Transcript of Episode 146: Can you drink wine and stay in ketosis?
With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Meredith Dykstra, and Todd White
Meredith Dykstra:
Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I'm your host Meredith Dykstra and this is Episode Number 146, and we have Dr. Dan Pompa, our resident cellular healing specialist on the line. Today we have a very special guest, and his name is Todd White. Todd White is a wine expert and we have a lot of fun things to talk about. This is not your average wine that he makes. We're going to talk a lot about wine today, but before we delve in, let me tell you guys a little bit more about Todd. Todd White has been a serial entrepreneur and creator since he was age 17. Today, after 15 years in the wine business, his life is dedicated to educating and helping people make better choices about food nutrition and how they think about consuming alcohol. He is the founder of Drive Farm Wine, a writer, speaker, and a leading authority on healthy organic natural wines, and the importance of micro-dosing alcohol for health, longevity, and vitality.
Todd's passion is unlocking the best way to enjoy alcohol, how to enjoy the benefits of modern consumption while avoiding the negative outcomes. Todd has been a featured guest on many of the nation's leading health influential podcasts, including David Asbury, Bullet Proof Radio; Mark Sisson, Primal Blue Print; Abel James, Fat Burning Man; Rob Wolf's, Paleo Solution; and Jimmy Moore, Living Low-carb Show. Todd is a self-described biohacker who practices daily meditation, Wim Hof breathing, cold thermogenesis, a ketogenic diet, intermittent fasting, and he is a fitness enthusiast. He's also a frequent speaker on ketogenic lifestyle, and is completing a cookbook on the ketogenic diet and lifestyle to be released this fall called, Keto Well. He was most recently the featured ketogenic speaker at the 2016 Bulletproof annual conference on biohacking. He lives in Oak Brook, California in the heart of Napa Valley wine country. Welcome, Todd White to Cellular Healing TV.
Todd White:
Awesome! Hey, guys, I'm just super excited to be on your show today. We have a lot of fun stuff to talk about and wine is the topic.
Dr. Pompa:
Man, I tell you [00:02:17] comment. I mean, think about it, intermittent fasting, ketosis. I mean, we could do a three-hour show, I think, and just keep rocking it out, but today's topic will be trapped and forced into wine. Not really, that's probably my favorite subject. I mean, my gosh, we get to talk about wine on Cellular Healing TV. I can testify to your product personally. I can already testify to many of my clients who are not able to drink wine and I said, “Try these.” They were able to drink wine. You have already made a lot of people very, very happy. So let's tell people why that is. What's the difference with these wines, Todd?
Todd White:
Well, I can't wait to get into the wine thing. Hopefully, we'll get not only, but just a couple moments on ketosis and also my favorite topic of the moment, which is intermittent fasting. I know you and I have talked about, we just eat too much too often, and the wrong things, but before that, let's get right on to wine.
I came down this path. I've been in the wine business for a long time and as I got deeper into biohacking over recent years, and I think ketogenic for the last three years. what happened next was I just found I could not drink traditional wines anymore. What I'm going to have to do here, because I'm at my office today—this is kind of a crazy thing, but there's some beeping out in my warehouse, so I'm just going to move rooms while we're talking real quick.
Meredith Dykstra:
I thought we were going on a tour.
Todd White:
Looks like it's going to calm down now, so anyway.
Dr. Pompa:
You could show us where the wine is, though.
Todd White:
The warehouse is actually right next to me in a separate building, but we're kind of adjoined. It's noisy there for a second. Looks like they've calmed down. All right, back to the wine thing.
Dr. Pompa:
That was the truck backing up. Beep, beep, beep.
Todd White:
It was the truck backing up, actually. There's a huge, huge truck here making a delivery. Anyway, hopefully they'll get settled down back there. When I got to where I couldn't drink traditional wines anymore and so I started biohacking, and unpacking what was going on with wines. Initially, I thought it was just the high alcohol. We'll talk about how and why alcohols are higher in commercial wines today than ever. It's both the wine making style as well as it's being fueled by irrigation in the US, but we'll cover that.
I thought it was mainly the higher alcohol. I started dosing down on alcohol, which was effective, but then I discovered the natural wine movement, which is really exploding in Europe. There's not—there's very little natural wine made in the United States, so we'll define what natural wine means because most people think, well, isn't all wine natural? In fact, it's not. I'm going to cover all those topics for you. When I discovered natural wine and got rid of all the additives and toxins that are in commercial wines today, in addition to dosing down the alcohol, I discovered that I could drink wines again. This is what many of our customers also discovered. You've probably—Dan, you've had this experience, right? I mean, you've had the experience with our wines. They literally make you feel different and you don't have that negative repercussions. What's been your experience?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, just that. At the top of the show I said that it's—look, I've had many clients who are not able to drink wine. They're neurotoxic, they're very sensitive, and they're able to drink these wines. Again, what I found personally is I can drink a lot more of this wine, no problem, feel fine, right? Of course, we're going to discuss why that is, but there's a couple reasons why that is. Yeah, I know these wines are also—as we're going to talk a little bit about ketosis. They're keto approved, which could be one answer why. There's no sugar in it, but I think there's other answers too.
