Keto Tips and Common Misconceptions
By Dr. Justin Marchegiani
What if I told you that eating bacon, avocados, and butter could not only improve your health–it could also help you lose weight? By now you have probably heard of the keto diet, but what exactly is the keto diet and how does it improve your health? Let’s dive in!
What’s the Keto Diet?
The Keto Diet is a high fat and low carb way of eating which prompts your body to enter a state called ketosis. Ketosis is when your body burns primarily fat, rather than glucose, for energy.
The standard American diet is very heavy in carbohydrate-heavy foods. When you’re eating a high-carb diet your body mainly runs off of glucose (sugar) as fuel. However, if you cut the carbs and start eating more saturated fat, there’s no more glucose so your body starts burning fat (including stored body fat) for fuel instead! The weight loss effects of entering the metabolic state of ketosis is a huge reason why the keto diet is so popular for weight loss, but it also a great way of eating to lower inflammation, improve your insulin response and prevent/heal diabetes, and is protective against cancer, Alzheimers and other neurodegenerative diseases.
Glucose actually burns dirty, like a diesel fuel. It’s stinky. But ketones burn really clean–you don’t get a lot of reactive oxygen species or free radicals afterwards. Imagine fat is like a big branch and that you throw into the wood chipper, and then out of that wood chipper comes these things called ketones. These ketones can be used by different tissue in the body. In addition, burning ketones avoids the effects of glycation, which is basically all the proteins or tissue in your body gets sugar-coated and that creates basically a magnet for free radicals. Ketones are stable, whereas burning glucose is a constant up and down reaction.
How to Lose Weight on The Keto Diet
One of the biggest ways we can induce ketosis and burn body fat for fuel is by cutting carbs. Typically 20-30 grams per day is a great starting point for most people.
I recommend following a Paleo template for your keto diet, utilizing non-strachy vegetables for the bulk of your carbs. Around 20-30g per day is the sweet spot for most people. This is attainable if you keep your carbs to your paleo veggies: a cup of broccoli, a cup of spinach, a cup of kale, some asparagus, a salad… Once you factor out the fiber, you’ll probably be around 20-30 net carbs. As you continue with the keto diet you can play around with your carb range, some people feel better on 10-20 grams, others do well hitting around 40-50 grams of carbs per day.
How Do I Know if I’m In Ketosis?
Some people like to measure their ketones, either measuring their breath, urine, or blood. Not all of these methods are always effective–for example, if you’re burning ketones, they may not end up in the urine, giving you a false negative.
I use a ketone meter, either the Abbott Precision Xtra or Precision Xtra, to measure blood sugar in addition to ketones. The Ketonix breath meter is another good way to measure.
A Common Keto Mistake
One of the biggest keto mistakes is eating too much protein, as high as 30-40% protein. It’s hard to eat that much protein unless you do two things wrong. Number one, you eat lots of lean meat, and number two, you use excessive protein powders.
However, you can get away with going higher on protein if you’re doing a lot of resistance training. However, most of us are not elite athletes, so ideally your macros will be about 60-70% fat as a pretty good starting point.
Keto Misconceptions
Let’s clear something up. When people hear about ketones, they’ve likely been in the grocery store and they’ve seen the “raspberry ketones” as a weight loss supplement. This became very popular over the last few years. First off, raspberry ketones aren’t even derived from raspberries. Most of the time these products are filled with synthetic chemicals, artificial colors and artificial sweeteners. I do not recommend them, the ingredients will most likely do more harm than good.
For a good ketone product, try Keto OS or Keto Sport which use beta-hydroxybutyrate salts, which are the gold standard in keto products.
You can use ketone precursors like medium chain triglycerides C8 and C10. These MCT oils provide both the brain effects and metabolic effects of ketones. In the morning I do butter coffee with a high quality MCT oil. I’ll get my ketones up within an hour or 2 to—to .5, .6 mmol and I feel great.
Some people think the keto diet may be dangerous and destroy muscle. Sure, you can be in ketosis when you’re starving yourself. This doesn’t happen on the keto diet because we’re doing it nutritionally, meaning we’re actually eating foods. They’re real whole foods and we’re getting enough calories so you’re body’s not going to be eating away lean tissue.
Can I Cheat on the Keto Diet?
Cheating on the keto diet implies you’re eating enough carbs to bring you out of ketosis. Some people like to cycle in an out of ketosis in daily or weekly cycles. If you save all of your carbs for the evening and have some sweet potato or dark chocolate, the carbs can actually help you sleep! Some people can develop hypothyroid symptoms if they stay in ketosis long term. These people, primarily women, may benefit from cyclical ketosis like 5 days on, 3 days off.
Exogenous ketones can be great from a performance and neurological standpoint. They can be phenomenal if you are on the ketogenic diet–we call it therapeutic ketone therapy. However, if you’re still eating high carb and high sugar, don’t waste your time and money on expensive ketone supplements.
Who Should Try the Ketogenic Diet?
I recommend the keto diet for most people, especially those dealing with metabolic syndrome, which is when there’s a level of insulin resistance and you’re body is having a difficult time tapping into fat for fuel.
The Keto Diet is also great for cancer patients, Alzheimer’s patients, anyone with metabolic syndrome, women with a waist size 35 or larger, men with a waist size 40 or larger, blood pressure over 140, and anyone with inflammation or chronic pain.
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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Ketosis and Safe Natural Sweeteners | Podcast #210
If you’ve exceeded the pleasure that you’re getting out of pizza, cake, wine and everything else, diets may not just be suitable, as they are temporary. In order to get that lasting change, you really need to engage in a lifestyle shift.
In today’s podcast, Dr. J. invites Thom King to share his experience and insights that led to his writing of the book “Guy Gone Keto”. Watch as they tackle about the effects of sugar to our body, safe and natural sweeteners, how meat have more nutrition than vegetables and all other good things. Sharing is caring!
In this episode, we cover:
00:41 The Springboard of Discipline: Engaging in a Lifestyle Shift
08:23 Healthy Sweeteners
10:56 Effects of Sugar Intake Frequency to Insulin or Blood Sugar
16:57 Allulose, Stevia and Monk Fruit
21:17 Sugar Alcohols
23:04 Benefits of Ketogenic Diet on Thyroid
48:15 Metformin
33:46 Importance of Journaling
Thom King: Dr. J., such pleasure being on here. Thank you for having me and uh– this is truly an honor.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well thank you so much. So, let’s just dive in a little bit and just talk about your book. What inspired you to write this book, “Guy Gone Keto” and– and what are the top 2 or 3 things that you’re hoping for the readers to– to pull out of it?
Thom King: Uhm– well the book was a– the book kind of draw organically so, I had, you know, I– I own a– a food manufacturing business and a– ingredients supply company. And we supply sweeteners to sports nutrition companies, I love those companies, uhm– actually supply and manufacture ketogenic-friendly foods. So, I was in Vegas for trade show and went out with uh– with a customer. And they bought dinner and I way overdid it as usual. Uhm– went back to my room with a– beautiful luxer, and– could not stand to look at myself in the mirror. I was 35 lbs. overweight, I– my blood pressure was like 190/99 and I– I felt like a tremendously huge fraud because I’m catering to the– to that particular industry and not following at all so, at that point, sort of the pai– the pain of my, I guess dishonesty, the pain of my, you know carrying extra weight and being sluggish, and not following any type of discipline, I’ve exceeded the pleasure that I was getting out eating the pizzas and the cake and the wine and everything else, so at that point, I’m like, “Look, I need to make a lifestyle change”, so I really started doing a lot of journaling. And I was doing data collection on my weight, my blood pressure, temperature, I mean, all of the data points that I could find. And– err– and also like, use it as a springboard for discipline, so after about a 6 to 8 months period, I basically had a book on my hand. So, I just took it to it to an editor and, we added a day and it’s really– it’s more about my journey–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Mm-hmm.
Thom King: –on making a lifestyle change than it is keto. And, so the take home, I would say for your listeners on this, uhm– the points that I wanted to– I– I guess bring up in the book are– it– you can’t actually have a diet like, diets are really temporary–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Mm-hmm.
Thom King: –solutions.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Mm-hmm.
Thom King: In order to get lasting change, you really need to engage in a– in a lifestyle shift.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Thom King: Uhm that’s one thing, and then the second thing is, why does it take to– to make a lifestyle shift and what are those– what are the components of the discipline uhm, you know, that’s required.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very good points. Yeah, I mean, when I work with patients personally, we’re always talking about what’s the template, right? The template kind of gives us the flex– flexibility with our macronutrients, uh– some people may not need a– a keto template. I think most, tend to go better with a– you know a lower carb kind of paleo template so to speak. And typically, when your carbs get low enough your start spitting ketone as an alternative fuel source. And then, there you go, you have the keto diet is kind of off of that so we can adjust macronutrients in– in a bunch of different ways. But I think the commonality that needs to be present in all diet or lifestyle shift is where you need high amount of nu– nutritional density. Lot of nutrients per bite, we need an anti-inflammatory diet, right? Not with the junky omega-6 uhm– fats and the trans fats, and a high sugar stuff, and then we also need low-toxicity organic, you know, low hormones, all those good things. Any thoughts in that?
Thom King: Yeah, a lot– a lot is the definitely coming up for me. Uhm– and so, when you know, when you’re working with your patients, and– you know, you’re [clears throat]– when you say dense micronutrients, I mean, are you referring to– like more– like I would say, uh– like carbohydrates or vegetables, leafy greens, preciferous vegetables, you know, that– you know that have like those micronutrients, and then also you know, the– the fiber. Is that the– is that what you’re talking about in–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Thom King: –this nutrition?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely, so, of course like, uhm– vegetables, bone broth, uh– organ meats are incredibly nutrient-dense. If we really look at a lot of the nutrient-density– you know scales that are– that are more out there today, they kind of favor a lot more of the vegetables. But when you’re really lo– and– and they also hinder. They have a negative impact for salts and saturated fat which isn’t really fair because that kind of negates the nutrients that are actually found in an animal products. But once you kind of control for the sodium and for the saturated fat, and you just look at the nutrient, you’d be surprised at how much nutrition’s in like, bacon, or high quality uhm– meat, especially organ meats. It’s pretty insane. Uhm– if you look at the amount of– let’s just say, uhm– nutrition that’s in like, 8 ounces of grass fed meat, you’d had to have 15 cups of kale to equal it. So yeah. So–
Thom King: Wow.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: –we’re looking at the vegetables, we’re looking at the high quality uh– meats, and even organ meats to a possible, ’cause those are super nutrient-dense.
Thom King: Right. And so, you also mentioned like, anti-inflammatory, like properties of particular food? And, so, I found in uh– you know, in– in a ketogenic lifestyle, particularly uhm– you know, with me, it’s that I’ve been giving a lot of my– I guess fats– some of my fats, put a lot of my proteins from dairy. [Clears throat] you know, whey protein, KCN, and– and stuff like that. What– what are your thoughts on– on dairy and inflammation?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well I think, whey proteins are one of these proteins that tends to be– it’s lowering KC in about 99% KC free and also 99% lactose-free. So most of the negative effects that you’re gonna see in dairy are gonna be in KC and they’re gonna be in lactose, right? You hear lactose intolerance, people can’t break it down. They get bloaty or gassy.
Thom King: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And then KC tends to be the more inflammatory component. So, when you do whey protein, you don’t like get that. Whey proteins are great– are great precursor to glutathione which is just like awesome master antioxidant because the amino acids are so– uhm sulfur-rich. And uhm– you know, I think there’s a lot of like, what’s tonight price talked about, you know, activator X, which is just Vitamin-K2, it’s commonly found in ghee or grass fed butter. So, I think if you’re doing like, those good he– healthy, higher quality dairy thing is better. I think some people tolerate, you know, the milk and the cheese, better is well, especially if it’s raw, unpasteurized, those kind of things. I don’t even do well with that, I get bloaty and gassy. So, I think it’s really individual but if you’re gonna do the dairy, it– you know, you wanna make sure it’s raw, unpasteurized. But I think the– the butter and the ghee tend to be awesome, really good.
Thom King: Interesting. And do you find– do you find that fermented dairy is easier to tolerate?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well I think fermented dairy is gonna be better. But just because you want, you’re gonna have more B-Vitamins and– and more vitamin-K2 and such. I– it just tends to be have more enzymes. Those enzymes are gonna help with the processing of lactose, processing of the KCN. So just kinda like, predigest it a lot for you. So, they– and that’s kind of a benefit, but when I’m dealing with patients like, I’m cutting dairy out initially, but then that’s one of the first things we’ll have back in are gonna be like ghee and then butter. And ghee is just like a more clarified, filtered-out butter. It’s just les K– less KCN, less lactose.
Thom King: Interesting. And then so, don’t you need– you need Vitamin-K2 in order to– to be able to absorb Vitamin– uh– Vitamin-D3, right? Is that right?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah but, connect the D3 and then A and then– uhm– Vitamin-K2 is really important. It kind of help escort the calcium into the bone. So, we wanna have healthy, strong bones as well. And then on that note I wanted to highlight uhm– ’cause you’re in– in the– in the sweetener industry, and I know that, you’re kind of like, you’re looking at things like stevia–
Thom King: Right.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And you– yeah monk fruit which are really interesting, and I’ve seen a lot of uhm– different videos where people are testing their blood sugar and I’ve seen it not actually go up, I’ve seen it actually drop a bit. What’s been your experience with kind of a healthier sweeteners that are out there?
Thom King: Well, so, I’m like huge on that a collection. And so, part of that data collection is I pull blood continually so–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Mm-hmm.
Thom King: I’m trying to see where my blood sugar levels are, I’m trying to see where my ketone levels are. So, and– and plus, since I provide ingredients, you know, to food manufacturers, I always make sure that I’m testing you know some of our sweetening systems and even the compounds we carry on myself. So, like I feel confident when I go in the lab but, you know, that what I’m– what’s going out to the consumer is, you know, is– uh– you know, is healthy or at least they’ve he– healthier options. So–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Thom King: –I’ve– what I’ve done is I’ve– I’ve pull blood sugar, you know, after consuming Aspartame and–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Mm-hmm.
Thom King: –I’ve pull blood sugar after consuming uh– Sucralose. Uhm– I blood– pull blood sugar levels with stevia and monk fruit. And I’ve found that stevia and monk fruit don’t affect my blood sugar levels whatsoever–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Thom King: However, like Aspartame and Sucralose does. And I’m not sure if it’s because of the uh– like dextrose or maltodextrin that they use to, you know–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes.
Thom King: –to– you know to– to cut it. Or uhm– another theory that I had and I think that this might not be too far off is that, your body– you know, your body recognizes things that are– exist in nature. And you have the ability to metabolize those particular things are recognizes it. And I think when you put something that’s been chemically manufactured like sucralose which is a– chlorinated sugar molecule, uhm– you know, or– or Aspartame which is a modified phenylalanine. You know–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes.
Thom King: –your body doesn’t recognize those. You know, it’s like, “Hey, this is super sweet, why do I do with this? I don’t know what it is”. So, you do get the– you do get the benefit of calorie abatement. Uhm– but the downside is that your body doesn’t really recognize it and you– it– what’s it say– uh– insulin response. Uh– what the– what are your thoughts on that?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, I think I’ve seen some of the same date. I’ve known some of the functional medicine docs that have done like, you know, they– on their YouTube page. They said, “Hey, you know, let’s– everyone, let’s a study and let’s test your blood sugar, you know, fasting 1 hour, 2 hours, 3 hours. Let’s compare regular meal then let’s add a little bit of stevia to your coffee or to whatever that drink is, mo– and then monk fruit”. And I’ve seen, you know, it’s not a scientific study, but you know, these studies cost millions of dollar to do–
Thom King: Right.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: –in a formal setting, so I think this is– this is even better because it is instantaneous.
Thom King: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And I’ve seen people test their blood sugar and then they post their data really showing it didn’t go up, if not, dropped.
Thom King: Hmm…
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And my– my big concern is I think it’s– I think it’s a viable alternative, and it’s something that I use sparingly.
Thom King: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: The question is, is there like a dose-dependency where you frequently added so much, or maybe there starts to becoming a problem because you are telling your brain sweet. Now in punctuated periods, you know, 20% of the time, 10% of the time, it’s probably okay– do you find if it’s– if it’s frequent all the time that you’re starting to increase insulin or your blood sugar may go up over a longer period of time?
Thom King: Uhm I have not found that to be the case with myself. So–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay.
Thom King: I actually use bo– uh– we have a proprietary sweetener called KetoseSweet– uh KetoseSweet+. And it’s actually a blend of allulose, uhm– stevia and monk fruit.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Allulose is that new sugar alcohol I’m seeing? Couple places do. I wanna hear on that later on. I’ll– I’ll plant the seed now, we’ll– we’ll come back to that. That’s great.
Thom King: Perfect. That’s– that’s ___[12:00] sweeteners, so, you know, and I– wha– I’d noticed this over the past few years, you know when I really, you know, became a– committed to leading a ketogenic lifestyle, that my– uhm– my desire for sweets actually went down quite a bit, and foods that I would normally have eaten before, uh– you know, before I– I started keto, uhm– just don’t– they taste way too sweet to me. Like some of the bars that I used to eat, super sweet. So, I think that your palette shifts uhm– you know when you engage a– uh– a keto diet and you don’t–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Mm-hmm.
Thom King: –have the desire to– to have the– you know–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Mm-hmm.
Thom King: –have stevia or monk fruit. As far as like dosage levels go, uhm– I mean, we’ve got scientific papers that we use in conjunction with you know, with a formulation, and we– err– generally suggest that people stay under 5 to 10 grams of– of stevia or monk fruit, uhm on a daily basis. Uhm– and that is a lot– that’s a lot of stevia and a lot of monk fruit. But–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally.
Thom King: But– you know, at that point ’cause I’ve dosed myself to that level and I’ve dosed myself to a hundred grams of erythritol, I’ve dosed myself to a hundred grams of uh– uh– allulose and so, I mean, I’ve tested blood sugar levels and– you know, also, you know jotted down notes on– uh– you know, like GI effect, because if you have too many like alcohol sugars, it can definitely cause bloating cramping, diarrhea, uhm– which you know, nobody wants.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: No, that totally make sense. And I’m just curious, so, I like to also see– I’ve seen that as wll with the blood sugars not going up. I really like to see what fasting insulin’s doing. Is insulin for– potentially compensating at any level at all? Is insulin rising even though blood sugar’s dropping? Maybe insulin’s rising to compensate for that? I just precarious, you have any data on that?
Thom King: I don’t have any data on that. I mean, I would certainly collect data on that. Is there– is there a way to test for– for T4 and T3 uhm– like a home kit or something like that without having to go in and pull blood?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: With T4 and T3, yeah there’s a couple of lab CRT and already in Valley lab’s definitely have them. And insulin I think you— I think you probably just have to just get like a– a ___[14:21] to have that done.
Thom King: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Go everything in there with– I be curious, but I– I do know that those are gonna be things that typically don’t increase the blood sugar as much. Now one thing I– I do notice though is that some people that may have a negative experience, and I’m seeing just a lot of maltodextrin and corn sugar–
Thom King: Hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And some of these sweeteners. What’s the deal with that?
Thom King: Uhm it’s cheap. [Laughs] So, any time you–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Does that defeat the purpose though? I mean, people are– are consuming these products to avoid sugar and then you have sugar in it. Which is like, “What?”.
Thom King: Well, I mean, it– it’s that– I think that that’s typical and, you know, in food manufacturing.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Thom King: That– you know, [clears throat] there’s– it– it’s tough ’cause it’s the– you know, people are trying to keep an eye on their cost of good sold, right? They’re trying keep high margins and– and the food that they’re selling. And– and maltodextrin and dextrose are so cheap that it’s easy, you know, it’s easy to use that as a– as a uh– as a filler or a bulking agent. So, uhm– you know, when you– when you look at typically like a high-grade sucralose, it’s gonna be 700 times sweeter than sugar. So you can’t really put something 700 times sweeter than sugar into little pocket, uhm– because– it there be a minute such a small amount you wouldn’t be able to actually detect it. So, you do have to use in those particular situations bulking agents. And so for larger, you know– uh manufacturers that don’t have, you know a contingency of consumers, uhm– you know that lean into natural uhm– they’re not even gonna question, you know, maltodextrin. But–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Thom King: ___[16:02] getting to your– to the point of– yeah, it’s completely counter– counter productive and counterintuitive to add back sugar into something [laughs] you’re trying to cut the sugar out. Well, so, yeah, it’s ab– absolutely 100%.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It seems like on a liquid, you’re probably have more ability to– to manipulate that because it’s a liquid, right? You can use a glycerin or some kind of liquid carrier that– you know, you don’t need a certain– a– a bulking if you’re using liquid drops. So, I’m just curious, uhm– what’s the alternative if you are trying to– to get it in a powder. Which are company using what have they found to be better.
