Hey guys, I'd like to ask for your help. I do a lot with bulletproof radio to give back and to share so much information and it's also a way that I learn and one of the things that's made. The biggest difference for me is fasting and you can do it in so many different ways and you can also do it wrong. You can also have this idea that it's going to be a burden for you and it's my job to help you figure out how to do it in a way that works for you. And that's why I wrote my new book called fast this way and it comes out January 19 2012.
21 and you can order it right now. It's got cutting-edge scientific research that you'd expect but it's also got ancient wisdom and my own experimentation that went into the book including what it was like to fast in a cave all by myself for four days. I wanted to throw out the rules you think, you know about fasting you can actually reframe your relationship with food too. Seriously upgrade your health simply by conquering your fear of going without. I don't mean going without food necessarily. I mean going without things you think, you know,
Need that aren't serving you pre-order fastest way right now at your favorite place to buy books and start 2021 with a powerful tool to upgrade your life. No matter what you like to eat
bulletproof radio state of high performance.
You're listening to bulletproof radio with Dave asprey today is going to be awesome because I have my very favorite all-time science journalist.
On the interview for you today. This is a guy who got famous in Quito circles before Quito was a thing with a book called good calories bad calories, which for me is the high Mark of science books to be able to not waste one word In A Book Like That a great thinker and leader in understanding low-carb understanding keto understanding sugar. He's also known for book called The casing and sugar and if you're a longtime listener, you might remember episode 223. We're
About the bad science and public health, which is only gotten worse researching healthy diets. What got bacteria does and how to experiment on yourself and Gary has released one of his infrequent and always epic new books and this one's called the case for Quito and he just explains straight up how the way we think about obesity has led to 60 years of controversy and these Daya Wars about calories and basically the end of it why I always felt ashamed
Shamed when I weighed 300 pounds because I did what was supposed to work and it just doesn't work and he tells us why also side note before we officially welcome to the show. Gary actually introduced me to the very first agent who represented me for my first book. A lot of you probably don't even know about called the better baby book, which took five years to write was all about fertility, and it was a phone call and an email that he placed. They really set me in motion as an author. So Gary welcome back
David.
Good to be here. Thank you.
What made you have to write another book now?
Okay, well.
You know, we have not won this battle what I'm doing this book. It's you know, I think of this as a Grassroots
movement.
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You said whole world of people who were struggling with their weight or struggling with their blood sugar and we're doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing and it wasn't helping and you know, when I started writing about this 20 years ago, there might have been a dozen doctors in the US or maybe in the world were prescribing low carb high fat either keto diets half of them and written diet books like Mike and married a needs and sugar buster.
Eyes and agates then with the South Beach Diet and 10 Naaman and not in that, you know Atkins was still alive. Yeah.
And that was it and if you did this and you lost 60 pounds, you would go see your cardiologist and your cardiologist would tell you were crazy. Even though you were 60 pounds lighter. So now 20 years later. We've got a few tens of thousands of Physicians out there or prescribing these diets and we've got dieticians who are being won over and nutritionists or slowly being won over and it's a slow slog and we're still fighting The Establishment as you've said the bad science has not gone away or gotten better.
And so we have to keep getting this message out there and as it evolved, but I wanted to discuss was how that how it evolved and I wanted to put it all in context. So it is like, you know the book started off with the title how to think about how to eat actually even before that. I wanted to call it in Praise of fad diets. Just the reason you know, it sort of struck me I talk about this. I was doing a being interviewed for a BBC documentary.
And all they wanted to hear from me was why did people do fad diets and why were there so many fad diet doctors out there and why did the diet books sell so well and I was literally doing the interview and I thought why do people do fad diets because the conventional wisdom doesn't work.
You know you do exactly what you're told to do and all it does is keep you fat and make you hungry.
And you feel bad about yourself because you're running a failing and you know, any reasonable person that circumstance is going to look for another approach and the other approach is that the approach is being peddled by fad Diet Doctor some of whom have happened to have gotten it right?
