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Head First Podcast

Ep6 - Mark Sisson on the Primal Blueprint and Primal Kitchen.

What is the Primal Blueprint, and why would an endurance athlete go “low-carb”? Let’s talk to the founder of the Primal Blueprint, Mark Sisson about this health and wellness approach to peak fitness, eating, and aging. Mark Sisson is an American fitness author and blogger, and a former distance runner, triathlete and Ironman competitor. Sisson finished 4th in the February 1982 Ironman World Championship. He has written several books, including The Primal Blueprint, which incorporates aspects of the Paleolithic diet. The Primal Blueprint is his fifth book. Sisson also blogs on fitness and health at his website, Mark's Daily Apple.

Episode Summary

On a recent episode of my Head First podcast I sat down with Mark Sisson, founder of the Primal Blueprint and Mark's Daily Apple, and creator of the Primal Kitchen product line. Mark is a former elite distance runner and triathlete who finished fourth at the 1982 Ironman World Championship, then spent the next several decades reverse-engineering why a body that looked fit on the outside was falling apart on the inside.

What he built is worth a careful look, because a lot of what he stumbled into through trial, injury, and self-experimentation lines up with what the metabolic and aging literature has been showing. Here is what we covered, and where the mechanisms actually hold up.

What is the Primal Blueprint, and how is it different from Paleo?

Mark frames Primal as a template for choices rather than a rulebook. Diet is maybe 40 to 50 percent of it. The rest is activity, sleep, sun exposure, and stress.

The core eating pattern is simple to state. Keep healthy fats up, keep most carbohydrates down, eat a balance of lean proteins, vegetables, and a little fruit. Meat, fish, fowl, eggs, nuts, seeds, vegetables.

The Paleo-versus-Primal distinction has softened over the years. Mark has become more carb-agnostic, and the gut microbiome research changed his thinking on legumes. Properly prepared legumes (soaked, fermented) feed the trillions of microbial cells living in your gut, so Primal allows them back in. Primal is also more permissive of fermented and raw dairy. The original design goal was to be inclusive rather than exclusionary.

The food framing here is mechanistic, and that is the part I find useful. Every bite of food is a hormonal signal. Food switches genes on and off through insulin, through inflammatory cascades, through the substrate it provides. The choice of which genes you want to express is the actual lever.

Why does sugar drive the diseases of aging?

I spend a lot of teaching time on this, and Mark and I agreed hard on it. The culprit in most of the diseases of aging is sugar, not fat.

The mechanism runs like this. Chronic high glucose drives glycation, the non-enzymatic bonding of sugar to proteins and tissues. Glycation and advanced glycation end-products show up in the pathology of Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative disease (Vlassara & Uribarri, 2014). High circulating glucose also drives chronically high insulin, which is itself inflammatory. Reduce the sugar, and you reduce the first step of the glycation cascade, reduce insulin, and reduce systemic inflammation downstream of both.

There is a related and underappreciated finding about Alzheimer's specifically. Neurons in the affected regions develop insulin resistance, sometimes called type-3 diabetes in the literature (de la Monte & Wands, 2008). They cannot pull glucose for fuel even when blood glucose is adequate. They starve while surrounded by fuel they cannot use, which may be why early Alzheimer's patients often crave carbohydrates. For the mechanism behind midlife metabolic shifts, see my piece on strategic fasting and the critical aging window.

This is well-established at the level of glycation chemistry and insulin biology. The Alzheimer's neuronal insulin resistance work is strong and growing. Whether intervening on it changes outcomes is where the evidence gets thinner.

Do ketones protect the aging brain?

The brain burns about 20 percent of your daily calories. It is a hot-running organ that needs fuel. The question I get constantly is whether that fuel has to be dietary carbohydrate.

Your body makes glucose through gluconeogenesis and by stripping glycerol from triglycerides. That covers the brain's obligate glucose need if you have built the machinery to burn fat efficiently. A sugar burner who has not become fat-adapted may demand more dietary glucose. A fat-adapted person makes what they need and runs the rest of the system on fat and ketones.

The brain readily uses ketones when they are available. Beta-hydroxybutyrate is a clean fuel for neurons. This is why ketogenic approaches have a long history in epilepsy and are being studied in traumatic brain injury, stroke, and Alzheimer's (Cunnane et al., 2016). Mark cited work giving memory-impaired patients supplemental ketones and seeing cognitive improvement; the controlled work on medium-chain triglyceride ketone supplementation in mild cognitive impairment supports a measurable cognitive effect (Fortier et al., 2019). The logic is that ketones can fuel insulin-resistant neurons that can no longer use glucose well.

There is also a slower adaptation. Mitochondrial biogenesis means that over weeks of fat adaptation, the mitochondria get better at burning ketones. You build the capacity through sustained demand, not through a single dietary switch.

Mark is writing a book on ketogenic diets, and his position is one I share. Ketosis is a useful tool, not a permanent way of living. He uses a compressed eating window (roughly 1 PM to 7 PM, a coffee in the morning being his only intake until then), which is intermittent fasting that produces a mild ketogenic effect and sets the body up to drop into deeper ketosis without a hard transition. If you want the cognitive angle on this, I covered it in biohacking memory.

Do supplemental exogenous ketones actually work?

This is where Mark and I both got skeptical, fast.

A typical ketone supplement delivers a small dose of beta-hydroxybutyrate, roughly seven calories per gram. A sugar burner who has not built the metabolic machinery to use ketones will simply expel what they cannot use. You are, as Mark put it, supplementing your toilet.

The marketing claim runs like this: we can measure ketones in your urine, therefore fat burning. What you measured is the ketone you just swallowed and then peed out. Presence of a ketone in urine is evidence of that ketone leaving your body, not evidence of fat oxidation. Mark's image for someone in this state is the person who does a four- or five-day juice fast, goes into ketosis, and is still groggy with acetone breath, expelling a fuel their cells have never learned to burn.

There is a narrow hypothesis that keto-adapted people can use exogenous ketones to jumpstart additional ketone production. Even that is speculative. As far as I can tell, the broad consumer ketone-supplement market is mostly marketing. This is my read of the research and Mark's, not settled science. Buy fat adaptation, not a bottle.

Why does mobility and lifting heavy things matter for aging?

Three of the ten Primal laws are about movement: move slowly and often, lift heavy things, sprint once in a while.

Moving slowly and often keeps your body tracking through as many ranges of motion and planes as possible. The popular step targets drift around (currently around 7,000 a day), and the value is staying active and mobile, not any calorie arithmetic. Loss of mobility is one of the strongest predictors of rapid health decline.

Muscle mass is the target of lifting, and the mechanism is systemic. Your whole body is organized around supporting lean muscle. Your heart paces to muscular demand, your lungs scale ventilation to it, your liver processes fuel and clears toxins largely in service of it. The body is ruthlessly efficient and discards any system it is not being asked to use. Stop loading muscle and bone, and the body de-allocates both.