Thom King: Uhm– we use lots of different, you know, uh– uh different sweeteners and different sweetening systems depending on what uh– you know, depending on the– the functionality in the outcome that the customers looking for like–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Can’t we rate down the ingredients in your keto-sweet product?
Thom King: Sure. So, uh– we have a product called a KetoSweet+ and it is– it’s allulose, stevia and monk fruit. And we have it both in a powder form, and we have it also in a liquid.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Is there a bulking agent with though with that at all?
Thom King: That’s the allulose. So, we usually–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh.
Thom King: The allulose is the bulking agent ’cause allulose is only about 70% of sweetened sugar. So–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I see.
Thom King: — in order to get to parity with sugar, we add stevia and then we add monk fruit as well. And so what we found is that, the combination of stevia and monk fruit actually mask each other’s off notes. Uhm– which is–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Aaahh.
Thom King: –super interesting. And then, you know, adding those two high intensity sweeteners to allulose which is 70% is sweetened sugar brings it to parity. So, our liquid– our liquid– KetoSweet+, I’d say you can compare it to like DE-42 high fructose corn syrup, or like–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Thom King: –any of like kerol or syrup that you would like, you know at the store. Uhm– and then, the– the powders just– very-very similar to sugar. Uhm– it’s not a sugar alcohol, it’s actually considered– still considered a saccharide, uhm–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay.
Thom King: So, think fermentation. So basically–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes.
Thom King: Uh– allulose exist in nature in small amounts.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes.
Thom King: It’s been considered a rare sugar.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Mm-hmm.
Thom King: And so, basically, take a– uh– fructose molecule and you treat it with an enzyme. So think fermentation.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Thom King: And then, metabolite after that is a rare sugar called allulose. So– in allulose, your– you know, your– your body recognize it, recognizes it because it exist in nature. But your– because it’s been– you know, because it’s been enzymatically treated, your body is unable to metabolize it. So, it just basically goes through urine and feces and doesn’t affect blood sugar levels or uh– ketones. And what I have found is it actually drops your blood sugar levels slightly. Uhm– and I think it’s because of the enzymes that are used to– to manufacture that. Uhm– the beauty of the allulose, is its functionality. So, it participates in mallard which is the interaction of proteins and sugar that causes uhm– or creates a ___[19:13]–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Mm-hmm.
Thom King: So you’re using it in the baking process when you are making cookies or a cake, you’re not gonna get something that’s like brick, you are actually gonna get something–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Thom King: –that’s you know, crispy on the outside, fluffy and moist, you know, in the middle. So, it has that functionality and, I mean, to me, this is gonna be most definitely a– a game changer.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, this– this allulose– and I have a couple of dark chocolates too that I– I do consume that are very low sugar that have allulose as this kind of sugar substitute. So I am seeing that catch on. And allulose is not in the same family, it’s like a paleo like– like xylitol or erythritol–
Thom King: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: –this is a– a polysaccharide you’re saying?
Thom King: It is. So, it’s actually a– [crosstalk]
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah?
Thom King: It– well, it’s actually a monosaccharide.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Monosaccharide is in the sugar?
Thom King: Yeah, but it’s not– but it– yeah, it’s definitely not at all like– like an alcohol sugar like xylitol, or maltitol or any of those–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And you don’t get any bloating if you consume too much?
Thom King: Uhm– I’ve dosed myself to a hundred grams, which is like err– like, 4 times which you, you know, you should be taking in, probably even more than that. And what I noticed is that, I had– it created some gas but it didn’t create like cramping or laxation. Uhm, I think that whether was happening is a level of fermentation. So, there’s probably some, you know, some bacteria in my gut that’s metabolizing it and–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Thom King: –off-gassing, but it wasn’t anything serious. And a hundred grams of that is a lot, like you have to force yourself to get it at your body.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, that’s like 3 and a half ounces, that’s– that’s a decent depth for sure.
Thom King: It is. And so, at that point, I would say don’t exceed that. I would say if you’re going to use allulose or something like that, uhm– you know, not to exceed maybe 15 or 20 grams.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay. Let– it makes a lot of sense. Uhm– anything else you wanted to highlight regarding other sweeteners? Is this the only major sweetener you have, or do you have any others like, what’s your opinion on like the birch bark xylitol? Any other opinions on the sugar alcohols, anything else you carry similar to that?
Thom King: Yeah, we carry all of the sugar alcohols, we carry xylitol, we carry–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Mm-hmm.
Thom King: –uh erythritol, and I mean, right now, erythritol is probably our biggest seller like we have an erythritol stevia blend, and we are able to process it in a natural powder so it dissolves into solution better, uhm– you know, companies that manufacture bars that are sort of extruded process, are able to use that sweetener, you know, ’cause it– it does dissolve uh– easier, so, in my opinion, like– so I have worked quite a bit with paleo’s, uhm– paleo’s have a tendency to increase water activity in the lower intestine.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Thom King: Uhm– which is– which can lead to bloating, cramping, diarrhea, uhm– xylitol I find, I mean, when you start talking about the m– maltitols of the world.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes.
Thom King: Maltitols of the world, the laxation effect that those had is pretty extreme.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Thom King: And I would say away from those unless you have really doped up the tolerance to sugar alcohols. Uhm– xylitol is a little less, but still pretty intense. If you over consume xylitol, you’ll definitely get a laxation effect. And I would say that the least, the– the sugar alcohol that has the least amount of– of uhm– of GI impact is gonna be erythritol.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay.
Thom King: And I think I would still recommend that people stay under 15 grams of erythritol per day.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think the big issue with a lot of these a m– m– mo– most are gonna come from uh– GMO corn. So, you could potentially get that round up– or that– that– that glyphosate pesticide uhm– potential trace in there as well which is common with a lot of the corn processing.
Thom King: Right.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Like the birch park, tends to be a little bit more of uhm– let’s just say the unadulterated form.
Thom King: Right, yeah. And we– you know, we– we have very– every one of our raw ingredients that comes in, uh– third party tested. So, and I mean, if you guys are– like any of your audience are gonna do business with, you know, with a ingredient company, you should actually 100% demand third party testing and see evidence of a thrid party testing. And part of our third-party testing is to test for like a GMO protein indicator. So, we’re always looking at, you know, we don’t anything in-house that’s GMO at all.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Interesting. I’m just curious, what are you finding in the– I mean, I’m not saying you guys did this but what have you found in the past when you started testing these things, did you find any of the round-up residue, did you find any lead or metals or mycotoxins that kinda– can you give us some of the bad stuff you found, in the past?
Thom King: [Laughs] Those are awesome questions. Uhm– and that is why we started doing third party testing. So, uhm– you know, I would say 10 years ago, when we just started getting into third party testing, we would find crazy, like shovel handle, uh– glove, like all sorts of adulteration in the products that we are getting.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hold on, I wanna make sure I heard that. So, like, meaning like, particulate of a shovel handle? Particulate?
Thom King: No, I mean a shovel handle.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Like an actual piece of it in there?
Thom King: Yeah. And–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, okay– I think the whole handle, you mean?
Thom King: No, probably 68 inches of the shovel handle.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, my gosh! How does that happen? Like it’s crazy.
Thom King: I have no idea, or in the glove, like we found the glove, and–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay, got it.
Thom King: –so, I mean, a lot of these things– you– I mean– we– we do visual testing, so every– you know, all the raw– and this is back in the day. And we– we you know, we would– obviously not use those particular ___[24:51] after that, but anything that we bring in now goes into QC’s cluster. And we– you know, and we send it out for third party testing which test for heavy metals. Uh– test for Coliform, you know, various like yeast–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, bacteria.
Thom King: Or– uh– pe– uh– petrochemicals, uh– GMO protein indicators. So– we– we tested all that way, and I would say that our current blenders that we have in place, we don’t generally run into issues with them, uhm– I like to also add that everything that comes in and goes out of here runs through a metal detector. Uhm– you know, so, we– you know, we’re able to– to pull anything out that maybe the smallest piece of uh– of metal that, you know, got into it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Thom King: But, uhm– when we– so when we start vetting new ingredient suppliers, I mean it’s a pretty– it’s a pretty rigorous uh– uh– task for them, you know, they have to give us all of their documents, their organic search, we send it off for third party testing, uhm– we will bring in, you know we could just bring a load from them, and then all of that gets tested. So, uhm– I wish more companies did that, because we’ve had products coming through our warehouse once we send ’em to third party, boom, they’re out of our warehouse and it’s like, no, this isn’t what we ordered. So, everything has to fall within a spec. And I would– it was really highly encourage, your– your listeners, to– I mean, and I know that they’re probably are getting a lot of their supplements through you and you’ve already vetted those companies, well I would say, oh, my God, like, I would say that, we’re just sweeteners. So, this is like, not a big deal but when you start looking at companies that are selling supplements and they’ve got a lot of compounds going in there, it– absolutely everything should be third party tested because I know in the supplement industry, 75% of the supplements out there don’t even contain any active compounds.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I agree. And this is a problem and that we test all of our– raw ingredients independently and I found increases in lead and some of these–
Thom King: Oh yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: –raw material back, and that can happen, of course, you know, you just over time find out who the best ones are–
Thom King: Right.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: –where the qualities at. And then so you are also testing for like, round-up and or GMO type of contamination as well?
Thom King: Yeah, and I mean, in petrochemicals and heavy metals. So we test–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh.
Thom King: –for cadmium and lead, and, I mean, we’ve had products come in specifically from China which is kind of interesting, uhm– you know, that are showing up super high in cadmium and lead.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Mm-hmm.
Thom King: So, we do– I do a ton of formulation for companies. So companies will send us their product then in order for us to push it through our queue– our-our RND, uhm– we’ve gotta have ___[27:35] and then we also get that third party tested. And I found that, there’s a lot of P-Protein, uhm that is out of China that is super high in lead. And–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh.
Thom King: –I think it’s just because of the amount of the petrochemicals that get better in the air and then settle out into the soils. So, uhm–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes.
Thom King: Yeah, so we test– we test for– yeah, we test for all of those things–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally
Thom King: Uhm– you know, and– occasionally we find something but– at the more rigorous our– our testing has become, the more we are able to weed up the suppliers that are unscrupulous.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, very good. Now we talked a little bit earlier about in some of the benefits of being ketogenic earlier on the thyroid. I wanna just kinda peg you back to that because you are asking me some questions in the pre-interview like, you know, who’s gonna benefit from the ketogenic diet on– on the thyroid side? And this is a question I get a lot because you have some data– uhm, people saying, “Well, I– my thyroid gets worse or weaker on a ketogenic template and some gets better”, and I think a lot of it has to do with how insulin-resistant, how numb someone’s cells are to insulin. So the more numb you are to insulin, your body has to compensate by making more insulin to overcome that numbness. And I think that’s the big issue and kind of the physiological imbalance that’s driving a lot of issues with people’s heath and thyroid, and finding healthier sweeteners like you mentioned, getting the carbs down can really dese– uh– really increase the sensitivity, meaning it lowers the insulin–
Thom King: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: –and that allows thyroid conversion to happen better because insulin’s a big blocker of thyroid conversion if it’s too– too high. Just answer that question.
Thom King: Right, yeah. And I mean, I found that with my– with myself. So, I was carrying about 35 lbs of extra– uh– of extra weight. And I mean I was definitely insulin– uh– resistant. And so, I did show a depleted T4, uhm– you know, when I started, and then that T4 leveled out. Uhm– but I’m not sure like on a– real long-term basis, uhm– how the thyroid will be affected, I mean, I test– like I do a batch test and–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Thom King: –and like I do full blood panel batch test and then I also uhm– do stool sample once a month–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Thom King: –to track my microbiome.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay.
Thom King: So, yeah, I’m like, really– so I’ve really found some interesting stuff in this data collection that I’ve– have done. But I found that the ketogenic diet really did help my insulin resistance so I became more– more sensitive but you know, another– I– I would have like a question I guess, have– have you do you have any experience with uh– berberine with your patients?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I mean, I use berberine a couple different ways. Uhm– with some patients it’s typically used in my SIBO-clearing programs where we’ll try to knock down SIBO or bacterial overgrowth.
Thom King: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And this– a bunch of different berberines, Goldenseal, ___[30:29], Barberry, you know, those kind of things. Obviously, yeah, berberine HCL. Uhm– but berberine’s also a really good insulin-sensitizing compound. It can really help lower your blood sugar, and– and lower your insulin levels. So there’s some really good benefits there as well.
Thom King: Right, ’cause I added that as a supplement and I almost wonder if that was, you know, if that really helped me become more uh– you know, more sensili– sensitive to uh– to insulin. And another thing too, is I’d like to hear your thoughts on– on Metformin.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I think uhm– berberine kind of works similar, in a similar way it helps us uh– on the insulin sensitizing side. Metformin ‘s gonna work more by decreasing like the glucose absorption in the gut, and then it also kind of shuts down gluconeogenesis in the liver. Uhm– part of that decrease in the glucose absorption though, it can also decrease the absorption of B-12. So, if you’re on Metformin or Glucophage, you really wanna be on some supplemental B-12 on top of it. Uhm– and then, you know Metaformin’s relatively natural like the extract from Metaformin comes from the French Lilac flower, so it’s–
Thom King: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: –it’s kind of on the natural side, uhm– but I tend to like be more impartial for like the Berberines and the other more nutrient-based insulin-sensitizing compounds. But if people are on it, you know, you just gotta make sure the B-12’s dialed in there too.
Thom King: Interesting. And do you feel like getting a B– uh– B-12 supplement with it or just increasing the amount of like– of– of uh– like organ meat would– would suffice?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I would just be a– I just make sure you’re on at least a good Malt tea with some extra B-12 on top of a really good diet.
Thom King: Interesting.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: A– a– and again you can monitor that with you functional medicine doc like, you know, I like methylmalonic acids are really good tests to look at to assess your B-12 levels. Whien methylmalonic acid goes high, that actually means lower B-12, right? Methylmalonic acid gets metabolized to succinic acid. And so you need B-12 to make this conversion happen. So if there’s not enough B-12, methylmalonic go– acid goes up, if you don’t have that B-12 that convert it. So, let’s ___[32:31] if people are gonna be on it, you wanna be careful because, you know, lo– low B-12 can cause, you know, alzheimer’s dementia-like symptoms.
Thom King: Interesting. And then so, do you find like with your patients, that– that taking– taking these vitamins and supplements orally and/or do you feel like there’s greater efficacy in IV’s?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well the– I mean, I think IV’s are good, the problem is they’re impractical for people to do daily, that’s the only issue.
Thom King: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Just because uhm– you know, people got a work, they don’t have, you know, 30 or 40 minutes to get drip in there, and that can be more expensive but–
Thom King: Right.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: –uh– Iv’s here, they I think can be really good but, ideally you want good food and supplements are those easier take–
Thom King: Defenitely.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And that’s the big benefit. If I see patients that do a lot of gut issues then we will go on the– s– the sublingual B-12 side, and that can really help too because it can kind of get more of the absorption via the oral mucosal kind of buccal tissue versus the gut, and that can help too.
Thom King: Wow, awesome. [Laughs]
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And then I’m just curious–
Thom King: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: What other– like what other key things, you know, you wrote the book, Gu– uh– uh– “Guy Gone Keto”, and you also–
Thom King: Great.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: –come up some of these great sweeteners. What other cool tools are out there that you found kinda as– in your transition to a healthier diet, and making a lot of these health thing you think really impacted you?
Thom King: I would have to save the th– the thing or modality that had the greatest impact or what I found was the– the– the– lent itself to the success that I had was probably journaling. So, you know, that is– w– you know– and being mindful. So, when– when I get up in the morning, one of the first things I do, grab a cup of coffee, sit down and I start to journal, and you know, I journal with real intentions of things I wanna manifest. Uhm– you know, I do some data collection like my weight and blood pressure. Uhm– so, I think journaling was really-really-really huge. And really taking time to do that first thing in the morning sets the– sets the stage for your day. And then within that, I incorporated what I called “My Arrow of Power”.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Thom King: Uhm– journaling, run, cycling, you know, I do try, and then you know, every other day, I do yoga and then I finish out my workout with a meditation. Uhm– and I think that those real things can actually helped me the most.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s really good to hear, that’s excellent. That sounds like something like a little Tony Robins kind of morning progress. That’s what it sound like.
Thom King: [Laughs] I’m totally influenced by Tony Robins.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s cool. And then I’m just curious too, just kind of piggyback on a couple things, where do you guys source your Allitol from the mean like– not like what company but like, wh– what’s the raw ingredient it comes from?
Thom King: You mean the allulose?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I’m sorry, Allulose. I said Allitol– Allulose. Great.
Thom King: I don’t know but that’s a weird interesting compound. That’s not like the– the mix of– [laughs] of– erythritol and allulose.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly, exactly, totally.
Thom King: Uhm– so, we– so I’ve been working woth allulose for the past five years and part of it was so new, uhm that the supply chain really wasn’t there.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Thom King: And we weren’t really able to verify stuff, so we won’t add– we won’t add something as an ingredient unless we’re– unless we’re 100% confident that the supply chain is solid, and also reliable like everything is– that arrives is within spec. So, the– the allulose, you know, we’ve got 3 different suppliers, and all three of those suppliers uhm– are using non-GMO uhm– corn fructose uh– substrate to– to enzymatically create the allulose.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Got it. So it’s corn fructose but it’s GMO-free and– and ___[36:11].
Thom King: Great.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Are they able to separate the– the sugar from the protein component pretty well?
Thom King: I think so, I mean– ’cause when we third party test, we’re not showing any proteins. Uhm–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh good.
Thom King: So, I mean I– I– I don’t have any reason to believe that there’s any problems with the– the– with them separating it. I know that they use like what’s called resin– resin column uh- filtration. So it pulls out like any of the pure– the– the impurities of– so– yeah, I mean we’ve been working with it for a while, and we third party test it and we haven’t found any– you know, any proteins in it to indicate that there’s, the– you know, the genetically modified uh– corn was used in that process.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So someone was gluten-sensitive and one of the ___[36:55] out, you’d feel like it would be filtered enough, it wouldn’t be a problem for them?
Thom King: Uhm- well, we’re also uh– allergen free– uh– facility, so we always test for– we test for gu– uh– you know, gluten? Uhm– and absolutely the allulose is gluten-free.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Good. And if they were sensitive to corn, like the corn protein like the zein protein, you feel like it’d be– it’d be filtered enough for there wouldn’t be an allerenic reaction to it?
Thom King: Yeah, I do, well, ’cause we test for proteins and there’s no proteins– there’s no proteins left in there, so I would– I would feel confident thst, uhm– yeah, that, that people, they are sensitive to that but not, you know, be affected by it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very cool. Well, we’re gonna have to put some links down below where people can find the KetoSweet+ formula–
Thom King: Oh.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Anything else Thom you wanted to highlight for the listeners here?
Thom King: Uhm– no, not really. You– we were the– the questions you asked worked totally through, and I appreciate that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I appreciate you comin’s on. Anything else you wanna leave to listeners with for just– how– how they can find more about you and more about your products too?
Thom King: Uhm– well if you want to get a copy of the book, and we also have uh– we released a line of ketogenic uh– condiments like ketchup, barbecue, sauce–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, cool.
Thom King: And– teriyaki sauce. And so, if you just go to guygoneketo, you can find all of that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Thom King: Uhm– you can reach me through that too. Uhmm– all of the social medias under this Thom King, T-H-O-M, K-I-N-G. Uhm– reach out to me if you ever got– if you ever have questions. If they want to buy the KetoSweet+, I think kwe– the KetosSweet+ is available on the guygoneketo site. It’s also available on steviva.com, that’s S-T-E-V-I-A “dot com” that’s we have all of our compounds on there available for retail. And if they wanna see what kind of madness we’re up to in the– in our lab, they can go to iconfoods.com and follow us on linkedIn and you can see some of the craziness that goes on in our lab, things we’re inventing.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very cool. And is it possible the coke with the KetosSweet+?