So anyway, this is I wanted to explain sort of how we got into this crazy naivete this idea that people get like you weighed 300 pounds because you ate too much
which is the fake the
Bedrock conventional. That's the Newton's Laws of obesity science and it's insane and then I wanted to explain sort of what
the alternative should have been which is you weigh 300 pounds because you had a you know, a hormonal disorder or going on in your body were storing fat rather than burning it for fuel. That's a fuel partitioning problem. And anyway, so, you know, there are a lot of with is the bad science in the nutrition Community has evolved and as the having to live with this and they and idea that obesity is an energy balance idea that the Visa T researchers.
Adding their own in the philosophy of science and calm epicycles like one stupid idea after another so that they could justify continuing to believe what they had always believed despite all evidence that it's complete and utter failure among that evidence being the Obesity epidemic in the diabetes epidemic and you know, so this was an opportunity to meet a sort of unravel all of those epicycles throw them out.
Bring us down to the essence and then I interviewed about a hundred and twenty of Physicians out there and another 20, you know, personal trainers nutritionists dietitians a dentist the smart guy and I got to ask them what their challenges were and what they were learning about prescribing these diets and what they were seeing in their
clinics.
I I remember really well when the bulletproof diet which involves cyclical keto not eating sugar not eating bad fats and stuff that you very are very familiar with and someone think it was a New York Times or maybe the telegraph they're saying well, how do you how do you know this isn't just another fad diet and like guys we're going on 50 years of the starting from the year. I was born Robert Atkins published a book and yet I was fat because no one listens except for these
Free periods. So if this is a fad diet in fad diets last for 50 years then yes, it's a fad diet, but I'm pretty sure Quito is not going away because it's the only thing that works
well in this is the thing and first time it's it's not 50 years. It's actually in five years. It will be 200
years. Yeah, there you go from panting.
Well, I know even before Banting it goes all the way back to this Frenchman brillat-savarin to breathe out Saverin say he's a lawyer who in the bone leave only likes to live and he likes to eat.
He's struggling with his weight also, so he quits his law firm and he travels around and he writes about eating and he puts together. This book called the physiology of taste which is has been in print since 1825. Not that many non-fiction books other than the Bible can make that claim and in it. He says look, I talked to five hundred people all of them struggling with their weight and they all died, you know, somebody's obese and they are going to tell me they love potatoes they loved
Add they love pasta. They love varieties of the foods. They can't live without. These are the foods we found in animals
with
The shocking
and sugars make everything worse. So in 1825 sugar was still hard to come by and sugary beverages like basically, you know, you might get eliminated a cafe because they could put some sugar in water and Stir It Up and add lemons, but other than that, so he didn't think of sugars as a major problem because if you've got people not to eat grass and then they will wouldn't eat pastries and they wouldn't get the sugar. But anyways, that's it. It's always been there. There's always
Been this idea that if you want to get fat you how to avoid carbs and I use this in the book ultimately they low-carb high-fat ketogenic way of eating is a way of eating that then I use brillat-savarin 195 year old phrase more or less rigid abstinence from he said flowers and Grains surf at Gilliam, which is another word for it that it's gone out of style in the past 200 years, but that's it.
Wow, you know that the fad diet is the low-fat diet that was introduced in the 1960s. It was supposed to be a way to prevent heart disease and then became a obesity diet. It had never been tested and never been tested for obesity. It required lowering fat and adding back carbs. So when the nutrition Community starts to embrace a low fat diet for heart disease, they transform carbohydrates from something that
Every Woman knew was fattening. This was the first line of a America British Journal of nutrition article in 1963. Every woman knows carbohydrates are fattening which they did and then by like 1985 22 years later their heart healthy diet foods and the personal health reporter in the New York Times is writing a best-selling diet book telling us all to eat pasta because even though we used to think it was fattening it turns out it's not
And they never tested never you know, nobody thought let's do a clinical trial comparing these so the the carbohydrate is fattening idea was left for the diet book doctors. He Adkins and towler's and Eads and you know, all these people who stumbled on and on their own and said hey when I
Tell people not to eat fattening foods. They don't get fat anymore. It's
a what do you think when you hear the words the French paradox?