Watch how that plays out across decades. After 30, sarcopenia sets in: a slow drop in muscle mass, bone mass, and water mass with a rise in fat mass. An inactive 80-year-old has atrophied muscle, low bone density from years of no weight-bearing load, and a heart that has never been asked to keep up with anything. A trip and fall breaks a hip. The hip is rarely what kills. The cascade is what kills: immobility, a hospital-acquired pneumonia, an inability to clear sputum while prone, congestive heart failure. Low vitamin D from a decade indoors compounds it.

The trajectory reverses, and that should make you hopeful. Some of the most compelling studies I have seen put frail older adults on resistance training and saw large strength gains over a matter of weeks, with improved mobility and walking ability (Fiatarone et al., 1990). The body still responds when you ask something of it. With strength comes mobility, getting out of the chair, walking, re-engaging with life.

Mark's 2017 theme, and his ongoing one, was mobility. Paddling, snowboarding, playing ultimate frisbee with twenty-somethings into his sixties. The goal is to stay capable enough to play.

Can you rebuild collagen and connective tissue with diet?

Tendons, ligaments, and the connective tissue that lets you move through full ranges all depend on collagen, the structural protein also found in skin, hair, and nails.

Your collagen-producing cells, the fibroblasts, still exist as you age, but they slow their output. Mark faced severe Achilles tendinosis around age 60 and was told he needed surgery to scrape scar tissue off both Achilles. Instead he loaded the tissue with raw material: 20 to 40 grams of collagen a day. There is controlled work showing that collagen peptides taken before loading exercise improve collagen synthesis and connective-tissue outcomes (Shaw et al., 2017). His logic was direct. He was a meat-centric eater, and he was sprinting hard, getting sore, and giving his body little substrate to rebuild with, so it built scar tissue instead, because that is the default repair when raw material is short.

Dietary collagen sources include bone broth (the traditional go-to), the soft connective tissue and skin of slow-cooked or stewed poultry, and marine collagen from fish bones, which is a more sustainable use of a filleted carcass. This is a reasonable mechanistic case and Mark's personal experience, not a large randomized trial.

Is avocado oil better than seed oils?

The fat story behind Primal Kitchen centers on monounsaturated fat, the omega-9 family. Most of the conversation focuses on omega-3 (anti-inflammatory) versus omega-6 (pro-inflammatory in excess). Omega-9 monounsaturates get less attention, and Mark argues most people do not get enough.

Avocado oil is pressed from the fruit, not the seed, so it carries polyphenols and antioxidant compounds. There is an extra-virgin version with the green color and back-of-throat bite you get from good olive oil, and a refined version with a higher smoke point (up to around 500 degrees) for cooking. The contrast is with industrial seed oils. Most commercial mayonnaise and most restaurant cooking runs on soybean, corn, or canola oil, chosen because they cost a fraction of avocado oil. Primal Kitchen's mayonnaise is 70 percent avocado oil with organic eggs, vinegar, sea salt, and rosemary extract.

I raised the satiety angle, because in my limited reading omega-9 monounsaturates seem to nudge satiety and fat oxidation in a way other fats do not. That is a soft, emerging observation, not a strong claim.

One critical caveat that came up. Eating more fat does nothing useful in the presence of high sugar. People hear "eat healthy fats," keep their carbohydrates high, add 300 grams of fat on top, and gain weight. In the absence of sugar, there is little evidence that fat alone drives fat gain. In the presence of sugar, excess fat compounds the problem. Cut the sugar first.

What does a brain-protective evening routine look like?

Mark calls sleep one of the most overlooked aspects of health, particularly for mental health, depression, and productivity. I agree, and I have written it up in biohacking sleep and biohacking your morning.

His nightly ritual is a clean demonstration of circadian and thermoregulatory principles. Around 10 PM, all house and yard lights are off. He has an unheated pool, currently about 52 degrees, next to a hot tub and a fire pit. He does a cold plunge, moves to the hot tub for about 20 minutes with his wife by firelight, then takes a final cold plunge before bed. The light exposure for that whole window is warm amber firelight, no blue light, no screens for at least an hour before sleep.

The mechanisms here are real. Falling core body temperature is a sleep-onset signal, and a warming bath a couple of hours before bed followed by the body's rebound drop in core temperature has been shown to support faster sleep onset (Haghayegh et al., 2019). Avoiding blue light in the hour before bed protects melatonin secretion driven by the suprachiasmatic nucleus; evening exposure to room light suppresses and delays melatonin (Gooley et al., 2011). He aims for eight hours and does not apologize for it.

He also handles travel deliberately. Crossing time zones is one of the more physiologically stressful things a person does. His protocol is specific: when to sleep on the plane, how long, how late to stay up on arrival, and timed melatonin. The principle is to shift the circadian clock on purpose rather than let it drift.

On meditation, Mark does not sit formally, and I made the case for why his life may already cover it. He gets long stretches of solo flow time paddling and hiking, and he runs constant, varied intellectual challenge as a business owner with no fixed daily routine. Normal aging is associated with a meaningful loss of gray matter in lateral frontal cortex across midlife, and the research suggests that long-term meditation is associated with less age-related atrophy in these regions (Luders et al., 2015), as is being metabolically healthy, physically active, and cognitively engaged. If you want the mechanism, I broke it down in biohacking meditation and mindfulness.

A note on the fractal dosing idea

One thing Mark does that I found interesting is vary his vitamin D dose deliberately. He is a poor converter by DNA, so he supplements, but he does not take the same amount daily. Some days 10,000 IU, some days 5,000 twice, some days none, some days 15,000. His reasoning is to keep the signal varied so the body does not accommodate to a fixed input.

Flag this as personal experimentation rather than established protocol. Dose vitamin D to blood levels, not to a feeling. The general principle of varied signaling is worth thinking about, but vitamin D has a known therapeutic range and accumulates, so anchor it to testing.

The through-line

The convergent theme across everything Mark and I discussed is that your body and brain de-allocate what you stop asking them to do, and re-allocate when you load them again. Muscle, bone, connective tissue, and metabolic flexibility all follow the demand you place on them.

The practical version is short. Cut the sugar first, because it drives the glycation and insulin pathways behind most diseases of aging. Build fat adaptation so your brain can run on ketones. Lift heavy things and stay mobile so the structural systems have a reason to maintain themselves. Protect sleep with cool temperature and darkness. Skip the exogenous ketone supplements until you have built the machinery to use them. Start with one of those this week and measure what changes.

You can find Mark at Mark's Daily Apple, the Primal Blueprint on Amazon, and the Primal Kitchen line at primalkitchen.com.

