The Top 5 Reasons Why Your Estrogen Levels are High – Men & Women!
Let’s talk about the top 5 reasons why your estrogen levels are high. We’re going to break them down today.
WHAT ARE ESTROGENS?
First, let’s look at the 3 major kinds of estrogens: E1 or estrone, E2 or estradiol, and E3 or estriol. In a woman’s regular cycle, it’s usually estradiol we’re talking about. When you start shifting to more menopausal and the ovary stops working, you start getting more estriol. The adrenals help in kick in a lot of DHEA and you make more estriol. Estradiol is more of the growth factor type of estrogen and estriol is a weaker estrogen.
WHERE CAN WE FIND ESTROGENS?
- PLASTICS. You’ll get it when the plastic is warm like in a microwave or out of a plastic water bottle especially if it’s in the car and the sun is hitting it or it’s outside. That’s why you want a good stainless steel or glass water bottle if you’re going to go outside or leaving it in the sun. The microwave heat and the radiation is going to cause a big release of plastic chemicals there, the xenoestrogens. One of the big ones are the phthalates but also BPA. There are other types of BPAs that are new which are supposedly safe but there are still estrogen-like compounds there as well. These plastics can affect women and men as well. Men are actually going to be more affected by them because men aren’t used to having estrogen in their environment and getting a whole bunch is going to be a problem.
- PESTICIDES. These tend to have an estrogenic quality to them and if you’re eating foods that are not organic, you’re definitely going to be getting organochlorines and various pesticides in your environment.
- PHYTOESTROGENS. These are found in soy. For example, I had a vegan-vegetarian patient. We ran a Dutch sex hormone panel on her and her estradiol was through the roof and really high. Phytoestrogens can be a big one, so soy may be a problem. With vegan-vegetarian, there’s a lot of phony protein consumption like fake meat kind of stuff such as the Beyond burger where there are a lot of soy and estrogen-like compounds in there. There are also hormones in meat. You have to make sure you get antibiotic-free, hormone-free, and ideally organic and pasture-fed or if you’re on the Whole Foods scale, step 4 or step 5 is ideal. Step 2 is at least pretty good. Organic means no pesticides, no hormones, and also the food they’re eating has no pesticides or hormones, too.
- HIGH LEVELS OF INSULIN. Too much carbs drive high levels of insulin because insulin responds to a high level of blood sugar. The blood sugars in your bloodstream go up and your pancreas comes in. The beta cells make a bunch of insulin to bring it down and bring it into the cellar and converted to fat. So, high levels of insulin upregulate an enzyme in men called aromatase that converts testosterone, the male hormones, to estrogen which becomes a problem. Now, in women, a similar thing happens but it’s the exact opposite or the big switch. Their estrogen is converted to testosterone. So, women can actually get more androgen-like issues which results in weight gain, acne, hair growth, and sometimes you can see some libido enhancements on that. So, that’s the difference between men and women.
- POOR GUT HEALTH. In the gut, we make healthy good bacteria in our gut that help us absorb a lot of nutrients. A good healthy gut function helps us break down protein for good HDL levels and good enzyme levels. We need these to break down protein into amino acids which are really important for helping us to detoxify. So, detoxification helps us to excrete estrogens that we’re getting exposed to in our environments such as the pesticides, plastic, or something that you don’t even know you’re getting exposed to. Good healthy detoxification will help your body eliminate that, so that’s a good backup plan.Also, if we have a lot of dysbiosis, SIBO and bacterial overgrowth, we can make a lot of what’s called beta-glucuronidase. This is an enzyme that’s made by bad bacteria and it makes it harder to detoxify estrogen. The beta-glucuronidase takes conjugated estrogens and binds it to a protein that helps us excrete it out the body. It takes that protein and it pulls it apart. It takes the handcuffs off that protein, so that allows that estrogen that’s been deconjugated to go back into the body in the general circulation. So, if we have gut issues, that could be a major concern.
HOW DO WE ADDRESS THE PROBLEM?
We need things like cysteine, glycine, glutamine, sulfur amino acids, and things that help us methylate like B12, B6, and folate. So, these nutrients we have to get them in our diet via a good diet. We need to be able to break down and absorb those nutrients, so we need good digestion to get those things in there.
So, in general, we’ve got to make sure we have a good gut bacteria balance. Even fungal overgrowth can cause problems and H. pylori that can lower stomach acid and make it harder to break down nutrition on one side and then it can create this bacterial overgrowth enzyme that makes it hard to detoxify estrogen. These are really important components. If you have any issues with estrogen, you’ve got to look there.
Now, we may want to do things to help detoxify like make lifestyle changes, food changes, pesticide changes, make the changes in regards to plastics, and make in in regards to your diet, your glycemic load, and your gut. That’s a good first step to get to the bottom. There are also different things we may do to help upregulate detoxification to help get that estrogen. It may be activated charcoal or various soluble fibers. It could be things like bentonite clay. We could use things like DIM or Calcium D-Glucarate or glutathione, sulfur amino acids, and vitamin C. They’re all helpful in different situations. We would recommend them based on what’s happening but at least make the diet and lifestyle changes out of the gates.
Top 5 Warning Signs of Hormonal Imbalance
Let’s talk about hormones. I’m going to dive into a couple of clinical pearls that I see in my practice from working with hundreds of female patients and male patients which have a major effect on modulating and supporting hormonal balance.
These are my top 5 hormonal balancing strategies:
- One of the first things in regards to hormones that’s very important, and this may be common sense but I try to give a lot of knowledge guided by experience, is nutritional building blocks for your hormones. Healthy cholesterol from animal products are very essential. Fat soluble vitamins like A, D, K are very important. Lots of good protein are also very important. We have steroid-based hormones that are going to be more cholesterol-based and we have peptide-based hormones that will also be protein-based. So, a lot of these protein, fat-soluble vitamins, and cholesterol especially healthy animal cholesterol are very helpful for hormonal building blocks. If you have a vegan-vegetarian diet or if it’s very nutritionally poor or there’s a lot of processed food, that may set you up with a deficit out of the gates for just hormonal issues. Remember: Make sure the food is nutritionally dense, anti-inflammatory, and low in toxins. That’s vital.
- Now, if you’re having a lot of good nutrition in there, the next thing is we have to make sure we’re able to digest it and break it down. So, if we have a lot of chronic acid reflux, poor digestion, constipation, or bloating, we know we’re not quite breaking down our food and our nutritional building blocks. That could tell us that we may have hormonal issues because we’re not breaking that down. Therefore, those nutrients can’t get into our body or get in our bloodstream and be taken throughout the body to be used as building blocks. So, if we have a bottleneck in the nutritional side, that could be a big factor.
- Stress, whether it’s emotional or chemical stress. If we’re eating foods that are inflammatory or we’re nutritionally deficient and we have a lot of emotional stress, what tends to happen is our hormones kind of go on two sides. We have an anabolic side which are the growth hormones — testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone — that kind of help deal with growing. Then we have anti-inflammatory hormones which would be cortisol and are catabolic. I always put progesterone in that category because progesterone can be used to make more cortisol. So, we have our anti-inflammatory and then our anabolic. In some, they kind of cross over. Insulin, growth hormones, and testosterone are anabolic. The more inflamed we get, we could have high amounts of testosterone because of PCOS and because of inflammation. So, some of these hormones kind of interact and cross over. With men for instance, the more inflamed men get and the more stressed they get, that can actually cause an upregulation of aromatase and could increase their estrogen. So, see how these things kind of cross react. Your hormones are going to be either pro-building or anti-inflammatory to reduce stress. So, for chronically and stressed out state, cortisol is going to rip up your protein and kind of decrease your muscle mass. As a woman, you’ll see your progesterone level start to drop and that will start putting you into an estrogen-dominant state because if we normally got 20 to 25 times estrogen than progesterone, that ratio starts to drop. Even if you still have more progesterone than estrogen, that ratios is going to throw you off and that can create breast tenderness, cramping, mood issues, excessive bleeding/menorrhagia, infertility, a lot of mood issues, back pain, and fluid retention. All those are possible situations.
- Xenoestrogens from the environment and foreign estrogens. They can come from plastic components, pesticides, herbicides or rodenticides, mold toxins, and heavy metals. They are going to disrupt our hormones. The easiest thing is eat organic, avoid plastics, and avoid a lot of the chemicals in the water because a lot of times you can get pesticide runoff or hormone runoff in the water. So, clean water and clean food, and then make sure it’s organic avoid the plastics as well. That’s a big, big thing. Plastics are probably okay if they are in a refrigerator or in a cold environment but ideally if you’re heating stuff up or it’s going to get exposed to light, you want some kind of a Pyrex or a glass container. It’s much better and really important.
- Last but not the least would be just making sure our detoxification pathways are running well. So, if we have good hormonal balance but we can’t detoxify it, then a lot of times we can reabsorb it. So, if we don’t have good sulfur, good glutathione precursors, good B vitamins, good methylation, N-acetylation and glucuronidation, we may have a hard time eliminating. Hence, we are re-absorbing a lot of our hormones. So, being able to break down your proteins, break down your amino acid and your B vitamins is going to help with your body’s ability to eliminate a lot of these toxins.
Summary:
Blood sugar, digestion, stress, xenoestrogens, and toxicity are really big. Those are the big 5 across the board. Try to apply at least one of these things.
The Top 5 Causes of Chronic Headaches
Today we are going to be talking about the top underlying reasons why you may be having a chronic headache. I had a patient come in today who had headaches for 25 years, monthly and chronically, and we were able to get to the root cause and there are many different root causes for every person. Let me lay out the common ones that I find to be a major vector of my patients.
So we have headaches and head pain or migraines where you kind of have that aura and sound sensitivity. There are a couple of different major reasons why headaches may happen.
1. Food Allergens
Most common food allergy is gluten and dairy. There are some studies on gluten affecting blood flow up to the brain. We have these garden hoses on the side of our neck called our carotid arteries. When we have inflammation especially caused by gluten that can decrease blood flow and blood profusion to the frontal cortex, and when you have less blood, you’re going to have decreased performance of the brain. You can see that manifesting in a headache. People don’t know but headaches are actually an issue with vasodilation in the brain. Caffeine can help as caffeine actually causes constriction and brain’s typical headache signal is caused by vasodilation.
2. Food Additives.
These could be things like MSG, aspartame, Splenda or various artificial colors and dyes.
3. Blood Sugar Fluctuation.
We want to have healthy proteins and healthy fats with every meal. If we skip meals or we eat foods that are too high in carbohydrates and refined “crapohydrates” and sugar, and not enough fats and proteins, our blood sugar can go up and then drop. This is called reactive hypoglycemia. We react by putting a whole bunch of sugar in our bloodstream because all of these carbohydrate sources break down into sugar — processed sugar, grains, flours and acellular carbohydrates. These type of flours and refined processed carbs get converted to glucose in our bloodstream. When glucose goes up, our pancreas goes, “Holy smokes! We got a lot of glucose there. We got to pull it into the cell.” It spits out a whole bunch of insulin and pulls that glucose right down, and we have his blood sugar going up with a lot of insulin driving that blood sugar back down. When that blood sugar goes back down, this is where we have cravings. This is where we have addictions, mood issues, energy issues, jitteriness, and cognitive issues. Our body makes adrenaline and cortisol to bring that blood sugar back up. Most people literally live on this high insulin where they are making fat, storing fat and engaging in lipogenesis which makes us tired. Then blood sugar crashes which makes people jittery, anxious, and moody. Most people live on this reactive hypoglycemia rollercoaster and that can drive headaches.
4. Gut Infections.
Patients with a lot of gut inflammation, gut permeability, and infections whether it’s H. pylori, SIBO (small intestinal, bacterial overgrowth) or fungal overgrowth have gut stressors can create inflammation in the gut. When we have inflammation in the gut, we have gut permeability. So our tight junctions in our intestines start to open up and undigested bacteria, lipopolysaccharides, food particles can slip through and create an immune response. You can see histamine along with that immune response and histamine can create headache issues.
5. Hormonal Issue.
A woman’s cycle is about 28 days and in the middle is ovulation. Some women have it during ovulation and most have it right at the end just before they menstruate. This is called premenstrual syndrome that is right before menstruation. A lot of women may also have it during menstruation, too. What happens is progesterone can drop out early and that drop in progesterone can actually cause headache manifestations and also the aberrations in estrogen can also cause headaches as well. We may also see it with excessive bleeding too. So if you’re bleeding a lot or too much, what may happen is you may lose iron and that low iron may cause oxygenation issues. That low level of oxygen may also cause some headache issues as well. Because if you can’t carry oxygen, that is going to be a stressed-out situation for your mitochondria and your metabolism. For menopausal women who have chronically low hormones and they’re not in an optimal place, that can create issues. Progesterone and estrogen can be very anti-inflammatory. So if there is inflammation in the brain, progesterone is a powerful anti-inflammatory and that can really help a lot of inflammation in the brain.
Oils That Cause Gut Inflammation
There are various top-causes for gut inflammation but a big one is an oil. The oil you use to cook or bake into foods could be a major culprit to your very uncomfortable gut inflammation. Let’s look at the good and stable oils vs. the unhealthy oils.
If you look at the standard American diet, just even a hundred years ago, your grandparents or your great grandparents, they did not have access to these type of oils. They were cooking with traditional fats. They did a lot of lard and maybe some beef tallow.
If I asked my grandfather, “What did your grandmother cook you and what did she cook it with?” She was not using soybean oil. She was not using corn oils. She was not using rapeseed oil, which is canola. She was not using peanut oil. If they did something fried, it was going to be fried in possibly bacon fat, which came from the pig in the backyard of the farm or it was going to be cooked in some type of like a beef tallow, where the cows were on the back part of the farm.
When it comes down to fats, most plant fats are not going to be the best unless they are cold extracted or unless they are minimally processed to extract the fats. Partly because of the processes of extracting, it tends to damage the fats because the heat and the extraction process also makes the fats rancid and taste bad. There’s a lot of like deodorizing and filtration and different processes to make it more palatable that you would never be able to have at a natural state.
So the best plant fats are:
- Coconut oil because it’s a saturated fat and it’s more temperature-stable.
- Cold-press olive oil and good-quality avocado oil, which is primarily a monosaturated fat.
- Palm oil, which is more in a kind of saturated state.
There are some nut-based and some seed-based oils, but then you start ramping up the Omega-6 and those may not be the best. There are some supplemental oils that are more GLA-based that I’ll give supplementally, like black currant seed oil but we’ll give it supplementally and that’s coming from great sources that are going to be in capsules that won’t be oxidized and such.
Bad fats are going to create a lot of oxidative stress and they are going to deplete a lot of your antioxidant reserves because if those fats are oxidized, your body is going to need a lot of vitamin C and vitamin E to help with the oxidative stress that those fats may cause your body.
Now what it you find a good fish with gluten-free breading so it’s not covered in wheat with some type of non-gluten containing flour, but then you’ve got canola oil. Do you think you’re still going to be net positive in terms of nutrition because you’ve still got the good fish, but yet you’ve got the inflammatory oils or would you say, just get you some grilled fish and then if you want to bread it, you bread it yourself?
There’s a product that we like of sweet potato fries that my wife will do for my son because it’s really easy, but they have a little bit of canola oil in there. So you have this kind of convenience factor where ideally if you could you always would want to put your own fat on there if you could and my easy saturated fat or my easy fat for cooking that’s plant-based would be avocado. I like avocado because it tastes a little bit more neutral. I do not like olive oil as much. Olive oil is better for dressings, but I’ll do avocado for cooking. If you have control over it, you always choose the better fat over the junky fat if you can.
So the interesting thing is like coconut oil and avocado they’ve become kind of trendy and I would say avocado is not going to be a traditional fat meaning, meaning like traditional people were probably not doing it because you’ve got to have some heavy-duty equipment to extract the oil, but coconut oil would be super traditional. I mean, this would be something that has historical use.
Your big fats that are going to be plant-based would probably be primarily coconut. But your biggest ones that I think are going to be used more long-term from generation to generation will be your tallows, your bacon fat, your duck fat, and those kinds of things because saturated fats don’t go bad. They stay good for a long time because the carbon is saturated with 4 hydrogen bonds between them, which makes the fat really, really, really temperature-stable.
Take note of oils are that bad for your gut because they cause inflammation and oxidative stress.
4 Herbs That Give You The Upper Hand Against Viral Infections
Let’s talk about four herbs with antiviral properties.
Click here for a consultation with a functional medicine doctor before taking herbal supplements!
Olive Leaf
As part of a Candida protocol, we’ll have a couple of herb combinations that will have olive leaf combined with monolaurin. Stack those two right on top of each other. Monolaurin is a lauric acid coconut extract. It has been shown to be very, very potent as an antiviral. With olive leaf, the main compound in it – oleuropein – and that actually prevents the virus from attaching to the cells. We kind of talk about mechanisms a lot and people ask why does that matter. It is because some herbs may prevent the replication of viruses. Things like olive actually prevent the virus from attaching to healthy cells. So if you have multiple herbs, you’ve got multiple mechanisms. You’re just making yourself even more resilient.
Astragalus
They help with either immune modulation, natural killer cell, antibody modulation which is the infantry that comes in afterwards, or it is going to help with viral replication. Typically, it’s going to modulate the inflammation from the immune response.
Usually it is hitting things in about three to four different ways, and most are going to fall into that category. That is kind of the mechanism how they are working.
Cat’s Claws
We use Cat’s Claw or Samento a lot with biofilms. They work really well. These are protective shields, bacteria and critters use. We also use it with a lot of Lyme and various co-infections, but Cat’s Claws is great at the immune system, helping with viruses, and really enhancing the body’s ability to deal with infections. Again, everything we are talking about is not necessarily to treat anything. A lot of the time it is just to support our own immune response to what’s happening, because our body is really the ultimate fighter in all of this. Everything we are doing is just trying to give our body’s immune system an edge to address the issue to begin with. The body has dealt and humankind has dealt with viruses since forever.
Echinacea
When we are doing a lot of these herbs, a lot of times we want to make sure the whole root is present. A lot of times with Echinacea, you will see a lot of flower present. I want the whole root. I find that it has a lot more of the immune-modulating alkaloids that really have the immune benefit. It is excellent in how it reduces virus levels. It inhibits the growth of bacteria. It inhibits the growth of viruses. It is also going to modulate with the inflammation caused by that immune response and caused by the cytokines and interleukins.
What can you do to try to gain the upper hand?
These things are just going to improve your resilience. It’s important to have the right mindset. A lot of people are selling like cures or solutions and that is not going to be the case, but it is really going to be our body to begin with. Even antibiotics, when an infection gets cleared, it is still not the antibiotic. It is the antibiotic lowering the level of the infection and then the immune system can kind of come in and play. It is like if we are using a lifting analogy, it really gives a very helpful spot when you’re kind of low in that bench press, it really gives you that little spot to kind of get it up through that sticky point.
Holistic Farming, Improving the Food Chain, Your Immune System Starts with Good Food – Joel Salatin | Podcast #290
For today’s podcast, Dr. J has got a treat for you! Joel Salatin, American farmer, lecturer, author, and owner of Polyface Farm. He is one of the most famous farmers with his successful, unconventional techniques (agricultural methods used at Polyface are “beyond organic”).
Dr. J is talking us through the food journey and how a strong immune system starts with our food. We open with segregation vs. integration in conventional vs. unconventional farming. The benefits are obvious, and Salatin chooses not to mass produce to maintain a holistic and environmentally friendly business model. We shift into a discussion about quality and nutrient density of foods. We look at how some recent studies, documentaries, and food movements sweep over the fact that organic grass-fed meat is of a far superior quality to fast food meat. The quality of mass produced meats, fast food “meats”, and organic grass-fed meats are all different, and Dr. J and Joel acknowledge and elaborate on this. Much is covered during this podcast, but stay until the end to learn how our food-spending habits are changing with the times. While we used to spend 18% of our income on food and less on health, now it is the opposite. Dr. J sees this need to spend more on health in direct correlation with the quality and nutrient density of today’s foods. Spend more money on good quality food that is high in nutrients and you’ll spend less on hospital bills, etc.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
00:00 Intro to holistic farming
07:01 Junk food epidemic
19:47 Food processing plants
26:16 Politics of food
31:10 Nutrient-dense food
37:00 Plant protein vs animal protein, bacteria, biomass and the climate
44:24 Food labels and grading system
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are live! It’s Dr. Justin Marchegiani here in the house with Joel Salatin, who is one of the most famous farmers out there who runs Polyface Farms, an organic natural farming association. We’re gonna talk about all things farming, health, immune system. Let’s dive in. Joel, how are you doin’ today?
Joel Salatin: I’m doing great and it’s an honor to be with you, Dr. J.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, thank you so much. So, I first came upon you, how long has it—maybe 10 years ago now? In the documentary, Food Inc? Has it been 10 years?
Joel Salatin: Yes, it has been 10 years.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow! I remember that movie. There was a couple of things. It really kinda juxtaposed conventional farming methods. You bring in the cows then you bring in all the corn and then you have to move everything out. Get the corn you know—get all the cow patties out because of all the toxins that happen in it and then you see this wonderful juxtaposition where you have these cows, you move them throughout the pasture. You bring in the chicken to eat the remains of the stool they bring. You have this beautiful synergy in your farming and it was like this complete circle where the conventional system was just so, let’s just say, it lacked that holistic nature. Can you just kinda juxtapose, you know, the farming on the conventional side this with the more holistic farming just so the average person—
Joel Salatin: Right.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s stepping into this, understands the difference?
Joel Salatin: Sure! Well, you’ve laid it out very well. One of the big differences is segregation versus integration. I mean—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Joel Salatin: In the industrial system, the animals are segregated from their environment, from their feedstocks. They’re cooped up in a house. They breathe in their own fecal particulate all day.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct.
Joel Salatin: Their waste goes into whatever lagoons. I mean, if North Carolina didn’t get a hurricane every 2 years, the whole state would be full like a toilet tank right now.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Joel Salatin: You know, from all the clogged lagoons. Where—and then it goes to, you know, to wherever the food gets, to wherever it goes, into a great huge processing plant that’s also segregated with razor wire and no trespassing zones from its own community. Whereas in our system, it’s a highly decentralized system, a highly integrated system where the environments of open land, forest land, and water integrate closely. Wildlife is not considered a liability. Wildlife is considered an asset.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct.
Joel Salatin: Pollinators are encouraged and so the animals are each in a habitat that allows it to express its phenotypical distinctiveness. We call it the pigness of the pig, the chickeness of the chicken, ah so that they can fully express their, you know, yeah, their physiological uniqueness.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally makes sense.
Joel Salatin: The animals are moved from paddock to paddock. The chickens come behind the cows. The cows eat grass. I mean, they are herbivores so they don’t grain and they certainly don’t eat dead chickens and chicken manure like the industry feeds them and the manure fertilizes the pasture like the bison did that built the great soils of, you know, America and then we process locally and we, you know, we feed our foodshed and so everything is this circle. I mean, even our composting, we build compost with pigs. So instead of using—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow.
Joel Salatin: Great big machines, you know, to turn these piles, we actually just put some corn in it, turn in the pigs and the pigs aerate it and stir it like a big egg beater and of course, the pigs love to do this. We are not asking them to do something they don’t like to do.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%, I like it and I’m not an educated farmer but I could just see the holistic in this and the synergy and it just made sense. Now obviously, there’s business and, you know, the whole market type of feeds, this conventional type of way of living or producing animals in a conventional way, is it possible to still make money as a farmer and produce food holistically like this or is the profit mode of just really, really change the direction in how farming is moving?
Joel Salatin: Well, absolutely. It’s possible to make a living this way. That’s what we do. We’re not a non-profit. We are a for-profit outfit and now, that said, it’s important to realize that much of the food sold in the supermarket is not honestly—the cost of that is not honestly gathered. I mean, the fact that we have a dead zone the size of Rhode Island and the Gulf of Mexico, that is a direct external cost of industrial agriculture or the fact that half of all cases of diarrhea in the United States come from foodborne pathogens. You know, what’s the case of diarrhea worth? I don’t know what it’s worth but it’s not very fun and so we have all these additional costs that are not captured in the supermarket price and so we say, we’re the cheapest food on the planet because we are not polluting anybody. We’re not, you know, we’re not polluting anybody’s, you know, backyard barbecue with a stinky air and we’re not giving anybody a case of diarrhea and we’re not giving anybody MRSA and C. diff with subtherapeutic antibiotic use. So there’s—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I just wanna interject real quick. You said, “A dead zone in Mexico or the Gulf of Mexico?” Can you elaborate a little more on that?
Joel Salatin: Yeah, well the Gulf of Mexico, of course, is the ocean and the right now, in the Gulf of Mexico there’s a dead zone which is a toxic—where there’s no oxygen and nothing grows and it’s the size of Rhode Island right now and all those trip fishermen—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Joel Salatin: Fisherman that made a living in that large area, there’s no longer anything produced there.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, wow. I didn’t know that.
Joel Salatin: Yeah. So I mean, it’s big. I mean, it’s the biggest dead zone on the planet right now.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Interesting.
Joel Salatin: And not mention the many that are just, you know, internal but no, that’s a direct result of industrial, chemical and you know, run-off down the Mississippi.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, I see. So it’s caused by the pesticide run-off and it’s creating a dead zone where just life can’t happen because of all—
Joel Salatin: Right.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: The toxic soup that’s happening there essentially.
Joel Salatin: That’s right. That’s right.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay, very interesting.
Joel Salatin: That’s right.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And you have really touched on it too much, I’ll dive into, I wanna get thoughts on it is there is an inequality in regards to junk food being cheap partly because of a lot of the government subsidy, right? 20 billion dollars or so for wheat and soy, so when you throw that on, it’s gonna make these foods artificially sweet so when you see the Dollar Menu for instance, it’s really not a dollar, it’s probably orders of magnitude above that. Can you talk about the junk food epidemic with high fructose, corn syrup, soy, all these refined processed foods and how they’re artificially cheap?
Joel Salatin: Well, sure. I mean, the entire whatever farm program, USDA program, is dedicated toward subsidizing, concessionizing A) not only a large-scale enterprises to the exclusion of small-scale enterprises.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Joel Salatin: And you know, amalgamation and centralization and all that, but also to certain products, certain crops. There’s only 6 crops that get subsidies. Now they call insurance because subsidies have become you know—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Joel Salatin: Too politically incorrect.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Too politically, yeah, exactly.
Joel Salatin: So now they call insurance. But there’s only 6 products that have that you know, corn, soybeans, wheat and rice.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Granola?
Joel Salatin: Uh, not granola. Cotton.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Cotton.
Joel Salatin: And the other one is sugarcane.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow.
Joel Salatin: Sugarcane. So those are the 6 crops that are officially in that, you know that, kind of—well, the old subsidy program now the new insurance program, and so anytime you have incentives for just 6 commodities, guess what? You’re gonna get a skewed cost structure and an inordinate amount of production in those particular commodities and so that’s exactly what’s happened. And of course, you know, when you talk about junk food, you gotta realize that junk food is not necessarily less expensive than nutritious food. I mean, a Snickers bar, the price per pound of a Snickers bar is more than the price per pound of our, you know, grass-finished beef for example.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I think I heard you once say this, I mean, you can correct me if I’m wrong. I think you were talking about your organic eggs versus the conventional eggs and you’re like, “Hey, yeah. This is the twice the amount of cost but do you know that the amount of folate in here is 20 times more.” Can you talk about the nutrient density? And is that about correct? Is that number about correct? From the quote from before? In regards to the folate and eggs?
Joel Salatin: Yeah, so we participated with Mother Earth News Magazine.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Joel Salatin: In a study back, oh I don’t know, 5 or 6 years ago. They got tired of people—of being whatever panned and excoriated for saying that there was a difference from carrot to carrot, egg to egg, you know, pork chop to pork chop and so they said, “Well, let’s do it. Let’s take, you know, pastured eggs. Let’s find some farmers and settle this dispute.” And so they got 12 of us and we send them to a lab and they measured it for 12 nutrients. One of them was folic acid and the official USDA, you know, nutrient label for eggs is like 48 mcg per egg of folic acid and our eggs averaged 1,038 mcg per egg.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow.
Joel Salatin: No, I mean, yeah, so your magnitude of 20—this isn’t a 5% difference, a 10%. This is like, you know, magnitudes. The same thing is true with like grass-finished beef compared to corn-finished beef. For example, riboflavin. Riboflavin is especially—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: B2.
Joel Salatin: You know, yeah, and it was like 300% higher.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow.
Joel Salatin: And, and so you know, these products. When you talk about a salad bar, you know, being able to exercise and fresh air, and sunshine and/or grass in a salad bar where they’re moved every day to a new spot and you get this fresh salad. The keratins in that salad completely changed the fatty acid, the nutritional profile—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly.
