2018 Podcasts

Transcript of Episode 205: How to Tell if You Have Candida or Parasites

With Dr. Daniel Pompa and Meredith Dykstra. See more information on Dr. Pompa's parasite cleanse diet here.

Meredith:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Cellular Healing TV. This is Episode Number 205, and Dr. Pompa and I have a very special show for you today. To start off before we dig in, before I even tell you what the topic is, I have a few questions for you, because if you are listening and any of these symptoms that I'm about to read ring a bell, then you definitely want to tune in, because we have some answers as to why you may be feeling this way. To start off with, have you ever experienced any of these health issues such as exhaustion, cravings for sweets, bad breath, a white coat on your tongue, brain fog, hormone imbalance, joint pain, loss of sex drive, chronic sinus and allergy issues, digestive problems, a weakened immune system, or UTIs? That's the first list of symptoms for a condition. Maybe you can guess what it is. The second list, maybe if you've had any of these symptoms let us know: constant illness just in general, chronic illness, different nail funguses, constant fatigue, difficulty sleeping and waking up, and rectal itching, any of those symptoms for the second condition. Dr. Pompa, maybe you want to fill them in. What are these two different conditions that we're going to delve into today, because these are very common symptoms, and they're kind of across the board as well?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Well look, if you identified with the first one, that's Candida. If you identified with the second one, that's parasites. By the way, I didn't even know what order you put them in, but I could just tell by some of the symptoms. However, most of you probably are saying, “I have symptoms with both, so I'm very confused.” It's so true, because a lot of people, myself actually, I had parasites when I was sick, and I had Candida.

Meredith:
Great combination.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, the first set of symptoms was Candida, and the second was parasites. You're going to hear my dog bark in about ten minutes here, I mean ten seconds. When someone knocks at my door, no matter what, this is going to happen on Cell TV. I apologize. Look, the bottom line is that these things—and we've all heard this, right? Everybody has parasites. Yeah, that's true, right? Everybody has Candida. That's true, but to what extent does it become symptomatic? To what extent does it become a pathology, right? Then with that said what can we do about it?

We're going to show you, because I believe there is absolutely a time that it becomes a problem, and we have to knock back these infections, but I also am going to tell you on this show that I had those things, and yes if I knocked back my Candida, if I knocked back the parasites, I would feel better. However, I wasn't better, so we're going to talk about that too, because I think there's an important—and I'm going to give you a Candida protocol, a basic one, and I'm going to give you a basic parasite protocol—but I think there's a deeper lesson here for all of us, so let's dig in. Meredith, you as well have suffered from this, so talk about some of your experiences with this. What were some of your symptoms?

Meredith:
Let's start off with Candida. I had learned about it years ago actually when I was first getting into natural health, and my friend told me all about it because she was these having these symptoms. By the way, if you're just tuning in for the first time now, Candida is a yeast in the body. It's naturally there, but the problems occur when it becomes overgrown, when there's an overgrowth of Candida in the body. It can get out of control and cause these different symptoms that I first read some of those in the list when we first started this show.

I had some of these symptoms that my friend had mentioned like the white tongue and brain fog. I'd had some UTIs in the past recurrent. I was like, “Oh gosh, Candida, I've never heard of this,” so I started to delve into it more and more and just kind of started to experiment with some of the protocols that I came across. I know you're going to delve into that as well. First, I had started just kind of experimenting with the no Candida diet which was no sugar at all, so for a while I had taken sugar out of my diet and that included alcohol for a while as well. I was living in New Orleans at the time. I remember that was challenging. No fruit—

Dr. Pompa:
-inaudible-

Meredith:
Yeah, because it was such a part of my lifestyle, but at the time too thinking back, gosh there's no wonder I had Candida, because I had set myself up kind of in the perfect storm, as you say, to get Candida. I know my immune system wasn't very strong because I wasn't sleeping well. I wasn't eating well. My microbiome therefore was out of whack, and so with different gut issues and a weakened immune system, you set yourself up very well to have Candida issues and overgrowth issues.

I had gotten to the point where I had been in a good position for Candida, and just initially by starting the no Candida diet where I was taking the fruits, the sugars, some of the carbohydrates—definitely not all—out of my diet, I did start to get some relief and decrease in symptoms, but then I didn't really take it too much further, and I got caught up in other things, and that's where my Candida specifically journey ended, because I've stepped back and seen the bigger picture too. I think sometimes we get so focused on fixing a specific condition when we're missing out on the bigger picture and the multi-therapeutic approach as you teach.

Dr. Pompa:
You just did such a good job there because you set the stage for what everyone goes through. No doubt when you go to a lower carbohydrate diet, take refined sugar out of your diet, a lot of the fruits out of your diet, it gets a step better, but it seems like severe Candida is never healed by the perfect diet. Matter of fact, I mean there's even some people that say, even people in ketosis, that Candida will feed from the ketones. Bacteria, fungus, yeast, they're very intelligent. They'll do anything to survive

I don't know that you'll beat it all the way back with the perfect diet, so then there is a time to come in with some killers, as we call them. The key here—I know you guys want some of these answers, right, so let's just give you some of the products that were very successful with me and my clients. The #4 FungDX, F-U-N-G-D-X and it's literally the number sign 4, we've used it for years and it's very effective. Let me give you another one that I absolutely love. It's Candidaplex. Spell that for them because it's a funny spelling, Meredith

Meredith:
Candida, C-A-N-D-I-D-A-P-L-E-X. You can get that at revelationhealth.com.

Dr. Pompa:
Exactly, and then I love grapefruit seed extract, just straight up grapefruit seed extract. I love oregano oil. I just gave you four different products. Now the magic with Candida and bacteria is rotation, meaning that they are clever. -inaudible- for a month, and then you have to switch the product, so it's not just using one product, especially when you deal with more severe cases. On more severe cases, whereas you just have a mild case maybe using one product for a month and then switching to another product for a month, that would work, but with a more severe case, you'd probably pick two of those four and do that for a month, and then pick another two, and then pick another two. I think garlic could be in that rotation. Olive leaf extract could be in that rotation. The magic isn't this one pill or this one thing. The magic is, in fact, the rotation, because you have to fool these clever little guys. The diet that we mentioned, no doubt low carb which I think most of you watching this get that, but mixing it with the killers.

Now this is my experience is that I would do this, researching on this rotation theory et cetera, and it would work. It would knock it back, but guess what happened when I would stop? It would come firing back. It may take two months, but before I'd know it I'd start getting a white tongue, I'd start getting itchy ears, just the stuff that my particular set of symptoms would start and give me the red flag that my Candida's back, very frustrating. Then I would go back at it.

Okay, so how ultimately did I beat my Candida? As I did multiple brain phases getting the toxins out of my deeper tissue, and that's the cellular detox for new people, after a period of time I realized, “Oh, I haven't beat back my Candida in months. That's odd.” Meredith, you said something. You said, “My immune system was low because my lifestyle, and therefore it gave these pathogens—in this case we're talking about Candida—the opportunity to overgrow.” Candida is in every one of us. We're not going to beat it back to dawn. It just doesn't work that way. They're there waiting. They're opportunistics. It's like robbers waiting in alleys for someone to walk by, but again we can avoid these things. Ultimately it's this. What is beating back our immune system? In my case, it was my upstream heavy metals.

I'll tell you, with Candida heavy metals are typically the burden. It can be lifestyle, it can be pure sugar, it can be other things, but when it's chronic look upstream and say, “What is up there?” If you think of that analogy that I just gave, imagine a stream. This was actually a true story that I watched happen. They were trying to stalk fish in a certain area because people were in a pay stream area, and the fish kept dying. They would put more fish in. They kept dying. They would put more fish in. Then they realized that there was this bad pathogen that was in there, so they killed the pathogen, and they thought, “Okay, this is the problem.” All of a sudden, the pathogen came back, and they killed it again.

Meanwhile, they're spending obviously thousand dollars on putting new fish in. That could be your probiotics. That could be a lot of different things you're trying to get to survive, your good bacteria. Anyways, finally someone much smarter said, “You know, I think because this pathogen keeps coming back, something's killing off the good microorganisms and allowing that pathogen to populate, and that's what's killing the fish.” Miles upstream they discovered there was in fact a factory, and I think it was dumping lead in this case into the water. They brought it to the attention of the EPA who came in, blah blah, but it was like, “It doesn't matter. The thousands of dollars we spend downstream, you have to look upstream.” My case a factory was dumping mercury upstream. It was coming out of my brain. It was coming out of my deep tissues. It was killing my good bacteria, and it was allowing these bad pathogens to kill all my fish. I hope that resonates, but what I don't—

Meredith:
Does that add in for me too? I was living in a moldy home in New Orleans as well when all of that was happening, which I was having other symptoms and other issues too, but clearly that was an upstream source where I was living in this home, there had been six feet of water during Katrina. I was starting to take supplements, learning these things, but I was still living in the moldy home.

Dr. Pompa:
Exactly. By the way, if we talked to 100 people you'd get 100 different stories. If you say, “Yeah, but I'm looking,” look, if you have Candida, we'll get to parasites in a minute, there is an upstream. Look upstream, absolutely. People say, “Should I knock back my Candida before I do detox?” No, there's a dance. I would do detox, and when I did detox, sure enough I would get worse Candida. I would have to knock it back, so it was detox, Candida, detox, Candida. Of course, when I was on a cycle, my heavy metal cycle, I would actually take some Candida stuff, but it would come flaring up and I would knock it back until I got my mercury down to a certain point. That's when all of a sudden Candida wasn't in the show anymore. Candida is—it's a problem in so many sick people, but please folks, I hope you hear our message that Candida isn't the problem. It's a symptom of an upstream issue.

Meredith:
How does fasting come into play too with treating Candida?

Dr. Pompa:
You'll notice—it's funny. I just finished a five day water fast with our Facebooker, and you can still go there. All the videos are still there. We took 2400 people through a 5 day water fast. If you go to dr.danielpompa it'll bring you to my fan page. There was a private group called Fasting For A Purpose. You could look there. Anyways the videos are stellar. When I used to fast, I would get a really white tongue as an indicator of still some pathogens, and I think a lot of them were in some habitations too, but anyways this time I barely got a white tongue. I think a white tongue's very normal during fasting to some degree.

Fasting beats back all pathogens. It does. It starves out good and bad bacteria, then after a fast this is our opportunity to re-inoculate the good guys, and that's what I've been doing for the last two days actually is just putting in all kinds of fermented foods and re-inoculating. Right Meredith, fasting is a strategy to absolutely beating back not just Candida but many pathogens. The testimonies coming through—people passing parasites, people pass a live thing—so it's an opportunity to just knock back some of these bad guys and overwhelm them in the re-inoculation phase with the good guys. Many people, if you imagine this, many people are up here, so let's say we'll put Candida and other bad guys—this is your gut where you have more of the bad than the good. This is called dysbiosis. Here's what most people are trying to do. They're trying to build up their good guys, take probiotics, take this, take that, and this is what's happening, and it's probably more like this, but here's what fasting does. It brings them both down, and then you re-inoculate these guys, and these guys, now they don't have a chance. Good point Meredith. That's another strategy I would add here.

Meredith:
We need both good and bad bacteria for that healthy balance.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely. If you could -inaudible-

Meredith:
Right. Another question too with the protocols is that some of the binders, are they effective for helping to attack these specifically Candida but other pathogens as well? The CytoDetox, the activated charcoal bind—are those helpful along with the killers, and the anti-fungal, the antibacterials?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, to complete the protocol bind is important for this, both the parasite protocol and the Candida, any pathogen protocol, because when you're killing these things a lot of the symptoms, what they call a Hertz reaction, are actually caused by the dead guys. They spew a lot of toxins in the gut, and we can even reabsorb, especially if you have a leaky gut, the toxins from the die-off. Imagine if you kill a spider on the floor, you “Oh!” That's happening in your gut. Maybe that's too graphic or an ugly example, but it's what happens, right? It's like you kill a mosquito and you see the blood come out.

That's happening in a smaller degree with either the parasites or the Candida in your gut, and that's what gives you the darn symptoms. We want a binder in there, and Bind has four different binders in it. Not just heavy metals but all these other we call them biotoxins, toxins produced from a living thing. In this case it would be a toxin produced by Candida from the die-off or the parasite. Yes, we want that binder in there to grab these toxins in the gut so you don't reabsorb them. That's what makes you feel like crap, right? I think you're right. Even CytoDetox, where you have a more systemic binder floating around, absolutely minimizes the symptoms, and let me throw a couple other out of lymphatic stuff. Lymph Drainage from DesBio which you carry on Revelation Health, Lymph Drainage

Meredith:
SENG right?

Dr. Pompa:
SENG too, so Lymph Drainage and SENG. You can rotate them back and forth. There's two: Lymph Drainage from DesBio and SENG from Systemic. You want to keep the lymphatic opening, how about some rebounding on a trampoline, just very mild? That opens lymph up. Lymph brushing, epsom salt baths have opened up that pathway. -inaudible- saunas have opened up that skin pathway. All of those things along with those killers are, no doubt Meredith, part of that protocol.

Meredith:
Enemas too as well?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, coffee enemas because—thank you—because sometimes what happens is the liver ends up getting overwhelmed with the toxins, and what a coffee enema does is the caffeine in the coffee goes to the liver and pushes out the bile. Now when we do our coffee enemas we like to take that Bind that I mentioned 30 minutes before a coffee enema. The reason we do that is because now there's a catcher's mitt sitting in the gut. It doesn't leave the gut. When you push up the bile that holds all the toxins from the liver, it goes into the catcher's mitt so you don't reabsorb it.

I like to also take right before the coffee enema a tablespoon or so, maybe even a teaspoon, of ghee which is a dense fat that you need to dump bile into to digest, so that brings the toxic bile out too. Take the bind, 30 minutes later—45 to an hour, there's a window there—then you take your fat and immediately do a coffee enema. That is a great thing to do, and you can Google how to do a coffee enema, but just you do it my way it takes it to the next level. Again, I would put that into the parasite protocol, or the Candida protocol, or any pathogen protocol.

Meredith:
I love it. Alright, a lot of gems there. Just quickly before we move on to the parasites with the Candida diet, it's kind of a lower carb diet and then do you intermittently bring in any higher carbs while you're taking the killers to knock them down? Is there any strategy with that, or is it just a lower carb diet for a while?