References

  1. Vlassara (2014). Advanced glycation end products (AGE) and diabetes: cause, effect, or both?. doi:10.1007/s11892-013-0453-1
  2. Fiatarone (1990). High-intensity strength training in nonagenarians. Effects on skeletal muscle. PMID 2342214
  3. Haghayegh (2019). Does before-bedtime body warming by bathing or other means attenuate sleep-time arterial blood pressure?. doi:10.1080/07420528.2019.1696812
  4. Gooley (2011). Exposure to room light before bedtime suppresses melatonin onset and shortens melatonin duration in humans. doi:10.1210/jc.2010-2098
  5. Luders (2015). Forever Young(er): potential age-defying effects of long-term meditation on gray matter atrophy. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01551
Full Transcript
[Music] so welcome to another episode of head first with dr. hill today's guest is marxist and creator of the primal blueprint so welcome mark thanks for being here thanks for having me yeah absolutely so I know a lot about the problem open or at least I've done it myself for many years but I'm guessing some of our listeners don't would you just give us a little bit of background about who you are what your story is and what this thing we call primal is sure always been interested in health and fitness since I was you know 11 read as many books as I could which weren't that many even in existence at the time on what it would take to be strong and lean and fit and and so in my teen years discovered that running and the whole aerobic movement was where it was at so I embraced that sure I also embraced this concept of eating lots of complex carbohydrates to fuel the running and over the next decade I began to became a really good runner quite quite fast raced very well in marathons and ultimately in triathlons however as fast as I became and as fit as I looked on the outside of starting to fall apart on the inside I was getting sorts of injuries that I shouldn't be getting inflammation osteoarthritis tendonitis I had irritable bowel syndrome most of my life I had upper respiratory tract infections several times a year so this this pursuit that I'd launched initially to become healthy took me in our path of of ill health and so when I retired at an early age unable to continue to compete at the level I had been because of injuries I really kind of dedicated the rest of my life to figuring out what I'd done wrong or you know where the shortcuts they call them hacks today were to get to this level of fitness and health to where I was back to being vibrant and energetic and enjoying life and I'm not miserable from having overtrained and and and inflamed from having eaten the wrong kind of foods so over the years I developed a way of living based on an evolutionary model that was starting to emerge we sort of referred to it as paleo but there are other there were other influences so based on on a way of eating a way of orchestrating the rest of my life making my workouts fun less grueling trying to get the most out of every workout paying attention to my sleep paying attention to how much Sun I got stress levels I crafted a life way that I said that seemed to resemble what an indigenous person might use as a guideline throughout their their lives and lo and behold because I'd been doing some research into genetics and how our genes recreate rebuild renew us on a minute-by-minute basis based on the inputs they get I started to create this framework that I would call the primal blueprint based on a primal primary evolutionary model but it was sort of a blueprint in that it's a template for making choices in your life that might serve you better if your goal is to be strong lean fit happy healthy productive this is not just about a diet it's not really that restrictive it's not about a diet and you can't really achieve all of the goals and the benefits you seek without paying attention to the diet so it's not just a diet but but and diet is probably 40% of it's 50% of it there are a lot of other factors but you really do have to you have to dial that diet in at some point and that's sort of just to probably grossly oversimplify is focused on keeping good fats up keeping most carbs down and eating a nice balance of proteins vegetables correct so it again to use the Paleo paradigm that was emerging starting 15 years ago this idea that our genes expect certain inputs from us and that food is a you know food is a is a signaling device among other sugar in the body and obviously for repair and for energy but as a as a you know it sends signals so every bite of food has a hormonal effect on the body so to the extent that we can switch on jeans and build muscle that burn fat turn off the genes that store fat turn off the genes that cause inflammation through the foods we eat then the choices of foods they it's kind of not coincidental that they mimic what our ancestors would have eaten lean proteins clean healthy fats minimal or no amounts of sugar for the most part minimal processed foods and and processed carbohydrates and there you have it and that's the meat fish fowl eggs nuts seeds vegetables a little bit of fruit that kind of forms the basis of this sounds great I mean I'm a big biased you know Pro primal guy from my perspective I teach a lot of people about you know brain health and there are things that can do modifiable behaviors to affect aging to affect performance and I often get asked about primal versus paleo and I'm I'm sure I'm not doing it justice but my sort of take on it is Palio's less focused on the carb limit and primal is more permissive of dairy yeah I mean in terms of the eating right and I think even to reduce it to those sorts of distinctions is becoming more blurred now as well because we we are more car bagged Gnostic okay as time goes by we were where paleo for instance would have been kind of don't eat legumes of any time you know the whole legume length anti-nutrient story got told a lot and as I dug deeper and deeper into that I started to see that some of the reasons that that that was making the headlines in the paleo world were maybe unique and probably ill thought that instead with the advent of this this focus on the biome on the microbiome in the gut and gut health and 100 trillion cells that live within us that are not us right and how we feed them all of a sudden the idea that the substrate provided by legumes properly prepared legumes could be an important factor in maintaining good health so we've allowed more legumes back into the primal blueprint properly meaning fermented soaked yeah not just simply right I mean they're a certain yeah there are certain types of legumes that that can be problematic if you don't prepare them correctly and I think that's one of the reasons that the Paleo world in general sort of shun them point uh you know carte blanche right but we're looking at a number of different methods of preparing them sort of the Western a price bringing Western a price into the into the mix here and suggesting that and by the way the the original idea behind the primal blueprint was to be as inclusive as possible not as exclusionary structure so that's why if you don't have a problem with dairy there are certain types of dairy that I would allow in the primal blueprint right and say go for it you know altered fermented dairy yeah raw milk you know artisanal cheeses certainly cream you know organic cream butter you know gay things like that so yeah I'm a pro dairy guy I'm yeah but that's simply because you know I'm Scotch Irish and we survive I'm Darius the primary protein for hundreds of years Papa right so right that's wonderful Arian in spuds yeah the potatoes were a relatively recent before the potato became big in in Ireland Scotland it was it was dairy and like forty seven kinds of different like fermented dairy as the main you know source of protein you know kind of interesting stuff so paleo is still pretty anti dairy though yes as a movement correct but that's just the the food component of it there are other things in certainly the primal blueprint that are much more about act architecting your lifestyle archiving your activity your behavior you know I praise going to mind like move slowly often and lift heavy things yeah can you say more about the idea that we need to be actually activating the bodies axiom yeah I mean we're you know we're bipedal which if you think about it and you and you think of all of the work that Dean came and put into the Segway to get two wheels to stand up and not fall over it and that's what we have two wheels that we can stand up and not follow it's amazing how we don't just topple over all the time well the way we're designed is to be mobile and to be to be agilent to move around a lot and by the same token we're not designed to be running marathons every day unlike some recent authors might have you believe you know we're born to run once in a while but not necessarily on a daily basis we're born to be fit enough to run when we need to and to the extent that we can orchestrate a life way in a lifestyle that allows us to maintain