diet variation, we’re varying our diets. Often times, you’re using either the Cellular Healing Diet or the ketogenic diet, and shifting back and forth between those two diets because those are the diets you found to be most successful for most people in decreasing inflammation, balancing our hormones, losing weight. We’re varying between those two diets typically. We’re adding in feast and famine cycles which we’ll delve into a little bit more to further promote cellular adaptation and variation. Then we’re varying the foods as well and the meal timings. There’s variation in literally every aspect of what we’re eating, when we’re eating it, how we’re eating it. I mean, there’s just variation in really every aspect of consumption in diet.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly. One of the other things was is this; we know that when someone’s also in this state of ketosis for a long time—I mentioned Joe Mercola’s experience. We added the feast day in, increasing his carbs. He noticed that, even when he did that, his glucose actually would drop after he ate a carbohydrate meal. How is that possible? We explain that. The point is is that we do get that major drop often times in glucose, even after a carbohydrate meal.

I think one of the big things is this; we added in a carb day. This is diet variation where maybe five days a week we’re doing ketosis. Then we’re adding in this feast day where we’re actually eating more and eating more carbohydrates. Okay? Then we vary it even more. We take another day of the week and we fast. We go dinner-to-dinner and fast, well, 23 hours, right? We have feast and famine going on in the same week, and then five days of a very low-carb ketosis diet. That’s weekly diet variation.

Then I talked about seasonal diet variation where we’re literally being in a diet for three, four months perhaps and then shifting the diet completely. However, even in a ketotic state, I think there’s major benefit to adding in these feast days and famine days. Now, let me explain why I think, okay, what’s happening. The body eventually thinks it’s starving. That’s what happens. I mean, technically, when you’re in a state of ketosis, the body mimics that fasting state, so when you’re in it long enough, it could have a tendency to think it’s starving, right?

One of those things I always say is, when you eat, you have to eat a big enough meal just to remind the body it’s not starving, but when that insulin continues to go down, it could take on starvation plans, if you will, or adaptations. One of which is this; the body is in ketosis. The majority of the fuel of the cell is fat, right? Cells can use glucose and fat. In ketosis, we’re making the cells use fat mostly as its energy source, 95% at least, right? Energy comes from fat.

Therefore, the body is so intelligent it says wait a minute. If this is my fuel, I want to conserve it. The body’s always trying to just survive. That’s its number one thing to do. Therefore, because famine cycles can come, then I better start holding onto this fat that’s so precious better. I better become more efficient at burning it. One of the things that it will do is it will even genetically just block the insulin receptors. It’s not insulin resistance like a diabetic. The DNA will literally blunt the receptor, and then be able to store a little bit more fat.

The irritating part is that the fat is stored typically where you don’t want it. I store it right at the bottom of my belly. Women will store right where they don’t want it on their butt or legs. You know the story. The point is that here’s what happens. When we remind the body it’s not starving and to go ahead and have the freedom to burn the fat, when we do that feast day, now all of a sudden the body goes, okay, we’re good. Let’s burn fat, so let’s become more efficient at fat burning.

Now it starts burning up your fat again, which is amazing. You feel that energy surge, and you now are tapping into those fat stores again. You become a more efficient fat burner again. You’re able to kick in the efficiency just by biohacking the body’s survival skill, really. Throwing food at it in an abundant way just tells the body A-Okay. We’re good. We have plenty of fuel. Go ahead and burn the fat, and it does. It’s really cool that it works like that.

Another example, sometimes people do better, especially thyroid people, because you need insulin to convert your stored T4 hormone to T3. If insulin gets really low, it’ll start messing that up a little bit too. Throwing in two, even three feast days a week works for some people more. They have these higher carbohydrates three days a week and then really low on the other days and even a fasting day or two. I like two or three fasting days a week. I like to go 24 hours at least 2 or 3 times a week, and sometimes I do 2 feast days. You can see I really vary my diet weekly.

Then, of course, right now, seasonally I’m doing this. In the summer, I was probably around 100 grams of carbs on average in the summer, and in the winter, now I am fully in ketosis. I’m experimenting with something new. This is fun because I’m really efficient in fat adapted. I realized, when I went back into ketosis, I was in ketosis in two, three days. I mean, just like that, which normally would take three weeks, right, but because I’m so efficient, I realized I was in. I was just in Florida for a week. Purposely came out of ketosis. I was out for one week. I came back, and literally, within a day, I was back into ketosis, so now I’m back in ketosis. I’m looking at even varying it like that where maybe I’m in ketosis for two weeks, and I go purposefully out for a week.

I don’t know. I mean, put it this way. There is magic here in the adaptation. I believe it’s optimizing hormones. I believe that there’s so much that happens that we don’t even understand with this diet variation so pretty cool. I probably just created more questions than I even—so you have to try to figure out what questions they would have, Meredith, to make this simple.

Meredith:
Right. Yeah. I think that the definition makes more sense now. You’ve clearly explained the why behind it, the reasoning and the importance of it, and a lot of anecdotal evidence as well. I think it makes so much sense from an ancestral perspective as well. Just when we look at our ancestors where food wasn’t always consistent, they couldn’t eat like we do or three meals a day and snacks. They couldn’t just go and buy food so readily. Their eating schedules were much less consistent.

It really makes sense that their bodies were made to adapt. When they were able to feast, their body could just relax, and oh, I can trust you. I don’t need to hang onto this fat anymore. Then they would get leaner, and their bodies would adapt from a cellular level because of that. Then during times of famine too, their bodies became efficient at burning fat when they were in ketosis, so they could have those stores and energy to get them through those challenging famine times. I think just diet variation makes such sense from an ancestral perspective. That’s clearly why it works so well, in my opinion.

To get down into the nitty-gritty of it, we’ve got the what. Now we have the why, but now we need the how, the implementation. Dr. Pompa, you mentioned a rule you have, the 5-1-1 rule, and I think that’s a really awesome strategy for a lot of people to be able to implement. You wrote about it in your ketosis article on drpompa.com, so you can check that article out if you want a little bit more in-depth explanation of that. I like how you’re explaining that it’s possible to vary that as well. Instead of the 5-1-1 rule of five days on the ketogenic diet, one day fasting and one day feasting, that alternation where perhaps four days keto and three days feasting or three days fasting and one day feasting. There’s just such beautiful magic variation in that.

You mentioned a little bit about what works best for some people. Do you want to delve into it more, maybe some people are watching with different conditions, as to what you would you suggest of some other kinds of conditions work better with more carb days and if there may be better for women to have more carbohydrates? If you can delve into that a little bit more with conditions?

Dr. Pompa:
I alluded to thyroid, but I would say low adrenal people too. They seem to do better with at least two carb days, higher carb days, feast days a week. Let me be clear. I think that, though, you get—you want to become as fat adapted as you can be. I mean, meaning that some people just aren’t going to be totally in ketosis where they feel like they’re really in this fat burning mode. I always say give it a few months, maybe two months at least, and then throw in the variations. I mean, some people can do it within a month because they adapt much quicker. Then I would start throwing in the variations where it’s either two feast days a week, even try three, and again, experimenting with even more—maybe a week of higher carbohydrates. When I say higher carbohydrates, let’s be clear, healthy carbohydrates. I think this is what people always want, right?

Meredith:
The pizza pie and fries and all that, come on, Dr. Pompa.

Dr. Pompa:
I want to say this, though. Remember when we interviewed [Kristin] Varaday? Remember that? She is the scientist that wrote the book, Every-Other-Day Fasting, right? By the way, what they were doing is just—they were fasting people for a day, and then they were just putting them back on a Standard American Diet, which you and I were cringing, right? She said, “Yeah. Okay, but it worked. People still lost weight.”

Meredith:
Still getting result.

Dr. Pompa:
She said, “People still lost more weight by that variation than just doing one or the other diet.” I said to her, “Krista, why?” She said, “Well, I think it’s just adaptations that occur in the body.” Bingo! That’s exactly right. We don’t completely understand it, but forcing the change is actually where the magic lies.

Okay. This is what people really want I think. Okay, so what do I eat on my high-carb days, right? How about sweet potatoes? How about more berries; more shakes with more berries, right? Maybe that’s the day you can have a little bit of honey, right? Just some of those little treats that you would love.

Meredith:
A little curds, a little maple syrup, some special treats, yes, and it’s so fun too. Working with people, don’t you find that it’s so much more sustainable when people are able to implement a feast day because it’s so fun, and they can create healthy variations of some of their favorite foods? Maybe they can do a cauliflower mac and cheese, or a coconut flour pizza crust, or have plantains, or a maple syrup dessert. Bring that joy back in having some really special treat food that sometimes people feel like they’ve missed out on for many years or months when they’ve been trying to follow such a rigid diet.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely. Ultimately, most who people watch our show, right, I mean, they struggle with staying on a diet. I mean, they look at you and I, and they may get mad because we’re like this all the time, but think about it. When people have some freedom—and we’ve even done some interviews with food addiction. He says no. The best thing to do is give yourself planned days actually works even with people with food addiction. We know that this is going to help people stay on a better diet.

Look at these foods that I’m telling people to eat, right? You can eat more legumes in your diet. You can eat more berries, healthy fruits. You can eat more root vegetables, beets. Make more smoothies. I mean, these are healthy foods, right? We know this too.

Meredith:
They’re a pre-cooked food.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely. Some of the science is showing this too. By bringing in these foods periodically, it helps our microbiome. Remember, this is in the category of ancient healing for the microbiome. I found research with the American Indians showing that their summer diet versus their winter diet and I’ll talk a little bit about that was magic for changing their microbiome. It was a big part, they were saying—in this article, they were saying—because this is really what was one of the big things for preventing diabetes, which we know the American Indians are very prone to diabetes and heart disease, but this variation and how it affected their microbiome they believe was a critical component to avoiding this in their culture. They’re not getting it now.

One of the things that was said was—I have some quotes that I wrote down which I thought were good. It said “the more toward an all-year-around abundance of food in many populations may have caused overconsumption at times when the human metabolism otherwise would have benefited from more caloric restriction and/or greater insulin sensitivity.” What they were saying in here is that they believe this is causing disease because we’re in this constant food abundance all the time, and that went into another article, and I presented this at my seminar. I just want to show it real fast, if you don’t mind here. This was an amazing article because—here it is. I’m going to click on it. Okay, so the article was—sorry. I thought I had it. Oh, gosh, I thought I had it in this PowerPoint.

I’ll find it as we speak, but anyways, it was a—oh, here it is. I found it. I found it, great. Okay. It says, “Diet, individual responsiveness in cancer prevention.” Okay? This is basically the abstract. I’ll read a piece of the abstract, “beyond consideration of genetic polymorphisms.” Okay, so beyond some of the genetic stuff, “the last half century has brought stark changes in lifestyle that departs from normal diurnal cycles of periodic fluctuations in food availability.” Just stop right there.

What it’s saying is is that, basically, we are stuck in a feast mode, and this is potentially causing problems. “Thus, modern times may be characterized by being constantly in a feast environment. The cellular consequences may be an increase in risk for several diseases, including cancer.” In this article here, they are basically saying that they’re finding that the fact that we’re stuck in a feast mode all the time in modern day society is actually leading to disease. I couldn’t agree more. Now, in this article, they’re talking about cancer. In this particular article that I was referring, the American Indians, they were talking about diabetes and heart disease being prevented by forcibly moving in and out of these different diet cycles. The Indians in the winter ate a diet of meats, and I even wrote down what they were eating because I did this homework.

I actually went to Wyoming and researched this topic. Elk, deer, antelope were the mainstays of their diet in the winter. The women would trap small game, typically, and the men would go out hunting. In the spring, they often times—or even in the late winter, they ran out of food, forced fasting. It forced a fast. Early spring, they were in between food supplies. The Hunza people, which is completely another culture, there’s something called starvation spring where they would fast every spring. Then guess what happened in the summer? The American Indians now would start gathering berries, fruits, amaranth, wild onion, rice grass, dandelion, inner bark of the trees, different roots, root vegetables. Their carbohydrate intake soared, actually.

Now, in this, they talked about how getting more sun in the summer, exposed to more sun actually helped them with the higher carbohydrate. It made them more insulin sensitive, which means they could handle a higher carbohydrate diet, right? It also talked about in the winter, the lack of sun. Actually, how the higher fats would help them. Now we’re making an argument, even for seasonally, perhaps we should be varying our diet. Okay, so food, seasons—anyways, I’m bringing up a lot of points.

Look, I made evidence from science saying, hey, this could be—and I have many other articles here. Even with MS and how diet variation really helped with this. They said that just regular dietary changes in this study didn’t help MS; however, the diet variation did. Periodic three days mimicking fasting. In and out of ketosis actually made a difference. Just dietary changes didn’t. Anyways, we look at ancient cultures. We get evidence. We look at studies like this. We’re gaining evidence, and I’m gathering more and more.

Full circle, who’s right, the vegan, maybe; the Paleo, guy, maybe? The point is I believe that it’s this switch forcing our diets. It’s really helping our microbiome. It’s adapting from a hormonal perspective. It forces cellular health and cellular healing. There you go. We have a growing group of doctors doing this diet variation, utilizing this in strategies weekly, monthly, and we’re seeing the results. The science, yeah, it works.

Meredith:
Yes, -inaudible-. I love the idea of -inaudible- —feedback?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. You’re breaking up a little bit.

Meredith:
Okay. Better now. I’m wondering too. I love the idea of diet variation, but I think there’s quite a few people with food intolerances, digestive issues. Maybe they love the idea of eating a lot of different foods, but simply can’t digest many foods. I know you’ve spoken of past clients, Dr. Pompa. When they came to you, they could only eat four or five foods. How does diet variation work with that when you literally can’t digest or can’t tolerate many foods at all?

Dr. Pompa:
Again, diet variation, also aka feast-famine cycle, so how we got a lot of those people eating more foods is fasting, periodic block fast, whether it’s once a month you do a four-day fast, even then partial fast on the back end every other month. Even intermittent fasting daily, which we’re talking about here, is a variation. I think it really leads to part of the solution for that as well, of course, removing toxins at the cellular level. Again, this is a three-legged stool. We’re talking a multi-therapeutic approach, but I think these variations play a role actually as part of the solution. Let’s work with the foods that we know that we are okay with. My wife’s calling me during a Cell TV? Is she crazy?

Meredith:
Merily.

Dr. Pompa:
I’m doing Cell TV on diet variation. I’ll call you back, all right, anyways. What? What? Anyways, I better turn off my ringer. If I know my wife, she’ll just keep calling. She’ll be like, “What do you mean? What did you say?”

Meredith:
-inaudible-.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I think that we can work then with the few foods that they’re okay with and still do diet variation from even a feast-famine cycle point of view.

Meredith:
Which is a modified approach, yeah. You don’t think there are any foods that we should always keep in our diet. For example, there are some foods that they say. We should always have bone broth every day or fermented foods every day. You think we should vary every single thing, or are there things that we can keep fairly consistent?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I mean, I don’t think there’s a problem with keeping certain foods always in your diet, right? I think more of the focus should be on these major nutrient caloric contents, the feast-famine cycles. I think that certain food— increasing the certain amount of foods, the amount of fats, the amount of proteins, the amount of carbohydrates, I think that matters more. At least from a clinical perspective, I can speak to that, right? Meaning that we know that far more carbohydrates versus far more fat or not. I think that matters more.

Now, if you watch the interview that we do with Jack Kruse, okay, he talked about seasonal eating, right? You’re getting more sun versus less sun, and foods can adapt to that. I don’t know clinically how much of that applies. I believe there’s truth to it. I believe there’s truth to it. I’m not the first one to talk about seasonal eating, by the way, right? A lot of people talk about eating foods that are in season, and there’s nothing new here as far as that perspective goes. I think there’s truth to it. Clinically, how much just eating different foods seasonally, I don’t know. I know that the macronutrient adjustments matters a lot, especially when we’re trying to fix a cell.