Dr. Pompa:
There is a strategy there. Just like SIBO, we've done other shows on small intestinal bacteria regrowth where you do a high carb day and then they come out, because many of them hide back in the biofilm and they're kind of protected, and you do the high carb day, and they come out. They're going, “Woohoo! Food,” and then boom, there's the killers. Meredith, once again you can tell she's done this a few times folks.

Meredith:
Yeah, it just made me think of it because when I was doing a SIBO protocol that's something I've had challenges with, and I took the antibiotic Rifaximin, Xifaxan, that was last year I think for two weeks, and I said, “Dr. Pompa, should I just do a super low carb diet—it was a 14 day antibiotic—to specifically target the small intestinal bacterial overgrowth?” and you said, “No, eat carbs, eat a bunch of carbs while you're taking this antibiotic to really bring out these bacteria so they feed, and then you hit them with that killer.” That did help. That's a fun trick, and that's something that a lot of people—you're not going to hear that a lot. I think that that's a really great tip for specifically targeting these bacteria.

Dr. Pompa:
Exactly. That could be three of those a week. It could appear to everybody—that's why often there's working with a coach that gets this stuff, because it is a little different for everyone, even the dosing of this stuff. Very sick people find a coach, but those who aren't as much try these things. Great advice.

Meredith:
Great tip. Now we're going to—because we have a dual show here we're going to move into parasites, because you suggested that we talk about these two pathogens in one show, because there are as you heard too in the beginning of the show a lot of overlap with the symptoms. We're moving on to parasites. What's the issue with parasites? Why do so many of us have them, and can they be a good thing sometimes too? What's the connection with Candida? That's a lot of questions but wherever you want to take it.

Dr. Pompa:
Those are the two main guys, and I hated to separate them because typically one that has one has the other, and that's why I wanted you to start the show throwing it out there, because I know most people would be like, “I have none.” Typically they're both opportunistic, and one raises its ugly head, and the other, and then back and forth. You did it. There's a dysbiosis in the gut. Your immune system's low. Parasites, we're all exposed to them all the time. It's on lettuce. It's on this. It's on—you beat them back.

People in Mexico, they're exposed to these bacteria and parasites. They're not getting sick. We go there, and we get sick. At a certain point, a good, healthy immune system just deals with it, man. It keeps them at bay. Not every disease is parasites, but it can become problematic if all of a sudden I have this skin issue that's very odd. You have very odd symptoms. Like you said, you labeled the symptoms in the beginning and of course there's others, but yeah, at a certain point we need to beat them back. Of course there's large ones.

By the way, I get pictures all the time with people with parasites. I want to caution. If you go online and people hold up these things called mucoid plaques, those aren't parasites. You remember that, right? I was like, “Meredith, look. Google this. Those aren't parasites.” It's not even mucoid plaque. People take parasite products and they have cilium in it. There's a few of these things that, if you put them in water, put your parasite thing in water and if it gets all gooey that's what you're looking at. These things get in the intestines, and they roll up, and they create these things. “Mucoid plaque and there's parasites in there!” Not necessarily, so don't be fooled.

Meredith:
What is the mucoid plaque made of?

Dr. Pompa:
The point is it's just the cilium or other non-soluble fiber that is in the product that rolls up into that mucus-looking strand that they call either mucoid plaques or parasites. It's a scam. It is, so don't be fooled by that. That doesn't mean that parasites don't exist, and that doesn't mean you're not going to move them out of your bowels and see them in the toilet. I'm just saying a lot of that stuff, people sell their products, so they put a lot of these things into a lot of the parasite products that you buy at the store, because people stay on them. “I'm still getting parasites!” I'm always telling my clients, “Well, send me a picture. That's not a parasite. That's the stuff in the stuff. Oh, that one? Oh yeah, that's a parasite. There's a head. There's an eye. There's a tail,” or I tell them, “I'm not sure. Go get it analyzed. I want to know.” Some parasites, you have small ones that you can't see. Gardia—

Meredith:
Giardia?

Dr. Pompa:
Giardia, thank you. Gosh, Giardia—that's my dyslexia—Giardia lamnia, histolytica—anyways there's a lot of them that are so microscopic that you won't see. I had those too. I actually did a stool analysis and tested for those guys. Some people have the roundworms which can range anywhere in humans. The tapeworms can be a little longer. I've seen pictures of tapeworms coming out of people.

By the way, I just had recently a client doing coffee enemas and passing three long parasites, and that was the real deal. Don't be fooled number one, but yeah, if these things grow it will make everything more difficult. Some of these parasites, as you start let's say a detox program, all of a sudden now you can start moving them out. Some people we have to beat back the parasites even to move ahead in the detox, but a lot of them won't even come out just like the Candida until we start detox. I'm always asked the question, “Should I do the parasites first or this?” The question is, “I don't know. It's different for everybody.” Some people, you start with parasites first especially if it's a glaring issue. Some people, they don't even know. We start the detox and then down the road all of a sudden the parasites become an issue.

What happens is parasites and Candida, they're so smart. Bacteria do the same thing, Lyme disease the same thing. They'll put themselves around the heavy metals as an example, and they'll hide from the immune system because the immune system will not go near mercury. It will die. It will put itself around it, and until you start pulling out the mercury then the pathogens will come, but if you don't pull out the mercury you won't get to them. In that case, well, it makes sense to start the detox first. Sometimes the pathogens are so out and about it makes sense to do that first. It's not a clear answer. You can't just do this first, that. It is a little bit different per person.

Meredith:
Right. Typically, it would be when you're doing true cellular detox and at some point in the body phase or in the brain phase you would bring in a targeted parasite protocol, right? You would do it in conjunction with it while you're working with a practitioner of course, because you're going to need guidance if there's parasite issues. It can be very tricky, so you definitely want to work with someone who would know what to do to orchestrate the process in the proper sequence.

Dr. Pompa:
Honestly, people always say, “How do I know? Should I test?” You can look at some of the symptoms. Do you have them? I think this is the cheapest test of all. Do two months of a parasite protocol. I do that with many of my clients. “How do you feel?” “I don't feel anything.” “Okay, great. Let's change up the parasite program the next month. Do you feel anything?” “Nope.” Typically I'll do large parasites for the first month and small parasites for the second month.

With that said, let me give you a protocol because I know that's what people want. Systemic Formulas is actually world-renowned for their VRM products. V as in Victor, R as in Mary—gosh, did you hear that dyslexic comment? R as in Mary. V as in Victor, R as in Ralph. How's that? M as in Mary. 1, VRM 2, then there's VRM 3 and 4 so let's stop there. VRM1 is for the big guys. VRM2, you know, kind of the medium guys. Those are cycled ten days on, five days off. The reason they are is because—there is times that I keep someone on them longer than that even for a whole month—but the reason they're cycled ten days on is because the bigger guys have a life cycle where they're in a cyst phase or the big phase. You give five days for the eggs to hatch, if you will, and come back into the worm phase where you can kill them. Then you do it again. If they laid any new eggs then they'll hatch and you'll kill them. That's why you cycle ten on, five off.

I will do typically VRM1 at night. I'll give two pills. VRM2 in the morning I'll give two pills. For those of you who are smaller in status maybe one and one, or just more sick in general one and one. I'll do the first month's cycle on the VRM 1 and 2 going for the bigger guys, then the second month I will do the VRM 3 and 4 which are for the microscopic guys, and I'll do VRM3, two at night or one. In the morning I'll do VRM4, one or two. That's the heart of the protocol

There's another product that DesBio that you all carry on Rev Health called Dia-Verm. It is another different like these shards of little glass if you will, that don't bother you or your intestines, but they're hell on parasites. Dia-Verm is good. Sometimes I'll throw in another homeopathic called Ver, V-E-R, and that's from DesBio as well, and that helps push it out of the biofilm. There's four products there, three, that you can put together, and I'll keep people on the Dia-Verm or the Ver through the whole two months. I'll run two months. If someone has symptoms during the two months I'll run it longer, but if they don't then we'll move on to maybe a bacteria protocol, virus protocol, as we're doing the detox, because again, a lot of these guys don't come out until you do the detox. That's why you can't just start with this often times. As you're doing the detox these darn guys will come out of their hiding places.

That's a very standard protocol. We already talked about using Bind with that, very important to use Bind to clean up. It has four different binders in it, things like humates, fulvates, those things keep the metals back, but the carbon actually does better for the biotoxins, and it's a very special carbon, very expensive carbon. Then there's another binder from Africa that does all around. Anyways, the different binders work really well, because remember it's the toxins in the parasites after you kill them that really cause a lot of the problems. Then again, CytoDetox -inaudible- “When do I do the protocol? If I'm doing a heavy metal cycle do I do it on or on the off cycle?” Heavy metal protocols you're on for 3 to 7 days say, and then you're off for 4 to 10 days say. Some people do better doing it while they're doing heavy metals. Some people do better while they're on their off cycle. That's why working with a coach is important, because your dosing, how you cycle it, how you do it with it, it's different for everybody, and you have to know what to do with that dance. It's kind of complicated.

Meredith:
It does get tricky. If someone's listening and they had heard these symptoms and could definitely relate and say, “Gosh, I have a lot of these symptoms,” is it okay to just do the detox and start to experiment with some of these protocols? If they're not super sick would that be okay? If it's not confirmed that for sure they have Candida, for sure they have parasites, is it okay to start to play around with some of these parasite products, or some of the Candida, the killers?

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely. If you're not severely sick, auto-immune or just very sick, yeah, absolutely. Many of you watch the show. For sure, absolutely. Depending on this, if you get symptoms you're onto something, right? For sure, absolutely do that. As far as testing goes, I said that's the easiest and cheapest way to test. Some people do stool analysis. It's gotten better at detection. Remember, when they're backed into your deep tissues hiding in the heavy metals, it's not going to show up on the stool analysis. Often times I would say don't waste your money.

Meredith:
I just have a word of caution as well just from my personal experience. I had started taking—gosh, I've been working with you, Dr. Pompa for years, and I've been doing these protocols and just following your advice of course, doing these things that you suggest, and I started for the very first time in my life took some parasite products earlier I guess it was last year now, and wow. I took them at a very high dose as I do. I just kind of went in. I wanted to see if I could get a result, and I had a massive reaction on my skin, remember? I sent you pictures where I just got these massive acne-type welts that came out all over my face. I had been taking a very high dose of these parasite products for—not the ones specifically we're talking about but some parasite products—for about three weeks, didn't notice anything, and then literally overnight I woke up and had all of these welts. I immediately started fasting and stopped the products, and it cleared up within a week. It scared me to have such a reaction even though we know these things have to come out of us and that's a good thing. Also just a word of caution too, when we're detoxing we're taking all these products. We stir things up. They start to come up. Working with a coach I was so grateful to be able to talk to you and ask you, “Okay, what's going on?” because we do want to be prudent in what we're taking as well.

Dr. Pompa:
Exactly, you're right. I'll add to that caution in a similar note. I'm always testing. I'm very connected with Systemic Formulas. Shane Morris is a good friend, and we've developed a lot of product together. One of the things I love about their products is they test everything that walks in the door. Even if they're getting say black walnut—which is common in parasite products—from a company for years, they still test it every time, because people source it from different places

A lot of these things that are in parasite products, probably even more so than Candida products, are from China and they're loaded with lead. Here's what we're finding because we just tested a bunch of product that some of our doctors were getting excited about, and it came back with lead, mercury, and huge amounts of pesticides and other chemicals, so you have to be really careful. A lot of these killers in these parasite products come from China and India, and they are loaded up with stuff. You have to know the product. You really do. I say we, it's not me, but Systemic—I say we because they've given me, sourced me the product—it's sometimes very hard that they start testing for something, and all of a sudden now it's coming back contaminated with something. You have to know your sources especially on these parasite protocols, or products.

Meredith:
Very true. Be very aware of what you're taking, what you're doing, the ingredients, and where things are coming from, and that's true of anything. It's very important to do the research. These two pathogens—this is a really important topic because they're such hot subjects in the natural health world. Candida, parasites, and I think, doctor, overall you gave a great overview of what they are and the issues they cause. Some of these symptoms that you may be experiencing could be related to these, and ultimately it seems from our discussion with diet, lifestyle, fasting, detox, that it all comes down to multi-therapeutic approach and just bringing in these targeted protocols to address these specific conditions.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you're right on. Imagine if you're doing this, and you're not doing the cellular healing. If you don't increase cell function it's all for nothing. That's why we're all sick. That's why we don't feel well. You have to be dealing with the cellular healing and getting the cells to work even to detox properly, right? You have to be dealing with the cellular detox and then the ancient healing strategies. We talked about fasting. We talked about the different diets, moving in and out of different diets. It's putting it all together. That's why if you do have more severe challenges you need a coach. This is why I'm passionate about training doctors around the country, around the world for that matter, because something that works, right? Do we have all the answers? No way. I'm praying this morning for more. When you put it all together, we definitely have something very special that I know came from Him, not from me.

Meredith:
Amen. Awesome. Thank you so much for tuning in. Send us your questions, your show ideas. We love to do these episodes too where we get just a lot of questions on certain topics, so if you have show ideas send them in to us. Thank you so much for watching. If you're interested in learning more about the overall multi-therapeutic approach, go to podcast.drpompa.com. Check out Episode 117. We also dived in with Dr. Todd Watts, I think it was episode about 140 or so, on parasites specifically if you wanted to learn a little bit more just about that topic as well. Any of the products that Dr. Pompa mentioned you can find on revelationhealth.com. You can feel free to call into the store too if you have any questions, but otherwise check out those products online and be in touch. Any closing words Dr. Pompa?

Dr. Pompa:
No, that's it. Good lesson.

Meredith:
Awesome. Thanks everybody for tuning in. Have a fantastic weekend.

Transcript of Episode 203: How to Safely Eat Wheat

With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Meredith Dykstra, and Dr. John Douillard

Meredith:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m your host, Meredith Dykstra, and we have our resident cellular healing specialist, Dr. Dan Pompa, on the line. Today, we welcome a very special guest, Dr. John Douillard, and he just put out a new book. It’s called Eat Wheat, and this is a really, really hot topic for us on the show and for all of you listeners and viewers out there. This is going to be a really fun discussion on some of the pros and cons of eating wheat.