that that level of fitness that is robust and well-rounded so that we can lift heavy things once in a while so we can sprint once in a while this is what our genes expect of us and that was so those are three of the 10 primal blueprint laws or move move around a lot of the low level of activity and that just means it doesn't mean burn it's not really about burning calories it right about moving it's just about the fact that your body needs to move through as many ranges of motion and planes of activity as possible lift heavy things again really no more than twice a week but you know are the ancestral model was to drag the carcass back to camp to build a camp to carry a baby all day long to to to lift things that prompted a response at the genetic level to make that muscle stronger right so to the extent that we want to lift heavy things to build muscle mass you would say well why do we want to build muscle mass well the whole body the systems of the body are orchestrated around supporting lean muscle mass so your heart beats according to the demands of the muscle your lungs expand or contract according to the demands of the muscle do we need more oxygen we need taken taken greater volumes of oxygen you know the liver processes fuel and and removes toxins largely according to the demands of muscle and so on for the frame that I had thought about it well so you know it and then if you look at in the in the ultimate iteration of that you say well you know what does that look like when I'm 80 or 90 years old and I don't have my muscle mass well what it looks like is the fact that you haven't done anything for decades and you have muscles of atrophied also means that the heart has had no reasonable to bump jurors clear so the and the body doesn't want to hang on to any system that it doesn't really need today it's a waste of resources so body is very efficient in getting rid of stuff that that it doesn't need except for that right but in terms of muscle mass the fact that you can that you can decide to move and then by you're deciding to move and making that movement the heart then says oh I guess I got to be a little bit faster and keep up with that demand on the lungs start to breathe a bit more so when you when you don't have muscle mass and you don't have these demands on the body now you're you know 80 or 90 years old and you get up in the middle of night and you trip and fall and break a hip well your bone density is is terrible because the bones had no reason to maintain their structure because you hadn't been doing any weight-bearing activity you break a hip you get pneumonia you're prone you can't cough up the sputum you'd basically either die of you know of the pneumonia or of heart failure from from the heart not being able to keep up with you know congestive heart failure so all of this goes back to the beautiful design of the human body which sort of still requires that we do something to maintain its integrity on a regular basis that's wonderful so this sort of is in line I'm a gerontologist teach courses at UCL a-- an aging and we tell people that no less than depends on what year it is but now it's 7000 steps a day you see 5,000 and it's just step sitting and not burning calories per se it's remaining active and one of the biggest predictors of a quick decline in health is loss of mobility absolutely the hip thing you know happens a lot and the hip itself as you as you alluded to is not the reason people tend to die it's because of secondary infections from the hospital because of loss of mobility and damages and lifestyle yeah so this is all pretty congruent with aging yeah and ER so I mean we and we could take that to as many different generations or iterations as possible one that one would be you get an infection in the hospital and because you have been in the Sun for ten ten years your vitamin D levels are low mm-hmm many have been supplementing with vitamin D so there are a lot of a lot of aspect to the primal blueprint that are based on this longevity model which is how can I live you know we have t-shirts it's a live long drop dead right you know compression of morbidity yeah yeah push your illness to the last few moments of your life and right and the the bizarre and perverse iteration of that currently is you know you live long but you steer but you're ill for 20 years and somebody's got to pay for that yeah I think about this a lot in terms of flattening trajectories yeah all decline a little bit yeah there's a in terms of body mass there's a single sarcopenia where 30 years old and older we tend to have a long slow drop in muscle mass bone mass water mass and an increase in adipose mass yeah but I imagine and I'm not sure but I imagine that remaining active weight-bearing exercises these things will blunt that trajectory more than London I mean I on a daily basis thousands of people you know discover the fact that at 55 or 60 they start working out and they haven't for decades and they they realize that they can increase their muscle mass they can still decrease the amount of fat mass yeah so the sarcopenia isn't just you're just not just stemming the decline you're actually reversing reversing it and improving some of the most compelling studies I've ever seen her on octogenarians who are dead ridden who you get them into a leg press machine or some kind of machine in the gym and their strength improves three or four hundred percent over a six-week period the body still responds you just have to make it do something I just have to make the decision so with that increase in strength comes an increase in mobility and the next thing you know they're out of bed they're not in a chair they're walking around they're enjoying life more and it's it's a it's an amazing transformation that can happen just by engaging in some form of exercise that's wonderful so now you retired from competition how old were you when that happened when you I mean the first time I retired I was 28 uh-huh and your body's pretty who's fit was significant that it should have been at 28 essentially oh yeah oh yeah I had the inflammation any injuries and it just more than anything I was having fun I mean I didn't I'd already spent a decade more than a decade so I started running last I think I like every tire - 29 or 30 I guess but you know what every day of my life was about managing pain right and you know running 15 or 20 or 25 miles I ran out of miles a week for seven years it was about in a race it was about same thing managing pain it was never about having fun it was just about some drive that I had and as did millions of other people during the running boom seven eighties to go prove something to myself or whatever but by the time I'd been doing this for ten years and I'd been in 200 contest between the mile two mile 5k 10k marathon triathlon you name it I was over it yeah there's no money to be had those days it's like what am I doing with my life for one more medal yeah so I basically hung up the shoes yeah now oddly enough I had a I had a Jones for that endorphin rush that lasted another decade so I trained as if I was coaching for about a decade yeah I did you still have some increased injury and and you know lack of a recovery because you were training that way yeah I mean I trained at that point that's when I started the I started to understand the nature of training and because I wasn't racing and I didn't feel compelled to match what other competitors were doing in their training I coached a professional triathlon team for a bunch of years and to my to my wonderment and pleasure I found that I could keep up with them in whatever workouts I chose to come to participate with them I just didn't participate every day right so I might do one bike ride a week in one run a week but almost and that one bike ride net one run I could keep up with them and you were probably ten or twenty years old in these guys yeah I was in my late 30s by then so it was that's when I understood the nature of recovery and rest and and how you know most endurance athletes who are on the line there are beating themselves up in a basis or not recovering and then of course the diet the highly inflammatory diet just makes it worse right right so I changed my diet by then I'd gotten rid of a lot of the sugar I'd gotten rid of most of the alcohol which was there were copious amounts of alcohol on the running days uh-huh beer was a carbo-loading strategy so some joyful strategy but you know it was no this was in the days when when beer company sponsored races all over really Bud Light you know that yeah they were there were all sorts of trucks with spigots at racers you know actually my brother sorry my sister and my father had both long distance runners my sister's a lot of marathons five feet tall and yeah runs marathons and I remember as a kid seeing a top truck yeah Adam beer 3 yeah so I gave up I you know I stopped I stopped with the prodigious consumption of beer cut back on the sugar started to recognize the benefits of healthy fats and limited a on healthy fats and and and that