Thom King: Oh, absolutely, yeah. So, it does– it does actually participate in maillard at lower temperature, meaning that uhm– like with sucrose or table sugar, you– you’d probably about a hundred and forty-five–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Mm-hmm.
Thom King: –to a hundred and fifty-five as when it starts to caramelized, and you’re gonna noticed that you’re gonna get that a little sooner with the uh–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Mm-hmm.
Thom King: –with allulose, probably in the 130 to 135 range.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Thom King: So, probably wanna bake it and cook at little lower temperature for a little– e– extended period of time.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Mm-hmm.
Thom King: But then, you know, other than that, yeah, you can– cook and bake just like you would for a sugar.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Awesome Thom, well, thanks for all the great information here today, appreciate it. And you have a phenomenal day.
Thom King: Thanks, you too Dr. J., thanks for having me on.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Thank you. Bye now.
Thom King: You’re welcome.
References:
Dr. David Jockers – Ketosis and Cancer Prevention – Podcast #139
Dr. Justin Marchegiani and Dr. David Jockers engage in a very informative discussion about cancer prevention and ketogenic diet. Explore how a ketogenic diet helps in optimizing the mitochondria, reducing inflammation and supporting metabolism. Discover how it can be combined with periods of intermittent fasting and learn about its benefits on cancer patients.
Gain information on how to go on a ketogenic diet. Be aware of the high-quality, nutrient dense foods and supplements to take and understand the possible mistakes to avoid while on this diet.
In this episode, we will cover:
01:53 How Ketogenic Is Integrated With Cancer Patients
12:05 Internal Glycation
18:13 Cyclical Ketosis for Insulin Sensitive People
22:44 Blood Ketones Measurement
25:21 3 Ketone Mistakes
27:35 Collagenic Diet
28:01 Gluconeogenic Proteins
32:14 Ketogenic Diet and Cholesterol levels
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hey there it’s Dr. Justin Marchegiani welcome back to Beyond Wellness Radio. We have Dr. David Jockers on the show. David, it’s great for you to be here. How are you doing today?
Dr. David Jockers: Justin, so awesome to be on with you. I’m so in a form of a fan at your show so uhh- so great to be on with you and actually make it to you know- your show! And then uhh- be on a chat with you.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, I appreciate that. I’ve been following your blog posts for years. I saw you on a treat about cancer with uhh- the thigh bones your series. I appreciate that, lots of good knowledge bombs there. Really excited to bring a lot more info to the listeners today.
Dr. David Jockers: Yeah. Absolutely! You know that was uhh- quite a privilege to be on that. And, what a movement! The truth about cancer to just getting that message out. Uhh- I mean people are starting to really realize wake up to the fact that, there are natural strategies for you to intake in order have you not cancer to obviously get well. Whether they’re going to take a conventional route right in alternative rather in a sense, combination which is more of like help a lot of people is in this combination of conventional as well as using natural strategies. So uhh- so it’s been huge.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love it! And the great thing is you are also a clinician. So you’re working with patients as well. The nice thing is, it’s not just theoretical jargons so to speak. You’re actually applying these to the patients that you’re seeing in your clinic in Georgia which is great. And, one of the things that you’ve been doing and applying is Ketosis. So I’m just curious, how are you integrating that in with your clinic? As well as, how are you integrating that in with the cancer patients too?
Dr. David Jockers: Yeah, absolutely! So, I mean, Ketogenic Diet is so powerful for its facts on the mitochondria, reducing inflammation, and supporting in a sensuous help in about person have better metabolic flexibility. So it’s always a goal that I have. But, as you know, you know the different cases? You know, some people are going to struggle to try to apply Ketogenic Diet in their really phases. So, typically with auto-immune patients, I focus more on- in elimination diet still including yeah- a little bit more carbohydrates you saying things like carrots, you know, nutrient-dense sources varies seems like that. And I’ll get a lot of people that with auto-immunodeficiency and leaky gut that will say, “Okay, how am I going to get in the Ketosis by applying this and I was- so, I mean, that’s truly not our goal right now. In general, it’s you know, just like you talked about; Hey! It’s a Paleo template so it’s gonna be a lower carbohydrate go in hands and the anti-inflammatory nutrition plan. But the goal is in as early Ketosis whereas, when I’ve got somebody that has cancer. You know, early on I mean “Hey , I want them producing ketones and utilizing ketones because of the incredible therapeutic facts it has on reducing cancer cell division right. So basically, it’s something that goes down. It’s gonna lower cell division and that’s just so important. So basically, we’ll start implementing that. Now I like to do it in a nutrient-dense fashion. So, a lot of people would go out and you know, get and find information in Ketogenic Diet and it’s more like what’s being taught of in times of more like an Atkins Diet? And, I really try to focus on getting a ton of micronutrients in and you definitely can do it on a low-carb diet if you use herbs, if you use non-starchy vegetables; you can juice. You can apply a lot of your different techniques. Certain things from the Garcin therapy right which has tremendous results using things like coffee and a moss, and juicing and a nut. You can take elements of that, you can take elements of Budwig and kind of put them all together in a very low carb, high good fat template uhmm- to get a desired result.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah people don’t understand right? They think like, “Oh a Paleo Template” or like hear Ketogenic, they just think a whole bunch of meat. People forget you know a lot of times on a Paleo Template or Lower Carb Paleo Template. How you keep it a lower carb is you would really exchange it in a lot of the greens and a lot of the starch for vegetables, non-starchy vegetables which are nutrient-dense, low in toxins uhmm- they’re going to have lots of phytonutrients which are lot of these compounds that you’ve talked about or anti-cancer, right? The Diiodomethane, the Indole-3-Carbinole. Really good nutrients to help metabolize estrogen and again not just an all-meat diet but then again, meat is going to be very nutrient-dense as well that’s going to have a lot of good Amino Acids in there. A lot of good fatty acids especially were coming from the assumption that this is grasped organic high quality antibiotic-free. So you’re going to get a lot of nutrient-densely from that as well. So, I like the fact that you’re really focusing on the nutrient-dense. Yeah I think Atkins kind of missed that because well, you know- soil proteins are also lower carbs too, right? That may not be the best food, so I like how you kind of differentiate that.
Dr. David Jockers: Yeah absolutely! Like for example, I mean it in the Paleo Movement, the Atkins Movement, you know- we talk a lot about- a lot of people who use things like bacon. Whereas, the problem there is, bacon really has very little micronutrients in it. It may have a lot of good fats , right? And so- it coud be Ketogenic but it does have now the micronutrients in it and when we have highlight process meat; we’re gonna have a higher amount of Heterocyclic Amines and Acrylamide and different things like that. So, you know- we apply it. You know I’m a real big stickler on how the person prepares their meat so, you know- one reason why a vegetarian or vegan diet maybe beneficial for a period of time for somebody with uh- cancer would be because; we are taking out some of these environmental toxins like heterocyclic amines that are produced with a high heat cooking. (Which is healthier between grass-fed beef and frying meat) A lot of times we tell somebody, you know- eat grass-fed beef were not necessarily differentiating on how they prepare that so they may be barbecuing it and producing a lot of these compounds. So, I am a big on making sure they put it on the pan, put a whole bunch of coconut oil or MCT Oil down. I would tell them, put it- put down the oil to where- you know be so generous with it to whether it’s like a quarter inch of oil on your pan. Okay? So, that way, in a sense- Oil is going to protect against the really high heat, breaking down the proteins and creating things like acrylamide and heterocyclic amines and then cooking it low and slow right? So, cooking it in a more a lower temperature for a longer period of time is gonna be a lot better.
So, yeah I will do more of a moderate protein diet not high protein. Okay, moderate protein. That’s critical! We need the amino acids for the immune system but at the same time we don’t want to overstimulated M2O or we also don’t want that gluconeogenesis process or the protein; amino- protein is broken down into glucose and elevate blood sugar. So, moderate protein, lots of micronutrients right? So, Lots of cross super fetch vegetables. I’m a huge fan of sprouts. So, you know- a cancer diet we want to be consus sprouts. So I tell people to go and get, go to their whole foods or heath foods store. You know if they can’t grow it in their own? Right I may be a big step for people at first. So, yeah obviously can create their herb garden and regrow sprouts but you know what? You can just go to your health food store and I’ll tell them they should be going through you know, small little container sprouts every single day. So mong bean sprouts, broccoli sprouts, kale sprouts, be putting those sprouts into your diet using a lot of herbs so they should be able to smell the meal from the next room. Right? So much oregano, basil, thyme and the things like that. You know those flavanol, antioxidants, that are indoles some polyphenols? So powerful for improving cell communication and you know- Cell communication. The breakdown on cell communication- one of the biggest factors that initiates cancer growth and polyphenols are one of the best things for improving that cell communications- lots of those things in our diet.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love it! Totally make sense coz- you talk about the polyaromatic hydrocarbon, the heterocyclic amines and the things that happened in our cooking. Now kind of my approach is- I try to high temperature? I sear in a minute or two, sear in a minute or two and then pull it off and then bake it on a lower temperature their form not charring coz- It’s the aspect of you wanna seal the flavor in the high heat but then you don’t want to keep it on there and let it char and develop those cancer causing things. So, for me it’s like I get half my grill not you know-there’s no flame? The other half there’s a flame. Let that heat up for like 5 or 10 minutes. I get that to about 500 degrees. Sear, sear then pull it off, then raise it above and put it over the flame where there’s no- put it over the part where there is no flame. That way, it cooks the middle part. So, i appreciate that and that’s a really good point. Also, adding in those vital nutrients. I think that was Dr. McCauley said, any of the advanced glycation end-products that you get from the charring aspect that you just eat a whole bunch of vegetables and ad some of those herbs on there like you mentioned. That can easily just negate those too. So when you combine things up, you can negate some of that too, right?
Dr. David Jockers: Oh yeah! Totally! And, I’m a huge fan also of so you prepare your meat and then you squeeze lemons on there or lime or you can do lemon juice, lime juice. You get a mutual benefit. You get a really combination of benefits there. Not only do you get the antioxidants especially, when it’s fresh squeeze- which we best get the vitamins you get the vital flavanoids right on there. Then you put herbs on top as well. But also the lemons got citric acid or if you use an apple cider vinegar that acidic acids can start the digestive process before even get into your body. And you know Justin, may I hey. The more we can take stress off the digestive system the better we’re gonna stimulate nutrients, less-inflammation, were gonna curr less energy we got to put in to digestive track. Therefore, the more energy we are going to have left over for immune benefit right? To help regulate and run our immune system. So, I love lemon pepper chicken. I mean using lemon, lime, apple cider vinegar, on meat anyways it tastes better right. And uhmm- and you get those benefits
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah I was watching some of your wife Angel with doing a lot of recipes on YouTube – really, really good stuff too. I was checking out the recipe on homemade breast milk or homemade milk for the child if you can’t have enough uh- And I know you guys had twins like a year to go so I know that’s gonna be hard right? That’s gonna be a supply issue there with just so many kiddos.
Dr. David Jockers: Yeah absolutely! Having twins.. That was uh- our initiation into parenthood. So, it was like all of a sudden. And you know crazy thing is, we were only met- we were married for 6 weeks from we conceived. And she had that been diagnosed with Endometriosis whom us told we would have a lot of struggles having a baby. I’ve been working with her, helping her balance out her hormones. Okay, but we just didn’t even expect that it would happen that quickly. We got married and had our twins within the same year and so, it just kind of this initiation at parenthood and uhm- basically she had trouble producing enough milk for both. So, we need to create a formula and there’s not a lot of good ones out there. And so, you know- as quickly as possible I’m jumping onto a westonaprice. Looking at their recipe, learning on how to do it. Fortunately, we’ve got a great grass fed milk formula out here. So whenever we get our milk our boys tolerated it so well, and of course we had our probiotics in there. And uhm- just a whole bunch of different things cod liver oil, all kinds of good stuff there. And our boys are so well-developed. And, you know- then there are stapled food. I mean they were getting- up until an she’s stopped being able to lactate at about 6months and even up until then they were getting like 25% breast milk, 75% formula. So..
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Damn. That’s great and I’m an empathetic uhh- my younger brothers are twins. My mom had myself, and then my younger brother Matt, and then she wanted a girl and she got twin boys. So, it’s just- I lived through that, I saw her right. So- I know it man you are uhh- you are going through a lot. I get it you know. I’m not worthy doing so good man. That’s good. Good for you.
So I appreciate the recipe your wife’s doing. I saw it somewhere, and were really, really excellent. Very good stuff. And the couple of thing he talked about the Advanced glycation end-products. Which you kind of refer to it as like the polyaromatic hydrocarbons, the heterocyclic amines but also, we get that same type of reaction that glycation that’s happening internally with excess sugars. So that’s- We have one aspect where we can create it in our food right? Which is like the glycation’s like. If you pull out the blow torch in the rest on and they do the crumbule in front of you. That browning blasted glycation that happens in your food but also in yourselves. The best thing about kind of your approach; what you’re talking about, is you avoid the internal glycation . Can you talk more about that?
Dr. David Jockers: Yeah absolutely! So basically, we know that sugar is something we absolutely need. All of ourselves in the sense we need some level of blood sugar. If your blood sugar drops to zero, you’re not gonna live. So, we have blood sugar body has certain regulatory mechanisms to keep your sugar elevated to a certain degree. Well at the same time, the more that we are running off a glucose metabolism or glycation. The more anti- you know it’s really an anti-nutrient, the more damage is actually causing the body. So, we want minimal reliance on glucose when we are at rest. You know obviously if were working out exercising at a high intensive, were gonna need more of it- were gonna need that. We’re gonna need that. Our body will adapt to actually create more stronger antioxidant defense system when we do that . Thats one of the reasons why high intensity exercise can be really beneficial. However when were at rest like you and I here we are, we’re just having a conversation. We should be burning 99% fat and ketones. That’ gonna keep really that glycation impact low. And we know that sugar in general- I c-I call it basically it’s dirty fuel. Right? So we produce. It’s a very very low gas mileage in a sense. We produce 2 ATP from Anarobic Metabolism. So ATP, I then and see try a fast fit so our major molecule event energy. We produce an amount of metabolic waste. And o it’s just powdering out smoke right that you know- tons and tons of smoke out of the exhaust. That’s basically what it’s like. Whereas when were burning ketones which basically our liver converts fatty acids in te ketones and the ketones are what we use for energy. And so when our body is using these ketones, we produce a rampant amount of energy in very little metabollic waste. So we get a lot of better mileage overall. So basicall, we want our bodies to be very good at burning both. When it’s very good at burning ketones for energy and glucose, it will preferentially use ketones as long as we create an environment where glucose in general stays at a moderate level. As long as were not spiking it with high carbohydrate meals. Okay, then were gonna have that metabolic flexibility to our bodysays, “you know what, at rest, while I’m having this conversation with Justin here? I’m gonna burn these ketones up because they’re just better for my body theyre uhh- again, they’re cleaner fuel I might need a lot of more and I’m gonna produce a lot less toxic waste as oppose to when I go. Because after this interview, I actually- I’m off for my workout so I’m gonna go do some heel sprints and uhh- and squat jumps. And so, good high quality you know- really good high intensity workout? So while I’m doing that- I’m huffing and puffing my body’s gonna switch over and start burning up that sugar, right? during that period of time and as soon as I’m done with that exercise and I caught my breath?- back in the burning ketones.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes 100%! It’s the seen versus the unseen. Because if the ketones are there, if we are doing it dieterally, we get these awesome fuel source that’s really clean, right? so, if we got sugars like diesel fuel, right? You drive behind a diesel truck and we got high octane race fuel from the ketones. We get the ketones tht are high but when the ketones are high we have to have the insulin low for the ketones to be high. And when the insulin’s low, that’s a strong promoting growth factor for cells. And cancer basically is cell growth kind of unchecked, right? Where you can go in the pub med and just type in hyperinsulinism or insulin and cancer. And you can do it for any cancer. There’s almost a correlation.
Dr. David Jockers: Yeah! So, I mean Insulin really is a lifesaving hormonic get to butter up. But ultimately, it helps prevent against AGE development that advanced glycolitic enzyme development. Coz if blood sugar is really high in our bloodstream and it’s not controlled? then we end up basically just destroying nerve endings. This is why people with diabetes end up with optic neuritis, peripheral neuropathy coz the sugar, the advanced gycolitic enzymes- those sticky proteins were sugar grabs onto Protein molecules creates this uhh- highly reactive molecule that damages nerves. So insulin comes out, it’s job is to lower blood sugar so it takes sugar put it in the cells where it belongs. Problem is we have to keep on cranking out lots and lots of insulin. It ends up also promoting inflammation in the body. The inflammation will scar up the cell membranes and the receptors. And overtime, our bodies starts hearing the message for Insulins. Kind of like, you know-if you recurr my houses start banging on my door. At first I hear you, if you just kept coming over messing with me. Then overtime, it’s like the boy who cried wolf. It’s like okay uhh- you know what- this is probably not a real scenario I’d dole you out. And so it’s kind of same thing with insulin. Basically, we want to keep our body really really sensitive to insulin. We want to were insulin knocks on the door, immediately we open that door. And the best way to do that is keeping our sugar down, keeping carbohydrate total, net carbohydrates– thats the amount of carbohydrates minus fiber. Fibers does not count. Fibers are not glycolitic. Were not gonna be able to break that down. Fibers is really a nutrient for microbiome which we need. And so basically, we want to keep those net carbs fairly low right? It can range for different people the better the more insulin responsive your body is, the more carbohydrates your body is going to be able to handle.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love it! Love it! Love it! Very Good. We got some questions coming here on the live chat so to everyone that’s putting the questions, keep em’ coming at the end we’ll do a wrap at the fire round with Dr. Dave. And we’ll go through them all. But you said it’s some really important things that I wanna echo couple things. Number 1, we talked about the fuel sources. Number 2 we talked about the insulin kind of like being a double-edge sword. Now most people in the population being insulin resistant there’s massive benefits on the ketogenic diet because you get those receptors sites more sensitive which is great. But the double-edged sword. I did a video on this last week, the double -edge sword of ketosis. Where if you are already very insulin sensitive then youre going low carb for too long. Then we may drop the insulin almost a little bit too low we may get some negative symptoms with being ketosis and not cycling up and out. What’s your take on cyclical ketosis some people that are already insulin sensitive then going into it for too long What’s your take?