Todd White:
They are. All of our wines are sugar-free. In fact, we do independent lab testing and even the King keto, Dr. Dominic D'Agostino, who's the leading ketogenic—
Dr. Pompa:
He just spoke at our seminar. He's been a guest on the show. Yeah, two weeks ago he was at our seminar in Vegas.
Todd White:
Yeah, awesome guy. In fact, endorses our wine product and he's done independent lab testing with—in his own la, and at his house with blood testing on our wines and has recently posted and endorses what we do as ketogenic wine. Let's talk about what makes a wine natural. Let's start with farming. Natural wines are always organically or biodynamically farmed. Biodynamic farming is just a prescriptive of organic farming, so it's an advanced form of chemical free farming. All natural wines are chemically free farmed or biodynamic. There also dry farmed. What that means, just like our name, the wines have no irrigation and the reason that's super important is because irrigation, fundamentally, changes the physiology of the plant, and most importantly, how fruit ripens.
What happens at the end of the ripening process is, that when a fruit is filled with water, having been irrigated, is that the character of the fruit is not as well developed and the phenyl flavors don't develop correctly at the ripening process. What that means is that the fruit has to be picked later in the ripening process with higher sugars. What higher sugars create are higher alcohol, and higher sugar byproducts like glycerol, right? It's important to have organic chemically free farm -inaudible-.
Let me give you an example of what irrigation does to a vine. When you irrigate a vine, it gets all of its nutrients and all of its water right from the surface from a little drip hose just above the trunk, right? The root ball of an irrigated vine is about 3 feet in diameter and about 3 feet deep. Where an unirrigated grape vine at maturity, will have a root structure that can range 30, 40, 50 feet deep as that vine struggles in search of water and nutrients, right? It's struggling against its neighbor, it's struggling against nature, to feed. This creates a fruit with much higher character, right? This is a reason in most of Europe, almost all of Europe, it's against the law to irrigate a grapevine. In fact, irrigation did not come to the United States until 1973, for grapevines, right?
Now, why do you irrigate a grapevine? Why do American vendors irrigate a grapevine? Because it creates a higher yield and the fruit weighs more. It's filled with water, right? Fruit is sold by the time, so if it weighs more, then there's more profitable. Just like with most of Agra business, the industry has consolidated and the goal, and the objective have a corporate consolidation is not to make better, healthier wines, it's to make wines cheaper, and faster.
Dr. Pompa:
Always.
Todd:
This has happened all across our food and everything that we grow. This has been a massive, massive problem driven by corporate America. To give you an idea, in the American wine industry, 52% of all the wines made in the United States are made by just three giant companies. Now, you don’t know that, and they don’t want you to know that. It’s a multi-billion dollar operations, and so they hide behind thousands of brands and labels to have you believe that you’re drinking from a small farmhouse or somebody’s chateau when in fact you’re drinking from massive factories. Just to take that one step further, 70% of all the wines made in the United States are made by just the top 30 companies, mass consolidation of the industry. What happens with mass consolidation is we’re working on spreadsheets. We’re not working on your health, right?
Again, the goal was to make wines faster and cheaper. Not healthier or better. How do they do that? First of all, they use a whole bunch of chemicals, right? What’s little known to your listeners or anybody who hasn’t heard a podcast or read an article that we’ve written about this topic—because this is the big dirty dark secret of the wine industry. There are 76 additives approved by the FDA for the use in winemaking. Of the 76 approved additives—which your audience has no idea that these additives even exist. They think wine’s fermented grape juice, but in fact, it’s not. Of the 76 chemical additives that are approved by the FDA for the use in winemaking, 38 of them include the acronym GRAS. You and I know that that stands for generally regarded as safe, so the FDA is telling us that, half of these additives, they’re safe, right?
Now, why don’t your—here’s the reason your audience doesn’t know these additives. There’s no contents or nutritional label on a bottle of wine. It’s the only major food product without a contents label on it. Now, let me tell you why it doesn’t have a contents label on it. If it did, the contents label would be this big with a bunch of names you couldn’t produce. You couldn’t pronounce, right, just like you find in food products today. Wines are filled with preservatives and additives and adjustments, right, to make them snackable and drinkable and to make you want to crave them more, right? The reason that there’s not a contents label on the bottle of wine is because the wine industry has spent tens of millions of dollars in collaboration with the government to keep wine labels off of wine. Now, if it were just fermented grape juice, why would they care if there was a contents label on it? It’s not, and that’s what they don’t want you to know.