Before we jump in with the discussion, let me tell you a little bit more about Dr. Douillard. Dr. John Douillard, DC, CAP, is a globally recognized leader in the fields of natural health, Ayurveda, and sports medicine. He is the creator of lifespa.com, the leading Ayurvedic center and wellness resource on the web, with six million views on YouTube. Lifespa.com is evolving the way Ayurveda is understood around the world with over 800 articles and videos on proving ancient wisdom with modern science. Dr. John is the former director of player development and nutrition expert for the New Jersey Nets NBA Team, bestselling author of seven health books, including his newest international bestseller, Eat Wheat, a repeat guest on the Dr. Oz show, and featured in USA Today, LA Times, and dozens of other national publications. He has been in practice for over 30 years and has seen over 100,000 patients. Dr. John directs LifeSpa, the 2013 Holistic Wellness Center of the Year, in Boulder, Colorado.

Welcome, Dr. John, to Cellular Healing TV! We’re so excited to have you.

Dr. John:
Thank you. Great to be here.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, John, you know I loved your book, by the way. Matter of fact, I have it right here.

Dr. John:
Oh, cool.

Dr. Pompa:
There’s a lot of pages folded down and highlights. You know it’s a good book when you see that when I read it, but you know, we’re singing the same tune. I wrote an article probably a couple years ago now, and I said it’s not just gluten, meaning that, okay, gluten can be problematic for certain people. However, in the article, I talked about the fact that it’s the toxins disrupting our digestion, creating poor digestion, leaky gut, and driving this gluten epidemic, if you will, that people are under. I think there’s so much. This is going to be a huge show for people, because right now, I think it’s so in fad and in vogue to avoid gluten. I think I read in your book that maybe three to seven percent of the population actually has a gluten sensitivity, and we’re going to explain why those people actually have that sensitivity and what they should do about it, so hang onto every word we speak here, but many people are avoiding gluten unnecessarily, and it can even be leading to health problems by avoiding certain grains, gluten, etc. A lot to learn on this show. This is going to be one that you’re going to want to share with people, because I promise you, especially our viewers, many of them, are avoiding gluten and avoiding wheat, but maybe, just maybe, you could actually be causing problems. I wrote an article called “Diet Variation,” so I’m a believer in eating grain and changing our diets, but John, how do we explain that people take gluten out of their diet and yet they feel better? Some people do, John. How do we explain it?

Dr. John:
Oh, yeah, and I write that in the very beginning of the book. I get it. You eat wheat. You feel bad. It makes perfect sense. Don’t eat it if it makes you feel bad, but that’s not the solution, taking the wheat out of the diet, just take something that you’re having difficulty digest, and it makes you feel better. The reality is, it’s a $16 billion a year gluten-free industry, okay? We have up to 60 percent of the population being gluten-free and only one percent of the population have celiac, and they should not eat gluten. Only three to seven percent have actually gluten sensitivity, so there’s a lot of people who are avoiding gluten and buying into the gluten-free industry, which is $16 billion, which is giving us nothing but highly processed foods in replacement for whole wheat.

Now, the science is amazing. First of all, we know that in the Mayan diet and in the Mediterranean diet, those diets where two and three servings of wheat per day reduced the Alzheimer’s disease by 53 percent in one study and 54 percent in another. Two major Harvard studies came out in the last six months. Both of them, over 100,000 people – both studies over 25 years show that the people who ate the most wheat compared to people who were gluten-free had less heart disease and less diabetes than people who were eating gluten-free foods, so what is it? Why do these massive studies show that, when people are eating wheat, they’re in fact healthier? They have less diabetes and less Alzheimer’s, and I did a big debate with Dr. David Perlmutter, author of The Grain Brain, and found – my mother said I won the debate, by the way, so clearly –

Dr. Pompa:
That doesn’t count.

Dr. John:
No, it has to count, but it was really cool, because it was back and forth with the science on both sides of the aisle, and when you look at whole wheat, not highly processed, refined bread, whole wheat actually has a low glycemic index. What David did was, he said, wheat has a high glycemic index, bread has a high glycemic index, therefore it does what sugar does, which causes Alzheimer’s, but whole wheat doesn’t have a high glycemic index. It has a low glycemic index. It lowers the risk of diabetes in study after study

We have to look at what happened. In 1960, when they took cholesterol out of our diet, they replaced it with polyunsaturated fatty acids, which are seed oils, which are very unstable. They had to bleach, boil, and deodorize them to make them stable, and they stuck them in loafs of bread. The loafs of bread would stay on the shelf now for, I don’t know, a week, two, three, four weeks and never go bad. We know that the microbes are everywhere, or we’re 80, 90 percent microbe. You put a loaf of bread on the counter, anything on the counter, it should go bad in short order. Anything that’s packaged that has these cooked vegetable oils in it that uses preservatives that are in most of the foods you’ve been eating for the last 60 years are indigestible, and where do they go? All the oils and all the bad oils, stuff we can’t digest, goes to the liver, and the liver becomes congested.

The number one abdominal surgery today in America is gallbladder surgery. They are being taken out like crazy. The gallbladder is the kingpin of the digestive process, and when that gets congested, it leads to your inability to burn fat as a natural source of fuel, so you crave more sugar. It actually doesn’t allow you to get rid of your own fat, so you become obese. Fats and delivering good fats supports brain function and mood stability, so we have people who are depressed and critically fat. Burning fat and having good bile flow from your liver is a buffer for the acid in your stomach, so if your liver’s congested, and your gallbladder is not making enough bile, you’re not going to have the buffer for the acid in your stomach, and when you eat a ham sandwich, your brain says, I just ate a ham sandwich, and I need four ounces of bile to emulsify the fat in the ham and break down the gluten, and I’m going to need that buffer, that bile, to neutralize the acid from my stomach. If you don’t have that bile flow, your stomach will eventually stop producing the acid, and that’s why people can’t eat wheat or hard-to-digest foods any longer.

The simple solution, which you and I probably did 20, 30 years ago when we were getting started in practice, is, yeah, get off of wheat, get off of dairy. You’ll feel better. They do for six weeks or six months, but the problem came back. It was never a real solution, so that’s why I dove into really helping people reboot digestive strength and got so frustrated with the whole gluten-free industry, because people were actually putting themselves in harm’s way down the road. We should talk about why

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I mean, I was one of those people. When I was sick and challenged, I couldn’t eat gluten. I would react, and matter of fact, I took all grains out of my diet. I felt so much better. However, again, it’s certain things, symptoms that weren’t going away, where there were deeper-rooted issues upstream, but then, as my digestive health came back, I dealt with the toxic upstream issues. Then, all of a sudden, I could eat wheat. I could do these things, and of course I can eat all the gluten that I want today. I’ve watched it. My doctors, their patients, their clients, we see it. As their digestion improves, then they’re able to introduce these foods again, and we actually see benefits to these foods.

Look, you said something, though, and it’s so true, about the bile in the liver. This is why we have an epidemic of heartburn, where people are trying to deal with the acid, when really it’s the liver or gallbladder, the bile, its effect on the acid. That same thing, that same bile, it gets thick, and that bile that we need to digest fat, well, it interferes with the pancreatic enzymes that we need to break down some of these hard-to-break-down things, so your argument is, look, it’s not the gluten. If we’re able to break it down, if you have good digestion, then that’s the answer, so then people are now saying, watching this, okay, what do I do, because I’m one of those people that seem to have trouble with gluten and other grains, so how do I improve my digestion? We’re talking about cleaning the liver and the bile, and you probably have some suggestions there. I liked a couple of your suggestions.

Dr. John:
Right. You’re so right. In 91 percent of the people, the pancreatic duct, which is liver and digestive enzymes, it joins up with the bile duct, so they go in together. If you have thick, viscous bile, your digestive enzymes aren’t going to get into the small intestine, and neither will your bile. The real problem is that those digestive enzymes can backflow into your pancreas and gobble up your pancreas and cause pancreatitis, and lots of doctors think it’s a risk of diabetes. The fats go back to your liver, causing fatty liver, two major epidemic issues of our time, and the bottom line is, it dials down your digestive strength. When the stomach says, hey, I have a ham sandwich here that I need to digest, and there’s no bile that’s being delivered, your stomach will just hold on to the acid and wait for the green light to go on. That’ll give you heartburn and reflux and indigestion, so I think people are starting to see, wow, this makes sense. This is why I have heartburn. This is why I have indigestion. This is why I have undigested food in my stools.

These are all because of weak digestive issues, so clearly, the very first thing is, you’ve got to get rid of the processed, cooked vegetable oils that have been put in most foods to preserve them that are literally blocking our ability for our liver and our bile to flow. That has to go. Very, very important.

The second thing, there are foods that are called cola dogs. Cola dogs are foods that actually help move your bile. Beets and celery and apples are natural cola dogs. You can actually have a small – you don’t need a 20-ounce shake, but you can take a small shake of beet, apple, and celery juice in the morning to get your bile flowing. You can take artichokes, powerful cola dog, to get your bile to move. Turmeric increases the contractibility of your gallbladder by 50 percent. Fenugreek as a tea in the morning with your food, it’s actually not too bad-tasting. It increases the contractibility of the gallbladder by 75 percent

All of these foods, you can do to get that gallbladder to really start to contract and bring that baby back online, and then, once you get your gallbladder kicking in, you want to make sure your stomach can actually start producing acid again, because you remember, if your stomach says, hey, there’s no bile down there, and she hasn’t made or he hasn’t made bile in years. I’m just going to stop producing the acid, because if I keep making all this acid, I’m going to burn a hole through something. Then, your body will slowly stop producing the acid, so before we can turn the acid on with something like hydrochloric acid – everybody takes hydrochloric acid, and the body’s going to be like, who’s turning the fire on? I turned that off years ago, because there’s no bile to buffer that acid, so we have to first amp up and strengthen the bile flow and give you the buffers that you need first and then turn the stomach fire back on in a natural way that does not create dependencies, and that’s – I use spices like ginger, cumin, coriander, fennel, and cardamom, all the ancient recipes that actually the science shows that they actually increase the production of your own stomach acid, your own bile, your own duodenal and pancreatic enzymes versus an enzyme or HCL supplementation. They do the job for you, so my goal is always, hey, let’s use herbs, foods, pills – herbs and foods to get you to do the job so you can get off the pill and -inaudible- and not be dependent on anything, reset function.

Dr. Pompa:
I love that, and I think that’s great. People are going to watch this show twice, man, just to write those down, but you know what? Get the book. It’s in there. I think another great advice that you’ve had – this is from your training, your Ayurvedic training, was sipping warm water all day, so explain why that’s something you’ve used for years. Explain that. Why does it work? What does it do?

Dr. John:
There’s two things about water. They did a study, and they found that, if people drank a big glass of water 45 minutes to a half-hour before the meal, it actually helps them lose weight, and they digest it significantly better. Now, the stomach is very easily and commonly dehydrated, because the buffer that protects your stomach lining from the acid burn of your stomach is about 80 to 90 percent water. If you drink a big glass of water a half-hour before the meal, that water will prehydrate your stomach lining and actually give you that buffering bicarbonate layer to protect you from the acid, so when you eat – you drink that water an hour or 45 minutes before the meal, the stomach goes, well, I got all this buffer, I have all this water, I have all this bicarbonate, I can make as much acid as you want, so it’s one way to turn the digestive fire back on without any risk.

Sipping hot water throughout the day as a two-week lymphatic detox is an ancient remedy, and there’s studies to show that, when you drink hot water, the little cilia in your respiratory tract, they beep, and they move mucus about 200 times per second to kind of clean out all the yuck in your respiratory tract. When you drink hot water, it amps that up by two- or threefold, so we know that, when you increase the hot water, it increases the activity of the cervical respiratory lymphatics and keeps that mucus in the right consistency. The mucus in your gut and in your respiratory tract is like the three little bears. It can’t be too dry. It can’t be too wet. It’s got to be just right for the microbes to give you the immune support that we desperately need, so hot water’s one of the ways to accomplish that, and it’s a very powerful way to hydrate you.

Dr. Pompa
It works. It is one of those little tricks. It’s been around for years, but people kind of forget about it. My grandmother used to do that, but you brought something up in there that is really important, because some of the problems with why people can’t break gluten down and arguably other proteins, maybe casein as well, the system that surrounds our GI is congested via toxins and undigested glutens. The key is getting that lymphatic system opened up again. It improves digestion. It has a big impact on what we’re able to break down, so talk about that a little bit.

Dr. John:
Such a great question, and it’s a question that really answers the David Perlmutter Grain Brain question. It’s not a grain brain issue, it’s a brain drain issue. When you have – we talked about how the digestive strength becomes weaker, therefore you don’t have the fire, the acids, to break down the gluten or the mercury from the coal mine plumes and all these undigested proteins now, because the digestion got weaker. They go undigested into your small intestine. They are now too big to get into your bloodstream and feed you as a protein, so where do they go? They get uptaken into the collecting ducts of your lymphatic system, and there are enzymes for gluten specifically in the lymphatic system in case some rogue gluten got through there, but if you overwhelm it with processed, undigested foods, toxins, impurities, and environmental pollutants and clog up that lymphatic system, those lymphatic vessels will get congested.

When the lymph gets congested, three things happen. One, you get extra weight around your belly. Your lymph system is trying to delier triglyceride fats to every cell of your fat as a source of energy. Your baseline energy supply system is fats via your lymph. When that gets blocked, you’re tired. That’s the chronic fatigue and the food coma you get after wheat if it wasn’t digested properly. We now know – three or four years ago, University of Virginia found there were lymphatics in your brain that drain three pounds of chemicals and plaque out of your brain every year while you sleep, and when those lymphs get congested, they give you brain fog, anxiety ,depression, cognitive decline, and autoimmune conditions. When you have a lot of wheat that is not being digested, and it’s clogging up those lymphatic channels, it’s going to clog your lymph under your skin, give you skin rashes. The brain can’t drain and gives you brain fog, so it’s not a brain grain issue.

It’s a brain drain issue that’s giving people the mental clarity concern that they have when they eat wheat, and I get it. They do feel brain-foggy when they eat wheat. They do get skin rashes when they eat wheat, but it’s not the wheat. It’s a breakdown of the digestive system, and the key point here is that your digestive strength is directly linked to your ability to detoxify. You can take the wheat out of your diet, but what about the mercury on every organic vegetable from the coal mine plumes? If you take the hard-to-digest food out of your diet, you’re setting yourselves up for vulnerability for this toxic environment, which can end up in your brain, cause cancer, and cause a host of real serious conditions down the road, so we’re just kicking the ball down the road, not addressing the real problem.