Dr. David Jockers: Yeah that’s a great question! I think it really depends on the individual but I’m a huge fan of experimenting. And I know for myself, I did much better on the cyclical ketogenic. What that means is, were gonna rotate in some healthy forms of carbs from time to time okay. And I really- what I trying to- Have my clients do something like 30 days low carb and then from there we switch in where we do 1 day a week, we add in more carbs ideally from healthy sources. You know the sicker you are, the more important that is to stay away from fake foods. and stick with really nutrient-dense foods and there’s a lot of higher carb nutrient dense foods that are amazing for the body like carrots I mean just awesome food for the body. it just has the carbohydrate low, so we add in sweet potatoes so yeah different things like that. Beets, these things are great for the body.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Safe starch forms
Dr. David Jockers: Exactly! All those safe starches. Even quinoa you know well basically if you use something like quinoa with apple cider vinegar on it load it up with turmeric. I tell them do quinoa but make it orange quinoa or if you’re gonna do rice, make it orange rice. That’s such a good carrier for turmeric you got more of that Curcumin Antioxidant need to your system put a bunch of herbs in there. That would be really really good.Which you hve one day , you’re not regulating your carbohydrates your getting them from safe sources but you’re not really regulating it and uhh- so I like to include that in. And then I also like to include a 24-hour basically liquid fast where you are doing things like broth uuhm- or salt water uhh- you can do maybe a green juice or something along those lines your greens powder and water and just staying really well hydrated for about 24hour period of time. So you get these powerful benefits of intermittent fasting in there. So basically, what we’re going to do to you is 5 really low carb days, 1 day where we do 24-hour fast, 1 day we’re not regulated. We’re not trying to count calories or carbohydrates; we’re just saying Hey you know what? I’m gonna eat healthy foods and eat all these higher carbohydrate, healthier starches and just you know how i feel. Just eat them to n a sense till I feel associated. And were gonna include good fats in that. So I tell them “Hey! put some MCT oil or something like that on your carrots till we saw the ketones in this system”, were not worried about were just uhm- were not worried about hey what are our blood sugar is, what are our total carbohydrate count is. Uhm- when we do that so usually once a week for most people that respond well. Sometimes we need it more; sometimes we need it twice a week. Okay and for other individuals I tell them “Hey! Experiment! Try going two weeks without it right and maybe a carb blowed on oneday every2 weeks and see how you feel with that”. And so a lot of its subjective coz all of us are unique. We all have a unique biochemistry and our body is gonna give us different signals and so part of our health journey is really you know- I sell my clients it’s about getting a master’s degree on your health. You know it’s gonna take your time to really understand how your body runs best. Okay? and you know people like Justin and I were here to help coach you to help you get good advice. But at the same time you gotta really help- you gotta really pay attention to signs and signals your body is giving you. And make the adjustments that you need. You know if you’re under more stress and you’re doing higher intensity training on a more regular basis. You may need to carb cycle a little bit more. Uhm it’s a really just depends on what your stress load is, what your lifestyle looks like or your sleep habits look like. All of those factors.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love it! Totally great points here. I’m actually gonna be testing my blood ketones here live on the air. Again, I got the precision extra meter heat and I get these little strips here I got them on ebay they’re a little bit cheaper there you get it from New Zealand but I’m gonna test my ketones. I like to be at least .5 to 1. I mean this morning was just some coffee somewhat high quality organic coffee about 1 or 2 tablespoons that high quality MCT coconut base not palm. Tablespoon or two of grass-fed butter and about- a bit about 10-15 grams of collagen amino acids that might through collagen and that’s where I’m at it. SO I et about 5600 calories and I’m feeling great this friday so I like .5 to 1 and then typically I’ll even measure my blood sugar as well. I went out to last weekend to a really nice steak restaurant we did a really good grass-fed rib eyes, uhmm- oysters, some brocolli, I put bone marrow on my steak I measured my blood sugar after my meal- it was actually at 70. So no major spikes in blood sugars so that’s a pretty cool thing. What are you doing to measure? I’m doing ketones. I’m doing blood glucose some clinicians are even measure fasting insulin I see people blood sugar blow a hunder but their insulins are like 15, 18, Like it’s. The Insulin’s so high, its compensating by pulling that blood sugar rim but the insulin so high but that’s creating all that cell growth that could promote cancer right?
Dr. David Jockers: Oh yeah absolutely yeah we test fasting insulin as well but they’re at some important thing to look at. Hemoglobin A1C’s we have to look the overall clycation impact on uhm- on the blood cell. So we look at that as well. Definitely, precision extra using the ketone strips. For me personally I like to use the Ketonix breath meter just know that my body is producing them. And you know ultimately once you’ve been doing this for a little while, you kind of know how you feel when you’re using these ketones because you’re able to go a longer occurrence at time between meals and you feel really mentally sharp. Uhh- you don’t feel tired. You feel good. You don’t feel hungry and so if people are telling me that their having issues, mood, energy, cravings, uhhhhm- you know hunger things like that. These are all signs that the body is not utilizing the ketones well. And that’s an important factor and you know I’m a big fan of getting a lot of salts in the diet. most people need a lot of extra minerals and especially when your insulin starts to go down. Insulin helps your body basically to retain particularly sodium but really most minerals. And when you start to lower your insulin levels, you’re gonna need- you’re gonna excrete more of these minerals. You’re gonna need those. So, doing something like a broth, okay? You can just go out and get organic free ranged chicken broth for like 2 dollars 50 cents or something like that from your local. I mean, it’s becoming more and more common at our local grocery store. We can get imagine organic fruit and chicken broth. Not the same thing as bone broth, doesn’t have that the same level of collagen protein might have a little bit in it in there but doesn’t have much of those types of amino acids but it has got tons of minerals. And you also get some antioxidants in because typically, what they’re doing is they’re using like celery and onions and garlic and stuff like that and just kind of boiling it up. So you get some of the essence of those. You get good minerals and to me I drink it as a mineral drink. Uhm and I like that. Warm mineral drink. We keep our house cold at night for good sleep. We turn down the Ac when hot. And so when I wake up in the morning it’s like: yeah I just really like that broth kind of that saltiness get that into the system and it just seems worked so well. Uhm and I find it that helps for blood sugar regulation as well just getting those good minerals because it keeps your adrenals balanced.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Really great points and that kind of goes into my top 3-5 ketone mistakes. 1. when you go too low- when you go low carb what’s gonna actually happen? Insulin Drops, the minerals go. So you have to `consciously make an effort to get the pottassium back up from the green veggies and let me get the sodium amount from the broth and seasalt that’s number 1. I see patients quite frequently saying I’m starting to have heart palpitations down this lower carb ketogenic diet it;s like where the minerals at , we adjust the minerals- fixed!.
Number 2: Too much muscle meat. Boneless, skinless, chicken breast right? Just getting protein powders without any fat in with it. Veal, Venison, uh- Rabbit meat right? Those are the big things and the Number 3: Poor Digestion. They don’t have enough hydrochloric acid you already mention the citric acid in the apple cider vinegar helping, not enough enzymes, that’s not in a bile slots, maybe they even got a gut infection that’s preventing that from happening. So I see that digestive component is a huge component because we know protein and fats harder to digest than carbohydrates and sugar.
Dr. David Jockers: Huge component especially you know when people are starting on the Ketogenic Diet one of the common complaints we have is constipation. Yeah know but I was like uhhh- I’m constipated. here’s a number of reasons for that . If you’re doing it right, one of ther reasons could be the fact that your microbiomes got a switch over right. And there’s kind of this transition which could cause lowered intestinal motility. That;s possible but most often is because, person’s eating a lot of meat and then a hormone of hydrochloric acids . We gotta address that. And then the mineral, the mineral elements. Uhmm getting more minerals into the system magnesium into the system to help improve gastrointestinal motility and all those strategies we talked about earlier using a lot of herbs. And all of that those are carminatives they’re really really good for muscle contractions in the intestines moving the waste through. So the more that we can add these components in, getting those minerals, getting the high quality herbs and sprots and different things like that and those uhh-really really polyphenal rich very low carb with any carb, types of nutrients into our system with our meals is just so powerful. Lemon juice, things like that that helps support digestion with enzymes and citric acid that’s for acidic gastric from the apple cider vinegar. Very Very powerful. And Justin I had a question for you. Can you put the collagen in the Bulletproof coffee there? Your MCT Oil in the coffee.Do you notice any change compared to when you don’t with your blood sugar. What have you been noticing?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh that’s a great question. I got to test that. I tested it just the other day. Typically my blood sugar will just stay below a hundred. Again i listen to Josh Aksin, Jordan Robin just last weekend and uhmm- Jordan Robin’s talking about “Hey it’s Collagenic Diet”. Now we have a conversation I pulled them off the stage as a doc. I said let’s talk about the gluconeogenic proteins versus the ketogenic. He’s like you know the Hydroxyproline, these are in the collagen. Are these gonna be as gluconeogenic as let’s say what’s in whey protein or other muscle needs? According to him, his opinion is that the methionine and a lot of the sulfur amino acids are potentially more gluco neogenic and then the collagen aminos are more ketogenic in nature, it won’t spike up blood sugar as much. So tha’t his take on it and I think they get similar to the podcast for Dr. Burn Freelander talking about the major reasons why collagen is so great. It’s a little bit lower in methionine and that can have some blood sugar.
Dr. David Jockers: Yesh absolutely. We need methionine but the realty is most people in the society are eating a ton of muscle meat and very little collagenous meat. These ligaments, joints, cartilage structure which our ancestors ate a lot of that. So yeah getting that college and proetin and really helps balance it. Now L-glutamine obviously will really keep to the immune system, havereally keep for gut help but tends to be more insulinogenic and more you know just basically tends to increase much sugar a little bit more uhmm- what’s your glutamin status and collagen protein? do you know?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So you get a lot of L-glutamin because it typically comes in a form of glutamic acid many people do great with it some people that are more on the inflame side, they can go down to glutamate but for the most par I find it tend to be pretty good with a lot of people .
Dr. David Jockers: Yeah, Justin for those people, I know you’ve seen that. For thoe people that produce more glutamate and less Gaba with it. Magnesium and B6. See it really well with that conversion.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: yep I a 100% agree on that too. Then I also see it too. You mention the muscle meat like methionine is still really good, we need that- that’s a really important phase to detoxifying compound for you said it Crom P450 (Cytochrome P450) oxidize pathways. But were getting a lot of muscle meat you mentioned it uhh- Jordan Robin’s talked about were missing the connective tissue component that’s just so important for skin, nails, joints, tendons, ligaments right?
Dr. David Jockers: Oh yeah absolutely. I have an article on my website where I talked about that where muscle meats are very rich with methionine and tryptophan. And glycin and protein are the major amino acids that were gonna find in the cartilages, the cartilage and the joint structure. Glycin so critical for phase 2 liver detoxification..
Glutathione..
Dr. David Jockers: yeah it helps regulate Gaba right then have it to our neurotransmitter to reduce excite or toxicity and the brain help keep us calm. Most people are just knocking it enough of that because again they’re taking so much of this methionine. So, I’m a big fan of the cartilages diet. i just wasn’t sure personally how would it affect in my autoimmune cases and people blood sugar instability issues oftentime. I have them do that the cartilage uhm sorry the collagen in the coffee. And I know Dave asked for you you know he recommends that. I know that you’ve been talking about that a lot .
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Gotta be beef collagen you know I do the neo-cell chicken collagen. Tastes like crap. I gotta throw my coffee out of the. Gotta be collagen peptide its gotta be beef for my taste. It destroys the coffee if it’s not beef.
Dr. David Jockers: I use a bone broth of pure bone broth protein. i find it that works just kind of a savory flavor but you just mix it and you really don’t notice it. I noticed that, that works good.. Now for myself, I don’t personally do that. I personally either just do broth in the morning or I will do a Bulletproof coffee without the collagen proteins in there and the usual i put those in a protein shake. For me that seem to keep my blood sugar in most stable and my ketones at the highest and i feel the best with that. Now this wasn’t sure I haven’t had a lot of people test their ketones pre and post. So that would be interesting to see. How they responded adding in the collagen protein into the Bulletproof coffee.
I will test it today. I got my ketone meter. I’ll test it in a bit.
Dr. David Jockers: Keep me updated on that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I’ll do a video on this today. But .5 to .6 tend to where be.. at the minimal of ketones there which tends to be pretty good. Now I want to touch upon a couple of things here. People whose cholesterol I’m going to hit a person’s question over here on the chat. But people, whose cholesterol goes out in a ketogenic diet; Typically, I find a lot of people’s cholesterol actually goes down on a ketogenic diet if they’re coming from an insulin resistant type of diet. Coz insulins resist or insulins gonna stimulate the HMG coereductase enzyme hematolitiric oil reductase that’s the enzyme’s status block. So if you are actually decreasing that enzyme by cutting the insulin down, i see people really improved their cholesterol numbers. But at the same time, cholesterol may go up on a ketogenic diet but if it does, I see the HTL go up in conjunction wih the LDL so the ratio is not getting worst and the trigs will also go down and the particles side shifts so your LDL A would go up , B would go down and your LDL will also improve too.
Dr. David Jockers: Oh yeah absolutely I mean that’s huge. Im are always looking at that triglyceride HDL ratio. It’s always been less than two. Ideally, yeah I like to uh 1.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep
Dr. David Jockers: And that’s a big fact that’s way more huge than our over cholesterol. So you wanna definitely look at that. And really when cholesterol’s huge. If you have that terrible, try at of high LDL, Low HDL, High triglycerides- usually like you said- it’s because of insulin resistance. It could also be a thyroiditis.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s the thing! That’s what I was gonna touch upon yes you hit it.
Dr. David Jockers: Yeah or could be an infection. So those were really the 3 big factors that are causing that so it’s really a downswing of that its the body that actually saying “It’s a response by the body to certain agree for healing when it comes to inflammation, infection and insulin resistance. And then , you know a thyroid basically you’ll just gonna end up producing steroid hormone which is so important for proper regulation of cholesterol levels. So..
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% and 1 other 2 other X factors I find is a dairy allergy and an egg allergy. So, people put a lot of butter, cream or a lot of eggs. Try cutting those out for a few weeks. Go get a lipid panel done. I’ve seen people literally been at 450 for their cholesterol and dropped down to 200 for in weeks.
Dr. David Jockers: yeah that’s a goal of nugget right there. Especially for some people, trying to do a ketogenic diet. Yeah! Absolutely! And egg i mean the reality is: milk, protein and egg sensitivities are very high in our society. I think one reason is rally vaccines. They have egg out boom it in the- Vaccine is to create antibiotic response. So if you get a vaccine at an early age, your body creates an antibiotic response to egg out boom and.. And then some level of permeability in your gut and you’re eating eggs and you’re not fully digesting them well. The ability now to egg out boom and slips out doesn’t get fully digested and broken down in Amino acids Soups out in the bloodstream , your body’s gonna do what it’s ought to do.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: A 100%. And I also find too that if you heal the gut and you get the inflammation down, and then you reintroduce things the right way. What I mean by the right way, is you do the egg poached soft, you keep the yolks would run. In that way, we are not denaturing the protein coz sometimes it’s just the oxidize cholesterol that are our immune system is reacting to. Sometimes it’s evident in the yolk or sorry the white part of it. And when it comes to dairy, you start with Ghee, grass fed ghee and then you progressed to grass-fed butter . But again, one at the time. And then you can monitor with the lipid panel in between. And that pretty inexpensive task. But I’ve seen that really help and people have been able to add those things back in and not have jump in to cholesterol.
Dr. David Jockers: Yeah that’s really really good. Especially some of again, that’s how a ketogenic diet. Coz typically you’re gonna be eating like I’m a huge fan of your grass-fed butter right. So yeah, taking it, take it out for a week then try adding it back. You know you could even do that something along those lines. I’ll have people do post testing a lot of times.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep
Dr. David Jockers: So basically, just take your pulse. Take a resting pulse. Okay? Say its 60 beats per minute. Then go ahead put some grass-fed butter on your tongue right? Take a few deep breaths. Wait about 20 seconds and take your pulse again. And if it jumps up 3 or more beats that’s a sign of stress response to it. And if ever you have stress response to something, it’s gonna cause inflammation in your body. So I’d be something to take out at that point if you did ever response like that. Take it out for a month. Okay? Follow a good anti-inflammatory, leaky gut based diet outside of using you know-those dairy using any sort of dairy products and then try adding it back in and then and.. like you said. Best thing if it’s dairy is to add that Ghee; cause that’s got the least amount of inflammatory dairy proteins like Casein in Whey, also the Lactase as well. Those are the things that most people are reacting to. So you start that. Then go ahead and do a pulse test with that. And if your pulse test comes out well, add it back in your diet one day. Consume a bunch of grass fed Ghee on things and then see how you feel of it for about 3 or 4 days. If you notice of symptoms, okay- increasing amount of symptoms. Sign your body is still not fully recovered.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%! Theres an application called Food Sense, you can download it on your phone and it will do that same thing you mentioned. You out your finger over like the camera and it’ll measure your pulse before and after so, 100% that’s a great way to do it. Now next, is I see people that are going maybe too low carb for too long or maybe they’re more Insulin sensitive. And I actually see their blood sugar jump and there are some people where we actually add in a little bit more carbs and their blood sugar actually drops. In my whole theory is that the gluconeogenic processes is corticol dependent. So that cortisol is causing a little bit too much of a bump in that blood sugar. And if we add just a little bit of carbs back in especially the safe starchy carbs you’ve mentioned. We can actually drop the blood sugar by actually adding in carbs. What’s your take on that?
Dr. David Jockers: Uh, 100% I totally agree with that. So I have seen it a number of times and so, they’re super, super low carb diets ultimately long term for most people are not gonna be very healthy. So, adding in again some of these safer carbohydrate components. In all reality, the body was meant to adapt. Our ancestors, they weren’t just low carb because they were tryna’ lose weight. They were low carb because they were eating whatever was available And for the most part, what was available was lower carb foods, meats, and they would have times of famine. They have times were they would go days without food. And so, reality is, they had a great adaptability. And cells that can adapt are healthy cells right? Whereas sick cells, cancer cells don’t adapt well. So, in a sense adding in priming the body with little bit of carbohydrates here and there. I find to be the most effective way for a long term health and long term sustainability for most people that are- certain percentage of people that.. They tell me “Hey you know I’ve been for Ketosis for 3 years and I’m doing great”. Okay? So, there are certain percentage that I won’t- I don’t wanna take that away from those individuals. But at the same time I would say probably four or fifths, 80% are gonna do better to some level of cycling out their carbs.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah a hundred percent totally make sense. Now what about Ketogenic Diet when you have infections? We all know that a lot of people are Insulin Resistant. A lot of these got microbes that love the feed off of sugar, carbohydrates, especially the yeast. I see what parasites and fungus why could that’s really easy to access. But there are people like, Kressers talked about it at poligy emanate. Talked about that these critters can also fuel off ketones. Now my approach is, that sugar is gonna be the easier fuel source. So that’s gonna be the low-hanging fruit. But what do you do when people, maybe the ketogenic diet is feeding some of these critters. My approach is we go low if we see an exacerbation being so low. We just gently tape for about and see if there’s any improvement in symptoms. How do you handle that?
Dr. David Jockers: Yeah! very very similar. I think microbes are adaptable just like our cells who are adaptable. So you know if we go low carb at first, they’re gonna start dying. And the at some point if they want to maintain the resiliency, they got to adapt those microorganisms. You know they have short half-lives and that they start to adapt. And they start to be able to burn whatever fuel they can. But again just like you said- I mean glucose is the easier fuel for them that’s why they prefer it. Uhmm- it’s easier for their chemistry. And it’s so.. I still am a fan of “Hey! let’s get some ketones in there”. Now, big thing there is getting the right antimicrobial stance. So eating a diet that’s rich in polyphenol like antioxidants is important. Coz it improves cell communication, improves your immune system’s stability- can recognize whether it’s a virus, whether it’s yeast, parasites as opposed to uhm normal cell right? We wanna do things to uhm- strengthen the immune system while we change the you know the -metab- the, the.. fuel source for these microbes and I think that’s really key. I think doing both of those things is a fantastic combination and then even if implementing if the person’s able to handle it some intermittent fasting can also be very very helpful there too because again, we were reducing the food stuffs for those individuals. And then when we do feed, we feed with lots of antimicrobials. So that way, the yeast, microorganisms.-they start hunkering down when during the fast. Then, that’s food become prevalent they come out and you know- they are not differentiating in a sense there like “Hey!” I’m like If you are hungry, You know- you know what Justin if you go a week without a food or whatever it is and you’re starving- you’re gonna be a little bit less uhmm– you know you’re gonna be a little bit less sensitive about what you eat. You just want food in your body, you know? And it’s kind of the same thing with the yeast, the different uhh- microbes and they’re gonna start eating and then a course of if you’ve got the anti-microbial whether its from supplement. You know, I’m a fan of it with supplement and foods, right? Right in there at the same time as they eat they are taking in the these different component or gonna help basically combusters of wall or whatever it si whatever the mechanism is to help kill them off.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally make sense.
Dr. David Jockers: And then following it up with a bunch of charcoal or clay or something like that to .. Any of the gases and uhh- all the sort of uhh- toxic metabolites that they were least .
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally make sense and one of the things that I incorporate when we’re doing specifically clearing programs to address these infections. It’s like chum in the water. You wanna go shark that and then you gotta put some chum in the water to bring those sharps in the surface if you’re gonna do some killing of these bacteria, you gotta chum that water with maybe a little bit more of carbs or a little bit more fodmaps that for dealing with SIBO (Small intestinal bacterial overgrowth). Bring them in the surface and then, *clap smash* blind site baby!