Meredith:
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. It does just from the adaptation perspective, and it all boils down to that is promoting cellular adaptation through good cellular stress.

Dr. Pompa:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Look, I’ll keep it really simple, right? We can think about this many ways. From a scientific perspective, very simple, bad cells don’t adapt, right? You heard our interview with Thomas Seyfried who does diet variation for cancer. He’s moving people in and out of fasting. He calls it Press Pulse. This variation, there’s magic here. I’m telling you, from a clinical perspective, we’re seeing this, so bad cells don’t adapt.

The guy who won the Nobel Prize last year, 2016, he won it for his work on something called autophagy or autophage, which simply means that your body gets rid of bad cells. When we’re forcing the body to make these changes, bad mitochondria that produce energy, bad cells don’t adapt. Eventually, you do it enough. All of a sudden, the bad cells are not adapting. Your good cells are and becoming stronger. That’s why Tom Seyfried is noticing this with cancer. We’re creating bad cells that die, simple as that. Autophagy, the guy who won the Nobel Prize showed in fasting states why autophagy is one of the big reasons we thrive in health and healing during fasting.

Bad cells don’t adapt, so is it true with many things, just switching our diet, ketosis, non-ketosis? Yes. Yes, we’re seeing this. The magic is in forcing adaptation. Weightlifters, exercise people, listen. You guys get it, right? If you do the same exercise day in, day out, what happens? You don’t make gains anymore.

What if you change the exercise you’re doing? You’re forcing adaptation. All of a sudden, now you’re sore again, and now your body adapts and becomes stronger. Every time weightlifters go in the gym, they like to switch what they do. Switch what they do, purposely changing the—that’s exercise variation. We’re doing the same thing with the diet that the bodybuilders knew for years.

You know what else we got from the bodybuilders? They knew about diet variation too. You know why? They would do carb days after they were in these major—they were getting lean. Then they would throw carb days in right before competition, and they would get extremely lean and vascular. After a carb day, day two, even the next day, I am visibly leaner. My body went in and started firing up the fat burning mechanism, and I immediately got leaner. The bodybuilders, they did that biohack for years. All we’re doing is taking this adaptation and doing it to fix cells.

Meredith:
Yeah. I know. I was feeling that too. I love practicing diet variation as well. I think I had been a little bit too low-carb for a while, so I really enjoyed a feast day this past Sunday. Often times for people, they like to just book it on a weekend where you know you can really enjoy those feasting foods, and you do feel better the next day. I did. I just felt better. My energy was better. Sometimes when you just do low-carb, you’re doing the same things for too long, your body—there’s homeostasis. It just gets a little too consistent, so you have to mix it up.

I’m wondering. I’m thinking too for people to maybe know as far as which kind of style and timing and variation works best. Do you think it would be prudent to suggest testing blood sugar and ketones as far as to track patterns, and see what might work best for you with fasting and feasting days? Do you think that’s even necessary as the results -inaudible-?

Dr. Pompa:
I don’t know if it’s necessary for the average person, right? Someone who’s sick and they start intermittent fasting, we like to look at morning glucose and ketones, and then right before their first meal. We want to see glucose dropping and ketones rising. It’s an indication that they’re responding. If glucose is rising after 18 hours of fasting, you’re in gluconeogenesis. That’s an indicator that you need to shorten your fast until you get a little bit more efficient, and that’s a strategy that we use and teach.

I think that, no matter what, everyone can benefit from this in some way and for the reasons that we’re saying. I don’t want to overcomplicate it for people that you have to test to do it. I think that, if you’re challenged, it can help determine your fast. Even like I said, I guess to some point, Joe realized his glucose levels were rising, and yet, he did what I was doing. I kept cutting my carbs, right? Why isn’t my glucose going down? We see this opposite thing occurring.

Understanding that insulin’s main function really is to shut off the liver’s production of glucose, if insulin goes lower and lower, you’re not able to do that, and then gluconeogenesis happens just from the production of glucose in the liver. Diabetics, I hope you heard that. I hope you heard that. Balancing these, throwing these feast days at it is a way to really offset the gluconeogenesis of the liver, or your body taking it’s muscle and breaking it down into sugar, which, again, that’s happening to people all the time as well. We take the muscle and break it down to sugar. That’s called gluconeogenesis, so again, throwing in feast days like this break that cycle. Then looking at your glucose could tell you. If your glucose is rising in a fasting state, change something, so there’s a good indicator.

Meredith:
Change something. I love that. For all of you who are watching who have maybe been following this strict, rigid diet, even it’s a great diet, even if it’s the Cellular Healing Diet or a ketogenic diet, vegan, Paleo, fill in the blank and if you’re following this diet, not getting results, diet variation is an incredible solution. It’s ancestral. There’s historical evidence as well as cutting-edge new science that is validating this strategy. Dr. Pompa, I think it’s brilliant, and it’s made a change in so many people’s lives. Thank you for bringing this information and explaining it in a formula and in a way that we can get it, and we can understand it, and apply it to our lives to increase our health.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Maybe we’ll attach this episode to the video that I did in Wyoming. I did a great video. Listen, I have to tell the story because I didn’t get to tell it in the video, right? My son and I were there. I had been doing days of research on the American Indians because they have a lot of great history there. Anyway, I said, okay, today we’re going out. We’re going to try and find the buffalo herd. I heard they’re coming out of the Great Plains up in Yellowstone. They were coming down to where we could actually access them, and so we did.

He thought I was nuts. He thought there’s no way we’re going to find these buffalo. We’re driving, driving, and he’s probably frustrated with me at this point. All of a sudden, I see ahead what—he was saying, “I think that’s just a bush.” I’m like, “I think it’s a buffalo.” We drove up. One turned into many. We literally ran into the buffalo herd, hundreds. There was thousands probably behind them, and there they were, right off the road.

I literally jumped out of the car. He held the camera on me, and you see the buffalo herd behind me. I started talking about the history of the American Indians. Buffalo is a huge thing, right? I went through a lot of this diet variation stuff, some of the things I shared with you, in that video. You have to watch the video. The wind’s blowing. The buffalo are behind me. Daniel was like the back door is open because if they charge you—people die from buffalo all the time. They’re mean.

He said, “If they charge, run and jump in the back door.” I’m doing this video not knowing if they could be coming or not. I’m telling you. I was ten feet from these big huge buffalo that literally could’ve charged me at any moment, so you got to see the video. It was great.

Meredith:
Awesome. I can’t wait to watch it. We’ll definitely connect it to this episode. Thanks for risking your life to bring us that information, Dr. Pompa.

Dr. Pompa:
I even went and—part of that video, I had my son splice it on. I even went up—because I read about the Sheep Eaters of Wyoming of the high mountains, and this is what they survived on, these sheep. They call them sheep, but they’re the bighorn sheep, like the rams. We call them the rams. Someone told me where these things are, and I went up looking for them. I found them. In the video, you see these little specs moving around. That’s the sheep. That’s the bighorn sheep, right?

I did a piece of the video of how this was the mainstay of their diet, and they survived on these things in the winter so, anyways, cool stuff. We can learn from ancient cultures diet variation, feast-famine cycles. No doubt a part of what we need as humans today. I believe that wholeheartedly.

Meredith:
Yeah. It’s so true. With our ancestors, with their diet variation, they were still always varying between whole real foods. Whether it was buffalo, and sheep, and berries, and twigs, they were still eating real food. Don’t think that diet variation can be eating -inaudible- to then eating—varying it up with some French fries. You definitely want diet variation to still include whole real foods. Bottom line, you do need to include those foods because that’s what heals your cells to decrease inflammation and ultimately help you increase your health.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely. No doubt about it. Here I am in ketosis with all that amazing snow out there. Can you see that? No. I guess not.

Meredith:
No. It’s just all white out the window. We believe you.

Dr. Pompa:
Four feet of snow in the last few days.

Meredith:
You can get out there on the ski slopes. You go out and have some fun. Thanks for breaking down diet variation. We hope that you listeners and viewers out there have a better understanding of what diet variation is, why it’s so important, and some take-home strategies for how to start implementing it in your life to increase your health. Thanks as always, Dr. Pompa. You’re a wealth of information and these strategies that you found to bring us to help us live healthier lives, so thank you.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, absolutely.

Meredith:
Okay. Have a great weekend, and we’ll catch you next week. Bye-bye.

156: Viome Test with Naveen Jain

Transcript of Episode 156: Viome Testing with Naveen Jain

With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Meredith Dykstra, Naveen Jain, and Dr. Helen Messier

>> Go Here for Priority Viome Test Access.  Viome Demand has been high, but a special priority access code is
available to my subscribers at: www.viome.com/tcd (Get priority access with code: TCD).

Warren:
Hey, guys. Welcome to a really special program. I’m going to start with a story, and introduce two amazing people, Naveen Jain. Again, without words how I met this individual, and he transformed my heart and then his business partner. Something that we’re going to share with you today called Viome. I’m going to start with the story, Naveen.

I was at a mutual mastermind, Archangel. Again, you have a laundry list of success, Silicon India’s “Most Admired Serial Entrepreneur,” Red Herring’s “Top 20 Entrepreneurs,” Red Herring’s “Lifetime Achievement” award, “Albert Einstein Technology Medal,” “Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year.” You’ve experienced some success, right? A little bit philanthropic these days in the things that you’re doing, but that’s not what impressed me. There was that story you told me about Richard Branson and his mom that—you could tell that story maybe that was one of the funniest thing that left me in stitches. What left me in tears and touched my heart was what you guys were able to bring to natural health, to the world, which will literally transform healthcare as we know it, and I mean that. If you’re watching this, get rid of everything else you’re doing right now. Turn off your phone, and listen to this webcast, webinar, podcast, however this is getting to you, on Facebook. Share it, and listen to it because it’s literally something that had me weeping and shaking because of what this is.

Once I talked with Dr. Pompa, I got on the phone with Dr. Helen Messier who’s a bird. Bird, you’re a bird. You’re flying away. A board certified family practice physician. You’re on the staff of Institute for Functional Medicine, a faculty member there. You have a PhD in molecular biology and immunology, so she kind of knows what she’s doing. She’s kind of a big deal. Naveen, first guy with the – was it called Moon Express?

Naveen:
Yeah.

Warren:
First private company in the world to be able to have access to land on the moon and essentially take rocks back. Kind of big deal too. When I heard this, what Naveen had to share from stage, and he got into this—starts talking microbiome, epigenetics, I’m like are you—you’ve got to be kidding me. This can’t be happening right now in this room. There was a lot of serendipitous events that even got me to this place.

He took the time to talk to me afterwards. He said, “Warren, here’s my cell number. Give me a call.” I called my business partner and best friend, and we train physicians all over the world. When I start sharing this with him, he’s like this could be the real deal. After several meetings, here we are bringing this to you.

Again, pay attention. I’m going to just let these guys roll with it. Tell this story that will literally transform your life. It has to deal with epigenetics, the microbiome, the Viome, and everything else, and how this can literally transform healthcare as we know it. Guys, buckle up for the most power packed 45 minutes you’ve ever had in natural health and healing. Here we go.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Thank you for being here, everyone. I’ve had the privilege of interviewing the world’s experts in some of these topics. Today, I think that we have a breakthrough. I really do. For years I’ve talked about looking at the microbiome’s effect on epigenetics, and I don’t want to lose people right there. What we’re talking about is our bacteria that is in and around us. Not just bacteria. Viruses, funguses, all of it together making up this amazing conglomeration of bugs that we realize now we’re more bug than human.

How it shares information with our DNA and even changes our DNA. It changes us for better, for worse, all of those things. We’ve talked about this. Naveen, for years I’ve educated on it. I said, gosh, if one day we could be able to test this, change protocol, see how these ancient healing strategies that we do, our cellular work and detox, man, what a breakthrough it would be. Naveen, I’m just going to turn it a little bit over to you here and Helen because this is a reality. This is something that I’ve talked about, and here we are. Tell us where we are.

Naveen:
Sure. I think, for the last ten years, that fundamentally we now have technology at our disposal that can look inside us at such a molecular level that was never possible before. As you see, the reason we get sick and the reason we spend trillions of dollars and still not feel well is because we really are a bad host. We are just a poor host. As you mentioned, we are less human than bacteria. Ninety percent of the cells in our body are these microorganisms in our gut, on our skin, in our saliva in our mouth.

These are the things that keep us healthy. This is symbiotic relationship that nature has created between these microorganisms and us. If we don’t feed them right, they don’t feed us right. We are an equal system in ourself. We are not a homogeneous organism. Us together, just like a climate. If you really screw up the climate, you screw up the organism. If we don’t take care of our gut, that’s when we start to get sick. Helen, maybe you can please take it from here, and describe it a little bit more detail about what is it so exciting about we’re doing at Viome.

Helen:
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Naveen. Just take one quick step back, and reiterate what you said. Just really establish the importance of this collection of microorganisms that is living on and in us in our overall health and wellbeing, right? We know that there is probably not any chronic disease out there that doesn’t have the microbiome as a component of why that disease happens.

The microbiome and these organisms, they do not only help us digest and absorb our food. They regulate our appetite. They impact our mood. They control our immune system because 70% of our immune system lives in the lining of our gut. They make essential nutrients and vitamins that we need to survive. They control our metabolisms, our weight loss and diabetes, and they change our genetic expression. The whole epigenetics, all of those things are controlled and influenced by these microorganisms.

Dr. Pompa:
Right. Yeah.

Helen:
Go ahead.

Naveen:
You go, Helen.

Helen:
Oh, sorry. I thought you said something there. Yeah, what has been the challenge up until now is that we’ve just not had the techniques or the ability to look at the microbiome in enough detail to start to understand what it really does and how we can influence it very specifically for each individual. When we look at humans across the board, we’re all about 99% the same when we look at our genetics. We share almost all of our genes, but when we look at our microbiomes, we’re only between 10 and 30% the same. We’re as individual as our fingerprints, and in fact, we’re using microorganisms and our microbiomes in forensics to actually identify individuals. You can look at people’s handprints and identify who they are by the organisms that they leave behind.

What we’re able to do now is look in a very, very high resolution, and determine exactly not only what’s there down to very specific levels but also what they’re doing. That’s been the challenge up to now, and that’s why what we’re doing here with Viome is so exciting. We can actually see what’s going on.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I want to get there because that’s an important component, but I don’t want to lose our viewers and listeners too much. I had the privilege of interviewing Stephanie Seneff. A lot of her work, she’s talking about how certain toxins we’re being exposed to are changing our microbiome, right? Not to mention living in the antibiotic age that we’ve lived at. We’ve abused this microbiome, whether it’s the overuse of certain toxins. Glyphosate she talks about, multiple different stressors that we’re exposed to today.

How has that changed, for our viewers and listeners? You threw out some things. It affects our immune system, our brain, our brain work. Specifically, what are studies showing that it—this disruption of these bugs that are in us, what is it leading to as far as people watching going, oh, that could be why I’m depressed. Talk about a little bit of that, and then let’s look at where we’re at right now with this new science.

Naveen:
I mean, if you think about it, 90% of the serotonin is produced in our gut by these microbiomes, so think about it. Serotonin is the chemical that makes us feel good. When it’s not being produced, then we feel depressed, and we have anxiety, and we have ADHD. Now they are finding even the things like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer, the autism, all of these diseases are not actually a disease of the brain. They are the disease of the gut, and it starts in the gut. The chronic inflammation, it causes all other disease.

When you start to think about the first word, diseases, whether you’re thinking about autoimmune disease, or you talk about the allergies, and you talk about eczema, and you start to talk about all the chronic inflammation that’s happening that’s causing all these diseases, it’s because we have been carpet bombing our body. When you eat bad processed food or when you take antibodies, it is literally carpet bombing the whole ecosystem. When we killing this ecosystem, then we somehow find—we say why am I getting unhealthy? It is because there is no precise medicine, so when we get sick, we give them antibiotics. It’s not just killing the pathogens. It’s killing all the good stuff around us. That’s why we’re getting constantly all these diseases.

