Written by Christopher Kelly
Jan. 22, 2015
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Christopher: Hello and welcome to the Nourish Balance Thrive Podcast. My name is Christopher Kelly and today I am joined by the Perfect Health Diet author, Paul Jaminet. Paul was an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics that became a software entrepreneur during the Internet boom and now provides strategic advice to entrepreneurial companies while pursuing research in economics. Paul’s experience overcoming chronic illness has been key to forming his views of aging and disease. Hi, Paul. Thanks for coming on.
Paul: Hi, Christopher. It's great to be with you.
Christopher: Tell me. The first and most important question is: How much sleep did you get last night?
Paul: Oh, we got a good amount of sleep. Those of you who may not know, we have a young baby, four months old. But he's sleeping very well. We are pretty skilled in circadian rhythm entrainment so he sleeps pretty well. Last night, he got up twice at 3:00 a.m. and 7:00 a.m. which is almost like getting up once. But most nights recently he's been getting up once at about 4:00 a.m. or so.
Christopher: Wow.
Paul: So we're sleeping quite well.
Christopher: We're doing something wrong. So tell me, what time did he go to bed then to not wake up until that time?
Paul: He usually goes to bed about the same time we do, between 10:00 and 11:00.
Christopher: Okay. Yeah. I've got a 14-month -- maybe 15 months now -- daughter and she definitely wakes up more than that. So what would you say? Are there things that you did that were different having authored the book with the pregnancy and now with the little one being here?
Paul: Yeah, there's a few things that are different, a few ways we have deviated from the pediatrician's advice.
Christopher: Okay.
Paul: Well, for example, I mentioned the circadian rhythm thing. That's not a case of deviating but I think it's pretty important so even though when he was first born he was sleeping 20 hours a day, we still kept daytime, nighttime light schedule and we kept him under very bright white lights for 12 hours during the day and we kept him under orange red lights for 12 hours every night.
He would sleep quite well under the bright white lights during the daytime but I think we have been seeing the benefits of that with him sleeping so now he has a pretty clear daytime/nighttime rhythm. In the daytime, he'll take naps for about half an hour and then he'll be up for three hours, and then in the nighttime he'll sleep about ten out of 12 hours so he'll get up -- we'll have to feed him at least once in the middle of the night but he sleeps very well. So I would say that's one thing we do differently than most people and we try to get him to exercise a little bit during the day.
Christopher: Like a baby treadmill.
Paul: Yeah, yeah.
Christopher: I'm joking.
Paul: Well, for instance, I'll hold him up and let him stand a little bit and see if he can get his balance. His legs are getting fairly strong so of course he needs support to do that but he actually enjoys it, enjoys pressing on the ground. We give him some tummy time and he's trying to figure out how to roll over right now. He does it a few times. His sticking point is his arm gets in the way so he's learning how to move his arm under his body to get all the way around. But those are good exercises. He'll struggle for a while but it's good for him.
Christopher: Yeah, that's great.
Paul: Yup. I guess one place where we deviated from the pediatrician, we had to switch from breast milk to formula with my wife working. He had had great bowel movements all through the breast milk and as soon as we switched to formula, he became sort of constipated and he didn't have a bowel movement for five days. We asked the pediatrician and he said, "Oh, that's normal. Babies will still go after ten days without bowel movements." But we weren't convinced and he seemed to be really struggling with it.
We tried putting a little fermented vegetable juice in his formula and that cleared everything up. He pooed right away. We've made a few tweaks. We put just a few drops of vinegar and fish sauce in his mouth also. Anyway, he's had really good bowel movements.
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Christopher: What's in the formula then?
Paul: Well, formula, they try to mimic breast milk but they are shy in several things and several ingredients. For instance, they don't have quite as many nucleotides as breast milk does and that's why we put a few drops of fish sauce in. They are a little short of some lipids so we have started putting some egg yolk in his milk and he seems to like that. Vinegar is nutritious also. A little bit of acetic acid is beneficial. We're just making very slight tweaks to the formula but I think it's helpful for him.
Christopher: That's great. And then in pregnancy, you managed to avoid gestational diabetes and all those types of problems.
Paul: Yeah. There were no problems. Yeah, we're very happy. He's a very healthy boy.
Christopher: That's awesome. I should talk about the book. The book is fantastic. I'm sure that most people know it and have read it, the "Perfect Health Diet." It's a couple of years old now. Has it remained the solution to your own health problems? Is there anything that you'd like to go back and change in the book?