That's one of those at the Cycles, you know, so you've got this theory that fat causes heart disease, right? And then you have a country like France where they live on she don't even really didn't even eat chicken and France, right? They
dock you soak your chicken and pork fat and then you'd eat it. Yeah.
Why brine cheese and eggs and Bay I lived in Paris for two years. There were two of the best years of my life. I have to admit and every morning for breakfast. I had eggs and bacon and the cafe because that's what they were serving. So how do you explain a low level of heart disease and that population? Well, you say it's a paradox so you don't have to say maybe our hypothesis is wrong and there's a low level of heart disease and Switzerland. I lived in Switzerland doing my first book for nine months. Um,
Geneva was not my favorite City.
But two of their staple foods the to food that that the Swiss are famous for cheese fondue in a dish called rack flat, which is melted cheese on a plate with corny Shaw onions and pickles.
Cornish all our pickles anyway, so this is it anytime you come upon contrary dating you just assume that this is you write it off as a paradox. You never have to consider that your hypothesis is
wrong I used to do after I lost the weight. I was really angry for a few years and I was so lied to I had a chip on my shoulder and I think I'm over that now just mostly incredulous, but I would call the American Paradox which is why don't Americans you like French people to get thin.
It's not that hard because it seems to work for them instead of like oh, hey clearly, it's because of the wind let's drink more wine, and I guess that's not going to work either. So
that's the thing you add you say that it's all because of the red wine. I mean, it's just it seems like a bad science. Yeah, you start off with an assumption that you can't even test and experiment and then you assume it's true and then whenever you just keep layering these you again these
Was on top of it or spinning them around then you end up with what you call a multifactorial complex disorder that it's clearly so complex. Maybe you can't be solved anyone who says there's a solution is clearly deluding themselves or selling something and the mm maybe just have the wrong Paradigm.
Do you ever feel a little bit of Pride when you look around and like there's tens of thousands of doctors talking about the keto diet.
Were one of the first and most science-based voices writing about this. I mean back in 2007 your big book came out, but I consider to be one of the big guys who first planted This Modern seeds of this when you go to bed at night you like. Alright, I hope these 10,000 plus doctors get that
when I'm feeling bad about myself and I need to prop up my ego. I you know, this is going to sound.
Cube ristic, I don't mean to but I did a book. I've always wanted to ride this bucket science and bad science. I spent a lot of time when I'm not watching Netflix or Amazon Prime with my wife and wishing the kids would just go to bed already.
I spend a lot of
time reading Memoirs of scientists looking for where they talk about how they do their science and what they think is good science and bad science. And so I read Darwin in his Memoirs. Wow, the end of the memoir
He talks about how many books is a talks about how many books he's published down many different foreign language editions. There. Are there books. He does everything but talking about his Amazon numbers and then he talks about the Mantra that he repeats to himself over and over and over again when he gets criticized her feels like people aren't taking his work seriously and the Mantra was something like I've done all that one man can do no one could ask for anything more while I thought you know.
No, I'm like, I know Darwin is my high school guidance counselor, but it said what he said with your know and it's Stein. But but you know, you just see, you know, sometimes you have to remind yourself that and I said this even I did this misguided debate with us something young neuroscientist named DNA. Whose first name. I'm not going to say because I remember
You did
that on the debate and I still can't remember how to pronounce it correctly. It's either he spells it wrong. That's why.
So at one point, he said to Jesus you've clearly think that I have done an enormous amount of damage in the world by raising these issues and implying that the mainstream medical community. You know, God forbid might have made a mistake and they tragic one in this case, but you and I both know we're both bombarded by emails. We get emails daily saying look, I went on keto diets and I went on low carb high fat diet and for the first time in my adult life.