I think, to me, taking care of your gut, taking care of your bacteria is the key. We need to be less hygienic. We need to be really one with the system in the nature. The more we are able to become one with the nature, the better we are, so the people who used to live in the farm, now we are constantly wiping our hands with the antibacterial soap, killing all those microbiome. We don’t eat with the hands. Everything is now hygienic, and that is the problem.

Other problem that we also see is a lot of the babies are born through cesarean section, and that means they are not really getting the microbiome from the mom that they used to get. That’s another big problem, right? All the things that we’re thinking we’re doing it for the safety of humans is we are essentially making us so clean they’re essentially getting rid of all the things that make us feel good. Helen?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, absolutely. I have this question. I think many people right now are starting to realize there’s tests. Hey, we can test our microbiome, right? To date, we would look at these tests, even as physicians, and go, eh, great. We see a balance. We’re trying to say, okay, a balance of Bacteroidetes with these Firmicutes and this bacteria and that one. It’s like, okay, that could lead to people being overweight, but we really don’t do anything with it right now. Is that changing?

Helen:
Yeah.

Naveen:
I think the fundamental problem we are seeing right now is that, through these tests that were available, they were actually more or less useless, right? You look at the whole gut bacteria, the trillions of bacteria in our gut, and divide them into eight categories. We said America consists of its Smiths and Joneses. Rather than thinking about, my god, the Smiths can be a doctor, and they can be a plumber. They’re not the same. They really perform very different function, but through these tests, could not differentiate.

That’s why I think that Viome is such a game changer. This technology came out of Los Alamos National Lab where they spent billions of dollars in the last ten years coming up with the technology to actually understand every—not just a species but every strain of bacteria there is going on. Not just in our gut but also in our blood. For the first time, we’re able to look at the bacteriophages. These are the viruses that impact the bacteria. It’s not the viruses that impact us, but they impact the microorganism.

Now we are able to look at the fungus and the [eukaryotes], and we are able to look at parasites. Then we’re also able to look at the human RNA. That means the gut shedding. That means the inflammation that’s happening in your gut. Most importantly, we know not only who they are. We know exactly what they’re doing. I think there’s some—the interesting thing is that some of the things that we find is—Helen can describe in more details. When you look at the people and then you’re looking at simply the DNA and the old techniques, we really did not understand what was going on.

This morning, I think Helen was giving me a story. That if you look at extreme athletes and if you were to go to the current test, even the metagenomics where they’re looking at the DNA of all microorganism, they’re more or less the same between the people and the extreme athletes. When we look at their RNA, we find something called [00:14:15] that is so prevalent. That means the expression of it is so overabundant that 80% of the microbiome RNA actually is the single bacteria. Unless you had this test, you would never know that. Helen, you want to discuss a little bit more there?

Dr. Pompa:
Helen, bring to life for people listening, clinically, how is—I hear an echo. I don’t know where that’s coming from. Anyways, is it there? It’s good. Okay.

Clinically, what’s it going to change? People listening, that’s what they want to know. In other words, okay, great. My doctor runs this amazing new test on me. What’s it going to do for me? How’s it going to change what the doctor does for me? What do you see, Helen, because you’re one of the first to really experience this new testing clinically?

Warren:
How is it way different and not even on the same planet as these other tests that are out there? I don’t want to name them but genetic tests and biome tests that are out there. How does this just blow the cover off this whole thing?

Dr. Pompa:
It’s showing what these bacteria are doing. Naveen made a really good point there, but clinically, what does it mean?

Helen:
No. No, exactly right. I think the challenge in some of the criticisms that you were just describing in why it’s not overly useful clinically up until now is because we’ve just been looking at such a high level. We’re seeing maybe some changes. You mentioned the Firmicutes versus the Bacteroidetes and that ratio, and that is looking at the Smiths and the Joneses. Not even that level that Naveen was describing. When you can get down to the level of saying that this Smith has a medical degree, but he’s actually working as a plumber right now. We’re getting down to that specific. We can see exactly what those organisms—not only their potential of what they can do; like they have a certain degree, but what they’re actually doing. It’s really critical. We’ve never had the technology…

Naveen:
Helen, can you give an example? Can you give an example of the things that we can now look at and how clinically you would use that?

Helen:
Yeah. The first thing is—and I think this is something we haven’t talked about yet that’s absolutely critical to what we’re doing at Viome is we’re going to be able to follow you over time. We’ll be able to—your first test is we establish what your microbiome is. Remember, we said we’re only 10 to 30% the same between each other, so it would be wrong if I tried to compare your microbiome to your neighbor’s microbiome. They’re not the same. You develop it differently. You grow up in different environments. You colonize it differently.

We’ll be able to see what your microbiome is, and then with interventions we can see how that’s changing, whether you have the appropriate pathways for doing things like short-chain fatty acid production, or butyrate, or making certain vitamins. Is the pathway that makes vitamin B6, is that being expressed in your microbiome, for example? Then what we can do is say we know that you need more of this particular function in your microbiome. Let’s feed those microbes that do that function. We can build up the ones you need, and all of that can be manipulated through diet, through lifestyle change.

Dr. Pompa:
Wow. Yeah.

Naveen:
Can you talk a little bit, Helen, on not just the microbiome but the other things we do to be able to put them together? For example, the [00:17:50] typing and the metabolites and how all these things come together rather than just one simple thing.

Helen:
Yeah, absolutely. We’re really looking at a couple things that we’re doing at Viome. One is the gut intelligence, which is really the microbiome or the function of the microbiome, and also, what we call functional abundance. It’s not just the abundance of the organisms that are there. Is there enough of the guys doing the things that you need, the functional abundance? We’re also combining that, of course, with what we call metabolic intelligence. We all know that no two people respond to the same diet the same way, right?

Dr. Pompa:
Right.

Helen:
Even Hippocrates said way back when that “one man’s food is another man’s poison.” We know that there’s a lot of people proclaiming a specific diet. That it works great one for one person, and it just doesn’t work for another person because we’re all biochemically unique. Now, our microbiome actually contributes to why we’re so unique, but we’re also genetically unique and biochemically unique. What we’re doing is a test to look at how do you process the different foods, the different food groups, the ratio of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins that’ll be right for you? There’s certain foods that we think are good for everybody. There’s bad foods we know that are bad for everybody, but there’s good foods that are better for one person than another person. We’ll be able to monitor and establish that as well, and then see how the microbiome affects that.

The other thing that we’re looking at and Naveen alluded to this as well is looking at the expression of your genes in your blood. Doing your blood transcriptome where we can look at not only any microorganisms that are there. We can also look at what your genes are doing, what they’re expressing. It really gives us a complete picture.

Naveen:
It’s not about the testing. I mean, it’s not about the testing that we do. We’re not a test lab.

Helen:
That’s right.

Naveen:
What we’re really doing is a full service of making you personalized individualized recommendation, and adapting it as we learn how you’re body is reacting to it. We do the tests. We made the recommendations based on what we are seeing. Then we continue to follow through, and keep changing your nutritional needs that you have, and see how they are adapting. We’re not a testing company, but we are a service company that you sign up. You have a monthly service, and based on that, it’s an adaptive nutrition rather than one diet fits all.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. It’s really neat.

Helen:
Exactly.

Dr. Pompa:
Clinically, I just see so many possibilities here, right? The thing that’s always missing is we’re doing certain things, and we don’t know exactly what it’s doing at the level of the genome. How is it changing their epigenetics? How is it changing their cell function? This is a way of actually seeing what we do as a practitioner, and then how is it changing the outcome. Therefore, it’s going to guide the path individually for each person.

Just looking at some of the science and I was just into it this morning, fasting, which is something that we do, massive impact on the microbiome. I mean, it changes people completely to where their microbiome has this different result. Now we’ll be able to measure and see the results on the functional end of what a fast did for the person or this dietary change. Moving in and out of ketosis, what did it do as far the cell function?

Helen:
Exactly.

Naveen:
Also look at the biochemistry of how the biochemistry of the body changed by looking at the metabolites. Right, Helen?

Dr. Pompa:
Right. Right.

Helen:
Yeah, absolutely. We’re adding in as well. We’re able to look at metabolites from blood. All of this is collectable in a person’s home. It’s just from a finger prick. There’s no need to go to a lab and get any blood drawn.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, that’s beautiful.

Helen:
Just easy collection by the person from a finger prick, from stool, and from urine. We can look at metabolites in all of those body fluids, and really see not only—the microbiome tells us the function of what they’re doing. Now we can see its effect on the body. That’s what’s really exciting.

Naveen:
One example, take a person that at least you know of and…

Helen:
I’m sorry. You’re breaking up.

Naveen:
How you’re able to change the change the person’s life.

Helen:
I didn’t hear that, Naveen. I apologize. You were breaking up.

Naveen:
Helen, let’s give an example of a person that—what you learn from this thing and how you change their diet. What they thought was really good for them, it turned out that it was completely wrong for them.

Helen:
Yeah, absolutely. That’s the case. We have a client who has been struggling with prediabetes for years, right? Read a lot of books and has been following certain people, and said, well, I need to eat a very high-fat, low-carb diet because that seems to be the right thing for my prediabetes. He was very fastidious in doing that and eating very high-fat, low-carb, following it as closely as he could. His sugar levels just were not coming down. In fact, they were getting worse. He was starting to progress from prediabetes to diabetes.

When we did our testing, we identified that he actually would do much better with a very complex carbohydrates. Not simple carbs, but he needed more carbohydrates in his diet, less fat. He needed to eat at different time intervals than he was doing, and that’s made a huge difference. What he thought and he was very careful what he thought was right was actually not right for him, even though that same diet would work very well for someone else.

Dr. Pompa:
I have a question, a clinical question. We see that there’s no doubt. One of the things I teach is diet variation and how we alter. We move people in and out of diets. Especially when someone’s not successful here, we move them on to a very different diet. Here’s what we found clinically. They could be on this diet for a period of time, and maybe they stopped making improvements, whatever, blood sugar, weight loss, whatever it is. We move them back to a diet that maybe they didn’t do as well on.

You know what we find? All of a sudden now they start succeeding in that diet, which is the microbiome, their DNA, their epigenetics because they changed diets. One of the things that I always say is, in ancient cultures, they were always forced to make dietary changes, whether it was seasonal, environmental, drought, or whatever it was.

Helen:
Precisely.

Dr. Pompa:
We know it changes microbiome. Now, are we going to be able to measure this often enough to see that? Can we measure it in three parts so we make these changes?

Helen:
Yes.

Naveen:
Yes. Yes.

Helen:
Exactly. I mean, you’ve identified it. You hit it right on the head. That’s exactly what it’s doing is you need to refine over time. Most people will test one point in time, and say this is what’s right for you for the rest of your life. That’s absolutely not true.

Dr. Pompa:
No. It’s not true.

Helen:
Just as you identified, our environment changes. We have different stressors. We have different things that happen to us, and different things change our microbiome over time. We have to continually monitor you, and refine the recommendations to what you need at that point in time. That will change over time. That’s the critical thing of doing the follow-up testing. You’re absolutely right. This case that I presented that I just told you about, we have to monitor him in three months from now to make sure that we may not have to do some tweaks and switch him back, right?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.

Helen:
Absolutely.

Naveen:
Helen, tell a little bit about that—you found something like the spinach that everybody thinks is good for them, and not necessarily is good for everyone, right?

Helen:
Exactly. Exactly. We think of broccoli and cauliflower and spinach as the foods that should be good for everybody, but that’s not necessarily the case.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s amazing. I was doing some research on the American Indians in Wyoming, and it was astounding what I found. First of all, the diet in the winter for them, ketosis, high-fat, very different than their diet in the summer. It looked more like a vegetarian diet, if you will, right? I mean, they were so sick of different meats. In this, they were saying that this variation, even driven by—because of sunlight, the amount of sun that they’d get in the summer enabled them. Again, microbiome changes, things that changed in the summer just because of more sunlight allowed them to withstand higher carbohydrate levels than they would normally in the winter without sun. The sun’s effect, the microbiome, the things they were exposed to in the summer versus the winter all changed the microbiome. Therefore, changed their diet, and how they responded to the diet is probably a better…

Warren:
Listeners, you now know why.

Helen:
That’s absolutely right. We know that…

Warren:
Okay. Can you hear me? Never mind. Did you hear me?

Naveen:
Yes.

Warren:
I was just going to say one thing, and I won’t say anymore because this is, again, on my chest. You can see why when you’re watching this. When I heard this happening—and again, I got sick. I was sick for ten years, the last of my life. Through all that work, all of Dr. Pompa’s work, training doctors, hundreds and hundreds of clinics, hundred hours a week for the last ten years trying to find solutions, injecting ourselves with everything on the planet. Microbiome transplants from multiple donors. I mean, we’ve done it all. When you see something like this come to the table and the potential to see people set free from pain and suffering, and being able to track a client and see how their epigenetics are changing their microbiome, which essentially controls their epigenetics more than anything else, and then the viruses that are controlling the bacteria and your—I mean, it’s so complex.

To have that test, you can see why I started this with, yeah, the guy lands on the moon, but he’s also bringing technology through technology. He’s philanthropic, I always say that wrong, to change the world. We’re going to be able to get you guys to be on the front lines of getting this test even here through this show. Again, the tears for some of you should be there and the heartfelt thank you to Naveen and his team, which are high-level team. He hires the best of the best because he’s run—I won’t even say the number but very, very high-level businesses, and he has a high-level influence and impact. This is coming on at a time that is so necessary in our nation where people are divided. I think a lot of it has to do with health, and their mental health, and their ability to handle stress.

This could be a huge game changer, and I’d like to say God allowed it to come through. A lot of these high-end practitioners that have this test available through Naveen, who has dedicated his life to innovation, and Helen who’s—obviously, Dr. Helen, who’s invested her life into helping people. You’re not a functional medicine doctor because it’s fun. You’re a functional medicine doctor because you want to transform someone’s life. It’s not fun. It’s hard. It’s difficult. You’re dealing with the sickest of the sick like Dr. Pompa does. Again, continue to watch this. I just had to say thank you to you guys again, and now they know why I was crying.

Naveen:
Warren, I want you to do something. I want to do something for your audience. I would love to—obviously, as you can imagine, we’re launching this service in the next two weeks here, and there are thousands of people already on the wait list. The people who are listening to you, Warren, I want to give them a special code so they can get in front of the queue. Would you mind sharing that thing with them please?

Warren:
Yeah. Yeah. We have a code. If you went to—there’s two ways to get there. I’ll actually edit this video a bit, and I’ll put it up at the bottom of the screen if you haven’t seen it already. I’m going to share my screen, and show you the Viome website. See how that works. Then we have a code, a priority code, which is the—which Naveen gave to our listening audience that gets you up in the queue. It puts you higher up.

Essentially, you’re pulling a ticket from the meat counter that says 20, and there’s 20 people ahead of you. He’s going to give you a ticket to the head of that meat counter so you don’t have to wait. I am presenting so everyone can see. Thank you. Now I want to share my screen. Can you see my screen?

Naveen:
No.

Warren:
Share, can you see it now?

Naveen:
No.

Dr. Pompa:
I can.

Warren:
Can you see it now?

Naveen:
Yes.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.

Warren:
Okay. You can see my screen. Do you see this…

Dr. Pompa:
Guy standing there.

Warren:
The guy standing there. That’s not just a guy. That’s a guy with a sweet microbiome. He has that special athletic microbiome that everybody’s looking for. We’ll talk about that off. I want to get some of those.