Paul: Yeah, I think it's still the freshest diet book or the best diet book out there that I'm aware of. Really, I think, the science keeps coming out and I think it's pretty much confirmed. It still supports everything we said. There are a few places we could refine things and we're going to do that in our cookbook which we are working on right now.
Christopher: Oh, okay.
Paul: So we focused in the book, "Perfect Health Diet," in figuring out how to make an optimally nourishing diet and we focused on the macronutrients and the micronutrients like vitamins and minerals and how can you optimize all of those with food and then work backward. What's a natural whole foods diet that will give you optimal nourishment?
One thing we have been thinking about in the cookbook, "Perfect Health Diet," you'll see if you read that book, it also led us to the realization that the optimal diet should look very much like gourmet cuisine and it should be delicious. That's because our brain evolved to encourage us to go get foods that are nourishing for us and so when we actually do that we get rewards in terms of happiness, satisfaction, pleasure in our food. That's a very pleasing aspect of eating a healthy diet.
We have been developing that idea in our cooking and we are putting that together in a cookbook and that has given us an opportunity to start addressing a few areas we didn't get into in "Perfect Health Diet," things like benefits of fermented foods, of things like vinegar or lemon juice that are often used in cooking or spices and herbs or some of the aspects of fiber and some of the cooking methods that you can use to enhance fiber content.
Those are all -- they are actually significant things for health but they're kind of a little bit subtle. Most people wouldn't be aware of them but they can have surprisingly large effects so I think our cookbook is going to be a really interesting book too.
Christopher: Yeah. I must admit that was something that drew me to the book initially was at the time I was watching a lot more TV and I was really into the British celebrity chefs like Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver. After you pointed that out in the "Perfect Health Diet," it kind of struck me. It's like: Blimey. Yeah, you're right that these people that are cooking on TV, it's very rare for them to use, say, like a ton of refined carbohydrate in their meals or any of these processed seed oils or anything like that so really high end ingredients and the outcome is something that people really want to eat and that's why they're successful.
Paul: Yeah, that's right. We tell people to eat a natural whole foods diet. Well, if you're cooking for yourself, then you're bound to do that. Nobody cooks using donuts and cakes and cookies as ingredients. Some people do but it's hard to find those recipes.
Christopher: I wanted to ask you about two moments that must have happened. So at some point you realized that the diet and lifestyle was a really important factor that was affecting your own health and then at some point you must have realized that other people were affected. When was that? Was that very early on or did it come much later after you've fixed your own problems?
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Paul: No, it came before we fixed our health problems. In fact, we needed diet and lifestyle to fix our health problems. But it came quite late on in terms of our health problems. I had been aware that I had some health issues and that they were getting worse every year for about 15 years before I discovered the Paleo diet in 2005. That was the key thing that led to a breakthrough.
The Paleo diet itself, it caused me as many problems as it fixed but the key thing that it taught me was that diet is really important. I had been going to doctors and I've tried medicines and nothing ever had any effect. But then I tried diet and all of a sudden my symptoms changed dramatically.
So diet really does matter. People have known that for a long time. Hippocrates said let food be thy medicine. There's a lot of ancient knowledge that we kind of lost in pharmaceutical medicine there about how to heal. I think we're developing a lot of new knowledge aided by science so things are really coming together in a good way, figuring out how to heal people properly instead of giving them drugs that may just mask symptoms or move them around. So instead of having a symptom show up one place, it shows up somewhere else.
Christopher: Right. There must have been another moment though and I know this because you've moved on to do the "Perfect Health Retreat" and that's for some people -- in fact, maybe even many people -- that just reading the book is not enough for them to start changing their diet and lifestyle.
The two examples that are closest to me are actually my sisters. They started with my younger sister. I've been eating a Paleo style diet for some time and she had many of the same problems. I think my younger sister and I, we share a lot of the same genetics.
At first, she didn't really get it. We live in different countries and I don't think communicating via email really worked that well. One day, she came and stayed for us for a week and it just changed everything. She saw what we were doing and I think the most important thing was she saw how easy it was and how good the food tasted. It was like a real transformational experience for her and she's never looked back.
Almost the same thing happened with my older sister much later on, only this year. But it wasn't -- do you see what I mean? I could have sent them a million copies of different books but it was that being there in that moment and seeing it was what made the change. Do you realize the same? Is that what the Perfect Health Retreat is about?
Paul: Yeah, yeah. I'd say it's about several things. One is we are trying to cover every aspect of natural healing and good health and so we comprehensibly cover lifestyle environment, how do you shape your environment to make it healthy, exercise, movement. Not just the physical activity part but also the relaxation, the healing, massage, mobility, those aspects of movement, cooking classes. We've got science classes to explain and motivate everything. You get to experience great food. Even the social aspect is -- there's a social element to good health. People who are isolated or who have too much social stress have worse health so you want a certain amount of social engagement during the day and then a certain amount of quiet time -- at night especially.