Natural wines contain zero additives. They are also fermented with native yeast that are indigenous to the vineyard where the grapes are grown. Commercial wines are inoculated with genetically modified commercial yeast. The very first thing a winemaker does when a standard wine is made is they use sulfur dioxide to kill the native yeast, right, so that they don’t ferment. Then they inoculate the juice with a commercial yeast, and we don’t know what the health ramifications of these genetically modified yeasts are. We just know that when wines are fermented with native yeasts and additive free, they don’t contain any of these problems commonly associated with drinking wines, right? We’re talking about native yeast, no additives, no adjustments, organic farming, and biodynamic practices. This is what makes up a natural wine.
Again, less than 1% of wine made worldwide is actually naturally made. We’re talking about this permeation of additives and adjustments and manipulations to wine are spread globally. I mean, they began in the West. They began in here in America, but it’s really a global problem now. There’s a few hundred thousand winemakers worldwide. Less than 500 actually make these natural wines.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. It’s hard to believe.
Todd:
It’s just crazy. Here we are trying to protect our health, trying to really be aware, and listening to folks like you and other health influencers who are really doing amazing work in educating people about how to live a healthier longer health span. I know you and I have talked about this before. The goal is really health span. Not lifespan, right? We want to be healthier longer, right?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.
Todd:
Your listeners and my followers and the folks that we associate with and live with are super concerned about what they eat and drink. We try to eat whole and fresh, and clean and organic, but then nobody’s really telling us about what we’re drinking. Most of your audience enjoys imbibing in alcohol, as do I. I want to take the same approach toward wine or alcohol consumption that I take toward everything that I think about consuming.
Dr. Pompa:
Two things, there was just a study going around talking about how one or two glasses of wine is actually good for our microbiome. However, you add 76 additives and other chemicals. Who knows, right, higher alcohol contents? I think we go against what we know is true about wine. A little wine is—from the antioxidant values to the fermentation, what it does for our microbiome I think we’re just learning. It has all types of benefits until we screw that process up.
European wines, no doubt. We see that benefit to the microbiome as opposed to the U.S. wines. Obviously, European wines, one thing you pointed out was—number one is that it’s illegal to use irrigation, so they’re getting a better fruit, obviously, a better product even to make the wine with. They’re not adding the additives, evidently. Some do though, right? If you’re going to find natural wines, you’re going to have to go to Europe. Am I right on that?
Todd:
Substantially, most natural wines, 95% are produced in Europe. That does not mean all European wines are natural.
Dr. Pompa:
Correct.
Todd:
There’s a very specific category. We’re the largest reseller of natural wines in the world now. If you were to buy wines from us, you’re going to get a lab tested natural wine that isn’t…
Dr. Pompa:
That’s where I was headed. That’s where I was headed next. You have a criteria. We risk it. Oh, natural wine, we order from them. However, we don’t really know. Do they have sugar or not? We really don’t know that. You do. You test them.
Talk a little bit about that testing. One of the things you look at too is the alcohol content. Real wine really has a lower alcohol content that we’re finding in the U.S. The U.S. wines, the Napa wines, people like the higher alcohol, so that’s probably part of it. Talk about your criteria, and talk about your testing. Really, that’s why I want to buy wine from Todd.
Todd:
Right. We have a very specific testing protocol. We’re looking at alcohol. We’re looking at sugars. Because I’m sugar free, I want to drink wine that’s sugar free. Consequently, it’s virtually carb free because the carbs in wine are coming from sugar. We’re also looking for mycotoxins like ochratoxin A. There is no screening in the United States.
This is really interesting. Quite a few of your audience and there are a lot of folks in the health movement who were concerned about molds, right, and quite a few people who have allergies to mold. All of our wines are tested for ochratoxin A, which is the primary mold found in grape farming. The problem in the United States, there is no screening for ochratoxin A. It is not required by the government. Now, you can get it screened. You can lab test the wine for ochratoxin A, and it is required. If you’re an American wine producer and you export to Europe and other parts of the world, they actually require that you submit an ochratoxin A report as a part of your export lab reports, right? Our government doesn’t require that we look at it here, so we’re also screening for molds.
Here’s the interesting thing about alcohol. Let’s talk about alcohol for just a second. Alcohol is a toxic. I mean it’s a toxin. It’s poisonous, right? So is water and oxygen in the wrong dose, right?
Dr. Pompa:
Mm-hmm.
Todd:
Dosage really matters in everything that we do, and the reason we talk about micro-dosing alcohol. Let me talk about once again the government and their collaboration with the wine industry in not being honest with the public. When you get American bottled wine and it says 15% on the label, which is quite common—alcohol levels have risen in wine over the last couple of decades both as a result of irrigation and as a result of wine making styles, right? Americans, typically, historically want bigger, bolder, bigger, right? In everything, we just like big, right, including alcohol and this boldness of taste. That’s not how real wine tastes. Real wine doesn’t have that kind of alcohol level in it.