If you put in Viome—there’s two ways to do it. If you go viome.com, V-I-O-M-E.com/ T as in Tom, C as in cat, D as in dog, Tom, cat, dog, TCD, that will give you the priority code. Then you hit the top right hand corner. You hit Join the Wait List, and you can see that it automatically populates. There’s a priority code here, and you get priority so the TCD priority code. Naveen, thank you so much for doing that for our listeners. I know that we’re probably only, what, the second—Matt, can you derail me here, and stop sharing my screen? How do I stop that?

Naveen:
There you are.

Warren:
Okay. Am I back?

Naveen:
It’s really amazing. This is something we are so excited about. The only reason I started Viome was because I thought it can help billions of people around the world. This was a technology that has—it’s been last ten years. The hundreds of people spend their lives building it. Once I saw this, I’m thinking, oh, my god. It can really help billions of people around the world, and I wanted to bring it to people’s hand.

I started this company not because we’re going to make billions of dollars. We did it because we’re going to help billions of people around the world. To me, it’s the most exciting part. I always thought landing on the moon is going to be my legacy, and now I’m sitting here at Viome. Thinking you know what? My legacy is not about landing on the moon. It’s really going to be helping the billions of people’s guts.

Imagine. Imagine if we can live in the world where the sickness is optional. That means you only get sick because you choose to be sick. Not because you have to be sick. You have the power now. Instead of taking the drugs and the pharmaceuticals, imagine in the food. Something you do every single day. If you just ate the right food and that became the best drug that you will ever have and if you never have to be sick.

What if we can not only cure what’s going on? Allow you to live healthy. Even if you’re healthy now, you can live healthier, and really perform up to your full potential. Imagine if we can find the biomarkers, and cure every disease before you even see the symptom of it. That’s the kind of world that I get excited about. I want me and our children to live in the world where no one ever have to be sick, and I hope that Viome is just the foundation that you need so that every doctor can take care of their patient. Everyone listening to it can empower themselves by going to Viome, understanding it, and following the right diet.

I hope everyone of you who is listening to it will go to viome.com/tcd, Tom, Charlie, David, and really go out and get yourself—do now. Sign up now. The earlier you sign up, the earlier in the queue you get now. There are thousands of people who are waiting on the list, and I want every one of these guys listening to it to get there right now.

Dr. Pompa:
Cool.

Warren:
Boom.

Dr. Pompa:
Helen, question for you. Right now, it’s in vogue, the SNP, the genetic testing. I’ve been critical about it as far as what it offers us really. When we first started doing this genetic SNP testing, I was studying it, figuring it out, trying it. Clinically, I ended up not being as impressed. This versus that, SNP testing, which I think is running its course versus what we’re talking about. Right now, there’s nothing more in vogue than that in our world anyway, but talk about the two.

Helen:
Yeah, absolutely. I’ve done a number of talks on SNP testing and have been teaching that for IFM. I’m very much in agreement with you in that it’s a potential, right? It’s a change that’s in the sequence of our DNA, but that doesn’t tell us what’s actually happening. It doesn’t take into account the epigenetic regulation of those genes. It’s a potentiality, but it’s not an actuality.

The difference of what we’re doing is we’re measuring what’s really happening, and so we can see the effects of those SNPs. Usually, clinically, when I look at SNPs, they’re a last resort for me. I never look at them first. You may go to them if a person’s not responding to some of the changes, and you might want to double check something. They don’t change. They don’t change with your environment. They’re static, and they’re just a possibility. They don’t tell you what’s really happening, so I think you’re…

Naveen:
Helen, they may not change. The SNPs may not change, but the effect of a SNPs changing by the environment. I mean, the food we eat. The places we go to. The environment changes how they are expressed, so as you see…

Helen:
Precisely.

Naveen:
It does have an impact.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I mean, that’s exactly right. We see people that should have methylation issues. They have the MTHFR gene, homocysteine, and yet, no problems clinically, right? Epigenetically, I believe that the body in its intelligence make up for many of these things via epigenetics. That we’re looking at a SNP saying this should be happening, but it’s not. The science is just so early because we know—and I have said—without even this new technology I have said there’s epigenetic things happening, whether the body’s adapting to the SNP because it’s that smart. That’s been my take.

Helen:
Absolutely. I think that that’s true. I think that environment can compensate. You can have an MTHFR SNP, but if you have a very high—a diet high in leafy greens and are getting a lot of folate, that SNP is going to have zero effect on you.

Dr. Pompa:
Zero.

Helen:
I think that’s right. I wanted to come back for a minute. You mentioned the idea about sunlight changing our diet and what we need. There was a really elegant paper that came out just last month that showed the effect of vitamin D on the microbiome. How it changes the microbiome and that, as we know, vitamin D also affects the regulation of hundreds of genes. It changes the epigenetics of our expression, our gene expression. Sunlight, as we know—or vitamin D comes from sunlight, and so there’s a beautiful interaction. I think science is now starting to prove what people have known for thousands of years, and they’ve adapted to that.

Dr. Pompa:
All we can do is emulate what these very healthy cultures and ancient cultures have done, right? I know that we’re going to learn more of that. We change our environment. No doubt about it, our microbiomes change, and therefore, the need for certain foods changes. We can tolerate maybe higher fat or lower fat more, right? I mean these things change based on that. I think this is what this testing is going to show. Something that I’ve spoke about for many years. At least not without some clinical evidence of what’s actually happening.

Helen:
Absolutely. Our microbiome does change in response to our diet to help us actually process what we’re eating. If you eat a high-fat diet, you start producing—or the number of bio-resistant organisms start to go up, and that changes within days of changing your diet. Now you’re able to process the higher fat, which may be a good thing for some—well, it obviously helps you adapt to your diet.

Naveen:
More importantly, Helen, I think to me the most important part is this constant testing and adapting of things. It is not a one-time thing, and you’re done. It’s not like you’re DNA test, like 23andMe. You do a test once, and that will never going to change for rest of your life. The idea here is that, as you sign up, it’s a monthly subscription, and we follow you. As you change yourself and your body adapts to it, we adapt the right diet that actually constantly changing. It’s not a personalized diet. It’s an adaptive personalized diet. That means it’s constantly changing.

Dr. Pompa:
I recognize this; that it would be a need to keep changing because I know that these things change. You all made it affordable enough to make that actually happen. Otherwise, it’s just going to be this thing that, yeah, okay, yeah, that month or whatever it was that was going on, yeah, that particular food and diet was good for you. It’s the change, and being able to retest is key here.

Naveen:
One of the interesting thing is this technology has never been available to the people. In fact, it would normally cost $10,000 or more to do a single test. In fact, I got it done at one of the institutions that I went to. I paid $25,000 for one single test. We are making this test available now to people at $99 a month. Imagine $99 a month, and I paid 25,000 for one single test. This test is done every three months, and we do it every three months, the test. Adapt your diet. Follow through with that. This is a game changer. This is [00:40:32] technology at a price point that everyone can afford.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. No. No doubt about it. There’s no doubt about it.

Helen:
Yeah. That’s again what’s so exciting is that the Viome technology allows us to do it so cost-effectively that then allows us to do the follow-up testing for people. That’s really key. I mean, as a clinician, you’ve probably seen this many times is people will fork out a whole bunch of money because they want this one test, and they want to see it. Then you make changes based on that test, and they just can never afford follow-up. You can never see if those changes were effective or not.

Dr. Pompa:
I always say I’m a big critic of most testing because it doesn’t change what the practitioner actually does. I would have to say this test is the most change that I would see from it. Meaning that there’s not another test that will change what the practitioner does more than this one. That’s for certain.

Helen:
Absolutely.

Warren:
Yeah. I didn’t even think about pricing. The ability to get this, I mean, there’s more of a story of that. I mean, there’s this technology that you guys got access to is literally a miracle on how you’re able to reapply it. For the cost of that, I mean, I—it still blows my mind. I didn’t even think about money when you guys were sharing. I mean, I didn’t even think—I just thought about how we can get this into our hands through our doctors for our patients. I didn’t care how much it cost.

Naveen didn’t care how much it cost. He was doing $25,000 every three months. I know that a lot of people just went like this. I can do this. No matter where you’re at, you can afford to have this type of technology. What it’s going to do for our practitioners across the world, our True Cellular Detox practitioners, our platinum practitioners that work with us, it’s going to take their practices through the roof, and really guide them in such a way.

Dr. Pompa, I mean, you get excited about this stuff because you’ve saying more.

Dr. Pompa:
More, more.

Warren:
It’s the epigenetics. It’s the epigenetics. It’s not this. It’s these parasites, and you’ll die without parasites. Those parasites are important, and people are doing all these parasite cleanses. They’re destroying their epigenetic code because that dang roundworm is necessary for that person. This test even does that, doesn’t it?

Dr. Pompa:
Hey, this brings science and testing around my diet variation concept, Warren. You know that, right? It’s like now we’ll actually know when to switch the diet, how to switch the diet. If we switched it, is it working? I mean, you have to understand. This is something that I teach to my practitioners is how to make these dietary changes, feast-famine cycles, diet variation. All we know is it works. Now we have something that will actually guide us through the process, which is just so cool.

Warren:
Incredible.

Helen:
Yeah, precisely. One of the things I wanted to add is that it comes—you were talking about technology. Not only is the technology with the testing, but we provide it through a Health Companion app. The client has all of their results with their recommendations on an app, and they can use that app to also keep track of their diet. Keep track of their sleep and stress and other things that we can then use to make even more precise recommendations. They’ll be part of the Viome community. They can compare their results with each other and do a community support.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.

Naveen:
Dr. Pompa, do you want to get back to the audience again how they can get this thing, amazing service, and they can get them right now.

Dr. Pompa:
Me? I have no clue. I’ll let Warren do that.

Warren:
Yeah. One thing I was going to say though, Naveen. Okay. There’s a priority code, which is TCD. They go to viome.com, and that gives them the ticket to the head of the line. Viome, V-I-O-M-E.com/tcd is how they get that priority code, or they could type it in on your website. It says Priority Code. They type in Tom, Charlie…

Naveen:
David.

Warren:
Dog, David, I was going to say Dick. I’m like that’s not the right thing to say, but I wanted to get Naveen to laugh. Naveen, you should tell them your story about Richard Branson.

Naveen:
No. No. No. No, for some other time.

Warren:
That was a funny story. No. That other story, that was funny too. Then how much longer—and I know this is going to go out. We’re going to put this all over the internet, and I want everyone that is watching this to share it out. This is big time breakthrough. It truly is. I want everyone to have an opportunity to get ahead of the curve on this. As we always say, to be on the cutting edge of science. That’s Dr. Pompa and I and our group’s—our drive is to always find new answers, and we pray for new answers.

Dan prays every day. He says, “Warren, don’t worry about it.” We lost this modality when DMSA was off the market for a while or this happens in the natural health world, and we lose this. He’s like, “We pray for answers, and God will bring a better solution. Watch. Trust me on this. It happens every time.” I believe this is one of those answers. We want everyone to have that opportunity to jump in with us, and learn how this can transform our lives. When is this going to go live about? Is it going to be mid to late February?

Naveen:
Yes. It’s going to be in the mid to late February. The third week in February is what we are shooting for.

Warren:
If you’re watching this now, you need to jump in right away, and get in line. That’s all I can say. I mean, I think the audience is ready to go. They’re ready to share this with the world with us and with you, Naveen, and the rest of your team. In another broadcast, we’ll bring on some of the other team members, and we’ll keep just connecting with one another and our audiences that are across the nation. If someone’s international, that’s a question they’re going to have. Can they get this?

Naveen:
They can get it. I mean, one of the things I really want; please, please help me get in the hands of a billion people. I have dedicated my life to make sure I can help a billion people. Please go to viome.com. Please share it with your friends. Share it with anyone who can use it. Talk to your neighbor. Talk to your community.

Really, let’s get in the hands of billions of people, and let’s move away from living sick to really living healthy. Please, please help me. Go to viome.com, and get yourself tested. Get yourself [00:47:00] where you could actually be helped.

Dr. Pompa:
I have an idea. I think if you did a broadcast from the moon. Get you back up there. I think perhaps we can hit a few billion people.

Naveen:
How about this? You sign up the—you help a billion people—how about this? You help a million people now, and I will have you broadcast from the moon.

Warren:
Okay, so that’s our deal. Everybody out there so that we can get it on the moon use the code TCD, and that’ll track our people with our priority code. There’s very few that have the priority code, by the way. I want to let our viewers know that. There’s only a handful. I think you’re limiting it to 12 people that you’re giving the priority code to, just high-end people. We’re just blessed and honored to be part of that group, Helen. I know that you do amazing work with Functional Medicine. That is our heart, and that’s the doctors that we work with as well. Again, we couldn’t be more—I mean, with the technology challenges that we had getting onto this call, it just really—it absolutely leaves me speechless, Dr. Pompa, that we get to be part of this breakthrough today, right now, with where the world’s at.

Naveen:
Thank you very much.

Dr. Pompa:
Thanks, guys. Appreciate it. Thanks for coming on. Thanks, Helen. Thank you both. Bye-bye.

Helen:
Absolutely. Thank you.

Warren:
Have an amazing rest of your weekend. God bless. Bye-bye.

155: Supporting the Healing of Brain Tumors

Transcript of Episode 155: Supporting the Healing of Brain Tumors

With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Meredith Dykstra, and Dr. Adrienne Scheck

Meredith:
Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m your host, Meredith Dykstra, and this is Episode #155. We have our resident cellular healing specialist, Dr. Dan Pompa, on the line. Today we welcome special guest Dr. Adrienne Scheck. We are really excited to talk to Dr. Scheck today because we have an awesome topic today. She is a research scientist, and we’re going to be delving into more cancer research and some alternative therapies she’s using, one of which is the ketogenic diet. We’re really going to delve into that.

Before we get started, let me tell you a little bit more about Dr. Adrienne. Dr. Adrienne C. Scheck is an associate professor in neuro-oncology research at the Barrow Brain Tumor Research Center at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona. She is also an adjunct professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University and an associate investigator in the cancer biology program at the Arizona Cancer Center of the University of Arizona.

Dr. Scheck received her undergraduate degree from the University of Rochester and her Ph.D. from Rensselaer—oh, I don’t know if I pronounced that correctly—Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. After a post doctoral fellowship in viral oncology at the Pennsylvania State College of Medicine in Hershey, Pennsylvania, she moved to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center to study AIDS-related dementia. She began her study of brain tumors while at Sloan Kettering and moved to the Barrow Neurological Institute in 1989.

Dr. Scheck is an acknowledged leader in the field of metabolic alteration as an adjunct to the standard of care to improve survival and minimize side effects for patients with malignant brain tumors. To this end, her laboratory has been studying the use of therapeutic ketogenic diet for the treatment of malignant brain tumors. Their work has shown that the ketogenic diet reduces the growth of malignant brain tumors through a wide variety of mechanisms, and it potentiates the effect of radiation and temozolomide chemotherapy. These preclinical studies have led to a clinical trial for patients with glioblastoma multiforme. The second main goal of her research is to identify biomarkers that improve on the current methods of diagnosing and prognosis for this devastating disease.

Dr. Scheck has a strong interest in science education, and her laboratory team includes seven to ten high school students and college undergraduates. She directs the high school component of the scientific enrichment program for students, a program that places high school students in research laboratories around the Phoenix area.

Quite an impressive bio, Dr. Scheck. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV.

Dr. Scheck:
Thank you.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, thank you. I almost have the tendency to go right into our Dr. Seyfried interviews where we interviewed Thomas Seyfried who you work closely with, Dominic D’Agostino who you work closely with who spoke at our seminars, all of which has been on the show. We would lose a lot of our viewers and listeners because if they didn’t see that show, they’d be like what are you talking about?