Dr. Pompa:
Right. Yeah, I mean, look, people have silver fillings leaching mercury in their gut all day, 24/7, and that lymphatic system is clogging up. No wonder you can’t break down a protein or gluten you should be able to break down. All right, there’s one more big thing that you brought up in your book that I think is – it’s right on line with what I say. You talk about America – well, most of the planet, we’re eating gluten and grains all through the season, all year round, every meal, every meal. We’re eating them all through the season, but when we look at ancient cultures, and that’s one of my favorite things to do as far as how we should live, ancient, healthy cultures, they ate it mostly in the fall, early winter, because that’s when they had it. It was harvested. Now, we can harvest it anytime, so talk about that, John.

Dr. John:
Yeah, amazing research. First of all, they found gluten in the teeth of ancient humans three and a half millions years ago, so to say that we’ve only been eating wheat for ten thousand years is simply not the case. We now know that you and I, modern humans, have an enzyme called amylase, which we genetically acquired to digest starch about two million years ago. It’s a starch-digesting enzyme that we acquired a gene for to make our own two million years ago, probably because we were eating some starch, not just meat and vegetables. Today, we now know that that enzyme is cyclical. It increases in your body and my body in the fall and in the winter, exactly when the grains are harvested.

Why? Just like you write about and talk about, this time of the year, we’re now to – it’s the end of the fall. The fall is the feast time. We’re eating fruits and vegetables and nuts and seeds and grain stuff, just to amp us up and overwhelm us with nutrition to store extra fuel, food as fat as insulation, to handle the winter drought and get ready for the famine of the spring. Then, in the spring, we go into the famine, and we’ve been doing that. We should continue to do that. We should eat light, leafy greens, sprouts, berries and cherries, light, low-fat harvest in the spring, a high-carbohydrate in the summer, and a very high-protein and high-fat diet in the winter. Those are the three bestselling diets. I wrote a book called The Three Season Diet. I actually published a grocery list and a recipe list and a seasonal superfood list for every month of the year for free for folks at my website at lifespa.com, where folks can get exactly what they need to eat for January, for February, for March, for April, for free, because the research is so compelling.

Dan, there was a study that was done that blew my mind. I wrote a book called The Three Season Diet about the three harvests back in 2000 about seasonal eating. Then, I read a study a few years back where they gave deer bark in the winter, and they have microbes for bark in the winter. They gave the same deer leaves in the summer, and they have diferent microbes in the summer for digesting leaves. If they gave the deer bark in the summer, they had the wrong microbes. It would literally give the deer such indigestion, it could kill the deer, and I was like, wait a minute. Deer die when they eat out of season? What about us?

We eat the same food, like you said, all year long, no cyclical changes whatsoever, and that’s when I decided, you know what? I’m putting this information monthly for people for free so they can start to get reacquainted with their seasonal change. The soil bugs change from winter, summer, to spring. Big study. You probably saw it. It came out about three, four weeks ago. Stanford study. They actually measured the Hadza tribe, and they found that their gut, hunter/gatherer bugs, changed dramatically from season to season to season. I wrote those studies, in terms of soil bugs changing and bugs on the foods. That came out years ago. I wrote about that years ago, but now we have the hard times. The Inuit cultures, traditional cultures, that’s exactly what should happen, and we should all begin to start to get reacquainted with what is in season and why.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. No, I couldn’t agree more. Even the position of the sun, we know, affects our microbiome, right? We see the microbiomes changing on the foods. Hello? Doesn’t it make sense that we are designed to change our diet, and what are we doing today? Nobody changes their diet. They’re eating the same diet, whether –

Dr. John:
So simple.

Dr. Pompa:
– whether it’s paleo, whether it is, they’re locked into their diet. The reason why is because it worked for them at one point, right? They went on a vegetarian diet, and it worked. They went on a paleo diet, and it worked. They went into ketosis, and it worked. The problem is staying there. I think that’s when you end up with trouble, so yeah, John, I couldn’t agree more. I think your principles are fantastic and well spoken. How do they get the free resource where they can get the foods?

Dr. John:
You go to my website at lifespa.com, and on the homepage, there’s a banner there for the Three Season Diet Challenge, and that’s where we give you the free information about how to get the recipes and grocery lists and superfoods for every month of the year. Of course, I got a newsletter there. We put out three videos, newsletters a week for people to get all kinds of information for free to learn about how to connect ancient wisdom with modern science, so it works like that.

One more study – if I can tell one more study, I think which is important, which I think I didn’t write about in the book that you may be interested in hearing as well. There were a couple of studies that showed that, when people were gluten-free, they had four times the mercury in their blood than people who actually ate wheat. Another study showed people who actually ate wheat had significantly more good bugs and less bad bugs than people who were gluten-free. Another study showed that people who were gluten-free had less killer T-cells measured for immunity than people who ate wheat, all of those suggesting that, when you eat hard-to-digest foods, which we ate poisonous foods for millions of years, in an evolutionary sense, and we figured out what was good and what was bad. Those hard-to-digest foods like the lectins, they are the immune stimulations for our gut immunity. When we just take them out because we feel better when we eat more processed, predigested food, what we’re losing is the evolutionary gut immunity, and if we do that for the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years, where is our immune strength going to be to fight the next epidemic bacteria or virus that comes along? We are really putting ourselves in harm’s way, and that’s why I want to thank you so much for having me and helping to get this message out.

It’s not about wheat. It’s not about should – or a diet. It’s about getting our digestive strength, which is our immune strength and our detox strength, back onboard so we can live the second half of our life and generationally in a healthy way and not be in harm’s way, because this diet of being on processed, highly gluten-free foods and taking foods out of our diet and not fixing the cause is really risky. It’s an insurance policy for disaster.

Dr. Pompa:
It really is, and you look at these gluten-free products. They’re all super sugars. I mean, it’s just remarkable what the starch is. The potato starch is all processed garbage, and yet people – you know, it’s the same thing over and over again. It was the fat-free, right? The worst products on the planet were fat-free. Sugar-free became the worst products. Now, gluten-free products, the worst thing, but beyond that, let’s say that we have our viewers out there just eating gluten-free, saying, well, I’m not eating those products, but your point is that it’s still unhealthy. You just quoted studies showing that the glutens and the lectins are actually arguably good for your health, and by avoiding them – so you’re saying, look, you can avoid them for a period of time while you’re upstream, working on the stressor that’s causing the poor digestion, but you need to get these things back into your diet in some aspect, seasonally, whatever it is.

Dr. John:
They don’t talk about the studies that have showed that the lectins actually reverse colon cancer, that the phytic acids are beneficial for bone health, and they don’t cause osteoporosis. They support. They deliver minerals. People who eat high phytic acid diets don’t have mineral deficiencies. They don’t have bone density issues. You don’t hear the other side of the science, which is why I have six hundred references in Eat Wheat, because I needed to let people know, there’s a lot of science out here on this side of the aisle that nobody’s talking about, because everybody’s preaching to the choir. Wheat’s bad, wheat’s the new poison, and we’ve got to get rid of it.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you know, and we interviewed Gundry, Dr. Gundry, on the show about lectins. I pressed him on just the Mediterranean diet, right? I mean, come on. They’re not following to the thing. They’re not fermenting everything. They’re not doing – but yet, their diet’s still – even if they were doing everything to de-lectin foods, the diet is still loaded with lectins, right? How do we answer that? You answer it even in a further way of not only is it not bad, you quoted studies in your book and just now that the lectins actually charge up our immunity, and they’re actually healthy. I just back up often and say, wait a minute. Okay, the lectins are in the tomato skins, and the Italians remove the skins and the seeds, but let me tell you. I just got back from Italy. They may do that in the sauce, but they’re eating the skins and the seeds in everything else they’re doing, so the point is, they’re there. The lectins are part of the food in just about every vegetable. How can they be bad? Again, poor digestion can make lectins very difficult, but we have to fix the digestion.

Dr. John:
What I do usually is I help guide people to help them troubleshoot what part of their digestive system broke down and also how to reintroduce wheat back into their diet, using sourdough breads, which have been rendered gluten-free if it’s done properly, sprouted breads, spelt breads, and how we can get back to eating bread that isn’t the processed, cooked vegetable oil, loaded with preservative bread that is really nothing short of toxic for you.

Dr. Pompa:
You and I, we’re both a fan of still eating ancient grain, right? These ancient grains, sprouting them, doing the old way of processing, making your own bread, for goodness sakes. I mean, if you don’t have time to make your own bread, and by the way, it’s only three ingredients, right? It’s wheat, water, and salt. You can even do just wheat and water, right? It’s like it – by the way, when you’re in Italy, that’s it. It’s the best breads in the world, and that’s the ingredients. Anyway, there’s different websites that you can buy these breads made correctly with organic flour. I think you gave some in your book.

Dr. John:
It has recipes, how to make it. There’s bakeries you can go and get some stuff online. You can definitely – nowadays, you can find good bread. Just when you go to your health food store or your local bakery, just make sure there’s no oil, like you said. It just needs wheat, water, and salt. An organic starter is usually a really good idea. That helps break down some of the glutens and some of the lectins and makes it easier to digest, and those are good to start with. Sprouted breads are good to start with. Rye is really good for your blood sugar. Spelt is really low on phytic acid, so depending on what you’re sensitive to. If you have high blood sugar, do rye. If you have issues with antinutrients like lectins or like phytic acids, you can do really good quality spelt bread, so there’s many, many ways to break bread again and do it in a safe way, of course doing it seasonally, and then, when you go into the spring, you reboot fat-burning with natural intermittent fasting that takes place with a low-fat diet that’s naturally occurring.

Also, the other study showed that this digestive strength in our body, not just the amylase increases in the fall and the winter but also the actual strength of our digestion. The parasympathetic digestive strength amps up in the winter when we’re harvesting the nuts and the seeds and the grains, and we’re hunting more, eating more meat, all of these more dense foods. In the summer, the digestive strength is weaker, because the food is cooked on the vine. You’re eating vegetables off the vine, and we don’t want to increase internal heat, because part of the reason why we’re here and the Neanderthals aren’t is because we figured out how to dissipate heat better than they did, because the Earth was heating up. The summer is the time where we didn’t need to heat up and eat all these hard-to-digest, heavy, dense foods, although we do that. We barbecue everything in the summertime, but the harvest in the summer is right off the vine, cooling foods, fruits, and veggies that cool the body down, and the heavier, higher-protein, higher-fat foods are warming and heavier, and they heat the body up, which gives up the perfect solution to the extreme of those seasons, cooling in the summer, heating in the winter.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, diet variation. How do we answer Norman Borlaug – we’ve spoken about this. Wheat Belly made it more popular, Bill Davis’s book, Wheat Belly. He did change gluten in the 70s when he created dwarf wheat, right? Arguably, these are new gluten strains that our body could be more reactive to, but your point is that, okay, he did. However, if you have good digestion, it doesn’t matter. Is that your point?

Dr. John:
Yeah, absolutely, and if you really look at the science there, in the Wheat Belly book, he talked about one study that had – they measured a whole bunch of, I forget the exact number, modern strains versus ancient strains, and they measured the immune reactivity to those strains. They found that there were some strains that were – the ancient strains had less reactivity, but they also found that the modern strains actually – let me get this right. I haven’t read this study in a long time, but they showed that they were – the immune response was either ones that caused an immune reaction, or it caused no reaction, and the modern strains – many of the modern strains showed no reaction, but he just talked about the fact that just a handful of the modern strains showed an immune reaction, but the vast majority of them showed no reaction, so again, and I’m not maybe explaining that as clearly. It’s been a while since I read that study, but it was just, again, when I actually read the actual study, it was a misinterpretation of the science. He spoke from the study what he wanted to make that case. He cherry-picked the study and cherry-picked how he interpreted the study as opposed to actually telling us the facts.

The reality is, when they first hybridized wheat thousands of years ago, they wanted the wheat that was bigger. It would -inaudible- and get it off better. The bigger the wheat kernel, the more gluten it had, so they actually were selecting for wheat that had more gluten, because it was bigger, and so the issue was not really that gluten was bad for us. From the very beginning, we were actually selecting wheat that was actually having more gluten and also more sugar, so the problem was never the gluten. It was always the sugar. There’s a lot of issues there that, when they look at the science, they say ancient wheat versus modern wheat. The big study in Canada, they took ancient strains and modern strains, and they found no genetic differences whatsoever.

The bottom line is, we overdose, eating three times a day in a processed world for 50 years. Not going to be good for anybody. Neither would any food like that, so there’s a – so it’s really eating it in moderation, eating it in a seasonal way, eating it in a nonprocessed way, booting your digestive system back up from the pesticides that are on a lot of these foods like wheat, and also, more importantly, the processed, cooked vegetable oils that they’ve been poisoning us with for the last 60 years. That has to go, and if we do that, start to reboot digestion with herbs and spices, the natural way, the next thing you know, you’re starting to get digestive strength back, detox strength back. You can break bread again.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, just in review, right? It’s the fact that we eat it all year round, eating too much of it every meal, not challenging our digestion. Number two, toxic, right? I mean, all the glyphosate sprayed on it, all the mercury, everything, causing it to get into the lymphatic system, not breaking it down, causing the liver to get toxic, the bile to get toxic, which now we can’t break down. It affects the digestion, so dealing with the toxins, eating it seasonally, and obviously, the last point I missed. What was the last one? There was three that you gave.

Dr. John:
They found out that the glyphosates and the pesticides literally kill the microbes that make the enzymes that specifically digest wheat, so right there we have a reason why people are wheat-intolerant. We have to obviously stop eating the glyphosates, but then, of course, there’s the cooked vegetable oils, and that was the other piece that you were trying to say was the cooked veggie oils. That’s just the thing that’s just taking us out piece by piece for the last 50, 60 years.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, we’ve done a lot of shows on the polyunsaturated fats, and we just did a show on even the dangers of fish oil, because again, it’s a polyunsaturated fat that people think is good, and really there’s a whole ‘nother side to that. If you didn’t watch the show, it was a few shows ago.

Dr. John:
I’ll check it out.

Dr. Pompa:
Where we interviewed – what was the title of that, Meredith?

Meredith:
There are two, one with Dr. Jeff Matheson and one with Professor Brian Peskin. The one with Professor Peskin just aired last week. I think it’s episode 197, and it’s part two on fish oil. It’s really amazing research he presented.

Dr. Pompa:
We love it, Dr. John. It’s been what you’re saying here, too, but yeah, so looking at those things, this is why we have all these people – well, like you said, we have some people reacting to gluten. Let’s go back – we’re saying, hey, eat it. I think that people are saying, okay, but I still have trouble with it, so again, you’re also telling them to introduce it slowly, introduce it in the season, improve your digestion. You gave a lot of tips there. Is there any other tips that you can give them of how to introduce wheat back into their diet?