really affected my my health greatly and then the final thing that the final really piece the puzzle that fell in a place for me was when I gave up grains grain time range it wasn't written transform my life yes my inflammation went away my IBS went away my you know my heartburn that I had on a regular basis went away it was yeah I didn't experience I gave up grains the first time after reading primal blueprint whenever it first came out decade ago or more at this point and I was reading your book and Rob Fagin's natural hormone enhancement on the same time and I started cycling and doing some you know cutting that way and found it to be just transformative and then started realized in the absence of grains when I let some slip in I oh yeah that's how I've been feeling bright house 30 years of my life oh oh yeah this isn't actually how I should be feeling again ace lines and there's a danger to that because I mean the good news is you recognize the feeling but the danger is too slight to backslide into you know what how much can I get away with yeah you know we don't know humans tend to do what they can do right up to the point right up to the edge and whether it's at work you know how little work can I do in so collect a paycheck or whether it's you know in relationships or whether it's in with in with food it's basically how much you know how much bad food can I eat I not suffer more than I need to yeah I have this perspective that it's at least partially due to the bat and foods quote-unquote have such high reward value and that from an evolutionary perspective we only had access to things with this high reward value yeah occasionally yeah Kim across the honey comb or the overripe tree or fruit or whatever it was these were not daily occurrences where you couldn't sit and just binge on hundreds of grams of rice free carbs every day so I think that's one reason why they're so compelling because evolutionarily required heirs yeah we're wired we're wired to to consume as much sugar as you can find in a in a hive now we're finding of course you know the the culprit is not fat the culprit in health consequence is usually sugar I mean I rant about this in my classes on my show most of the brain health most of the diseases of aging you know Alzheimer's cancer diabetes Parkinson's all the dimensions these things are all driven fairly aggressively by sugar a glycation of tissue shows up in beta amyloid glycation shows up in Lewy body disease so there's an obvious argument for dropping that out but beyond simply restricting carbohydrates what sort of you know primal implication is there for actually improving long-term aging decreasing brain inflammation that has less about sugar more today was actually the addition of fats or your body using fats give me a sense about that sure I mean again food is fuel and it's information and so the first thing I do is cut out the sugar I mean that's the more gets accomplished by doing that than any other single factor yeah and I've said this for probably a decade and Ron Rosedale said it for two decades and that is the less sugar you burn in a lifetime the less glucose you burn in a lifetime probably the better off you are so to the extent that you can eliminate sugar eliminate that that first part of the glycation experience to reduce inflammation as a result of having reduced sugar to reduce insulin which is also inflammatory all those things fall into place as you come back on sugar now in terms of the healthy fats the latest trend is to experiment with ketogenic diets surely how do you think about that I'm a big fan I'm writing a book on ketogenic diets and I'm uh but I'm a fan of it as a tool in a lifestyle and not a fan of it as a way of living okay necessarily partly because I just enjoy right other kinds of food so much I don't want to again I don't want to be exclusionary and one of my personal boundaries is I want everybody food I ever put my mouth to taste great so I don't want to choke something down just because it's supposed to be good for me right right and I don't want to be over consuming the crunchy salty fatty sweet stuff that's going to you know even though it tastes good I will say yeah you set up some bars of your your clinic they're crunchy so don't find any salty sweet and yummy I mean I'll say a couple my great research techs went through a box and about yeah half an hour we have it but no I am past week I've been eating a bar as breakfast with my cup of coffee after yoga school and just forgetting that I need I need food it has this really profoundly satisfying good part of it is they're chewy and they do you have to work at them to eat them so you're you know I had a problem with bars that we just you know eat three bites and they're gone you're like wait I just had 240 calories and I don't even feel like I did so we make you work for it a little nucleus next hypothalamus that actually I've almost this feeding and sometimes a specific nucleus that actually looks for crunch yeah that tries to get by breaking the bone marrow or something attention airily so if you satisfy that that's a big piece of it so I you know that's one awful and then just to sort of segue that back to original discussion about mobility you know we have eight grams of collagen protein in their content collagen is is an integral part of connective tissue so not just bones and muscle and skin hair nails which which in which collagen is prevalent but tendons and ligaments and so when you're doing that wide range of motion in those movements and you over time you tend to lose that mobility because you're not doing them the the supplementation with collagen helps to support the regrowth of that healthy tissue that's great so in my case I had dust severe achilles tendinosis about four years ago was told I needed to have surgery on both Achilles to scrape them down I scrape the scar tissue off and then put them in a cast for a couple of months and it's like I'm doing that and your collagen producing cells fibroblasts at your age I don't you're probably about sixty two or three I forget how old you are yeah be 64 in July yeah you you know your collagen cells are still they still exist but they aren't replicating anymore by producing more collagen yeah so this is almost a dietary strategy to continue collagen access exactly and up until very recently bone broth was the sort of go-to collagen source yeah and um you know I like bone broth but not everyday and I'm trying to get 20 or 40 grams a day while I was repairing my achilles and and it worked I literally because what I recognized was that after sprinting playing ultimate frisbee once a week with 20-somethings and keeping up with them by the way I would get home and I'd be sore and I'd be you know stiff and and because I'm a meat centric eater yeah and I wasn't getting a lot of collagen and the methionine in meat protein is sort of an anti College genetic or college Enic amino acid all these things conspired to where my body was going hey wait we want to we want to fix this Achilles thing but you haven't given us any raw material so we can't do it so we're going to do know what we know how to do which is build scar tissue so we can certainly get 8 grams of collagen in your bars yeah what other dietary sources besides going full-blown in a bone broth I mean do I forget just is there but collagen in like the skin of roast chicken I mean uh yeah there's you know there's you know it's like PII friends like I told professional baseball player about my bars and goes yeah well I I eat the bones of chicken that's how I get my collagen Wow well you know that the soft connective tissue between the ends of the bone certainly and you know if you cook a chicken enough or if you if you stew it yeah it's edible so it's it's really the other parts of the of the animal that are providing the collagen same with you know a lot of there's a marine collagen now comes from fish bones uh-huh which is a great use of the leftover carcass or after the meats been filleted cause a little bit less of an ethical challenge to directives of staying with marine animals tend to be a lot more sustainable right so so they say so they say it will be we may find out in the future that I grew up in a fishing village in Maine oh yeah where'd you grow up Boothbay Harbor I grew up in or I was born in Bangor actually in Hampton outside of Bangor how come you don't talk like that anymore because when I was seven years old or six years old I moved on to Boston and my mom would always say don't drop your R's you found Co top so I end up with sort of neutral accent I used to have that may next thing yeah several recluse plays nice but yeah heavily fishing yeah you probably get a lot of access to early good fats as a kid - yeah but it was also the sustainability issue always became because it was a lobster fishing town yes omit the Maine State fisheries controlled tree the catch every years and it's size varied from web season to another it was pretty well done yeah I eat lobster two three times a week growing up my grandfather