Joel Salatin: Structure of the, you know, of the meat, poultry, egg. You know, whatever it is on the protein.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And this primarily just has to do with the fact that the cows are eating a natural diet. They’re getting lots of greens and then of course, the greens aren’t gonna be laden with GMOs and pesticides and then you’re cycling that through, and then you’re providing the synergy in with the chickens that eat the fecal debris afterwards, which then re-fertilized, and then it just creates this healthier microbiome. Healthier microbiome in the soil. Healthy soil microbiome creates more nutrients in the grass and then the circle just continues. Does that—
Joel Salatin: Right.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Sound about right?
Joel Salatin: Right. Yeah, you’re in the ballpark. Essentially, the diversity in our microbiome can only be as diverse as the diversity that we’re feeding it in our food and that can only be as diverse as the soil food web in the soil. I mean, every like tablespoon of soil has more beings in it—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Joel Salatin: Than there are people on the face of the Earth.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly.
Joel Salatin: And so if we—so if we reduce half of the soil bacteria, you know, with chemicals and make it simplistic and then we only do mono speciation of plants and animals growing on that soil, and then we send that into a sterile processing facility and what comes out as sterile, there’s not much there to feed our microbiome.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly.
Joel Salatin: And so, you know, when I go pick a carrot out in the garden, I don’t even wash it off. I rub it off on my pants and get a little bit of that dirt. You know, I can always imagine these dirt like the acetobacter and mycorrhizae.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Joel Salatin: They come in and they go down and I swallow them and they hit their destined cousins down in my gut, right?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Joel Salatin: Like, “Oh, hello, cousin. Where have you been?” Yeah, you know?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Joel Salatin: And they have this family reunion of microorganisms, you know? I can just–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That makes so much sense.
Joel Salatin: Going on.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That makes sense. Are there any bigger companies like Tyson or any of these bigger farming companies that are trying to do what you’re doing on a larger scale? Obviously, they’re doing it because they feel like they can be more efficient in how much product they produce. You know, we can argue about the quality aspect as you already just did with the nutritional density on the carrots, on the eggs, and I imagine that goes with the grass-fed meat.
Joel Salatin: Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And the vitamin B2. So there’s a nutritional density component that they are not measuring because I think they get paid by the pound, not by the nutrient, right?
Joel Salatin: That’s right. Nobody in the indust—nobody in the food system gets paid for nutrients right now. Now that may change. I mean, there’s some cool technology coming out with little handheld spectrophotometers.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow.
Joel Salatin: You know, which is Abby’s machine on NCIS, you know? The mass spec that she’s always got.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Joel Salatin: And so there’s some interesting technology especially now in produce where we’re trying to measure, you know, wavelengths. So there’s some cool stuff coming but yeah, you’re right. In the food system, nobody really gets paid for nutrition. They get paid for pounds and bushels and of course, that is not a measure of—that’s not a measure of quality. It’s a measure of quantity but it is not a measure of quality. It would be like measuring the effectiveness of a college by the number of diplomas it produced rather than the quality of jobs that graduates got.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love it. Great analogy. So essentially, we have a system that is really good at getting animals fat and big, which then they get paid more because of the weight versus healthy and nutrient-dense—
Joel Salatin: Yes.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Which then provides more health to the consumers and I just—I tell my patients when they’re going out shopping, you really have to change your mindset when you’re shopping. You have to say, “Hey, how can I get the best price? No, “ How can I get the most nutrients for my dollar?” And when you do that, the organic higher quality, more local foods will always give you more nutrients per dollar versus more bulk per dollar.
Joel Salatin: Right. For example, in beef production, a lot of people are familiar with ionophore either implants or supplements in like a mineral box. Well, these ionophores are basically steroids. They don’t actually increase mass. They increase the cell’s ability to hold more water and so you get more weight but you don’t get more nutrition. I mean—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Ahh.
Joel Salatin: The poultry industry right now, I think Tyson sells something like a billion dollars a year worth of water because they put chickens in chill tanks and agitate them so the birds take on water and the industry—like 10% of the weight of a bird in a supermarket is water. And so there’s all sorts of little tricks and techniques to try to, you know, abscond a few more pennies for nothing out of the supermarket which is why we promote actually just circumventing the industrial food chain. Whether it’s a Farmer’s Market, an on-farm store, a farm that ships to you, you know, directly to your doorstep. I mean, there are now all sorts of alternatives to the mainline orthodox food system and all of those offers, in general, you know, better alternatives than you can find down at Costco and Walmart.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Joel Salatin: Where the only way to get into those places—several years ago I had a bunch of—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Joel Salatin: Costco vice-presidents here and we—they spent the day. They were excited about what we were doing and they asked me then at the end. They said, “So how we get your stuff in at, you know, Sam’s Club and Costco?” I said, “Well, the first thing you have to do is let a truck smaller than tractor-trailer back up to your dock.” That was the end of the discussion. They could not even—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: There wasn’t enough scale.
Joel Salatin: No, they couldn’t imagine a system where a truck smaller than a tractor-trailer back up to their dock. So, you know, this was the kind of—it’s a prejudice within the marketplace that excludes, you know, positive alternatives.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right. Essentially, they’re looking for more scale and this is more of a decentralized way of doing it just because of, you know, it’s the big companies are kinda wetted to this conventional system because it’s all a weight-driven system not a nutrient-system so you kinda have to change how the system for it to make sense on the financial side to grow. I mean, is it possible like if you had more money right now if someone gave you a hundred million dollars, could you scale this thing to the size of a Tyson, while producing the same food quality?
Joel Salatin: Sure. So what a great question and you know, our most questions and criticism is price and scale. You know, can you actually feed the world this way and so the way I envision it is to explain to people absolutely this scale, in fact it scales just fine but it doesn’t scale like an aircraft carrier, it scales like a million speedboats.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Joel Salatin: And so we believe in scale not by taking something—not by taking a stationary piece of infrastructure and turning it into a mega, you know, infrastructure but rather a whole lot of decentralized, democratized—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Joel Salatin: Infrastructure all over the landscape so that instead of 150 mega-processing facilities worth 3,000 employees, the country has maybe, you know, 50,000 smaller scale abattoirs or canning plants or processing facilities scattered all over the landscape devoted to their own food, you know, their regional foodsheds.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Joel Salatin: And so one is scaled by duplication, the other is scaled by whatever, you know—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Subsidy or?
Joel Salatin: Empire building.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: The Empire Building.
Joel Salatin: Build a bigger coliseum instead of building a whole bunch of little theatres.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right. Now that makes sense. There’s a quote by John Paul Getty, “You’re better off getting 1% out of 100 men than 100% out of 1 man”, right?
Joel Salatin: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So it’s kinda like that? And it’s probably safer for our food supply. I mean, you can go read—you read stories of Russia before the revolution where all the starvation and stuff would happen and you know, because you had one farm controlled by the government and then that went sideways, and everyone starved, right?
Joel Salatin: Sure, yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So it makes sense from a safety standpoint for sure. Let’s talk about food processing plants right now. There’s a lot of hoopla where things were closed off because of the COVID-19 thing and then they had this big supply chain that was moving and they had to kill animals off because that supply chain couldn’t move and the supply chain was so tight in how they brought animals in, fed them, brought them to slaughter. If they couldn’t slaughter them on time, the whole thing got backed up and they had to kill them. So you have this supply chain backup. You have the whole food processing plant owned by a lot of companies outside of the country that are—it seems like they’re selectively choosing food from outside of the country versus inside the country. Can you talk a little bit about those politics?
Joel Salatin: Sure. So the idea there is that these processing plants, remember half, almost half of the US processing plant capacity right now is owned by China and Brazil. They’re owned by foreigners.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Joel Salatin: So, you know, these companies are above whatever national politics. You know, they’re global in scope and loyalty. They have no loyalty, you know, to a culture, to a country, to a place. And so what happened was in these big plants, as the coronavirus came in, they started—they were unable to continue to operate. They had a lot of workers get sick. You gotta remember that right now, the only place in America where thousands of people are working shoulder to shoulder every day in wet, damp, cool, damp conditions is in these large-scale processing plants. It’s not happening anywhere else. And a lot of these workers are themselves living in difficult conditions. They come from Somalia. They come from, you know, all over the world and I’m not being xenophobic. This is just a fact.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Joel Salatin: Most of these workers are foreign workers. They’re trying to save pennies to bring, you know, additional family members home. So they’re crammed, you know, 10 people in a house that we would consider only big enough for 4 people. They crammed 10 and 20 people in these houses and they’re scrimping pennies so they’re eating, you know, they’re eating out of the gas station and they’re eating SPAM, you know, to eat cheaply. So the living conditions, they’re in a new culture, they’re under the stress of a new language, I mean, there’s a lot of stress in their life and stress of course, you know, reduces your cortisol, okay? And so, then you become more susceptible. My point is that these huge plants are incubators for sickness. Whether it’s COVID or anything else and so when you have a very small plant, a community plant like we co-own one that has 20 employees. It’s a small community plant and we—you know, we have 20 people and we’re spread out a lot more because, well, it’s small, you know? And there are 2 guys over on the kill ford, 2 guys in the back pack machine, 4 guys in the cut room and they have a lot of room. It’s just not shoulder-to-shoulder like these great, great, big plants that are basically assembly line. We do stuff by hand with individual knives and individual workstations and there’s a lot of room and there’s not that many people and we’re hiring neighbors and so it’s better working conditions. And so, the fact is, that the small decentralized plants are simply less vulnerable to pathogenicity of any type.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Joel Salatin: Of any type whether it’s on the food or in the people. They’re just less vulnerable to pathogenicity than the great big plants.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, 100% and I remember in Food Inc that you were slaughtering a chicken outside in the open air with the UV light coming through and, you know, we’ve seen data that a lot of these coronaviruses cannot really survive more than 1 minute in 75°F temperature, 40% humidity so it seems like the sunlight or the UVC rays are really powerful natural disinfectant that you’re utilizing to help keep your food clean.
Joel Salatin: Yes, absolutely. And so a small plant, you know, has more windows. You know, workers can step outside for you know, for lunch or a break. I mean, there’s just a lot of additional, whatever, resilience in a small facility. So that was one of the big glitches in the food chain system. The other big glitch that happened was that when the restaurants were closed down, the food industry has 2 very distinct, whatever, journeys of food. It either goes into wholesale and you know, and restaurant trade or it goes into the retail trade. And as you can imagine, those 2 trajectories are completely different kinds of packaging, completely different kinds of distribution, everything. And so what happened when the restaurants closed down, everybody started buying retail, while the industry couldn’t adjust their packaging and their, whatever, their fabrication lines—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Joel Salatin: Fast enough to adjust. I mean, we even had it at our farm. At our farm, we never ran out of ground beef. We ran out of ground beef for 3 days. People were going, you know, going ballistic. We don’t have ground beef. We had 5,000 pounds of 5-lb packages of ground beef for our restaurants but that was not for the ret—you know, our retailer customers didn’t want 5-lb, you know, 5-lb packages of ground beef. They want 1-lb packages of ground beef. And so—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Joel Salatin: And so our retail customers saw us being “out” but we had plenty. It was just in bigger packages for restaurants.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow. That’s—
Joel Salatin: You know, so we encouraged people, we said, “Look, here’s how you can do it. You can take this all home, cook it, and then what you don’t eat, freeze it, and you can use it another time. Or you can take a hacksaw, you know, whack in quarters, you know and move.” So we were doing all sorts of creative things with our customers trying to get them to understand the meat is here, you just might have to help us and you know, meet this glitch here for a little bit.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: No, that makes a lot of sense. And just from a national security standpoint, you know, it doesn’t make sense allowing foreign people to own so much of our food supply. I mean, the gateway of our food supply being these food packaging plants. It just doesn’t make sense that they would—that such a large percent of them are owned by international companies. That is so mind-blowing!
Joel Salatin: Well, it is and you know, you can really see it right now in the last I think I’m right on this, in the last like 30 years, the US has gone from one—from roughly 1% to 5% of our food being imported to today, it’s 20%. In other words, 1 out of 5 mouthfuls of food that an American takes is now coming from a foreign place. We are becoming more and more vulnerable to these kinds of shocks within in the system. Of course, you know, during this time, China for the year leading up to the coronavirus, for that year, China depopulated half of their pork industry. You know, China consumes half of the world’s pork. Just the country of China consumes—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow.
Joel Salatin: Half of the world’s pork and in China, pork is the number one, you know, animal protein. In America, it’s chicken.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right. It makes sense.
Joel Salatin: Chicken, but in China it’s pork. So when the African swine fever came into China and by the way, it decimated the large producers more than the small ones, but when it came into China they began depopulating and so China was entering this whole COVID-19 thing short of pork, and so here we were with empty store shelves and Smithfield, which is owned by the Chinese, were sending 20% of our pork to China to help meet the African swine fever shortfall in China—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow.
Joel Salatin: While our grocery shelves were empty.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow, this is unbelievable and the politics of food I think are really important because it just—you gotta have common sense with a lot of these things. And when you have a lot of these international companies running these food processing plants, they are selecting for their fellow international probably subsidiaries I imagine, so then they’re picking meat from these international companies and bringing it here and then leaving our domestic farmers in the hole, kinda empty-handed, with all these extra supply and they are just being given money for the—by the government to sit on it essentially, right?
Joel Salatin: Yeah, well, I don’t know how much the subsidies, you know, go into those big outfits. I can tell you that probably the single, you know, when you talk about the politics of food, probably the single biggest issue here is that it is not necessarily money if you will, but it’s regulatory where it’s very, very difficult for a small, you know, community abattoir to get in the business because of very scale prejudicial—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Joel Salatin: Scale prejudicial requirements. That’s one reason why Congressman Tom Massie from Kentucky—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Kentucky, yeah.
Joel Salatin: Has put in the prime act to try to allow the intrastate, not interstate, but intrastate sale of custom processed beef and pork and so that a lot of these little community abattoirs can actually join the marketplace and aren’t excluded from the marketplace. The cost of getting into this is extremely expensive in its primary regulations. You know, you can go out and shoot a deer on a 70-degree day and feed it to your kids and give it to all the neighborhood and you’re a great American, but if you do one pig on an appropriate temperature day, you’re a criminal.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow.
Joel Salatin: And so this is not about food safety, it’s about market access.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right. There’s some common sense or form that could be done, I mean, if I was the agricultural czar and I could do a couple of different things right now policy-wise to just improve the health of this country, I think number one, I would get rid of all farming subsidies. Because I think number one is you have to show people, the Americans, what the true cost of food in your junk food is, number one. Number two, I would adjust a lot of the food stamps/SNAP program. People that need food, I think you give them a stipend to actually get the real food from their local farmer so you actually get the real food and you can’t spend it on junk food and crap and sugar, and anything else because I think if people need assistance, the worse thing we can do is give them crappy food and then they end up being on more drugs and—
Joel Salatin: Right.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And they are drained on the healthcare system because then you pay twice and you know, chronic healthcare is actually probably more like 10x, right? So I’d start with those first 2 things if I were to do anything just to let the free market, and then I probably would do more on the education side because I think people need to be educated about nutrients, not just how much their food weighs. I think it’s about value. People look at their food and they don’t have the value component. They just kinda look at it as, “Okay, it’s you know, this chicken is the same as that chicken,” and they don’t have the value component and that takes education to people like you and people like me.
Joel Salatin: Right. Well, I’m with you. I’ll vote for you. When you run, I’ll vote for you. But yes, I agree with all those things and in fact, one of the best ways to educate people is to actually put good food in their mouth. Most Americans have never actually eaten what we call nutrient-dense authentic food. I mean, this coronavirus has brought some interesting people into our farm store. A guy came in last week and you know, he had never shopped anywhere except Walmart and so he, you know, with all this coronavirus stuff, he came to us and he got a couple of, you know, 5 chickens or something and said it would take them a month. He called back the next week and he said, “I’ve never had anything like that. We ate them all in a week.” And what it was, it was his body telling him this is real nutrition, you need to eat this. Just like—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow.
Joel Salatin: A little anemic 6-year-old came in with his mother.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Joel Salatin: You know, this is little itty-bitty little child. Mother said, “Oh, he’s such a picky eater. He won’t eat anything.” She bought a dozen eggs. She called us the next day and she said, “He’s eating 6 eggs in a sitting.” Well, the child he was eating, but he was starving to death. He was starving nutritionally.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow.
Joel Salatin: And so when he got really decent nutrition, his body, you know, whatever, it woke up. You know?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right. Yeah.
Joel Salatin: That’s a better wokeness than the politically correct wokeness.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. No, that makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, when your body has the nutrients it needs, its metabolic systems run better and yeah, they literally will generate more energy which helps with the energy and focus and mood and everything. Now I’m just curious to get your take. I mean, I’d lecture my patient on whole food and how animal nutrients—animal bioaccumulate plant nutrients. So when you have the vegan-vegetarian argument versus being able to eat whole food, healthy animal products, number one, the argument tends to—it tends to create a straw man. The first argument is it tends to create all meat as conventional junk food McDonald’s meat and I think we have to be able to differentiate that. I don’t talk about the organic broccoli in someone’s backyard and compare it to the soybeans on a monoculture farm. So we have to be able to differentiate the quality of the meat, number one. And then number two, we have to look at the nutrient density like you mentioned. I know animals bioaccumulate plant matter. I think it’s something like 8 lb of grass goes into 1 lb of cow meat. So there’s bioaccumulation and when you look at the nutrient density studies comparing a carrot to liver or beef, or your egg yolks to any type of plant, you’re gonna see this increased nutrient density. Can you—what’s your argument on the plant-based nutrition side or the more the plant and animal-based side especially the animal side?
Joel Salatin: Yeah. Well, you’re exactly right. You’re exactly right. The problem is that with things like, you know, Cowspiracy and Game Changer.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes.
Joel Salatin: They refuse to differentiate that there can be a better way to raise a chicken or a cow—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes.
Joel Salatin: Than a poor way to raise a chicken or a cow. I’m liking it to this. It’s as if you and I, let’s say we live on Pluto. We’re looking down at the Earth and Pluto says, “Hey, that’s an interesting-looking planet down there. I wonder what their education system is. How about we get 2 volunteers to do down there and check it out?” So you and I volunteer, we jump in the flying saucer and we come down to Earth, and we happen to land in the schoolyard of the worst school district with the worst superintendent—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Joel Salatin: In a school with the worst principal and we go visit the worst classroom with the worst teacher.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Joel Salatin: Worst parents in the whole country. And we watched this for 2 days. We go back to Pluto and they say, “Well, what did you find?” We’ll say, “Man, if education is like that, we shouldn’t have any education.” You know?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly.
Joel Salatin: And that—so when you—when all of your data points are from a dysfunctional system, you’re gonna come up with a dysfunctional conclusion and that is what has driven the data points, the science, the data points of you know, Cowspiracy, the UN Long Shadow report, the EAT-Lancet report, all these, you know, anti-animal, anti-meat things are—they don’t come here to do their data collection. You know, they go to feedlots, they go to factory farms, they go to, you know, desert irrigation.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Joel Salatin: And it’s all those systems rather than a truly holistic functional synergistic type system.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, anytime someone makes an effort to create that straw man and not let—and not really argue against the premises that you’re making, that’s sophistry right there at its best. I mean, we see it all with a lot of the people talking about climate change and the methane produced by cows. Well, okay, you know, well, let’s talk about the fact that methane is significantly reduced if not totally neutral with cows that eat grass. And so, you know, we’re just supporting now an argument of cows eating more grass and keeping the grains and the corn and all that crap out of there. But the argument still—the goal post constantly gets shifted in the plant versus animal argument and I think it’s a combination of the two but we gotta acknowledge there’s a different way to raise these animals in a healthy fashion and the results totally change. And we’re not even talking about the bioavailability of plant—
Joel Salatin: Right.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Proteins versus animal protein.
Joel Salatin: Right.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s a totally different argument. The assumption is that all plant proteins are absorbed and assimilated the same way and the anti-nutrients aren’t affecting any of it and also that the amino acid profile is the same. We know that animal-based amino acid profiles are gonna be more sulfur-rich and the plant-based profiles are a lot of times are gonna be incomplete and you have to combine different proteins like rice and beans, etc. Your thoughts?
Joel Salatin: Yes. So yeah, exactly so a lot of people have never heard of a bacteria in the soil called methanotrophic bacteria.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes.
Joel Salatin: Methanotrophic bacteria lives in pasture. It doesn’t live under corn. It doesn’t live under asphalt. It doesn’t live in feedlots. It doesn’t live on factory farms. It lives under perennial grasslands. Methanotrophic bacteria in a healthy grassland, there’s enough methanotrophic bacteria. Methanotrophic is it’s a bacteria that eats methane.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Eats it. Totally eats it. Yup.
Joel Salatin: Yeah, it eats methane and metabolizes it and feeds it back to plants, okay? And so in a healthy pasture, you know, perennial grass situation, there’s enough methanotrophic bacteria in the soil to eat up all the methane from 2,000 cows per acre. That’s how constructive and regenerative nature is. Now, nobody is gonna have 2,000 cows per acre. The point is that nature has all the mechanisms necessary to make sure there’s no waste stream. That everything has a place of reconstruction and regeneration that there’s no landfill in nature. There’s no away. There’s no waste stream. Every waste stream is the beginning of something else. And so that’s—so methanotrophic bacteria—so you don’t hear in Cowspiracy, you don’t hear them talking about methanotrophic bacteria, they just talk about, you know, feed lots and factory farms and things. And so, you know, it’s important to understand that there’s a lot in the system that they’re not talking about. Even to the point that how much water it takes to make a T-bone steak. Well, they don’t measure the urine that comes out of the cow or the bacterial exudates of the biomass when healthy biomass exudes bacteria, that’s the number one coalescent for water vapor in the atmosphere. Water vapor can coalesce around ice particles. It can coalesce around little pieces of chemical or it can coalesce around bacteria. 90% of it coalesces around bacteria and bacteria just is exhaled by the biomass, trees and grass and shrubs and things. And so, when a cow stimulates through proper grazing measure, when a cow stimulates biomass production in the forage, it actually comes alive with additional exhale bacteria that allows the clouds to form, rains to come, and stimulates water. I mean, this is all out of Walter Jehne from Australia, probably the, you know, the world’s foremost, you know, climatologist, climate change guy talking about how atmospheric moisture is the Earth’s radiator and the problem is that none of these climate changers are talking about, how do replenish the radiator of the Earth? You replenish it with biomass-induced bacteria exhaling from the plants.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Joel Salatin: And how you do that is with the proper animal pruners around the land and not continuous grazing, not overgrazing, not desertification, but proper animal management to stimulate the abundance of the biomass on the landscape.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Can you just re-say that like in 15 seconds again? It was a lot—I wanna be able to connect those bullet points because there was so much said there. Can you just kind of reiterate that just a little bit more succinctly again?
Joel Salatin: Okay, so moisture in the air, water droplets condense.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Joel Salatin: They condense around ice particles.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Joel Salatin: They condense around little pieces of chemical, cloud seeding.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Joel Salatin: And they condense around bacteria. They’re favorite one and the one that’s most conducive is the bacteria. The bacteria comes from the exudates of biomass, green material, vegetation.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Got it.
Joel Salatin: And so it’s the vegetation that stimulates the condensation that makes the clouds that helps to create functional water, you know—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes.
Joel Salatin: Water cycle, you know, hydraulic cycles in the world.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And is it just vegetation and the vegetation that’s coming from the cow’s actual food that they’re eating in the grass. Is that where that vegetation’s coming from?
Joel Salatin: Yes. Because if you don’t prune biomass, then it tends to become stale and dormant and doesn’t—I mean, a grass plant goes into senescence. You know, in like 60 days, a grass plant goes into senescence.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow.
Joel Salatin: So if something doesn’t come along and prune that grass plant, you know, it turns brown and the bioaccumulate—the, you know, the photosynthesis stops. And so it’s the herbivorous pruner, that’s why the planet has so many herbivores—zebras and elephants and you know, llamas and alpacas and caribou. The reason for all these herbivores is to keep this vegetation freshened up like pruning an orchard or pruning a vineyard to make it, you know, to make functional. So the problems associated with domestic livestock and herbivores is not the problem with herbivores, it’s the farmers and ranchers who manage them incorrectly to not allow them to do the job they were supposed to do as freshening up, you know, pruners.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s excellent. It’s such a holistic cycle and everything is affected. Everything affects everything.
Joel Salatin: Yes.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: From the soils to the plants, to the cows to the atmosphere, to the gasses being produced and you know, I always tell my patients, old foods can’t cause new disease and I don’t think we can—I don’t think new farming methods will ever beat the old farming methods that have always been there because it’s just the closer you are to Mother Nature, it seems like that’s the better way to do it.
Joel Salatin: Well, that’s for sure. And nature always fills, you know, we believe here at our farm that nature’s default position is fundamentally wellness.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Joel Salatin: And whereas in the industry, they consider the fundamentally default position as sickness. So we’ve gotta make pharmaceuticals and drugs and GMOs and all these things to override nature’s propensity towards sickness. Whereas we believe nature’s fundamentally well and if it’s not well, my first question is what did I do to mess it up.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly.
Joel Salatin: What did I do to override the immunological terrain? And so we’ve actually—I’ve actually co-authored a book with Dr. Sina McCullough, it just came out 2 weeks ago. It’s, the title is Beyond Labels and it’s all about going beyond, you know, beyond just the labels in food and understanding how foods produced from a, you know, a practical standpoint. How do we make food decisions, proper food decisions and get beyond just being stuck on, you know, paleo, keto, organic, whatever it is, but you know, and labels of sickness? You know? I have this. I have that. But just going all the way beyond labels in life and I would encourage folks to, you know, to see it and it’s written like a dialog from a farmer and a PhD. So it’s—and you know, it’s—so it moves, when you get tired of me, you get her. When you get tired of her, you get me.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I love it. That makes so much sense. That’s great. And on the conventional side, you see grades like select or choice or prime, right? How does that correlate to your meat? Like where does your meat kinda plug in to that typical grading system? Obviously, that grading system does not—I don’t think look at the hormones, the antibiotics, the grass-fed or grass-finish nature of that. Can you talk about that grading system and compare it to kinda where yours plugs in?
Joel Salatin: Sure. So that grading system was started in the early 1900s when everybody was using candles, you know, tallow for candles and so the grading system was developed so that the fat content could be measured because cattle received way, way more value if they had enough tallow to make candles.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hmm.
Joel Salatin: This was before electricity. And so the select choice in prime—that whole grading system has nothing to do with nutrition, it has nothing to do with taste, it was nothing to do with eating quality. It’s strictly a measure of fat percentage in the animal based on—well, okay, so now we got enough fat to you know, boil down to make candles to light our houses. That’s how archaic it is and yet it—this is what happens with government programs. As you know, government programs they start and even when they are, you know, a century out of date, we got electricity, they still keep them functioning. You know, one of the things with eggs for example. You know, you get a carton of eggs, it says Grade A, Grade A large eggs. I’m having trouble with my bud here. It keeps falling out. You know, when you get a carton of eggs, it says Grade A large eggs. So what does it mean? It has nothing to do with nutrition. It only has to do–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Joel Salatin: With appearance and the size of the air cell and the viscosity of the albumin. It doesn’t have anything to do with—but people, they see this, you know, stamp of Grade A or whatever on an egg and they think somebody has checked it for Salmonella or Campylobacter or something. But nobody has checked them for any of that. It’s strictly an aesthetic grade in the market so that we don’t get crinkly and extra-long or extra fat or whatever you know, eggs in the marketplace. And so, this is one of the big—this is one of the reasons—this is what Sina and I are bringing out in our book, Beyond Labels, is some of this background stuff, people look at these labels and they assume it means all this. I mean, like if somebody is checking all these unpronounceable things. Doesn’t the FDA check monosodium glutamate? No! It’s generally regarded as safe. GRAS.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Joel Salatin: And GMOs. Who’s checking GMOs? Nobody. They’re considered equivalent to non-GMOs, GRAS. Generally regarded I think it is—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Joel Salatin: Generally regarded as safe. You know more about that than I do. But generally regarded, GRAS. And so there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of unnatural fake compounds in our food that if they get GRAS designation, nobody checks them. Any company can add them to food without any check whatsoever.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and there’s no real safety studies behind it or anything which is kinda sad.
Joel Salatin: No. There’s no safety studies behind it or anything. And so many of these stamps and inspections and labels, they have nothing to do with nutrition. None of these labels has anything to do with nutrition. And I think if you and I could get all the listeners here today to understand that none of the labels has anything to do or measure either A) nutrition or B) pathogenicity, you know, they don’t measure antibiotic residue. None of this stuff. That all the things—here’s the thing. The thing that consumers fear, the things that worry consumers that they would like to know, none of that is on the label.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. Exactly. The toxicity, the drug residue, the GMOs.
Joel Salatin: The nutrient density. Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Maybe even mycotoxins. Exactly. The nutrient density which is the most important thing and that kinda comes back to one other thing that, you know, I first learned about in the documentary where I first found you, Food Inc was I think it was Michael Pollan was talking about it is that the percent of our income that we spend on food today is about 8% or 9%. It used to be 15% to 18%. So we used to prioritize a lot more of our income to food quality and that prioritization has shifted and of course, the disease management and all the drugs that are being taken I think directly correlate with the lack of investment in our food quality and then we end up investing in drugs on the other side to kinda balance out the other end.