There are many, many aspects to health. Even just the diet and nutrition part, the reason we chose the name "Perfect Health Diet" is because you know the old saying, "Your reach should exceed your grasp." It's going to exceed your grasp so you should reach as far as you can. Seek perfection so that you can achieve goodness. That's what we want people to do.
What we realized was that there are really hundreds of things that you do that impact your health in small ways. What really fixes your health is fixing all of those things. When you get all of those little things in place, then your body's natural healing and immune mechanisms can generally heal you.
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We want people to have the concept of: that they are aiming for perfection, they are fixing lots of little things, and it all comes together in a very simple, easy, but very pleasurable lifestyle and diet. But there are so many different little things. It's very hard for people to put them in place. We've had people come to our retreats who would say, "Oh, I read your book five or six times. It's my bible. But I've learned so many new things here. Some of them were in the book; some weren't but even the ones that were in the book I had overlooked them or not realized them. But now I come here and I see the model and I experience them and I experience the health benefits while I'm here." People, they often come. "Oh, I sleep better. My mood is better. I have more energy. My mind is more clear. I am enjoying the exercise more than I was at home." Little things do make a difference.
Since we wrote the book, we have been continuing to research and develop all of those ideas and especially in the lifestyle environment, exercise, cooking areas. We have developed a lot of new knowledge that we haven't had a chance to publish yet. There're a lot of things we communicate at the retreats and, yeah, it would be really hard to get all that across in a different type of environment.
The other good thing about the retreats is that I do health coaching, both before, during and after the retreat. So doing it after the retreat, I do that in exchange for people keeping me informed of their health status and so it's a really good educational opportunity. Our plan is to keep expanding what we do for retreat participants. We just did a partnership with uBiome who makes gut microbiome --
Christopher: Yeah, I know. Interesting.
Paul: -- sampling kits. They're going to provide gut microbiome kits to all the retreat participants. We'll do a before the retreat and after the retreat gut test and see how things change and we'll look and see. People often get health improvements from the retreat and they want to see how do those health improvements correlate with changes to the gut microbiome and we'll try and produce scientific papers out of this.
So it's a great learning experience at the retreat. If you think of it, it's like a lot of scientific clinical trials where you might go for a week in a controlled environment and then you are continuing to try to implement the advice at home afterwards and you do follow-up later. So we're trying to do those types of things and I'm really hoping we can prove that natural diet and lifestyle really heals many diseases successfully and it can really help people live long healthy lives. I think it's really going to be a great experience for all the people who come and it's really going to help move the ancestral health community into the mainstream of healing and medicine.
Christopher: Uh-hmm. So logistically then, I should describe the people that are listening at home, say, in the UK. This is basically an all-inclusive holiday package, right? You don't need to really do anything. You just show up and accommodation is provided and the food is provided. Everything you need as a human being is provided.
Paul: Exactly. That's right. It's located on the beach in North Carolina. For those of you who don't know, they have magnificent beaches on the Barrier Islands. We are right on the beach and it's in the seasons when we do it, on the beaches, almost private. There're very few other people there. But the weather is great. The ocean water is warm and very comfortable to swim in. The air temperatures are very warm.
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It's a luxury property. We've got two heated saltwater pools. We've got two hot tubs and very nice facilities for everything. We've got a staff of about a dozen. We do cooking classes. We have personal trainers, three to four movement sessions a day. Two of them are devoted to physical activity and two of them are devoted to relaxation and healing and stress relief, mobility.
We do science classes, one science class daily that I teach that explains and motivates why we do everything else. We have a controlled environment that promotes circadian rhythm entrainment for example so we'll have very bright natural lighting during the day and we'll have orange lighting for 12 hours every night to help prepare you for sleep.
We have a professional chef who prepares the Perfect Health Diet meals. He was formerly a private chef to famous musicians including R.E.M, Steve Winwood. He was also a chef at Hollywood on the studio sets, and a chef in a very high end restaurant. Anyway, so we've got between my wife leading the cooking classes and him -- so my wife has great experience with home cooking and teaching how to be very efficient. She's a busy scientist and she has learned how to very efficiently make delicious gourmet meals for her family, and then we have great food.