was a lobster man out of Narragansett 25 cents a pound yeah gives me trivial but after doing that for most of my life and past few years I can't eat lobster anymore you're saying figures like an allergic reaction yeah but for most of my life I was fine and it's just accumulated enough right I think I might have overdone too much right I don't know so um we tell me ask you more about your these primal kitchen products that you're producing right I have a couple of my office now I noticed a lot of these things are sort of driven by avocado oil tell me about avocado oil as a fat as a food substrate what right so what about so we're looking for in my company in my life we're looking for the best possible fats in terms of fats in avocado the fruit is an amazing fruit it's one of my favorite things to eat and the avocado oil derived from from the fruit not from the seed part but actually it's pressed foul okay so you get some of the antioxidant oh yeah so we actually sell two types of avocado oil at my company we have one that's a extra-virgin first breast Hass avocados straight from California it's the most beautiful emerald green color has a little bit of that same bite on the back of the throat that extra virgin true underrated excess virgin olive oil has and then we have a more refined version that has a higher smoke point so it's got a more neutral taste to it you can cook with it up to 500 degrees vibrant and that's really not true the extra versions of the extra-virgin fresh press has it has enough of of the polyphenols and even some of the bits the micro bits of the fruit because of the way it's been pressed yeah that you want to remain in there they give it that for like salad dressing slings alders and lo roasting you can roast in at low temperatures but the idea behind avocado oil is it's a it's a source of these are heart-healthy fats so these are mono and predominantly monounsaturated fatty acids okay which is the Omega nine so we hear a lot about the Omega 3 being any inflammatory in the omega-6 being pro-inflammatory the cations have their own space on that and we don't necessarily get enough of them so the real search now is on the mono mono unsaturated fat I spent a while a few years ago trying to find a good source of nine because I didn't I could didn't seem to be anything out there this woman cashew but the cash is also fairly high carb for a nut right or pseudo nut so I wasn't all that excited by that but from my limited experience or research on Omega 9 it seems to activate satiety and fat burning in a way that the other fats don't yep and I was kind of excited to do that so I may have to start you know drinking large well so you know in addition to the cooking oils we we make a mayonnaise that's oh yeah our mayonnaise is 70% avocado oil Wow so where most mayonnaise is off-limits because it's made with soybean oil or corn oil or some derivation thereof it's literally may contain one of these on the label because it's whatever's cheapest that day those oils cost one twentieth the amount yeah avocado oil cost so we use only the best ingredients we have it's avocado oil it's organic eggs from cage-free hens organic vinegar from non-gmo beets sea salt great little rosemary extract and it's a great tasting mayonnaise then we make our salad dressings based on avocado oil as well so we have I took your honey mustard salad dressing and I poured it over a pound and a half of chicken thighs pop it in the oven for 40 minutes at 350 and it was the lightest most school tender I can't say enough good things about that particular ya know it's as many people use it as a marinade for marinade as do a dressing and then we just launched this non-dairy ranch dressing which is just killing it everybody that we have that will we're just we're sold out were and we were in a lot of stores now and we sell out where we go but it's again it's based on this idea that people want to have access to healthy foods and my theory about eating is once you get rid of the sugars once you get rid of the processed grains and the industrial seed oils there's not a lot of variety you know it's meat it's like five kinds of meat you're going to eat right next year and this couple lines of fish and there's you know namely eighteen vegetables you'll eat yeah what the difference is is how you prepare them well how you cook them what you put on them the sauces the dressings toppings Europe spices so we create a line of products that allow you to take these clean protein sources or these organic vegetable sources and then beautify them and make them incredibly tasty while imparting additional health values to them so it's a it's a cool concept that people have talked about over the years but no one's really executed really well so we look at every aisle of the supermarket we go okay what is it that people want to eat but are afraid to because they've been told to stay away or use it sparingly or it's not really good for you and how can we improve upon that and make it something that makes the whole taste experience spectacular noble calling means a great business but it's a really wonderful calling down before to the micron you mentioned briefly the primal kitchen which I was delighted to find out is not far at all from my Culver City peek brain office is that a lab where you're building products is it a place where you're actually serving food yeah it's a restaurant it's a task casual dining experience breakfast lunch and dinner vas casual all based on yeah all based on the primal blueprint eating strategy which is again clean sources of protein healthy fats little to no sugar great no processed things of any kind we'll be cooking with avocado oil that's very that's almost unheard of in a restaurant most restaurants are using some form of canola or soybean over and over and over and it's a it's a well I have lots of employees that try to eat in a healthy way and I can send them all down the stroll because it's right next to our ramen on that okay that's great that's wonderful so a couple of the questions about healthy things in general I think you do drink coffee right I remember for a while you had an egg yolk coffee where you're experimenting with I never tried that but yeah in general it's different mm-hmm it was a my response to the whole bullet-proof movement yeah yeah I mean I I thought the bulletproof coffee was a great idea um the problem was that I have with it is I like coffee too much yeah I I know I'm a I'm a snob for that flavor the nuance I have you know small batch organic stuff shipped down from places I like you know small good healthy ethical farms and I really like the nuance flavor of coffee when I had too much fat to it or you know no fat and MCTS suddenly I can't taste the grade and I and I'd rather chew my calories and then then drink them which is another thing but I also um you know when I wake up in the morning I have a cup of coffee that's the that's the only thing I have until probably one o'clock in the afternoon so I'm I'm a I have a compressed eating window again we talked a little bit about the ketogenic diet that not that that's a ketogenic so intermittent fasting that's sort of an intermittent fasting thing but it still promotes a ketogenic you know effect and and it sets you up for the ability to embark on a three or four ten day ketogenic life without any major concessions what kind of Windows is a six hour eight hour 10 hour what do you do well so I from 1 to 7 because I don't eat for 6 hours but I mean I only eat anything that's it at the buffet just so anything yeah which happens sometimes people start to do this I have no it's yes yeah it's interesting starve until they don't it's people it when I first started talking about healthy fat people's eyes this is awesome mark I can eat healthy fat they didn't cut back their carbs right and I go in there say mark I did your healthy fat thing and I'm gaining weight I'm not losing weight I'm gaining weight oh dude when you take in 4,500 calories a day and 300 more still carbs yeah you know you're worse off than you were before yeah I tell you I rant given any opportunity that there's zero evidence in the absence of sugar that fat does anything and the presence of sugar access it's a perfect storm of horrible health yeah so I took coffees a plus because the antioxidants get a little stimul what about things like meditation how do you feel about that you do that you know I think it's a wonderful thing and I don't do it by just just alright I my excuses that I spend enough time alone paddling or hiking in the zone yep that that's my form of meditation rather than finding a quiet space in Rome I mean I'm out of the ocean alone sure I'm sure sure digging it so so and in those moments that I can find going to be out on a paddle board our few and far between because I'm so busy now that when I do those that that serves as the meditation so I'm but I'm a big fan of meditation for people to do my sister was one of the original disciples of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and she taught it