Joel Salatin: Absolutely. You know, 30 to 40 years ago, the average American spend 18% of their income—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Joel Salatin: On food and 9% on healthcare. Today, we spend 9% on food and 18% on healthcare. Those numbers have completely inverted in the last 30 to 40 years. That’s truly profound and in fact, that inversion really accelerated in 1979 when the US—I call it the US-Duh.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, USDA. US-Duh. Yeah, that’s a good one.
Joel Salatin: Their first food pyramid, remember the food pyramid?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Joel Salatin: And they put Cheerios and Twinkies on the bottom as you know, the most important stuff. You know, the grains and we can track our diabetes, our, you know, our obesity. We can track all these things directly to the consumption of the way the USDA had told u to eat. The fact is, the sobering fact is, if the government had never told Americans how to eat, including hydrogenated vegetable oil and demonizing butter and lard back in—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Joel Salatin: You know, if the government had never told Americans how to eat, we would actually be healthier today.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% and because special interest lobby and they get their piece out of that food pyramid or that my food plate—
Joel Salatin: Exactly.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: The recommendations are based off on financial interest, not about what makes us healthy.
Joel Salatin: Absolutely.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and it kinda goes back. I think people need to look at it from this perspective—old foods don’t cause new disease.
Joel Salatin: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And if you kinda go into that kinda model, that gives you the foundation to move forward for sure.
Joel Salatin: Right and a kind of a corollary to that is that we didn’t get this pandemic because there was a lack of a vaccine.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Joel Salatin: It’s not like a sickness fairy floated over the planet and said, “Let’s see what are they lacking down there? Oh, they’re lacking a vaccine to COVID-19. So we’re gonna sprinkle some of that down there.” You know, we didn’t get this because we lacked the vaccine or lacked something. It’s always a result of some sort of mismanagement or you know, misapplication of things and nature doesn’t like vacuum. You know? If you’re not getting enough good bugs, they’re gonna put in some bad bugs. Nature doesn’t like a vacuum. So nature’s gonna fill the void with something. So if you’re eating junk food and if you’re, you know, if you’re drinking Coca-Cola instead of, you know, good water for that matter, nature’s gonna fill that deficiency in your cell structure.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% and also, I saw a study recently, because how vaccines work is, they’re stimulating the TH2 branch of the immune system that makes antibiotics. I saw a study talking about the TH1 branch of the immune system and how other coronaviruses that we’ve been exposed in the past, our TH1 immune system has kinda been primed so a lot of the high amount of asymptomatic cases, these are people that get the infection, show no symptoms, are infectious maybe for a week but then develop antibodies long term. A lot of the reason why they were asymptomatic is because they have a TH1 immune response to the virus and the TH1 is like our natural killer cells, right? This is like in the army, there should be like the Navy Seals or the Delta Team. These are the first responders to go in first. Think of the antibodies as the infantry that comes behind alter, so you take a vaccine to increase the infantry but the TH1 immune system which is typically ignored—part of good health, good nutrition is gonna help increase that TH1 immune response and that’s part of the immune system we totally forget about.
Joel Salatin: Well, absolutely. You know, that’s so fascinating they way to hear you describe that which is really cool because I was just on a podcast not long ago in person and they tested every guest for coronavirus antibodies.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Joel Salatin: And with a blood test and so you know, the doctor came and he pricked my finger and took my, you know, took my blood and it was like a 15-minute test and he said, “Well, you know, you haven’t had it.” I said, “Well, have I been exposed to it?” He said, “Well, the antibody test only tests your secondary immune system because if your first—like if your first, like if your skin, if your exterior immune system was good enough, it will never even get into your antibodies.”
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s the thing.
Joel Salatin: So he said, “I can’t tell you if you’ve been exposed. All I can tell you is did it get through your first immune system, not your second immune system.” He said, “That’s all I can tell you.” And I thought, my goodness, as much as we can’t even tell that, that’s incredible what we don’t know.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%! We forget about that TH1 immune responses. There have been studies with people that if they have gammaglobulinemia, meaning they don’t have the ability to make antibodies and if these people have gotten exposed to infections and have been able to fight it off because of the TH1 immune system, which we don’t really have a great way to measure because it’s not like you make a natural killer cell specific for the COVID-19 where you can go test it. Where antibodies, they’re a specific locking key that you can test for herpes or for chlamydia or for COVID, right? You can test it.
Joel Salatin: Right.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Because there’s a specific shape of it. You don’t quite have that same, you know, I’m not an immunologist but you don’t quite have that shape recognition on the TH1 immune system where you can go look for it specifically. So it’s a little bit tough—
Joel Salatin: Right.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: To measure.
Joel Salatin: Right, yeah. And you know, and that just shows how trying to reduce everything in life—to reduce everything in life to some sort of empirical hard, whatever, formula, ratio—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Joel Salatin: Material is just—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Joel Salatin: I mean, this was the problem with the Human Genome Project. You know, remember when the Human Genome Project launched?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Joel Salatin: And they said, “This will take, you know, this many years and we know based on mathematical statistics that based on genetic variability, we know there will be a 100,000.” I remember it like yesterday, “There will be a 100,000 pairs on the DNA strand.” Well, goodness. This has to be the only Federal Government-funded project that ever finished at half the budget in half the time. The reason isn’t because they only found like what 24,000 pairs.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Joel Salatin: I said, “That’s mathematically impossible.” And that launched the entire new, new sphere of study called Epigenetics, which is how—which is the hanky-panky, the hanky-panky going on up and down the DNA strand. Nobody knew that before and so it’s amazing how we—as we western empirical, you know, Greco-Roman Western reductionist linear compartmentalized thinkers try to break apart these pieces, life becomes more magnificent, more mysterious, more awesome, more complex, more beautiful than anything we can imagine. And so why don’t we just—why don’t we just back up and enjoy the beauty? And let’s drink water instead of Coke and let’s eat, you know, real carrots instead of make-believe carrots and real cows instead of make-believe cows, and let’s just back up and enjoy that nature is way more beautiful and complex than we can ever try to break apart anyway.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally. I think that really just summarizes everything. Just to kinda piggyback on the whole DNA project. I remember this. I was in college at the time and I remember what, 98% to 99% of all DNA they labeled as junk DNA because they didn’t understand it, right? Junk DNA are these DNAs that are non-encoding, right? They’re not essentially encoding proteins. Turning off right? And turning on. And that’s where I think a lot of the Epigenetics plays into. They just labeled 98% to 99%–
Joel Salatin: Right.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Of all DNA they didn’t understand that wasn’t encoding things as junk, which is unbelievable. The hubris in science to just label—
Joel Salatin: Yes.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 99% of something junk but I think that’s where a lot of the Epigenetics play in and we know nutrition and sleep and hydration and managing stress—
Joel Salatin: yes.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Really control a lot of that DNA that we don’t understand and we just label junk.
Joel Salatin: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, it’s similar to black hole in the cosmo—in the cosmic, you know, physics to labeling black hole because somehow when you don’t appreciate the electrical components to the universe that you can’t mathematically justify all this just with gravity and mass and so well, we gotta have a placeholder to make the math work so we’ll call them black holes. We have never seen one. We don’t know if they exist but the math doesn’t work and so we humans in our finiteness, you know, we’re always coming to this big thing trying—we try to make the complex too simple and we try to make the too simple to complex.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep, I 100% agree, Joel. I think you did a wonderful job summarizing that. How can listeners support you? I mean, can they buy your food online? Do you ship it? How can they support you? How can they support other people like you? What’s that next step?
Joel Salatin: Okay, so yeah, there’s an entire, you know, network of people like us and yes, and we do ship. We do ship now. We started it last year. We ship nationwide.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent.
Joel Salatin: So yes, you can call us up and now, I’ll tell you right now we’re struggling to keep up, okay? But we’re, you know, we’re growing more. We’re doing some things so we can try to meet the demand because we’re very cognizant that this whole coronavirus thing has stimulated for the first time large-scale cultural discussions around immune function. And that’s an exciting—that’s the exciting silver lining to this whole cloud is that people for the first time on the street talking about building immune systems. That’s an exciting thing. So yes, our website is PolyfaceFarms.com and you can, you know, you can order food there and you can get information, books, you can see where I’m speaking, of course, most have been canceled but now they’re coming back. I’m actually gonna be—July 9th I’m gonna be doing 5 presentations.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow.
Joel Salatin: For, it’s called A Day Up The Creek With A Lunatic Farmer in Orlando, FL at the national—Libertarian Party National Convention in Orlando.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Cool.
Joel Salatin: How about that?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s awesome. Very cool.
Joel Salatin: Yeah, yeah, so anyway, yeah. PolyfaceFarms.com is our website and I’ll be glad for anybody to visit that be glad to help anybody that’s trying to get some help.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And also, you’re an author, you have many books. You have many books as well so I imagine getting some of the books—
Joel Salatin: Yes.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Would be very helpful. I think you had a book you should recommend that kinda dovetail with this topic?
Joel Salatin: Well, certainly the book by Dr. David Montgomery on—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Joel Salatin: On soil, that’s, yeah, that’s a powerful, powerful book. I mean, there are, there’s a new one just coming out. It’s just been literally just been released by Diana Rogers called Sacred Cow.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.,
Joel Salatin: In fact, I—it’s so new, I just—she just sent me it. Yeah, here it is.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love it.
Joel Salatin: Here it is. Sacred Cow and of course, our new book, Beyond Labels is just out and it’s too far away to reach. It’s over on the other counter, but yeah, these are all books that really speak to this—you know, the whole message that we just talked about today and will help, you know, dig in a little deeper.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Is there any other ways people can donate or help besides that? I know there’s like farm to legal defense funds for some of these—
Joel Salatin: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Farmers that are really getting hit hard with some of these lawsuits. Is that a good method? Is there a site you recommend for that? Are there any other ways people can help?
Joel Salatin: Oh yes, Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund is my number one recommended, you know, kind of charity in this. What people don’t realize is that as soon as you stepped out of the orthodox seat today, you step into a hearsay and hearsay is not liked by many of the government regulators and I mean, for example, they don’t even like that we love customers to come to our farm. You know, they think that they’re gonna bring disease. And so that’s why, you know, all your industrial farms, they have big, you know no trespassing signs and you know, they don’t want people—and so what has happened is we’ve disconnected so much from our food that in the industrial food, when you invest in that meal, it’s like prostitution food. It’s a one-night stand. There’s no romance or no—
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Joel Salatin: There’s no understanding of that food and so we want people to come and visit the farm. See the cows, touch the chickens, you know, pick a cherry off a tree, okay? And actually have a memory. There’s actually information that indicates if you sit down for a meal and what you’re eating, if you have a memory—if you have a memory that goes beyond that meal, then it actually helps your digestive enzymes to digest it better if there’s a memory that goes with that food. And so, you know, we’re all into building those connections of wanting people to do, but Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund is a wonderful organization that’s providing legal help for those of us who dare to question the orthodoxy to hold us by the hand and work us through to either fight in court or to create workarounds so we that don’t have to get a license or comply.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You know, I’m a huge fan. I donate money to that every single year. I think it’s great and I just urge people to shift the values of food and don’t look at just price. Look at the nutrient density when you go to purchase and remember that study that Joel did there, 10x, 10 to 20x on the folate and the pasture-fed organic high-quality eggs versus the conventional. So you really get a bargain even if you’re spending you know, twice the amount of 10x more. I’ll take that deal any day.
Joel Salatin: Right.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Awesome, Joel. Thank you so much. Is there anything else you wanna leave the listeners with?
Joel Salatin: No, you’ve been a delight. We’re, I think we’re two peas in a pod here and I can’t thank you enough for taking this issue and for giving me an additional platform here and just bless you, bless you for what you do. We need a thousand like you.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Thanks so much, Joel. Really appreciate it. Love to have you back anytime you have anything else important you wanna share. Thanks again.
References:
Audio Podcast:
Top 3 Ketosis Tips for Success – Dr. David Jockers | Podcast #240
Ketosis is a normal metabolic process that provides several health benefits. It’s a popular weight loss strategy wherein your body converts fat into compounds known as ketones and begins using them as its main source of energy. Ketogenic diets may even have benefits against diabetes, cancer, epilepsy and Alzheimer’s disease.
Read and listen through this podcast as Dr. J and his special guest, Dr. David Jockers discuss the Top 3 Ketosis Tips for Success.
Dr. David Jockers
In this episode, we cover:
00:43 Ketogenic Diet, Intermittent Fasting
01:10 Importance of Hydration
09:08 Stress Control and Good Sleep
13:54 Keto Adaptations
28:34 Meal Time Strategies
Dr. David Jockers: Hey always great to be on Dr. J, I love listening to you and Evan. Big fan of the show, so always great when I get to be on. And I love our conversation. So thanks a lot.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah well thanks for being here, Doc I really appreciate it. So let’s dive in to it, you’ve been utilizing ketogenic diet, intermittent fasting, these tips these techniques to help improve insulin sensitivity, to help with cellular turnover and healthy aging. So what’s the number one thing right now that you find that patients have a barrier with it, when you make this tweak or you make this adjustment, they get to their next level of health utilizing a ketogenic diet?
Dr. David Jockers: Now I would say the number one thing is hydration. You see, in our brain our, our hypothalamus, our hunger center and our thirst center are right next to each other. And whenever we eat, we stimulate dopamine. It helps us feel good. And I think that’s a great adaptation, because you know it’s like, it’s great to feel good when we eat and it helps drive us to eat to consume food. But what happens is because food so prevalent in our society today, whereas as our ancestors didn’t have access to, you know we didn’t have pantries and refrigerators and things like that in years past. So food is prevalent. We could literally be eating all day long and we’re constantly stimulating that dopamine. And so for many people have become addicted to it, and our hunger and our thirst center are right next to each other in that area of the brain. And so for many people they’ve had these neuroplastic changes where the hunger center has now moved into the thirst center. So they’re really thirsty but they experience it as hunger. So they’re like I need something, I need a dopamine hit. There’s something that I’m missing and there’s food, I’m going to go for the food, and really most people are chronically dehydrated meaning more fluid. We need more water. And so I find that drinking more water, hydrating your body really well especially when you first wake up in the morning, so critical, so critical, for intermittent fasting, so critical for fat burning, for cleansing the body, for energy production, for good mental clarity, and for Keto adaptation. And so getting some good water, I recommend drinking you know, if you’re not used to it start with just eight ounces, OK. But ideally, trying to get 16 to up to 32 ounces of water within the first hour of waking up. So really hydrating your body well because when you’re sleeping overnight you’re breathing out water vapor. So you’re actually losing water throughout the night. So when you wake up in the morning really hydrating well, not only will replace that water, but on top of that it’s also going to help stimulate energy production, you’re going to notice that your energy goes up, the better you’re hydrated, more energy production your body’s going to have, you’re also going to poop better, right. We want to get poop out, want to have good bowel movements early in the morning, you’re at your large intestine is most active. So my goal is always to have two really good solid bowel movements within the first hour of waking, and it’s like my energy is just amazing, my mental clarity- I’m so productive when I’m able to do that. So hydration is number one tip.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I think that’s amazing. I’ve been following that for years. When I first discovered the book, your body’s many cries for water by Dr. Batten and Gila. She talked about that. I’ll add some extra like Redman’s real salt or I’ll use a trace minerals support I’ll add to it. Today, I had a little bit of alcohol last night so I before I went to bed I have a drink, I typically drink mineral water in between each alcoholic beverage to get the extra minerals back in and then I did a lot of glutathione before bed and a lot of vitamin C and extra electrolytes to start my day, and those stretch receptors in your tummy when water comes in, it hits those stretch receptors and allows you to feel more satiated and then naturally have an appetite that’s more calibrated with what their nutritional needs actually are. So that’s a great tip.
Dr. David Jockers: Yes so important, I mean we have that ghrelin hormone. And so when we’re when our stomach is empty, ghrelin going to come out and tell us we’re hungry. So yes the eating a big breakfast in the morning, it’s normal for you to want to eat a big breakfast because you conditioned this response that ghrelin pop out. What if you just start by hydrating your body you’re gonna notice you’re gonna be more satiated. This is a great way to get started with intermittent fasting- you just hydrate your body really well in the morning, and then wait for natural hunger to come after that, to start with the hydration, now allow the natural hunger to come, you know, as it comes naturally after that. Yeah definitely getting the electrolytes and to adding some —
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes it’s very important. And as insulin levels drop too we tend to pee, pee more because insulin tends to pull sodium. Sodium tends to pull water. So that’s why you know someone does a ketogenic diet and drops their carbs really low they’ll lose three or four pounds the first day it’s not going to be fat it’s going to be water. So yeah I mean that’s that’s a really salient point because we are going to be losing a lot of that water so we have to make sure we get it back. And I would even say the key electrolyte to on keto that I find is really low is potassium. So really upping the potassium and or just really focusing on lots of green vegetables and avocados is another awesome tip for sure.
Dr. David Jockers: Yeah. That is important and sodium too actually. When you lose a lot of sodium, so getting a lot of those salts are really the cool thing is in nature you get potassium, and a lot, you get potassium and sodium and good ratios right. So avocados actually have sodium, celery potassium and sodium, C vegetable. Right. So all these natural foods [inaudible], these broccoli cauliflower got potassium and sodium. So if you’re consuming a lot of those things and then salting your food up to your desired case. I don’t think you need to go beyond that. Not like I’m shoveling salt in your mouth. They just flush you out right. Probably just move your bowels, could you loose stools but instead just salting up to your taste. And even if you’ve been told to be on a low salt diet, it’s kind of like what you were saying there, Dr. J you know, basically once you, once your insulin goes down, you turn a lower carb diet or if you are doing some fasting, your insulin is going to drop down and when you when you drop insulin, you start to excrete sodium. With that sodium comes the water so you need to replace that. So adding in these good trace mineral rich foods, even grass fed meets you’re very rich and in minerals, a lot of good salts and they’re really really good stuff. Dark green leafy sea vegetable, a lot of things we we just talked about, fermented foods, olives, pickles, sauerkraut, all really really good stuff when it comes to trace minerals. So getting those in your diet and then just salting up your desired taste, really good. And then I mean it’s really as simple as this when it when we’re talking about taking Redmond’s real salt or Himalayan salt. Yes a little pinch on your on your finger and put it on your tongue. Specially noticing that you’re just feeling a little bit dizzy or especially a lot of people when they start intermittent fasting or if they start going in a low carb diet, they feel a little bit dizzy, a little bit spacey and oftentimes that’s an electrolyte issue. So just taking a pinch of salt putting it on your tongue, drinking you know, two to four ounces of water and shrinking a little water after that can knock that out right away. I’ve also seen people with allergy symptoms, certain having like a runny nose and coughing things like that, taking a little bit of salt and water actually acts as a natural antihistamine. Dissolution, yeah because histamine actually, one of its jobs in Doctor, Doctor Batman is who I helped in that book he talks about it talks about histamine helps triaged water so we become dehydrated. We triaged water into organ systems that are most vital, like the brain, heart rate. And so therefore the mucous membranes get less of it. So we’re more likely to have allergic type responses right and plus we have elevated histamine in our system. So when we hydrate the body, get the electrolytes in, naturally reduces that histamine response and we get more balanced, more balanced histamine response, therefore, less of the congestion right runny nose things like that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, totally makes sense. Love it, love it. and then what’s your favorite brand for a good mineral salt? Redmond’s Real Salt?
Dr. David Jockers: Redmond’s Salt is great. Absolutely. That’s what I think. I think it’s a little bit lower costs than Himalayan, Himalayan sea salt a great one, Celtic is a good one. So any of those are great.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And then just people listening. It’s not just sodium chloride, your typical table salt would be sodium chloride. It’ll be bleached as well. So we’re talking about salt that have you know 60 70 different micro minerals as well as just sodium chloride. So you’re getting a lot more in there. I think that’s phenomenal. What’s number two. Dr. Jockers?
Dr. David Jockers: Yes. So we talked about the water in the electrolytes obviously we’ve got to start with that. Number two is really controlling your stress and focusing on good sleep. So most people understand this but you know we’re under stress, we’re gonna be elevating our blood sugars, so higher amounts of stress hormone are telling our body we’re in a place of fight or flight and when we’re in place or fight or flight we think we might need to sprint at any moment with survival. Right so our bodies naturally can elevate our blood sugar, and when we do that, then you know if we’re not running, so we’re just stressed out like we’re sitting in traffic, whatever it is, your spouse says something, and we’re stressed out about it ,we’re elevating our blood sugar but we’re not giving the response the body needs which would be to run or lift something, I had to climb a tree so therefore we just end up with this elevated blood sugars in the body towns out some insulin to help lower that blood sugar, high blood sugar can be toxic, can actually cause damage to the nerve system, cause advanced location and products, all kinds of all kinds of oxidative stress, so the body gets insulin up to take the sugar out of the bloodstream and of course, when insulin is up, that’s going to inhibit the production of ketone to burn fat. So insulin being elevated because of the stress response is going to cause you to not be able to burn fat, not get into ketosis, and therefore it’s also going to cause kind of this spiral where you’re going to end up with hypoglycemia, because oftentimes you’ll drop that blood sugar too low. Yeah. And another stress response and this is a vicious cycle, you’ve got to really keep your stress under control. Why I never tell anybody to start intermittent fasting or start a ketogenic diet. If you’re already overwhelmed by stress, like if you would describe your life you’d say, I’m just overwhelmed by stress. Not a good time for you know a ketogenic diet or fast. That’s more for somebody that’s got stress under control. Now these are hacks that are going to really take really improve your body’s ability to be more resilient to stress, to improve your fat burning, improve your brain, down regulate inflammation really powerfully. But first you have to get your stress under control and you’ve got to get your sleep under control because if you don’t sleep well, then you’re you’re naturally going to be under a higher amount of stress. If you get if you’re getting consistent poor nights of sleep, even if you don’t feel stressed out during the day you’re going to have higher stress hormones which is again going to cause that cascade of high blood sugar and high insulin.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally makes sense, and I see an email in my inbox that you sent me a couple of days ago for your newsletter and you talked about some of your favorite adaptogens. Yes. Again this is kind of what you probably plug in on the supplements that outside of diet and lifestyle modifications. I imagine you’re probably using some adaptogens to help modulate this stress response. Is that true?
Dr. David Jockers: Oh absolutely. I love [inaudible]. A great one. Magnolia fish [inaudible] reishi mushroom. Yeah. Lemon bomb right. Very good relaxing herbs. If you want more energy, something like Rhodiola. Really good siberian ginseng. Another great one for energy. Right. The great thing about adaptogens is they’re going to help balance you. So if you feel anxious, all right, and jittery, they’re going to help bring you down, if you feel fatigued and lethargic, they’re going to help bring you up. and that’s the great thing about them. They just kind of modulate and help balance you out. Also a huge fan of magnesium too. Know I find that most people are deficient in magnesium some magnesium can be really really powerful for helping modulate the stress response, modulation means balancing. Right. That’s what we want. You know we don’t necessarily want to increase or decrease. We want what the body needs at the moment. Right. We want to help balance it out, so we were able to adapt to the environment adapt to the stressors we’re under and be able to perform at our highest level. So those are those herbs and Magnesium here are key.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That makes sense because people I think forget like, they’re so focused on their diet. Hey I’m trying to keep these carbohydrates down because these eventually will break down into glucose or fructose in my body and have potentially a negative effect at burning fats or cause insulin resistance. People forget that their cortisol levels can create surges of glucose through either protein in their body or just releasing glycogen that’s already in their muscles and that can be the equivalent of having an extra carbohydrate that you wouldn’t want to eat but eat you’re not even eating it, it’s being released internally from these different stores and you can still have deleterious effects, so the adaptogens like you mentioned I think are great, just getting those glute four receptors upregulated on the muscle, these are little fingers that help pull glucose into the muscle and you can do that by movement, by taking a walk after after an hour, or doing some bands or some resistance training to help soak up a lot of that glucose, that’s really good points.
Dr. David Jockers: Yeah absolutely. So important. A third big thing is to you know basically, you want to gradually move into Keto adaptations. So for some individuals I say about 25% percent of the population they can start today. They might have eaten 500, 500 grams of carbs yesterday for twenty five percent of the population. They can go down to 20 carbs and actually feel great within the first week. That’s only 25 percent the population. The other 75 percent is gonna feel really crappy. Yeah. So what we want to do to be on the safe side is, gradually reduce your carbohydrate load. So if you were to take it for example, if you were to take this week or the next three days and just count out how many carbohydrates you’re consuming, right. Subtract the fiber, so your net carbs, total carbs minus fiber that you consume on a daily basis, you keep track of your your macros and you can use like chronometer or something like that. See, see where your carbohydrate load is. Let’s say you’re consuming 250 grams of total carbs, right, in a day. OK great. So for the first week, all you do is you reduce it down by 50 grams. So for the first week, you’re going down to 200 grams of net carbs. So total carbs minus fiber, you replace that with a couple grams of, well not a little bit more than a couple, but roughly about 10 grams of healthy fat. Right. So you eat a little bit, eat a few more olives, you know, a teaspoon of olive oil something along those lines, you just add that and while you take out the carbs, and then you do that each week you drop it down roughly about 50 grams each week. So if you started at 250, you know, by the time you get into the ketogenic range, it’s roughly between 20 grams to 50 grams. It’s about five or six weeks. Right. So you give your body time to start to adapt and build the metabolic machinery to be able to run on a lower carbohydrate diet and use fat for fuel. And I think that’s a big thing. A lot of people try to jump right in, they try to go cold turkey and have a bad experience when you gradually shift into it. So you’re leaning into it, shifting into it. You give your body time to build the metabolic machinery to get more familiar with that with ketones in the bloodstream. Right. So if you’re eating 250 grams of carbs a day, your body has not seen ketones. It doesn’t. It’s not familiar with how to use them for energy. You’ve got to give it some time to see that in the bloodstream then it’s going to up regulate the enzymatic systems to sort to use that for fuel. So that’s a really important strategy. Just keep dropping it down roughly 40 to 50 grams of carbohydrates, replacing that with healthy fat or in some cases, healthy protein if you’re on a very low protein diet, but replacing that until you get into that 20 to 50 gram range. And typically for somebody at sedentary. So if you’re not doing a lot of movement, you’re going to need to get your net carbs down in that 20, is certainly under 30 range and some in some cases under 20 if you’re very insulin resistant, you’re more active. You could find that you’re going to get into a state of nutritional ketosis which is zero point five million miles or higher when you’re testing your blood ketones with, you know, you probably are going to be able to handle up to 50 grams of net carbs and be in that range. And if you’re extremely active high level athlete maybe they’ll take up to 100 hundred and twenty grams in that carbs. So you got to kind of find the right zone for you. So once you get into that zone, I tell you, you know my recommendation is spend 30 days in that zone. I think 30 days in nutritional ketosis is extremely powerful for helping clean up cellular debris reset your systems. I mean ketones, epigenetic modulators. So they help to help your body to express genes are gonna have more anti aging benefits, are going to help upregulate mitochondria and support healthy mitochondria. So you spent 30 days in that and then you find a good carb cycling strategy after that. Right. For some people they like to carb cycle, you know, every other day, for some people it’s you know once every 10 days, where you have a higher carb day where basically you’re.. you’re consuming more carbohydrates roughly somewhere between 50 and maybe up to one hundred and fifty grams of of net carbs depending on you. So if you tend to be more insulin resistance, you might do less. Like for me I tend to be more insulin resistant so I.. For me it’s like a higher carb day might be 70 or 80 grams of net carbs. OK. Whereas for somebody else they may be able to tolerate a little bit more especially if they’re very very active. So you’ve got to kind of find the right zone for you and then you drop back into ketosis. OK, find again, find the right strategy. So for some people they’ll do a feast day once a week, where they’re like one day a week where you know, they’re eating 150 grams or 100 grams net carbs, so just consuming more carbs and for them that works great. Right. And then usually takes them two days or so to get back into ketosis. If you do a high carb day like that and it takes you a week to get back into ketosis, then you really shouldn’t be carb cycling once a week right then you would probably want to carb cycle like once every two weeks once every month. Something along those lines. That way you’re you’re splitting your time right. You want to spend some time where your body is utilizing glucose right for fuel and basically resetting your glycogen stores. You also want to spend time in this state of nutritional ketosis. You got to find the right carbs cycling approach, and the strategy I like to apply is more of a carb backloading strategy. Yeah I like to eat less during the day I eat less food during the day hydrate. I do a lot of hydration during the day, keeps my energy high. It allows me to perform at a higher level because stress is the antagonist to good digestion, meaning that when we’re under stress, we’re not gonna be able to produce as much stomach as–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct.