So it's a wonderful environment and there's free time every afternoon. That's when I do health coaching but most people enjoy the beach or they'll read or do whatever. It's a fantastic experience. The most recent one in October, we had I think 22 people come. Eleven of them gave us video testimonials. Five I think gave written testimonials instead. A bunch of others said, "I would give you a video testimonial but so many other people have given you great video testimonials. I don't think you need it."
Christopher: That's great.
Paul: Everybody had a great time and healed their health. I think we have really -- we have been two years putting this together and finding and training staff, putting together a curriculum, finding a great site. So it's been quite a bit of work but I think it's really come together well. It's a great experience for the guests and it's a great experience for my wife and I and our partner, Whitney Ross Gray, who eats PHD and has carried or at least put into remission her multiple sclerosis.
Christopher: Oh, wow.
Paul: Anyway, so it's been a fantastic experience for us. It's a great joy to provide the retreats and get to know the people there and help them overcome their health problems. They have been really fun experiences.
Christopher: I was going to ask you about the people that attend. Are they people that have already solved their problems and they are kind of like me: fan boys. They just want, "Okay. This sounds like a great holiday, just like have someone doing that for me," or are they people that's just starting and they are really looking to overcome their problems much earlier on in their journey?
Paul: Well, I'd say there're probably been three types of people who have come. Most of the people who have come have significant personal health problems that they want to deal with, whether that's obesity, diabetes, gut issues like chronic IBS or other issues -- sleep, chronic fatigue. Those have been very common complaints. So I'd say that's at least half of the people who had come would fit into that category.
And then there're people who are fans and who have minor complaints and they just want to learn how to be healthier and do things better. They varied in age quite a bit. We've had a number of people who come in their 70s. Sometimes they came; the retreat was a gift from their children. In other cases, they purchased themselves. But we've got I think about six people in their 70s, most of them in fairly good health but you can almost always, when you're in your 70s, think of a few ways your health could improve.
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Christopher: That's great.
Paul: We've had people, the youngest was 18. We've had a number of people in their 30s. We had one woman in her 30s dealing with fertility issues. The healthiest people who have come have been actually we had a gym owner, nutrition health coach, people who want to come learn what we do and use some of our ideas and advice in their own practices, health practices, and in their personal lives.
So we've had a really broad mix of people. We've had people from many different countries at the most recent retreat. We had people from India, Korea, Sweden, and Norway -- so all types of people. We've had lots of married couples. We've had mother-daughter teams. We've had single people. But I think everyone's really enjoyed it and we've really enjoyed all of our guests.
Christopher: Uh-hmm. I wanted to ask you, both with people that have read the book and are taking the advice and the people that have been to the retreats, do you ever get a moment where it appears not to be working and you know that something else is going on for that person and only lab work can really show what's going on. Does that ever happen? I wanted to know more about your experience as well because I know this was true for you. You had some infections you needed to deal with before you could completely restore your health.
Paul: Yeah. Definitely, all of the natural diet and lifestyle things, they are complements to medicine. We are not trying to eliminate medical doctors. Lab testing can be very valuable at giving clues. The key to healing is really to figure out what's causing the problems and then address the causes, relieve them. Sometimes the causes are diet and lifestyle errors and if you fixed diet and lifestyle then everything clears up.
But often, people have infections or other things going on and sometimes it can be very difficult to diagnose so that's a challenge because medicine, it's still in a pretty primitive state as far as diagnosing infections and figuring out how to treat them. So even the treatments that they have, often they don't work that well and they do a lot of collateral damage to our body and to our gut microbiome. The diagnostic tools are very poor. It's a tricky thing and we're learning.
Some people just see tremendous improvements very quickly and all their problems go away. Other people fix half their problems pretty quickly but they have other problems that linger. We work with them post-retreat to try and troubleshoot those problems. There are a few people whose issues are recalcitrant and hard to fix. Many of them have come to us because they have been working with doctors for years and the doctors haven't been able to do anything.
So it's kind of a learning experience for us. I mentioned the uBiome gut microbiome kits. We're going to keep working to try to figure all those things out. As we get experience with guests, we'll keep trying to help them troubleshoot and fix their health problems after the retreat and we'll keep trying to learn better ways to try to heal things. I can't say that every health condition is going to be cured but what I can say is that we are very confident we can show people how to eat a healthy diet, live a healthy lifestyle and that it often does have very powerful effects against chronic illness.
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We are really interested in learning what are the health conditions that can most readily be addressed by diet and lifestyle and which ones we factor into it.