Dr. David Jockers: Yeah absolutely! Yep! That’s what I think like the warrior die approach for it’s like played. You know like doing a 24-hour fast like I was talking about for able to do that one once a week. That’s 24-hours. These microbes replicate so fast they usually have like- `something like I don’t know if you know the numbers but I’ve heard like 4-6 hour lives, right? So reality is, they are already changing their metabolism during thta period of time. And, uhm- you know they’re having to adapt very rapd rate in order to survive and so we go 24-hours without major amount of calories. Now, we’ve started- we’ve reduced some of that microbial load overall. Okay as long as we moved our bowels. Also, while were doing that- drinking lots of fluids maybe using magnesium supplements. Keeping the bowels moving well, right? Getting all that stuff out. We’ve reduced some microbial load Yeah then we hit it in. You know the warrior died that’s kind of like “Hey you, you know you eat very light during the day and then you have the feeds meal, right?” And of course, we want to recommend a healthy feast meal. Not just Domino’s pizza right? But you have that healthier feast meal wherein you’re getting in a lot. Your good foods okay- you know safe starches, things like that. You know at acertain point you know at least once a week. Uuuhm- you know with some day it does have infections I’m a fan of and then pounding it with those anti-microbials and the again using charcoal clay, different things like that , different absorbing agents help clean the system because you’ll gonna have a lot of metabolic waste leftover from these microbes so you wanna go in there and grab that stuff out or we’re gonna have a greater livelihood of having uhm- die of symptoms- using a lot of water too, good hydration again keeping those bowels moving that’s so important.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love it! well outside of that couple of questions I’ll just roll through here. I’ll just give you a wrap of response. Can taking digestive enzymes plus ACL plus Apple Cider Vinegar prior to a meal be too much for someone with a compromised digestive system? My opinion is if you have a compromised digestive system you’re probably not making enough HCL enzymes so my take is the gut’s not irritated by the HCL, you know- do HCL based on sensation and then opt the enzymes which tends to be more you know, non-abrasive. What’s your take?
Dr. David Jockers: Uh totally! Absolutely! I would do that. And I think that uhm- that question I think they said do HCL before the meal. Okay if you’re really irritated with your gut lining, probably better to do HCL in the middle of the meal.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Bingo!100% Yep! Kind of aligns it you know it says like the oreo cookie. You got the filling there. Totally! And none of the top be there coz sometimes they got stuck at the top and hit that top of the atrium or the soft…I see it both ways.
Dr. David Jockers: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Perfect! and then the person here comments “Well it sounds like a Ketogenic Diet is a diet for inactive people” My take is well if you’re insulin resistant, you’re not burning fat. This is a therapeutic diet to burn fat and number 2 is we want to burn clean fuel. What’s your take?
Dr. David Jockers: Well yeah. It’s reallya diet for active and inactive people. Definitely, inactive people obviously we need to use diet to uh- to get insulin under control if they’re active- you know what? We want the body to have this level of metabolic flexibility where ot’s able to adapt its metabolism based on the needs of the environment. I wanna have incredible metabolic flexibilities. What do I do for that? I move my body a lot. I exercise at a really high intensity uh– Four days a week I do a really high-intensity workouts. Okay? while I’m in Ketosis. Why? because I want mybody to be able to be realy good at going between using ketones for energy and using glucose for energy. What’s gonna happen, youre gonna actually end up boosting your uhh- you’re basically you’re losing your blood losing in levels between meals and that’s gonna help preserve muscle mass and help improve performnce. and that’s gonna help preserve glycogen in yourselves. your body gets really good at storing glycogen and utilizing it only at times when it need sit.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love it and losing its antiviral in a ketogenic amino. That’s one of the few aminos that could go to ketones. Love that! Yep! So what are you eating Dr. Dave? Give me a rundown of your day look like.
Dr. David Jockers:Yeah absolutely so for myself This is uh- a big thing that I teach I only do one solid food. I would say 6 days on a week. On an average. I’m doing one solid food meal a day. Okay? And then usually its in the evening coz that’s typically my most relaxed period of time. So I’m a big fan of liquid nutrition. So, In the morning like… This morning, I drank a lot of broth; In fact, there still have some right here deluded uhh- with hot water. Okay, and I drink that. And sometimes I go like its 24 hours like were talking about and do that but uhm- typically especially on a workout day- for long noon I do a protein shake. And I actually like a protein putting. I put 1 or 2 avocados in there. I use coconut milk or raw grass-fed milk. Uhm- I use good high quality protein powder I like uhh like a boom broth collagen protein uhhhm or sometimes i use like a p-protein. Whwy protein seems to bump up my blood sugar a bit so uhm I use one of those types of proteins in there. And sometimes I use a combination of them. And uh- and that’s really pretty much it. That’s in the- oh yeah, I put MCT oil in there and somtimes some extra coconut oil in. So really it’s a lot of fat and it’s dense. Proetin putting and I love it. So either make it with chocolate or just a vanilla. Okay? Chocolates uh- that chocolate avocado pudding, one of my favorites. Uhm and so I’ll have that typically for lunch okay and then you know I stay really hydrated especially in the afternoons. Uhm- a little bit more intentional about hydration. In the morning it seems like my body is craving the hydration, the minerals. What about a naturally, I drink usually about a gallon of water before the time wake up before noon. I’m just cranking to lots and lots of hydration. Then I usually work out around this time of day and the right after that, room protein shake then in the mid-afternoon I drinking a lot of water usually with about the hour after my shake and then I start really hydrating my body well again. And I like to do magnesium in the water. I have a product bringcome magnesium that I put on the water okay and ill drink that. I love to get that extra magnesium in. Uhm stay hydrated as much I do greens powder and water as well. And then the evening, were usually using some sort of healthy meat whether ts well caught salmon, chicken, turkey, duck, lamb, vicen, grass fed beef. Something along those lines. Lots of vegetables. I like to use a lo of grass fed butter. Uhm my vegetables, getting a lot of good fats so i use MCT oil on mymeat sometimes on my vegetables as well. Coz MCT oil turns in the ketones a lot faster than coconut oil or really anything else. And so put that on everything lots of herbs, lemon, apple cider vinegar all those super strategies that we talked about. Sometimes I do just big gigantic salad with some chicken breasts and MCT oil and olives on there or maybe avocado on there. So I’m always trying to get these good fats in and uhm- you know for me I think the biggest things sometimes, I’ll crave extra protein and so in my workout days; I usually increase my protein , my meat consumption a little bit on the evenings and now on workout days, I try to keep it a lot more moderate.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love it. I’m kind of in a similar boat. I tend to do a lot of uh- butter coffee, MCT and collagen in the morning on days that I’m more stressed I will do uhm- eat a bigger breakfast that will add up some eggs, and bacon and grass fed all that good stuff. Tend to go like maybe 5 or 6 hours between meals. I got a desk treadmill so I walk about eleven miles per day. You know seeing patients, and then I like the bars and kettle bells so in between atient calls. Push-ups a feel your, kettle bells to seal you. So I tryna do a lot of unorganized exercise where its just like it’s sporadic term of my day. Lunch- I mean typically for lunch, I’ll take some tuna on top of a salad cut up an avocado use to mark primal dressing. You know , the Caesar dressings awesome now. I’m loving it. And then tonight we got Keto Burgers stand out. Mean, I get these from US Wellnes Meats. 55, 45 right? Buy protein 45 fat put that on the baddest spinach cut up some avocado. Tonight, I may go all out and have a glass of sparkle and wine. Typically have a low-sugar kind of demi-sec where you drive version of it. With one or just do a Kombucha instead of low sugar GT des Kombucha and then for dessert maybe a 90% dark chocolate.
Dr. David Jockers: Yeah I love it! I like Cavitas. I’m on Fiasec Cavitas ..
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh my freak just talked.
Dr. David Jockers: I’m in Cavita, one of my favorites. Think about lime and menthols such good carmenertives so good for the gut then we got the coconut water that’s fermented. you got more b vitamins, lowers sugar levels and i respond really really well on that. oftentimes at night we’ll do herbal tea. Like a nighty-night tea or something like that. uhm just getting more on those herbs. i think that’s something that you know there’s a lot of people that are teaching ketogenic diet but now whole lot more of emphasizing herbs and uhm i think that’s a missing component in our diet as getting using these herbal medicines.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: you enjoy a little bit on the same track men you were talking about all that lastly again. You made some great points like the herbal infusions the teas.. Also uhm the bom brought there and I think thats really huge and I think you call it serum soluble nutrients. I loved that, that worked!
Dr. David Jockers: Absolutely. Yeah Jordan is a good friend of mine so uh- we talk about all these stuff often.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah I hink he’s totally on track with that. Awesome. http://drjockers.com uhh- awesome blog, awesome YouTube. I check it out weekly then it gets lots some of great info- information. I’m happy you’re on the podcast. Any other knowledge bombs you wanna drop here before you exit.
Dr. David Jockers: You know I think we covered a lot. I think ultimately at the end of the day, uhm people often realize we’re striving for metabolic flexibility you know and so when somebody is real fatigue, real adrenal fatigue. Theyre very very poor metabolic flexibility okay. But ultimately the better your metabolic flexibility, this ability is watched between ketones and glucose and energy source, the better your quality of life is gonna be. The better your performance is gonna be. So uhm- so basically you know practitioners like you Dr. Justin and myself, that’s really our goal to our clients is. Hey, get them to the point where they are so metabolically flexible to where they can adapt to different nutritional practices and go low carb for a few weeks at a time or maybe even do a high carb week right and not have the delirious effects that come with that and being just able to adapt is so critical. Healthy cells are cells that can adapt. Unhealthy cells can’t adapt. And so as a whole as an organism we wanna be that adapt strong.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love it and now if you’re stuck on a desert island, and yo can only bring one supplement with you what is it
Dr. David Jockers: For me its magnesium. Magnesium is like my magic bullet so from feeling a little bit low on energy? okay? – Magnesium. Following a sleep crate? Magnesium. For a grove good mental clarity? Magnesium. Magnesiums seems to be- especially magnesium of 3na that would respond best to that one. Crosses the blood brain barrier. helps to-its really like an adaptogenic herb, its really an adaptogen where it helps to balance out my stress hormones. I just feel great with that. And that’s something that in general if you’re stuck on a- on an island you may have access to things like coconuts and stuff like that but uh- you know chances are you just in general especially if I’m eating a lot of fruit uhm because I’m on the island. I probably gonna need a little bit more of magnesium.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally make sense plus said here. On an island men you’re probably stressed on act that magnesium that definitely help with constipation right. Love it! very good very good. Any closing thoughts we got your information out there Dr. David Jockers go to the site. you’ll also see the YouTube channel great recipes, your wife Angel’s rocking out of the park with those recipes, they got my wife checking them out too. Anything else Dr. Dave?
Dr. David Jockers: You know, I think that’s really is . I just want to thank you for having me on the show. And I just remind you again that Hey I’m a big fan of the show. So if you guys are listening to Dr. Justin here, people like myself and other health influencers, we tune in to Justin’s podcasts because he is always dropping nuggets and uh- I love your analogies and how you create things down so I really appreciate all the great work you’re doing
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well uh appreciate that Dr. Dave. Awesome! Well you have a great weekend on Multstein Dutch.
Dr. David Jockers: Alright you too Justin.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Alright take care!
References:
https://www.youtube.com/user/djockers
https://www.facebook.com/DrDavidJockers?ref=hl
Using ketosis to lose weight and improve your health – Podcast #109
Dr. Justin Marchegiani and Evan Brand dive into an in-depth discussion about nutritional ketosis and what benefits you can reap from it. This is a podcast episode where you’ll get valuable information about a Ketogenic-Paleo diet, what to eat (and when!) to get the best results.
Learn why insulin needs to be kept low and the ketones high. Find out how you can keep your diet in check and avoid wasting money when you’re taking exogenous ketones. Discover why carbohydrates are better consumed during night time.
In this episode, topics include:
03:38 What is Ketosis? Who is it for?
08:35 Kinds of ketones
09:50 Ketone supplements
17:36 Using ketones beneficially
28:45 Ketoacidosis vs ketosis
Beyond Training – Ben Greenfield – Podcast #18
In this episode, Dr. Justin and Dr. Baris interviewed Ben Greenfield, the New York Times bestselling author of “Beyond Training”. He is also a prominent fitness coach, ex-body builder and an Ironman triathlete. Ben has over a decade of experience training professional, collegiate and recreational athletes through proper nutrition, lifestyle management and wellness to obtain optimal performance.
In this podcast, discover the proper workouts to help improve one’s speed and performance. Recognize the benefits of combining isometric exercises and electro-stim for greater accumulation of lactic acid as well as improve endurance. Learn how to maintain ketosis even on a high carb intake. Also find out the common parasitic infections in triathletes and the natural supplements to deal with it.
In this episode we cover:
08:31 Proper speed training
13:10 Isometric training plus electro-stim
16:41 Lactic acid and growth hormone
22:48 Ketosis
25:52 Parasite infections in triathletes
30:10 Two-A-Day Training
Baris Harvey: Thank you guys for tuning in to another episode of Beyond Wellness Radio. And today’s awesome podcast we are interviewing Ben Greenfield. Ben is a super productive, awesome person. He had so many different initials behind his name. So I am going to try to condense his bio real quick. He is a coach, nutritionist, author, speaker, ex-body builder, Ironman, Spartan Racer, like every fitness thing you can think of he has probably done it. In addition to that, he is the head coach and nutritionist for a specific elite fitness. He is a consultant for WellnessFX. He is the host of the Get-Fit Guy and the Ben Greenfield podcast on ITunes. And he also just released an awesome book called “Beyond Training”, not to be confused with our Beyond Wellness Radio. (Laughs) So Ben, how is it going today?
Ben Greenfield: Actually, I was totally ripping off you guys…
Justin Marchegiani: Laughs
Baris Harvey: Yes.
Ben Greenfield: Actually the whole scheme there was… (Laughs)
Baris Harvey: And no way that we would have even known that, though. If anything, we are ripping you off. You are way more…
Ben Greenfield: That is right! Actually, because my publisher is the same publisher that published Beyond Bacon, I have not gotten out before their book. Beyond Bacon, I am like, “Oh, it actually was it.”
Baris Harvey: And it’s the same people so you know it’s the same thing.
Ben Greenfield: Yo.
Baris Harvey: So first question. I noticed you used to be an ex-body builder. So what got you into the kind of holistic field? I know with body building, you know you read the muscle magazines, kind of just the generic kind of carb loaded kind of thing. And the same thing with the Ironman, too. But what got you into the holistic form of training?
Ben Greenfield: Well, you know, like, body building is kind of a lot of BroScience like you are definitely delving deeper into especially like nutrition. Everything from sodium loading to diuretics to a lot of research into supplements. And so like you kind of start to go down that road. Grand body building does not look at things through the lens of performance combined with health. Like I do in my book and like I do now, you know in my own training. But I think that between body building and then what I got into later which is just the same thing, one of the nerdiest geekiest sports on the face of the planet when it comes to like delving into the nutrition part of things and that is triathlon. Like between those two, that really got me into looking more deeply into this science of performance more than just like you know, smashing yourself with workouts. So, I think that the reason for that again is that, body building, there is such a nutrition bend in order for you to really get from 15 down to 10 percent body fat, let us say as a I did. You can do that just by working out hard and by kind of following your diet. But then if you drop from like, let us say, 10 percent down to 3 percent. You got to pull out a lot of stops.
Baris Harvey: Basically, those are like the, oh, gee kind of biohackers, right?
Ben Greenfield: Yes, exactly. Exactly. And so, like the same thing for triathlon. In triathlon, you could go out and do like a sprint triathlon and do pretty good by just having done some pretty tough workouts. But then once you get up in the Ironman and it becomes a sport of attrition or if you run out of muscle glycogen and whatever glycogen you are pretty much screwed. Then that becomes a little bit more of like a nutrition science sports. So body building and triathlon shoved me kind of deeper down into the tunnel of nutrition, supplements and the deeper science of performance. Then going into that got me more into self-quantification. Going into self-quantification began to help me realize that, “Hey!” Even though we are going fast and we have got lots of muscle or we are getting good results in races or whatever, we are not actually healthy when you look at cholesterol parameters or inflammatory parameters and stuff like that. And then that kind of got me into like the whole holistic thing of kind of taking into account everything from sleep to nutrient density to digestibility of foods to Biohacking to everything that I kind of focus on now. When you look at stress fractures for example, you know, that is a pretty common occurrence especially in female endurance athletes. That is part of what is called the athletic triad which is basically an eating disorder and that is combined with the amenorrhea and osteoporosis. So typically, like if we look at those in detail in a female endurance athlete, that first component, eating disorder that I was talking about a little bit earlier like you just need to eat more damn food. Like so many, like let us use as example like this whole ketogenic diet thing. Like so many women are like, “I am ready to do this ketogenic diet to lose weight.” That is not really a weight loss diet. And a lot of times like carbohydrate restriction especially, drop so low on that diet that women kind of shoot themselves in the foot when it comes to creating basically like either nutrient depletion or carbohydrate depletion by focusing so much on this ketogenic diet when all they really need to focus on is just eating a lot of food when they are hungry if they are like a hard charging female endurance athlete. And trying to skew a lot of it towards that but not focusing on like the ketosis per se. We will get the next part, amenorrhea. In most of the cases of like female athletes, it is usually due to pregnenolone steal and low progesterone from too much of cholesterol and sterol precursors getting shuttled towards cortisol formation. And so in the case of that, it is a combination of eating a lot of fat, getting a lot of vitamin D, eating a lot of calories period and then focusing on decreasing cortisol using some of those methods that I have talked about earlier. And the other part of this, osteoporosis. When you look at that a lot of times it is just straight up mineral depletion. What I mean by that is when you are constantly perspiring through your inspiration and expiration and also through your sweat. If you are eating a standard fruit and vegetable-based diet just because of the leeching of minerals from modern farming practices you are not getting typically as many minerals as are necessary to help you out with bone density. And so most female endurance athletes in addition to decreasing cortisol, increasing fat intake, increasing overall calorie intake, I usually really encourage the use of like Sea Salt mineral supplementation, things of that nature to help out the things from that standpoint. So those are some of the big winds when you look at that.
Baris Harvey: Yes, that sounds great. I wanted to kind of go on to a tangent for a bit. We are talking about some of the metabolic processes. Now I want to kind of shift over because I hear you talk a lot about endurance because you are an endurance sport athlete, of course. But you have such a wealth of knowledge. And one thing that I have only heard you talked briefly about is more the Fast Twitch kind of athletes. And now that you are kind of shifting into the sport and racing, I know that that might have play in a little bit more. So the question that I wanted to go into some of the sports performance kind of thing is what are some of the best ways to improve speed? I know speed is one of those things that people would say you know you are kind of born with it. You either have it or you don’t. Can you possibly increase your speed like a significant amount like someone can increase their strength or their mass?
Ben Greenfield: Oh, yes. I mean, you can absolutely increase you speed. But really the biggest thing or the biggest kind of like misconception that I find is that people, they tend to focus on more kind of like 400 or 800 meter distance, 1 to 2 minute efforts per speed. You know very glycolytic efforts when really like speed is more about almost like patience when you are trying to tap into that phosphagenic energy pathway that relies primarily upon the splitting of creatine phosphate for very short efforts that are under, usually under 20 seconds in duration and at a very, very high turnover. So when it comes to training speed, we are talking about short quick efforts with low, low amounts of resistance or force that you are working against with very long recovery periods. And that is hard for a lot of just like exercise enthusiasts to wrap their heads around because when you are trying to get better or faster you are just thinking you got to be huffing and puffing and breathing hard and feeling the burn the whole time. When in fact, there is no hydrogen ion accumulation when you are tapping into your creatine phosphagenic pathway. There is very little fatigue, from like a musculoskeletal standpoint, when you are primarily just taxing your neuromuscular system. And it is just a totally different type of workout. So, what I mean by that is like a speed workout might be that you are doing a set of depth jumps, maybe some single leg plyometrics and some quick, very, very short over speed treadmill or downhill repeats and surely not that taxing of a workout. You are just focusing on from a metabolic standpoint. It is taxing from a neuro system standpoint but not from a metabolic standpoint. So you are basically just trying to increase turnover, decrease ground contact time and increase your ability to tap into that phosphagenic pathway. And it is a style of exercise that is commonly neglected. I mean, even when you look at it from like a professional sports level, I will see still a lot of coaches like strength conditioning coaches saving these types of workouts for like when the day’s metabolic conditioning is over. When in fact, and I have talked about this in my book, like if you want to get faster, if you want to get fast feet, if you want to get fast nerves, if you want to get quick reaction time, you do that stuff while you are fresh and preferably also when your reaction time peaks during the day which is typically between 4 and 6 pm in the afternoon. And that is kind of tough logistically to pull off for a lot of athletes. What it means is you are going to save your working out until the afternoon. You are not going to go into a speed workout fatigue and you are going to prioritize speed before you move into any metabolic conditioning. So if you are looking at this from like, let us say, like the World Cup soccer or leading up to it, so let us say, like a soccer team is prepping for something like this. Well, ideally what they would do is they would go in. You do your warm-up; you do your foam rolling. Then you do all your speed protocols and then you move on into your metabolic conditioning and scrimmage and practice and that type of thing. So it is just kind of a matter of priority and a matter of knowing the right way to stack your sets and your reps. And then make sure that you do speed with a low, low amount of resistance. So typically, if you are doing speed protocols you should not be using anymore of 10% of your total body weight. So if I am going to go out and do let us say like squat jumps for speed then I am 180 pounds. So I might be using at most the bar and that’s it.