Dr. David Jockers: The bile pancreatic enzymes to digest our food well so I like to do more smoothies ,right, things that are predigested during daytime. I’ll throw avocado in my my protein shakes so I get more healthy fats. But the blender is the job of the digestion and then the evening that’s when I feast, right. That’s when I had my big meal meat, right. Vegetables. Healthy fats on there. And I find that that approach works well and especially if you’re going to add in more carbs, doing a lower carb during the day. So if you want to eat solid foods, eggs, right. Maybe like a big chicken salad with olives, and I’ll add avocado and olive oil or something like that where it’s low carb throughout the day and then when you add in the carbs, you do it more in the evening, your sweet potato, right, or your your steamed carrots, beets, if you want grains something like Quinoa or or rice or something along those lines, doing it more in the evening you’re going to notice it. That’s going to get better benefits. A lot of research on that for helping stimulate fat burning, right and supporting the sensitivity.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Some people, one of the side effects with Keto sometimes sleep can deteriorate and that could be from a hypoglycemic kind of episode before bed. So if that’s happening, maybe adding a tiny bit of carbs or even a tablespoon of coconut oil to provide some more of those ketone precursors before bed to keep that blood sugar and add an additional fuel source outside of the blood sugar in your bloodstream.
Dr. David Jockers: Yeah yeah for sure. Absolutely. And I think if you do the slow keto adaptation approach you’ll notice less of a hypoglycemia. Which will definitely help you. Your bio get better and better at using ketones. But a big thing that I do see is that people aren’t feasting. Right. So if you’re under eating for a certain portion of the day you’re eating a lower amount of calories in the evening. Definitely eat a higher amount of calories right to make up for it. And that is a mistake I see a lot of people make is they reduce the carbs but they don’t they’re not as generous with the fat. And therefore, they end up not just not consuming enough calories which can then cause the hypoglycemic type issues especially for like lean women. I see that a lot of lean women having that issue don’t have as much body fat. The body’s trying to protect the body fat tissue.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I see that all the time. You don’t get enough fat in there to replace some of the carbs that are pulled out, then you could still be in a caloric deficit and that can still create a stress response. So I think that’s really important because the whole goal is we have this kind of fuel partitioning mechanism imagine like an air traffic controller. Right. Planes come in. You point this way, you point that way, imagine an air traffic controller saying, OK go to the mitochondria get burnt up or go back into the fat cells and get burnt up get get stored. So we want to be an air traffic controller shuttling everyone to the mitochondria, to the muscle cell to get burnt and not get stored. And we have to change these cellular enzymes. We need more lipolytic, right, lipo meaning fat, lytic meaning to break down some more lipolytic hormone, sensitive light pace Growth Hormone thyroid hormone versus insulin, lin lipo eugenic hormones on the storing or formation side. So I think what you’re saying these are just basically unregulated that air traffic control, what if they get burnt up and this cellular energy can’t be snapped on and the more insulin resistant you are like you’re highlighting, this may take a few weeks maybe even a month and you’re having a tapering protocol just so it’s not so painful. So you don’t develop this Keto flu type of thing where you’re you’re tired, you’re achy. Correct?
Dr. David Jockers: Oh yeah absolutely. So the keto flu is going to be related to hypoglycemia, you know the light imbalances like we talked about and HIPAA axis dysfunction or you know we’ll be college adrenal fatigue. Right. So it’s kind of a combination of all three of those and they all work together. So you’re absolutely spot on and we want to be able to adapt and teach the body to be able to run and use fats for fuel. Right. That’s the key there. Now another caveat to it. And Justin, you probably test fasting insulin on your patients is that correct? Yes. So I test that on all my patients right fasting insulin levels, and so normally if you’re fasting for 12 to 14 hours you finished dinner let’s say 6:00 p.m. You’re doing your bloodwork at 8:00 a.m. something along those lines. Your ideal fasting insulin should be roughly somewhere around three to five right in that range. If you’re on the lower end, they’re like two three. OK, you probably need to do a little bit more carb cycling, you probably need a bump that insulin a little bit more. OK if you’re on the higher end right. There’s a lot of people out there you know they’re they’re insulin levels fasting insulin is 12 14 16. These are people that are going to do better doing fasting, right. Intermittent Fasting, longer fasting, and lower carb throughout the day to get that insulin level down. OK. So that’s another caveat getting your fasting insulin levels tested. That’s going to help you understand your carb tolerance right.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Just kind of piggyback on that, Christopher Gardner did an amazing study out of Stanford in 2007 called, The A to Z Study, and this study was interesting because he compared four different kinds of diets– he compared and Atkins style diet, and Ornish kind of you know higher carbohydrate more vegetarian diet, the Zone diet which is like a 40 30 30 and then I think a standard American diet. So there were four diets and it was interesting because the Atkins group, the lower carb group had the largest amount of success. But then there were still people that were successful in other groups and then they looked at the people and they tried to extrapolate why a lot of people in the act is that great. But why. There were some people in other groups and what they found in the higher carbohydrate groups, the people that did well were the ones that had their fasting insulin below seven. So in other words, the people that were more insulin sensitive, meaning their pancreas made the less insulin, they could tolerate the higher carbohydrates and that threshold was seven anything greater than 7 they could not tolerate the higher carb, and they only got success on the lower carb group because that helped bring their insulin back into balance. And I agree that study this seven I like two to five, I think gets a good point and I think this is really important people listen like you know we’re practitioners so, we understand that there are some people that do well not following that exactly and the question is why? We don’t want to be dogmatic and say no. Everyone has to and it’s a rule it’s tough but we have to understand why there may be some exceptions and that’s I think one of the biggest data points that we can use to say hey these are the people that are going to benefit these you may be able to break the rules a bit and then we can actually have some objective data on that.
Dr. David Jockers: Yeah, absolutely because you do need insulin, you need insulin in particular for converting T four and T three. So you’re active thyroid hormone and if you don’t get that, know this is where we’ll see people start to for example lose hair, when they get really really fatty, they get constipated, they get really really cold, when they’re fasting, or on a ketogenic diet it’s a sign that it probably ban under consuming calories right as a whole. And possibly not carb cycling enough. Right. And that’s really big. So even on a low even on a low carb diet, if you do like a very high calorie meal once a day. OK. So where you’re doing like maybe under eating, lower amounts of calories for a period of time and then of a larger meal, your body is going to still secrete a lot of insulin like on a low carb diet. When you. Eat a lot of food your body’s excrete a lot of insulin. OK. And so you want to get at least, unless you’re like in a period where you’re just doing an extended fast for a specific reason, you want to get a really good shot of insulin at least once a day. I really once no more than twice a day in my opinion. OK. But you want it when you do get it, you want to get a good shot of it. What happens is in our society it’s like people are just continually spiking it because we’re eating all the time right. We’re eating every several hours just continually getting spikes of insulin that promotes too much inflammation right. Insulin is going to activate your inflammatory home right and amplify inflammation throughout your body. But if you strategically get it, once, maybe twice a day. Right, a really good spike of it then that’s going to get. That’s the right amount to activate thyroid hormone to enhance cellular energy production is a lot of good benefits that are going to come from that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I think that’s great. And what’s your strategy on mealtime and I know we’ve talked about this as, I think for a while you were doing kind of o mad one meal a day. How are you timing your meals and then how do you dial that in for patients exact.
Dr. David Jockers: So here’s how I do it personally now. I’m about one hundred, one hundred sixty five pounds strong, I’m an 8 percent body fat it’s mostly just muscle tissue, and the way I do it is I workout four days a week, when I workouts very intense strength training, so I’m usually working out for about 45 minutes or so strength training. Monday Tuesday Thursday Friday are typically my spring training days and what I do is on Wednesday, and on Saturday, I only do one meal one meal on those days, usually it’s lunch dates, whatever’s most convenient for me I’m usually eating lunch I find that I just do best at that time. Right so one o’clock, two o’clock, something like that having a really good really good solid lunch and then that’s it, you know just hydrating outside of that and then on the other days, I’m consuming two meals, lunch and dinner, right now typically my dinners are usually my largest meal of the day. I’m consuming a lot of a lot of food right. I mean I’ll easily consume fifteen hundred calories or so, you know a typical dinner. All right. And usually my lunch, if not, I mean I probably could even consume two thousand calories, my dinner and my lunch is usually probably somewhere around five hundred eight hundred calories, somewhere in that range. OK. And yeah that’s how I do it and I function amazing in fact my best sleep. My heart rate variability gets really high on my fasting days so when I’m, when I’m sleeping. Wednesday night and Saturday night it’s like I wake up the next day. I just feel amazing like so good. And that’s why I do it. In fact if I didn’t lose weight. When I would do one meal a day if I didn’t lose weight when I get it. So what happens is I tried that and I started losing muscle. I started losing weight and I’m already very lean as it is, very very thin. Five foot eleven hundred and sixty hundred sixty five pounds so so I feel amazing when I’m fasting but obviously I don’t want to lose weight. So. So that’s why I do the two meals five days a week. One meal two days a week seems to work amazing for me. Now when I do eat, I eat a lot of food. My wife’s always like, wow I’m fond of food. So in order to be able to digest that food effectively at its most effective level. I think a lot of digestive enzymes. OK. From time to time, if I’m under more stress, I’ll take a little bit of stomach acid support it would be THCL. Typically speaking a bunch of digestive enzymes works great for me. OK. And that works well and then I also take a supplement that has Curcumin, Turmeric, right. It’s also got a whole bunch of bitter herbs. It’s called fermented turmeric right. It’s got a bunch of different bitter herbs are really good for stimulating digestive juices production. So I think a combination of those and my digestion is great. OK. And that’s right I feel really good with it. And that’s typically my lunch most days, my lunch is liquid nutrition so usually I’m making a smoothie with Collagen protein. Yeah. Coconut milk, avocado in there. That’s usually my lunch and I might munch on like a cucumber that that I cut up and put some lemon juice on, some salt and some herbs. Right. Or maybe radishes. I’m crunching you know, chewing on some radishes. So it’s usually some sort of raw vegetable. Along with this sort of smoothie. And then for dinner it’s usually a lot of meat. So whether it’s grass fed beef, or we do like grass fed beef hotdogs and I’m familiar with those. Yeah those were great. Lots of vegetables so like steamed broccoli or cauliflower to make up mashed potatoes, and cauliflower all times calling mashed potatoes, broccoli with butter. So we do a lot of that. You know we started using this thing called [inaudible]. Now if you’re familiar with that, it’s hearts of palm, it’s pasta. It’s pasta with hearts of palm and then it’s great. My wife makes this amazing pesto right. We put pesto on that which has got olive oil and avocado and pine nuts and all kinds of stuff like that. So it’s just a scrape,we put chicken with that. So different things, different meals like that. So typically how I’m doing it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s great. Excellent. I did something similar as well typically in my day in day out. I’m having some level of coffee in the morning with some butter at MCT and a little bit of collagen and that’s my breakfast, somewhere at three four hours later, I’ll have a nice glass of celery juice and I’m definitely drinking mineral water throughout the day ,and then my lunch is going to be a big salad typically, it’ll be about four, maybe five servings of vegetables, it’ll be a full avocado maybe six to eight ounces of chicken chicken thigh, or chicken breast with skin on and then an olive oil, olive oil apple cider kind of sea salt pepper type of salad, and then dinner will be some level of non starchy veg if maybe a little bit of starch, in there squash or sweet potatoes, and then mostly meat and vegetables, and then typically my Saturday, is my wife and I will have a date night and we’ll do like a steak restaurant and now I’ll just fast all day and I’ll just that one meal when I go out to eat. Typically that one day it’s nice. I’ll still do coffee with a little bit MCT just to kind of start my day off and get those ketones up and then I’ll just kind of ride that high all day long. And people listening if you have a lot of hormone issues or thyroid issues or blood sugar issues, you have to have some level of one metabolic stamina imbalance before you do it and to have that really good digestion like you mentioned, because now your meal is probably twice as big when you eat at nighttime and you really need the enzymes in the acids and good digestive function to be able to handle that load.
Dr. David Jockers: Yeah I mean I think that’s really really important is you know, for me for example, I don’t actually get hungry. I don’t feel hungry throughout the day. I don’t get hungry till I start eating. Once I start eating, I’m like OK my body wakes up it’s like, OK I need a lot I need food, right. And that’s actually when I get hungry. So for me it’s very liberating, fasting is so liberating because I don’t I just need to think about food, I’m not hungry I don’t have cravings my body feels great my brain feels amazing feels alive so it’s so good. But you’re right I mean fasting is a level of fitness. It’s kind of like you know if you were just if you, if you’ve never exercised and then you think OK I’m going to do a 5k and I’m going to sprint 5K obviously it’s not going to happen right. You’re going to be so sore and beat up so you’ve got to kind of lean into it right. I always said people start with twelve hours overnight–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 12 to 12 is the easiest to start with, you know, 7 to 7 or 8 to 8.
Dr. David Jockers: Simple fast just like that, and then do the water like we talked about in beginning it. Yes. You just hydrate your body well in the morning and allow for the natural hunger to come out, for a lot of people they notice 14 hours easy. Like my kids they finished dinner with us. We’re usually done eating dinner by 6:30. My kids sleep till like 8:30 in the morning. I don’t know if, I don’t know if, if if you’re if your child is like that too.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Same way same way and it’s all nutrition based. Like my son for dinner last night I mean he had a grass fed organic hot dog, a cut of avocado. And then he’s having a hard time with green vegetables. We’re getting green beans with sea salt on an organic green drink no added sugar no fruit juice in there and that will kind of pile that throughout the day and its meal. So yeah. I see kids that wake up. It’s all a lot of it’s blood sugar and it’s not getting enough fat. If that is humanly you gotta have that.
Dr. David Jockers: Yeah. So important got to have the fat so my kids will go well we’ll finish there by 6:30. We get him in bed by 8:30. They sleep till 8:30. They wake up. They take a bath right by the time they get breakfast. It’s usually like 9:30 or so. Right there. I mean they’re getting late and they’re fast growing kids, three and a half year olds. Right. So they’re getting like a 15 hour fast right there. Yes. And that’s because we have and they’re not on a ketogenic diet. They are, they’re definitely consuming carbs. Healthy carbs but they always have the healthy fats and they’re still on a lower carbohydrate template than your typical modern Americans ,or your typical sad diet. And so because of that they have better metabolic flexibility right. They’re able to go 15 hours here without consuming food. So what I find is that for most people 14 hours as long as you hydrate well as long as you’re sleeping well. Right. Doing those things. Not an issue. Right. And then especially if you do feel like you’re overwhelmed with stress or if you tend to be like a very lean woman or a lean woman that’s doing a lot of exercise. OK then one thing we’ll try to do is something called crescendo fasting, I’m not sure if you’re familiar with that now but that’s basically where we do a 16 hour fast. Two days a week. Non consecutive days. So be like a Monday Friday. Right. So fasting is a stressor on the body just like exercise is a stressor. So exercise may you know exercise is great, but if you do exercise five days in a row. Right. It will too stressful on the body. Yeah. I don’t recommend exercising more than two days in a row. After two days. I recommend taking a rest day. Like for me I do upper body. One day and then a lower body the next day and then the next day is always on resting. OK. So unless you’re like a high level athlete I wouldn’t wreck it there’s just no reason you actually the recovery is is where you get the most benefit. Right. You need to recover. So two days in a row. Same thing with fasting especially if you’re new at it or if you’ve been under stress or if you tend to be leaner. Leaner female then not doing it more than two days in a row and ideally a better way to start would be two non consecutive days a week, Monday Friday for example. Or your, your least stressful days like just you’re doing your long fast on a Saturday. Yep. Less stress on Saturday you’re hanging out with the family. Yeah. So it’s easier for you.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. Well Dr. David this is amazing. Lots of great tips. I think people that are listening to a lot of these tips are clinical as well. So we’re in the trenches working with patients so these aren’t theoretical things you know things that actually works out you know take it to heart, try to find at least one thing in this podcast that resonates and try to apply it. I think there’s some great information and for all you out there, head over to DrJockers.com. Make sure you subscribe to his email list. Also Keto Edge Summit, we’ll put a link down below if you guys are listening, just click there. Make sure you sign up to get access to all the great speakers and great content that’s available. Dr. Jockers, anything else you’d like to leave the listeners with today?
Dr. David Jockers: Yeah, I would just I would say, you know, definitely the Keto Edge Summit is great, we talk about all these types of things how to get fat adapted more effectively, how to kind of lean into fat agitation, like I was talking about before how to navigate through you know things like the Keto flu, how to prevent getting it and you know the tremendous benefits that can come from a state of nutritional ketosis. You know I’m a huge fan of diet variation, meaning that you’re not always in ketosis. Well I mean I would say some people probably about 20 percent of the population, 20 25 percent that will do great. Being in ketosis, you’re rounds right. But then you have the other 75 to 80 percent that are not going to do good. Being in ketosis your rounds. They need to cycle in and out. Right. You know for whatever period of time works best for them. So we go through that, Keto Edge Summit, and you know it’s really the goal of personalized nutrition. You know there’s there’s no cookie cutter approach. You got a kind of find what works best for your own unique individuality.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Dr. Jockers, thank you so much for all this great information. We’ll be in touch. You take care.
Dr. David Jockers: Alright sounds good. Thank you.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Bye.
References:
Audio Podcast:
http://justinhealth.libsyn.com/top-3-ketosis-tips-for-success-dr-david-jockers-podcast-240
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The Pitfalls of Intermittent Fasting| Podcast #233
We all want to be fit, but are we doing it the right way?
In this episode, learn the pros and cons of intermittent fasting. Also, other types of windows is included in today’s podcast. Stay tuned!
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
01:14 What Is Intermittent Fasting
02:09 Ups and Downs
Evan Brand: Yeah, maybe you should define intermittent fasting first. How do you even say, yes this is considered intermittent fasting, this is not considered intermittent fasting, what do you make of that because some people say, well, I just don’t eat breakfast because I’m too busy, I mean are they technically doing an intermittent fast or not. How do you classify it? Excellent, really, really.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Good point, so intermittent fasting is you’re compressing your feeding window, so it could be 16 hours of not eating – eight hours of eating, that may look like you’re eating between noon and 8:00 p.m. right ,it could be an 18 by 6 where you’re eating between 2:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. so you compress it to a six hour window, it could be a 20 hour and then a four hour eating window, maybe you have a meal at 4:00 p.m. or let’s say 3:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. right or 7:00 p.m. you could do that so that those are your big kind of compression windows and then there’s the O mat which is one meal a day where you’re doing just one meal once a day and you’re having like a 20 plus our feeding window, does that make sense?
Evan Brand: Yeah, it does, it does so there, there are some benefits in terms of hormones. It’s crazy to me that the human growth hormone goes up, I don’t really know the mechanism or the why behind this, I know that your HGH production does go up when you’re in a minute fasting, I wonder why though because to me the fasting is more of like a stress response so maybe, it’s part of the stress response the HCA goes up we know that you know, you may get a little bump of cortisol too right to kind of put you in that hunting mode like, hey you’re not eating, are you not successfully hunting, it’s time to go, so you may get a bump of cortisol but the HGH, I just think it’s interesting.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well there’s a, um, a glucose suppression test or an HGH suppression test where they’ll actually give you a shot of glucose and then they’ll actually watch growth hormone drop, so though actually they’ll give you glucose and then they’ll test your growth hormone after they giving you glucose and they’ll see your HGH drop, so I think a lot of it has to do with the surging glucose and or insulin acutely does knock down your growth hormone. I think that’s part of the reason why keeping insulin low does increase growth hormone, now in that stage of the game though a lot of bodybuilders still use insulin post-workout and they primarily use it to open the cell up so they can drive more nutrition and more amino acids into the cell, aka the muscle cell after workout, so I dunno insulin is anabolic and is used anabolically but stimulating insulin acutely via glucose and food can also drop growth hormone down acutely as well, so it’s a double-edged sword with insulin, that makes sense?
Evan Brand: It does, it does. I would just say the important thing to remember with intermittent fasting too is you still have to focus on good quality nutrition, like if you wake up and you’re only eating six or eight hours through the day but all you’re eating is some like paleo protein bar and then like a green smoothie that’s, that’s not enough. We still have to remember you still got to get good quality nutrition, good quality calories. I see a lot of people where we’ll look at their food journal and let’s say they are doing intermittent fasting, they wake up and they’ll have a smoothie, which is like you know protein powder in an almond milk, that’s it for their supposed lunch and then they’ll do like a chicken salad, it’s like, no way, you’re not gonna feel good on that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly, yep, so in general somatostatin, which is we’re gonna be released by so somatostatin inhibits growth hormone release in response to growth hormone, releasing hormone to stimulating factors such as low blood glucose growlin binds to receptors of the somatotropin, the pituitary that stimulates growth hormone and potentially stimulates growth hormone so from what, how, I’m reading this is basically that low blood glucose is gonna have a stimulatory effect on growth hormone release. Therefore, higher blood glucose is going to decrease that feedback loop.
Evan Brand: Okay, yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hypoglycemia, a potent stimulus to secrete growth hormone, so hypoglycaemia produces an abrupt sustained rise in the level of growth hormone so it makes sense if these low blood sugar states or lower blood sugar states can increase growth hormone, it makes sense if you’re doing the opposite and you’re spiking your blood sugar, that it would negatively impact growth hormone.
Evan Brand: Well, we know with other hormones too like ghrelin, that’s your hunger hormone. Ghrelin normalizes when you’re doing intermittent fasting and we talked with so many people where they notice that they are just not as hungry, you know you feel like you’re just gonna starve to death but you just don’t, you’re not starving and I guess part of that’s probably because you’re producing ketones, would you say.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, ketones have a strong appetite suppression effect. My big concern is this, right, here’s my big issue just kind of putting it out there so number one are you a healthy individual. Okay, if you’re a healthy individual and your symptoms are relatively under control and I know that may not be a good marker for health because you may still have some health and balances with your thyroid or autoimmunity or gut and you may still be symptom free, right, but let’s just use, hey I’m feeling relatively good health wise, I’m symptom free but I think doing more of these intermittent fasting things can be helpful, number one. Number two, it also depends on how stressed you are during the day because your body needs nutrients to run. It needs nutrients to run. Now you’re gonna get caloric forms of energy just by releasing fat that you can start burning for fuel but that fat is not B vitamins, that fat are not nutrients so for and foremost. You’re not gonna get adequate levels of nutrition. Number two. We know people even in fasting states. Let’s just use the the British sailors from Europe to coming to the new world. I think in the 17 and 1800’s they were called limeys. Why were they called limeys? Because they would basically be on these trips, coming overboard they had a lot of nutritional deficiencies. They would get scurvy so they basically, their capillaries would dissolve, so to speak because they didn’t have enough vitamin C and they would they be chewing on limes the whole trip because they found that limes would help the vitamin C and prevent their capillaries from rupturing from the lack of integrity, from the lack of vitamin C. Essentially scurvy, so they needed vitamin C so there’s a there’s a level where just fasting and not eating enough calories eventually bite you in the butt because you’re not getting nutrition in. There’s eventually that balance and my other balance is, people say, well your nutritional needs go down when you’re fasting well I get that because you know ideally your body when you’re in a fasting state, it’s down regulating your metabolism, right, so if you’re in a fasting state, you can go into PubMed and type in hypo caloric state or hypo caloric and low thyroid hormone or low triiodothyronine or increase in reverse t3, the scientific literature is very clear that thyroid function will drop, your overall metabolic rate will drop in response to a local or ik environment reverse t3, which is your inactive thyroid hormone that clogs two receptor sites. Where your thigh will go increases, so there’s this balance of, yes, your thyroid hormone, your metabolism will drop, your metabolic needs will drop, but is that necessarily a good thing, because we want a robust metabolism, you don’t drop your metabolic needs and then still feel incredibly robust. Now if you already have healthy thyroid function to begin with, it may not be that big of a deal, maybe you’re on the top 25% of the reference range and now you start moving mid range, but what if your bile, what if you’re already a little bit below mid-range and then now you start dropping way below? You see what I’m saying here, so it’s a slippery slope people talk about your metabolic needs drop when you’re intimate and fasting or doing these various techniques, but why what’s happening and what are the ramifications of that and if we already have thyroid issues and I already have blood sugar issues, we already have adrenal problems and hormonal issues, that that could actually be a stressor to you, people don’t remember, people forget that fasting is actually a stressor to your body because you’re not getting nutrition in. The people that benefit the most from fasting are people that number one have really irritated gut. Their digestion is really poor so not digesting foods as much helps a lot. They’re avoiding a lot of food allergens. Number two and they already have a relatively healthy metabolism because you can still be on a ketogenic Paleo template and you can still get a lot of the benefits of fasting, which is the lower insulin. The growth hormone and still get adequate nutrition and still have at least two meals today. My recommendation is at least two meals a day, I’ll pause there and let you kind of give me your thought process, I don’t want to go too deep on so we chat a little bit more .
Evan Brand: Sure. No, that was all great. I just wanted to point out for me that I had so much stress just working with clients and moving from house to house and all that, that when I looked at my blood my reverse t3 was too high. I was actually up into the low 30s which is really high for reverse t3 and I was really, really cold. Now I haven’t retested my blood to confirm that the reverse t3 has gone down but I just wanted to have my comment that I’ve personally experienced what you just mentioned which is that if you have your stress bucket already full you and I are busy go, go, go, go, go during the week, my bucket was already full, I couldn’t afford to skip a meal so I’m on three meals a day and I saw it on the blood work to confirm and I felt it my hands, my feet, you know, I had the, the circulation issue some of that was related to mold and all that nitric oxide but I do know that my thyroid, I could definitely feel just the weakening of myself if I were to do just a protein shake with breakfast and not an actual solid breakfast like you’re talking about, I was just nutrient depleted based on the amount of stress, my seesaw was unbalanced.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly, about my typical breakfast though I’m doing, I like doing an iced coffee, I feel like I get very good cognitive benefits with some caffeine and some coffee, and I also add in butter. I add in collagen and I add in MCT oil, so number one, I’m bumping up my ketones first thing in the morning. I’m getting adequate calories and I’m getting a good whack of amino acids as well so I have that good, of course, I’m taking a good multi support pack as well so I’m getting some extra vitamins and minerals and then I hit up the good fats and the ketone precursors then, uh, maybe I’ll also sip on some celery juice just to get some extra potassium and B vitamins, so there’s that you can go into it fasting. I mean, I have no problem with it, I’ll typically pick one day a week where I’ll just do a coffee and then I won’t eat til 2 or 3 o’clock, I’ll try to do that one day a week. I find a lot of people are taking intermittent fasting and they’re making it their lifestyle and I can’t tell you how many people I see that are chron- that chronically skip meals and have blood sugar issues, and have adrenal problems and a lot of symptoms – I’m not saying this causes, that but it is a stressor and the stronger and healthy you are, that stressor can have a lot of benefits if you can overcome the stress of what it’s causing. If you already have enough, let’s say, stress balls and your stress bucket that may be enough to put you over the top and I personally find that a lot of people don’t have the reserves to be able to overcome if you already have a lot of issues, you can’t fast or starve your way out of it and this is a fine line where this intermittent fasting thing becomes an eating disorder especially when in your feeding window you’re not getting enough nutrition and you’re not meeting your metabolic needs for the day and I think it’s really easy to do that when you’re doing a nomad or you’re doing one the two meals a day, because now your meals gotta be essentially fifty percent bigger than your typical lunch or dinner and then number two is if you’re doing a one meal a day, I mean, good luck eating 2, 500 calories or 2, 000 calories at one sitting. Let’s say, I need 2 500 calories and you’re under the auspice that well my metabolic needs have dropped, okay we’ll try getting 2, 000 calories a meal, that’s pretty hard. I mean you need a big, big salad. You need a lot of fat at least, maybe one and a half avocados on there. You need a lot of nuts, a lot of seeds, you need a really good fatty dressing, you need at least 8 to 12 ounces of protein on there at least that maybe even 16, so it becomes is really kind of delicate balance and I see a lot of people that have a lot of hormone issues that are falling into that trap and are coming in, and it’s not enough to get them over the top.
Evan Brand: Yeah, I mean not that I want to get into calorie counting and all that because I get bored, but I’ll just mention a cup of broccoli, which is maybe an average serving size 30 calories, so if you have a woman, it’s like God hormonal problems and she has, you know, a small piece of meat and then a cup of broccoli as her dinner, it’s like, good Lord, you maybe got five to six hundred calories.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah and I’ve seen a lot of people online there’s dr. Berg he’s another guy that puts a lot of content out there I think he has a lot of great content but he does he’s a big one meal a day guy and again you know let’s say you do 10 servings of vegetables okay there’s 300 calories there, all right, you need 2,000 calories a day so you’re gonna need a ton of fat and you’re probably gonna need you know I’m I’m 6 to 220 pounds right I’m gonna need probably a 16-ounce steak or 16 ounces of protein in there to get that to get enough nutrition, I’m gonna need a lot of fat, I’m probably gonna need two avocados cut up, I’m probably gonna need a really fatty dressing that strange ___[14:42] has a lot of nuts and seeds, so, but also that’s a lot of food to digest at one time.
Evan Brand: That’s true.