The resulting alcohol in a bottle of wine will be determined by the sugar level in the fruit at the time of picking. The higher the sugar caused by irrigation—the higher the sugar, the higher corresponding outcome of alcohol will be. American wines now are—domestic wines, commercial wines are typically seeing 14½ to 16, 16½% alcohol stated on the bottle. Now when I say stated, what that means is that the alcohol—the wine industry is back in bed with the government, and the government has allowed the wine industry to be dishonest with you. What I mean by that, about alcohol, is that what’s stated on the bottle by law is not required to be accurate. If a wine says 14% on the label, legally it can be as high as 15½%. The wine industry gets up to a point and a half to mislead you about how much alcohol is in it.
Now, the reason that happened is because that law was written back in post prohibition era when the testing methods for alcohol were not as accurate as they are today, but there’s no reason for that to remain on the books today. The lab methods for measuring alcohol are extremely accurate today as technology has evolved. Again, the wine industry wants to keep that so they can fudge, and tell you that there’s a lower amount of alcohol than is actually in the bottle. The reason that matters is because here’s what we want from alcohol. Am I right? You can drink spirits. Let’s talk about just drinking in general for a moment. You can drink spirits, and we’re talking about a 40% dose of alcohol, right? Spirits are clean when they’re distilled. In the Paleo movement or many people say you should drink -inaudible-. It’s plant based and it’s distilled, so it’s clean.
I agree with of all that, except that the alcohol dose is simply too high, right? You’re talking about 40% alcohol. Then you can go to traditional wines, which are 14 to 16, 17% alcohol, or you can go to beers, which are strictly out for me for two reasons. Sugar levels are too high and the gluten levels. Even it’s gluten free, you sugar level and high—your sugar level is very high in beer, right, which is why you have the beer gut. We know that’s an insulin response. It leaves me with how do I get a responsible dose of alcohol to achieve the following effect? I only drink at night, generally around the table. We don’t’ drink in the daytime here. I don’t recommend people drink during the daytime for a whole host of reason.
Dr. Pompa:
We fast…
Todd:
What’s that?
Dr. Pompa:
I said we fast during the day. We don’t want to drink that. We want to keep it going.
Todd:
Exactly, exactly. Here’s the benefit of alcohol and how alcohol is just super positive, an amazing drug, right? Here’s how it’s positive. We’re around the dinner table. We’re going to have a lift of euphoria, a bringing of creative expression. We’re going to have a little lowering of our vulnerability window, which allows us to know one another better, right, which allows us to bond. This is the reason that people drink with their buddies, and they have these bonding experiences, right? We made ourselves a little bit more open and available, right? It also helps to settle our monkey mind, right, which I recommend meditation for that first and foremost. It’s going to help settle us into that community around the table when everything else just melts away, and that’s a beautiful thing.
Dr. Pompa:
It is.
Todd:
That’s particularly beautiful when we’re with people that we just met. I was at a dinner party last night with about 20 folks around a large table and about half of them I didn’t know, right? This is an amazing experience of community and sharing, and really love and opening up and elevating euphoria. That’s what’s terrific about alcohol. The problem is when we crossover this side of that plateau, now we’re losing cognitive connection. We’re losing creative expression. We’re losing that sense of community, and now were’ into a place of oneness, right? That’s what we want to avoid, and that’s the reason it’s super important from my perspective to dose down the amount of alcohol that you drink.
If you’re like me and most people, including the people I was with last night, I’m not going to drink a glass of wine. I’m going to drink several over the course of the evening, right? I want to start with a lower alcohol product that allows me just to drink a little bit more. Enjoy it longer, and frankly, lower alcohol wines taste better with food. Alcohol and food don’t taste great together. Well-crafted wine and food taste well together. It brightens the expression of food, but we got to keep the alcohol level down, which is the reason we don’t drink anything over 12½% alcohol. Most of the wines I drink are 11%. I just prefer the taste of a lower alcohol wine. It allows me to drink a lot more of it without any of the negative effects. I mean, I know you’ve had that experience with our wine.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. No doubt about it. Being able to drink more of it allows you the benefits of it, really -inaudible-. You’re getting more of the benefits without the drawback. When we’re dehydrated in the morning and at night, it’s the alcohol. It’s the over alcohol that’s dehydrating. When I drink your wines, I’m not getting that. I’m not getting that dehydration that I hate with regular wine. I mean, there may be other reasons for it, but I would say the alcohol is probably the number one reason related to the dehydration.