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Ben Greenfield: So speed is an interesting animal. They got a lot folks kind of misunderstand how to train properly.
Baris Harvey: So everybody out there that are listening, do not throw on a 40‑pound weight vest and at the end of your workout try to run the entire football field.
Ben Greenfield: Yes, that is not speed. That is all metabolic conditioning.
Justin Marchegiani: Interesting. Good points, Ben. How do you incorporate some of Jay Schroder’s work with the explosive dynamic, isometrics or altitude drops or even just isometric training? How do you incorporate that into your workout routine?
Ben Greenfield: So the cool thing about electro-stim especially when you combine it with isometrics is that you build up crap loads of lactic acid in the muscle tissue. So you get a bunch of hydrogen ion build up and you build up your enzyme buffering capacity big time. And you are able to do it without joint impact and without some of the things that would tend to cause a bigger release in cortisol, longer recovery implications, etc. So I personally use those types of protocols even though Jay works with like professional football players for example. I use those protocols for enhancing endurance, like I train 8 to 10 hours last year for Ironman. Qualified for Ironman World Championships and had some of my best races ever. And I was doing Jay Schroder’s protocols twice a week. Meaning that I would get into an isometric position.
Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Ben Greenfield: Like a squat. Like a wall squat against the wall. And I would have electrodes; in this case i just use a unit called the Compex Unit because the ARP wave unit that Jay uses and like what you use, Justin.
Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Ben Greenfield: It is kind of expensive for just like the general population grab. So I would hook up that Compex Unit and just put it at a pretty high electro stim setting and just basically feel the burn for 5 minutes. And you finish up on those sessions and felt like you have ran like two hours. So you get this lactic acid buffering capacity that just goes through the roof. And one of the reasons for that is when you are in an isometric position you are now milking lactic acid out of your tissues, it is just accumulating. Like there is a very, very little occurring, you know like if you are riding a bike and you keep the pedals turning over. Like that is one of the things that I tell the triathletes that I coach. You never, never glide. You never cruise on a bike, like you always pedal even when you are going downhill. So you are always milking metabolic byproducts out of the tissue. And when you are in an isometric position and you are holding your joint in a specific position that does not happen. And the cool thing is even though it hurts like hell because it is burning, you really are building up a really good buffering capacity when you do something like that. So, I mean you can do just isometrics but when you add the electro stim in, it just gives this compounded effect that is great for squeezing a lot of training in the short period of time. And I got to the point when I would travel through airports, I would duck into like the, don’t tell any of like the folks in the airport with kids this. But I would knock into like the family restroom.
Justin Marchegiani: Yes.
Ben Greenfield: And just like hook up the electro. And I would do like a 15-20 minute protocols or I do like a pushup-hold, squat-hold and lunge–hold with the electro stim added and you know then I travel with this little action wipes so I can wipe off the sweat and everything when I finish. I could be travelling internationally and get like a killer workout in doing something like that. So I like it as biohack to really tap into a ton of fitness in a short period of time.
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Justin Marchegiani: That is great. And for everyone listening at home, Ben goes in to the detail in that on my topic right there in Chapter 4 of his book. So if you want more information feel free and check that out. And what do you think about the lactic acid providing a growth hormone stimulus? What is your take on growth hormone and lactic acid?
Ben Greenfield: I have not seen a lot of research on lactic acid and growth hormones stimulus so I cannot really speak to that. What have you seen?
Justin Marchegiani: I mean Charles Poliquin talks about that in a lot of his training and I think Doug McGuff has mentioned some stuff, you know creating that lactic acid that has provided a strong growth hormones stimulus. I have seen that in a handful of places I am just not sure if you had any personal experience with that.
Baris Harvey: You did have an interview with, forgotten his last name, and it was Peter with NASA and he has the Vasper System.
Ben Greenfield: Oh yes.
Baris Harvey: And it is kind of that idea of like holding the lactic acid in a place while you are doing the exercise to release more growth hormones.
Justin Marchegiani: Yes.
Ben Greenfield: Oh, it is interesting because one of the other things that can increase lactic acid buildup is like a short hypoxic state. And there is some pretty good evidence out there for hypoxia-based induction of DHEA and growth hormone. And I actually do that on my recovery days, every Wednesday. I do a hypoxic session in the pool where I will do 20 repeats of underwater swimming for as long as I can go holding my breath until I am literally about to pass out. And it is very, very low impact, like you recover from that workout super-duper quick. The only thing that is taking a hit is your lungs. But I do that because of that research I have seen on DHEA and growth hormone release related to hypoxia. So yes, it is possible that a big, big part of that is because of the increased lactic acid that accumulates in the presence of low oxygen.
Justin Marchegiani: Interesting.
Baris Harvey: Yes. Yes.
Justin Marchegiani: And it can have a similar effect with EPOC like after your exercise when you get to that state where you are kind of like really reaching for your breath. That type of exercise excess post-exercise oxygen consumption, can that have a similar stimulus?
Ben Greenfield: I do not know. Because it is a different feeling. Just like breathing hard after your workout. It is a different feeling than what I would consider to be true hypoxia where it’s like going blue in the face holding your breath type of thing. Probably a closer analogy on that would be like using for example, like an elevation training mask during a workout.
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm.
Ben Greenfield: Or using, like I got a device out in my garage called the hypoxicle which decreases the partial pressure of oxygen in the air. And you can like put it next to a bicycle or a treadmill and it will simulate you exercising like 18-20,000 feet. And the interesting thing about that is that it is kind of hypoxia but it is also decreased partial pressure of oxygen. So you will also get increased production of erythropoietin which is a red blood cell precursor. So that is kind of a cool little toy to have around if you want, let us say, compete at altitude or increase your blood’s oxygen carrying capacity.
Baris Harvey: Yes. And speaking of hypoxia training, you talked about the elevation mask which I guess technically does not change the partial pressure like the other device you have but it is kind of more of a resistance breath kind of training thing. So I have one of those and also a Powerline but I have been using it during some of my practices. During some football practices, running routes in the beginning and actually getting pretty fatigued quickly at first but it makes the training without it so much easier. Can you talk a little bit more about, because I think that is an easy first step for people because it is not that expensive. Like I think its 80 or 60 bucks something like that. Can you talk about the elevation mask and how you might use it in you training?
Ben Greenfield: Yes. The elevation mask like you say is just resisted breathing, really. It is not reducing the partial pressure of oxygen. You are just kind of having to breathe through a smaller hole. It is like breathing through a straw. So there are a variety of applications for something like that. I mean my favorite way to use it is just like I do not do as many short quick exercise sessions with it as much as I will rock with it. Meaning I will put on a weight vest or weighted backpack and do a hard hike in the hills wearing the elevation training mask. And the thing I like about that is like I can take my kids with me and take my kids out on a hike and whereas normally like going on a hike with your kids, like my kids are six. Like that would be really easy but it turns into a hard workout. The other thing that I like to use it for because I am really focusing on slow controlled breathing anyway during this is Yoga. Just because it takes something like Yoga and turns it into a little bit more metabolically demanding type of routine. So I have used it for that. There are a lot of people that like to use it for you know kind of like you are doing running routes or doing like a Burpee based workout or Kettlebell swings, stuff like that. The only issue I found with that is sometimes I have trouble focusing on quality of form when I feel like I am going blue in the face. And maybe that is why I like doing it better with things that do not require as much quality attention paid the biomechanics. But you know if you are able to maintain good biomechanics and good running form and all that jazz while you are using it, then you know it certainly has got some application there, too.
Baris Harvey: Yes. Definitely when the form starts to go down it is like, “All right, let me take this off of my face so I can breathe and actually focus a bit.” It is the same thing with like a weighted vest which is probably not that much heavier because it is like 12 to 15-pound kind of thing just for some added resistance. But yes, definitely like you said not the kind that will throw you off and just start making your form horrible. Because then, you will be actually going backwards and training yourself to do the wrong thing.
Ben Greenfield: Yes.
Justin Marchegiani: And Ben, I also see you write a lot about doing a lot of your endurance work. But you are going into ketosis and I noticed that you said that you can keep your carbs even upwards of 100 to 150 grams of carbohydrates and still be in ketosis. And most people if they are familiar with ketosis, that is basically your body burning more fat for fuel. And typically like in an Atkins type of world, that is keeping your carbs below 20. But Ben has experienced keeping his carbs much higher. Can you talk more about that?
Ben Greenfield: Yes, just this paradox between trickle down health information coming from people who might be, no offense, wander around Whole Foods, doing yoga, you know, three times a week versus people who are out there really exercising hard. Like my experience, primarily my background is working with athletes, people who are really going out there and doing some pretty tough stuff. In many cases, you know most days of the week. And when you look at somebody like that who is going through that amount of energy, they can get away with a lot more than the average person can when it comes to things like carbohydrate intake or even total calorie intake. And when I do blood and breath ketone monitoring when I am in the throes of Ironman training, I can maintain ketosis on a very high level of carbohydrate intake because I am simply using all that carbohydrate very rapidly for formation of ATP. And elevations in blood glucose really are pretty slight just because glucose is disappearing from the tissues so quickly when you are exercising. Especially, if your primary carbohydrate intake is coming during periods of time when you have a really high upregulation of non-glucose dependent insulin or non-insulin dependent glucose transport pathways. Meaning that you are really not putting much of a strain on the pancreas, glucose is getting shoved in the muscle tissue or liver tissue very, very quickly because you are exercising and because you are very insulin sensitive. And so when you look at a situation like that, you can even get as high as 250 grams of carbohydrates on a tough day and the understanding there is that depending on like the training program that you are doing or what you are eating during exercise, sometimes half to three quarters of that is just stuff that you are taking in during exercise to support, you know, the day’s fueling. And you know, in a situation like that there is very little happening in terms of elevations in blood glucose and you can still stay in a very concentrated form of ketosis. And all the more so if you are using things like medium chain triglycerides and things that are going to keep ketones elevated.
Justin Marchegiani: Interesting, interesting. Great. I am going to switch gears here for a second because Ben does a lot of work with functional medicine and he works with WellnessFX, blood panels and those consulting I think across the country? International?
Ben Greenfield: Well, I work primarily online. So yes, like I do most of my consults via Skype and over the phone.
Justin Marchegiani: That is cool. And in Ben’s book, he talks about parasites. He talks about the experience of him getting one or two different parasite infections. Can you go into that and how that affected your performance?
Ben Greenfield: Well, you know parasites primarily where you would see that of course, as you would expect would be on a bowel performance level. But you can also, like for example, I did that completion in Thailand where I got a parasite from basically the stagnant water that we swam in in Thailand. And initially, it manifested itself as just a little bit of like diarrhea and some bowel upset. And then like long-term, I had some floral imbalances and issues with constipation about every two weeks like clockwork as these things like hatch inside of you. You get insomnia. And so there are some pretty nasty things that are happening. And interestingly, I test a lot of triathletes, especially. And they, a lot of them wind up with parasites related to fresh water, the type of parasites that you would find in fresh water or water growing parasites. And I think that a lot of times when you are looking at gut issues, leaky gut, you know, stomach problems, bloating, poor sleep, and those types of things that you tend to see a lot of times in athletes, and in this case triathletes. And a lot of cases it can be a parasitic issue. And there are different things that you can use. You know in my case, I use the Chinese Herbal extract that was primarily a base of Berberine and the Ayurvedic herb complex Triphala and you know that was and has been pretty efficacious for me for knocking out a parasite. But yes, it is definitely an issue. And you know, I do not think that all parasites are bad. There is definitely that whole healthy hygiene hypothesis that suggests that some amount of dirt and germs and bacteria and viruses and even parasites help to strengthen the immune system. But I think that there are some that you know, if you are very symptomatic with bowel issues and insomnia and stuff like that, that is a parasite you should probably think about getting rid of.
Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely, and I worked with patients all over the world as well and I see a good amount of these parasite infections they do not even have gut symptoms along with it which is pretty crazy. I mean just seeing brain fog or hormonal issues or just lower performance because they can just be that kind of silent energy suck out of your adrenal glands where it just lowers that cortisol. Decreases your ability to recover. Kind of drains down your sex hormones a little bit. That is interesting that you had that in your book and then you had an experience with it. Very cool.
Ben Greenfield: Yes, yes.
Baris Harvey: Yes, when I first met you, you are on that herbal extract and you looked like you have something you are putting in there to take that bad boy away.
Ben Greenfield: Yes, yes. Well, because parasites can cause gut inflammation, I think in that case I was using the, who is it that makes that; it is the InflamX Meal Replacements.
Justin Marchegiani: Oh, that is Metagenics.
Ben Greenfield: It is very, very good with people with Crohn’s or irritable bowel. Yes, Metagenics, yes. The Metagenics InflamX is good. Thorne has one called MediClear, I think.
Justin Marchegiani: Yes.
Ben Greenfield: But yes, those are good. They are good for travel, too. Like a lot of people get stressed out. This happens to me sometimes when I travel, I will get constipated. I am travelling with some kind of a meal replacement blend that you use for most of your meals. Can help out quite a bit in situations like that where you just basically kind of not going for your airplane food or airport food or even hotel food at all. And you just travel with these meal replacement blends and you go to Starbucks and ask them for a cup with some water and dump it in there and stir it up with a plastic spoon. And will do that three times a day when I travelling now and it helps up quite a bit.
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm. Yes, really smart move. All right, last question. Overtraining. Now this is something that comes up big but at the same time we have people that are CrossFitters that we work with that are pretty darn good at their sport and they do like Two-A-Days. Now, with the world of the neutraceuticals and some of the access to food that we have, is there a way that you can, I guess, push the envelope and possibly do something like a Two-A-Day? Say I know this is something we do. As a football athlete, I might do a Two-A-Day. But CrossFitters and what not, are there ways to kind of improve recovery I think would be the main point not necessarily the ads where people sell these pre-workouts. I think what is important is the recovery portion. Is there a way that you think that you can get by doing Two-A-Day at least for a short period of time to increase performance for a sport?
Ben Greenfield: Oh, yes. I mean like I do Two-A-Days with a lot of my clients. We do in the morning when parasympathetic nervous system is a little bit better branch of the nervous system to go after. Where you would like easy aerobic movement protocols, a lot of Yoga, we will do foam rolling, inversion, just like a lot of the stuff that is a little bit more like deep restorative exercise. And then the hard MetCon stuff, high intensity interval training and weight training we do later in the day. And that works out really well. I think that a Two-A-Day that includes hard training that is very sympathetic nervous system based earlier in the day is stressful. I have done it before, I have gone to camps. Like I will be at SEALFit camp this August and I can guarantee we will be getting up early in the morning and like hitting the grinder with drill sergeants yelling in our faces in the mornings. And I do not think that is good for the body or the adrenals long term. One of the reasons I am doing it is because it makes you cut short term and it prepares you for stress short term. But I think that long term as a habit to do hard morning workouts, I do not think that is an ideal scenario. I think that the human body does best slowly waking up and getting that parasympathetic nervous system activation and training the body for parasympathetic dominance in the morning and then doing more of the fight and flight later on in the day.
Baris Harvey: Uh-hmm. Sounds awesome.
Justin Marchegiani: Good stuff. Good stuff. So everyone that is listening here, if you to want to get more information about some of Ben’s work and his New York Times bestselling book, “Beyond Training” feel free and check that out at Amazon. Ben, tell us about some of your site, your blogs, YouTube channels, your coaching stuff. Where can our listeners get access to that stuff?
Ben Greenfield: Yes, I do a lot of blogging and podcasting over at bengreenfieldfitness.com and that is a good place to go to just check out the articles that I write and the audio recordings that I do about twice a week. And it is basically kind of tapping into some of the stuff that I am talking about. I am constantly trying to research the best ways to optimize performance and fat loss and health. And so that’s it. That is a good place to go, its bengreenfieldfitness.com.
Justin Marchegiani: Thanks so much, Ben. We appreciate you coming on.
Ben Greenfield: And thanks for having me on guys.
Baris Harvey: All right, thank you.
Justin Marchegiani: Awesome.
The Benefits of Coconut Oil, MCT Oil, and Ketosis
By Dr. Justin Marchegiani
Most people aren’t aware of the benefits of coconut oil, MCT oil, and ketosis. Coconut oil is a fat that has been really popular over the last five or ten years. It is a saturated fat, which means it essentially has a very stable temperature, allowing you to cook it at higher temperatures and not rancidify the fat. Healthy saturated fats are really important for optimal health.
The Chemistry behind Saturated Fat
Saturated fat is nothing more than open carbon (C) atoms linked, or bonded, together. Each open carbon atom can take on four bonds, and when all four bonds are in place, the bond is saturated. By comparison, in monounsaturated fat, one (mono) of those bonds is a double bond. And in polyunsaturated fat, more than one (poly) of those bonds are double bonds.
The Chemistry behind Coconut and MCT Oil
Carbon chains consisting of six (C6), eight (C8), ten (C10), or twelve (C12) carbon atoms are known as medium chain triglycerides (MCT). The majority of the fat in coconut oil consists of the following MCTs:
- Caproic fatty acids (C6)
- Caprylic fatty acids (C8)
- Capric fatty acids (C10)
- Lauric fatty acids (C12)
Whereas coconut oil contains all four MCTs, or fatty acids, MCT oil is primarily made of caprylic (C8) and capric (C10) acids, so the carbon chain is eight or ten carbons long.
Benefits of MCT Oil
The benefit of using MCT oil over regular coconut oil is that we get seven to eight times more concentration of the C6 and C8 or C8 and C10 fats. The health benefits to adding MCT oil to your Bulletproof coffee or your tea, for example, include a nice boost to your metabolism and brain function.
Benefits of Coconut Oil
Coconut oil is an abundant source of lauric acid (C12) and has many health benefits including ketosis, decreased cravings, boosted immune functions, weight loss, and enhanced brain health.
Ketosis
A lot of those fatty acids, those medium chain triglycerides, convert into ketones through a process called ketosis.
Ketones are breakdowns of the fat that our body can use for fuel and energy, especially parts of our brain that have been damaged because of a metabolic syndrome or insulin resistance. This will keep the brain from being able to utilize glucose for fuel, but a lot of times the brain can refuel using ketones and light right back up.
If you want to learn more about ketones, so a search for Dr. Veech of Harvard University. Jimmy Moore’s book Keto Clarity will give you more information on ketosis.
It’s important to understand the difference between ketosis and keto-acidosis.
Keto-acidosis has to do with disease pathology, such as liver cirrhosis or type 1 diabetes.
When we go into ketosis, it’s not because of starvation. It’s nutritional ketosis, which is having an adequate amount of calories but keeping sugar low. It’s actually a normal bodily function, and there are a lot of health benefits in ketosis.
Click here if you need help determining if ketosis is right for you.
Decreased Cravings
The nice thing about ketones is they assist appetite regulation in the brain, telling you when you’re full. This decreases cravings. When we burn fat for fuel (ketosis), it helps our body understand when its hungry and when its not. So burning fat for fuel is incredibly satiating.
Boosted Immune Function
Lauric acid, the 12-carbon fat in coconut oil, has a lot of immune-boosting qualities. This is actually the primary fat that’s in mother’s breast milk that really helps support the child’s immune system and acts as an antibacterial.
In some of my antiviral programs I put together for patients, I use a product called monolaurin. An awesome benefit of monolaurin is it helps destroy viruses.
How do viruses work?
Viruses are nanoparticles—tiny compared to bacteria. Imagine the tiny virus particle wearing a cloak. This cloak keeps it covered so the immune system can’t see it. Since it can’t see it, it can’t attack.