First of all, I want to thank you for your research because, as I read these studies, I see your name on so many things. It’s really exciting that someone with your experience, working at Sloan Kettering and all these amazing places—that we’re getting more people pulling out of the conventional treatment for cancer and looking other places. If you’re losing a war, it makes sense to me that just maybe, just maybe, we’re doing something wrong or we need to do something different. To me, that seems obvious. Your research is showing that. You’re into some really amazing work.

The first question I have is this: how in the world did you come from that world to this? What brought you here?

Dr. Scheck:
When I moved to Barrow Neurological Institute in 1989, I had just started getting into brain tumors. I moved with a colleague of mine who was—she and her husband were starting the brain tumor work here at the BNI. I moved here, and I basically was a microbiologist. I was looking at genes that were involved in therapy resistance, things like that.

Then, maybe five or six years ago, I had a conversation with Dr. Jong Rho. Jong is an international expert in the ketogenic diet for epilepsy. He’s a pediatric epileptologist. He’s also a fantastic researcher, which is an unusual match for somebody to be really good in both arenas, and he is. His lab was on the same floor as mine at the time.

We started chatting after one of his seminars. He said to me hey, do you want to try this ketogenic diet in brain tumors? There’s this guy in Boston that’s doing it. It kind of looks interesting. I have this student who wants to work in my lab for six months, and I have the money to pay her. I’ll give her to you if you want. I’m no dummy. I’m going to take free labor, right? I said sure, but I also said to him the only way I’m willing to look at it is if it is in addition to the standard of care because otherwise it really will not get to most people. His answer to me was something to the effect of you’re the brain tumor person. Do whatever you want.

Essentially, this individual came into the lab for six months, and we started doing some work. We started with cultured cells, just growing cells in a lab from a human tumor. It was a very, very aggressive human brain tumor. We just added beta-hydroxybutyric and acetoacetate, and it inhibited growth. It slowed their growth.

Then I added the chemotherapeutic agent that this patient had had because these were patient-derived cells that had been derived by my colleague back in the 80s or something. This patient had received a particular chemotherapy. We tried that. When that was added in combination with ketones, it basically wiped the tumor out. That was really enough for me to say okay, this is worth pursuing. This is worth doing more on.

At the time, for another project, we were in the process of getting an animal model up and running in the lab. I’m an animal lover, and that’s my last resort not my first resort. We were in the process of doing this for another project, as I said. We tried the ketogenic diet in the animals, and sure enough, it extended survival. When we tried it in combination with radiation, it was amazing.

We actually used KetoCal, which is a human formulation of the ketogenic diet. It’s four to one fats to protein plus carb. In 9 of 11 animals, the tumor disappeared. These tumors were bioluminescent. That means we genetically engineered them to glow like fireflies, so we have an instrument in the basement that can actually see these tumor cells. Live tumor cells can be picked up by this instrument. We know these animals had their tumors, but when we added radiation—because we also have a little animal radiator downstairs. When we added radiation to the ketogenic diet in these two separate experiments, a total of 11 animals, 9 of the tumors completely disappeared.

After about 100 days, we decided well, let’s put these animals back on standard diet. We did that, and the tumors never came back—

Dr. Pompa:
That’s awesome.

Dr. Scheck:
That was really exciting.

Dr. Pompa:
What is it? We know that chemo and radiation can be destructive to not just tumor cells, cancer cells, but all cells, hence the problem, correct? Obviously there’s something about the ketogenic diet that gives the healthy cells some protection. Explain what you found.

Dr. Scheck:
We were basically following the epilepsy literature to a large extent. Even in epilepsy where this has been used for many, many, many years, they really don’t know the full mechanism. One of the things we looked at is reactive oxygen species. We looked at that early on in collaboration with Dr. Rho and his lab. It turns out that the ketogenic diet reduces reactive oxygen species. Now, I think in cartoons, so if somebody says what’s a reactive oxygen species, I tell them to think about a pinball machine. A reactive oxygen molecule is a ball, and it just bounces around. It hits things, and it busts them up.

It reduces reactive oxygen species, and that should be good for normal cells. The confusing thing is that it reduces it in the tumor cells. How does radiation work? It works in part by causing the creation of reactive oxygen species, and that’s in part how it kills cancer cells. We had at the time, and we still have, this conundrum of we’re reducing active oxygen species but it’s make radiation work better.

We haven’t answered that part yet. We do think that there are other things about the radiation in the cancer cells that the ketogenic diet is affecting. I think it’s affecting the repair of damage. If it’s reducing reactive oxygen species in the normal cells, perhaps it’s actually helping to protect the normal cells.

From all the things I’ve heard when I’ve spoken to physicians, or family members, or whatever and all the papers I’ve seen, it does appear like the ketogenic diet, and intermittent fasting, and things like that do help protect normal tissue. What our work showed that I thought was really important is it doesn’t protect the cancer cells because obviously if you protect the cancer cells, it doesn’t matter if you protect normal cells. If you damage normal cells as much as you damage cancer cells, again, it doesn’t matter. You need a differential between damaging normal cells and damaging cancer cells.

Dr. Pompa:
One of the things that I’ve seen clinically, and I know we’ve talked to Seyfried about in some of our past shows, is we can just see that when you put these cells under the stress of being able to only burn fat, for example—when someone goes into ketosis, what they’re cells are burning is a fuel source majority of fat. The bad cells have trouble making some of these transitions or adaptations, if you will. We’ve noticed even just moving people in and out of different diets, this adaptation doesn’t occur in a lot of these damaged or bad cells. What’s your feeling about that? Do you think that’s part of it?

Dr. Scheck:
I think that’s part of it. Again, excuse my cartoon analogy, but when I talk to people about stress—because even at the genetic level when you look at cancer cells, the ones that are really, really, really genetically screwed up are more sensitive to therapy usually. I tell them okay, if you yell at your kid for having a dirty room during summer, he’ll probably just say yeah whatever and clean it. If you yell at them during exam week, they might yell back. If you start from a stressed point of view, you’re less able to take additional stress. I know it’s a very nonscientific, generic comment, but it seems like it works for me when I try to think about these things. It seems like everything I’ve seen in the past that has come out and things that have continued to come out suggest that a stressed cell is usually less likely to be able to handle additional stress, whether that’s metabolic, therapeutic, whatever.

Cancer cells are Darwinism speeded up. They basically can keep shuffling their genes, and some percentage of them will survive whatever stress you give them. Interestingly, like I said, the ones that are at the genetic level more bizarre are often ones that are more sensitive. It’s the ones that are similar to normal cells that are more resistant. That’s something that my colleague, Joan Shapiro, found at a genetic level a long time ago.

That’s my thought process on a lot of that. The other thing, though, that we found that’s—I don’t think it’s confusing, but it’s very interesting. When you talk about the ketogenic diet, or fasting, or any of these things, our original work when we first tried this was with cells grown in the lab in very, very, very rich media. By that I mean they had glucose. They had everything a cell could possibly want. They were in cell heaven, and we still inhibited them by added ketones. We have found that routinely. In all the work we’re doing in cultured cells, we have not dropped the glucose level yet. We will eventually, but for now we’ve just been adding ketones. We’re seeing sensitization to radiation, all kinds of things.

I think the cells—I don’t know if they preferentially use the ketones, especially not if they’re cancer cells. From a molecular point of view, I think there’s probably things that dropping the glucose does that’s good for the person and bad for the tumor. There’s definitely things that raising the ketones do that’s bad for the tumor. If you put the two together, it’s wonderful. That’s the way we’re looking at things.

Dr. Pompa:
We see it clinically. I know some of your work has to do with ketones. I think when Dr. Dominic was at our seminar, he presented a few papers on how it’s affecting the epigenetics, that you’re learning the ketones, even down to the micro RNA—explain that. I don’t want to lose our viewers or listeners, but it’s important work. We know that ketones, which every ancient culture on the planet has gone into ketosis, either the lack of food, the change of food, into ketosis. We know that it has this epigenetic effect, meaning turning off bad genes and turning on good ones. We’re finding that in the lab, right?

Dr. Scheck:
Right, we’re definitely finding that in the lab. Epigenetics means—well, this isn’t the real definition, but it’s the way I think of it. Epi means outside and genetics would be the genes, as in the code of the genes. Our DNA is an alphabet. It’s basically an instruction manual. Instead of having 26 letters in the alphabet, there are 4. When things happen when cells become cancer cells or when you inherit something, usually it is due to a change in a letter in the alphabet.

What epigenetics are is—you don’t have to change the alphabet, but you can still change the gene and whether or not it’s turned on or off. This is changeable, meaning the environment can change this particular on/off switch. In fact, it’s also even inheritable to some extent. They’re finding things from parent to child, that some of the epigenetics are actually inheritable, but they are changeable.

It’s another on/off switch outside of the one that’s hardwired. It’s a software on/off switch not a hardware on/off switch. Micro RNAs are hardwired, in a sense. They are very, very small pieces of a molecule called RNA. What they do is they also are able to turn on and off the expression of genes. When I say on and off, I mean on and off like a light switch. Our cells don’t use every single gene they have. That’s why our skin cells look different than our muscle cells.

The genes that are necessary are turned on and off. Micro RNAs are one of the things that turn those things on and off, but micro RNAs are odd in that one of them can turn on a bunch of genes. You have changes that occur from a cell ingesting ketones that has a whole lot of what we call downstream effects, changing groups of genes and, in fact, entire pathways of genes.

Genes don’t work by themselves. They work by pathway, kind of like a basketball team. You don’t get the basket unless the ball is passed amongst people back and forth a lot. That’s kind of like what our cells are doing, too.

Epigenetics and micro RNAs are ways that those entire pathways can be disrupted. What’s cool about it is the way it’s being disrupted is usually disrupting the aberrant, which is a fancy word for screwed up, the aberrant pathways and making them more like normal pathways. Essentially, they are making the tumor cells in some ways behave a little bit more like normal cells.

Dr. Pompa:
Interesting. Yeah, we’ve seen it clinically. We move people in and out of the ketonic states, ketosis. For our new listeners, this is when we’re getting the cells—your cells can use two things for energy, glucose and fat. We’re getting your cells to be more fat efficient, and then it makes these things called ketones that your brain loves and evidently your cells.

Anyways, we see these ketones are able to turn off some of these expressed gene conditions. Even things -inaudible- turned on for health, thyroid conditions, these things that are expressing in a certain way. It is a magical tool that we don’t understand exactly how it’s working. Until some of your science, we just thought gosh, we don’t know what it’s doing exactly, but it works.

Dr. Scheck:
One of the things we found it does in a brain tumor is it reduces the expression specifically of a gene called COX-2 or cyclooxygenase-2. That is a pro-inflammatory gene. In fact, the over-the-counter medicine -inaudible- Celebrex actually works to try and reduce that, and so does the ketogenic diet

When I first started working with the ketogenic diet, I had trouble believing our own data. Nothing is this good. This is like snake oil. Look at all of these genes that promote the growth of tumors, it dials most of them down. Nothing affects this many things, but it does. That’s what’s incredibly cool about it. It really does.

Dr. Pompa:
It is amazing. Meredith, you might have some questions.

Meredith:
Always. Dr. Adrienne, in your research were you using exogenous ketones, or the ketogenic diet, or both? Can you delve into that a little bit more and maybe what you see in benefits of either or using both synergistically?

Dr. Scheck:
In our mouse brain tumor model, we used the ketogenic diet. At some point, we will probably go towards using exogenous ketones, but for now we’re doing it—basically, we started this before exogenous ketones were really available for people. I’m a basic researcher. My goal is what can I do that is going to get this implication, that’s going to convince a clinician to put this into a patient. The easiest way to start with that was let’s use something that the patients can do, that they can eat, that the epilepsy community has already shown is doable. That’s the only way we’ve done it so far in vivo is what it’s called, in the animal models.

In our cell culture, we simply purchased beta-hydroxybutyrate and acetoacetate. When you say exogenous ketone, yes, those are exogenous ketones, but they were purchased chemical. They’re not something that a person could just go, and weigh out the powder, and eat, at least not to my knowledge. I wouldn’t because they’re not made for humans.

Now there are essentially exogenous ketones, things that Dom D’Agostino has been involved with making. They’re making it more palatable and things like that. They are essentially a source of beta-hydroxybutyrate, as far as I know. We just purchased beta-hydroxybutyrate from a chemical company for our cell culturing.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you’re right. It’s new science. Dominic’s on the cutting edge of that. We’re utilizing some of these exogenous ketones clinically. People always ask me the question. I say it’s too early to tell.

Dr. Scheck:
Yes, exactly. That’s exactly the question that I’ve been getting. I was asked to give a—at the global conference for ketogenic diet therapies which was in Banff last year, the end of last year, last fall, I was assigned to present an update on clinical trials and brain tumors. I say assigned because I would have preferred to talk about my research, as any good scientist would. In preparing for that talk, I actually contacted everybody who had clinical trials going that I was aware of and asked them what was going on and what were they finding. I can summarize that pretty easily.

First of all, in terms of survival, it’s too early. Everybody said the same thing. It’s too early. Second of all, it is not an easy thing to do in terms of staying on it. I think it’s much easier now than it used to be because there’s premade meals and things that can help people. A lot of the brain tumor patients, anyway, and their families had difficulty with it. I think there’s a lot of reasons for that that are not getting fixed in terms of giving out the support these people need, the fact that they already have a devastating disease that is exhausting them. They have to go for therapy every day. All of these things that are involved in life, and then you completely change everything that they’re eating. Stuff becomes difficult.

The other thing that some of the centers were doing is they were going—pre-selecting is the wrong word, but they were actually doing a test upfront to see if they thought the person would be compliant. What they found was only, in general, one in four of the patients or one in five of the patients actually should be enrolled in that clinical trial based on their ability to be compliant.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I believe that.

Dr. Scheck:
There was a lot that went into it. There’s a lot that’s going into it. My personal bias on all this is we’ve been looking at this wrong and this includes me, in trying to get it through the clinical side. Everybody says well, it’s just food. The problem with it’s just food is that people don’t see it as an actual therapy. Then you get things like Aunt Jane said I can eat this and that’s ketogenic. It’s like no, that’s not what your dietician said. Your dietician said to do something else.

The other thing is it doesn’t always work. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t no matter how compliant the person is. If you look at brain tumors, they are—and I’m sure other solid cancers are the same. They are something called heterogeneous. What that means is if you look at ten cells in a person’s tumor, you will find ten different genetic makeups. They are not identical. If cells have different genetics, then they have different capabilities.

What I think we need to do, and what is starting to happen with other therapies, is try to find some markers to suggest the patients where this will be the most useful. One of the ways to do that is to do the molecular analyses that they’re using for all the other therapies out there and do the same thing for fasting, for ketogenic diet, for all of those things. Let’s try to find out what traits about a tumor make a particular metabolic therapy work or not work.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, even the type of cancer. Thomas Seyfried talked about the metastatics, and they can go after glutamide. They can break a protein down into a fuel. Now all of a sudden oh, we don’t get the same result. What’s your feeling on that, the glutamide thing? Where are we on that with these metastatic types of cancer?

Dr. Scheck:
I haven’t been doing a lot of work in metastatic tumors, so I’m not sure I’m qualified to make extreme comments about that. I don’t think it’s just the metastatic cancers. There was a really, really interesting talk at one of the last meetings in last year nationally—in one model system, taking exactly the same tumor cells and, depending on where they were implanted, their metabolism was different. They were actually using different things for metabolism.

Again, I think it comes down to—in people anyway, I think it comes down to when you find a person where it worked, analyze that tumor and see what’s going on. When you find a person in which it doesn’t work, analyze the tumor. See what goes on. There are therapies that can be added to something like the ketogenic diet, something like exogenous ketones, that might help make it work better.

For example, you’ve got a tumor where you say okay well, most of this tumor receded, and then it grew again. What changed? What’s going on? Oh gee, the cells that survived and were growing again, that was the Darwinian selection for the glutamine-using cells. Let’s inhibit glutamine.