Able to achieve and maintain a healthy weight without feeling like I would starving myself to death and you know, they just they there's always I don't know why he didn't find those observations meaningful. I do. I mean there's clearly as you put it we
but I talk about in the book The Conversion experience. So you had a conversion experience, right? This was a Malcolm Gladwell phrase from his first hit in 1998. He wrote an article on Obesity called the Pima Paradox and he asked the same questions. I asked when I wrote about obesity for the New York Times magazine in 2001, but the difference was and those three years. I had David Ludwig to follow at Harvard and Eric Westmont to follow it that Duke and I could see that there were
Really, you know respected establishment physician researchers who were taking seriously that idea that carbohydrates are fattening and die for a diet to work. You shouldn't have them in it and Gladwell talked about the conversion experience and diet books, you know, every diet book doctor tells a story first about how he was getting fat or diabetic or growing five arms or turning green or whatever it was and nothing you did helped and he followed the advice and then he
went to the depths of the local medical school library. And from there. He emerged with the secret formula that he's now going to give you because it cured him and the fact is all these Physicians went through that and it was either one of two phenomena, either, you know, if you're doing family medicine or internal medicine or Pediatrics and America you're dealing with the- sequelae of
Obesity diabetes hypertension metabolic syndrome insulin resistance. That's what you're confronted with and you're telling your patients how to eat because that's how the American Heart Association American Medical Association says we should do when they're not getting any better and you're just managing disease, you're either confronted with your patients getting fatter and more diabetic that was the case with like erequest men and one of those patients does Adkins against his will
He does Adkins.
To get healthy and it's cholesterol profile gets better and Eric Westman is open-minded enough to say wow. This is interesting. This goes against everything. I believe maybe I should look into it exactly what you want your doctor to do. So some of them did that and some of them are getting heavy themselves.
And so they couldn't blame their patients for not taking their advice because they knew they were taking
their advice
right in there. Some of them are vegans and vegetarians and some of them were world-class athletes, you know, my former partner Peter or Tia a new C is a prime example and in Peters an exceedingly smart physician, he's great doing everything was supposed to be doing right working out three four hours a day swimming from LA to Catalina and back and he's just getting fat.
It's so frustrating.
It's but the problem is you have to have a weight problem to understand that right if you're thin and you're doing everything right then there's nothing to learn. There's no conflict between your expectations and reality. So there's no learn and science starts with the observation of something that can flicks with what you believe it should be so you have a hypothesis about how the universe works and you see something that doesn't fit that hypothesis, and now you have to generate a new
New
hypothesis. Okay, Gary, you've got it all wrong. If there's something that disagrees with what you believe you suppress it via orchestrated censorship and Commercial interests. I mean, come on. I don't know what century you're living in this old science you speak of
sand cognitive the never discount the fact that nobody wants to admit they were wrong. Yeah. It's also, you know, I thought about a lot about this when we were running when new see was up and running and we were dealing with these
This research is particularly the collaboration of Columbia University which has some of the leading obesity and diabetes researchers and the world that we were working with, you know, regularly on this experiment we would meet with them every three months and one of them in particular just kept getting fatter and fatter over the course of the three four years of the meetings went on and you knew that when he was in college it was about six foot three. He was within a month of being my age and I could bet
Only was in college you wait, a hundred and sixty pounds and maybe it was up to 220 by the time, you know, we were doing these experiments. A lot of it has got and I kept arguing that he should do, you know, like just he should understand the phenomenon of going into ketosis of being on a ketogenic diet because that's kind of what we were studying. We were asking a scientific question. We're using ketogenic diet to ask that scientific question, but I said, you know, you're clearly gaining weight.
Wait, try the diet as an experiment just so you can understand this phenomena of sort of gaining weight regardless of what's happening to your you know, what you're eating and how much you're exercising and then suddenly it's like you flick a switch and the weight starts to go away. I couldn't get them to do it
get him even to
try a new it always he would write me these long thoughtful. I mean apparently thought for explanations for why
Be unscientific to do an end of one experiment and I thought so much about this in the problem is it's like it's like we attend different churches. So you and I attend the Church of sort of carbohydrates and
Insulin that's a
drive weight gain. They attend the Church of energy balance. That's the Newton's law of obesity is you get fact as you consume more energy than you expend. There's no more fundamental law.