Christopher: Right. Yeah, so I mean my personal experience was that the diet and lifestyle stuff was an essential prerequisite. I really must have to change those to reach full resolution to get my health back. But the infection piece was important too. I had a couple of infections, a pin worm infection and then a yeast overgrowth I needed to deal with as well. I'm starting to wonder if through our working in our practice whether everybody might be suffering from similar sorts of things and so that everybody needs to do testing and make sure that they need. But I've got kind of a polarized view in the world so I'm not really sure. What do you think?
Paul: Yeah. That's exactly what I think. First of all, I think diet and lifestyle is relevant for everything. It's almost always essential, the healing. It also can be essential to diagnosis. So symptoms can be very complex. A different diet and lifestyle can modify how an infection presents symptomatically. It can be very hard to figure things out if you're eating a poor diet, living a poor lifestyle. But when you clean those things up, often the symptoms clarify and it becomes much easier to diagnose infections or other things that are going on.
That was my experience for instance. I had a couple of chronic infections that I had to deal with. It wasn't really possible to diagnose them until I have cleaned up diet and lifestyle and so many symptoms went away; I got better and then I just had a few remaining ones and it was much easier to link those up to the infections and then get appropriate treatment.
Also, the treatments in my case, other people have had similar infections. Often, they get treated with antibiotics and they don't see any benefits. In my case, as soon as I got treated with antibiotics, everything cleared up very quickly. I think the antibiotics were so effective because I was nourishing my body, supporting immunity. Just a little bit of disabling of the germs allowed my immune system to really take care of them.
So diet and lifestyle makes all the medical treatments more effective. The challenge is, now, one of the things we talk about in our book is that -- and on our blog -- everyone gets chronic infections so when they go to look at people, and people are constantly acquiring chronic infections. They test positive for more and more of these infections as they get older. The titer of antibodies keeps going up and the burden of the infections keeps getting bigger and bigger as you get older.
So a lot of what we take as aging is actually a sort of a buildup of infections in the body. Some of these infections you can treat and get rid of and then you can start feeling younger again. It's easy to mistake some of these things for aging. I think that's going to be a really big part of medicine in the 21st century is learning how to diagnose those infections, learning how to treat them in a way that doesn't damage our body, and figuring out how much of aging is natural.
Christopher: Right.
Paul: And how much is infections and malnutrition and poor lifestyle and other things that are just hindering our body's functions.
Christopher: Yeah, I wonder about that all the time. We look at some of these steroid hormones, sex hormones like DHEA and testosterone. Do they really go down with age or is just everybody doing the same thing and ending up with low testosterone? I just kind of wonder. What were the tests that you did? What infections did you have and what tests did you do? Which were the most useful tests?
Paul: Well, I had some kind of fungal infection, probably a candida --
Christopher: Right.
Paul: -- variety and some kind of bacterial infection. It was probably something like Chlamydophila pneumonia. But in the end, things were kind of experimental. The fungal infection, when it flared up, I would get oral thrush. I would get skin infections that would respond to the drugstore anti-fungals. The bacterial infection ended up responding to doxycycline.
[0:35:20]
In my case, we never really diagnosed things through blood tests or other tests. It ended up being kind of experimental, which treatments worked and which didn't. I did get some skin scrape things that found candida but it's always unclear. People do have lots of infections and so they can detect that something's there but you don't know that that's the one that's causing your --
Christopher: Right.
Paul: -- illness. You've got other infections too and it could be one of the ones that can't diagnose that's causing the symptom. The technology is just very primitive right now. When it comes to chronic infections, there's always the experimental aspect to it. I think that's one of the big problems in medicine nowadays. It's become so bureaucratic; doctors are afraid to experiment.
Christopher: Right.
Paul: They are afraid they'll get taken before a review board and said, "Oh, you're not following standards of practice" or clinical care.
Christopher: Even when the standard of care isn't working.
Paul: Yeah, that's right. So patients really want a doctor to work with them, try things but the doctors are really afraid to do that. I think the healthcare system right now is really failing a lot of people.
Christopher: Yeah, I would totally agree. I wouldn't be doing this. I quit my job as a computer scientist, as a program or a hedge fund manager this year to help other people and it's been mostly with the diet and lifestyle coaching but we had been using some lab tests in our practice.
You're right. At the moment, they are very useful but I get the impression that in ten, 20 years, I'll look back on these tests and they'll be like one of those giant Hewlett Packard calculators you see that it's going to look so dated.
But, yeah, certainly, the organic acids have been quite useful for me. I don't know if you know about this. There's a urine test that you can do and there's a metabolite called d-arabinitol. Usually, it's the metabolite of yeast overgrowth and that's been quite good for diagnosing those. But, yeah, again, it's not perfect. That's for sure.