Dr. John:
I think we touched on it a little bit, which was the lymphatic system, which is the biggest circulatory system of our body. It’s the system that takes the waste out, carries the immune system, and feeds us with baseline energy and fuel.

Dr. Pompa:
Sipping the hot water was part of that lymph – that’s what it –

Dr. John:
Yeah, a big part of that, and when people get lymphy, their rings get tight on their fingers. Their joints ache. They get tired. They’re stiff in the moring, tired in the morning, achy, skin rashes, brain fog, bloating around their belly. When they did a study, they found that – three studies they found – three things that are linked to the aging process. One is the breakdown of the intestinal skin. Two, the breakdown of the lymphatic system that drains the intestinal skin. Now, they determined that lymph, the mesentery to be the 79th organ of the body. It’s now its own organ. The third thing is, the health of the microbiome that depends on the lymph that drains the intestinal skin and the intestinal skin. I call it the most important half-inch in your body. When that breaks down, the quality of your intestinal skin, we’re in big trouble and sort of a leaky gut thing, so you have to support lymphatic drainage. The things that do that – exercise, of course, does it really, really well, but anything like a berry or a cherry or a cranberry or a beet, anything that would dye your skin or shirt red, a blueberry, they have antioxidants, and the science shows those antioxidants work through your lymphatic system. They scrub clean, detoxify your lymph, as well as your leafy greens, so exercise, leafy greens, and all your berries and cherries and anything that will dye your skin, those are your lymph movers. People need to understand that that’s a really important piece of the puzzle, because if the lymph’s clogged up, your drains are clogged. You know, if your drains are clogged in your house, you can fix the faucet all day long. You’ve got to take care of the drains.

In Ayurvedic medicine, traditional systems medicine, we always look at the drainage systems first, the waste removal channels first, and if they’re not working, nothing else is going to work, so that’s something we don’t do in America. We check the blood. Do you have high cholesterol in your blood? Then, we try to lower the cholesterol in your blood. We don’t ask the question, how did it get there? Why did it get there? Was it toxins in your blood because your body’s not moving waste out effectively? How are your bowel movements? How is your lymphatic system? How is your skin? How is your breathing?

I wrote a book called Body, Mind, and Sport, where we compared nasal breathing versus mouth breathing, and it turns out that, when you breathe through your nose, you actually activate lower lobe activation of parasympathetic receptors that turn on your digestion and activate a parasympathetic neurological calm that allows the body to detoxify and rejuvenate. Memory doesn’t make you calm, and you produce alpha in your brain during vigorous exercise, and it makes exercise more enjoyable. It also has this parasympathetic alpha brainwave effect, but also the new studies show that, when you actually breathe through your nose when you exercise, it increases nitric oxide production, which actually increases cerebrospinal fluid, lymphatic flow, so your brain can begin to drain.

I love this ancient medical science where they talked about all these things, and now we have all this modern science going, wow, those things made a whole lot of sense. Yeah, it’s your digestion. It’s are you exercising? Are you eating the right foods in season, and are you getting your lymphatic foods at the right time of the year, your digestive-strengthening foods at the right time of the year? When you put the high-protein, high-fat in the winter and the low-fat in the spring and the high-carb in the summer together, you get an annual nutritional cycle, and after one year, you get all your nutritional needs met, so yeah, in the winter, more protein, more fat. In the spring, you’re cleaning house. You’re burning fat. You’re eating a low-fat diet. In the summer, you’re starting to build your body back up. Historically, that was the time for reproduction and mating, and you needed all your nutritional energy for that. It’s just something that was completely lost, and this is circadian science, and it’s this year’s Nobel prize-winning science that we now have to look at, because it’s Nobel prize-winning science. It’s really important.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah, no doubt. A fact that you and I have in common and love is ghee. I eat ghee every day. I have for years, and it’s a great way to clear out that liver, gallbladder. You need to dump bile to break the ghee down, and myself and the doctors I train, we use that, the dense fats, to dump the bile and then bind it, so we pull out that hepatic biliary sludge holding all those toxins, fouling up the digestion. It’s a strategy that’s been around for a long time, to dump that bile using something like ghee, but yeah, give them your little ghee recipe that you’d like to do.

Dr. John:
Yeah, we have a – Ayurvedic medicine used ghee as a source of cleansing for thousands of years, and we have two cleanses, one called the Colorado Cleanse, which is a two-week ghee cleanse, and one is a four-day cleanse called the Short Home Cleanse. It’s a free download. You get a 50-page e-book for free about how to do a four-day ghee cleanse, but what the ghee does is just exactly like what you said. It forces the bile to flow. It’s a natural cola dog, but the ghee is also the highest source of butyric acid. Butyric acid is the number one fatty acid in your gut. We have bugs in our gut, Clostridium butyricum, that literally made ghee or butyric acid for a living to strengthen your gut immunity, to heal and repair your intestinal tract and support blood sugar health and all that.

That’s just the part that blows my mind is, how in the world did ancient humans know that, if you take milk, and you boil off all the milk cells and make an oil out of it, you end up getting this ghee – there you go – that has the highest source of butyric acid on the planet, and it feeds the healthy bugs and the immunity of your gut? That’s where I just think it’s so fascinating, and of course, there’s cleanses that have been around for thousands of years, using what’s called lipophilic-mediated detoxification where the fat in the ghee will hook onto the bad fats in your body and pull them in -inaudible- out of your body. We do those cleanses as a group as part of our Colorado Cleanse twice a year. Wonderful way to not only get the junk out but to reset digestive strength and reset your ability to be a good fat burner in a natural way without having to do excessive ketosis.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, but here’s the products that I like. There’s the ghee. You can buy these in most health food stores. Just make sure you get the grass-fed. This says grass-fed right on it. This one has some Himalayan pink sea salt in it. In the cleanse, how much do you do?

Dr. John:
The way the cleanse works is, you start the first day with two teaspoons of ghee in the morning, then four, then six, then eight. As you get better, you can amp that up a little bit and take more, and then, during the day, you have a no-fat diet. You have a bunch of ghee in the morning. That forces you into fat metabolism. Then, you have no fat all day long. Now, if you ate a dietary fatty meal, you would just burn the dietary fatty meal, but we want to get you to burn your own fat, so by giving you a big amount of ghee in the morning, you go into fat-burning. With no fat in your diet, you stay in fat-burning the entire day. Women’s World magazine downloaded my Short Home Cleanse e-book. They did a little forum with about 40 people. They did the cleanse, and they wrote a feature article, and they said people were losing 10, 15, 11 pounds effortlessly in your four-day Short Home Cleanse by using just the ghee, a no-fat diet for four days. The diet is based on Kitchri, which is an ancient Ayurvedic recipe of split yellow mung beans, which is an anti-gas, really easy-to-digest bean with rice, cook it with herbs and spices, and you eat that for four days, as much as you want really, with the ghee in the morning, and then you do a little intestinal flush at the end. Super simple, really easy to do. Start on Thursday, finish on Sunday. You’re done, and you get a powerful digestive reset, fat-burning reset, and lose a bunch of unwanted pounds.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and I love mung beans. You can make soup from it and everything. I love that stuff. Yeah, you – well, look, this is great. Sharing such incredible stuff here, Dr. John, so we so appreciate it. I know our viewers appreciate it. I’m almost tempted one more time, and you kind of – you did hit on it, but I think I want people to hear it one more time, because I know I’m going to get this question. The paleo people out there, and there’s many, their argument is, well, we haven’t been eating grains in our diet. You did hit on this, but I think I want you to hit on it in their argument, the Paleo argument, just one more time, as a wrap-up.

Dr. John:
The study was done at the University of Utah, and they found that ancient – it was three and a half to four million years ago. They found gluten in the teeth of ancient humans three and a half, four million years ago. They also found that they could gather enough wheatberries, which – now, remember, Africa was covered in grasslands, filled with wheat and barley, and they were able to gather the wheatberries off the wheat stalks in just two hours, enough to feed them for an entire day. Now, when you’re sitting in four-foot grass, and you can just pick out some wheatberries – they found bowls that they ground the wheat in to make porridge in them, and they ate that. It’s a lot easier – if the whole, entire continent is filled with grasses of wheat and barley, it’s a lot easier to eat that than try to kill a wooly mammoth or try to hunt down some animal, because in fact, three and a half million years ago, we didn’t hunt. We didn’t start hunting until maybe five hundred thousand or maybe a million years ago, depending on how you look at it. We were scavengers. We would go kill – eat other people’s kills, but it was a while before we actually started eating our own meat or cooking our own meat, for that matter. We’re talking about three and a half million years ago, they were eating – they were gathering their own wheatberries, so it’s hard to ignore that fact.

Two million years ago, we acquired an enzyme for amylase, which is for digesting starches like wheat, so that science just seems to – I don’t know. It just seems to be – no one wants to talk about that, and that’s just sort of odd to me, but if you read the story of the ancient – The Story of The Human Body by Daniel Lieberman, a Harvard professor. He wrote a book about anthropology, and in his book – really amazing – -the amount of proteins and fasting carbohydrates that the ancient humans ate and we ate are pretty much identical. The two things that jump off the page, the amount of fiber that they ate, a hundred grams of fiber that they ate, we eat about 15, and the amount of potassium they ate, which was about seven to 11 thousand milligrams. We get about 500. When you look at the amount of protein, fats, and carbs that ancient humans and modern humans eat, according to the most modern science, not the Paleo diet, but the paleolithic research, it was the same, so it’s – if you talk to a Harvard anthropologist or any anthropologist, they will tell you that the Paleo diet is nothing like what the paleolithic people actually ate.

It’s a diet that has come on the heels of a high-carbohydrate, pre-diabetic people who are eating way too much sugar and processed carbohydrates, and it’s the pendulum swinging to the other side of the fence. It makes sense, but the pendulum’s got to stop swinging, and we’ve got to get back to eating seasonal food, because no one can argue, because you agree that that’s what we’ve been eating for thousands and thousands of years, and that’s what we’ve got to get back to, just simply getting the food, getting the bugs that attach to the soil in the winter, summer, and spring, and eating those in season so we get the right bugs in our gut to change our microbiome to support immunity in the winter, dissipate heat in the summer, get rid of mucus in the spring, and help us get back to being connected to the rhythms of nature, because that’s what got us here.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, there’s no doubt. Look, I think that what happens is people go to a Paleo diet. They feel so much better. Of course they do, right? They were eating all these carbohydrates. That comes down. Of course they feel better. Then, they stay in that diet, and then problems can arise. The vegetarian diets. People were eating all these horrifically toxic meats, grain-fed meats, etc., all the toxic dairy. They take it out. Of course they’re going to feel better. Then, they stay a vegetarian. Problems arise. It really is. When we look at every healthy culture, they vary their diet. They were forced into times of ketosis, which no doubt resets microbiome, etc. Then, they would – the moment they had carbohydrates, they would come out again, right? It’s like the Eskimos. The moment they had carbohydrates, they ate them. The point is diet variation, seasonally, all of it. It really is a message that not many of us are touting, that’s for sure. John, thank you for being on the show. I think it’s a great message. People are going to share the heck out of this one, that’s for sure. You gave a lot of great tips.

Dr. John:
I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

Meredith:
Thanks, Dr. John. Thank you, Dr. Pompa. Thanks, everyone, for watching. We want to hear from you. What’s your feedback? Are you going to start incorporating wheat again into your diet if you have not had it in your diet for a while? Let us know what you think, and thanks so much for watching. We’ll see you next time. Bye-bye.

Dr. John:
Bye-bye.

Transcript of Episode 202: Becoming a Fat-Burning Beast

With Dr. Daniel Pompa,Meredith Dykstra, and Mark Sisson

Meredith:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m your host, Meredith Dykstra, and this is Episode #202. We have our resident cellular healing specialist, Dr. Dan Pompa, on the line, and today we welcome special guest, Mark Sisson. We have a really, really exciting topic for you guys today, one we get questions about all the time, talking about ketosis and how to safely go in and out of it.

Mark just wrote a new book. It’s called The Keto Reset Diet, and I’m going to tell you a little bit more about Mark, but this is going to be a really fun discussion for all of you who call in, write in, want to kind of know the implementation of what this looks like to kind of safely incorporate ketosis into your life, so before we dig in, let me tell you a little bit more about Mark.

Ancestral health pioneer and ex-endurance athlete Mark Sisson is the New York Times bestselling author of The Keto Reset Diet, bestselling author of Primal Blueprint and Primal Endurance, and blogger at top-rated health and fitness website, marksdailyapple.com. He’s the founder of several companies, Primal Blueprint, devoted to designing state-of-the-art supplements that address the challenges of living in the modern world; Primal Kitchen, delivering uncompromisingly delicious, nutrient-dense foods that are always dairy-, gluten-, grain-, and soy-free and full of beneficial fats and high-quality protein, which I was just saying, I love your Primal Kitchen Mayo – it’s fabulous – Primal Kitchen restaurants, a franchise of primal/paleo-aligned restaurants that offer healthy, clean, and organic, fast, casual dining options; and Primal Health Coach, an unparalleled and fully rounded health coaching and business education program. Join Mark as he shares over three decades of research and experiential learning and unlocks the keys to building metabolic flexibility, becoming a fat-burning beast, and taming hunger and cravings forever.

Welcome, Mark, to Cellular Healing TV. We’re so excited to dig in.

Mark:
I’m so thrilled to be here.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, Mark, your book – I should really show it. I have it here, and it’s such an amazing resource. I know that so many of our viewers and listeners are going to love it, because you give the 21 days. You literally lay it out, and that’s what people love, right? They want the recipes with the foods. Here’s what to do for 21 days. Yeah, and one of the things that I talk about is how we use ketosis as a tool, moving in and out of it, just like our ancestors did. I have to start hear, though, because I want to hear even about how this book differs from some of the other ones that I know many of our viewers have probably read. How did you get into this, man? You were an athlete. Kind of tell your story a little bit.

Mark:
Yeah, I was an endurance athlete, primarily marathons, in the late 60s, early 70s, and I –

Dr. Pompa:
Which probably is the opposite of what most people would think, right? Ketosis -inaudible-.

Mark:
Sure, sure, sure. No, that’s exactly right, and that’s what got me here. I was a pretty good marathoner and finished fifth at the U.S. National Championships in 1980, finished fourth at Iron Man Hawaii in ’82, had some nice success, but with all the training and all of the high-carb diet that it took to fuel all of the miles that I was putting in, I started to develop some ‘oses and some ‘itises. I had tendinitis and arthritis, and I had irritable bowel syndrome and got sick a lot, because my immune system was trashed.