I think it’s gonna be a lot so you’d probably need extra HCl and extra it’s still a lot of stuff on your tummy
Evan Brand: I’m looking up bison meat. You know, cuz I really like enjoy a bison burger. Let’s, so let’s say, this one meal a day person or even a two meal a day person, let’s just make up a story that you did a bison burger with veggies for lunch and a bison burger with veggies for dinner a 6 ounce bison burger a hundred and 85 calories, granted you get you know almost 40 grams of protein but not even 200 calories from it and-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You put your calories there, let’s say you, let’s say you do four servings of vegetables with it, okay? Maybe you’re at 120 to 150, I mean, you gonna have to have a lot of fat, you have to eat a ton of fat.
Evan Brand: I think there’s a lot more people now that we’re kind of like flushing this out together I feel like there’s probably more people in this space under eating than overeating
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And that’s what I was saying. Intermittent fasting can be a slippery slope to an eating disorder, like, okay you know, let’s have a conversation about what differentially differentiates anorexia and intermittent fasting because I could imagine someone being anorexic saying, hey look at all the awesome benefits of this, I’m losing weight on this, but obviously, there’s one person is trying to meet their caloric needs and burn fat while the other person is burning everything right there burning fat there are bag of bones you know muscle they’re fatigued you can see their their bones so there’s obviously this fine balance and I really want to draw a line cuz I’m just seeing a lot of stuff on line where the line is totally blurred and I could see that being an eating disorder clinically.
Evan Brand: Yeah, makes sense. Alright, here’s another example. A lot of people are doing like almond butter, almond bars etc., maybe this is the snack that they do that for a cup which nobody’s eating a cup of almonds, that is a lot of almonds, so well give them the benefit the doubt, maybe it’s a half cup but a cup of almonds around 500 calories. So let’s say you had a handful of almonds with that bison steak and your broccoli so you’re it maybe 250 and then you throw in an extra 200 or so with the almonds, you know you’re still less than 500 and if you do that twice a day you’re still only at a thousand, God that makes me feel like I’m under eating.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I know, doesn’t it? So that’s why I just I scratch my head being like, yeah, your metabolism goes down, you need less but why is it going down? It’s going down because your body’s freaking out that there’s not enough nutrition there and it’s down regulating metabolic pathway so my generalized advice is if you have health concerns or health issues, get them under control. First you probably want to start with at least two solid meals a day and at least one shake or some kind of a smoothie or maybe a bulletproof coffee or a butterfat coffee with some extra nutrients in it. Maybe some celery juice as a good breakfast, you’re getting a lot of nutrition calories amino acids you’re starting your day with a lot of ketone precursors and then two really good meals later in the day a lot of good vegetables, that age me a lot of good fat, lot of good protein avoiding the leaner meats, that’s good, or if you have more issues, we may just want to even start with three solid meals, alright. People that have a hard time gaining weight, we’re doing four meals a day yeah and then I typically recommend as we get healthier, we can choose one to two days a week where we do an intermittent fast and let’s start with a, let’s start with a 12 by 16 by 8 so we eat between 12 and 8 because you can still get three meals between 12 and 8 pretty easily, yeah, but you don’t have to increase your meal size that much as soon as you compress it to a 18 by 6 or 20 by 4, now you only get two meals now you got to eat 50% more in each meal to get your nutritional needs up so I’m even-
Evan Brand: Yeah, it doesn’t make sense. Even at that point though you’re probably gonna feel sleepy or fatigued or bloated or something by the time you eat that much food, you know, I mean you’re at that point you’re trying to remedy the digestive issue but in those cases smaller more frequent three or four a day is probably gonna be better than two huge ones.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: This is the reason why people get tired after their Thanksgiving Day meal, I mean, yes there’s a carb issue but there’s a size issue when you eat so much food there’s a lot of resources your body needs to do that to digest it and break it down so that’s part of the reason like people get tired after these big omadd’s, these one meal a day things. This is a lot of digestion that has to happen. That’s a big problem as well.
Evan Brand: Yeah, this is an important conversation. You know, like on the surface people may listen like, man this is boring, just talking about do I eat two meals a day, do I eat three meals a day, but really this is like your foundation of the gas tank. You know we dig so much into supplements and adaptogenic herbs and restoring gut issues and eradicating parasites and infections and all that, but that’s like the, the level 201 or 301 stuff. This is like the 101 stuff where if you don’t get this right you can’t really advance to the other stuff because your compliance will fail, because you feel bad or you’re too tired to stay on a protocol.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. We mean you will keep everyone nameless but we’ve had some friends and colleagues where we have these little healthy debates about this topic and they’ve been very pro intermittent fasting which we are but we’re more with caveats, and one of the big caveats are how many people that we see that have gut issues gut infections or compromised digestion already, I, 95 yeah and and then now you’re gonna tell me, okay now, now eat 50 percent more at the meals that you eat so we can compress that feeding window down. I mean, do you think that puts more stress on that I justice system or less I mean definitely more?
Evan Brand: Yeah it’s well and on also the difference to is you and I are not just publishing a video here’s the 20 benefits of intermittent fasting and then you send people on the way we have to find a cup-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s a lot of click bait and we have direct people go online and they read lots of stuff. Everything can work with the right situation and the right person but at the same time, everything has a possibility of not working so then if you’re producing content online it’s great because the people that want to find it will find it. The problem is when you’re dealing with people we need to not try to squit put a square peg through a circle hole. We have to understand who may be beneficial for and who it may not be beneficial for so we have to be able to look at it as it’s not an on/off thing, it’s who’s the best candidate for this and if you’re not the best candidate here’s why and here’s what to look for, so if you’re having issues and you’re struggling, here’s the reason why and it’s not you. You may be doing everything totally right there may be other things we have to look deeper at like the adrenals like the gut issues, like low stomach acid achlorhydris or hypochondria, gut infections thyroid issues autoimmunity so these are all really important things that could be the reason why an intermittent fasting thing may not be the right fit for you, or the reason why you’re struggling. Number one and number two, if you have things under control, let’s start with a sixteen by eight and see how we do and then you can move to an 18 by six and see how you do and just make sure you can get at least two meals a day, I think the omadd’s a little bit bad because of how much you have to eat at one time, that’s no different than a Thanksgiving Day dinner personally.
Evan Brand: Yeah, it’s just a one big feast. You know it would be really sexy to say everybody could just do this or that but the nuance is something we have to bring up just because we’re working with people one on one and if we give them a protocol and they fail or they don’t get a result we’re looking for then we have to come back and fix it so you know obviously our perspective is gonna be a bit different than somebody who just makes a blog article or a video because if they follow our advice, we have to follow up with them, hey, how did it go, so this is more of like the, the behind the curtain information than what you’re typically gonna get in an article or a video o podcast.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%, ep anything else Evan, you want to highlight on the topic?
Evan Brand: I would just say what you started to rant on and then you, then you stopped. Which is get the clinical data, get the laboratory information. You mentioned adrenals you mentioned thyroid, you mentioned the gut, you know do a good work up on yourself if the world were so simple that you could just diet and exercise, I mean we would have fixed people’s problems. You know I don’t know 20, 30, 40, whoever knows how many years ago but there’s so many people still doing paleo or Whole Foods diets or keto diets or whatever and they’re still miserable. They still, you know, feel bad. They can’t sleep. They’re overweight. They’re depressed. They’re anxious. They’ve got skin issues. So, if diet in the exercise were the variables that actually gave you a result then we wouldn’t be talking. So get the workup done, if your doctor will run a full panel or they can look at your ferritin and address anemias as you and I were kind of talking about off air, look at the thyroid, the reverse t3, get your free t3 run, get your antibodies run, go above and beyond your standard blood work, use that data to help guide you and then if you need a practitioner, reach out to Justin, reach out to me. We love helping people, you know, we don’t care about whether you pick one of us, we just want you to get better and if you keep spinning your wheels, you can’t do the same thing over and expect different results so you’re like, I’m gonna swap, you know, my protein shake that was a pea protein for a grass-fed whey protein shake, that variable may do nothing if you don’t address your gut infection, like for me, I continue to lose weight and have terrible skin until I fix my gut and then finally I was able to bring my weight back up and get my skin health back to normal and I was eating no dairy and no gluten, still suffered-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly, and I’m just curious, people that are listening, if anyone had good responses during intermittent fasting, just put it in the comments. Anyone that’s had negative reactions to intermittent fasting, I’m curious as well, put that in the comments. I like to just chat about that briefly just to see if anyone’s had negative reactions and we just want to look at and be able to draw the line, there’s a very fine line between having an eating disorder and anorexia and doing intermittent fasting and getting adequate nourishment, because most people that are already having health issues, that are reaching out to intermittent fast and they may already be nutritionally deficient and they may already be moving more into a nutritionally deficient state even with adequate eating, they’re just not getting enough of that food and that may further exacerbate the nutritionally deficient state, I mean, think about it, if you’re getting enough calories, but let’s say your diet isn’t the best, ok, well let’s say you have 25 or 20% less nutrition than, let’s say, a whole food based diet but then now your calories cut in half or cut in half by maybe 60% of us 40% less but now the food is more nutritionally dense but, but you’re just eating less of it you may not have enough nutrition in the food to make up for the caloric deficit does that make sense?
Evan Brand: Yes, yes, it does.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s out of community, this much food, but let’s say this much of it was nutritionally dense, but now you’re eating this much food and all of it additional, you dense, you still have this gap over here where you’re missing this nutrition again I’m doing some hand stuff so if you’re listening on the podcast, you may want to check out the vide, we’ll put the video link below but either way we have to make sure if you are doing some kind of an if, or intermittent fasting thing, you are getting adequate amounts of nutrition –
Evan Brand: Yeah, I felt more anxious when I did it. That’s my personal thing when I would try to either push my breakfast back or skip a meal, you know, I get on the call with clients I’m working, I’m working, I’m burning, burning, burning, you know, the candles lit. I’ve got this stress in my bucket, adaptogenic herbs help regulate it but I still did not feel that good, satiated, calm, relaxed. I felt like I was running from a bear so then when I ate breakfast had a good passengered sausage or a bacon or some blueberries pecans and I was satiated, that’s stress response was shut down my body’s like, oh okay Evan’s not starving to death, we don’t need to go hunt today, hunting was successful you can relax now, so I mean, there’s, there’s the primal wiring system behind all this that people forget about.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100 percent, so Kelly, Kelly Clark or Rob Kelly Clark writes in when I was I had negative reactions, I felt like I was crashing every morning lightheaded shaky, not able to think quickly and thoughtfully, I see that a lot but then that writes in intermittent fasting has been great, it’s been helping my bloating, controlling SIBO, sometimes I think people have an overgrowth simply reducing the amount of meals help starve them off. I would push back on that and just say, you may be able to have similar benefit by just cutting out some of the fermentable carbohydrates, so people that have benefits on the SIBO, I do agree you’re not, when you’re not eating, you’re starving off some of those microbes, the problem is you actually need to kill some of these microbes to just the diet change, alone is you’re starving some of them out but you’re still not. You need to wipe them out too and there could be some other deeper infections so that’s part of the issue and I think you may also be able to solve some of that by cutting out the higher FODMAPs and making sure some of these things are cooked because when you have a lot of poor microbiome issues, you need fiber to feed good microbiome but when there’s too much bad critters there, that fiber, especially from the fermentable, the higher fermentable foods the high fat Matt foods, that could be enough to feed that bad bacterial overgrowth.
Evan Brand: This is true. Well, that’s where the order of operations comes in, right? We’ll see a lot of people, for example, the lady that I work with that had the worst candida overgrowth ever, was a lady who was drinking five kombuchas a day and I was like, my god, okay, you took something that could be good, and you did way too much of a quite good thing.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And how did she feel? She got bloated after it?
Evan Brand: Oh she was terrible bloated, rain fog, she was drunk. She said, I can’t even focus, she said, I looked down at my paper, I can’t even see what’s in front of me, I mean, she had a ton of cognitive issues as well.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and if you see that, that’s a really good sign and you can be on top of it and know those symptoms ahead of time.
Evan Brand: So what did we do? Well, we got rid of the kombucha too completely and we came in and used an anti microbial protocol based on a stool test that showed she had not only sky-high Candida but she had a ton of back growth – so it’s like, yeah, probiotics are cool, yeah, kombucha is cool, good supplement but not in this case, you gotta, you gotta take care of the bad guys first.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally, and someone wrote and, this is a great question is: what do you think about a 12-hour fasting? I think that’s something that’s granting. Everyone should be able to do that, I think that’s awesome so if you’re looking at finishing dinner around 7 or 8 o’clock you know have breakfast till 7 or 8 o’clock on the am side. I think that’s great and I think that’s something that everyone can and should be able to engage in and part of the reason why you can do that is when you’re sleeping your metabolic needs obviously drop because you’re not moving, you’re in a kind of hibernation state so your metabolic needs go far less, so you can fast for that period of time right, so that I think 12 hours is your really good compromise for anyone with a lot of metabolic issues and then if you’re feeling more up to it then you move more to a 16 by 8, and then if you’re feeling even better then you can move to an 18 by 6 and you can try it a couple days a week and I just always tell people try to take your more stressful days and have something in the morning those more stressful days even if it’s like some celery juice and some amino acids and MCT oil if you want to keep it simple or a simple smoothie all the way up to bacon and eggs if it’s, um, if you want even more nutrition.
Evan Brand: Yeah, good advice, and, yeah, good question I’m, I’m on like a 12 hour fast I guess you’d say I eat around 6:30 actually, no, I’m more than tha,t I’m like 14 hours cuz I don’t usually eat till 8 see. I’m almost at 14 hours and I feel good I feel solid. There was a time of my life though where I needed a snack after dinner and that maybe just been my gut issues, adrenal issue, something like that it sounds like isn’t everybody doing the 12 hour fast but no, we have ton of clients that are like man 9 o’clock comes around and they’re going and rating the fridge and that’s because something’s messed up and it could be brain chemistry related to which is a whole another podcast, it could be serotonin or something that’s causing night cravings.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I personally find people that have lunch let’s say around 12:00 or 1:00 and then they have dinner around 7:00 or 8:00 there’s like a seven or eight hour gap that when they eat that dinner, even though it’s a normal-sized dinner, they went so long there’s a caloric and nutritional, deficit so they have extra cravings after dinner because they’re trying to fill in this big gap here, remember that number one, and then all just making sure you’re eating enough protein in fat and good fibrous vegetables that will fill you up and then try to choose a healthier snack after dinner, so my big snack as I put my son down and I’m gonna have some unsweetened coconut yogurt and some fresh berries like raspberries or blueberries, pretty low sugar so I’m getting protein and getting fat and I’m getting a little bit of carbohydrates not much, I mean, you can Google a handful of raspberries, it’s probably maybe five or six net carbs so it’s not much at all but it will give you some good nutrition and it’s tasty too so it gives you that dessert kind of feel with that would be the negative consequences.
Evan Brand: Yeah, a lot of people disrespect their lunch. We could do a whole another hour on this. I know we got to wrap up but you know so many people think of their lunches just, let’s get it over with, you know, let’s rush to the fast food, let’s rush to Whole Foods and stop at the salad bar and shove something down my face in five minutes and go back to work and I’m not gonna say that I haven’t rushed through my lunch because I definitely have, but I try to be as conscious as I can to slow down and chew my food into eat because that’s like your midday fuel, up you know like if you’re in the race and you pull over to the pit stop and you know the guys are trying to refill your Formula One car and you take off while they’re still filling the tank, you’re not gonna finish the race.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% and so my lunch is probably about four or five servings of veggies in a salad, a full avocado, some nuts and seeds and then like a nice, good dressing, a nice avocado or olive oil-based dressing and probably eight ounces of protein and that works great and I feel satiated. I feel really, I feel really like get a lot of nutrition in and I would just say the only people that I would say, the twelve-hour may not work for thre are people that really have very poor blood sugar issues and their blood sugar is dropping during the night and they’re waking up. To the people where I would say, you probably want something within two hours before bed a little bit of protein, a little bit of fat people, that have very low cortiso,l may need the teaspoon to a tablespoon of honey with a tablespoon of coconut oil before bed because their blood sugar is dropping, so I would always say sleep would trump the idea of being in a 12 by 12 fast.
Evan Brand: That makes sense. That it does, I was at a point where I had to do that and now I don’t so that’s, that’s a good sign of progress when you cannot wake up through the night due to the blood sugar issue, there’s other causes to wake up the mill tonight-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: But yeah, if you, toxification issue too could be a gut infection, that’s in cortisol, that’s waking you up so you know as functional medicine doctors, we understand the potential algorithm and we go through our checklist of what the possibilities could be.
Evan Brand: It’s just funny how we start out with such a simple topic but then we expand upon, that’s because in the world of, as you said, like click bait and titles and all that, people just don’t slow down enough to understand the different variables, and I think it’s very important to slow down and to hear these different pieces of the puzzle because if you go to ten different people and you ask them why you’re waking up in the middle of the night, you’re gonna get ten different answers and so we really want to help you understand the mechanisms behind things not just like, yeah, you need to take a melatonin supplement.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah and we’ll probably put the title of this podcast a little bit clickbait, like the pitfalls of enjoyment and fasting but I want to be clear, there are people that can benefit and, and most should be able to benefit, we just want to make sure the people that don’t here’s why and and if you want to be someone or you think you’re someone that could benefit ,make sure you go into it with relatively good health because I don’t want you to walk into it and then have health issues and those health issues don’t get better, maybe yet go backwards a little bit and you’re not sure why and so that could be a stressor but if you go into it relatively healthy and that stress starts to accumulate will you at least know that it’s because of the intermittent fasting. but if you are has strong enough and have enough you know constitution health wise, then that’s great, you know enjoy those benefits and maybe do it a couple times a week versus every day.
Evan Brand: Yeah, well said. Well, let’s wrap this thing up. If you all want to reach out to Justin, he works with people around the world and we send labs to your door, except for blood. We send you out to a lab for that but, fit stool you’re in a lot of the advanced functional medicine testing, we’re very grateful and lucky that you can do that at your house and you send it back through the mail. You get the reports back, you go over it and you make a protocol, you get better, so that’s how you do it, that’s the logistics of it. So reach out to Justin at justinhealth.com and there’s like, I don’t know, hundreds of more pieces of content so if you’re just finding us and you’re like, man, these guys are pretty cool, I want to learn more, well there’s more content type in whatever thing you’re looking for on his site. Me, my website evanbrand.com, we do the same thing, so you know, please reach out if you need help, don’t wait till you’re suffering in that rock bottom, it’s much easier if you know something’s off and you fix it now versus like, hey I’m at the end of my rope, we’re generally somebody that you know the person’s already been to twenty practitioners before they get to us but it’s, it’s a really nice, sigh of relief for us when we get somebody who’s like, yeah I got some stuff off ,and then we fix it before they’re at a critical state.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly and then if you guys enjoy it and you’re utilizing our services already as a patient or supplementation or just utilizing some of the products we personally recommend ourselves on our stores, if you’re not doing that we appreciate you doing it, but if not give us a share, give us a thumbs up, give us a like, share the content spread. This information, it’s totally free to friends or family, so they can improve their health and also engage in the discussion, put your comments below, I love to know what you guys are thinking it gives me something to think about regarding future topics and your questions really, I think, drive what future content will be about. When people ask a lot of the same, same things, I want to answer more of those questions, so it really motivates us to create new and even better content, that’s inspired to support our listeners
Evan Brand: Yep, well, great chat. I enjoyed it and we’ll be back next Monday
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Having great chat man, you would go on, take care, bye.
References:
Audio Podcast:
http://justinhealth.libsyn.com/the-pitfalls-of-intermittent-fasting-podcast-233
Conventional Medicine to Functional Natural Medicine | Podcast #232
Conventional medicine is a system in which medical professionals treat symptoms in diseases using medicines, or surgery. Functional medicine, on the other hand, is a treatment that focuses on optimizing the functions of the body organs, which involves holistic or alternative medicine.
Today’s podcast guest is Dr. Russell Jaffe. Dr. Jaffe is highly respected in the functional medicine industry. As a physician and scientist who aspired to be comprehensive, objective, empiric and experiential, Dr. Jaffe started his career searching for deeper understanding, wisdom, evidence, and insight in mechanisms of health.
Dr. Russell Jaffe
In this episode, we cover:
00:51 Medical Research to Functional Integrated Nutritional World
10:32 Intermittent Fasting
15:02 Keto Diet
34:15 Importance of Vitamin C
58:56 Importance of Vitamin D
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hey there it’s Dr. Justin Marchegiani. Welcome back to the beyond wellness radio podcast. Today we have a phenomenal guest, we have Dr. Russell Jaffe in the house. Dr. Russell is a Ph.D. MD nine years all at Boston University. One graduation lots of good knowledge there and Dr. Jaffe was really on the conventional medical side. I really want to dive in we’re gonna get his story and how he converted moreover to the functional natural integrative kind of model. Dr. Jaffe runs the perk supplement company, he also runs the company called Elisa Act which does premier testing for food allergens. Dr. Jaffe welcome to the podcast.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Thanks for having me
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent. Well, let’s just dive in. I want to hear your story and how you went into this mainstream medical research kind of world environment over to the functional kind of integrated more nutritional world. How did that happen?
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Well I was trained in need in academic medicine at Boston University then I matriculated to the National Institutes of Health where I was early on the appointed to the senior staff which is a bit of an indication that my science was acceptable and of course I was skeptical about anything that I didn’t learn in academic medicine in internal medicine in clinical pathology and Laboratory Medicine. In fact, when I heard that Queen Wu, an acupuncturist in Washington DC, could get results that NIH could not get. I went with great skepticism and ended up doing a seven-year apprenticeship with him
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Then I then I heard about yoga and I heard about Dr. Ramamurti Mishra an MD Ph.D. cross-trained in Banaras, wrote the textbook of yoga psychology commentary and Patanjali sutras. I went as a skeptic and I was his acolyte for five years, then I met a Cambodian Buddhist monk named Anti Dharma Aawara and I had the last 30 years of his life from 80 to 110 mostly together
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow that’s amazing
Dr. Russell Jaffe: So, I came as a skeptic but when I… but I was also curious and because I was curious, I went outside my silo I went outside my immediate peer group. Because I can tell you that when I started to bring information about traditional oriental medicine and acupuncture to the National Institutes of Health where it’s practiced today. I can tell you it was met with great indifference and crashing silence. Because these were very smart people who knew that they knew more than anybody else because they were at the NIH and I was you know with them. But I was also outside, curious, finding mentors who had answers, wisdom, traditions that I knew nothing about. You know I mean I knew from nothing. So, I had the time with Queen and with Ramamurti Mishra, Dr. Mishra and with his Cambodian Buddhist monk Anti Dharma, and yes, my world has absolutely turned around if you will. Why? Because I now advocate nature nurture and wholeness, I advocate physiology before pharmacology. I advocate eating what you can digest assimilate and eliminate without immune burden. I can tell you if you get restorative sleep and you keep your neural hormones and balance then gratitude will rise up at least in the springtime when you see the earth renewing itself. So yes, I do think that a functional, integrative, personalized, primary, proactive, predictive, personalized prevention practices is the medicine of the future, and my work is to speed the transition from sick care to health care. Because most people get sick care today, they really don’t get health care. In your clinic they get health care in my world I would like everyone to get health promotion health care preventive, proactive care. But that is a dream today, that is an aspiration. It is also a necessity because the cost of sick care is going to sink the businesses of America. We’re not going to well, let me summarize very quickly who. Uwe Reinhardt, a very famous Princeton health economist. He says, if you just look at the rise of chronic disease today and projected forward a generation or so, everyone’s gonna be in a hospital bed taking care of the person next to them. No one’s gonna be working or paying taxes that’s clearly not a vibrant productive society.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct 100%. Now I’m just curious having it’s such a, you know strong conventional background MD, Ph.D. and having to had such an open mind to pull in other modalities and other forms of natural medicine and you know you’re looking at obviously the outcome you’re looking at the effectiveness. What it’s your colleagues think cuz I mean obviously conventional medicine, the allopathic pharmaceutical surgical approach, it tends to rely on not addressing the root cause and it tends to not have a preventative nature to it. So, when you are looking at these natural forms of medicine obviously prevention kind of comes in we’re gonna be talking about predictive tests that can help us look at and assess and maybe prevent some of these things but what did your colleagues think did you feel like they were threatened? And then what was the atmosphere around with just the drug industry? You know cuz that kind of motion one direction.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Well I can. I’m gonna answer your question but before I answer it, Merck Sharp & Dohme gave me their annual award one time. I got the meritorious Public Health Service Award one year; my work was featured in the New York Times at one time. So, I was not unknown or unrecognized, I got to teach every year because NIH has its own University on topics that I was interested in that I was interested in introduced.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: But to answer your question especially about people who have advanced degrees they either come out of what’s called the Decartian Reductionist Mechanistic way of thinking, in which case I will not talk to them because they won’t understand what I’m saying and it probably will be uninteresting or irritating to them. Then there are the people who come out of the Garrettian Rudolf Steiner.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Mmm.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Before that, there was a theorist as Hoenn half before that you can go all the way back to Mymanatis and Hippocrates. But I will mention that Hippocrates practiced on the island of Kos because the conventional doctors and Athens drove him out of town.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Because ah was for radical to their beliefs and now, he’s a father of Western medicine
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Unbelievable so they, you did get some accredited you did get some accolades but not enough to incorporate a lot of these things in mainstream medicine. So, there’s still kind of a block.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Well that’s above my paygrade.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: My responsibility at the time was to do my job.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right
Dr. Russell Jaffe: To publish to communicate to inspire to inform to motivate and I’m glad to tell you that many of the people who are skeptical of my enthusiasm at the time have gone on to research in these areas and now they too have come around and an example, a very important example, but it’s just a personal face on this conversation Dr. Tony Lamas, Gervasio Lamas, he is the chairman of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in Miami and he is on the Faculty of Mount Sinai Medical School in New York and he led the tact trial funded by the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute NIH NHLBI he is the superb cardiologist, very conventionally trained, who now has documented the benefits of chelation therapy especially for people with diabetes. And we’re both on the rostrum today, we’re both on the program teaching other doctors. What we find to be the information that inspires us that keeps us younger and I will mention that he and I just got off the elevator just before our interview and he noticed that I had lost 65 pounds and I mentioned
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: I wasn’t going to find them again and I noticed that he had lost some weight. And so we commiserated with each other because it’s not easy to get to your lean weight but you feel so much better your restorative sleep is so much better your digestion so much better your moods are so much better. That from my point of view it’s absolutely worth doing in fact it’s an investment in my future and others have heard this I don’t know if you have, Dr. Justin, but I’m planning to be dancing at 120 and I want you and I want you to be with me.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wonderful. That’s wonderful that’s excellent. Well, also you got your CCN as well so you obviously have it your conventional medical training. When did you go and start learning more about nutrition, in general?
Dr. Russell Jaffe: I actually, I actually helped found the IWCN, I was the program director for the first eight years of the certified clinical nutritionist program, I believe that I have CCN number one.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow so before we dive into some of these predictive markers and I also want to you know get a sense of your background too because you also started a supplement and lab company which I think is very unique as well, but before we go into that, what would you say, give me a breakdown what’s your typical day like breakfast lunch and dinner, how do you spend your day doing a lot of research what’s that day like?
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Well thanks for asking. Here’s my day, I’m kind of a farmer which means I go to bed early, I get up early. I get up usually before dawn and I happen to have a wonderful mattress that I love and I stretch before I fall asleep, I stretch when I get up before I get out of bed, then I kind of check myself then I have a morning shower while the coffee is brewing and I do get organic shade-grown tea buried coffee from a wonderful guy who roasts the beans the day he sends it to you.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wonderful
Dr. Russell Jaffe: And while the coffee is brewing, I take my shower and I stretch again in the shower and I go through a mental checklist to see if there’s any part of my body that really needs help today. Then the next thing I do aside from putting on some clothes usually, is I make sure I’m well hydrated and I am now following a fellow who believes that it is better, in the long run, to take almost all of your calories in just six hours.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Mmm so intermittent fasting?