People have not been looking at metabolic therapy in the same way that they’ve been looking at other therapies, meaning, at the molecular level, what makes it work.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I think we run into that with everything because there are some people who respond positive to antioxidants, even Vitamin C, and other cancers do not. It feeds it. It makes it worse. It really backs this topic with almost everything. Why this and not that? Why did this person do well with simple Vitamin C and the other one didn’t?

Dr. Scheck:
The interesting thing about Vitamin C is apparently it mimics glucose. If you do a very high dose, like IV Vitamin C, it mimics glucose. First of all, it completely messes up your glucose readings if you’re using a meter. Also, it makes a difference—how that works with glucose, and I’m paraphrasing a paper that I kind of remember from a little while ago. It makes a big difference whether the person is in ketosis or not in terms of what the high-dose Vitamin C does.

One of the issues with things going to the lay public is how it goes there. Somebody says Vitamin C cured this person of cancer. Vitamin C didn’t cure this person of cancer. They forget to mention all of the other aspects of the science. Was the person in ketosis? What kind of cancer was it, all of these things?

To me, it all comes down to exactly the same thing: people have got to look at these metabolic alterations in exactly the same way as they look at chemotherapy, radiation therapy. Look at the underlying mechanisms of how it works, why it works on some people, meaning, look at the tumors when it works. Look at the tumor when it doesn’t work. Then we can start to use it in a much more intelligent way.

It does seem like something like the ketogenic diet, and when I say the ketogenic diet, I’m kind of—I know it’s not exactly the same, but I’m kind of lumping caloric restriction and fasting together at this point because there hasn’t been enough work to separate out one versus the other.

Dr. Pompa:
One thing we’ve found is the ketogenic diet it seems like in and of itself becomes even more magical when you put it in some restriction like intermittent fasting daily or block fasting. It seems like you get more bang for your buck, if you will. It’s so simple. We’ve found that clinically. Seyfried, I know, in some of his studies finds the same thing.

Dr. Scheck:
I would not even begin to argue that. I think that’s probably true. Again, I think it probably comes down to raising ketones, lowering glucose. Either one alone helps. Both together are the best and however you’ve found to do that. I think there’s other changes that are happening that we don’t even begin to understand.

The issue is getting clinicians to do it. The things I heard back from our clinicians when I first started trying to get them to do something with this was it’s disgusting. It’s awful. You’ll ruin the patient’s quality of life. When we had two patients that chose to do it, which is what convinced our clinicians to actually try this, it turned out it didn’t have to be disgusting and certainly nowadays. Five years ago, we weren’t where we are now, with so many recipes, and premade foods, and so many ways to make it more palatable. It’s not as bad.

In terms of quality of life, for some patients they can’t handle it. For the patients that do stay on it, it doesn’t hurt their quality of life. We’ve gotten some real positive comments about how the person feels. Again, I’ve got more anecdotal evidence. Honestly, a lot of the anecdotal evidence is even better than the clinical evidence in terms of how people have done. That’s not enough to prove it to the clinicians, but it’s enough to at least start. We are doing quality-of-life analyses, and it doesn’t appear to be hurting quality of life.

Dr. Pompa:
Listen, when I go in—I’m in ketosis as of today, back in. I move in and out of the state, Meredith as well. As a matter of fact, no one makes it more palatable than Meredith, I’m telling you. Meredith, is a ketogenic lifestyle hard? Not according to Meredith.

Meredith:
I know! I was going to say that I find it so palatable. For years, I shunned a lot of different meats, and fats, and things like that. Now, I have so much fun with the keto-diet. Of course, I cycle in and out of it. I found that that was best for my hormones to add in carb days, as you suggest with the diet-variation principle, Dr. Pompa.

Oh my gosh, I think the ketogenic diet is delicious. It’s all about approaching it the right way, and being creative with your recipes, and not overdoing the protein. When you incorporate that intermittent fasting, as you said, and the restriction is when you get the most magic and the best results. I’m a big fan, of course, within variation and having that balance, too.

Dr. Scheck:
Here’s the kicker on that. For a person who’s healthy, who enjoys cooking, who has time to cook, who enjoys playing in the kitchen, it can be great. For a cancer patient that’s doing just daily living things, and if it’s a younger cancer patient dealing with their children, dealing with their husband or wife, all of those things—the additional time and the additional effort to do something in a different way than they’ve done it before can be overwhelming.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, Dr. Adrienne, you’re right. It’s a game changer.

Meredith:
Great point.

Dr. Scheck:
That’s where I think if we get more clinicians involved, if we get more dieticians involved, and if we get some of these premade foods to be called classified as medical food so they’re not so expensive that the patient can’t afford it, you can take a huge amount of the burden off because now a person can say okay, I can cook ketogenic for a couple days, but the kids have soccer. I can’t do this. I’ve got to feed them. Okay, great. I can go to the fridge and get a TV dinner for myself, and still be ketonic, and still do things within my energy level.

We had one of our patients that started this. It was because their husband was very supportive and into sports nutrition. They had a lot of friends that helped. When I told her that some of these premade meals were coming out, she did and is still doing, I’m thrilled to say, very well. She said oh God, that would have made it so much better, so much easier when I was getting my other treatments and undergoing this. The only way we were able to do it was because of all of the outside help we had. With those, we would have been able to do it even without it.

If you can get those things classified as medical food so they’re cheap enough—because then we can get more data. If we can get more people doing it, we get more data. We can prove it works. We can find out how it works. It’s kind of a big spiral.

Dr. Pompa:
I’ll tell you, intermittent fasting really helps. When you’re only eating one or two meals a day, it’s so much easier to—even when I’m not in ketosis, Dr. Adrienne. In the morning, my ketone numbers would be low, but by the afternoon, I’m .5, .7. I’m high ketones even without trying just because of the fast, right? My point is, even then, I can eat a dinner that would have not appeared necessarily as a ketone dinner, but because it was my only meal, I remain in ketosis. It does make it a little bit easier.

Dr. Scheck:
Absolutely, and you’re keto-adapted. Here’s the other thing that we ran into that I know people are still running into, and that is—it doesn’t happen in brain tumors very much, but in other cancers, there’s something called cachexia, which is muscle wasting. Brain tumor patients don’t tend to have it. Other types of cancers do tend to have it. If you tell an oncologist that their patient has lost a few pounds, they are not happy at all. More than a few pounds they hit the panic button. If you tell an oncologist that you want their patient to fast, some of them will hit the roofs. No way, Jose. Absolutely not! I can’t afford to have them lose weight.

We don’t know the difference between losing the—it’s not that they don’t know the difference. I apologize for that. In their practice, they don’t separate out the cachexic weight loss from another type of weight loss. The tools to look at that are not readily available to them. It’s -inaudible- that the ketogenic diet is probably muscle sparing. It will probably—

Dr. Pompa:
It is. According to studies, it is. By the way, so is intermittent fasting. My son—

Dr. Scheck:
When I said ketogenic diet, I include the intermittent fasting.

Dr. Pompa:
Exactly, both are muscle sparing. I’ve read the studies on ketosis being protein sparing, as well as intermittent fasting, because it’s hormone optimization. We get these people—now body builders are using this as a strategy to keep muscle and become more anabolic, basically. It’s opposite.

Dr. Scheck:
Intermittent fasting just before chemotherapy, there’s papers out there that show that it seems to not only enhance the chemotherapy but also reduce the side effects. There are some papers that are getting out there of people doing this. It terrifies the oncologists because they’re so used to cachexia.

The other thing is then when a person is tired, and I’ve never known a cancer patient to not be—and I’m not a clinician, but from everything I’ve heard, from all my friends, from everything. If you’re getting chemotherapy, and you’re getting radiation, and you’re getting surgery, or you’re getting any one of those, you are going to be tired. Bottom line, you’re going to be tired.

Dr. Pompa:
Here’s the other problem. As you’re going into ketosis, the first week or two is going to make you more tired. It is. Until you keto-adapt, or what we call get fat adapted, there’s a few weeks there that your glucose is lacking, and you don’t have the ability to burn fat yet and make enough ketones yet. In that yet period is when people are going I can’t do this. I’m too weak. I can’t even get out of bed. Some people may not make the transition.

Dr. Scheck:
Right. Again, in a normal person, you’re very tired. A lot of normal people can live with it. Okay, I’m tired. When you add that on top of what is already a virtually devastating, in some cases, level of exhaustion, or coming right out of surgery, all those things—it’s really, really hard to do. If the clinician isn’t 100% on board and isn’t a major cheerleader saying look, I know you’re really tired. I know you think it’s the diet. Let me explain this to you. The diet’s going to help later. Right now, it’s a combination. You’re going to be tired from radiation. You’re going to be tired from this. You’re going to be tired from that. Don’t just blame the diet. Stick with it. Hang in there with me, patient, and we’ll get you through this.

Most clinicians are not for it enough. They haven’t seen the clinical trials to prove it works, so they don’t push it that hard. That’s, I think, really—we need the research. We need the clinical trials. We need the clinical trials to be more successful. To make them more successful involves having clinicians that are more on board. It’s a little bit of a Catch 22.

I think we’re getting there. Slower than I’d like us to but I think we are getting there. There are more and more people that are interested, more and more people doing it. Some of us are trying to collect information from patients that includes information from their clinicians so that it—anecdotal isn’t necessarily bad. It isn’t necessarily wrong. It’s just not controlled.

Dr. Pompa:
I was just going to say one of the things we said before we got on the air, you said look, this work is so important. I was thanking you for the work. You said yeah, it’s just keeping it going. We need grants. We need money. We have a lot of people watching this show I guarantee that have the resources to help. You need to give them a place where they can do that, contact you, because this is important work that needs to get done. It is so important because if this is—there’s an answer here. Like you said, most of these doctors don’t realize what’s going on. They don’t understand what’s happening because it’s about a money shortage. That’s it.

Dr. Scheck:
Yeah, more data is helpful. The more patients that we can put out there in publications, and a number of us are trying to do that, the better. If anybody would like to donate to my lab, I would love it. That would be incredibly helpful. It is totally tax deductible, just like you donate to American Cancer Society or something. If somebody passes away, you can donate to the lab. It’s just as tax deductible. We write a nice letter. I will personally write a thank you letter in addition to whatever our foundation does.

You can either email me, and I don’t know if you provide the email in your information. It’s Adrienne.Scheck@DignityHealth.org. You can go online to the Barrow Neurological Institute. Go to the foundation. You can go to Barrow Neurological Foundation. There’s a donation page. You just have to make absolutely sure that in the comments section you mention the Scheck Laboratory. Then the donation will—

Dr. Pompa:
Repeat your website one more time, your email.

Dr. Scheck:
My email or the website?

Dr. Pompa:
Repeat your email one more time. They would probably rather—I think they’re more apt to give if they can contact you directly.

Dr. Scheck:
That would be fantastic. My email is Adrienne.Scheck, so that’s A-D-R-I-E-N-N-E dot S as in Sam C-H-E-C-K at dignity health, and that’s one word, dot O-R-G.

Dr. Pompa:
Okay, thank you.

Dr. Scheck:
The other thing people should understand about not only donating to my lab but donating to any lab, it’s not just the people that have 100, 1,000, $5,000. $25, $5: it all adds up. We appreciate every penny. We put it to really good use, all of us as scientists.

Dr. Pompa:
This work is so important. Like I said, I know that with more studies, that’s the key. We’re going to get more doctors on board, more oncologists on board. Ultimately, it’s going to save more lives. When I look at the work that you, Dominic, Seyfried are doing, you all are just in a corner somewhere compared to the billions being spent on the genetic research and the billions being spent on all of the more popular, more common therapies. I hope that we see a shift in that, I guess, is my hope.

Dr. Scheck:
Me, too. I’m a little bit different from the way Tom looks at things. We’ve kind of agreed to disagree on this in that I’m not against standard of care. I think the ketogenic diet can enhance the standard of care, or intermittent fasting can enhance the standard of care, caloric restriction can enhance the standard of care, exogenous ketones can enhance the standard of care. If you can use those to enhance the efficacy of the current therapies, maybe you can reduce the doses. It also helps protect the normal cells. Frankly, if you want more clinicians to do it, you can’t take away the standard of care. You have to add to it. Then maybe you can start weaning away from the standard of care if it turns out that that’s okay.

Dr. Pompa:
I think you’re right in that sense because I know this for a fact, that so much of the money from the drug companies, etc.—I don’t know that it will take off without some support there. Believe me, you follow the money trail. If you’re saying okay, we’re going to alongside your treatments, great. If you’re saying oh, we’re against them. Even if you believe it or not, you might cut your own throat. I think Tom sees that and recognizes that. I think there’s a slippery slope.

Dr. Scheck:
It’s been a long road. He and I have had conversations for many years. He’s an amazing guy, totally amazing.

Dr. Pompa:
He really is. His heart is—he is 100% devoted to this, as you are. Look, we are at the top of our hour already. Holy cow, that went fast. Meredith, I’m going to hand it back over to you. Dr. Scheck, I just want to thank you for coming on. We just want to put out the word. We want people to donate. Thank you. I don’t know if you have a book coming out soon, or if you want to announce anything, feel free.

Dr. Scheck:
We just put a chapter in in a book that was edited by Susan Masino. We’re not doing our own book, but I’ve got some chapters and things. People can just go online and look it up. Some of the talks that Dom, and Tom, and I have given are actually online on YouTube. You can just look there and find us.

Thank you so much for the opportunity to speak on your show.

Dr. Pompa:
Thank you. We have hundreds of thousands of people that view this show, so God will stir the heart of the ones that need to do more, that’s for sure.

Dr. Scheck:
Thank you, awesome. That’d be great.

Meredith:
Awesome. Thank you, Dr. Pompa. Thank you so much Dr. Adrienne for sharing your research and all the amazing things that you’re doing on your end. I think it’s a lot of excitement ahead in the industry. It’s so exciting to think about the conventional world coming together with the allopathic world and bringing the best of it all together to transform more lives. I know that’s what we all want.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, thank you.

Dr. Scheck:
Thank you.

Meredith:
Thanks everyone. Thanks for tuning in. Have a wonderful weekend, and we’ll catch you next week. Bye-Bye.

154: Running 100 Miles on Fat

Transcript of Episode 154: Running 100 Miles on Fat

With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Meredith Dykstra, and Zach Bitter

Meredith:
Hello everyone, and welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m your host, Meredith Dykstra, and this is Episode #154. We have our resident cellular healing specialist, Dr. Dan Pompa, on the line, of course. Today we welcome special guest Zach Bitter. We have a treat for you guys because we’re going to delve into something that we haven’t talked a lot about on Cell TV yet. We are going to dive into the world of fat-adapted athletes. Zach has a very impressive resume here. Before we jump in, let me tell you a little bit more about Zach.

Zach Bitter is an ultramarathon runner and coach at Zach Bitter Running. Zach specialized in a variety of ultramarathon racing and coaching as well as a history of collegiate track and cross country focusing heavily on nutrition and its role in training and recovery. Personally, he has had the most success following a higher fat diet, treating macronutrient intake the same way he periodizes training.

A few of his notable accomplishments include a 12-hour world record of 101.7 miles, 100-mile American record that was 11 hours, and 40 minutes, and 55 seconds, a 200-kilometer American record, 100-kilometer track American record. He’s a three-time national champion and a three-time participant for Team USA at the World 100K Championships. He’s been in over 40 ultramarathon competitions.

Wow, Zach, very impressive. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV

Zach Bitter:
Thanks a bunch for having me on, looking forward to it.

Dr. Pompa:
Listen, I’m fascinated by you. I think my wife said last night when I was reading more about you – she said wow, you’re really impressed with this guy. I said you know, I’m impressed with anybody who does the ridiculous, that does the extraordinary. That is what you’ve done. Who runs 100 miles anyway, let alone in 11 hours and 40 minutes? I’m like is he doing this on a track? Is he doing it in the woods? Where do you run 100 miles? Is it both? I’m asking that question first.