What are some of the other things you test for? I mean, you talked about the mold, the number one mold in wine. You talked about, obviously, the alcohol level. I’m sure you’re looking at certain additives. What else do you have?
Todd:
We’re also doing random screening. We don’t screen every wine for glyphosate, but we just don’t find it. As you know, there was a study done last year with three American wine appellations showing 100% contamination with glyphosate in all of the wines tested, both from organic and nonorganic farms across three appellations. The reason it’s speculated that glyphosate is getting into American wines, this is a really interesting concept, is from the irrigation. The way Roundup is applied is different than the way it’s applied in other farming practices, which can be applied by plane or with large sprayers. In a vineyard, it’s applied very close to the ground in a very narrow spot just underneath the grapevine.
The way it’s applied doesn’t really afford the opportunity for overspray. When you’re seeing glyphosate found in American wines on organic farms where it’s not being used, how did it get there? The most recent speculation is that it’s coming in through irrigation. That’s obviously because our wines are dry farmed, and as I said, most all of Europe is illegal. It’s illegal because the Europeans who have been making wine for about 3,000 years—the reason irrigation is illegal in Europe is because the Europeans know what I know. The moment you start irrigating a grapevine you change the fundamental character of its fruit, and so in order to protect the appellation and the quality…
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. You froze up there for a second.
Meredith:
Lost you for a few seconds there.
Todd:
Oh, okay.
Dr. Pompa:
-inaudible- because you change the fundamental character of the fruit.
Todd:
Right. This is the reason that irrigation is illegal in Europe is because Europeans who have been making wine for 3,000 years know what we know is that when you change it to the fruit, you change the quality of the wine, right? In order to protect their brand quality, that’s the reason it’s been made illegal. We’re also not seeing this glyphosate issue in Europe the way that we see it here.
Dr. Pompa:
Let’s have the obvious conversation, the sulfite conversation that so many people know. They blame the sulfites on everything. Now, again, there is a difference in the level of sulfites. Every natural fermentation process is going to have them. Tell us a little bit more about that if you could.
Todd:
Sulfites is another element that we test for. Sulfites are naturally occurring in all winemaking, right? Whether you add additional sulfur dioxide, which is used as a sterilizer and a preservative by most wine makers worldwide, including excessive amounts in commercial wines so that they can create—they sterilize the wine so that they create this shelf consistent. Every bottle tastes the same just because we’ve sterilized it. Let’s talk about sulfites and what’s making most people feel bad when they drink wines. It’s particularly inherent to how red wines make people feel, right?
It’s not coming from the sulfites. Here’s what we know about sulfites. White wines are higher in sulfite than red wines, right? Most people experience wine problems with red wines, although with me it was historically just the opposite. I couldn’t drink white wines. The primary problem was the sugar level. If I drink sugar, it gives me a headache, right? I’m not accustomed to it.
Dr. Pompa:
Me too, I’m the exact same way. Yeah.
Todd:
Right. Our white wines are also sugar free. We test for sugar on every single wine in addition to sulfite. We place a cap on sulfites in wine at 75 parts per million. Now, the U.S. limit allowed is 350 parts per million. We place our cap at 75 parts per million because naturally occurring sulfites can be as high as 75 parts per million, although I would tell you most of the wines that we sell and test are under 30 or 40 parts per million and many of them 5 to 10 parts, right, because they have no added sulfur dioxide.
What sulfites do do to a wine, we don’t believe—for most people, unless you experience a legitimate sulfite allergy—and for those people, they’re walking around with an EpiPen in their pocket because sulfites are contained in many foods, naturally occurring and added, right? Most people don’t genuinely have—it’s less than 1% of the population has a sulfite allergy, right? What sulfites do do is when they sterilize the wine, these huge doses of sulfur, it removes the soul and the character from that living, beautiful, soulful juice, right? It just sterilizes it. It makes it just this shelf consistent. Every bottle tastes the same. That’s not how real wine tastes. Real wine has soul and character, and it’s alive, right? That’s what real wine tastes like.
Here’s what’s making most people feel bad when they drink wines. It’s not the sulfites. It’s generally these biogenetic amines like tyramine and histamine. Those are exaggerated in commercial winemaking practices because of the way wines are made now, and so you just inherently have a higher histamine and tyramine level. This leads to tightness and tension just in the forehead. It leads to, for some people, spotchyness, or redness, or a feeling of warmth that’s unnatural. These are these biogenetic amines that are really at work. I don’t have a particular sensitivity to histamines, but if I drink commercial wines, I can feel it right here in the front. Right in the center just above my—that’s tyramine and histamine, right, and it gives you that tightness in the head, a bit of—just a tightness. That’s unnatural. You don’t get that from natural wines.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah. No, exactly. I’ve tried to explain that to people, so hopefully having this show, you being the expert, you’ll get it across to them. Meredith, I know you have some questions, so we’ll turn it over to you.