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Yes, you can call this intermittent fasting. I like to think of it as intermittent digestion or…
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: What is it whatever is the good side of fifth to me fasting is, I don’t want to fast.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: I have resistance of the word not in the process but I tell you that my mornings at this point now I know breakfast is the most important meal of the day but please don’t knock me out about this. That’s what I actually do and I’m going to be honest with you.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: My mornings I stay hydrated I sip on coffee, I don’t put anything into my coffee there are no extra sweeteners in my home. You’re sweet enough as you are you don’t need to add sugar.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I love it
Dr. Russell Jaffe: And by the middle of the day I’m beginning to feel hungry, and where am I in the middle of the day? I’m at my R&D center in Vienna Virginia which is also my home. So four days a week I get to think write meditate and then I go out in our permaculture biodynamic food forest garden, where my job is to sit and watch the pollinators pollinate and the birds eat the birds, seed. And then my other job is to pick whatever is right for dinner because we like to eat from our land. We have a biodynamic Community Supported Agriculture CSA that we belong to and once a week we get very fresh food. And yes we go to Whole Foods but we only buy things that are whole. In my home, there are very few packages. We don’t need them. There are devices that make it easy to cook things work very well very quickly, yes we have steel cut oats not rolled oats and yes we put them in water or some broth overnight so they pre swell.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: I’m trying to think what else for me I often in the evening before bed I have about a half an hour where I get in a warm tub of water that has a cup of Epsom salts and a cup of baking soda that helps detoxify and relax. When I’m in the bath five minutes I do deep abdominal breathing just slow rhythmic breathing if you want to know what abdominal breathing is like watching a baby they all know how to breathe in there happen watch most adults, they under ventilate, they hypo ventilate they have so many traumas growing up that they’re daring to move that’s right they breathe from their chest which is not where the action is it’s these little tiny air sacs called alveoli, I really am a doctor at the that you have to expand your lung so I five minutes of abdominal breathing than 15 minutes of active meditation. My friend Robert Leichtman wrote a book called Active Meditation: The Western Tradition and published around 1976, still in addition highly recommend it and anything that Bob Leichtman has ever written because most of us have days that are structured I have earned and I worked hard to get this didn’t happen overnight but I worked hard to get to the point where I had a team with people that could take care of the day-to-day and in fact it’s better for me to not even interact with that because I’m constantly fixing things that aren’t broken.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: But if they if they can’t solve a problem well then it’s mine.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That makes sense.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Four days a week yeah four days I’m a week I’m at the R&D center in the woods I get eight to ten thousand steps a day in and how do I doing that well I have a hands-free telephone and when I’m talking which I offer them, when I’m talking I’m walking.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That makes sense I have a setup here where I’m on a treadmill at my desk and when I’m sitting I have a like basically it’s called the QB and it’s put by spending on us and you can bike. So I do the same thing
Dr. Russell Jaffe: That’s wonderful.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And just can just curious about protein consumption in fat consumption.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: oh well it’s, first of all, understand that the clear and the recent studies completely support what I’m going to say. The Greek Mediterranean diet is the healthiest diet the next healthiest diet is the Japanese diet. In both cases you take in lots of fresh things in joyful ways with lots of herbs and you have 60% complex carbs, 20%, of calories from fat and 20% of calories from protein now why do I say that, because if you want insulin resistance then go on a low carb high protein high-fat diet. If you want to increase your risk of atrial fibrillation and magnesium deficiency and all the consequences thereof go on a low carb high protein high-fat diet. It’s in vogue it’s called keto I even hear that South Beach is now a modified friendly keto. I don’t know what a friendly keto is. I know it keto, I know a ketoacidosis is it’s called starvation.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: You will lose weight if you if you do what Bob Atkins and others recommended for many years which is eat a lot of fat a lot of protein and zero as close to zero carbs as you have… weight but you but your bones will melt.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So what’s your there’s a lot of data coming out from over at Duke University, Eric Westman, a bunch of other Doc’s on the ketogenic kind of template you know they’re modifying it anywhere between 20 or to 50 grams of net carbs typically around thirty thirty net which typically gets you like eight servings of green vegetables a day. What’s your take on that? Because there’s lots of data with less mass…
Dr. Russell Jaffe: The folks that the folks at Duke are doing good folks at Duke are doing good work there is an integrative medicine group at Duke at they’re part of. However, you can call that what you want you can call it a rose or a petunia it remains what it is it’s not ketogenic. Ketogenic means you deprive yourself of carbohydrates and you force your mitochondria cells, the battery of the cell to use fats and amino acids for energy. So what they’re saying is if you’re truly ketogenic you’re in starvation and what I said before applies now what they’re saying is we want to have a best of both, we want you to have the option of more fat and more protein. So we’re gonna cut the carbs half of what I said. So I said 60% not and I’m remember I said no added sugar so that 60% from fiber nuts and seeds and things you have to chew those are the thing and fruits and vegetables which turn out to be associated with long life and good health and depriving yourself of fresh fruits and vegetables I don’t think anyone today who really knows about the true functional nutrition literature as a fellow of the American College of Nutrition as someone who was on the National Nutrition Consortium appointed by Mildred Seelig at ACN today. I can tell you for sure that the Greek Mediterranean diet is associated with the healthiest long life and the best energetic mood stability symptom reduction from diet alone. Now it’s not it’s more than diet, of course, it’s what you eat and drink it’s what you think and but in regard to eating and drinking with respect to the folks that do they’re trying to take a very overlooked problem identify it and find a solution by splitting the difference. As someone who is in academic medicine, I can tell you I’m splitting the differences often what’s done but it rarely turns out to be very helpful.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: When you say splitting the difference do you mean just instead of consuming zero carbohydrate kind of like a carnivore diet they’re doing essentially you know six to eight servings of green vegetables keeping the net below 30. Is that will you mean by splitting the difference?
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Yes I’m saying that the healthiest diet is 60% complex carbohydrates, 60% lots of fiber, 20% from protein, 20% from fat in which they’re very nicely…
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Would you customize the carbs if you have a patient that’s coming in with a let’s just say elevation in fasting insulin let’s say greater than 10 or at 15 or a functional or a glucose tolerance that stays up high 2, 3 hours after a meal. Would you make exceptions to cut the carbs lower if you’re dealing with those patients?
Dr. Russell Jaffe: If you want to reduce hemoglobin A1c if you want to improve glucose-insulin ratio, if you want to improve Homa which we studied in our diabetes outcome study which we talked about if you want. But if you want to optimize any of those parameters as you should. You must keep the fat less than 20% of calories, and you must have at least forty to a hundred grams of unprocessed fiber in your diet daily. That means 60% from complex carbs, 20% from fat, 20% from protein. Now if you include seeds and nuts if you include seeds and nuts you get healthy oils but remember that as soon as you remove the oil from the seed or them but, the protective factors are gone and now you have something that air is the enemy now and so there are no edible oils in my house. We cook with broth, we cook with wine, we cook with juice, we cook with foods that are wet. We like wet foods we started all of our meals with something wet and warm. That Americans but it’s a makeover that adds years to life in life to years.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Now you talked about 20 wouldn’t… go ahead.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: No I was just trying to kind of guild that point which is I had insulin resistance when I weighed 65 pounds more than I did now.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: I can tell you the last the last two hemoglobin tests on myself for 4.5% and the best outcome goal value is less than 5% and even a little bit about five and you begin losing years on the far end but losing quality of life today. It’s a bad proposition.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Interesting.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: We need it turns out we need a lot of fiber we also need a lot of probiotic good bugs and then we need a lot of nutrients that come from things like fruits and vegetables. Especially healthy fruits and vegetable.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: To me today the minimum is organic I prefer biodynamic and actually, I would prefer to grow it myself if I quit.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s amazing. Now you talked about having the fact go higher that causes insulin resistance. What’re the mechanisms? We know fat doesn’t really have much of an insulin genic response I mean you have some with protein more with carbs. So what’s the mechanism of fat getting higher and causing more insulin and just to be clear right, we want to draw a line between you know process kind of more rancid omega-6 or more trans-fat right and then we kind of have our healthier saturated fats in the category coconut oil maybe gear butter and then, of course, we have our unsaturated avocado, olive oil, those kinds of things.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Let me jump in on that and just just to make a very important point. EVO, extra-virgin olive oil is a fraud waiting to be revealed.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay let’s hear it yeah why.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Yeah well why because my family I went to Tuscany at the time when you harvest olives and you bring them and overnight they grind very slowly on this grinding wheel you know this is a stone wheel and one comes out is dark green and viscous and delicious and they eat it there and they love it there and you can buy it commercially. What you buy and this is actually what happened we stayed there all night in the morning there was this mountain of spent olive mash outside the building, and this big truck from Bartoli comes by and I say what’s happening and they say, Oh hahaha Portola is going to take our spent olive mash and the first time they process it they’re gonna call it EVO.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Got it.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: So it’s a fraud waiting to happen. Ghee, on the other hand, can be liquid sunshine Beatrice from hunter wrote about that many years ago but remember the ghee comes from the cow and if that was a healthy cow that’s fine. But most ghee is contaminated with the products at the cow ate including glyphosate, including lead and mercury and… I okay and and now if you want to make a fondue and you want to use some organic grapeseed oil a few drops, I will not tear it out of your hand in fact there is i feel to show you I’m not totally consistent there is a small bottle of grapeseed oil and we made fondue with it. If you tell me you have organic peanut oil and you want to do a stir-fry, I’m killing a few drops of organic peanut oil in a wok or a cast iron pan, it’s fine.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s okay.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: But most of the oil should come from Whole Foods seeds and nuts. The complex carbs are what regulate a slow uptake from the gut of sugar and the minerals that are necessary to process the sugar so that you actually enhance insulin functionality by having a lot of fiber in the diet. Now let’s flip to the other side let’s slip to the other side. Assuming that you will agree with me that you’re sweet enough as you are and therefore you don’t need any added sugar.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I totally hear that.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Now most now most of the studies that the people have cited included sugar and complex carbs as carbs. Sorry, that’s not fair look at the diet studies that use Whole Foods as their source of carbs. They got the best insulin resistance below 20% of fat from calorie… fat as source of calories, less than 20% of calories from that. Now, why is that? It turns out the more fat you take the more rigid are the membranes of your cells and it’s a little complicated biochemistry but trust me I’m not making this up. When the cell membrane itself this is the wrapper around the cell this is a very important packaging but very dynamic of thing membrane when that membrane becomes more rigid the fit between insulin and the insulin receptor becomes less efficient, and you develop insulin resistance but since your…
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Doesn’t that membrane get more rigid more with trans-fats though then or like vs higher quality omega 3s or higher quality saturated there’s no difference in that? mm-hmm.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Well let’s go back to the trans-fat comment. Kumar Kumaroh and Marianne showed in the late 70s early 80s, trans fats should not be part of the human diet, trans-fats should be out of your diet it’s not hard today because even the companies that used to advocate for them agree the trans fats bad bad bad yes trans fats do make rigid membranes but they’re bad and suggestible. Now stearic acid saturated fats are more rigid unsaturated fats are more flexible and fluid. You want to have more EPA DHA as omega-3, but you want it from a source that was distilled under nitrogen to remove the toxic metals and to avoid air oxidation damage of the delicate EPA DHA then you need enough magnesium in your body because magnesium acts as an antioxidant to protect the EPS, the unsaturated fats when they’re in trend.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Interesting, now when you talk about some of these fish oils how much does it matter if it’s a triglyceride or an ethyl ester what’s your opinion on that?
Dr. Russell Jaffe: In my opinion on that is that there are two points of view, one advocated by company a and the other advocated by company b. There are virtues to both what is critical from my point of view is that the distillation of the oil whether it be a triglyceride an ethyl ester or not, that the distillation be under nitrogen.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Nitrogen is important is that preventive grantee oxygenation doesn’t happen essentially.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: To prevent what will be irreversible oxidative damage to the delicate essential fats that you are interested in it yes so you must have still under nitrogen and then you want to take the traction that has the most EPA DHA of course, and now you want to micellize that in a soft jell because that will protect it until you swallow it and the micellized little droplets get into the body easier because it’s not easy to take up either the triglyceride or the ethyl ester you need some bile you need a gall bladder that works and as I started to say what’s really important is the quality of the EPA DHA because you can make a case on both sides, which means we really don’t know the answer yet.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And of course like you know you run a supplement company so we, you’re going out and you’re trying to find a person that to buy raw material offered there are obviously different tiers right you can go and buy cheaper stuff like you would maybe the equivalent of a burger at your local McDonald’s or you can choose the high quality grass-fed organic beef at your local farmer correct, so you’ve different options on your keys…
Dr. Russell Jaffe: The reason that Park Integrative Health the reason that Park was founded in 1987 was because I wanted to use pharmaceutical quality and above raw materials all the time. And I was told by people who knew better that our cost of goods was going to be so high than I would have a hobby and not a business. So I did something that some people do which is I took the marketing budget and I put it into the cost of goods I put it into the quality of the bottom the quality of our service and we’ve grown quite a nice business, thank you, over service without having more than a few dollars for marketing. Because you’ll never see a sports celebrity endorsing a Park product but if you take a Park product, you’ll feel the difference because if you use the higher quality raw materials and you put them together so that it’s only active ingredients all the time which is something we pioneered. Now you have a safer, more effective form that when you study it as we have in community-based outcome studies delivers feel the difference results and as you know we have an unconditional guarantee because we trust people to feel the difference that Park approach that is use the highest quality and monitor it very carefully, because people will promise the moon and deliver modified dog poop.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Make sense. And then with your a fish oil what’s your opinion do you like the triglyceride, or the ethyl does it matter and then what’s the difference is to kind of put it in in layman’s terms.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Well right see the difference is that eventually these delicate fats are going to get into a membrane as part of a triglyceride, and a triglyceride is three carbons, that’s the backbone and coming off of each of those carbons is a long chain called a fatty acid. Now the two position there’s one two three the middle position the tube position of the triglyceride is the source for your cytokines thromboxanes and prostaglandins it’s really important so if you put a racemic acid in there or you put it on mega six fatty acids in there you’ve got a completely different response than if you put in EPA or a DHA in there. So in that sense, you would think the triglycerides are better. But it turns out that the body is going to deconstruct and reconstruct a triglyceride so that’s not so critical and the ethyl ester, not the methyl ester ever the ethyl ester is easily taken up it has better bioavailability so if you say to me this is a person with a perfectly healthy gallbladder, across the coin both of them are okay.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: If your bile from your gallbladder is limited, well then you should have the ethyl ester.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And then when you’re producing the product what’s the how are you preventing the oxidation from happening outside. I’m just keeping the temperature down. Are you putting like a rosemary antioxidant, how are you keeping it stable?
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Well when I said, first of all, there’s a pharmaceutical-grade fish oil company.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You’re choosing a good quality right?
Dr. Russell Jaffe: No I’m choosing way above a good quality, the best food-grade right right right so there is food grade which you can think of as floor sweet. Then there is quality grade we can think of as better than floor sweet things. Once you get up to American Chemical Society to reagent grade to pharmaceutical grade and above, now you’re at a different level. You’re dealing with different companies you do different they provide different kinds of documentation you do we do third-party pros production testing on all our products because even though we trust our suppliers verified by President Reagan used to say Rastenburg.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly yeah that makes sense.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: So what happens is the fish oil is distilled under nitrogen the middle fraction the concentrate EPA DHA is basically put into a sealed container, it then goes to the place where it’s going to be micellized into the soft gel where it is immediately and without any exposure to oxygen, put into tiny droplets that are easily taken up from your gut. And by the way, you don’t get the burping and the comeback that most officials have you can bite into this fish oil soft gel and you’ll find it very delicate because it’s not rancid.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Interesting and then if you consume, so if you were to consume rancid omega-3s you essentially have more lipid peroxidation correct.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: You would have more lipid peroxidation and it would be a member of studies there have been several studies recently that said, oh we thought fish oils were good but they’re not really good. And if you look at them carefully these were people taking fish shows made in oxygen fish oils that were rancid and should, in my opinion, should not be consumed.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: is that just robbing from your antioxidant reserves it’s sucking up more vitamin C what’s it doing in your body?
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Well it’s doing several levels of harm yes you’re right when you start with something that’s damaged and oxidized than the body has to use antioxidants which is protective but he has to use antioxidants in order to somehow get the oxygen off the molecule that has it. Because when you put oxygen on a molecule like a fat, it’s like putting a hand grenade on the fat. When that oxygen comes off the recoil energy is going to be so high that you’re going to break the membrane of the cell you’re going to damage the cell that’s a bad thing. And now you have a molecule that kind of fits in where an omega-3 or omega-6 should you know triglyceride in a membrane, but it doesn’t have the right shape. It’s got this big extra oxygen on. So peroxides are bad epoxides are bad anything that robs your antioxidants are bad and most people need help with their antioxidants so anything you can do to preserve to enhance the function of your antioxidants like ascorbate. Is to your benefit and anything you do that depletes your antioxidants it’s the opposite.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent and what does that do to your cell membrane? Is it making the cell membrane more inflexible?
Dr. Russell Jaffe: It’s not only making it more inflexible when the oxygen comes off the recoil energy is so high you actually break the membrane and very often the cell is killed.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow I really appreciate your biochem background it really helps and I know you’re also famous for doing a vitamin C calibration. Can you talk about the vitamin C calibration and who can benefit from that?
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Right so let’s talk about the C calibration also known as the C cleanse and the reason that we focus on a ascorbate, known as vitamin C it’s really an antioxidant does not think of it as a vitamin A vitamin is something you need a little love to activate enzyme catalyst. Albertsons Georgy pointed out that ascorbate is as important to survival as light and oxygen. When you’re that important you’re kind of really important and the end the next question has to be, well how much, how much should I take. Now Linus Pauling famously said 9 grams then he said 18 grams and I got to ask him why he said 18 grams and he said because doctors are so dumb they could only remember a number and if I say it long enough then they’ll remember and I said but doctor timing shouldn’t it be individualized he said of course but doctors aren’t smart enough for that. I think people consumers are and I think that people aren’t a functional integrative and holistic medicine are and so the C calibration the C cleanse means that every 15 minutes you take a certain amount like a gram and a half, three grams, six grams, every 15 minutes and notice I said grams, not milligrams. But of course, you use fully buffered fully reduced l-ascorbic nature’s form is l-ascorbic you want to fully reduced not the partially reduced fully reduced and by the way our source of ascorbic is fermented. It’s done by natural fermentation but under a nitrogen blanket so that during the production of the ascorbate, which is triply recrystallized under nitrogen which is it’s a challenge but it now gives you nature’s form in a concentrated way. And then we have a balance of minerals potassium, calcium, magnesium, and zinc you need all of them in a proportion so if you need one gram 10 grams or a hundred grams you still get the minerals that help the ascorbate come in and help it work.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And so what’s the goal how high do you go up to and then do you ramp down how does the whole process work and why should people be looking for symptom was.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Well what they’re gonna do is once a week they’re gonna check their C calibration they’re gonna do it by taking the ascorbate every 15 minutes until they cleanse, until they have an enema from within, until they have a flush something so unique that until you’ve had it you don’t understand it but once you’ve had it once you know what I’m talking about. So you rapidly get toxic matter and fluid pumped into the rectum and evacuated from the tosh that’s why I meant by an enema from within. They do that once a week we do that once a week now in between you take 50 to 75 percent, so let’s say it took 10 grams to cleanse, you take between five and seven and a half grams. I recommend that people start at 50 percent and move up to 75 percent over time. You do the cleanse every week because the amount you need will likely go up over some period of time as you overcome the repair deficit that your body has accumulated for years or decades, and when you finally get to Plateau which means for four consecutive weeks your cleanse is the same amount. Now you know the amount you need on a daily basis, you’re taking three quarters of the amount to do that cleanse and you keep doing that until you get bulky or lose your stool indicating that repair has finally completed and now you do ramp down see now you check it once a week as you need less and less. And the goal is to need less than four grams, and when we checked about 4,200 people that reported their C cleanse. The people who are asymptomatic and healthy cleanse on four grams or less. They’re people who had just a few symptoms cleansed on four to ten grams the average person cleansed on ten to a hundred grams and there are people who need well over a hundred grams which is a hundred thousand milligrams to cleanse but it is safe and for it is safer for people to do this because the amount of oxidative damage, the amount of oxidative toxic material, the amount of nutrient-deficient oxidative processed foods that people are taking in the stress of high tech living has dramatically increased the amount of ascorbate that people need, ascorbate is the mother or maternal antioxidant that sacrifices herself so that all the other antioxidants can be regenerated and protected. so ascorbate is the critical one to test and the c cleanse is the way to find out how much you as individual mean.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So essentially just to kind of recap at your doing about one teaspoon of the L ascorbate reduced powder which is about 3 grams 3,000 milligrams every 15 minutes or you’re taking more of it and you’re trying to get to a place of bowel tolerance where you’re essentially you’ve saturated your bowels or saturated your vitamin C stores and now the stools start to get loose and that number may be higher in the beginning and as your vitamin C levels get more repleted, or topped off so to speak, then that threshold to move the bowels as you said drops. Is that correct?
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Well no let me clarify my friend Bob Cathcart introduced bowel tolerance. It has a fatal flaw. The fatal flaw of bowel tolerance is you creep up on the amount you need as opposed to the cleanse where you rapidly ramp up.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So you’re doing degree increments though right teaspoon 3 gram 50 minutes.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: No let me say again what I said before. If you’re really healthy if you’re really healthy you use 1/2 a teaspoon which is a gram and a half.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Gram and a half got it
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Right if you’re a typical person you do use a teaspoon which is 3 grams but many people there are many people who need 2 teaspoons which is 6 grams and they need it for hours and if you do 6 grams for 4 times in an hour that’s 24 grams if you do that for two hours that’s 48 grams. Most people will cleanse in that time the idea is to rapidly saturate the body with the ascorbic so that the ascorbate can energize the rectum which is really from the kidney embryologically and pump toxic matter and extra water in to the rectum and that would come whooshing out flushing out cleansing up. So yes it’s the same idea, but it’s the next generation after bowel tolerance it’s the C cleanse or the C calibration. And it really depends on how well you are. If you’re really well you don’t need that much but if you’re a typical American, even 3 grams and I just had a someone contact me about this they took 3 grams every 15 minutes for 5 hours.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s a significant amount.
40:45 Yes sir, but if they had done six grams they would have flushed and calibrated but after five hours what they proved was they had a lot of oxidative burdens and they need a lot of ascorbic. So you really do, I really recommend that folks read the literature that we have, this is free to download online, you can look up C cleanse, you can look up joy of living the alkaline way or alcohol a guide, and we want folks to help them we want to help people understand themselves so they can do it smoothly, efficiently, and generally within a couple of hours. So I personally do my cleanses on the weekend and I can cleanse within a couple of hours. But often we hear from colleagues that people try say a teaspoon and that means three grams every 15 minutes, that means 12 grams an hour, but they need 70 grams to cleanse and it’s gonna take them more time than they’re willing to take and. I don’t think it should be your whole day you shouldn’t be sneak on waiting for a cleanse the whole day.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So if that’s the case, could you go up in tablespoon increments if you wanted to go faster?
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Well understand that you want something close to an isotonic iso-osmotic beverage so when you go to 6 grams or 2 teaspoons, you’re now talking about at least eight ounces.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I see.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: And if you go and if you go above that you might go to 12 or 16 ounces, most people don’t want to drink that much.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I see.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: I have no I have no objection to that. I’m just saying that I don’t make it too concentrated and don’t make it too dilute, you don’t want hypotonic, you don’t want hypertonic. You want as close to isotonic as you can get and that’s why what we recommend is as the upper dose is the two teaspoons in 8 ounces. Could be water could be your herbal beverage could be a juice that you diluted one to one with water. And by the way, some people find if they take the recycled glutamine or they take a dose of magnesium and choline citrate or they take a dose of the digestive guard before the cleanse. That things go more smoothly and more easily.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent and I’m just trying to wrap my head around what the difference between this cleanse and just typical bowel tolerance by vitamin C. Is it because it’s in the L ascorbate reduced form with the minerals, does that make it different? What’s happening is different.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Well Bob has gotten himself recommended sodium L ascorbate and he did that because he knew that ascorbic acid would pull the dentin the calcium out of the teeth you know so you don’t know use ascorbic acid. He didn’t want to use a synthetic form and I agree with him on that, but what he said is you just keep taking it until you feel until you until your poop. That’s called bowel tones. Here’s here’s the fatal flaw with bowel tolerance and I spoke with Bob about this and he agreed with it was a very honest guy. When you do bowel tolerance, you have a very high probability that if you have a long transit time long digestive transit time as many Americans do, that you will recirculate toxic matter throughout your body and feel worse in contrast with the C cleanse you quickly ramp up, saturate the ascorbate throughout every cell of your body, and then pump the toxic matter and the extra fluid into the rectum, and it comes out quickly, and you don’t get the recirculation of toxic matter. People don’t want to feel worse on the way to feeling better.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well you motivated me. I’m gonna go pick some up and do my own vitamin C calibration very soon. Excellent. So let’s transition the conversation you talked about there eight predictive markers for your health to kind of give a window kind of your check engine light so to speak to see how you’re functioning in an optimal perspective. So let’s just kind of break down those eight markers briefly and let’s do a quick little blurb on each of them, so what’s number one?
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Well yes. Now with regard to predictive biomarkers, we reviewed hundred-thousand lab tests because we wanted to know what covers epigenetics and epigenetics is everything that’s not genetics. Epigenetics is everything you can influence with your lifestyle. It turns out to be really important, it’s 92 percent of your life Steinhaus epigenetics influences your genes, your genes are not a fixed blueprint they’re rather dynamically acted upon and modified by your habits of daily living, and your habits of daily living are summarized epigenetics and there are eight of these tests and I’d like to go through them and I’d like to point out what’s unique about our interpretation. And some of these are familiar, hemoglobin a1c. And the best outcome goal value is less than 5%. Now today if you ask most diabetologist, most doctors who specialize in diabetes don’t tell you that they don’t want to know the fasting glucose they don’t want to know the fasting insulin, the 2-hour postprandial. They want to know the hemoglobin a1c. It’s the average sugar stuck on to your hemoglobin protein over three or four months. So it’s a very good average risk predictor, it’s an oil cause morbidity mortality predictor, it predicts whether you want to live ten or more years pretty accurately, and the goal that is less than 5%. Now the second test is high sensitivity c-reactive protein, HSCRP, and you do need the high sensitivity version. Pointed out that while c-reactive protein is a good measure of acute inflammation, the more common chronic repair deficit which is what inflammation really is it’s really repaired deficit, that can be measured with a high sensitivity c-reactive protein known as HSCRP and that should be less than 0.5.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Is that the same as the cardiac CRP? I think it’s the same, right?
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Yes yes sir yes sir. Originally Read Crew who is a cardiologist thought that the high sensitivity test was cardio specific, and it’s sometimes referred to as the cardiac CRP
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That helps.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: And yes, yes no I’m glad you brought that up. It is it’s not cardiac-specific, but it is sometimes called cardiac CRP and it is the high sensitivity or the HS CRP that we want and the best outcome goal value is less important
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I see a lot of patients that want the HS CRP but their lab whether it’s a quest or LabCorp only has the cardiac and from what I’ve seen like you just said it’s the same thing.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Oh same thing same thing yeah. So the next test the third test in the sequence is known as homocysteine. This is a plasma test and you must process especially within 30 minutes or the lab shouldn’t even run it, but a plasma homocysteine predicts atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease, almost better than any other single marker and when you combine the predictive biomarkers the way we do you’ve covered all of your cardiovascular risks and you notice what’s in here and what’s not in here we can talk about what’s not in here at the end. So the next test is your immune tolerance task. Oh sorry, the homocysteine should be less than 6 the homocysteine should be less than six. And that, yes homocysteine should be less than 6 again don’t pay any attention to the lab range healthy people have a homocysteine less than 6, they have a high methionine, a low homocysteine they are protected from cardiovascular disease and they can methylate which is a very important function for moving things around in your body. So homocysteine value less than 6 on the plasma properly done specially
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And if that level is on the higher side what nutrients should we add in to help bring that down? Assuming a diet and lifestyles good.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Yes well you’d be surprised actually how much B complex including folate, how much magnesium and choline citrate, how much betaine hydrochloride known as trimethylglycine people need in order to keep a healthy homocysteine, and you can look at all these cycles if you want because I’m a biochemist and I do it in my sleep. But the bottom line is you need at least a super B complex, you need folate probably milligrams a day, you need trimethylglycine at least 250 milligrams a day, you need enough ascorbate to protect and two other antioxidants, and with that and with enough magnesium and choline citrate to activate your ATP, you too can have a low homocysteine a nice high methionine.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Interesting and they just the back story for everyone listening they can look at it here is Kilmer McCully who was a Harvard researcher that discovered the homeless cysteine atherosclerosis link. Was basically laughed out of Harvard me 10 20 years ago in this discovery, but now it’s becoming mainstream and its even part of your predictive markers for overall health.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Kilmer published in 1967 when I was a young scientist in Boston, I knew him then. He went to the VA and distinguished research career but you’re right he got left by other parties. He was right and he was right, and they were in it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep interesting.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Now the fourth test is the immune tolerance test known as LRA, lymphocyte response assay. Lymphocytes are specialized white cells, and they respond to things that are foreign and harmful, but they don’t respond to neutralizing and helpful things. So you want an LRA the LRA by ELISA/ACT is what we recommend and the goal is to have no intolerance is to be completely tolerant in your immune system, and healthy people with a healthy digestion and a healthy intake of the nutrients they need. The few of them that we found too are asymptomatic tend to have no reactions out of hundreds and hundreds of substances that we can now accurately measure on one ounce of blood, as long as it gets to us within a couple of days.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Now with that test, how is that different than your typical food allergy IgG your IgA. Is it companies out there like Everly Wells a big one you see on Facebook all the time which I think is looking more IgG IgA? How is that different from that typical you know food allergy that’s more antibody based?