Zach Bitter:
That’s the goofiest thing about, I guess, the sport of ultramarathon running is really any environment is fair game. It can be as dialed as a track, or it can be as wild, I guess, as mountains, and deserts, and things like that. The interesting thing to me with that is that when you’re looking at distances of that range, specificity is king in your training. To train for a track 100-mile is quite a bit different than, say, training for a mountain 100-mile in the way you’re going to go about the workouts and things like that.

Dr. Pompa:
I was reading, and I think it was 2015 you set a record, and it was around the track. Every four hours, you switched directions, right? Psychologically it helped you, but when you switched directions, it destroyed your rhythm, if you will. You slowed down. I read the whole thing. I was fascinated. Then at the end, literally the last 15 miles, you hit the wall, and you still kept going, at least what I read. I’m like that dude hit the wall. Your body was shutting down. You managed to still get the record, but the last 15 miles, you in your words said it was like an eternity. That’s unbelievable.

Zach Bitter:
Yeah, that was an interesting experience for sure. It was a little different than – I had actually done a similar attempt two years prior and had an opposite experience in terms that I felt like I was getting stronger near the end whereas this time I was starting to cramp up a little bit in my hamstrings and my posterior chain. When I finished the 100 miles, I was done.

It was interesting, though, the way it played out. In a perfect world, I would have kept going for another 20 minutes and tried to break my 12-hour world record because I would have had roughly 20 minutes to go over 1.7 miles and get that. I think I could have kept going had I had a 15-minute break and been able to get up and start going again once I got control and stuff like that, but at that point, the time had elapsed. I’ll have to try to go back and see if I can better that one at a different time.

Dr. Pompa:
Just to break it down, essentially, you’re doing four marathons. Someone do the math for me. What is your average marathon time on these runs?

Zach Bitter:
I think on that day it was right around a 3:03 marathon or somewhere in that ballpark.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, my God. Imagine running four three-hour marathons. That’s just unbelievable to me, honestly. Okay, for our viewers and our listeners’ sake – folks, he’s doing it in a fat-adapted state. I would argue that’s the best, most efficient way, right? Tell us a little bit about that. Were you doing this before non fat adapted? Now you’ve got your mitochondria used to utilizing fat, which is definitely a better fuel to go on -inaudible- evolution.

Zach Bitter:
Yeah, it’s been an interesting journey no doubt. I started ultrarunning on very much a stereotypical endurance athlete diet protocol, primarily carbohydrate. I wouldn’t say no or low-fat approach, but it was definitely one of the minority macronutrients. It was dwarfed by the carbohydrate consumption, for sure.

At the end of around 2011, I started experimenting with using fat as my primary fuel source. Since then, I’ve been really fortunate to have guys like Dr. Volek and Dr. Phinney to bounce questions off of and stuff like that. For me, it was I’ve always been a big fan of self experimentation. I like that part of it. That’s just as intriguing as the competition itself, for me, finding what works for me and what works for my lifestyle.

One of the biggest things I’ve noticed over the last five years is that lifestyle plays a huge role in what high fat means to you. For me with peak training and then recovery, my day-to-day life doesn’t look the same every day. Finding out what windows of high fat work at what times, and when is the best time to use one approach, and when is the best time to use another approach to maximize performance is key because someone who’s taking on a high-fat or ketogenic protocol just for health purposes, or if they’re sick, or something like that – that looks a lot different than someone using it to try to run 100 miles. I always try to emphasize that because people oftentimes assume it’s a template that can just be plugged in for anyone, but a lot of other variables need to be considered.

Dr. Pompa:
For a lot of our clients, and we have a lot of doctors that watch this show, we move them in and out of ketosis. I prefer diet variation because there’s a benefit, we’ve learned, by moving in and out of different diets even seasonally, even weekly, for goodness sakes, having higher carb days to get your insulin to respond in a better direction oftentimes.

When you’re doing this as an athlete – look, I could go out and I don’t have to eat breakfast. I intermittent fast every day. I could get out. I could ride three, four hours on my bike, and I do just fine without eating and then come home and eat, right? People find that fascinating especially the higher carbers that I ride with who are eating the whole time I’m riding. That’s a three, four-hour ride. I’m fat adapted. I can go out, and ski all day, and eat dinner, and I’m fine. I don’t bonk at all.

We’re talking about 100 miles. You have to eat during this 100-mile race. What are you eating? What’s the formula, man? You still have to eat.

Zach Bitter:
Yeah, it’s been something I’ve experimented with a little bit. I’ve had coaching clients and friends do it differently than me and have success as well. For me, what I’ve found is before when I was high carb, I was eating upwards to 400 maybe even 500 calories an hour in some of these events. Admittedly, I hadn’t done any 100-milers yet at that point, so I was able to finish within a five to seven-hour window because they were more like 50-mile-type endeavors. You can hit your stomach pretty hard for that long. From what I’ve read is when most people are running into trouble from a digestive standpoint, it was in those 10th, 11th, 12th plus hour range where they’ve been hitting their stomach with gels and sugars all day long. Then all of a sudden, especially in the heat, they’d start to reject it.

As I moved towards trying out 100-mile distance stuff, I started looking at that as more of a preventative-type of move. Now I’ve gotten that down to even in some of the, I’ll say, shorter, faster ultramarathons where I’m still in a much lower carbohydrate feed than I was previously. I’ve cut that by more than half, and it’s usually between maybe 150 and 250 calories an hour.

It’s interesting because the 100-milers actually require less because I’m going at a lower intensity. If I go into that event really fat adapted, then I can rely more on fat. Even at your leanest state, the leanest athletes have enough body fat to get them through a long event like that, especially when you put into consideration whatever glycogen stores they had and anything they’re eating along the way. They’ve got plenty of body fat. The fuel tank is much larger than your glycogen reserves.

What I’ll do is I try to eat as little as possible without sacrificing performance. The reason for that is because I see eating as an extra variable. It’s another task I’m giving my body. If I can get away without eating something, then I want to do that because it’s going to require less blood diverted to my stomach for digestion, which is another reason why I really don’t eat a whole lot of fat while I’m doing these events, either. I would probably do it differently if I’m getting into the 24-hour-plus range, but I don’t – if I’m going to burn fat, I may as well burn body fat during the event because that’s bypassing the digestive tract.

That just basically leaves carbohydrates. I use them sparingly, but I do use them in events. I’ll trickle them in throughout at what I said before, that 150 to 250-calorie-per-hour range, and then just really stay on top of hydration and electrolytes. That’s the game plan heading into most of those things.

Dr. Pompa:
I would think the electrolytes play a big deal. For our viewers and listeners, when we talk about fat adapted, we really mean that our mitochondria get so efficient at using mostly fat for energy that we’re able to go longer periods without relying on our glucose stores and our glycogen stores. The body does become much more efficient. I think you said going into it, if you go into it very fat adapted then your body is just so efficient at using its body fat, which someone would look at you or me and say you don’t have body fat. We have tons of body fat, probably 50,000 calories stored of body fat on either one of us. That’s what you want to burn.

I was going to say that. I knew that you probably weren’t eating a bunch of fat during the race because that would definitely bloat you, perhaps, and would just be more effort to break down than a simple sugar. Just by eating 150, 250 calories an hour, your body’s still relying on its fat to get the majority of the energy, but you’re relying on that just to help supplement it, I guess.

Zach Bitter:
Yeah because there is a – I always look at carbohydrates the same way I would caffeine. It’s something that is definitely a performance boost, but there’s a fine line between too much and the right amount. You want to keep your body sharp. What I’ve found is by training in a state where fat is the majority of my macronutrient from a day-to-day standpoint, that gives my body the sensitivity needed to make carbohydrate work as rocket fuel so when I do take it it’s very effective.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I find the same thing. If I do use a carbohydrate like that if I’m out for very long it’s like wham. It is like rocket fuel. That was a good analogy. It’s remarkable because understanding that the human body can go that long.

I read history about the American Indians, and I had recently read about the Wyoming Indians and how they would become fat adapted. They would literally chase prey all day long. Their endurance was incredible. In the article, in the history – it was really a history piece. It was really because they were fat adapted. I would have to say this is nothing new. This has actually been used by ancient cultures. Not to take anything away from you, but nothing new.

Zach Bitter:
We definitely took a step away from it for a few decades there, and now it seems like we’re digging back into it a bit, or at least it’s out there. People have some information to go off of if they want to take on the approach.

Dr. Pompa:
Let me tell you something from a standpoint of health. The most important thing you do – look, these carbohydrate athletes that are high carbohydrate, they’re all getting – this point in their life, they start crossing over in their 50s and 60s. They’re developing autoimmune degenerative diseases, inflammatory conditions. Even though they stayed fit, they realize that it wasn’t healthy. You can burn all that sugar, but you’re really forcing your mitochondria when you’re burning sugar drives a ton of oxidative stress that really causes a lot of injury to your DNA.

There’s something called telomeres. I’m telling the people this. You probably know this. Telomeres are the only biological clock that we know of. As they shorten, you become closer and closer to death. Endurance athletes get there very quickly. We used to think it was maybe just from all the endurance. We’re really finding out it’s really from the driving from the high carbohydrate diets. It definitely shortens your telomeres and shortens your age.

You’re an exception. Now we’re getting back to these fat-adapted athletes. I say you’re going to live a normal life.

Zach Bitter:
Yeah, I hope so because I know, for me, a lot of this stuff with the ultramarathons, I very much feel like I’ve crossed the line of doing it for health standards. I’m more into the realm of performance. That’s not always good for longevity. It’s one of those things, too, about enjoying what you’re doing while you’re here rather than asking what if for an extended amount of time.

With that said, though, I want to prolong my existence as long as possible, and that’s definitely part of the reason I take the high-fat approach as opposed to a really, really high carbohydrate approach beyond the fact that I believe it’s actually a performance benefit to keep macronutrients from the fat sources at the highest part of my nutrition.

Dr. Pompa:
I believe there’s no doubt of performance benefits. For me, there’s a massive health benefit. I think it’s going to keep you alive.

Alright, Meredith, I think you might have some questions. I’m going to end up going down the training route. I want to know how you train for an ultramarathon. Before I leave this topic of fat, I know she is the fat queen. She’s going to ask you questions.

Meredith:
I’m curious, too. What were some of the differences you noticed when you switched over from relying on carbs for fuel to more so being fat adapted? What were some of the differences in the benefits you’ve noticed?

Zach Bitter:
Some of the benefits were actually more along the lines of quality day-to-day life stuff, which I think translates heavily towards training and racing because so many of those variables play a role in your preparation and your mental state leading into an event. I know when I first started doing ultramarathons and I was on a higher carb diet, I had done a block of 50-milers where I ran 3 50-mile races in about a 9-week timeframe at the end of 2011. I did that on a high-carb approach. I trained for it on a high-carb approach. I was training very high volume at the time, where my peak weeks were up above 150 miles. I was averaging well over 100 miles a week throughout the course of the year.

I was definitely putting my body through the gauntlet. I started to notice, especially when I factored in work – I was a full-time teacher at the time. When I factored in work and stuff like that, it became incredibly difficult to sleep through the night. I would notice a lot more water retention in my ankles and swelling in my legs after hard efforts that took a lot longer to go away. Post race, it would take me a lot longer to feel like I had that pop back in my legs. Some things that weren’t necessarily ideal from either a performance or a health standpoint. I saw myself at a crossroads where I needed to either revisit what I was doing from an athletic standpoint and whether that was worth the potential health risk or look at changing some of the stuff I was doing in order to make what I was trying to do more sustainable.

The first thing I came upon was the higher fat approach. I went through some basic processes with that where I – in the early stages, I just flipped my macronutrients on their head. If I had been doing 60 to 65% carbohydrate, I instead did 60 to 65% fat. Then if I had been doing 10 to 20% fat, I flipped the carbohydrates towards that. When I did that, I noticed right away that I was sleeping better. Inflammation and swelling was going away almost immediately. That didn’t take a transition at all. That all happened almost immediately.

They talk about the transition phase, and how it can be very difficult, and it’s one of the reasons people bail on the program. I very much did have a transition period where I wasn’t able to do fast workouts or anything like that. For me, I was more – rather than being continuous for three or four weeks, I’d have a handful of days in the week where I felt really groggy and then a couple days where I felt good. Then after about three, four weeks of that, it started. The switch flipped, and I felt really strong all the time. I was able to ramp up intensity a bit in my training to go along with some of those health benefits that I was seeing along the way, too.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s awesome. Who won the Western States 100? Did you do that one this year?

Zach Bitter:
Western States was my first 100-miler that I did. I did it in 2012. I haven’t done it since then, but I am going back this year.

Dr. Pompa:
You won in 2012, didn’t you?

Zach Bitter:
No, I didn’t. In 2012, I was 14th place at Western States. It was very much a learning experience, though. I actually got in five weeks before the event by winning what they call a golden ticket race where if you finish in the top two, you get an automatic bid. I really had no ambition of doing the 100 miles at the time, but everyone told me you don’t pass up on a chance to run Western States. I jumped at that opportunity, and went into it, and learned a lot, no doubt.

Dr. Pompa:
Who is the guy, he’s won a few of them, fat adapted, as well, isn’t he?

Zach Bitter:
You’re thinking of Tim Olson. Tim Olson won it in 2012 and 2013 and set the course record in 2012. He did it in a fat-adapted program, as well. He’s got an interesting story where the year before he won it, actually, I think he was, I believe, it was sixth place. He got sixth place there, and I think in the last 20, 25 miles, he probably stopped that many times to use the bathroom because his body was just rejecting the fuel he was putting in. I think that was the catalyst for him switching. He was looking at a way to make that – in his mind, he’s like if I can eliminate all of these unnecessary stops, I could win this thing. He did, and he ended up winning it twice.

Dr. Pompa:
Have you ever gone up against Tim Olson? Have you guys ever –

Zach Bitter:
I raced him in 2012, and he kicked my butt at Western States. I’d raced him at Ice Age 50 mile earlier that year where I had beaten him. Yeah, I think those are the only two times I’ve raced him. Tim is very much a mountain runner, and the last couple years, I’ve been doing a lot more flatter, track, road-type stuff. Like I was saying before, there’s such a huge emphasis on the specificity of the training where you could have guys who are both super fit, and if one’s training the mountains, one’s training on the roads – if you race on the roads, the guy training on the roads is going to have a huge advantage where if you run in the mountains, then the guy training in the mountains is going to have a huge advantage, especially as the sport’s gotten more competitive. The last couple of years, there’s been a lot of talent come into the sport. That’s resulted in that much more emphasis in specifying on the course you’re planning on trying to nail.

Meredith:
I’m just so fascinated by all of this. I’m wondering, Zach, if you could take us through a day, or I don’t know if you have a typical day, but what that looks like as far as what you’re eating, and your training, and just how it all goes, if you could give us an overview of what it’s like, a day in the life.

Zach Bitter:
The mapping of my training and the mapping of my diet actually work hand in hand in the sense that when I explain it to people, I explain them with the same concept where it’s like a periodization. My training operates on a periodized-type of schedule where when I pick a race I want to really nail, I start with a base block where I’m doing a lot of what we’d call zone one, zone two work where it’s just building miles, building volume, getting that aerobic base developed. Then I’ll start adding some workouts, usually more tempo, progression based where I’m still – I’m not hitting that anaerobic zone quite yet, but I’m definitely pushing my body a little harder than I would in a base-building phase. Then I’ll drop in some speed workouts like what you’d traditionally see on 400 repeats on a track, or 200 repeats on a track, or something like that. Depending on where I’m at in training will depend a lot on what I’m doing.