Meredith:
Oh, okay, all right. Yeah. I’m glad because I was going to ask him, you just answered it, what people are mostly reacting to? I think that’s great. Can you talk a little bit more about the yeast, though? I’d like to understand that a little bit more.
Todd:
Let’s talk about how wine is made just real quickly for your audience who may not be familiar—I have to plug in my computer here—who may not be familiar with how wines are made. This is the most common question that I get when I travel around the country. We sponsor all of these. We’re the official wine for most health conferences. People most often ask, well, how can wine be sugar free? Doesn’t it have sugar in grape juice? Isn’t it filled with sugar? Yes. This is how it becomes sugar free.
This is how you make alcohol. When you inoculate the fruit juice or anything with sugar in it, potatoes—you can make alcohol out of many things. Let’s just talk about wine for a moment. When you inoculate the grape juice with yeast, the yeast eats the sugar, right? As it eats the sugar, the byproduct to that is carbon dioxide and ethyl alcohol, right? How a wine becomes sugar free is when the winemaker allows the fermentation process to complete and the yeast eats all of the sugar. Now, what’s happening in commercial wines is that the winemaker, again, is using sulfur dioxide to kill the yeast prior to its full fermentation leaving behind residual sugar, in the industry, known as RS, which of course we test for. We don’t want you drinking sugar. I believe sugar is public enemy number one for health. That’s how wines are made.
Now let’s talk about a yeast for a moment. Here’s what we don’t know because no one’s funded any study around this. We do not know what these genetically modified commercial yeasts are doing to you and your body and your mind. We don’t know. Here’s what we do know. When we’re not using them, you feel better, right?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.
Todd:
There’s no research. I can’t tell you what commercial yeasts are doing. I don’t know. Here’s what we do know is that when we remove the additives and we use a native yeast that’s indigenous—it’s on the skin of every grape. When we allow wine to make itself naturally, we don’t have any of these issues and problems. I mean, I’d love to be able to give you some science studies on the effects of commercial yeast. They just don’t exist.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah. I get that. Let me tell you something. What we know about GMO, none of it’s good. We know that there’s potential problems all over the place, even with our microbiome, so I’m sure it’s a big reason why we don’t feel as well. Like I said, I’m sure the studies will come eventually, but right now I just want to avoid it.
Let’s shift gears. You have a book coming out, man. It’s the keto. You’ve been keto three years. It changed your world. Intermittent fasting I always say was the thing I changed over. At 51, it had the greatest impact. It’s been a few years now doing intermittent fasting, probably three, almost four. It had the greatest impact on my health out of anything I ever did. How did you find ketosis? How did you find intermittent fasting, and what effect have they had on you?
Todd:
I discovered ketosis and the ketogenic diet like most people do. Not everyone but like most people, to break through a weight loss plateau, right? I first experimented with ketosis not understanding the ketogenic diet at all in the 1980s with the Atkins Diet, right? You might recall in the original Atkins book, I mean, he was a proponent of reaching ketosis, and this is before it was as sophisticated or well understood as it is today. He suggested using the urine sticks at that time to see if—we know now that once you become fat adaptive and you’re metabolically adjusted to burning fat that the urine sticks are no longer really accurate. Blood testing is the gold standard for the measurement of ketose. I had been experimenting with low-carb diets over the years, but I had decided to experiment about three years ago with ketosis to breakthrough a weight loss plateau. I thought I had just five more pounds I just personally wanted to lose that I couldn’t seem to shake. In fact, after I became ketogenic, I lost almost an additional 20 pounds over the ensuing years that I really had no idea that I really needed to lose.
Here’s been my experience with ketosis. Most people begin to break through a weight loss plateau, but in fact, I continued. The reason that I’m a proponent and an evangelist for the ketogenic diet today is really its effect on the reduction of inflammation, so you can even look in the face of someone who’s ketogenic, or I have—everybody on my staff is ketogenic. It’s not a requirement of working here. It just happens to be who we are, and most of the folks who work for me are younger and happen to be quite thin. Even when they became ketogenic, they didn’t experience much weight loss, but what you could really see is a restructuring in their face. This tremendous melting away of puffiness that’s even apparent—you don’t even realize it’s there, particularly people who are thin by nature. You don’t really see them as inflamed. In fact, when they become ketogenic, you see this melting away, and you’ll see a more defined facial structure, right? That’s inflammation. That was an amazing result.
For me, the problem with the ketogenic movement at the moment is that, even among health experts, talk about how difficult it is to be on a ketogenic diet, and I just don’t feel that way. It’s a luxurious way to eat. I mean, it just is exceptionally delicious and luxurious. What my cookbook is really showing is, look, this is a magnificent and pleasurable and delicious way to live, right, and you’re not actually depriving yourself of anything other than some poisons.