A super high dose of monolaurin, lauric acid extract, uncloaks the virus so the immune system can see it and then attack and destroy it. That’s one of the really awesome benefits of using coconut oil supplements, which are rich in lauric acid. They can really knock out viruses, such as Epstein-Barr, cytomegalovirus, or even herpes.
Weight Loss
The Journal of Lipid Research published a study on weight loss comparing coconut and soybean oils. Two groups of women over 40 were tested for 40 days. One group was given soybean oil and the other was given coconut oil. They saw better weight loss in the coconut oil group. They also saw an improvement in LDL and HDL numbers in the coconut oil group.
Soybean oil is an omega-6 monounsaturated fat that feeds proinflammatory pathways. Coconut oil is more anti-inflammatory in nature because of those C6 to C12 medium chain fatty acids, and that’s the weight-loss benefit of it.
In another group, they looked at long chain fatty acids, fats over eighteen carbons long. They compared them to coconut oil, and they saw a significant benefit—a 60% reduction—in the group that lost the most weight: the coconut oil group. That study was in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Enhanced Brain Health
Like I mentioned above, a lot of people have metabolic issues and are not able to light up parts of the brain that can no longer use glucose for fuel. If you have adrenal fatigue, you may want to be careful about relying on ketones fully because typically ketosis and gluconeogenesis work together and gluconeogenesis is cortisol dependent.
Conclusion
Coconut and MCT oils can help achieve ketosis, and a lot of people do well with ketosis. But if you’re doing a lot of exercise or physical work, you may need more carbohydrates. If you have adrenal or thyroid issues, this is kind of a controversial topic, and we should test and see how you respond to ketosis-supporting measures.
Remember, everyone’s a little different. I do well on a cyclical ketogenic, going very low carb throughout the day with a little more of my carbs at night. You have to find what works for you and test it out on a ketone meter; or using your blood sugar meter results pre and post-meal as a gauge. Check out below for a good starting point.
Blood Sugar Testing Range
Fasting: 100 mg/dl
1 hour post meal: <140 mg/dl
2 hour post meal <120 mg/dl
3 hour post meal <100 mg/dl
Click here if you need more help learning how to take control of your health.
References:
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/87/3/621.full
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/44/5/630.abstract?
ijkey=923a68ca8b36cbce62b7ca1e658118c490ff018e&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha
Recommended Carbohydrate Intake For Optimal Health
Do You Know What Your Recommended Carbohydrate Intake Is?
Based on my clinical experience as a functional-medicine doctor, carbohydrate recommendations can be different for each person. If you are a healthy, insulin-sensitive CrossFitter, your body may be better adapt at utilizing glucose for fuel without any negative effects. Some individuals may fall into the category of being insulin resistant or having metabolic syndrome. These individuals have a very difficult time utilizing sugar for fuel and need to utilize a lower carbohydrate plan that allows them to burn ketones/fat for fuel. There are also many people in between on the carbohydrate spectrum! There are exceptions to every rule mentioned.
Did You Know That Carbohydrates Are Not Essential Nutrients?
Your body has no nutritional requirement for carbohydrates. It can actually make its own carbohydrates through a process known as gluconeogenesis, where your liver converts amino acids into glucose. Your body can also convert fat for energy through a process known as ketosis.
There are essential fatty acids and amino acids; these are nutrients our body cannot make and needs to take in through outside food sources. Just because your body has no essential requirement for carbohydrates doesn’t mean you should avoid carbohydrates.
When you look at the Food Guide Pyramid, you’ll see that over 60% of the recommended macronutrients come from carbohydrate sources. This begs the question, if carbohydrates are not essential, then why are such a large percent of them recommended on the Food Guide Pyramid? Food recommendations are typically made for political reasons, not necessarily scientific reasons. It’s a sad state of affairs that the lobbying efforts from massive food corporations tend to dictate what shows up on the Food Pyramid.
Carbohydrate Consumption and Reactive Hypoglycemia
When you eat carbohydrates, your pancreas responds by squirting out some insulin so your body can pull the newly broken down glucose into your cells so it can be utilized for energy. If you consume an excessive amount of carbohydrates, or consume carbohydrates that have a higher glycemic load, your pancreas will squirt out an exaggerated amount of insulin to ensure it will be taken up by the cells efficiently. In your body’s desire to utilize the glucose, it has actually dropped your blood glucose into a hypoglycemic state.
Most people live their life on these blood sugar swings from high to low. These swings put a tremendous amount of stress on your adrenal and thyroid glands. Hypothyroidism and thyroid imbalances are strongly connected with dysglycemia (swings in your blood sugar).
These ups and downs in blood sugar (dysglycemia) are a hallmark of metabolic syndrome. These swings also create extra sweet cravings—your body is hardwired to crave sweets when your blood glucose drops past a certain point. If you are always triggering your body’s fight-or-flight response with low blood sugar stress, you are telling your genes you are starving and you feel you need food in your mouth as fast as possible. This usually translates to eating some refined sugar and junk food, which sends you back on the same viscous cycle you were just on. Most people live their life this very way!
With habits like this, you will be putting significant stress on your thyroid and adrenal glands as they are required to rev up and down to buffer the hormonal roller coaster!
“Subclinical hypothyroidism is significantly associated with metabolic syndrome.“
How Many Carbohydrates Can Your Body Hold?
Your body can roughly hold about 300 to 350 g of carbohydrates in your muscles. One of the best recommendations for health is to add muscle to your body. Muscle provides structural integrity, enhances performance when moving, and also provides an additional reservoir for carbohydrates. When your carbohydrate levels are tapped off in your muscles, the next place carbohydrates are stored is in your liver. Your liver can only hold about 60 to 80 g more carbohydrates than your muscles, and it can become saturated much quicker.
After the 350 g of carbohydrates your body can hold in your muscles and liver, the remaining carbohydrates are converted to fat. Your body is very efficient at turning carbohydrates into fat and will do so if there are too many carbohydrates coming into your diet.
Click here to help get your blood sugar back in balance now!
How Many Carbohydrates Do You Need on a Daily Basis?
Ketosis and Fat Burning (0 to 50 g per Day)
When you keep your carbohydrate intake near 50 g per day, you’re going to enter a physiological state known as ketosis lipolysis. Most people get scared when they hear the word ketosis, confusing it for ketoacidosis, a state that type I diabetics and alcoholics with liver damage may go into.
Ketosis lipolysis is a normal state of physiology that involves primarily using fat for energy (this happens in fasting too). Fatty acids are broken down into ketones. These ketones are then used for fuel by the body and brain. Ketones also have an appetite-suppressing effect, and after a few weeks in ketosis, you will tend to lose your sweet cravings, too.
The Sweet Spot! (50 to 100 g per Day)
This is a spot I typically like to keep my carbohydrate range within; it allows me to not rely on exercise to stay lean and fit. If you have a damaged metabolism, a 0 to 50 g per day range may be where you need to live for a while. Some people also do well cycling in and out of ketosis: three or four days in a row in ketosis and one day in the sweet-spot range or higher.
Carbohydrates are primarily used for instant energy, so if you’re doing lots of exercise or you’re under higher amounts of stress, getting a little bit of extra carbohydrates from healthy sources may be beneficial.
Maintenance (100 to 150 g per Day)
Most people do well in maintaining their weight when their carbohydrates are within this range. Everyone is different, so depending on how damaged your metabolism is, this range may be too high for you. If you’re relatively lean, exercise three to four times a week, and engage in activities like CrossFit, this will be a great place for you to be. I recommend timing a good chunk of your carbohydrate intake post workout as a means to help improve recovery.
The Steady Track to Weight Gain (150 to 300 g per Day)
When your carbohydrate levels are this high on a continuous basis, especially when there is no energy output to back it up, you are starting to push your body into an insulin-resistant state. The hormone that is secreted when you eat carbohydrates is insulin, and it primarily works by pulling carbohydrates and amino acids into your muscles. Like we talked about above, when your muscles and liver are saturated with carbohydrates, the rest of those carbohydrates will be stored as fat. When your carbohydrate intake is within the 150 to 300 g per day range, it’s highly likely it will be stored as fat.
Danger, Will Robinson! (300 g per Day of Carbohydrates or More)
If you’re eating based on the Food Guide Pyramid, it’s more than likely your carbohydrate intake will be in or around this range. All you have to do is eat your bagel every morning along with your orange juice or cereal, have a sandwich for lunch with your Gatorade, and eat a nice plate of pasta for dinner, and you’ll be on your way. Most people that are eating carbohydrates at this high level tend to have insulin resistance as well as increased risk markers for inflammation and metabolic syndrome.
What Types of Carbohydrates Should I Eat?
Starchy versus Non-starchy
Starchy carbohydrates: White potatoes, sweet potatoes, winter squash, beats, yams, carrots (if cooked), butternut squash, rutabaga, spaghetti squash, turnips, pumpkin, plantains, and bananas. These carbohydrates can have higher levels of sugar along with higher levels of nutrients.
Non-starchy carbohydrates: Broccoli, spinach, kale, celery, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, zucchini, Swiss chard, spinach, asparagus, peppers, onions. These carbohydrates have the lowest level of sugar along with the highest level of nutrients.
High-Glycemic versus Low-Glycemic Carbohydrates
High glycemic: Grains, chips, candies, breads, refined sugars, cereals, junk foods, and tropical fruits (bananas, watermelons, pineapples, papaya, mangoes, and all fruit juices). Outside of the whole food fruit sources, higher glycemic carbohydrates tend to have the lowest amount of nutrients with the highest amount of sugar.
Low glycemic: Blackberries, blueberries, strawberries, huckleberries, apples, oranges. these carbohydrates, as a fruit, tend to have the lowest amount of sugar with a higher amount of nutrition.
The carbohydrates that you eat on a daily basis should be of the non-starchy variety, which are all the vegetables your mom tried to get you to eat when you were little.
There are some benefits to the intake of some of the starchy carbohydrates, but you have to make sure they are dosed according to your metabolic constitution and activity level.
When we’re looking at the glycemic index, this refers to how fast the sugar in the carbohydrates breaks down and absorbs into your bloodstream. Carbohydrates that have a higher glycemic index get absorbed and impact your blood sugar faster.
The faster the carbohydrates impact your blood sugar, the faster your insulin spikes. When you have pronounced insulin spikes, this drives down your blood sugar, creating sweet cravings just a few hours later. This is a vicious cycle that I see most people live in their entire life. Break the blood-sugar roller coaster by eating healthy proteins, fats, and the right carbohydrates for your metabolic type with each meal.
If you need help getting your blood sugar balanced, click here for more information!
References:
- http://www.marksdailyapple.com/the-primal-carbohydrate-continuum/
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Evan, it’s Dr. J! It’s a Monday. How’re we doin’?
Evan Brand: Hey, I’m doin’ great. What’s up with you?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hey, it’s good that you survived the weekend.
Evan Brand: Yeah, it was extremely exciting weekend with the baby—getting a lot of trouble with the baby.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Nice. What’d you guys do?
Evan Brand: Just hanging out at the park, hanging out outside.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Nice. That’s awesome.
Evan Brand: You get—you get stopped by a lot of people when you have a baby.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, I know. I just a got a dog a month or two ago and I just—I’ve never realized how many people are dog lovers, but man, we get so much attention when we have our dog. It’s crazy.
Evan Brand: Yeah, if you were single. That would be the easiest way.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I told my wife that. I said, if I ever—like if something ever happened where I can go back in time—if I were to do it all over again. I would’ve got a dog like right off the bat, like just a really cute, small dog but it’s all good. I’m happy where I’m at.
Evan Brand: Yup, cool.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: But I wanted to say, we were talking pre-show there that I got a crown today and I go see a holistic dentist in Austin. Her name is Dr Joan Sefcik. I’m gonna actually have her on the podcast real soon. We’re gonna talk about root canals, cavities, crowns, all those things, but I had an issue with my tooth where I needed a crown. About 16 years ago I split my tooth in half when I was really young, just eating a whole bunch of sugar, eating a whole bunch of gluten. Hadn’t really got the message back then about health. Split my tooth but I was actually able to keep it together with some cement, and obviously changed my diet and never had anything like that happened with my tooth again, but I had those—the long-term consequence of that tooth being unstable so we put a crown on it and we actually did some testing, too, to figure out what the best material was and we actually—I think we ended on a cubic zirconia. So right now I have an acrylic crown that’s a temporary one and we got a cubic zirconia one coming in. We had it muscle tested and we called the lab. We—we chose the top 3 materials that test the best based on blood chemistry and then we muscle tested the top 3 and I tested great for all of them which was great, and then the doc said, “Well, you know, this is the one I have the best success with, and because you tested great with all three, we’re gonna go with this one.”
Evan Brand: So I’m sure people wanna know with holistic dentistry, that’s all cash no insurance for that?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: A little bit. I mean, we have some dental but I—you know, I paid that I think out of pocket. I think it ended up costing me like a thousand bucks for the crown–
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And if I didn’t have insurance, it would have cost me $1500. Something like that.
Evan Brand: Oh, okay. So insurance kinda works for holistic dentistry.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: A little bit. I mean, the thing is what’s holistic is the material we’re using, right? We’re not using the standard-based crap. I think it’s nickel a lot of times–
Evan Brand: Yeah, it’s horrible.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Which can screw up with, you know, the conduction of nerves in the body. So that’s the big thing and also she used a lot of ozones as she go in there. She’d use ozone and get in there, like a lot of essential oils. So it was really targeted to kill a lot of the bacteria and crap that could be in there even though she—I actually asked her, she said it was great, which is good. It’s testament to you know, good, clean—clean eating. So we’re gonna have her on the show real soon to talk more about healthy teeth and oral hygiene, so that that’ll be fun.
Evan Brand: Awesome.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So I’m doin’ pretty good. Not bad. I get to go get my cubic zirconia tooth. My wife was texting me, it’s like, “Is that gonna look like one of those fake diamonds?”
Evan Brand: Is it?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: In your mouth? No, I don’t think so. I asked. It’s gonna look, you know, it’s gonna look cosmetically in sync with my other teeth. So it’ll be alright.
Evan Brand: Awesome.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. So we talked about doing something on ketosis. I’ve had Jimmy Moore on the podcast. I’ve spoken on Livin’ La Vida Low Carb Cruise. We did a podcast a few months ago on Keto OS which is a synthetic ketone supplements and look forward to digging in a little bit more on ketosis.
Evan Brand: Yeah, there’s a lot of benefits. Ketosis in my opinion is not for everyone at every point in their life. It has a lot of incredible benefits for weight loss but if you have adrenal issues in my experience, some people feel worse. Maybe there is that adjustment period but I find that if people are just they’re afraid of carbs, they can tank out even more. What’s—what’s your experience with adrenal issues and—and ketosis?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So I think ketosis is phenomenal for most people that are out there, especially if you’re dealing with metabolic syndrome, meaning there’s a level of insulin resistance and you’re body is having a difficult time tapping into fat for fuel, ketosis is phenomenal because what you’re doing is imagine fat is like this big branch and we’re trying to throw that branch into the wood chipper and then out of that wood chipper comes these things called ketones, and these ketones can be used by different tissue in the body and the thing is, glucose actually burns dirty. Right? It’s like a diesel fuel. You kinda sm—it’s smells. It’s stinky. If you ever drive by in a diesel car, at least the older ones. But ketones they burn really clean and when I say burn really clean, you don’t get a lot of reactive oxygen species or free radicals afterwards. So it burns really clean like that and also you don’t get the effects of glycation, which is basically all the proteins or tissue in your body gets sugar-coated and that creates basically a m—a magnet for free radicals. So we like ketones because of the stability they give people, right? With sugar, we get this up and down reactive hypoglycemic effect with a lot of people that are doing refined sugar or just higher glycemic foods, meaning they get into your bloodstream really fast. We don’t quite get that with ketones. So the big issue is most people who have metabolic syndrome, big waist, high blood pressure, lots of inflammation, lots of insulin and blood sugar, they can’t get the sugar into their cells and utilize it for fuel optimally. So they can’t—their cells are—are very resistant so they start—one, they get reliant on sugar to burn but two, their cells don’t wanna take it in a lot and actually burn it so they get very tired and a lot of that that gets put in gets stored as fat. So it’s a double edged sword. They’re tired. They don’t wanna exercise. They get cravings. They create more sugar and then when your insulin levels are high, it basically blocks fat from being burned so you’re primarily burning sugar but you can’t get a lot of it to the cells so you’re tired.
Evan Brand: Right. I’ve heard recently which I’ve read. I can’t remember what I was reading. There’s this kind of—there’s kind of a myth that’s perpetuated where people who are only a fat burner or only a sugar burner and that’s not the case. It seems that most people have the ability to do both and if you wanted to survive in primal times then you would have, you better have that ability to be able to burn glucose or ketones to survive. But I think the goal of that is you just wanna be primarily a fat burner, not primarily a sugar burner which is what would you say, 90% of the population is probably primarily glucose—glucose driven?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I would say at least 75%, and we talk in generalities, right? We’re talking like, “Hey, you know, you’re primarily burning sugar for fuel or primarily burning fat for fuel.” That’s—that’s the thing that we’re kinda get across there and most people, you know, when we talk about calorie partitioning, their partitioning, right? You know, imagine you got a police officer and his siphoning people through, “Go that way. Go that way.” You got all these calories that are going through and the police officer is saying, “Hey, go this way into the fat cell. Get stored as fat and a small amount will actually get burned. So we’re not shunting those calories. “Hey, go to the mitochondria. Get burned. Create energy.” While you’re creating energy, you’re building muscle because you’re doing something that’s creating resistance in the body which builds muscle, whether it’s the piezoelectric effect and you’re building calcium into the bone or whether you’re putting muscle into the muscle belly. So we wanna essentially use that you know, traffic policer officer or that you know, flight tower attendant that’s telling the planes which direction to go. We want tell those calories, “Hey, go to the mitochondria. Get burned versus get stored in the fat cell.” And one the biggest ways we can do that especially with people that have this insulin resistance metabolic syndrome is getting into ketones by cutting carbs.
Evan Brand: Yup, so–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Typically down to 20-30g is a great starting point for most people. Go ahead.
Evan Brand: Now, the people actually need to count? I mean, I’m probably in ketosis now at this point because I haven’t had much today. I had some—I had a bison burger and also I had some bison—or no, what did I have for breakfast? Had some kinda meat and—and I can feel that. I know because you can feel your breath start to stink a little bit more. That’s how you know. That’s like the first sign of ketosis or one of the first signs.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, yeah, you get the acetone but I mean, if you’re only at like .5 mmol, I mean that’s not a ton. So maybe your breath gets a little bit fruity, that’s the acetone. So there’s 3 kinds of ketone. There’s acetone. There’s beta-hydroxybutyrate and there’s acetate. So like if you look at the breath meters. The breath meters are really measuring the acetone in the breath and then the blood is measuring the beta-hydroxybutyrate–
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: In the blood.
Evan Brand: Okay.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right? And then some will actually measure the ketones in the urine, not that efficient because if you’re burning ketones, well, that means if you’re burning them they may not end up in the urine, right? So if you get someone who’s in ketosis, they’re spitting out a whole bunch of ketones but they’re burning them up efficiently they may not pee a lot out. Does that make sense?
Evan Brand: Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So early on you get a lot of people that are in ketosis but they’re body’s not efficient at burning those ketones so those ketones go in the urine to start.
Evan Brand: Well, let’s–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: But then later on as they get more efficient, you won’t see them in the urine. That’s why I got my ketone meter right here. I use the Abbott Precision Xtra or Precision Xtra and it’s—I got blood sugar on there as well as ketone strips, too.