Now, I wanted to talk to you about some of the things that I've heard you say repeatedly that have not been consistent with my own experience. So tell me, what happens when you went on to a low carb diet?
Paul: Well, when I went on to a low carb diet, first of all, I had a big flare of my fungal infection.
Christopher: Yes, which is weird, isn't it? That in itself is kind of like not what you'd expect in a way. People always think that yeast eats sugar and if you eat sugar then that would be food for it. But it's not what happened.
Paul: No. Well, yeast can eat all kinds of things.
Christopher: Right.
Paul: You can get mold on meat, an old meat --
Christopher: Of course.
Paul: -- as well as on vegetables. It's not just sugar that they can eat. Your immune system needs sugar as well, and also your extra side of the matrix so your gut barrier, other barriers, the blood vessel backings that prevent germs from migrating through the body. Germs try to break them down so they can go and infect new places in the body and you need to be able to heal them and that requires carbohydrate. So there're various ways in which being too low carb can hinder immune function and hinder your defense against these germs.
Christopher: Uh-hmm. So that's what happened. You were really low carb and then you reintroduced some carbs and then some of these problems went away.
Paul: Yeah. The first thing I found was that I needed carbohydrates and so I reintroduced them and got better but I still had some problems. And then I realized I needed vitamin C and so I started supplementing vitamin C. Once I realized I had been my version of Paleo than I started with was deficient in at least two things: carbohydrates and vitamin C, then I figured out it's probably deficient in a lot of other things too that I just don't know about and I'd better research all of these nutrients to figure out how much of them I need, assess how much of them I'm getting in my diet, and then repair my diet.
Christopher: Uh-hmm.
[0:40:00]
Paul: That took five years for me to do all that research and figure it out and adjust the diet but that's what led us to the Perfect Health Diet.
Christopher: Okay. Yeah, it's funny that you can do that. Sometimes you can condense down like five or even ten or more years of experience into just a few words like that but it's true. It can be done sometimes.
Yeah, I was kind of wondering. It was actually you. I think it was you that kind of started to break down my fat phobia. I'm an athlete. I'm a cyclist. At the time I discovered your book, I was doing a ton, maybe 20 or more hours a week of cycling. Yours was definitely one of the books that helped break my fat phobia. Cyclists need to be lean in order to be competitive and I was kind of entrenched in the traditional dogma that fat makes you fat and clogs your arteries and all that kind of stuff so I was eating a very, very low fat diet at the time.
Reading your books kind of helped ease those concerns and I started eating more fat. I'm pretty sure it was your book that I read that athletes who are using more energy should get those additional calories from saturated fat and that ended up sending me down -- first of all, I should ask you. Is that correct? Did I read that in your book?
Paul: Yeah, I think that's beneficial for a lean athletic body --
Christopher: Right.
Paul: -- is to eat a high proportion of saturated fat.
Christopher: And then I almost continued down that road. I realized that re-feeding with carbohydrates, even if they were safe starches -- sweet potatoes or whatever else -- was really not working for me. It was causing so much more inflammation and taking me longer to recover when I would just replenish those glycogen stores with safe starches every night. Eventually, that led me down to the path of ketosis and that's where I have been for over a year.
I have not had any of the problems that you talked about and it makes me wonder: is it wrong or is something different about me? What do you think about dry eyes or any of these mucosal barriers or anything? I have not had any problems like that all. What do you think is going on there?
Paul: Yeah. Well, two things. First of all, I'd say a lot depends on your health status and your infection status.
Christopher: Yeah, that's an important point actually I should make clear is that I didn't just dive into ketosis when I knew that I had two infections and low cortisol and low testosterone. I fixed everything first so I was in pretty good shape apart from I just wasn't recovering quite as fast as I'd like eating all these sweet potatoes. It was only at that point I thought, "Okay. Let's try the ketosis thing." So, yeah, I should make that clear.
Paul: Yeah. So the healthier you are, first of all, the less you need glucose. The immune system is a big consumer of glucose and if it's not fighting infections then you don't need as much. But, secondly, the healthier you are, the more adaptable your body is to an imperfect diet. So even if you're deficient in something, your body can adapt to it.
If your diet is low in carbohydrate, you can convert protein to carbohydrate and if you're eating enough protein then that can make up for a lack of carbohydrate. Also, if you're eating things like lemon juice and things like that, that can diminish your need for carbohydrate. There're various dietary factors that might play in but basically the healthier you are and the more nourishing your diet, then the more you can get by with little imperfections in your diet.