Dr. Pompa:
Where do we get your cookbook, man?
Todd:
Like everything else, we’re just never on schedule. We’re just always constantly in a struggle. We’re super busy this year. Our business grew a hundred X because we sell all these healthy wines that people just seem to want to drink a lot of, right? We’ve just been kind of busy.
Let’s talk about fasting for just a second before we wrap up. I have to agree with you. Intermittent fasting for me was probably—it was so profound when I discovered it. I wanted to share with your listeners for those—many of them I’m sure are doing intermittent fasting. The Leangains method, the 16, 18-hour fast and 2 feedings in a 6 hour window is the most popular fasting regiment, and the one I followed for 2½ years or so. Six or eight months ago—maybe it’s been a little bit longer than that now. I adapted a single feeding a day doing a 24 hour fast every day, 22 to 24 hours. I had the most profound impact. When I went to a single feeding a day—I hate to use the word feeding. It sounds so clinical.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, for animals. -inaudible- and you’re like this mrrr, mrrr.
Todd:
Yeah, single feeding. I have such a romantic relationship with food that I hate to call it feeding because I just…
Dr. Pompa:
Let me give you a tip, one meal a day.
Todd:
One meal a day, it’s been the…
Dr. Pompa:
You froze up again.
Todd:
Once I went to a one meal a day program, I have got new power, best at the gym. I got boom. It’s like I had my personal best on both high-intensity training as well as resistance training for weightlifting. My personal best after I went to -inaudible- a day. I thought I might experience just the opposite. I thought I might experience some lean body loss or a loss of power in not having that fuel. In fact, just the opposite happened, and I work out in the mornings in a fasted state.
Dr. Pompa:
I think the way you went about it is right because some people—we’re dealing with sick people, right? They struggle even at 14 hours, and then all of a sudden, that gets easier. Then all of a sudden they can do 18, then 20. I do probably 2 to 3 days a week where I eat 24 hour, dinner to dinner, so 1 meal a day. One feeding a day when they take me from the barn, and they give me—I assure you it’s not oats. It’s more grass related.
Anyways, yeah, you know what? I’m telling you, Todd. I mean, I agree. You become hormonally optimized with the rise in growth hormone. I mean, how many studies did I read, right Meredith, at the seminar? It really is amazing. However, it takes people some time to get there. When people tried it right away, they throw the baby out with the bath water because their mitochondria are so damaged. They’re inefficient. They just simply can’t do it right away, but we have more methods. We have more methods.
Then I’ll tell you, Todd. What’s magic for me is at least one day a week where I actually purposely do eat more. It reminds our body that it’s not starving. We know that the body will hang onto that fat because it becomes that precious. Just that one day feast cycle, which I wrote an article called Diet Variation, it really is just emulating or imitating our ancestors and what they did, what they were forced to do. I’m with you, Todd. I mean, just powerful stuff, hormonally changes, and you do become more anabolic and lean all at the same time.
Todd:
My advice and council to people is really to ease into fasting. Also, if you practice a ketogenic diet, once you become fat adaptive and you’re burning fat as your primary fuel source, fasting becomes so much easier.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. No doubt. No doubt.
Todd:
Yeah. If you’re a glucose burner, fasting can be really tough because your brain is demanding fuel.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. No doubt. When you go into ketosis, you’re supposed to release upon fat burning something called cholecystokinin, which cholecystokinin actually tells your body that it’s not hungry. Therefore, you just don’t have to eat. It’s easier to fast, right? Let me tell you something, folks, though. The key is feasting in the evening, making sure you eat enough. If you try to caloric restrict by saying, okay, I’m going to eat less, even for my dinner, your body is going to think it’s starving. It’s going to shut off all the fat burning, so not a good idea.
Feast like our ancestors. Have a good glass of wine or two, right, or three for that matter. Todd, come on. With your wines, you can drink a bottle for goodness sakes.
Todd:
I drink a bottle every night.
Meredith:
Now, do you call that micro-dosing, Todd?
Todd:
That is micro-dosing. We’ve lowered the inherent amount of alcohol. When I say I drink a bottle, we’ll start at dinner, and I eat on the early side because I’m fasted. I usually eat between 6 and 7 at night. We’re going to start there. I don’t usually drink without eating because I’m fasted, right? I don’t want a jolt of alcohol to my brain, so I’m going to eat with a meal. Then drinking a bottle of wine will go on for three, or four, or five hours before I go to bed. I mean, it’s not like just sit down and hammer a bottle back. It’s a gradual process, and there’s food involved, and so that’s mitigating part of the absorption.