Dr. Russell Jaffe: The antibody tests were developed in the 1950s, they were outmoded in the 1980s, they’re still offered by most labs because they’re easy to do and impossible to interpret. So when you get an IgG antibody result, you have to ask yourself. Is this a beneficial neutralizing helpful antibody or is this a complement fixing harmful antibody? You can’t tell.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So essentially with the ELISA/ACT, you’re looking at the lymphocytes and you’re able to see if there’s a t-cell kind of mediated response to these foods specifically? Is that how you look more specifically?
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Yes. The innovation that we brought to immunology was the first amplified procedure done on the surface of a white so-called a lymphocyte. And the novelty is that we can do reproducible tests that is less than 3% variance. So we do a functional cell culture more precisely than a physical chemistry lab measures an antibody, and the point you made that you jump to is correct. More important than b-cell antibodies and more important than distinguishing helpful from harmful b-cell antibodies are the t-cell responses which you can only get cell culture, only get from a cell culture.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So the IgG and IgA, that’s more B cell-mediated and…
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Hundred percent. Not more these cells make antibodies
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Antibodies, correct.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: B cells make antibodies through specialized antibody factories called plasma cells. When you do physical chemistry, say hi GG or any antibody measurement, and I don’t care if you used a cooked antigen, I don’t care if you use a freeze-dried antigen, I don’t care if you used an aerosolized antigen, I’m telling you if you’re measuring antibodies you’re doing old-fashioned physical chemistry and you can’t interpret whether it’s good or bad and since you don’t know the function and you need to know the function I say don’t do tests that are intrinsically incapable of giving you the information you need. And then the point you made is well made which is T cells are more important than the antibodies, and you get nothing about the T cells when all you’re doing is old-fashioned physical chemistry. So we outmoded this in the 1980s we have over eighty thousand cases in our database, we’ve done over twenty-five million cell cultures, we published more outcome peer-reviewed studies that show the benefit of this approach when it was applied just by people living their lives. But as you said a lifestyle program, a program to add life to years and years to life, and we’re more excited today than ever because the data continues to come in that we have an advanced approach. It’s part of this predictive biomarkers suite of advanced interpretations and I’m glad to tell you that we at the Health Studies Collegium have been able to pioneer much of this validate it to the satisfaction of our most difficult critics and now make it available to colleagues and consumers.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very good. Now your test for this is the Elisa act biotechnology test now I’m just curious though. Is the liza the same thing as the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay test? Or is that just kind of a play on words there.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: No no it’s very specifically Elisa act, which is the coming together what you said Elisa, with a CT Advance cell culture technique
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay so it’s combining it. Okay.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: So it’s the first time, first time that an amplified procedure was done, not with a sandwich assay like a conventional Elisa introduced by Bursa Aiello in 1953, back then this is using a lymphocyte enzyme that when the cell is resting, when it doesn’t see anything that it reacts against, the enzymes turned off. Because this is the same enzyme that turns the cell on when it needs to go through mitosis and reproduce itself. We were fortunate enough to figure out the specific kinase at the MHC locus for those of you who are super technical. The antigen presenting cell in this autologous ex vivo cell culture wiggles over to thelymphocyte presents the processed antigen at the MHC locus turns on the kinase we see the results of that. This is the bringing together for the first time I’ll be Liza, just as you said and cell culture.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Interesting so you’re able to get the antibody response from that, the IgG IgA IgM, you’re able to get the immune complexes, and then you’re also able to look at that the t-cell activation there too, all three
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Exactly right C lymphocytes are smart enough that they will only react to harmful antibodies. So we get the meaningful harmful antibodies and we ignore the helpful neutralizing antibodies and then yes, we get the immune complexes which is IgM anti-ag G antigen and most importantly we get the T cell reactions.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent, very good. What’s the next marker?
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Yes, the next marker, the fifth one is measuring the pH or the acid alkaline state of your urine after rest. It turns out after six or more hours that the urine and the bladder equilibrate with the bladder lining cells and now you get once a day a measurement of cellular metabolic status. And if you lack magnesium, you have metabolic acidosis if you have enough magnesium you have a healthy happy cell. Why is that so important? Well magnesium is not just an electrolyte that balances calcium you need one molecule of magnesium for every ATP molecule to do any work in your cell. You need magnesium to activate your mitochondria so you can get the toxins detoxified. You need magnesium to activate hundreds maybe thousands of enzyme catalyst. You need magnesium to protect essential fat’s in transit, magnesium is nature’s calcium channel blocker. The problem has been that until very recently magnesium has been notoriously hard to get in, it tends to run out as soon as it comes in, and therefore it’s been forgotten. Now what we did was find out how to make inverted micellar nanodroplets, so you combine ionized magnesium salts with choline citrate and now you get enhanced update and chaperone delivery to the cells we’re hungry for it. So now we should remember magnesium.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wonderful, excellent. What’s the next marker.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Well the goal value from pH is 6.5 to 7.5 if you’re below that you’re too acid and you need more magnesium if you’re consistently above 7.5 it might be catabolic illness and that’s something you don’t want but we could talk about later.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we want like we want the urine though the saliva it doesn’t quite matter
Dr. Russell Jaffe: No no urine urine and the reason we want the urine is because that’s what we standardized, but more importantly if you put a Kirby Cup, if you put a little plastic discover your parotid gland in your mouth and you collect pure parotid saliva you two can measure the pH of that. But having had that done to me when Frank Oppenheimer was a postdoc and meet at some subjects, very true people will do that. What we call saliva or spit it’s a combination of gingival fluid zero sanguinis exudate some saliva sub submandibular some parotid, it turns out that saliva is not what you think it is. At least not in most Americans mouths and and talk to the dentist. There are very few Americans that have a healthy mouth.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And then with the urine, are we testing first morning urination, or they can be another example?
Dr. Russell Jaffe: No no no there’s only one time of day. You can only get a meaningful measure after six hours of rest. So when after six hours at rest the next urine… yes, and you by the way during those six hours you can go to the bathroom and go back to bed. You just can’t go to the gym or the kitchen
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Got it, because you’re gonna create acid byproducts on your muscle activation.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: And other than after those six hours of rest, there are somewhere between 20 and 40 variables that influence urine ph at any random time
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That totally makes sense.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Right the next measurement, the next measurement is vitamin D, specifically what’s called 25 hydroxy D but if you just ask for a vitamin D that’s what they’re gonna do. Now there are three forms of vitamin D and there are some experts who say measure all three of them. I do not advocate that, partly for cost and partly for practicality. So if you think there is something wrong with the way their kidneys are processing vitamin D or their liver is processing vitamin D then you might want to do all three different what are called isomers. In general you want the 25 hydroxy d and the goal value is 50 to 80. Now there was recently an article in New York Times, and a very distinguished science writer says, almost everyone in America is low in vitamin D it’s normal to be low in vitamin D so don’t even measure vitamin D and don’t supplement. Now did you understand what I just said it do you understand how silly that is?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely yes okay absolutely.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Let me clarify for everybody, because I know you know this, but when vitamin D is below 20, well of course your bones are gonna fall apart, but more importantly you just tripled or quadrupled your cancer risk.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: And you probably tripled your cardiovascular risk. Because vitamin D we call it a vitamin, it’s actually a neurohormone. It actually regulates cell division; it does a whole lot of things and we know in my opinion the best outcome goal value 50 to 80 the vitamin D council I believe says 40 to 70 but that’s close to 50 to 80. And the ranges that we have said were the values that we have said give you a certain latitude. So if you take a little bit too much vitamin D, and you get up to 90 or 100 I have no concerns. So when I say 50 to 80 I don’t mean that 81 is a problem, I’m saying the safer range that we know to be effective and protect you from the profound chronic illnesses 50 to 80. And how much vitamin D do you take? How much vitamin D do you take? Well as much as you need to get into the 50 to 80 range.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah as much as you need.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: And I take and I prefer for people to take drops under the tongue, so they can absorb, well that’s a turkey word be careful of that but drops under the tongue before you swallow them are easily taken up and many many people over forty million according to my colic. Over forty-million Americans don’t absorb vitamin D from their gut. They’ve got to take it up they’ve got to take it up.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Interesting
Dr. Russell Jaffe: From their mouth
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah Hollen he’s also he’s also a researcher over ABU as well right at your alma mater?
Dr. Russell Jaffe: that’s where I met Mike Hollen.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay he’s been there for a long time right. 34 years.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: About that he’s developed the fundamental methods in vitamin D research he’s known as dr. sunshine.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah absolutely now I’m seeing some people online they’re pushing back a little bit cuz we have vitamin d3 the pre-vitamin D we make on the ski. Somebody hits it that cholesterol I think goes through our liver and gets forming the 25 hydroxyvitamin D, which is calcidiol and then calcidiol hits the kidneys and gets converted to calcitriol. So more people I’m seeing are saying hey we had a measure calcitriol or that the vitamin D that’s activated to the kidneys and they say there should be like one to one ratio on the d3 the 25 hydroxy versus the 125 which is the calcitriol. What’s your opinion on that having that one-to-one or the 125 is?
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Having spoken to 12 different world’s experts and their opinions matter and mine doesn’t cause vitamins not my particular expertise. I can tell you they each have a different opinion. With respect to what your folks, were saying if you have the resources and you want to have the maximum useful information. Then at least you would measure the 25 hydroxy and the 125 hydroxy.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Got it.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: But you might want to measure the precursor as well. If you’re going to do that, but I will offer to most people for home the value proposition including how much is this going to cost…
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Leads me to conclude for most people to start with 25 hydroxy D. No disrespect on the question but just start with 25 hydroxy D bring people into the 50 to 80 nanogram per ml range. Then if you have any question or if you want to just be a more scientific and evidence-based practitioner, when you get them into range then measure and see if you have a one-to-one ratio.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And what if there’s not was it would there be something you would do specifically. I know some data says you should give resveratrol to help with that some today it can be an infection kind of thing. What’s your take on why that may be skewed we’re 25 is higher and 125 is lower?
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Well you raise several very good points. My friend happens to own resveratrol globally and I can tell you they’re going out of the resveratrol business because resveratrol tall has very low bioavailability. It is a polyphenolic it is in red wine, especially granule red wine. However, because it is very low bioavailability, which means very low solubility. When you give it in the doses that people have tried to give it, you end up irritating the gut and irritating the immune system. So we have for a long time at least the last 25 years advocated the safer more effective polyphenolics and activate your innate immune system and do many wonderful things for you. And that’s quercetin dihydrate as the flavonoid, and soluble OPC ortho proanthocyanidins for the chemists as the flavonol, because you need flavonoids and flavonols. These are the colorful compounds in foods but almost all of them in high doses are mutagenic which means oncogenic which means promote cancer because they have such low uptake and they can be irritating, and if you irritate the immune system enough, it will become very upset.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Make sense
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Flavonol but safer the soluble OPC we have them together in different forms because they help prepare they reduce pain they enhance many functions of the innate immune system and when your innate immune system is functioning, you are in a repair mode where you don’t have to call in the extra troops. What’s called the adaptive immune response which are the lymphocytes and the other delayed immune reactive cells. So, which one is to provide a lot of energy to the innate immune system so it can defend and repair you, so they can recycle foreign invaders down to their building blocks and make them available for the body to build itself up? And then more importantly, after you do defense you have to do repair. Well, most Americans are in defense mode almost all the time. You can think of it this way, during the day we do more defense work when we’re getting restorative sleep, we do more repair work. Ah notice I snuck in restorative sleep. Now if you need restorative sleep, then you might need that salt and soda bath the dichromatic light which we didn’t talk about but that goes along with it the abdominal breathing, the active meditation the magnesium and choline citrate, maybe tryptophane with some zinc and b6 so that your body can make the serotonin and the melatonin. I never give serotonin. I never give melatonin because the body never floods itself with those neurochemicals and neural hormones. I give the tryptophane in a way that it goes exactly in the brain where it’s needed, where the brain turns it into serotonin or melatonin as needed. And by the way, it has a very short life in the body because it’s too potent to leave around. So, we follow physiology before a pharmacology, but that also means we study physiology and frankly most of my colleagues today, they know about pathology and I am a double board-certified pathologist, but they don’t remember physiology and biochemistry flummoxes.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I agree healthy egg yeah biochemistry and physiology and when you apply it that becomes Clinical Nutrition and functional medicine essentially, right?
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Absolutely, absolutely.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very good.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: So now the next, right. The next test is an omega-3 index, want to know where you are omega-3 to omega-6 this is Bill Harris’s test. Can be done on a blood spot, and the goal value was more than 8%, and the quick anecdote is that Bill Harris was in the offices of Professor Patti Deutsch at the Military Medical School, she and I are friends I came by because I was going to confer with her and bill was lamenting the fact that it’s so hard to find adults with healthy omega-3 levels. Patti points to me he pulls out a Lancet he calls me up a few days later he says your omega-3 is 13.2% something like that I said well is that better than eight he said well we think it is if you know that above eight is good we know that above eight is good but let’s say that you were just a consumer or just a listener to this show. You might assume that 13 is better than eight. But I’m a scientist so I had to ask Bill is it really better than eight and he’s an honest enough scientist to say we think it is we pray it is we hope it is come back and five or ten years we’ll have more day. So that’s the omega-3 index. And then we only have one more and that is a urine test, this is the measure of oxidative damage and risk in your DNA it’s called 8-oxoguanine that is 8-O-X-O-G-U-A-N-I-N-E, 8-oxoguanine, and because it’s a urine spot test, we actually have a value per milligram of creatinine. So, your best outcome value is less than 30 milligrams per milligram of creatinine.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Is a test in organic acid by Genova it’s called 8 hydroxy – deoxyguanosine, it sounds very similar to that I know that’s an oxidative stress marker?
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Yes, yes. I think that we’re talking about the same molecule I can tell that this molecule has several different names, they’re all the same you want the DNA, the nuclear DNA oxidative stress marker that’s the one you are.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s it that’s correct good.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Now we help people interpret tests that other labs do. So we folks want to know about these best outcome goal values and how to attain them, then you would talk to our health coaches and our nutritionist. If you want to have them perform they can be performed through our lab or through your lab although the LRA is distinctive to us, and the omega-3 index is distinctive to Bill Harris.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very good. And then what’s the range you want to be in for the omega-3 again?
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Yes, for the omega-3 index you want more than 8% to be omega-3
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And with yours, you were up to 13 you were saying right?
Dr. Russell Jaffe: 13 plus.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay so what we’re going to do…
Dr. Russell Jaffe: At the moment there’s only one person who has a higher value if I remember correctly from what Bill said, and it was actually a youngster, was a teenager but this mom took very much pride in telling us how much omega-3 she got her kids to eat.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And if they’re a high threshold for that just because of the lipid peroxidation would you say eight grams, four, six, what’s your high-end recommendation you know we’re assuming farmers pharmaceutical-grade super high quality, so it’s not oxidized.
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Well if the question is how much EPA and DHA do I take and I would never take an oxidized product and I would never recommend anyone do that. But I currently take 8 to 10 grams a day, and that may seem high but I can tell you that given my particular background, that’s what seems to be needed to keep all the other parameters in the range that I would like them to be. So I’m personalizing my intake.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Plus you’re also probably calibrating the L ascorbate which is you know stabilized membranes too, right?
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Oh of course and I take the polyphenolics and I take the super B complex that has a full mineral complex, and I occasionally take some extras in because I’m a man. So yes and I take prebiotics probiotics and symbiotic. So yes I actually sent someone a photograph of the 12 supplements that I take a day and I take two to four doses a day of those supplements. Now I’m like everyone else when it comes to opening-closing bottles, I understand that it’s a commitment I have made because it helps me feel and function so much better. By most physical and functional measurements, I’m half my age and if I can keep that up if I can keep that up for another 30 40 years it’ll be a good run.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent Dr. Russell Jaffe, it’s been an amazing podcast. Lots of knowledge bombs lots of great information. Were there any other biomarkers that all the eight?
Dr. Russell Jaffe: No no we got through all eight of them yeah that was pretty quick but thank you for being such a good host and for making sure that I stayed on top
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent. I’m gonna put in the show notes here, we’re gonna put the links to the ELISA ACT biotechnology food allergy lymphocyte test. Will put the vitamin c el ascorbate, the potency guard powder links, and everything so if anyone wants information, we’ll put it down below. Is there anything else you want to leave the listeners with here today dr. Jaffe?
Dr. Russell Jaffe: Oh gosh yes, I would like folks to know that in the 21st century we have to save our own lives. You cannot rely on science from the 19th or 20th century. I’m not even sure today you can rely on an expert. As Jackie Mason, the comedian says, in the phone book or wherever you look up your doctor its lists every condition and whether they were present or absence the day your problem occurred. And I’m just trying to be a little bit humorous about it, I think consumers should be very active today learning about themselves through self-assessments, through tests that can be interpreted to best outcome individual levels, as we’ve just been talking. Now, this is a new paradigm, this gives information inspiration and if you put some effort perspiration in, you can recover decades of quality life, and you can feel and function better tomorrow. It’s the best value that I have found in all my years in science and by the, way this is not only how I follow through I do walk my talk. But this is how my parents live near the end of their life and the way my children live today. So put us to the test and find out how well you can feel.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well thank you so much I think you did a phenomenal job taking the hard science, biochem science, and applying it and making it practical so people can apply it so, thank you so much I look forward to having you back soon to dive in deeper and you have a phenomenal day that dr. Jaffe, you take care
Dr. Russell Jaffe: You the same, thanks so much.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Thanks so much, bye now.
References:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqKqHwkdOpc
https://www.merck.com/index.html
Audio Podcast:
http://justinhealth.libsyn.com/conventional-medicine-to-functional-natural-medicine-podcast-232
Intermittent Fasting to Improve Fat Loss – Podcast #144
Dr. Justin Marchegiani and Evan Brand discuss about intermittent fasting and the different ways on how it aids in detoxification, fat burning, and improvement of one’s immune function. Listen to them as they share their expertise on how to achieve a successful fast that fits your lifestyle and health status.
Gain an understanding on other types of diet which include conventional, water and juice fasting and learn how these types of diet affect one’s body.
In this episode, we will cover:
02:19 Intermittent Fasting, Water Fasting and Juice Fasting
05:09 Benefits of Water Fasting
14:46 Yo-yo Dieting and Slingshot Effects of mTOR
31:53 Snacking In-Between Meals
36:28 The Brain at a Fasted State
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are back! Evan, it’s Dr. J. How are we doing today, man?
Evan Brand: Pretty good.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Happy July 3rd.
Evan Brand: Happy– Happy July 4th weekend.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes. It was well. Excited. I’m working all day seeing patients but tomorrow I will take the day off, and I did good weekend. How is your weekend, so far?
Evan Brand: Good. It’s been great, man.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Awesome. Very cool. Well, just so you know, I thought I’d– you know we always, typically, start our day talking about food and kind of about what we had for breakfast. I really haven’t eaten breakfast yet. I’m doing a little fasting thing, but I can give you a little hands-on. My wife made this noodge. It’s great. So, I got a little lid on it. So, we got pasture-fed pork, and then some nice fresh scrambled eggs, pasture-fed eggs, so this is waiting for me cool about the noontime hour. So, I’m getting a little 16-hour intermittent fasting going on here so– I am rocking it, and that kind of dove’s tail into our podcast today on Intermittent Fasting. But, before we dig in, how are you doing, man?
Evan Brand: I feel good. Uhh – I was gonna ask ou about eggs. Are you – you – you’re doing eggs, no problem.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, yeah, I do eggs, no problem. I mean, I do a pasture-fed, and I, typically, do uhm– my yolk sac. My wife does scrambled. So, if she’s doing them, I’ll just say, “Just take off what– you know, make enough for you and then I’ll just take a little bit extra,” so she isn’t after two different pans. But I like mine. I eat a poached or uhm– just a yolk attack.
Evan Brand: Nice.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Awesome. I got a little sparkling mineral water here to keep my throat in line.
Evan Brand: Yam? I got some Matcha here. Might throw it out. Woke up a little scratchy.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: The weather’s been weird here so this Matcha’s helping me.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Matcha, love it. Cool. Well, we talked about– pre-show, talking about Intermittent Fasting. This is a big topic. I’m a huge fan of it. I do it in ways that make sense, that’s practical. There’s fasting just for the sake of fasting, you know, not eating for let’s say, a couple days, maybe even a week or so; where, you’re keeping your calories, let’s say, one to two hundred calories per day, and you’re getting more, just the minerals in there, maybe some broth and such. Uhm– to help with some of the benefits that may happen with fasting. My opinion – I’m not a huge fan of that kind of fasting. I know Jimmy Moore likes it. My opinion: it takes energy to run your systems, so I’m not a fan of shorting the amount of calories that your body needs per day. Your body, your Krebs cycle and your mitochondria need nutrients to run, and I want to make sure those nutrients are there. So, one of the key components for Intermittent Fasting successfully is, whether it’s a 16/8 or an 18/6, right, 16 or 18 being the time you’re fasting, the 6 or 8 being the time, the window, you are actually eating under– I’m a big fan of getting enough calories in that time frame that you’re actually eating to sustain your body. So if I need 2,500 calories per day, I want to make sure that I’m getting enough calories. That’s really important, because that’s the benefit that you get if you get that 16 to 18 hour window like this, where all the fasting happens, and that’s where you really get the Insulin-sensitivity up, which is great. And you also get the cellular autophagy happening, where you’re recycling a lot of proteins, which do have anti-aging effect on your telomeres– telomeres. And then you have that 68-hour window, whether it’s that 2 to 8 PM, or let’s say, 1 to 9, or 12 to 8, that’s where all your calories are consumed. So, when doing you’re a fast, let’s say, like uhm– the Master Cleanse kind of fast, where you’re maybe just getting a tiny bit of Maple syrup in there, maybe a little bit of minerals to prevent an electrolyte issues. That has some benefits for people that have severe gut issues that they just decrease a lot of their inflammation by not getting any exposure to food, but it’s not good long term, in my opinion uh – for your metabolism ‘cause you are decreasing nutrients. Maybe some benefits to people that are severely Insulin-resistant because they may just get no food, so that can help with Insulin-sensitivity. But then what are you gonna do afterwards after you break that fast. So, again, there’s fasting or there’s ultra-low calorie; not good in the long term, are some benefits though. And then we had Intermittent Fasting, which can play into people that are already relatively healthy. It can be a good modality to add in maybe once or twice a week, or every now and then. Once your hormones and your blood sugar are already in good shape.
Evan Brand: Let’s talk for a brief minute about Water Fasting, Juice Fasting. These are two other things that people do. I had a guy message me the other day. I think it was on Twitter. He said, “Hey. I’m about to break my 7-day Water Fast, any tips?” And I was like, “Whoah! First, I would never recommend a one-week Water Fast to start.” Most people are so nutritionally depleted. They’re so deficient in Vitamins and Minerals and Trace nutrients that a Water Fast is just too intense on the modern person especially due to all the stress we’ve got. Uhm– and then Juice Fasting, you’ve got people who are going to places. Even in Austin, I know that it’s super trendy there, where you’ve got people buying these Six or Seven-Day Juice Fast. However, a lot of the times, it’s not even organic, so you’re getting, probably, a nice…
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s nice.
Evan Brand: …nice dose of some glyphosate. Some companies are doing organic green juices…
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Evan Brand: But even them, you know, I remember working with people who would go from a conventional diet, eating fast food and then they would go on a Seven-Day Juice Fast or Juice Cleanse and they think that’s a good strategy. And I really don’t. What’s your take on water and/or juice?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Great question. So, the benefits that I see people that get from a water fast is number one: if your diet’s just total crap, if you’re just incredibly Insulin-resistant, diabetes, lots of issues, lots of gut issues, there may be some benefit there because you just give your digestive system a whole break, huge break, you’re just giving just enough water to stay hydrated. Ideally, you’re gonna make sure within the water there’s enough minerals so that you’re not getting uh– you know, any Hyponatremia. I mean, there’s no way you’re gonna be getting enough Potassium or minerals so you have to make sure there’s some kind of electrolyte solution that you’re drinking. Uhm – but the benefits are gonna be no stress on the gut. You may be sipping some bone broth if you’re doing something that’s modified. Or you may have an electrolyte-trace mineral solution that you’re drinking, but the benefit is if you’re severely Insulin-resistant, you can reverse that right away, which is nice. And then you give a massive break on the digestive tract so, if your digestion’s really terrible, it can really help give it a break. But, outside of that, those are the major benefits. I’ll let you kind of talk in them. We’ll hit them again.
Evan Brand: Well, so what about– what about the ration though, like if you were gonna promote that, what would be the duration? Surely, not a week.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I mean, a few days, a weekend, maybe a good start. People that are severely Insulin-resistant, like the Master Cleanse, where you’re maybe just adding a tiny bit of sugar in there so you’re preventing uh– a drop in, you know, severe drops in blood sugar, maybe beneficial. I’m not a big fan of those kinds of cleanse– cleanses. I’ve heard of doctors that have done it. They have good results, but the problem is, it’s unsustainable. So again, the goal would be to come back into kind of a Paleo template or really good Macronutrient template with actual real food. Now, you may break it. Sorry, I got some– some bubbles here from my Lecroy. I want to…
Evan Brand: [laughs]
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Alright. So, if you break that though, you want to start breaking it with some kind of uhm– liquid food. It could be a broth, or it could be a gentle soup, or it could be some kind of uh– smoothie, that’s just really easy to digest, so just you’re easing things back into the digestive system. That’s number one. The biggest issue, you have to ease back into food anyway. So, I’m a bigger fan of just making that change with food anyway. The only time I would say, “maybe we should do a modified type of uhm– diet, or moditied– modified type of solid food diet that people have severe digestive issues.” Then I would just work on doing uh– green juices, bone broth, maybe uh– amino– freeform amino acid. So, I kind of break everything into its individual constituents. Right? So, the fatty acids are– are easy to process as possible maybe from MCT Oil or– or Coconut Oil. The proteins are gonna be from freeform amino acid so there all easy to break down. Maybe we add in some extra minerals from a really good green juice that’s organic, of course without the fruit, and then we make sure, you know, enough electrolytes and minerals are in there. So, that’s how I would do it, in my perfect world if someone has severe gut issues, I would try to do it that way. And some people may want to move into a Water Fast to start with if they have severe issues where that’s not working. So, that may be a good first start moving into what I’m saying, but I predicted most people are gonna be able to do what I’m saying, and probably do better because they’re gonna get enough calories, because when you’re not getting enough calories, you’re sending stress signals to your body to turn down the thyroid hormone. So, you’re gonna have more reverse T3, and lower thyroid hormone when you start going lower calorie. So, that’s the reason why I don’t like that, because you’re actually creating a yo-yo diet effect. So then when you start adding food back in, your metabolism will be a little bit weaker. The goal– the reason why, or the goal behind doing that would be that the inflammation reduction on your gut and the improvement with Insulin-resistance outweighs the– the kind of yo-yo slowing out the metabolism effect. I think you can get both. I’m just kind of playing devil’s advocate, pros and cons for each. So, severe Insulin-resistance, severe gut issues, maybe a benefit for a few day to a week-long fast, under medical supervision with electrolytes and, maybe, some support there for blood sugar. Again, my version, if we’re gonna do some kind of modified fasting, is Intermittent Fasting, making sure, ideally, bone broth, minerals, cream juice, freeform amino acids, easy to digest fatty acids are in there. And that will be a really good way to do it. And then maybe have one solid meal at night. So, most of the day is liquid and easy to process; one solid meal at night, and that’s something that Ori Hofmekler, the author of The Warrior Diet talks about, too.
Evan Brand: Yep. Let’s break down the juice a little bit. That’s – that’s kind of a generic term now, like a juice fast, or like a green juice. I’m more than likely gonna promote more like a smoothie than a juice, ‘cause if we’re talking about juicers, typically, those are gonna be stripping away the fiber. What’s your take on that, where we’re pulling away fiber versus us blending something like a handful of veggies and maybe a little bit of look like scenic fruit with that?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. It totally depends on what’s the– what the patient– what the patient’s problem is, so if they’re having issues with digestion, that fiber may be an issue for them. So by stripping away that fiber, that may help with the bloating and just give them all those nutrients without any of the fiber, which may create a lots– a lot more improvement with some of those digestive symptoms. So, it just depends. I like the ‘stripping the fiber away’ for people that are really having a lot of digestive issues. And frankly, these are the people that you’re gonna be doing that with anyway. Yeah. That makes sense?
Evan Brand: Yep, for sure.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’ll be the major benefit. It’s just giving the digestive system more of a break.
Evan Brand: And you’d still be low sugar with that. You’re not talking about a green juice where it’s gonna be loaded with apple juice and all sorts of that where it’s [crosstalk] 30 grams of sugar per 8 ounces. There’s a lot of crazy, “green juices” out there, that are garbage. So, just to clarify, we’re talking mainly veggies here. Low, low, low sugar, in terms of our veggies.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: We’re not talking about your– your store-bought green juice.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. So, like some of the ones that I would do would be a kale, spinach, cucumber, celeries that you get a lot of minerals from the celery. You get some cucumber, some spinach, some kale, and then, if you want, you can add a little of beet in there, which has a lot of natural uh– Nitric oxide, NO2 , which is a good nasal dilator. And then, depending on how you’re doing metabolically, you may want to add in one carrot or one green apple to sweeten up.