for you guys in years and so don't get me wrong it's just sure I just feel like I'm also you know from my perspective the brain building there's a lot of a lateral frontal lobe cortex that you lose with aging and normal aging about 15-20 percent of that cortex can be lost over time from the ages of 40 to 70 yeah if you are a meditator for even 20 minutes a day you seem to sidestep that completely but you're probably also already sidestepping a lot of that loss because of the way you eat and because of how active you remain and I have a hunch you're an active guy who has to deal with lots of different challenges intellectually day to day moment alone as a business owner as somebody who's a thought leader you don't have a set path of challenges that you do the same thing every day right you're always urging gear it's almost the antithesis of a regular work day yeah yeah it's that's quite good for you I so know meditation but you're probably getting meditative experiences at least some intermittent fasting in there of course we're eating primal yeah what other things do you do the size well so one of my I try to stick to a regular sleep schedule and okay big fan of sleep and I think at least one of the most overlooked aspects of health in general certainly of mental health certainly auto in addressing depression yeah and probably in addressing productivity I travel a little bit more than I'd like to so when I do travel I I'm very aware of the tweaks that I need to accomplish because I think crossing time zones is probably one of the most stressful things a human can do sure yeah and I meet people to do it you know that's their life they do it all day learn on their road warriors so but I've you know when I travel I've got a process where I can like I never get jet lag because I can dial it in so specifically I know exactly how how much I need to sleep on the plane when I need to sleep on the plane how late I need to stay up when I get to the place I'm going to be when to take melatonin how much melatonin have to take but it's become such an intuitive part of who I am as long as I have my tools in front of me as long as I have my melatonin yes and as long as I have access to a place to sleep at you know I'm not being forced to you know spend the night in an airport waiting for a connection I get that pretty dog in but in my day to day life I try to go to bed I try to get eight hours of sleep a night okay and I don't apologize for that because I think again sleep is is wonderful and so I have a ritual at night when I'm home I have a pool that I keep unheated and as you cozy right next to it so around 10 o'clock most nights my wife and I'll go out and she doesn't like cold water I do a plunge so I'll usually walk into the pool to start and it's right now it's around 52 degrees so it's pretty damn very cold yeah yeah and just before I start shivering I'll get in the jacuzzi then we'll hang out for 20 minutes and shooting go over the days you know whatever happens by the way all the lights in the in the house have turned been turned out off all the lights and the yard have been turned off there are no neighbors around and we didn't we have a fire pit so I got a fire going so we got we got a nice fire light uh-huh and so we'll spend 20 minutes doing that and then then when she she heads up to get ready for bed I'll take one more plunge in the pool so I'll finish cold ok I was up those capillaries yeah and it's it's brilliant I mean it's I sleep like a baby it's it's a great part of my ritual she doesn't understand the the cold part and I gotta explain to you when I was a I was a triathlete for a while and I one of the reasons I quit doing triathlons is I just hated the cold water I hated weapon so I grew up in Maine yes where I was forced as there any little poor little kid to go to a YMCA day camp and learn how to swim in a saltwater pool that filled up you know twice a day from the ocean from the ocean yeah and so I just had this this thing about cold water I never you know as what's your name in Gone with the Wind said as God is my witness I'll never again you know what we called so when I walk like when I was doing triathlons I hated getting in an 81 degree public road and we say whoo cold right okay so now my latest kind of thing is our address cold for what it is it's not good or bad it's just a sensation so I literally you know I'll go from my house into the pool and and I walk into the pool I won't dive in I won't plunge I'll walk in with that thought process that it's just a sensation it's just a feeling it's not good or bad and it's interesting how once and then once I'm in there and I can hang out for a couple of minutes and if I stay still I I can get to the point where I don't there's no sensation or hold if you stay still if you stay still so it's a it part of it's a process part of its meditative for me in that regard and it's but anyway so that's so part of my ritual is to make sure that I go to bed cool enough to get right to sleep you have to have had no more exposure to a blue light for at least an hour before I go to sleep and it's just that warm amber light from the fire and you're avoiding blue light by just avoiding screens and yeah I didn't condense or are you actually using things like oh I don't LOX in blue blocker glass no I don't use FX because I try not to be on the computer that late and I don't you know the blue blocker glasses I have some but because I don't work on the computer I don't I don't feel like I need them and so I haven't I haven't really taken advantage of that and you know some of the shows now are shot in sepia tones anyway so like Westworld you know I yeah it's basically no blue light coming out of West world at all so anyway so I digress here but I try I try to get the sleep and then the sun exposure I'm a big fan of sun exposure now because I'm I'm for some reason I had my DNA tested a couple years ago and I'm not a good converter yeah so I do supplement with vitamin D okay and but you know I my company makes a vitamin d a-- a lot of thought I meant based on blood levels you supplement a staunch us just uh I'll get my I'll get a test done every once in a while and a tangential result of the vitamin D level show up I don't specifically get my D levels tested but I doing you know 5,000 IU's a day what is yeah it's um it's a bit it's a bit fractal so it would be ten thousand some days five thousand twice a day other days skip a day fifteen thousand some days it's it's really like I take a handful of I make capsules that have 2000 IU per capsule so I'll just take a handful or not mm-hmm and what affects your DDoSing day-to-day like why is it ten thousand some days and none something because I'm a there's no method to the madness other than I'm a believer in the fractal nosov all this stuff keeping a signal varied to the body right doesn't accommodate right and it Rob Wolfe and I joked a couple years ago it's actually starting to come true about creating a vitamin product with a with a black packet and it was called fractal formula and you didn't know what you were taking every day and everyone was different just to keep things getting keep Thanks oh that's great laughter that's wonderful all right another hot topic these days in health and I really don't know how I feel about it I'd love to know what you feel um these zero rise or barefoot approach to Footwear oh look at that so marks holding was footage which is like an audio he's got some Vibram FiveFingers looks like on s on his feet so you're pro the zero rise all have worn for ten years is actually all have worn his Vibram FiveFingers I mean I'll do a vivo barefoot once in a while I'll do some other some of the other shoes but it's the toast bread as well as the low-rise or no rice that so there's a lot being wide enough a lot of fun of your foot to actually yeah so so any any even of the wide shoes I haven't found one wide enough that that accommodates my feet partly because I've I've grown them that way in the last ten years by wearing by wearing the vibrance so I'm a huge fan of the minimalist barefoot movement I'm I'm frustrated because there aren't more of those sorts of shoes that that look good in a workplace saw some height some barefoot hiking boots yeah online yesterday and I was like that's interesting I'm making boots cover the ankle and is yeah very little soul to them yeah I I hiked the Grand Canyon in these Vibrams with a backpack on and through snow and ice and okay no you know no socks just bare feet and the in the vibram so I was I started out I didn't think I was going to be able to do it and so I started out with hiking boots I threw the boots away after two mile I just said this is not working my feet were cramped yeah yeah and I literally I throw them away I put him in place where somebody could put them put them on if they wanted to and not recycle them let's uh-huh that's great clear about that all right let's see all right so go back to this idea of sugar people asking this question and I usually tell them no but the question is does the