After I realized that my original mission, which was to achieve fitness and health, had kind of fallen by the wayside in pursuit of just abject performance – yeah, so I looked good on the outside, and I was racing well, but I was falling apart on the inside. I had to retire, and I had to reexamine all of my methods and my lifestyle and kind of rededicate the rest of my career to finding ways to be strong, lean, fit, happy, healthy, productive, all the things that we say we want without all of that pain and suffering and sacrifice, and that’s really what led me down this path of exploring ancestral health initially and looking at the – when paleo was just starting out as a concept, to try to emulate what our hunger/gatherer ancestors did and ate and the lifestyle behaviors that they exemplified, which, because I had an initial interest in evolution, kind of tied together nicely with the clues that come from evolution, maybe what the genes are expecting us to do to manifest this strong body, and then being verified recently by genetic science.

Virtually every study that looks at what’s going on when you change one of the variables in this human equation looks at what happens at the level of gene expression, so I kind of got into it at the right point, where I realize that there’s a lot of stuff that we can change about our lifestyles. There’s a lot of power that we have over how our bodies regenerate and renew and rebuild and recreate us on a daily basis. Heading down that path and using the hunter/gatherer paradigm as kind of an outline for how we ought to try and reconfigure our modern lives, and this included sleep – getting enough sleep, sun exposure, and play, literally going out in nature, listening to the sounds, getting our hands dirty, and exposing ourselves to bacteria and microbes and all the things that our hunger/gatherer ancestors did as a routine, on a daily basis, and didn’t think about it, and now we have to sort of think about it. How do I get these behaviors back into my life so that I can get the manifestation of that gene expression in the ways that we want?

Ultimately, a lot of this came down to diet. It seems to be kind of the initial jumping-off point for so many people, that you’ve got to get the diet right. You’ve got to figure out a way in which you can present information to your body in the form of food that manifests itself in increasing muscle tissue and improving immune system, in improving the ability to burn fat, access that energy, and create what we call metabolic flexibility, so all these things came together for me about 15 years. For the last 15 years, I have been eating a low-carb diet. I have been very happy with the results. My muscle mass is fine. The energy levels I have throughout the day, great. Cognition, great. I sleep well. I’m generally in a good mood. All the things I’m looking for are checking off the list.

You might say, well, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Why would you go keto? I’ve been writing about ketosis and a ketogenic diet on and off for the last 15 years, doing a lot of research on it, know a lot of friends who have been keto, have been keto myself. If you’re low-carb, of necessity every once in a while, you just do a little audit of the previous day’s food intake, and you go, oh, my goodness, I only had 40 grams of carbs yesterday. I must’ve been – that was a keto day for me, and I didn’t really even notice it that much.

I’ve been in and out of ketosis on and off but never spent a lot of time in it, so about a year and a half ago, I thought, you know what? I’m big on performance and experimentation, and I’m always looking for the next level of performance. Maybe there’s something – even though I feel great, maybe there’s something out there that’s a little bit one step up, one notch up, so I did a 60-day full de-keto experiment, felt great, felt like I actually added muscle in my gym work-outs, felt like I burned off a little bit more fat, felt like I was getting a little bit better cognition and had a little bit more energy throughout the day. I felt like I was sleeping better or at the very least needed less sleep, which I sort of chalked up to, well, maybe that’s – maybe because the brain works so well on ketones, maybe it’s doing more work in less time while I’m sleeping in the neural rewiring and all the things that it does.

Anyway, so I came out of the experience, and I thought, wow, I assumed everything was awesome in my life, and yet I found it could be even better if I did this, so I realized – and I think to myself a lot, when I do these experiments, if I got those kind of results, and I really wasn’t even anticipating that much, I wonder how many millions, tens of millions of people who are stuck in their diet, who are plateaued despite their best efforts, who are even maybe, in the ancestral paradigm, doing reasonably well but would like to do better. That was the impetus for writing the book, The Keto Reset Diet, and it’s become – in the last year, since I started writing it, it’s become a whole new level of performance for me, and now I live in what I call the keto zone.

What I mean by that is, because I did the work, the deep work, going into and doing a keto reset, I literally reset my metabolism. I made my metabolic flexibility that much more robust. I created that much more metabolic efficiency, to the point that I’m able to get more energy out of fewer calories being put into my body, and we’ll talk about that later, that now I live in this nice little comfort area where I don’t have to think about being keto. Some days, again, I do an audit at the end of the day, and I go, wow, I only had 40 grams of carbs today. Other days, I go, geez, I had 175 grams of carbs today, but the main, key point here is, I didn’t know the difference. I didn’t feel anything different, because I have this robust metabolism that can take energy from fat off the plate and burn it. It can take energy off the fat on my body and burn it. It can make ketones from the fat on my body and send that to the brain if necessary to replace the glucose that I didn’t consume that day, or in the event that I consumed glucose that day or carbohydrates to convert to glucose, that machinery worked extremely well.

It’s just a really nice, kind of comfortable area to be in, to know that as long as I don’t go way overboard and start taking in 350, 400 grams of carbs a day, day in and day out, that I can hang out in this zone and really use ketosis as literally a tool, as you describe and as I certainly describe in my book, as a means of reestablishing metabolic flexibility to give me this amazing opportunity to cruise through life and just not have to think about every little thing I eat.

Dr. Pompa:
Yep. Yeah, that’s one of the things I preach and teach. I believe that flexibility is an amazing state of health that you do have to adapt and get into, and we want to give some tips there, because look, I believe it’s actually healthier. I believe that increasing carbs certain days, mixing it up, the ability to do so, is actually better for you, and again, it’s imitating our ancestors. When they had more, they ate more. When they had higher carbs, they ate higher carbs. However, the base of their diet was obviously a lower-carb diet.

Look. When you look at studies today, a lot of the studies on low-carb diets are done at 150 grams of carbs a day, which you and I would be like, oh, that’s a high-carb day. It’s like, when I say I’m eating high carbs, oftentimes, it’s still defined as a low-carb diet, so we have to get our listeners to understand that, but give this flexibility that you’re talking about. In your book, you obviously give some tips here, but it’s like, give our viewers and listeners tips on how to achieve this flexibility, because I can tell you, it doesn’t happen for everybody right away, right? They don’t make the transition well, right? They switch over and have a carb day, and it throws them off. How do we achieve that faster?

Mark:
First of all, to your point, I know a lot of people who claim to be keto, but then, when they say if they have 70 or 80 grams of carbs in one day, they are kicked out of keto and feel like crap for three days. That’s almost the definition of metabolic inflexibility, so there’s a lot of work to be done there, right?

If you crave this metabolic flexibility, you do have to do the work. There’s not a pill that you can take. You can’t do ketone supplements and measure your blood ketone levels and go, oh, I’m 5 millimole, or I’m very successful at this keto thing, right? I say, and like Dom D’Agostino would agree, and he’s been one of my mentors in this field –

Dr. Pompa:
We’ve interviewed him a few times.

Mark:
Yeah. You’ve got to spend six weeks in keto to really get the benefits that will be long-lasting, and when I say long-lasting, what I’m projecting I’m going to be doing right now for the rest of my life is I’ll be doing at least a six-week, full-on, all-in keto reset once a year, just to – you know what I mean? Just the way somebody would do a cleanse, an annual cleanse or a new year, new you program, I’m suggesting that that would be a great way to do it. It would sort of emulate a seasonal opportunity that an ancestral – not an opportunity, but a lifestyle that was forced upon one of our ancestors, to – and what happens is –

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I was just going to say, in your book, you talk about some of the benefits. I know you’re going into another point, so don’t forget your point. However, because we may have a lot of new people, talk about some of the benefits of doing that six-week with those ketones.

Mark:
Right. Yeah, so when you withhold carbohydrates to the extent that the brain initially says, whoa, there’s not going to be much glucose for a while, let’s figure out a workaround, and that workaround is hardwired into everyone. Everyone’s born with this amazing ability to create ketones and to burn them efficiently and to burn fats efficiently. We just never develop it. Because we’re surrounded by carbs from day one, we literally let that fat-burning mechanism atrophy, the same way we let a muscle atrophy if we don’t work out in the gym, so everyone has this ability.

What happens when you withhold carbohydrates for long periods of time, you’re just sending signals to these genes in the body, and the genes go, okay, well, that’s easy, we can fix this. We just need to spend a little bit of time up-regulating enzyme systems that take fat out of storage, that burn fat. We need to build metabolic machinery, which includes increasing the number of mitochondria throughout the body, largely in the muscle cells, so the mitochondria, which is where the fat burns most efficiently – actually, it’s the only place the fat burns. If we double the number of mitochondria in your cell, you’re doubling the fat-burning capacity. It’s a huge benefit, and by the way, those mitochondria then don’t just go away when you take two days, and you’re out of keto, right? They stay there, so as long as you don’t spend three weeks or four weeks sending the opposite source of signals, like injecting yourself with 300 or 400 grams of carbs every day, then the – again, the body goes, whoa, what’s the message here?

If the message is, there’s not going to be any glucose, we’re going to build mitochondria. We’re going to build a metabolic machinery that burns fats, to make ketones, to burn ketones. This is going to be awesome. We can handle this. It’s no problem, and then you can screw it up by going back and just saying, well, there’s going to be a lot more glucose. Then, the body, which then says, I don’t like to waste energy, so I’m not going to take my fat out of storage. I don’t need you. You’re presenting all this glucose, this carbohydrate, all the time, so let’s just burn that, and let’s just – that’s all we’re going to depend on. You get to choose how the body reacts or adapts to the signals that you’re giving it. It’s so empowering when you get this concept.

Now, when you spend six weeks in ketosis, you get this up-regulation of all these enzyme systems. You get this mitochondrial biogenesis, which is the building of new mitochondria. The mitochondria have their own DNA. It’s called mitochondrial DNA, and they get the message that not only are there going to be more of them, they have to be more efficient at their through-put of fat.

You get a decrease in inflammation, which is one of the biggest things that people notice going on a keto diet, even in the first couple of days. They lose weight, and they go, oh, this is weight. This is great. I must be burning a lot of fat. No, you’re actually decreasing the amount of water that you’re storing as a result of your systemic inflammation from your crappy diet. There’s a decrease in inflammation, which means a decrease in joint pain for a lot of people, which means just a feeling of wellbeing. There’s an increase in energy that a lot of people will report after, say, a week and a half or two weeks.

There’s a little dip in energy, and we talk about in the book how we can mitigate that dip, but there are all of these – and I think the number one benefit for most people and certainly for me is a decrease in hunger, appetite, and cravings, that the keto diet, the keto concept, which makes you so good at burning your own stored body fat and so good at making ketones – do you know the – whoever – I just found this out about, well, six months ago in my research. The liver can make up to 150 grams of ketones a day. That’s like 700 calories with an energy that is all used to replace glucose, so not only do you not need to take in a lot of glucose when the brain gets used to burning ketones instead of glucose, not only do you not need to feed the muscles glucose, because when they become fat-adapted, they become really good at burning fat, but you have this closed system that you can burn fat off your body, you can make glucose to the extent – or glycogen to the extent that you need to from the glycerol molecule or the glycerol end of the triglyceride, and then you can take the other free fatty acids and either combust them directly for energy or make ketones and offset your need for ketones. It’s such a great – it’s like –

You know, we talk a lot in science – I’m sorry I’m rambling on here, Dan, but I get so excited about this. We talk a lot in science about evolution and how evolution typically isn’t very elegant. Evolution doesn’t look for the perfect solution. It looks for the adequate solution for an organism to survive.

Dr. Pompa:
-inaudible-.

Mark:
Yet, I would suggest that this whole fat-burning, ketone-generating system that we have is really elegant on the human body. It’s like, we’re wired to overeat, because our ancestors sort of – that’s how – they had this beautiful way of, okay, there’s food around. I’m going to overeat. I’m going to store the excess as energy on these fuel tanks that I carry around with me, and in the next two or three days, if there’s no food, no problem. I get to take it out of storage, burn it. I get to burn fat. I get to make ketones. I get to offset the need for glucose. I get all these great benefits, because I’m wired to overeat. That works – again, it’s survivor mechanism. That works beautifully, but in today’s day and age, we’re still wired to overeat, but we haven’t developed the skill to take a day or two and just extract those energy units from our stored body fat and combust them and live our lives, so anyway, I just – I get so excited about this.

Dr. Pompa:
I just kind of want to be clear for our viewers and listeners what you’re saying, because I think it’s so important. It’s incredibly healthy and beneficial to be able to switch to be a glucose-burner and a fat-burner. Here’s the problem. Most Americans have lost that ability, and I want to be clear on how damaging that is, meaning that they’re only able to burn sugar, so when they’re not eating, they’re either burning muscle into sugar, breaking muscle down, gluconeogenesis, or they are rundown, wiped out, craving carbohydrates, right? Their brain is going into an oxidative mode because of all of the – and their cells are inflamed, because all they’re burning is glucose constantly, which definitely burns with more oxidation, a little more dirt, if you will, a little more exhaust on the fuel. Ketones and fat burn cleaner. The healthy ability to go back and forth is the magic.

Zach Bitter, we interviewed him, and he’s – you know who he is. He’s a 100-mile or holds one of the 100-mile records, right? He talked about this. He said, you know, people think that when I’m doing the marathon that I’m only eating fat, but he says, it’s actually not true. I hijack, biohack the system. He’s like, I’m so fat-adapted, but marathon day, I’m eating the sugar in my –

Mark:
Just enough sugar, yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
I have all these mitochondria that are – just burn it right up, right? It’s like, so I get this extra boost of energy with my more mitochondria, and then, when he’s not eating, he’s fat-adapted, so his body moves back over into fat-burning, and he’s able not to eat as much. Everyone else has to constantly eat, so he’s getting a win/win, so that’s really the magic is that ability to go back and forth.

Mark:
That’s the metabolic flexibility that I think is going to – I want that to be the operative word for the next couple of years in medicine, because it really – if you were to boil everything wrong with our health system today and our medical healthcare system, it all comes down to metabolic inflexibility. It all comes down to diseases of civilization. It all comes down to the fact that we eat too much carbohydrate, which converts into sugar. It’s like it’s so simple, it sounds like I’ve reduced it down to something way too simple, but I would suggest that that is the answer.