Evan Brand: Yep, yep.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Again, if you’re Insulin-resistant, I would say, no fruit at all. But if you’re okay, one carrot and one green apple.
Evan Brand: Store-bought juices, there’s a couple good ones. I’ve seen Suja. They’ve got a couple of low sugar versions. They’ve also got insanely high sugar versions, 30 to 40 grams like per a 12-ounce, and I’ve also seen some Suja’s. They’re cold-pressed organic that you can get, I believe, like three, maybe four grams for an entire bottle of sugar so you really just got to take a closer look at the label. What about you? Do you know any other store-brought– uh– store-bought brands?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Just kind of look at Whole Foods, I bought a couple yesterday when I was there. Uhm– I just looked for organic. That’s really important because if you are doing juicing, you are gonna get a massive concentration of nutrients, which is great, but you also get a massive concentration of pesticides too.
Evan Brand: Oh, yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, that’s why you got to be very careful like you eluded to earlier. It’s got to be organic because of the pesticides. We can get a ton there. So, just look for the– the non-starchy kind of green ones. That’s gonna be the best. Kale, spinach, uh– broccoli…
Evan Brand: Carrots.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: …cucumber, celery, and then I like a little bit of beet. It makes it look kind of blood red, but it gives that extra bit of Nitric oxide, which is great. Pho. Vasodilation, too.
Evan Brand: Cool, yeah. I think there’s one that Starbucks carries. I believe it’s called Evolve, but for one, I think it’s high sugar, and I believe it’s not organic. So, definitely, uh– do– do your good research. Don’t just assume if it says cold-pressed juice, it’s healthy cause you can destroy– Even though we’re trying to reverse Insulin-resistance, you can destroy yourself even more if you go on a six-day uh – binge of 40 grams of sugar.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I mean, if you look at a couple carrot juice that has more sugar than a coke. Now, I’m not trying to say that– that the coke’s better, but either way, there’s a whole bunch of sugar there. A lot of nutrition but also a lot of sugar. I know the Gerson people like that but in my opinion, it’s a little bit too much sugar from most people, especially if they are exercising it much. So, I’d rather sweeten with one carrot, sweeten with the carrot, sweeten with a green apple, like a little bit of flavor, and then kind of do your staples regarding the greens. And then, if you want to add a little bit of flavor, you can juice a lime in there, or you can also add in a piece of ginger. Like can give it a little bit of spice.
Evan Brand: How about a little bit of apple cider vinegar?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Of course. That’s always great. Apple cider vinegar’s great because it’s got uhm – the Acetic acid so it lowers the pH a little bit, which is great. It’s got uhm– Acetic acid will help mobilize minerals better, and it will also flush out Guanidine, which is a by-product of protein metabolism.
Evan Brand: When I tried to with Mercola, he was talking about all the cool research on uh– apple cider vinegar supporting mitochondria, as well. And he didn’t know why he felt so good sipping on that, you know, during his uh– his fast or kind of his Ketotic states. He felt great with it. He’s like, “Wow. Figured out it supports mitochondria.” So that’s cool too when we’re working with…
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep.
Evan Brand: …people that, typically, they’re overweight, they’ve juicy issues with fatigue and likely mitochondria. So, kind of double– double bonus there.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, absolutely. That’s the really good benefit. So, looking at it was a couple modified ways we can do it. uhm – you can do the apple cider vinegar, you can do the green drink. You can do those healthy modalities; really get the nutrition in there. And then we’ll go in some of the fasting components, but there’s this compound known as mTOR, mammalian target of rapamycin. It’s cool though. Cool little name, little tongue twister there, but that has some effects on cellular growth. So, by doing Intermittent Fasting, we can decrease mTOR. And it’s like a slingshot, right. SO, if we decrease– So, if here’s mTOR at baseline, and if we decrease mTOR by doing some Intermittent Fasting, we decrease it, but then as soon as we break that fast, mTOR pops back up. So, part of the benefits of Intermittent Fasting is we decrease mTOR for a short period of time, creating a slingshot-like effect. Part of mTOR decreasing is not having the Methionine. Right? A Methionine’s an amino acid. It’s a good amino acid but it can be a little bit inflammatory for some people when done excessively and too much. M– Uh– Methionine’s really high in muscle meats so, by decreasing the muscle meats and doing some fasting for let’s say, that’s 16/8 or 18/6 timeframe, where you’re fasting for 16 to 18 hours, you’re decreasing the Methionine, ideally, and then you can utilize breaking that fast, let’s say, two o’clock that next day, you’re adding some of those healthy meats back in. But then, “Boom!” Then you increase mTOR, which can then help with protein synthesis and healing. So, that’s some of the benefits that you get. Coffee’s also helpful with that. Tea, or that Matcha tea that you’re consuming, has some effects on mTOR, some positive effects. And then, also, Cancer, of course. Insulin-resistance will drive mTOR too high because mTOR is good for cellular growth. Right? But not so good if you’re growing Cancer cells. Right? So, part of the benefits of going Ketogenic, and uhm – going low calorie have that effects on lowering mTOR, but while at the same time, maybe beneficial for Cancer too. Right? That’s why decreasing the Insulin-levels can have a beneficial effect for Cancer and such.
Evan Brand: Yeah. You and I were doing some research before this, and we came across uh – Howard Hughes Medical Institute. They’re designing drugs now that are blocking mTOR, and they define it as molecule that helps drive the growth of many tumors. So, when we’re talking about Intermittent fasting, Ketogenic diets, your kind of cycling your protein, you’re not just doing super, super high protein, which can be it. A problem, sometimes, in the Paleo space is people just overconsuming protein. They’re really cranking up their mTOR. Like you said, you’re– you’re enhancing the growth of cells, but if those are tumor or Cancer cells, that’s not good. So, uhm– once again, just ‘cause it’s fresh on my mind when I tried with Mercola, he said he’s only doing like two ounces of grass-fed beef. Like, that’s it. He’s not doing a full steak. He’s like babystepping. He’s also interested in longevity in the whole aspect, and he’s a little bit older than myself. And so, I still want to maintain and build more muscle, where now, he’s kind of transitioning. He wants to keep his muscle but he’ more interested in longevity as well. That’s what you can achieve by Intermittent Fasting, Ketosis. All of these things are tied in. We’re really talking about the same thing, just different pieces of this puzzle and how it’s all connected.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Is he doing a total of two ounces of protein a day, total for the whole day, every day?
Evan Brand: I’m pretty sure that was it. [inaudible]
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Honestly, I’m not a huge fan of that. I’m not a huge fan. There’s lots of studies looking at protein intake and lots of benefits on Insulin-resistance, uhm – lots of benefits on just your diet. Because protein is so satiating to the body that you get that uhm – better Leptin Signaling and Ghrelin Signaling, so your appetite’s more in check. You’re able to put on more muscle. Lots of studies in protein intake and longevity, again, typically, 1.2 grams per kilograms. So, what does that really mean? It’s about half a gram per pound of body weight. So, I weigh 210 pounds. [inaudible]
Evan Brand: I’m not– I’m a hundred percent sure I may have to go listen back and see what he said. I’m pretty sure that’s just for animal meats. Now, I know he’s doing a huge smoothie in the morning.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: He’s doing avocados. He’s doing cacao. He’s probably doing maybe some plant-based proteins. But in terms of animal protein, I believe yeah, it’s maybe like a two-ounce portion and less. I think that’s what he said when he’s cooking. So, maybe he’s getting meal delivery, or he’s got a chef cooking for him, I’m not quite sure…
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: …what happened, so don’t a hundred percent quote me.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I heard it man. They’ve asked if we’re talking about how he doesn’t really need dinner. Now, I think dinner’s good to eat. I think that’s really good to eat, especially if you’re Intermittent Fasting. It woulde be the breakfast and early lunchtime you’d wanna miss. And the reason why is because you’re sleeping, you know, from 10PM or 11PM to 6 or 7 or maybe 8AM. You’re already fasting, so it’s easier to do piggyback on top of a fasting window. So that’s why if you’re gonna do the fast, you much rather miss breakfast than early lunch, because then you’re piggybacking on that 10-hour of sleeping, and then you just add an extra six to eight hours on top of that. And then you have a sixteen to eighteen-hour fast window. So, I like hat aspect better, and then coming out of the fast around one or two o’clock, and making sure you’re consume enough calories than, typically, two meals, maybe three. And, what I do is, if I’m going out to like, you know, a nice steak restaurant, like Saturday or Sunday, I know, I, typically, like to go out to eat a little bit earlier, like around 4:00 or 5:00. That morning, I may have like uh– a butter coffee, and just sip on that all day, ‘cause the benefit is you’re having that modified protein fast. Right? Decreasing the Methionine, decreasing the muscle meat, is what allows that mTOR to go down more than it spring back. So, I’ll have that going out to dinner thing, Saturday to Sunday. And, I’ll kind of just sip on some fat, you know, low calorie though. You know, just a couple hundred calories during that day, and then, “Boom!” Then I’ll go have a really good refeed, right? People in the health– or Paleo communities, when they go to binge, right, we call it a refeed. It just sounds a little bit more scientific. So we do a little refeed, but keep the gluten then the refined crap out so just good healthy meats and good healthy vegetables, maybe some oysters, like a lot of that stuff, maybe one glass of a dry champagne. Something like that. That’s kind of like my refeed, so to speak.
Evan Brand: Yeah. I– I think you’re doing a good job of explaining. I just want to restate it back to you though, make sure we’re hearing it right. When you’re going Intermittent Fasting, you can still be doing plenty of fat. Your MCTs, your coconuts. You could still be doing your avocados, etc., not necessarily, not technically, breaking that fast, not causing any spike of Insulin that we’re trying to avoid. Soo even though it’s a– it’s a fast, you could still be consuming calories throughout this fasting period. Therefore, reducing the stress on the body. It’s not a hundred percent. You’re not touching anything food-wise or calorie-wise. Is that correct?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct. I mean, there’s a couple different ways to do it. You can do it that way, that I mentioned. You can upgrade it one level, and then you can add in one scoop of Collagen, right. Because Collagen’s primarily gonna be elevated in glycine hydroxyproline and proline. It’s very low in Methionine, relatively speaking. So, a lot of that benefit of mTOR, that decreasing of the mTOR, primarily happens by restricting Methionine, which is found in muscle meats. So, if you want, if my patients are like, “Oh, I’m on the fence. I want to try doing a little bit of Intermittent Fasting,” but let’s say, they have hormone and blood sugar issues. I want to get them more stable with that first. That’s number one. I want to make sure they don’t have any blood sugar issues, or adrenal or thyroid issues first, make sure those are stabilized. But then if they want, you know, butter coffee, uhm– Collagen peptides, uh– little bit of MCT Oil, and, you know, one scoop of Collagen peptides, and then do that in your coffee. That’s gonna really decrease mTOR and then cause it to absolutely spring back.
Evan Brand: Yep, well said. Uh– so let’s talk about who– who’s the good fit, who’s the good candidate for Intermittent Fasting. You hit on like the Insulin-resistance piece, they’ve got a lot of gut issues. Uhm– Athletes? Moms?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. So, anyone that’s– I would just say that is– has stable blood sugar. Their blood sugar’s stable, meaning these aren’t people that are just like if they skip a meal, they’re irritable, they’re moody, they’re just feeling really off. So, making sure that piece is dialed-in. And the reason why they feel off is primarily because they just don’t have their hormones dialed in. Their– whether it’s their adrenals, or their blood sugar, it is not quite dialed-in yet. So, making sure the blood sugar and the thyroid components are good. Uh – once that’s good, ‘then you can, you know– I like the 16/8. It’s pretty simple.
Evan Brand: Yep.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Go to bed, 10– 11 o’clock, maybe 12 o’clock, you’re up at 7:00 or 8:00. You don’t eat ‘til 1:00 or 2:00.
Evan Brand: So, you and I came across some a couple– a couple articles, pieces of literature talking about fertility and Intermittent Fasting. So for Moms, people trying to conceive, I mean, I think it’s still plausible that you could do it, but it is going to be stressful. I mean, if they’re getting enough calories, they’re getting enough fat, would you still recommend someone trying to conceive go for, or would you say, “Hey, don’t– don’t restrict protein. Let’s make sure you’re getting maybe a breakfast, lunch, dinner, more of like a two– three square meal a day?”
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I mean, you still shouldn’t be restricting anything, right. So, if I would look at your daily kind of meal plan, and we’re like go on chronometer and throw it in there…
Evan Brand: Yep.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: …and if you were to just see kind of where their nutrients are at at the end of the day, you should still look the same as someone eating three meals a day, right. That’s the– the key mistake most people make. It should still look the same. There should still be enough protein in there. There should still be enough fat in there. There should still be enough carbs. Then, in general, of course, the calorie should still be the same. That’s the key. The people make a mistake with, on the Intermittent Fasting, is the calorie still have to be adequate.
Evan Brand: So, it really just a timing thing.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes.
Evan Brand: So, may end up if you put two people side by side on their macros, the macros may end up the same. It’s just the timing that’s really changing.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep.
Evan Brand: But a lot of couple mess it up, you’re saying, and they’re actually accidentally cutting calories. They’re cutting protein. They’re cutting their macros, accidentally, by Intermittent Fasting just ‘cause that one meal or that– that– that compressed-eating window. They’re not actually getting everything back in that they should have, is that right?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, you have to make sure, in my opinion, you have, at least two times you eat, and that you get enough calories in there. Now, again, if you have digestive issues, right, and you need, let’s say, 2, 500 calories, and you’re cutting your feeding window from 2:00 to 8:00, that means you need two meals in there to get those calories. That means you need 1,250 calories per meal. That may be a little hard on someone’s digestive system if they are in good shape. So, I would also add the caveat, making sure your digestion is adequate. And then, in general, I would not recommend any Intermittent Fasting if you’re pregnant. It just doesn’t makes sense. I would uhm – I want to make sure there’s zero stress signal at all, and I would hope that all the Insulin-resistance stuff we’ve already addressed by just dialing-in the carbs and get in the diet right. Uhm– so when you’re pregnant, you’re actually something that sustainable. I don’t want to modulate anything. I want to make sure that food’s coming in at a predictable pace throughout the day for the mother and the baby.
Evan Brand: Yep. Love it. I think we hit everything. Are there any pieces that you wanted to hit that you didn’t?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. So let’s kind of summarize here. If we’re gonna use amino acids while we’re trying to Intermittent fast, we can do the butter coffee, we can do the MCT. MCT’s great because of its effect on increasing Ketosis, and increasing mitochondria functions, so, that’s great.
Evan Brand: Yep.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Collagen peptides are relatively low in Methionine, high in Glycine and Glutamine and Hydroxyproline and Proline, which is really, really good. And low in the Methionine which is great. It’s the muscle meats to have it at that negative effect on mTOR, making sure you get adequate calories in during that feeding window. And you can– number one, you can plan it, like I kind of have a Saturday or Sunday. Right now, I’m gonna go out to eat. I’m kind of have a really cool meal, nice meal; kind of celebrate for the end of the week. And then I’ll just kind of fast all day long. That’s a really good place to be. My wife, right now, being pregnant, she– she’s hungry every two to three hours, and she’s eating really good. So, for her, it’s gonna be a different ball game. That’s why if you’re pregnant, I think, you know, eating every three to four hours, just making sure you’re eating enough calories and protein. And she messes– measures her blood sugar, too. We do functional glucose-tolerance testing to avoid any gestational diabetes, and she’s on the sensitive side. If she does a little too much fruit, or a little too much starchy carbohydrate, her blood sugar will creep up and it won’t come back down as fast. So, making sure the blood sugar stuff’s dialed-in is very important, because if you’re pregnant, you may have that starch aspect maybe an issue. So, 16/– 16/8 or uh– 18/6 is a great window there. Making sure they’re adequate calories, making sure you’re not pregnant, making sure you don’t have any severe blood sugar thyroid or adrenal issues, number two. Number three, making sure your digestion’s good, because if you’re compacting the amount of calories for three meals into two, and you have weaker digestive system going on, that may make it harder to break down those foods. So, making sure the gut in the digestion’s good. And then we talked about the fasting versus the Intermittent Fasting pros and cons. My opinion: complete fast is more severe and is not something, in my opinion, that sustainable long term. It’s kind of uh– a specific short term kind of approach. Those have the yo-yo dieting effect where it does weaken the metabolism a bit, so, anything that lowers calories, right, you’re– gain weight back, when you have the food back. And that’s the yo-yo dieting effect. You weaken your metabolism, you add the calories back in, now, your body’s a little bit weaker, metabolically, so you put on a little more fat. So, that’s the big side effect with that.
Evan Brand: Let’s hit these questions. Are you ready for these?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Let’s do it.
Evan Brand: Alright. So, Samuel said, “If you’re drink bulletproof coffee in the morning, you don’t eat ‘til the afternoon. Is that considered in– is that still considered Intermittent Fasting?” We hit that. That will be a yes.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, that’s Intermittent Fasting, exactly.
Evan Brand: Okay. Ogie said, “Just started watching. People with adrenal issues, what’s your opinion on IF?” Uh – I’ll speak from firsthand experience. Justin, I’ve got clinical experience on this too, but my personal experience is, for me, Intermittent Fasting was actually destroying me. Maybe it’s because I’m younger, my metabolism is faster than someone who’s in their 50’s or 60’s with adrenal issues, and I’m commonly working with. But for me, I had to eat more. And for me, just trying to condense that into Intermittent Fasting, it didn’t work. So, I was doing breakfast, lunch, dinner and then I was able to recover, of course with additional support: healing my gut, adaptogens, etc. But, for me, the adrenal Intermittent fasting piece just didn’t go well together. Justin, what’s your take?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Same thing. Make sure the hormones are dialed-in first. Remember, from an evolutionary perspective, how did this all work? Well, we have food. We had food. We killed the buffalo. We ate it until it was gone. And then, there were periods without food. Right? That’s where we kind of where we were fasting, so it wasn’t like our ancestors were saying, “Okay. Like, we have all this food. Let’s just not eat it for a couple of days, or let’s just only eat it at the end of the day, right? That’s kind of not the thinking. The thinking is, food wasn’t available. We fasted for a short period of time. We got food and we feasted. Fasted. Feasted. So, I like to use that kind of sequencing in how we apply Intermittent Fasting. So, don’t do it every single day. I see a lot of people wear their daily routine is to fast every day.
Evan Brand: Yep.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And I just say, “No, use it punctu– you know, use it in a punctuated fashion. One or two times a week. And then starting out, do your Intermittent Fasting on days that are less stressful. Why? Well, because there’s gonna be less Cortisol in your system. That’s number one. Number two, the more stressed you are, the more you’re gonna need more nutrients to run the system. Dopamines, Serotonin, Precursors, B Vitamins, minerals to buffer the stress. Your Krebs cycle and your energy systems require nutrients, so, why would you want to fast and avoid putting nutrients into the system? So, do it on days that are less stressful to start with.
Evan Brand: That’s a pretty good starting point. I believe that’s the same thing we said about Ketosis, too, on previous podcasts. Might need more– more carbohydrates, a little bit more starch on a more stressful day.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s a really good place to start it. Again, I’m not black or white on these issues.
Evan Brand: Right.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I’m– these are the people that are gonna benefit. You’re relatively healthy, good blood sugar, right, you– already do okay if you skip a meal, you’re not gonna be in, you know, in dire straits. And then, these are the people that want to avoid it. Right? Pregnant women, the hormonal issues, the severe blood sugar issues. Here’s how we start inching our way into it. 16/8 will probably be a good starting place, then you can eat from, like, 12:00 to 8 o’clock. That’s a really good starting place, making sure there’s an adequate amount of calories in there as well. And also, making sure, like you know, minerals and bone broth, and you can also do the green juice, as well, uhm – to get enough nutrients in there. We need about 4,700 milligrams of Potassium a day, so, you need, like, two really big salads to get it all. So, maybe a green juice will be helpful to get all those nutrients there.
Evan Brand: Yep. Avocados, too, are good source.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: One gram of Potassium right there. One avocado. [crosstalk] people don’t know, avocado has twice the amount of Potassium than a banana does, but…
Evan Brand: I know.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I mean, people think, “What’s Potassium?” “Oh, banana!” Nope, avocado. Twice the amount.
Evan Brand: Yeah, and– and without the sugar.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: No, really. Any carb– maybe one or two grams of carbohydrate, very little.
Evan Brand: Yep, yep. You made me think of something. I lost my train of thought there. Oh, yeah! It’s that people want things in black and white. We’re just giving the generalities. There’s never gonna be in black and white. This is always case by case, so don’t take something in – in carved into a rose – Rosetta stone. Justin said this, or Evan said this, it will never exist that way.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s a spectrum.
Evan Brand: Yes.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s a spectrum. Figure out where you’re at on that spectrum and start there. Okay?
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Now, the person said he’s snacking between meal ‘s never good. In my opinion, snacking before meals or in-between meals is not good. Why? ’Cause every time you snack, food produces little drops of Insulin. The more Insulin surges you create– Insulin, when Insulin ‘s high, fat burning’s low. Insulin high; fat burning low. Just how it is. So, the more we can modify Insulin by keeping the carbohydrates dialed-in to what you’re needs are. Okay? If you’re lifting weights, and you’re already in good shape and you’re active, you may be able to do a hundred or 200 grams of carbohydrates a day without issue. If you’re sedentary or you’re Insulin-resistant, that may be 20 or 30 grams of carbs. So, you dialed in your carbs for what you need. You try to go at least four to five hours, so at hour two or three, you’re starting to kick in the fat burning, right? So, if you’re eating every two or three, then you’re never really getting in the fat burning. That’s not a good thing. And then I– the only time I allow snacks for patients is we called them “mini-meals.” So, they should be appropriate amounts of protein fat and carbs. Just you know, ratio, just a smaller amount.
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, some people let’s say, they eat lunch around 12:00 or 1:00, and then the time, their family kind of gets together and has dinner, it’s like, maybe, seven o’clock. That’s seven hours. So, maybe for them, they have like a nice little shake, or a nice little epic bar or something around three or four, maybe around four o’clock, just to get them to that seven o’clock time. So they eat at 12:00, mini-meal at 4:00, and then they’d eat a real meal at seven o’clock. So, a nice meal that kind of tied due over in between to get to the real meal.
Evan Brand: Yeah, well said. The second part of the question was uh– “Better to eat fruits with meals instead.” Typically, I mean, the ideology, we would say, “Yeah,” if you’re doing some fat. Typically, that would act as kind of a slow digest for the– for the fruit, where the fruit’s by itself may spike your blood sugar a bit more. I’ve not personally tested it. I don’t eat too much fruit beyond berries, anyway. Some, not really concerned about whether I’m eating a handful by themselves or with meals. What’s your take though?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I mean, this person’s probably coming from the context of meal-combining, where they say, fruits should be consumed by itself, because of the enzymes needed for it, and how fast he digestion process is. So that if you’re eating with fats and proteins, that’s gonna hold up the digestion, and leave it in the stomach longer and maybe create more gas or bloating issues. So, I always tell patients if you can handle fruit together, take– take it together. That tends to be the best way to do it. Take it with the food. If not, you can kind of eat your food, take enough enzymes and acids, and maybe do it like, uh – 20 or 30 minutes after your food. It’s kind of like a dessert kind of thing. But I would really make sure enough enzymes or acids are there. And if you really notice that you get bloated or gassy with fruit, while you’re eating it with food, but by itself you’d do better, then there’s probably some Fructose Malabsorption happening, and we got to work on the gut.
Evan Brand: Yep, yep. Well said. Also, thought about bacterial overgrowth when you were saying that, where that may present problems too if you’re doing fruit. Uhm – last question and I say, we wrap it up.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: Could a long term Water Fast [34.50] weeks, cut down on your stomach’s ability to produce sufficient acid for digestion. What do you think? I’ve got– I’ve got no additions on this.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I mean, wate– yeah, you would definitely decrease your stomach acid, for sure. I mean, you need Zinc. You need Potassium. Uh – You need a lot of those nutrients to actually make stomach acids. So, yeah. It’s very possible. It could decrease your ability – your body’s ability to make it. That’s why, when you’d add it back in, you’d want to keep it as– as liquid and easy to process ,as you add it back in and gradually rationing back up to solid food. I know Dr.– I think it’s True North, up in Northern California, Dr. Goldhamer’s Clinic. They do a lot with Water Fasting, so people are looking to get more info in that. They do it in In-patient. Clinic would actually monitor people and they put them on IV’s and watch them, and make sure they’re on the right tract doing it. So, if you’re gonna do a Water Fast though, like a long-term, more than just two days, and you have issues. You’d want to do it under medical supervision.
Evan Brand: Cool. Well said.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Not a huge fan, but I’ve kind of gone over the reasons why it may be beneficial and helpful.
Evan Brand: Right. Good job.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, anything else you want to touch upon, Evan? What do you think?
Evan Brand: I don’t think so. I think we did great. I mean, the starting point with people, the 16/8 is gonna be the easiest. You can just uh – look up your uh – your YouTube channel. There’s more videos you’ve done on Intermittent Fasting. I think I may have done one, but you’ve inspired me. So, I’m gonna have to do more Intermittent Fasting videos. Maybe even just share my day, what does it even look like…
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: …how do you structure a day. Because while listening to it, I think, sometimes, people fall asleep halfway while they’re listening to us ‘cause they just like the sound of our voices. And so…
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: [laughs]
Evan Brand: …maybe we’ll show a video, like, “what does this actually look like”, “how do you break your day down to do this”. It’s actually quite simple. It allows you and I to have our brains functioning while we’re working with our clients, to keep our brains elevated. I mean, I feel so much better, you know, when I am in a fasted state, so kind of pushing that lunch back a bit more. I really get a lot of good productive work done in those first few hours of the day. Compared to if I do a real heavy big, big breakfast and break it. Uhm– my brain, it does slow down a bit for digestion, which is normal. You– your body’s gonna send the blood to the tummy.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: That makes sense if you’ve got a real uhm– a job that requires a lot of– a lot of brain power that you may want to just– you may want to visit this. If you’re a coder, computer programmer, you know, people that really got to have your brain a hundred percent dialed-in, you’re gonna be in a much better place, if you do this.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I noticed the headaches, too, if I go too long if I skipped lunch. Hadn’t eaten ‘til, like, six o’clock and was, like, probably 24-hour fast but, I got really bad headaches…
Evan Brand: Ooh.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: …and I find that sometimes that can just happen from the minerals. So that’s where uhm– really getting a good electrolyte support in your water so you get the extra minerals that way, or you sip on a little bit of green juice, with the caveat of the ones that we mentioned of. The surely laid ones with the fruit. That can at least give you a little bit extra Potassium and minerals and Sodium and Chloride – all those extra minerals you need. So, that could be a side effect, and that’s part of the reason why people on Ketogenic diets get a lot of headaches is they just don’t get enough Potassium. So, making sure the minerals are there, and that’s a kind of a little tip of how you could do it.
Evan Brand: Yeah. I was gonna ask you what– what would you’ve done differently– to prevent the headache if you just got so busy again, you have to skip lunch. You deprived us half some electrolytes on board. Do you think you can avoid that?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I would just probably add some more electrolytes on board, and uhm– maybe add a couple sips of some green juice in there. Probably would have fixed it. Uh– and then also just add– making sure my fasting is on days that are less stressful. That tends to help too.
Evan Brand: Yep. Well, and maybe adaptogens too. You could always have a– maybe have some extra Ashwagandha in the tank or something like that may have helped you.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, absolutely, and someone asks about a green juice recipe. I’m honestly nothing specific. I throw a cucumber too in there. I threw kind of a bunch of Kale– kind of a half bunch of Kale in there. Uh – couple things, a celery in there. I just kind of like take, you know, an even amount, and I kind of just like create like a little lineup, and I just throw it in. Next, throw it in. Next throw it in. Make sure I get a cup worth. And then at the very end, I’ll sweeten it with uh – you know, one carrot or half to uh – half to one green apple, and then maybe a little bit of lime, or a little bit of ginger for a little bit of flavor. That’s it.
Evan Brand: Yep. Cool.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Now, I got a video coming up here on I was looking at my board. Think it’s all up right now. Yeah. [inaudible]
Evan Brand: What’s on that board?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: …fasting and hypothyroid. That’s gonna be done. I’m gonna record this later on today. So, I’m excited to put that video out. And I kind of talked about some of those gems that are in there in today’s podcast, but I’ll condense it down and fill up my little dry erase board behind me where we can really emphasize some points.
Evan Brand: What did– what’s the title? Hypothyroidism and Intermittent Fasting?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Intermittent Fasting and Hypothyroidism.
Evan Brand: I’ll– I’ll be kind [crosstalk]…
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s kind of big [pauses] to a YouTube near you.
Evan Brand: Cool.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Alright, my man. Hey, happy 4th of July. You enjoy it, and we’ll talk real soon.
Evan Brand: You, too. Take care.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You too.
REFERENCE/S:
“The Warrior Diet” by Ori Hofmekler
Apple Cider Vinegar, Dr. Mercola