Dr. Pompa:
You raise a good point, though. See, you’re talking about one meal a day. When we look at our ancestors, when we look at the Romans and the Greeks and so many other cultures, right, the Hebrew, I mean, they had this one big meal a day where they sat down, but it lasted two to three hours. I mean, Europe still is that way more, right? I mean, it’s this slow process of eating and feasting, so I mean, it’s amazing what happens in that process. Your body doesn’t think it’s staring. What does it burn all day long through the night? Fat, it burns it. You want to live longer; you stabilize your glucose and insulin, the only real way to do it. The only way of doing it is not eating. Every time you eat, even if it’s a salad, you spike your insulin and glucose, right?
Todd:
Absolutely, absolutely.
Dr. Pompa:
Todd, we have a saying on Cell TV. Don’t eat less. Eat less often. That’s the key to living longer, man. Eat less often.
Todd:
That’s right. The other thing that you see, when you talk about this longer dining period, this is about a cultural value too. This is how stories are shared. This is how love is created, right?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.
Todd:
The one thing we can all do to make the world a better place or as we say here how can we be the change we want to see in the world? The way we can be the change we want to see is to spread more love. There’s no better place than the dinner table to spread that love, right, and to touch people you’re with. We’re eating too often, and we’re in too big of a hurry.
Dr. Pompa:
Man, I’ll tell you. Add a little of the wine, right, the good stuff. I’m telling you. It’s good for your adrenals. It’s good for this. It’s good for your life. I mean, yeah, we know the French and all these cultures that lived long, healthy, without heart disease. They’d drink some wine. Our Lord and Savior drank wine.
I mean, come on. It’s part of the culture. It’s what man has done to wine, just like meat, just like dairy, just like wheat. Everything we’ve ruined, commercialized. Wine is no different. We’ve made bad for man. Let’s go back to the old way, right, Todd?
Todd:
Super simple.
Dr. Pompa:
I want to throw a caution out there because some people think that they eat one meal a day or two meals a day, but when you look at it closer, they don’t consider this. The handful of nuts or the scoop of coconut oil is a meal often times, right? They’re doing these things all day long. They don’t realize it. It’s like give your body a break. Truly fast and truly eat and enjoy, what you were saying.
Todd:
Yeah. No question about it. I’m sure many of your listeners are already on fasting regiments. It’s one of the greatest biohacks of all time, right? It’s natural. It’s ancestrally correct. We know that. I mean, we’ve known for two and a half million years sapiens have been walking around. It’s been a couple of thousand years arguably the agriculture revolution was just 10,000 years ago, right? Before the last 1 or 200 years, I mean, even we had more regular intermittent fasting because people didn’t have regular access to food.
Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely.
Todd:
If we look back prior to 10,000 years ago, it was a daily practice. Sometimes people went multiple days without eating.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s the thing we call block fasting here on Cell TV where one or two fasts a year, just like that. For patients getting their health back, often times we have to fast them once a month or every other month. Four or five days, I’ll tell you what. Without food, watch what happens. You know what? The Hunza people did it every spring. They called it starvation spring. The American Indians did it. I mean, all of these tribes did it. Sometimes they were forced to, but it also became something that they just planned on because they knew that these gaps were coming, and they wanted to get their harvest ready, etc. They fasted.
Human are meant to fast. It’s healing. Animals do it instinctively. We’re trying to teach you all to do it.
Todd:
Awesome. Awesome.
Dr. Pompa:
Hey, Todd, thank you, and I’ll turn it back over to Meredith to close us out.
Meredith:
Thank you guys so much. I didn’t expect to be totally re-inspired to fast from this show, but now I really am so awesome information. Todd, you have such a generous offer for our listeners. If you guys go to dryfarmwines and it’s wines plural .com/drpompa, that’s D-R-P-O-M-P-A, you will get a bottle of Dry Farm Wines for one penny.
Dr. Pompa:
Oh.
Meredith:
Yeah. Check that out. Yeah. Dr. Pompa, you can go to your own—you’re on your own. Get one.
Dr. Pompa:
I love Todd. I tell you. I love him. Let’s just keep having him on just so we can keep getting a bottle of wine for a darn penny. Hey, we’ll have you back on when we do your cookbook, man, when you get that sucker out there.
Todd:
Awesome.
Dr. Pompa:
All right, Todd. We appreciate you, man. We appreciate you.
Todd:
Yeah. Hey, listen, thanks for having me on the show today. It’s just an awesome time. Also, if any listeners want to contact me direct, it’s just Todd, T-O-D-D, @dryfarmwines.com. I promise to answer your emails. Also, I want to say to all of you and to your audience I love you. Thank you so much for having me on today. Spread lots of love throughout the world every chance you can, and spend more time eating with your friends.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah. We love you too, Todd. Thank you, man.
Todd:
All right, take care.
Meredith:
Amen. Thanks, everybody. Thanks for watching.
Todd:
Bye.
Meredith:
Enjoy your healthy wine, and we’ll see you next week.