Dr. Pompa:
I agree. This flexibility thing, and I see it’s unhealthy, because I deal with a lot of very sick people. They have no flexibility. It takes us changing those enzymes epigenetically to change those mitochondria. It takes time to do that, and you have a lot of tips in your book for that. That’s why I think your book is so good. This is the key. This, no doubt, is the key to living healthy longer is gaining that metabolic flexibility, and you go to the low-carb things, and they’re inflexible. They’re staying in ketosis, right? They’re not even utilizing that benefit that we have and they have, and I believe there’s massive benefit in that.

Listen, here’s another thing you tipped on earlier. This puts people in a place – when you’re burning fat and able to burn fat, you produce an enzyme called cholecystokinin, which decreases appetite naturally. You said it. You said one of the big benefits is just not having the cravings or eating less. When we look at studies, people who live long healthy, they eat less. In the United States, we think eating less is, I’m going to eat half my meal. It doesn’t work that way. You and I and Meredith, we eat to full. Believe me, I even eat a little beyond full, but the point is, at the end of the day, I eat less. No doubt, I need far less calories to function at a much higher level. That’s really the key to living longer. You end up eating less, because you’re not trying to push food away.

Mark:
Exactly, and this has been known for a while, and there have been a lot of studies done on lesser animals, which demonstrate that reducing the amount of caloric intake does lead to longevity. Now, the issue with humans has always been that the assumption that, if I’ve got to cut calories way down, there’s the calorie restriction society concept, and it’s like, that is so antithetical to what I’m talking about and what you’re talking about, because I want to make a point that I make sure I never go hungry.

Now, hungry, to me, is like, oh, my God, I’m hangry. I’m going to – now, I get to the point where I feel like eating, but I don’t even call that hungry, hungry. I just go, oh, it’s time to eat. Geez, I forgot to eat, and I’m going to eat enough to take the edge off the hunger, and that’s it. I eat till I’m full, but full for me, like you, is a lot less than I used to think was necessary to maintain muscle mass.

I think, in the next couple of years, we’re going to see a number of studies that show that it probably takes – you do a Benedict-Harris equation for your basal metabolic rate, and it comes out to be 2,100 calories for the day. I suspect there’ll be a time when people are really metabolically flexible when you think, wow, that’s just way too much food. I could literally thrive on 1,300 calories a day for a long period of time if they were the right calories, if I got 56 to 75 grams of protein and if I kept my carbs reasonably low and then used fat to kind of tide over the amount of satiety that I’m looking for.

I make a point that I make every bite of food that I eat – I enjoy the hell out of it, so I’m not – this is not a restriction program for me. This is one of enjoying food.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely.

Mark:
You know what? If you look at the country as a whole, we are a country of excess. We are a country that has been blessed with a lot of opportunities, and one of the things that’s kind of grown out of that is this notion that people have, like what can I get away with? What’s the most amount of food I can eat and not gain weight? What’s the biggest piece of cheesecake I can have and not feel bad about it? What can I get away with? That leads to this gluttony that we all have, like we’re seeing – we see – and I was guilty of that. When I was a runner, I could get away with eating 5, 6, 7,000 calories a day. Now, that was – in retrospect, that was horrendous for my body, because there was all sorts of thermal adjustment taking place in my body, trying to burn off this excess calorie if I couldn’t store it. I couldn’t sleep at night. I’d have probably a sleeping temperature of 102 degrees like a mild fever, just because my body was trying to get rid of all of the calories that I was consuming, because I could get away with it, because I wasn’t gaining weight, right? I wasn’t getting fat. I was a 142-pound marathoner running 110 miles a week, so I was guilty of that same thing.

Now, oddly enough, I go to the gym today, and there’s guys on the treadmill and gals on the treadmill. It’s like, they’re doing 450, 500 calories in a work-out, and I’m like, why? Are you training for a 10K? Oh, no, no, no, we’re just here. Why are you running on the treadmill so much? The answer often is, because I like to eat. It’s like, whoa, wait a minute! You are doing all this work because you haven’t put a lid on your appetite? You haven’t gotten ahold of your appetite, hunger, and cravings. You’re trying to earn or deserve a couple of more bites of something you probably shouldn’t eat in the first place? You know how crazy that is to –

Dr. Pompa:
-inaudible-. It doesn’t work anyway. I don’t know if you saw that Scientific America. They went out and spent time with the Hadza tribe in Northern Tanzania, one of the last hunting/gathering tribes. They measured these people who go out all day without food, by the way. They’re intermittent fasters. They go out all day, fat-adapted, so they were measuring their caloric output with the most accurate way, and on average, for a male, it was around 2,500, 2,600, no matter what. By the way, that’s the same as a couch potato. That’s the same as a person who’s sick. Your caloric output for the day sitting on your couch is still around 2,500, 2,600.

Mark:
Yeah, but that’s – you can look at it two ways. You can look at it one way, which is, oh, geez, what’s the point? I thought the whole point was to become wasteful with my calories and develop a high metabolism, a fast metabolism. Isn’t that what I want as a part of my strategy for maintaining optimal body weight? The answer is no, it’s not. If you could take a look at what’s going on inside the body and realize that, instead of seeing what’s the most I could eat and not gain weight and reversed it into what’s the least amount of food I can eat, maintain muscle mass, have all the energy I require, never get sick, and most importantly, not be hungry? Hunger ruins the whole thing, right? If you look at it from that point of view, and you say, well, what’s the least I can eat, and it’s a remarkably small number compared to what you think you needed in the old days, right? Particularly if – which is what I – I don’t know how you orchestrate your own eating schedule, but I eat two meals a day. I can’t eat three meals a day. It’s just too – there you go.

Dr. Pompa:
Interesting. There are days where my wife and I have gone on vacation, and we’re like, we’re going to eat three meals a day. We can’t. It’s like, we –

Mark:
Exactly. Yeah, I don’t eat breakfast. I have my first meal usually around one o’clock in the afternoon. I get up at 6:30, have a cup of coffee, but that’s it for the day, and I go to work. I do podcasts, I write, I go to the gym, and I work out fasted. I don’t eat any post-work-out meal. I come home. I eat around one o’clock, and then I have my second meal usually around seven, and it’s dinner. It’s usually when my wife says it’s time to stop work, so I work until seven usually, most of the time. That’s it.

You’re right. When we go on vacation, and we go, wow, geez, what are we going to do? Let’s have breakfast, so you have breakfast, and then you go, well, how could we possibly eat lunch four hours later?

Dr. Pompa:
That’s it, exactly.

Mark:
Yet, that’s how people live their lives. People live their lives thinking, well, breakfast, lunch, dinner, and not only that, but 10:30 break, bagel and coffee or donut and coffee in the breakroom, three o’clock in the afternoon pick-me-up snacking in front of the TV, watching Game of Thrones with a big -inaudible-, whatever. When you develop this skill, this metabolic flexibility, this ability to wake up in the morning and go, I don’t need to eat breakfast. I have all the energy I need to get the day started.

Dr. Pompa:
You’re burning fat. You’re still burning fat.

Mark:
You’re burning fat, and you’re doing it efficiently, so it’s not like – I’ve had nine, ten percent body fat for the last – for 40 years, so it’s not like I get fat and then don’t get fat. It’s just that I’m very efficient at how I either store it or take it out of storage, but if you come to that point where, first of all, you only eat two meals a day of choice – it’s not something I force myself to do. That’s how I wind up – I only eat when I’m hungry, and those are the times I get hungry. Sometimes, I’m hungry, and I don’t eat, because I’ve got work to do and stuff like that, but it’s almost impossible then to get to 3,000 calories a day or whatever.

It’s so easy to what I would say trend toward your ideal body composition in incorporating this keto ability, this sort of newfound skill to be metabolically flexible and to extract energy from whatever substrate is available at the time.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and I want people to be clear. Mark and I and Meredith, it took time for us to get this efficient, so I can not even be in ketosis, purposely trying to increase my carbs, and before my first meal, if I measured my ketones, I’m far into ketosis without even trying, right? It’s like, that’s the point is we’re still benefitting from ketones even when we’re not in ketosis, because we’re that metabolically flexible that our body’s burning fat when it needs to. When we eat glucose or carbs, our body burns it, but I think you hit it, though. This is a big problem.

I went to Israel for a docuseries that we were filming, and they were eating three meals a day, and I was with the crew. I was stunned, Mark. It was remarkable to me, because I hadn’t been around that in a while. I felt like all we did was eat. It was like, it was the breakfast and the whole thing, and then it was like, just when the day got going, it was like they were going, okay, what are we eating for lunch? I’m like, holy cow, so we have to break now and go to lunch? Then, it was another hour for the lunch, and then it was a dinner. Oh, and then, in between on the bus to the next shift, there was eating going on. This is ridiculous.

I’m telling you, if you want to eat faster than anybody, simply eat that often, and you’re right. At the end of the day, you add the increased carbs to that. You add eating all of these things that we shouldn’t eat all year round to that. It’s ridiculous, and no wonder we’re in the shape we’re in, Mark. No wonder. Your book really gives some pointers to how to get to this flexibility, and I love that.

Mark:
Yeah, well, you know, it’s interesting also that the people who were on the bus with you, because they’re sugar-burners, because they haven’t built the metabolic machinery to burn fat, because they’re not keto-adapted or fat-adapted, they needed to eat –

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely.

Mark:
– on those cycles. When people hear about what we’re talking about here, keto, and they go, well, I could never not eat breakfast, I could never skip a meal, I could never go a day or two without eating –

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, they need it.

Mark:
The interesting thing is they can’t without an incredible amount of struggle and sacrifice and focus and concentration, because when you haven’t done the work, when you haven’t built the metabolic machinery, when you are carb-dependent, then you literally do have to eat every couple of hours, because the body either can’t store any more glucose in the muscle cells, so it stores it as fat in the fat cells – the amount of insulin that you just secreted in response to that overconsumption of carbohydrate has not only caused the body to try to dispose of those carbs but also has locked the fat into the fat cells, and now you are unable to take that fat out of the fat cells and actually use it as energy, which was always the intention that, as part of the elegant system that is created through evolution –

Dr. Pompa:
Jason Fung –

Mark:
You’ve got all these –

Dr. Pompa:
Sorry. Go ahead. Finish your point.

Mark:
No, no, no. No, I just – so that’s the reason for the last 40 years in this carbcentric America, anyway. People have said, oh, don’t go three hours without eating. Humans are grazers. Don’t go three hours without eating, particularly carbohydrates, and get a little bit of protein at every meal, because you don’t want to be cannibalizing your muscle tissue. The concept of cannibalizing muscle tissue only happens because when you do run out of carbs, or you are unable to access any more stored body fat, the brain, which needs – because it hasn’t learned how to burn ketones, the brain, which then only runs on glucose, goes, where are we going to get our glucose? I know. We’ll create a signal to the adrenals to secrete cortisol.

Cortisol will then literally pervade our bodies and look for muscle tissue to break down, send the amino acids to the liver to become glucose, so the brain can stay happy, and that’s this terrible catabolic treadmill, catabolic/anabolic, in and out on a daily basis, because you haven’t developed the skill that you were literally born with, which is to be good at burning fat and good at making ketones and burning ketones.

All that shifts when you become keto-adapted, when you do a keto reset. All that whole thing, you just throw it out the window. You’re not hungry. You don’t need to eat. You don’t feel the need to eat. You feel sometimes like three meals a day is wasting your time, like what are we doing sitting here? We’ve got fun to have and work to do or whatever.

Dr. Pompa:
I have a saying. Don’t eat less; eat less often. At the end of the day, you’ll eat less.

Mark:
Yeah, exactly.

Dr. Pompa:
Jason Fung puts it this way, just to describe exactly what you’re saying. You’re eating, and you’re pushing the glucose in the cells, pushing it in the liver, which holds most of it. Then, when the liver’s full, then it’s pushing it in the muscle cells, and then it runs out of space. Then, it’s now fat. Now, we’re pushing it into the fat cells, so this is how America gets fat.

When you eat less often, what we’re talking about, and lower carb, now we’re burning – we’re giving our body time to burn those stores, so when we do eat glucose or carbohydrates, to say it like that, we have plenty of storage. Plenty, so we don’t get that damaging effect, and we’re definitely not storing it as a fat, but what happens is, when you run out of storage for the glucose, now it’s out causing damage, oxidative damage, damaging your cells, causing inflammation. Insulin is up, trying to get rid of it, causing damage, inflammation, but when you give your body – when you’re eating less often and lower carb, you have plenty of storage. You’re not getting the damage, so it’s just another benefit.

Talk about – okay, what did you learn from your first books to this book? How would you differentiate this book from some of your other books, which were fantastic? Take us through that evolution.

Mark:
You know, the first book, The Primal Blueprint, was a broad look at the lifestyle behaviors of our ancestors and in search of ways in which we could, again, try to recreate some of those experiences so that our genes would be happy, literally, and turn on genes to build muscle, support the immune system, and learn how to burn fat, and all those things that we kind of all list as things that we would like to achieve. The Keto Reset was basically next-level stuff. It was like, okay, how do I take what I learned from the first book and build upon that? I think one of the things that I got from the research was this concept that I wasn’t even quite that buying into the idea that we could eat less and thrive, that we could eat less and maintain muscle mass. I was more about, in the first book, shifting the macros around but keeping the calories the same, and by shifting the macros –

Dr. Pompa:
I like that book, so yeah, I gathered that. Yep.

Mark:
This was more of a – again, it’s kind of next-level stuff. How do I prove to myself and to my reader that it doesn’t take that many calories for you to thrive? I started looking at the human body as a closed system for days at a time, and thinking back to our ancestors and thinking – there were days when there was no food, and you couldn’t get hangry, right? You couldn’t get upset or moody or beat up on your spouse or yell at your kids. You just lived your life and moved on, and it wasn’t a big issue, because in this closed system, you take fat out of storage, you combust it, or you take some of the triglycerides, and you spin off the glycerol, and you make glucose, or you take the other part of it, and you make ketones.

It’s such a cool, closed loop that, for days or even weeks at a time, there’s no downside. There’s no suffering. There’s no loss of performance. In fact, in many cases, you would argue there’s an improvement in performance. You would argue that a hungry hunter is actually a more acute, aware hunter, certainly on point in trying to address the fact, the reality, that there’s no food. Am I going to get food? It serves you no purpose to be depressed about it, to be pissed off about it, to be like, oh, I give up, there’s no food. Hell, I’m just going to pull over on a side road and die.