brain even need a carbohydrate source coming in five miles so that's a quick that's a that's a bit of a trick question because the brain does need a little bit of glucose right it doesn't need carbohydrate from by mouth so ah so it can make the glucose you because the body can make enough glucose particularly if you've if you've built the metabolic machinery to be able to burn fats appropriately and use ketones then the body will make as much glucose as it requires to fuel the brain and the rest of the rest of the energy comes from a more efficient burning of fat provided you're not just going all out for hours at a time right so you know so the carbohydrate the idea behind carbohydrates is there's no minimum daily requirement for carbohydrates there is four there is four fats and there is four protein and the body will make 50 to 100 grams of carbs a day from gluconeogenesis or from you know stripping off the the glycerol from-from triglyceride which is which would be sufficient in the brain which in a in a what we call a sugar burner somebody who has not become fat adapted probably requires 100 120 grams a day of glucose yep - and I mean the brain uses 20% of all calories required by the human body 22:25 is okay so it's a it's a it's a hot burning machine that requires some fuel but if you can if you can become good at burning fat and become fat adapted and then create ketones as a byproduct of that fat metabolism and then use those ketones the brain actually prefers ketones which is why a lot of you know a lot of the science now in epilepsy and in your some of these traumatic brain injuries and other and now they're starting to use it with stroke victims a key a highly ketogenic diet now they're using ketone salts and supplements you know to address that as well and there was some Alzheimer's work being done now taking symptomatic Alzheimer's patients I mean the research Alzheimer's has been really focusing like specific interventions specific mechanisms and Alzheimer's and research has been finding things not progressing to a cure most of them have been centered around what a large drug company can create and make money absolutely and historically for the past 50 60 years research on people the Alzheimer's has excluded those who also are diabetic which gets rid of most of the disease mechanism that drives Alzheimer's right so you aren't even studying acute Alzheimer's mostly in the literature so study out last summer where they took a bunch of symptomatic people took them off all meds in these people with severe memory problems and gave them supplemental ketones and had symptoms reverse I mean one of the aspects of Alzheimer's of course is insulin resistance in neurons before they died and so the idea is you can you can't we spare those neurons by eating more sugar if you're and people who have Alzheimer's often crave early Alzheimer's are craving carbohydrates I would guess because the neurons are insulin resistant and are being fed yeah so they're their insulin resistant but they're still screaming for fuel yeah because they haven't built again there's no access to ketones yeah and over time there's also this mechanism this mitochondrial biogenesis where the mitochondria become even better at burning ketones so they become more efficient so and where we the one of the sort of the most obvious manifestations of someone who hasn't gotten to that space yet would be a carb carb centric eater or a sugar burner as I lovingly refer to people who goes and attends a one-week ashram where they're there they're not eating but you know juice and water 500 calories a day for four days or for five days in a row and they go into ketosis but they're still Logie and tired and you can smell it on their breath because they're expelling this this amazing fuel because there's no mechanism to really burn it to use it yeah so that actually leads me to another question it confuses me about this big push in supplemental ketones I see lots of product split for latex lots of claims I mean human bodies store something in the neighborhood of 500 grams of carbohydrates as glycogen in the muscle we can only feed about 50 grams of carbs per hour so it's of a limited restore that means unless you are fat adapted lowish carb you probably have a fair amount of glycogen stored carbs you're carrying around what does the dietary ketone the supplemental ketone do in the presence of existing glycogen I mean is it useful you tell me because I'm not buying it yeah I'm not buying thank you yeah so that's that's a this is the you know this is the attempt to take existing science fringe science and and popularize it with a supplement that everybody can take an access fat-burning right away and it just doesn't work that way so unless you've built a metabolic machinery to use ketones you're just the same thing you're going to sweat them out you don't piss them out yeah that's my thought and I see these companies who say we have ketones and I say well how are you you know justifying that you're saying this is causing fat burning when the people aren't low-carb and they say oh well we can measure ketones in the urine simply yeah you're you've just eaten that ketone yeah you're you're supplementing your toilet to the space except right and and it's there's a cascade effect that I'm only postulating right now because when mostly ketone supplements 14 grams of beta hydroxy butyrate which is about seven calories per gram isn't that much energy that you're providing so where's the energy coming from you know and if you so so if you're not good at burning ketones and you and you're not using the ketones to jumpstart some more ketone production which is one of the theories that that people have about keto adapted people taking these ketone supplements and if you're a sugar burner and you're Kinky's ketone supplement and you're paying them out then then you're getting nothing yeah we're where's the benefit no I have the same perspective I wasn't sure if there was something I was missing there was some real science there but as far as I can tell it's you know marketing mostly you know uh one related idea every so often I go fairly low carb I have this may be informed by your book I don't remember I'm perfect about 80% of the time and the other 20 from the time I throw caution to the wind and he's perfect well dietarily oh I eat I far from perfect in any other way but about 80% of the time I keep my per meal carbohydrates well below 20 grams I heat my daily carburetors below about 65 grams by came from Rob's book and it works really well for me but if I've been out of shall we say good behavior for a while and I'm put on some pad and I'm getting a little dark for some reason I seem to be able to kick off a much quicker sort of back into good diet back into fat burning with chicken livers it seems to be this magical turn on everything for my system I have no idea why doesn't contain ketones it's just it's a lot of good nutrients but I have no idea why chicken liver scenes with this magic fuel when I need to really just start kicking off that you know better fat metabolism I mean chicken livers are certainly fatty so you know you've said one source of fats it may resonate with her body more than others yeah it seems to otherwise I don't have an answer okay all right well I appreciate the the stab at it so I'm mark any other thoughts or general advice you have any other bio hacks you're playing around with any future perspectives want to share with us on where primal is going or where your own adventure six well I think my my theme for 2017 is mobility okay yeah I think that between my interest in college and supplementation and my interest in maintaining my own mobility so that I can play and have fun yeah and for me that means paddling it means snowboarding it means playing ultimate frisbee so so my my focus is going to be how do I maintain mobility great through the next one three years three decades yeah 30 years exactly and we're of course accelerating aging medicine - so you wanna search while you know thing comes to pass or I guess while I got to be ready for that yeah I mean he keeps pushing back to the date as he gets older I think he's just trying to make it you know happen in his lifetime yeah well thanks so much for being on the show if viewers and listeners are you know want to chase you down and learn more about you learn what the products where can they do that the blog is Marc's daily apple.com the book is the primal blueprint available on Amazon the product the product line primal kitchen is it primal kitchen calm and you can find it on Amazon where the number one best selling mayonnaise on Amazon every day oh with allow for the last 12 months I have some of mayonnaise I haven't tried it but I'm going to go home and get out so yeah great well thanks so much for your for your time today mark and I'm sure listeners have lots of questions and we'll point them at all your your places to find you on the show notes sounds great great thanks [Music]
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