Now, in my case, I had some pretty significant infections so I had much less leeway in terms of how I needed to eat before I would get negative symptoms. But I think even if you're healthy, you'd still benefit from nourishing your body a little bit better and not making it adapt. I generally interpret those problems -- eating carbohydrates -- as symptomatic of there are still some issue in the gut.
Basically, all of the gut microbes can utilize carbohydrate for energy so if you have an issue eating carbohydrates and it leads to inflammation, that usually means you have some bad germs still in your gut and when they get to feed on carbohydrates and multiply then you get an inflammatory response.
[0:45:08]
Christopher: Uh-hmm. Yeah, I guess the main benefit now when I think about it was my behavior. I used to get back from a ride and if there wasn't food ready then I'd be kind of almost anxious is the word. Regardless of what time of the day I did my exercise, I would continue to be hungry for the rest of the day. I'd be eating sweet potatoes until I went to bed almost and it was just I was insatiable.
It was my wife who was doing most of the cooking and she's a lot happier now that I'm in ketosis. I could almost care less when I get back from a big ride. I can just fit right into a normal meal schedule with her and it just makes life so much easier and then my energy levels throughout the day are certainly much better as well I should say.
Paul: Yeah. Well, that's one of the things we talk about in the book. If you're eating a diet that more resembles the composition of the body and the body is pretty fat rich in terms of macronutrient proportions, then it's going to be much easier to fast and you're basically going to be much more stable.
So basically, as far as most of your body is concerned, what happens in fasting is that you self-cannibalize your body so you're breaking down tissue in order to feed the rest of the body and that's going to be mostly fat. And then if you're eating exactly the same inputs, then a meal just looks like the same thing that the cells have been living on when you were fasting.
So it really doesn't change how you feel that much. Whereas, if you're on a very different diet, like a high carbohydrate diet, then the meal inputs are very different than the fasting inputs. Often, people will feel good after meals and not feel good when they fast or sometimes they'll feel bad after the meals and feel better when they fast but you'll get those differences. You're more likely to see those differences when you're on a high carb diet and when you're on a high fat diet.
Christopher: Okay. And you don't just think like -- I mean, it didn't happen to me so I don't really know but I hear lots of people propose that if you're suffering from dry eyes or dry mouth or something else, it's probably just dehydration and that you should drink some more water and then with it some electrolytes too. The traditional recommendation for ketogenic diets is the stock cube or bouillon cube I think you call them here or really just some extra electrolytes so that you increase the absorption of the fluid that you take in. Do you not think that's what's going on here, that that's what --
Paul: Well, you have to look at every individual case so --
Christopher: Right.
Paul: There're a lot of components in tears and saliva and mucus. The biggest components are water and carbohydrate. If you're low in carbohydrate, you won't be able to make the mucin that is a major component of tears and mucus. They have a specific fatty acid mixture and omega 3 fats figure significantly. Sometimes people improve dry eyes by taking fish oil. Sometimes it's dehydration, water and electrolytes and that's fairly common on low carb diets for people to get. People tend to excrete more electrolytes. Salt needs go up. Once your low in electrolytes, then you'll get rid of water in order to keep the right balance of electrolytes and water so often people become dehydrated on low carb diets.
So there're various factors that can play in. You have to look at what are people getting deficient in. In my case, it was both adding carbs and adding vitamin C made a difference for the dry eyes and those two together fixed it.
Christopher: Okay. Interesting. My final question was: What do you think about supplements? What supplements do you take now and what supplements do you recommend to people?
Paul: All right. Well, people can find our supplement recommendations on our website. There's a tab called "Shop" and if you go to the "Shop" supplements page then we list all of our recommendations.
Basically, we recommend getting as much as you can from natural whole foods. In order to do that, we recommend eating nutrient-dense foods like liver, egg yolks, bones, joints, tendons in soups and stews, seafood, seaweed, fermented vegetables, things like that.
[0:50:02]
Once you do that, there're still a few things that people may benefit taking supplements and those could be things like vitamin D because you live in the North in the winter and you don't get sun exposure. They could be things like magnesium. It's pretty easy to be deficient in. A lot of people are deficient in magnesium. There are some others that --
Vitamin C is a good example. Your need for vitamin C can vary tremendously. Whenever you're sick or stressed, you have an increased need for vitamin C. Also, most people don't eat a lot of the vitamin C rich foods like sweet peppers, and cooking destroys vitamin C. That was one of the things that hurt me. I cooked all of our fruits and vegetables so that was one thing that contributed to my vitamin C deficiency. Also, I had a lot of oxidative stress from the infections. Vitamin C supplements can be very beneficial, especially to people who are sick.