In the Obesity Community than that and everyone, you know believes that and everyone, you know worships at that all door and everyone, you know in your field has built up their career based on that belief system all the epicycles. I talked about that you have to add to that belief. So as to maintain continue to maintain that that's what the research that these people do and you yourself have moved the top of your field.
Based on the sort of respective garnered from all these people believe exactly what you believe. This is like the essence of groupthink. Yeah and everyone, you know, the people you respect think the way you do that's why you respect them. You think they're smart because you agree with each other. I mean, we think we're smart because we agree with each other it's sad, but it's true. That's human heart. If now if you're going to change the way you think now you're going to go to a new church.
Where everybody, you know goes to the old church and you're going to start proselytizing about some new religion when everyone you know, believes the old religion. There's nothing there's virtually nothing to gain other than the pursuit of Truth and reliable science and helping your patients and all that stuff. But that's indirect as far as yourself. It's almost impossible for people to make that conversion and only way you could do it is if you have the courage if you're getting so heavy.
so diabetic
that you now you're sort of your health is more important than what you believe to be
true. You know, what I would love to be able to do is to be able to sneak some xenoestrogens into the holy water at the church of calories because I've got academic literature from agriculture that says if we put xenoestrogens in cows ears, they get fat on 30% less calories and if that is possible the calorie thing is bullshit and it that one outlying thing.
Says there must be something else possible and the fact that people look at me and say you didn't lose weight on the low carb diet because you couldn't have lost weight and I'm just crashing man Towing like are these alternate universes we live in?
um
you know, there's a lot of the funny thing is
the Obesity research Community is overwhelmed with examples look like that. So, you know from the very first animal model of obesity the very first one one of the two most famous animal models of obesity. So the two most famous of the ventromedial hypothalamus clay lesioned mouse or rat pick your rodent, so bmh leaves and animals and then the OB OB mice that led to the discovery of leptin.
To every other animal model will be easy. But including these to those animals will get obese, even when you have starved them. So by half starving them. I mean you measure the amount of energy that a lean animal eats and you cut it in half and that's what you give to your obese animal model and you end up if you grow this mouse from you know, when it's a pop-up word you'll end up with an obese Mouse. It's half the size of the main animal but
full of fat
and these Studies have been sitting there and playing video The Churchill quote about some people, you know stumble over the truth and they just pick themselves up and hurry on like it never happened these studies. I just I spent the winter interviewing obesity researchers for what the ones who would still speak with me which about half of the community and those are the have that are so uninterested in what is science journalist says that they've forgotten what I've written in the past, but
Ask them look, you know, you've got all these belief systems about how or whatever Gene you've discovered or molecule. You've discovered affects appetite and how it tells the animal whether it's eating too much or not. But here you've got this your very own animal model that will get OBC wanted to have starved.
What does that tell you about the relevance of what the appetite if you can starve it and it still gets fat and they would say well that's an interesting question.
Bike you've been in this field for 30 years professor and I asked you basically to explain a fundamental observation of the field and then responses. That's an interesting question or I hadn't thought of that and these are these are very smart people and that's the sort of power of a religious Dogma like calories and you know energy
balance.
But I have a book on fasting that comes out a couple week after years. And with with good luck. Both of our books will be on the New York Times list at the same time answer that I know your
suspect yours will be higher.
I'm not worried about being higher but yours is worthy of being on the New York Times list because of the quality of your writing and what you have to say and I'm saying the very seriously the
The idea that we have this kind of religious filter in people's brains. It seems like if Quito is a problem when you start saying fasting that's even worse because now you're going to be starving and if you don't eat six times a day, you'll go into starvation mode and then you'll die and all that kind of stuff. So I almost was hesitant to write about that which goes hand-in-hand with keto. It doesn't have to be keto it can be kind of little bit key do sometimes depending on what you eat.
You come out of the fast, but it's like just bumping up against an immense mountain of belief systems that are based on false assumptions. I mean, are you hopeful that we're moving the right direction?