This idea that we can be a closed system for long periods of time started to then lead me down that path of looking at the old calorie restriction society people. You’ve got the Roy Walfords of the world, who tried to keep the macros, whatever. They still had to keep their carbohydrate level high, because everybody assumed that you needed carbs, and yet trying to consume 1,200 calories a day for years at a time and miserable. If you ever talked to any of these calorie-restricting guys, they were fricking miserable. They were so trying to stay focused on what they were doing, but they couldn’t, because they weren’t quite keto-adapted. They were just kind of low-carb – I mean, excuse me, high-carb, low-calorie guys.

Dr. Pompa:
Horrid.

Mark:
Yeah, it was a good idea – right idea, poor execution, I think. How can you achieve the benefits of this low-carb strategy, and one of those benefits that everybody is seeking is this cell repair concept, which is an anti-aging concept, which means that, in the absence of lots of nutrition, a cell will look – I’m going to give it a little bit of a – I’m going to anthropomorphize the cell for a second here and say the cell is thinking, well, if there’s lots of nutrition, then why don’t I divide, because there would be lots of nutrition for two of me? Cells tend to want to divide. Cells tend to want to pass the genetic material along to the next generation. That is, after all, the ultimate expression of evolution. A cell that’s faced with lots of nutrition surrounding it says, hey, let’s just divide. Party on, everybody, and let’s have a great time. Cells that are also – cells that divide also, if you’ve heard about telomeres, there are a finite number of divisions that some of the organ systems in the body will allow the cells to divide into.

Now, a cell that’s facing a dearth of nutrients would like outside and go, geez, there’s not even enough nutrients for me, let alone two of me, so there’s no reason to divide. I know what I’ll do. I’ll start to do some housekeeping, some house cleaning. I’ll start to consume some of the damaged proteins and some of the damaged fats within myself. I will start to repair some of the DNA that may have been damaged by reactive oxygen species or free radicals that were a result of combustion of glucose when all hell was breaking loose and there was too many – there was too much nutrition around. The cell thinks kind of like, okay, I’m going to be protecting myself and repairing myself. There’s even this autophagy, which extends to senescent cells that just go, you know what? This cell right over here, we don’t even need it anymore. All it’s doing is causing potential for damage in either the mitochondria or in the DNA. Let’s just consume that cell. Let’s just get rid of that cell. We don’t need it anymore.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s sucking our energy, and more energy – you know, we’re –

Mark:
Yeah, so it’s a really – again, it’s an elegant housekeeping, anti-aging concept that not many people either know about or understand, but I think that’s where the new research is headed, because for the longest time, people thought that fasting has some benefits, and I’d like to understand what the benefits of fasting is. One of those benefits is, once you are fat- and keto-adapted, then taking two or three days of not eating can have some pretty profound anti-aging effects.

Dr. Pompa:
No doubt. No doubt about it. We promote that on this show. I believe a couple fasts a year or even just one extended fast is transformative. Autophagy – obviously, your body will, as you pointed out, eat the bad cells, but here’s the best part. You said it. The good cells get better. They get stronger. They get more fat-adapted. The mitochondria get more efficient. All of that occurs. Everything that you said takes place, so I believe in periodic fasting, even weekly. I’ll go a day without eating, because I’m fat-adapted. I’ll blow ketones up, and my body – brain’s using them, my body’s loving the fat, but what happens? Stem cells rise to create new and even better cells, and your body’s eating the bad tissue.

It’s that stinking intelligent, so we’re talking about feast days, and we’re talking about famine, and that’s my diet variation concept. It’s feast/famine cycling. Our ancestors were forced to do it. We kind of have to be a little more conscious about it, but I tell you what. It makes this all so easy, because when I know that I don’t have to worry, and I can eat a day of higher carbs if I desire – I’m metabolically adapted. I can do that, but also there’s days – I had one yesterday. I didn’t eat. I ate one meal. It was later. It was like five o’clock, and I’m like, oh, I didn’t even eat my earlier meal. I work, work, work, and that actually happened two days this week already. I didn’t even plan or try. It just happened, because I’m fat-adapted. I’m metabolically –

Mark:
That’s what I do. That’s how I do it a lot is I don’t really plan on these fasts. They just happen organically, because I’m busy doing something else and because I’ve gotten such a hold of my hunger, appetite, and cravings. Those don’t come into play, and it’s like you said, like, oh, my gosh. It’s oops, I forgot to eat. Oh, well. I’m better off for having forgotten to eat.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. No doubt. Meredith, I want to make sure you’ve just – Meredith has, I’m sure, a lot of great questions, because she lives this life, that’s for sure.

Meredith:
Yeah, and I agree with so much of what you said and especially with the fasting. It’s such a faster way, I’ve found, to get into ketosis versus eating a lot of fat, just that restriction with the intermittent fasting, and some longer fasts are just really, really powerful. I’m curious, too, because although it kind of just seems simple, just the metabolic flexibility, and for us, having lived it and done it for a while, it really is, but I get a lot of questions about ratios of fat and protein and carbs and specifically proteins and working out to get muscle gain, so can you speak to a little bit about those ratios and maybe someone who’s just starting, how they could kind of go about determining that?

Mark:
Sure. First of all, I don’t like ratios, because that’s – ratios kind of pigeon-hole this whole thing into – they would vary from one person to another, based on their metabolic history and how efficient they currently are and what their goals are and things like that. What I’d rather do is start and look at each macro individually. When you look at protein, first of all, you don’t need that much protein. You don’t need as much protein as the rest of the world, particularly the body-building world, would have you believe. In some cases, it might be 35, 45 grams a day for some women. As it stands now, I can’t imagine anybody that I know of whatever size, if they are metabolically efficient, needing more than 100, 110 grams of protein a day. Now, you can take in 140 or 150 grams of protein, but then you’re starting back on this inefficiency cycle where the body says, well, I’m metabolically efficient, so I don’t need that much protein, and so I’m going to take the excess protein, and I’m going to either have to spend energy deaminating it and peeing it out, or I’m going to have to turn it into glucose. I’m going to use it as part of my gluconeogenesis efforts, and so it becomes counterproductive to take in excessive amounts of protein.

If you start with protein, and you go, well, on a daily basis, anywhere from 40 to 100, we’ll say 110 grams of protein a day, but the body is so efficient at holding onto protein, particularly within those parameters, that I don’t even look at protein on a day-to-day basis, certainly not on a meal-to-meal basis. I look at it on almost a weekly basis, like how much protein did I get in the week? The body is so good with this amino acid pool and this protein sink, and it stores it as muscle, and it does – there are a lot of things that the body does with amino acids that allow for a lot of leeway in protein, but in no event do you need to consume more than 100, 120 grams a day, no matter who you are, so let’s start with that. We start with 120 grams of protein as a max, max, max. That’s only 480 calories if we’re going to assign value to this.

When we talk about protein, we can’t assign – it’s weird to assign a caloric value to protein, because protein is largely a structural repair mechanism. You build muscle with it. You build -inaudible-. You build enzymes with it, and you don’t want to combust protein, so the idea that protein would even be assigned a caloric value is kind of antithetical to this whole process. It’s like, I don’t want to count my – particularly the first 40 grams. The first 40 grams you take in every day ought to have a zero caloric value assigned to them in my world.

Then, you go to the next level, and you say, okay, how much carbohydrate do I want to take in? If I’m going to try and stay keto, I’ll probably keep it 30, 40, 50 grams, if I’m an athlete, maybe 60, 70 grams in a day. At 70 grams, that’s only 280 calories’ worth, so we’re like at 800 calories, and then the rest is kind of topping it off with healthy fats, and that comes back to how aggressive or how gluttonous you want to be. My point is, you don’t need – if you look at the basic requirements, you only need a little bit of protein compared to what most people think. You only need – if you’re going to be keto, you only need a few carbs. By the way, if – Dan, you and I, a big carb day for us might be 175 grams.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, yeah.

Mark:
Right, and that’s 700 calories on a big day, on a big carb day, so the rest is fat, and fat has nine calories per gram, so if you look at your macro ratios, you would say, well, how do I use fat to kind of top off my eating so that I’m satisfied, I’ve enjoyed the food experience, I’m getting enough extra energy or whatever energy’s coming from the fat? I don’t look at the ratios as much as I look at one, two, and three. How do I put them together? I might look at a fourth macro right now, which is fiber, because I want to be sure I get enough fiber in my diet, because I want to be feeding my gut bacteria, and if I feed them appropriately, what are they going to be making? Short-chain fatty acids, right?

They’re going to be actually producing some fat themselves, and that’s why, on almost any given day, I have a big salad, and in that big salad, I put a lot of vegetables, a lot of fibrous vegetables. I’ll put some form of protein, 20, 25 grams of protein, on top, and then I douse it with some Primal Kitchen Salad Dressing, which is healthy fats, made with avocado oil and herbs and spices and things like that. Now, I’ve made this big, wonderful, tasty, crunchy, fulfilling salad that probably only has 20 grams of carbs in the entire bowl, because lettuce doesn’t have virtually none, right? It has 25 grams of protein. It might have 25, maybe 30 grams of fat if I put avocado and a couple of nuts on top. It is a perfectly keto meal, and yet somebody would look at a salad and go, well, that’s not keto. I thought keto was bacon cheeseburger with butter on it, and yet – so I’ve crafted this perfectly keto meal out of carbs, out of what people assume to be mostly carbs, right?

Anyway, so that’s my take on this thing is you have to kind of look at each meal and each snack and go, does that kind of fit the parameters here? I wouldn’t look at ratios or percentages, because they can be all over the place. I know people that have – what’s his name, at Hyperlipid? Peter at Hyperlipid. I don’t know if you ever followed his stuff. There was a time when he was – 90% of his calories came from fat. Most of that came from heavy cream. Geez, that’s a little bit overboard, and it kind of misses the point here, that I want to enjoy every bite of food I put in my mouth, so if I’m forcing myself to eat a lot of fat just because I think that’s how I’m going to be keto – and by the way, Meredith, to your point about ketosis and using fats to be in ketosis, one of the funny things, interesting things about ketosis, ketosis is basically a term that describes excess ketones in the bloodstream.

If people who enter this area that I call keto would say, well, I want to be in ketosis, and in ketosis, for them, is often defined as producing so many ketones we can’t use them. You look at your blood ketone level, and it’s 4, 5, 6 millimole, and you go, oh, I win the keto game. I’ve got the highest ketones. That’s not metabolic efficiency. That’s not metabolic flexibility. That’s just producing a lot of ketones. In many regards, that’s your body not quite being metabolically flexible yet and going, well, we better start producing a lot of ketones just in case we need them.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s true, Mark. The more efficient I got, the lower, when I was in ketosis, my numbers got, because your body oxidizes and burns them. Now, my breath ketones actually go up, but yeah.

Mark:
Yeah, your breath acetone goes up, but the –

Dr. Pompa:
The acetone goes up.

Mark:
Yeah. Correct. This idea that when you’re making a lot of ketones, you must be successful. Yeah, so you fit the definition of ketosis, excess ketones in the bloodstream, but the irony is, the people that I know that have been keto the longest, who have been 10, 15 years keto, they might get 20, 30 grams of carbs a day, and they might blow a 0.4 millimole on a keto thing, because here’s what’s going on. They’ve been keto for so long, the muscles are so fat-adapted that they – number one, they don’t need that much in the way of glucose, and number two, and more importantly, the muscles that are so fat-adapted go, you know what? We don’t even need ketones. Send the ketones off to the brain. We don’t need them. We’re so good at burning fat and a little bit of glycogen, we don’t need ketones. Send them off to the brain.

Now, the brain, which has a pretty significant daily requirement for energy – 20 to 25 percent of our daily energy is consumed by the brain, but when it becomes keto-adapted, it doesn’t – and one thing you need to know about the brain is the brain doesn’t have this dynamic range of energy requirements throughout the day. Dan, if you go to the gym, and you do a heavy leg day with squats and presses and deadlifts and all this other stuff, your energy requirements for that work-out might go from one MET to 20 METs, right? You might be burning 700 calories in that one work-out, most of it going to your legs, but the brain isn’t experiencing that same wild fluctuation. The brain’s like, I got a steady state kind of usage throughout the day. It might fluctuate maybe 2x, but it’s never much more than that.

When you get keto-adapted and fat-adapted, and you’re only producing ketones, largely to offset the need for glucose in the brain, then the liver’s going, I don’t need to pump out excessive amounts of ketones. That’s wasteful from an evolutionary standpoint. I don’t want to waste energy. I don’t want to waste ketones. I don’t want to pee purple on a strip and be raising that high, saying I’m successful at ketosis.

It’s almost like ketosis isn’t what you want. You want to be good at burning fat. You want to be metabolically flexible, and you want to be metabolically efficient, and so a metabolically efficient person only makes enough ketones to generate the energy in the brain as required. Because the brain doesn’t have this dynamic range of energy requirements, then there’s this sort of steady state production, low-level production of ketones by the liver all day long to just feed the brain. Again, it’s this crazy, elegant system, and if we can access it, and if we can do the work and build the metabolic machinery, we are all so much better off for having done that.

Dr. Pompa:
Mark, that’s why I think by taking exogenous ketones – look, if you take exogenous ketones to have this extraordinary situation, fine, but I believe that it messes with that elegant system that you’re talking about. The body gets messages it shouldn’t be getting. We have elevated ketones and glucose at the same time, and all kinds of bad things potentially can happen.

Mark:
Yeah, now, going back to your Zach Bitter example and other athletes, the use of exogenous ketones in a performance situation – I think the next real breakthrough in world records are going to come from a fat-adapted, keto-adapted athlete who’s using SuperStarch, which is a slow-burning carbohydrate, and maybe some MCT oil and maybe some ketone supplements in a race and just –

Dr. Pompa:
No, no, that’s a different kind of situation where I’ve taken them before a work-out, and I don’t knock that this works, but people take these things and go, oh, I’m in ketosis. It’s simply not true and -inaudible-.

Mark:
Yeah, you can’t hack your way into ketosis with ketones.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and it messes with that elegant system. We’re out of time, and I wish we could keep going. My gosh, that was fast, but that was extraordinary, Mark. We’re so in line, and I appreciate you coming on. Thank you.

Mark:
My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Meredith:
Yes.

Mark:
Yep. Thanks, Meredith.

Meredith:
Oh, yes. Thanks so much, Mark. Thanks for what you’re doing. This information is so important to get out, and I love the big picture perspective on it as well. I think it just – it makes so much sense, and I think it’s going to resonate with a lot of people, so thank you so much for what you’re doing and the amazing food that you manufacture as well. It’s awesome stuff. Thanks, Dr. Pompa, as always. Thanks, everybody, for tuning in. Have a fantastic weekend, and we’ll see you.