To match that with the nutrition, the way I do it is when I’m recovering is when I utilize a ketogenic approach. That’s when I’m trying to get my body to completely reset, recover, and just completely remind it that fat is definitely its primary fuel source. Those are the days where, if you looked at my nutrition plan, it would look very ketogenic. It would look like something right out of the textbook from Dr. Volek or Dr. Phinney.

Then as I start building up my base miles, and stuff, and getting more volume, I’ll start to reintroduce a little more carbohydrate -inaudible- during base phase because I’m not doing anything super intense. I’m still metabolizing such a high level of fat at that point, there’s just not as much of a need to replace the carbohydrate. When I do get into the higher volume plus intensity phases, and a lot of times that means a two-a-day workout, that’s when I’ll start bringing carbs back at the highest level they’ll be in my training. Usually that fits within a window of around 15 to at the most probably 30% of my intake, so it’s still a minority in my macronutrient profile. I’m still taking in easily 60 to 65% of my calories from fat even in those peak training blocks.

What I find is when I enter those high-intensity, high-volume phases in a very fat-adapted state, I can get all the performance benefits I need from that 15 to 30% carbohydrate window whereas someone who’s carb dependent is probably going to need to ramp that way up to 65 ,70. You read about some guys even go on 80% carbohydrate to meet those energy demands.

Dr. Pompa:
Wow, that’s incredible. Basically you’re doing something that we teach. You’re diet variation. There’s time where you’re utilizing higher carbs, times you’re using the lower carbs. We do that to get sick people well. You’re doing it for performance, ironically enough.

Zach Bitter:
It’s all about matching lifestyle with nutrition, I think. If there’s one thing that I’ve learned it’s that there’s tons of different “healthy” nutritional approaches. No matter which one you pick, there’s going to be some study or some educated individual promoting it. Really, it’s about keeping an open mind and being willing to try for yourself. If things aren’t working, that’s not the time to be bullheaded. That’s the time to experiment. Find something different. Change some things and see if you can make improvements.

For me, that’s been very much following a higher fat approach throughout my training. Then, like I said before, the recovery phases are where I’ll use what people call a ketogenic diet. Then high-intensity, high-volume training is where – I call it higher fat just because it’s confusing to some people, I think. If I run a good race, the folks who are very, very into the ketogenic approach, they’re striving to point to someone as look, it works. Look, it works. Then the folks who are on a high-carb approach, they’ll want to argue because they’ll say well, he’s not following 50 grams or less a day. You get in this gray area, I guess, and it’s hard to define.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s ridiculous because when you’re putting in that many miles, I have athletes, including myself – when I’m doing a lot of cycling and training, I can be in ketosis at 75 and 100 grams of carbs. It completely changes from winter to summer for me. I can get away with a lot more carbohydrates in the summer. I couldn’t agree more. It’s just remarkable what the body can do, the efficiency because your body’s carrying that efficiency over. Like you said, when you’re entering in even to eating higher carbs or whatever, it’s still low carb but higher carb, your body’s still carrying that efficiency of fat burning into that time. That’s what makes it work.

Zach Bitter:
The key is, too, I can’t stay at my peak. I can only get to my peak a couple times a year without burning myself out. When I get to the peak and I’m using more carbohydrates, that’s a limited timeframe. As soon as that timeframe is over and it’s time to recover and reset, that’s when I can remind my body and go back to that ketogenic mapping type approach.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely. If you look at the American Indians, in the summer they would go on a higher carbohydrate diet. They would eat more berries and root vegetables. Again, in the wintertime, they were back in ketosis. How many hours a day do you have to train to train for a 100-mile race? I know it changes. I know the base phase is longer, but give us an idea.

Zach Bitter:
It’s interesting, and it’s hard to put an exact number because for me, if I enter a high training block, I don’t necessarily try to match my energy demands within that block. I go into it assuming I’m going to run a calorie deficit. What that ends up doing is I end up leading out a bit during that phase. Then when I’m in a recovery block, I can put some of that back on if I want to. Sometimes the numbers don’t range quite as much as they could if I would match energy demands for the exact expenditure of that day.

With that said, there’s workouts I’ll do that demand 5,000 or 6,000 calories of energy expenditure. I’m in a training block at the moment where I’m going to hit pretty close to 140 miles this week with some intensity in there. There’ll be days this week where I’ll easily burn 5,000 calories. I probably won’t quite eat that many on that day, but then if I take a recovery day the following day, I’ll eat a little more than what I would need typically on a day like that.

I find that really intriguing because a lot of folks are – they’re working out for health. They’re working out to feel good or because someone told them to. For folks like that, they pretty much want to end up in a window of nutrients in order to maintain a healthy body weight and stuff like that. They can stick to a little more of an equivalent day-to-day approach.

I feel like I’ve gotten to the point, too, where I don’t really count calories too much. I’ll count in the sense where I know this is the window of carbohydrate I need. I’ll make sure I get that in. Then everything after that, I just go by feel. If I’m hungry, I’ll eat. If I’m not, I’m not going to force it.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s what I do.

Zach Bitter:
When you get really dialed in and you find what works for you, your body is very good at telling you what you need. I try to do that. If I have a couple of really good training days and all of a sudden I feel flat the next day, that could be my body telling me that I need to start catching up a bit on some of my energy demands. I’ll take a slightly easier day and make sure I get some really good meals in that day. Usually the next day, I’ve got that high energy back again. Your body definitely does a good job of mapping it if you let it. It’s the way I like it, too. I’d rather have that than have to meticulously count everything and plan everything out like that.

Dr. Pompa:
What’s your hours a day working out? Do you cross train? Do you do some lifting? You have to. You would have to.

Zach Bitter:
Yeah, I’ve done a decent amount of cross training, I guess, from the strength standpoint or the mobility side of things, more so recently with the mobility stuff. I’ve always been a fan of weightlifting just because I’ve enjoyed it. More recently, I’ve tried to structure that to be more specific towards what I am doing. I’ll do a lot of posterior chain work, like deadlifting and kettlebell swing type stuff for weightlifting, a lot of core strengthening stuff to keep form and posture in a good spot.

Then I’ll do a lot of mobility sessions. I use a program called MAPS Prime. It’s a full on mobility. You identify where your weaknesses are from head to toe. Then once you identify your weaknesses, you put a little extra work into those. Your strengths, you do some stuff to maintain it. It just really keeps everything humming and everything in place. People think of those mobility structures sometimes as just not a strength training thing. I’ll tell you, the first time I went through the MAPS Prime program, I was sore the next day. I was laughing to myself. I was like well, here I am able to run 100 to sometimes 150 miles in a week and not get that sore doing it, and then I do this stretching routine, which is what -inaudible- would define it, and I’m sore from it. There’s definitely benefits to it from both mobility and just an adaptation type of thing, too.

In terms of hours, I probably put in – when I’m peak training, I probably put in close to 20 hours a week when you add up all the running hours, and the maintenance hours, and the cross training type stuff all together.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I guess I would expect that. Maybe I expected more. Are you married? Do you have children?

Zach Bitter:
The thing is I’m very consistent about it, though. I come from the camp where the consistency, consistency over a long period of time is going to provide the biggest bang for its buck. For me, every year I’ll run over 5,000 miles, so even when I’m in low training mode, I’m still moving a lot. I’m still running. It’s just the intensity changes quite a bit. Sometimes the strength training will become a higher emphasis and require more time or the mobility with become a higher emphasis and require more time. Throughout the course of the year, I’m always up in that – I’m moving a lot. I’m real fortunate that my employer, Ultra Footwear, they are really flexible about the way I plan my own schedule, so I can set things up the way I need to to prioritize those type of stuff.

You’ll see other folks who’ll do it differently. They’ll take a big chunk of time of downtime where they’re doing very little. They’ll do these big blocks where they’re hitting 30+ hours a week, especially triathletes. When it comes to running, there’s so much impact with running. There’s almost a point at which you’re doing too much damage than good.

Usually when I’m in my peak phases, too, when I’m running the most miles, I’m getting pretty fit at that point. A lot of my miles will come in at a low six to mid six-minute mile range. I can go out for a two-and-a-half-hour run and have almost 22, 23, even close to 25 miles in already at that point. Some of it is that, too. If you look at time spent and distance covered, it can range quite a bit throughout your training and throughout your fitness levels.

Dr. Pompa:
I just find it hard. You can never train 100 miles. You can’t just run 100 miles. Then all of a sudden you’re out running 100 miles. How do you train for 100 miles if you can’t run 100 miles? There’s a disconnect.

Zach Bitter:
There’s definitely your very peak week. I’m always careful to use that as the focal point just because then people assume that that’s what you’re doing every week. There are certainly weeks where if I enter a 50-miler as a training run and I don’t taper for it, I’m probably going to hit close to 30 hours of training that week. It balances itself out then because the next week I’m probably going to be going a little lower on the lower side of things when I’m coming back from that. It’s an interesting lifestyle, no doubt.

Meredith:
I’m amazed that you run 5,000 miles a year. That is just still in my head. I’m wondering did you ever use exogenous ketones or any special support supplement to maintain?

Zach Bitter:
No, not really. I helped out a company with some information with an exogenous ketone supplement, but I haven’t done any regular training or racing with any of that. Some of that’s just – ketosis isn’t my goal. My goal is performance. I don’t necessarily feel like whether knowing where I’m at in ketosis is all that important.

Meredith:
-inaudible- or anything like that for your blood sugar?

Zach Bitter:
I’ll get tested every once in a while more often than not because of a study or something like that or like I was saying before if I’m testing something, but not often enough to know regular values. One interesting thing that we noticed when – I was part of the FASTER study that Dr. Volek put on at the University of Connecticut. That was, I guess, almost two years ago at this point. A lot of information has more recently been released or approved.

I suspect that training like I am or any of those subjects that were training at that study – when you look at their millimoles of ketones, I suspect it’s different. I suspect that there’s different things occurring that are causing those numbers not to mean the same thing as if you would measure someone who is much more sedentary just eating at a really low carbohydrate diet.

With that said, I’ve tested myself often enough to know that I do enter ketosis periodically throughout my training. I’ve tested it enough to know that I’m not in it all the time either. For me, it’s more if I’m feeling good and training’s going well – the way I’ll gauge it is if I can go out for a long run in a fasted state or at a very low-nutrient state and feel strong the whole time or finish strong, I know I’m fat adapted enough to have that advantage be there.

Some of that happens, too – when I train, I do the bulk of my work in the morning. I’ll wake up in the morning, and I’ll have some coffee with maybe a little bit of coconut or almond milk, maybe a very little bit of raw honey. Really, it’s more often than not probably 20 to 30 grams of energy at most. Then I’ll go out, and I’ll train hard for a couple hours, sometimes over three hours. At that point, if I slept eight, nine, ten hours the night before and ate dinner at a normal time, by the time I could get back, I’ve metabolized enough calories to almost put together a fast of over 24 hours. I think just by that lifestyle, you get really fat adapted.

A lot of people do a 16-hour fast on a more daily or a 14-hour fast on a more daily routine. I guess I kind of fit in that window where I eat the bulk of my calories probably, especially in the winter, within an eight-hour period of time. Then I’m sleeping a huge chunk of that 16 hours, and then I’m training another huge chunk of that 16 hours. That’s really just the window that I have.

Like I was saying before, I don’t like to eat when I’m training. I don’t even like to drink when I’m training if I don’t have to. That’s why I love winter running sometimes because it’s cool enough where I can get away with that. For me, I would just prefer to head out with an empty stomach and keep it that way throughout the workout. Then when I get back, prepare some food.

Dr. Pompa:
I’m the same as you. I prefer to drink a bunch of water when I’m done. Go in hydrated and finish afterward. I’m not a big – I go out, and these guys are drinking, drinking, fluid, fluid, fluid. For me it’s just making my body work somewhere else. I want the energy in my muscles. It’s not like I’m going to dehydrate that quickly. If I’m on a very long ride, I sip water. Like you, I try to minimize it. I eat when I’m done.

I eat at a window, just like you. Days I work out a lot my window broadens a little bit. I eat a little sooner. Days I don’t work out or like this morning, I worked out but it wasn’t that hard. I haven’t eaten yet today, and it’s 3:30 my time almost. If I did a bike ride, I would have eaten by now. It would have been maybe a shorter window, maybe a 14, 15-hour window. It’s amazing. We’re doing it for different reasons. I’m doing it for health reasons. You’re doing it for performance reasons. I do it probably for performance, too. I’m just not competitive like you are.

Zach Bitter:
The really intriguing thing to me is – because a lot of people will go into it and they’ll very much plan it out. They draw this line in the sand where I’m not going to eat before this time, and I’m going to stop eating at this time. For me, it just happens that way. I’m not trying to go for a 16-hour fast. I’ve done intentional fasts in the past, more so during recovery than during hard training. That’s just the way that I feel the most dialed in. It just works itself out that way. That’s the key for me. When things are happening just naturally like that and I’m not trying to do anything contrived is when I feel like things are working, and my body’s working for me and not against me.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s less stressful. Listen, I probably three times a week will fast dinner to dinner, 24 hours. It’s never planned, Zach. Never. It’s on my busy days. I get busy going, going, going, going. All of a sudden I realize it’s six o’clock. I haven’t eaten. I just fasted. It happened yesterday. I didn’t plan on fasting all day. I just did. I never got hungry. I’m fat adapted, so I just went all day. Sure enough, I feasted at about six o’clock. That’s the way I am, too.

Meredith:
It is the most natural way, but there of course is that time period at the beginning as well when you’re not fat adapted that it can be really uncomfortable. You need to just – you go through that period, too, while you’re training your cells to burn your own fat for energy to get to that place where you can really trust your intuition and just eating when you’re hungry. I think it’s important to note that there is that period where maybe you can’t always totally trust your cravings or when to eat until you become fat adapted. Then your hunger signals are just much more regulated and more natural.

Zach Bitter:
Yeah, definitely.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s awesome. Thank you. I appreciate every bit of information. I know our viewers and our listeners are just absorbing because we have many that watch and listen that do what you do, not to run 100 miles. I still find that absolutely fascinating. I find fascinating why anyone would want to run 100 miles. That’s incredible. I mean, that’s like oh, my gosh. I’m a cyclist. Running five miles to me is like drudgery. Cycling at least there’s some speed and some action. Anyway, not to take away from what you’re doing because I love what you do. I love extraordinary people that do extraordinary things, and man, that’s you. I take my hat off to you, no doubt.

Zach Bitter:
Silly as it sounds, I think running 100 miles happens accidentally. I remember when I was a sophomore in college, and I had decided to try out for the cross country team. I was talking to the coach. He outlined what most of the guys were doing throughout the course of their collegiate career. It basically started out with freshmen would do about 50 miles a week, and seniors would get up to 90 sometimes 100-mile weeks when they were base training. I remember thinking, distinctly, I will never run 90 miles in a week in my life. Here we are today, and I’m doing that stuff in a day. It’s weird how it grows on you. You get curious, and you try another. You end up running 100 miles.

Meredith:
You just end up running 100 miles. I don’t know if many can say that, but, hey, hats off to you for sure, Zach. You’re definitely an inspiration.

Dr. Pompa:
What’s your website?

Zach Bitter:
My website is zachbitter.com. That’s Zach with a C-H, Z-A-C-H-B-I-T-T-E-R. That’s where most of my contact info and stuff is, social media, as well. I’m fairly active on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Folks that have questions or want to connect in any way, those are good spots to reach out.

Dr. Pompa:
Great, thank you, Zach.

Meredith:
Hey, thanks so much, Zach. Thank you, Dr. Pompa. Dr. Jeff Volek was mentioned in this episode, as well. We interviewed him in Episode 104 if you guys want to check that out. That was a great interview, as well. I wanted to add that in. Thanks again, Zach. You guys should definitely connect with him on social media. Check out his website. Thanks for watching, everybody. We’ll see you next time. Have a great weekend.