We recommend iodine supplementation just because iodine deficiency can be such a severe problem. It's the leading cause of mental retardation globally. It's a major cause of thyroid problems. There are some supplements we recommend just because they are so exceedingly safe like pantothenic acid we recommend taking once a week. That's just extremely safe. So we have a few recommendations and if you read our book you'll see the logic behind them.
Christopher: Yeah, I know. There was something you said actually in your -- I think it was in your Ancestral Health Symposium presentation this year in Berkeley. I was there. You said that the diseases of deficiency are really quite devastating but the problems associated with excess really pale in comparison.
Paul: Yeah. For a lot of nutrients, that's the case. Or even in the cases where an excess can be fatal like, say, vitamin A, the doses that you need to get there are pretty high. So as long as you supplement intelligently, then you are more like to benefit. In our case, we recommend eating liver once a week and if you do that then you'll get plenty of vitamin A.
Christopher: What about polar bear liver?
Paul: Yeah, polar bear liver. Yeah. There's a famous Arctic explorer who died from eating polar bear liver because he didn't realize that the polar bears really concentrate a lot of vitamin A in the liver.
So, yeah, you want to be intelligent about these things and avoid overdoses but some supplements are quite safe in excess. Your body generally has excretion mechanisms to get rid of an excess so if you just get a little bit over, then you'll be okay. Some of them can be a little more dangerous in excess like selenium and iodine. So you do need to be careful in a few cases but, for the most part, the deficiencies are more likely to cause problems but they can be subtle because a lot of the problems can be delayed by decades.
Bruce Ames has done a lot of work on this. He calls it Triage Theory. If you're short of a nutrient then your body maintains all of the things that you need to hunt and gather food in order to replenish it. So you still feel athletic and you feel like you have energy and your mind works clearly but your body isn't maintaining DNA, it's not protecting you against cancer, it's not fighting chronic infections and so you're gradually getting a build-up of damage and it tends to stop detoxifying as well and you tend to get a little build-up on infections and toxins. Over the course of months or years or decades, those can start to significantly impair your health. So it's a good thing to be well-nourished.
Christopher: Absolutely. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Well, perfecthealthdiet.com is obviously the place to find you on the Internet. Tell me, what's the status? The Facebook group is fantastic. I kind of spend probably too much time there, to be honest. I try to read more than I contribute. But what's the status? Can anyone join the Perfect Health Diet Facebook group?
[0:55:17]
Paul: Yes, anyone can.
Christopher: Okay.
Paul: It's a closed group. There're are a couple of reasons for that: one is it helps keep out spammers which is a big problem on Facebook but more importantly we want people to feel free to talk about personal health issues and things like that that they may not want their other Facebook friends to be aware of.
Christopher: I haven't thought of that.
Paul: Yeah. Anyhow, you can find our Perfect Health Diet Facebook group. You just have to apply to join and I'll check and see if you're a spammer or a real person and then add you to the group.
Christopher: Excellent. Yeah. I know I'd highly recommend it. Once you've read the book, most of your questions are probably going to be answered by reading the book is one thing I'd say. Probably some of mine as well have been answered already in the book. But, yeah, definitely do that first and then afterwards to have that level of support -- I think you're accumulating quite a large group of experts there so it's quite a valuable resource. Yeah, I thank you so much for making it available in this way.
Paul: Yeah, yeah. We're planning to roll out a forum on our website.
Christopher: Okay.
Paul: And have more areas of discussion. So we used to have a very active comments section and I would participate there but it became very difficult to search back. I had a question and answer comments thread in Wordpress and it's got like several tens of thousands of questions on it, of comments on it and it's not very searchable so we migrated to Facebook and experts who contribute a lot of insight and knowledge and there's a lot of useful experience there. It would be good to make it searchable and keep our records so that people can find things.
Christopher: Yeah, I would agree with that. I was trying to do it yesterday. Facebook groups, they do actually have a search facility but as far as I can tell it's only available on the web interface. If you look at the top right hand corner, there is actually a search box that works kind of. I think it's like completely missing on the smartphone interface. Definitely, it's a bit weird. It's actually a bit of a step backwards from what forums were about ten years ago. It's strange.
Paul: Yeah, yeah. No, Facebook is definitely not ideal as a forum technology but it is good in the sense that lots of people are on it.
Christopher: Yeah. Exactly.
Paul: It's very convenient.
Christopher: Yeah, you got under a lot of people's eyeballs that way. Well, it's great. Thank you so much for your time, Paul. I'll link to everything in the show notes. Yeah, I'll look forward to that cookbook.
Paul: Okay, great. Thank you, Christopher.
Christopher: Cheers.
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