Evan Brand: Yeah, I’ve done the breath. It was by Ketonix.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: I’ve done their breath one. That one was pretty good. I find that I had like a low level of ketones all of the time. Let’s clear something up though. When people hear about ketones, they’ve likely been in the grocery store or Walgreen’s or somewhere and they’ve seen the raspberry ketones as a weight loss supplement. They became very popular over the last probably 5 years. First off, raspberry ketones, they’re not even derived from raspberries when you see those. Most of the time when I’ve looked at the ingredients, a lot of times there’s synthetic chemicals in there. There’s artificial colors, sometimes artificial sweeteners in these raspberry ketones. So I do not recommend them. I don’t actually know enough about what’s actually in there to know what’s actually going to happen but generally just looking at some of the ingredient list on ketones, it—it’s garbage.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, raspberry ketones aren’t necessarily ketones. I mean, if you look at what’s in there, there are these phenolic compounds that aren’t your typical beta-hydroxybutyrate whether it’s calcium or sodium beta-hydroxybutyrate salts. Like if you look at a lot of the ketone products, there’s Keto OS. There’s another one, a Keto Sport I think, and they’re using the beta-hydroxybutyrate salts, calcium or sodium. Those are like the gold standard. Now you can use precursors, right? Kinda like how we use maybe pregnenolone for adrenal support precursors. You can use precursors like medium chain triglycerides which are gonna be primarily C8 and C10. Like the, you know, the brain—the brain ketones are more C8, right? Octanoic acid or I think that’s maybe caprylic, there’s two names. I like the octanoic because it’s more descriptive. The oct–, octo–, octagon, that’s 8—8 carbons. So typically we’ll do ketones that are C8 and C10 because you get the brain effects of ketones but you also get the metabolic effects. So like typically in the morning after I have either a good clean collagen shake or some eggs and I do my butter coffee with high quality MCT oil. I’ll get my ketones up within an hour or 2 to—to .5, .6 mmol and I feel great.
Evan Brand: Do you measure that?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I measure it, yeah. Now the thing is with the Ketonix, it’s more qualitative. So like that number like let’s say you’re—you’re a different color or light on that variant. That light that you hit one day, you may hit it the next day but your number may have been different if you were measuring it in mmol of ketones. So it’s a good indicator to—to say if you’re in ketosis. It’s not a good quantitative indicator of what exactly were you.
Evan Brand: Yeah, the other brand that I’ve seen before. I’m looking—trying to find the ingredients right now is Kegenix. So I’m trying to see what’s in here. It’s $200 for a 4-week supply.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, they’re kind of expensive. My biggest thing off the bat is number one, get your diet dialed in. So you talked about carbs. So the first thing is as a macro percentage of nutrients is you wanna get your fat up. Most people screw up in ketosis because they go too high in protein. They’re eating like you know, 30-40% protein. It’s hard to do that much in protein unless you do two things wrong. Number one, you eat lots of lean meat and number two, you do excessive protein powders. So those are the 2 things. Now you can get away, going higher on protein if you’re doing a lot of resistance training, alright? But if you’re not doing a whole bunch of resistance training, you want your macros up around 60-70% fat as a pretty good starting point. So what I recommend is just throw your foods into a MyFitnessPal and if you’re using a Paleo template, so that means you’re gonna be getting most of your meats from animal products. Your carbohydrates, you’re gonna choose obviously more from a non-starchy vegetable sources. A really easy thing is you’ll typically be good around 20-30g and you can just throw in your carbohydrates, a cup of broccoli, a cup of spinach, a cup of kale, maybe you’re doing some asparagus, maybe you do another salad for dinner or lunch. Throw all the vegetables that you do in there, you’re probably find that you sit around 30g of carbohydrate once you factor out the—the fiber, 20-30 is pretty good unless you’re doing a ton of juicing or ton of veggies. You’ll probably be around 20-30 net carbs. That’s a pretty good place to be. So that’s a good starting point and then from there, depending on whether you wanna stay in ketosis—I like to—to keep myself around 40-70 carbs a day and I keep—I get my ketones up to .5 and I feel phenomenal–
Evan Brand: So you’re—you’re–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: At around .5.
Evan Brand: So you’re basically in some level of ketosis most days.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely. Absolutely. And then like if you listen to guys like Jimmy Moore, Jimmy is around 1, maybe—maybe 1-2. And again, you don’t have to worry about ketoacidosis until you get to about 20. Ketacidosis is potentially what could happen to diabetics type 1 primarily and/or alcoholics that have cirrhosis, with that—they have messed up livers. Essentially ketoacidosis is when your insulin levels are high and your blood sugar’s high. Okay, that typically hard to do because when the insulin goes high, blood sugar goes low.
Evan Brand: Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Alright, so insulin’s high. Blood sugar’s high in the bloodstream but what’s happening is we can’t get the—we can’t get the—the calories or the blood sugar into the cell so the cell’s starving and what happens is the body is trying to generate energy so it spits out a whole bunch of ketones.
Evan Brand: Yeah, so–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Does that make sense?
Evan Brand: Yeah, so I was looking at the ingredients here. Basically what this is, it is the beta-hydroxybutyric acid, that’s literally what’s your supplement— supplementing with. That along with some medium train—medium chain triglycerides and then leucine, lysine and isoleucine. That’s it. And then erythritol, some Stevia, some color, things like that. So you’re literally just taking—you’re taking ketones. That’s what it is, right? The—the beta-hydroxybutyric is one type of ketone?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: Is that right?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct. I wanna go back and correct myself. I misspoke. So regarding the ketoacidosis, it’s the insulin is low. Insulin’s low.
Evan Brand: So you can’t deal with the blood sugar.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Blood sugar is high so you can’t get it–
Evan Brand: Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Remember insulin’s the lock or the key that goes into the lock. The—the keyhole is receptor site, whether it’s a GLUT4 key which is that’s allowing sugar into the muscle or whether it’s on the liver and an—various different GLUTs. So imagine the GLUT’s the lock and insulin’s the key. So you can’t use the key to get into the cell. So what happens is all the sugar accumulates in the bloodstream because insulin’s low. So everything I said before is correct except it’s because of low insulin. Think, right? Type 1 diabetics have an issue with low levels of insulin because their—their islets cells in their pancreas, the beta cells have been destroyed by autoimmune attack. So they can’t get that sugar in there, so the body’s freaking out. It’s saying, “Where the heck am I gonna get energy?” So it starts ramping out a whole bunch of ketones. Ketones have an acidic ash to it or an acidic foundation to it so it shifts the pH because of instead of being a nutritional ketosis at .5 mmol or 1 or maybe 2, they are 20-10 x higher and that shifts the pH down. When the pH goes down, they can go into a diabetic coma.
Evan Brand: Wow. Yeah, I—you said that quickly otherwise, I probably would have caught that. That makes a lot more sense. So insulin’s low, sugar’s high. That’s when you don’t wanna do it and like the supplement says that you cannot use it with type 1 diabetics for that reason.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And I—exactly. And I was listening to a lecture just yesterday talking on the topic and he did the same thing I just did and I—I got his bad habit from it. He said the exact thing I said the first time.
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So I got the bad habit by osmosis, but we corrected it here. So think low insulin, high sugar, the cells are starving.
Evan Brand: Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: The body freaks out and it tries to go and generate a whole bunch of ketones but shifts the pH. Now how do we use ketones beneficially? So we can use exogenous precursors like we mentioned, okay? Obviously the diet’s gonna be foundational. Now for some people, there’s a couple of ways of doing it. You can live in ketosis. That can be great for some people. If you have cancer, lot of great studies especially over at Boston College, Dr Veech, NIH guy. He went to school—he studied under Dr Hans Krebs, I mean the guy invented the Kreb cycle, alright? He discovered it, which is how the body generates you know, energy via NA—NADH and FADH redox—redox reactions which then generate ATP in the—in the Kreb cycle as well as the electron transport chain, but this is how our body generates energy and this guy studied with this doctor that created or discovered this stuff. So moral of the story is this is another way the body can generate energy and ketones are really important part of the Kreb cycle and they are really important part of starving out cancer cells. So cancer’s primarily—primary fuel if you look at Otto—Otto Warburg or Otto Van Warburg, a German scientist in the 30s and 40s who got 2 Nobel prizes discovering this physiology around cancer cell metabolism and he found that cancer cells primarily survive on glucose and if you can starve the cancer cells of that metabolic fuel—remember it burns dirty—if we can use ketones, we can essentially starve that type of cell.
Evan Brand: Yeah, so—I mean, basically you and I both touch in to ketosis. Now I do do some sweet potatoes and things in the evening so I likely pull myself out of that so this is something that this is gonna depend on the person but you can touch in to ketosis—you do some carbs, don’t you? Do you do sweet potatoes with dinners?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I cycle in and out. I cycle in and out. Typically at dinners, I’ll do after a dinner as a treat. I’ll do a handful of berries and maybe some cream.
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Or I’ll do some high quality, 90% dark chocolate that’s you know, organic and you know, obviously gluten-free. So it depends. Like this week I did buy some sweet potatoes so at one night, I’ll have that. I mean, you get different diets out there like a cyclical ketogenic diet.
Evan Brand: Right.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: There’s also Jason Seib’s stick on the AltShift Diet, which is I think a 3 days—I think it’s a 5-day low carb, 3-day high carb kinda stick as well. So there’s different things out there where you can cycle in and out and those I think tend to be really good for most people. If you’re more metabolically damaged, ketones, ketosis at that 20-30 induction phase can be pretty good. It depends. Some people I see if they’re in ketosis long-term will start to develop some of those hypothyroid symptoms, losing hair, hair loss, outer third eyebrow, cold hands, cold feet, mood stuff.
Evan Brand: Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And then would just add in just a little bit carbs, small amount, and they’re doing better, so–
Evan Brand: That’s what I had to do.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, so some people–
Evan Brand: I crashed.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Do better so I’m not dogmatic at all. There are people out there that do great on that diet and because they’re not clinically oriented, meaning they’re not working with patients that we are, they—they just think well, because they did good on it, the other person out there that’s having a bad response or not as good response must not be doing it wrong.
Evan Brand: Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I’m sorry, must not be doing it right.
Evan Brand: Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Because they’re doing it wrong essentially. So we always just make sure the fat macros are up, the protein macros aren’t too high, and then just make sure the carbs are there and that’s a pretty good sign off the bat and then we can always measure it. Get to a .5 to 1. 1 is pretty good. Cut off. So we can customize it and then we can figure out. Okay, you’re at ketosis. You’ve been there for 2-3 weeks. You’re stabilized now. Okay, you’re already at a healthy weight. You’re feeling good. Your markers look good. Let’s just taper up some of those carbohydrates a little bit, just a little bit. And this is where it’s cool that you can play around with these exogenous ketones, the beta-hydroxybutyrate salts like the calcium and the sodium. This is great to try. Be careful though. Don’t make the mistake of adding these synthetic ketones and eating a whole bunch of sugar. The body is programmed when insulin goes up, typically ketones never should be there, right? Because think about it, right? Insulin has to be low for ketones to be high. Because if high insulin’s present, the body will block fatty acid synthesis. What are fatty acids? That’s the tree branch going into the tree chopper. Out comes the ketones, right? So we wanna keep insulin low so if we eat a whole bunch of sugar, take some exogenous ketones, insulin’s high, guess where those ketones are going, you know?
Evan Brand: Well, hopefully it’s gonna help go into the mitochondria.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, if insulin’s high and sugar’s high, you’ll actually pee it out. So if you use exogenous ketones, you wanna keep the insulin low still.
Evan Brand: So if you—so if you’re eating high sugar or you’re eating high carb and then you take ketones, you’re saying waste of money.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Waste of money. And again a lot of the marketings out there because frankly, a lot of these ketone companies, they don’t care if you do it right or wrong.
Evan Brand: Right.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Because they’re getting—they’re getting paid either way.
Evan Brand: Exactly.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Not saying that’s bad. There’s education that comes into play. So if you’re using exogenous ketones which I think can be great from a performance, neurological standpoint especially if you have issues with Alzheimer’s, things like that. That can be phenomenal because then if you have the right diet in place and then you add some ketones, it’s like bada-bing! You’re there. You know, we call it therapeutic ketone therapy. You know?
Evan Brand: So basically, don’t waste your money. If you’re gonna do this thing then get the diet straightened out always but then get the—get the cyclical Ketogenic Diet or experiment with that first before you buy ketones.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Experiment.
Evan Brand: That—that’s expensive. That’s $200 and that’s a—a way to waste it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And you may not have to be you know, full out ketosis. You know, I sit around .5 to 1 and that feels pretty good. I think just spit out some ketones.
Evan Brand: Okay.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Get to a pretty good place. See if you can test it. Get down to .5 or 1. See how you feel. Stabilize and then taper in some carbs. You know, start off with a little bit of lower sugar, lower fructose fruit, and handful of berries. It’s a pretty good place and then you can always try adding in a little bit of safe starch, sweet potatoes, squash, yams, plantains. Do it at night. Because your body doesn’t need the extra sugar during the day because cortisol’s already there, mobilizing and conducting sugar out of the—out of the glycogen, out of the muscle tissue, or out of the liver. So the glucose is already going where it needs to go because of the high cortisol. Do your carbs at night where that cortisol isn’t as present.
Evan Brand: This is fun.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, you having a good time here?
Evan Brand: Yeah, this is fun.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Awesome.
Evan Brand: Well, just because you know, there—there’s so many different ways to go about this and there’s never—I—I think when people download these episodes, they think there’s gonna be like a single and that’ll be all answer, and that’s never going to exist especially for this ketosis discussion here.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Plus we’re clinicians, so if it were that easy, you know, every patient would be a home run, right?
Evan Brand: Yeah, exactly.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So we have to put on our clinician cap, you know, so to speak. And we look at the diet, we customize it. So if you’re an endomorph, right? Larger, bigger, you know, wider hips, bigger belly, you know, those type of things, you put on fat easier–
Evan Brand: Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And it’s harder for you to burn, then you know, you’re gonna really benefit by starting out with a Ketogenic Diet and then customizing and then stack your carbs. When it’s time to stacking your carbs, stack your carbs on at night.
Evan Brand: Here’s another thing I wanted to mention though, too, that we haven’t brought up yet. And you and I talked about Kalish’s talk I think a few weeks ago together, where if someone has a bigger waist and they have this excess body fat. Even if they go into a ketogenic approach, they may not lose weight because of those toxins that are stored in the fat cells could still disrupt the metabolism, right?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, so the fat cells are a toxic reservoir for toxins essentially. A lot of our toxins go into the fat cell. They’re–
Evan Brand: So what do we do then if—if you’re going, you’re trying to go super low carb and yet you still just maintain your heavy weight, you cannot burn fat?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, that’s where seeing a good functional medicine practitioner helps so we’d look at organic acids. We would look at how you’re detoxifying via pyroglutamate and sulfate and a lot of these organic acids that look at phase 1 and phase 2 liver detoxification. Phase 1 is taking fat-soluble toxins, right? It’s already there. They’re lipid-soluble. I mean, they’re in the fat cell. We’re liberating them and turning them into water-soluble toxins primarily via B vitamins, antioxidants, and then we facilitate the transfer of these water-soluble toxins out the urine, out the stool, out the breath or skin, right?
Evan Brand: Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we do that with sulfur amino acids, right? We’re supporting methylation and—N-acetylation, hydroxylation ,right? Glucuronidation, glutathione, all of these pathways that are shooting it out. So phase 1 is more B vitamin and antioxidant induced. Phase 2 is more sulfur amino acid induced. And then also some people because amino acids make carnitine, carnitine’s a really important compounds that shuttles fat into the mitochondria. It’s literally called the carnitine shuttle. You can Google it. It’s shuttling fat in the mitochondria to be burned so some people will see low carnitine. We’ll see some mitochondrial defects and then we’ll see some detox issues. So that can be something that we–
Evan Brand: Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Incorporate into someone’s metabolic functional medicine program to help enhance it. So we get the diet dialed in non-dogmatically. Again, if you’re overweight, default to a Ketogenic Diet. That’s pretty safe. A Ketogenic Diet on a Paleo template. Right? Atkins create the—or Atkins made that ketogenic term famous except he used a lot of crappy foods, you know, didn’t differentiate with soy protein, added aspartame and artificial sweeteners. Didn’t care about grass-fed or chemicals or pesticides or Roundup so he kinda stumbled on it by accident–
Evan Brand: Right.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Because he was just looking at it from a sugar and carbohydrate standpoint. He didn’t look at it from the qualitative standpoint of phytonutrients and pesticides and chemicals and—and inflammatory foods and excitotoxins like MSG and aspartame. So we know more. So we kinda add like a—a Ketogenic-Paleo template on to it and then we have tools like the Precision Xtra by Abbott and get it on—I think get it on eBay and buy the strips on eBay. There’s a company out of Australia. You can get a much cheaper—they’re expensive. They’re like $1 or $2 a strip but if you buy them here, they’re like $2 to $3. So you can get them like 50% off. I bought like 100 strips and I just test my ketones a couple times a week to see where I’m at and I pretty much know where I’m at based on what I eat because I’ve tested so many meals. I see a pattern.
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So if I’m eating like good, clean eggs or a good clean collagen shake with some good fats, MCT and butter in the morning, I’m sitting around .5.
Evan Brand: Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And I feel pretty damn good with that.
Evan Brand: Yup, so I know we’re running out of the time but some of the benefits you can expect—I notice mental clarity goes up if I’m pushing towards ketogenic. Weight loss can happen which I don’t need to lose any weight but I am less hungry. I’m able to go little bit longer between meals. I don’t feel like I’m crashing like I was when I was doing more starch. There’s a few benefits for me. Did you wanna say anything on that part?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I think you touched upon it really well. I think a lot of people will hear this especially if they’re medically oriented. People get confused between ketoacidosis and ketosis. So I already kind of touched upon the people that ketoacidosis happens to and typically you’re looking at over 20 mmol/L is gonna be what happens in ketoacidosis and ketosis, you’re gonna you know, .5, 1, that’s totally fine. Now there’s nutritional ketosis which is what we’re focusing on, right? We’re doing it by nutritionally eating an adequate amount of calories because you can go on ketosis by starving and fasting.
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right? Because you still drive down your insulin levels because there’s no calories. If there’s no calories, remember insulin’s the door that opens up the cell for the calories to go in. Whether it opens up the mitochondria or the muscle or the fat cell, that’s dependent upon how much insulin is coming in. But you can lower insulin by just going low calorie. So you can be in ketosis via starvation, too. The difference is we’re doing it nutritionally, meaning we’re actually eating foods. They’re real whole foods and we’re getting enough calories so you’re body’s not gonna be eating away lean tissue.
Evan Brand: Yes.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Most people confuse it and they think, “Oh, you’re gonna be ripping up your body. You’re destroying your muscle.” It’s like—well, my body’s not stupid. It rather burn the nutrients that are in it versus taking away lean tissue, right?
Evan Brand: Yeah, so—so don’t starve. This is not starvation–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: They’re confusing the physiology.
Evan Brand: Yeah, totally.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: They’re confusing it and that happens all the time.
Evan Brand: Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And it drives me nuts so people need to really understand ketoacidosis and nutritional ketosis, and they need to understand ketosis vs fasting vs ketosis vs adequate calories and also ketosis at the acidotic level because of cirrhosis or type 1 diabetes.
Evan Brand: Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, I think that’s pretty good there. If you would have sum it up, what’s the take home, Evan?
Evan Brand: Well, take home. Try it out. Make sure you’re eating enough food. It’s easy to undereat if you’re basically cutting out, not almost, not an entire food group but essentially, so make sure you are getting enough good fats, enough good proteins, your coconut oils, your avocados, your avocado oils, your good meats, your good veggies. You know, your leafy greens are excellent. Stay away from the chemicals. If you start to crash, if you notice your outer one-third eyebrows going away, if you notice hair loss, if you feel like you’re a little bit more sluggish, you feel like hands and feet are getting cold like you alluded to, get some tests run. You can get some blood panels run for thyroid. You could get your adrenals tested to see if you’re just tanked out. Maybe you can’t go super ketogenic. Maybe that puts an extra stress on the body and you’re—you’re just not ready for that right now. So make sure your adrenals are healthy. Make sure your gut’s healthy and I think you’re gonna be—you’re gonna be on your way to—to weight loss if that’s a goal which is why many people go to—to ketogenic approaches.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So who should do this? Cancer patients, Alzheimer’s patients, anyone with metabolic syndrome, right? Waist size 35 or bigger for a woman, 40 for a man. Blood pressure, you know, in the 140s or up. Any bit of inflammation, chronic pain, any of those symptoms. A good therapeutic trial of a Ketogenic Diet, Paleo style, Paleo template is a great starting point and again if you enjoyed this show and you’re applying the information and loving it, sharing is caring. Also give us a 5-star review. We appreciate it and click below this screen and you can help us out.
Evan Brand: Yup.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Evan, it’s been real, brother.
Evan Brand: You, too. Take good care.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You, too. Bye!
Evan Brand: See ya! Bye!