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Well, I do think I mean we are moving in the right direction. There are forces that are working against us. So like I said when I started this 20 years ago when I got into this 20 years ago, there were dozens decisions prescribing these diets. Now. They're my rough estimate is a few tens of thousands and my support for that is there's a Facebook group of women physicians in Canada who are eating low carb high fat.
Diets and last I look which is about nine months ago. There were 4,000 women physicians in Canada. So I'm assuming they're 4,000 male physicians in Canada who are also doing it at least maybe more and I don't know how many have stopped doing and didn't you know disengage from the Facebook group. You don't know those things. But from that I think we can reasonably guess a few tens of thousands worldwide minimally. That's a that's that's a positive thing. I
I just spoke this morning with ours you and panesar and Charlotte Summers is for book. I'm doing on Diabetes alone and they started diabetes Well, Arjun started diabetes code. I've UK in the UK. And so this was Arjun was studying machine learning and artificial intelligence. When his grandfather was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and his grandfather didn't know what to eat. So Arjun said, you know, let me
Sort of crowd Source it online. I'll build a program where people with diabetes can go online and talk about what they eat more kind of what works and what doesn't and now between their various, you know arms of their on Empire. They have 1.7 million members. Wow, and what came out of what works and 10% of the type 2 diabetics in the UK.
18 I think they said 18% of the type 1 diabetics and what came out of it was what works is a low-carb diet, you know the opposite of what they're being told to eat by their Physicians and this was not they could they went into it with no bias Arjun. Just wanted to know tell me what you're eating and tell me what your numbers are and because of the way the National Health Service works as a involved. So there are these forces. We don't even see in a day-to-day notion day to day.
Yeah that moment the moment that that are working to communicate this have everyone and this is one of the phenomena I talk about in the book every for every physician whose patients get healthier.
Doing low carb diet so spits those patients see any other doctor. There's a likelihood after a while. Those doctors will say jeez. I noticed you lost 60
pounds.
Yeah, it's funny that going back to a story Arjun told me Arjun panesar. Were they there? They've been working with his physician day. Even on one in the UK and David on one has a practice.
With a lot of diabetes barracks and about 15 years ago or ten years ago. I forgot what the date was. He realizes that he has a woman. He's been seeing in his practice. He hasn't seen for two years. So he made contact and they say you should really come in for a check-up because an exam because you've got diabetes and she shows up and she's lost so much weight that he doesn't recognize her and her diabetes has apparently gone away.
And she's
on Diabetes dotco died UK so she's changed the way she ate because she's been looking at what all these other kinds of thousands becoming hundreds of thousands of people are doing that are making them healthy and she wanted to be healthy too. So, you know, and then David being, you know doing what Eric Westman didn't the u.s. Looks at her and says this is fascinating. So he gets on Diabetes dotco dot U k-- he signs up.
And he's the first physician or Healthcare professional to ever sign up for it. Even though they now have like a hundred thousand members and they have to contact the first time they ever talk to them is they have to apologize because they assumed he was a
troll
ever confronted a physician with an open mind before
there's a lot of anger. I didn't see a doctor for four years. I was really pissed in my late 20s, like you guys have no clue what you're talking about. You think I'm
You're sneaking Snickers bars, and I'm doing what you said and I'm just weak and tired and hungry and all that and that's part of part of it too is fixing that Rift between people and doctors because most doctors really do want to help they just didn't have the information and at least now it's out there. I think any doctor who reads any of your books is going to have to lie scratch ahead and say maybe there's two ways to lose weight.
Well, that's the thing when I'm when I'm writing and
With the title, so originally I told you I wanted to call this in Praise of fad diets, but that was never going to fly with my editor. That was my fantasy man. It was and I think I have a chapter called still called In Praise of yet diets and then it was how to think about how to eat. That was my wife suggestion. I thought that was terrific because you know, basically the idea is we've been getting lean people's diet advice. So lean people do what the the authorities tell them to do.
Works form and then they say well it's keep Smith in clear little key
works until they get cancer. Yeah, there's
yeah for a short time. We don't know what's going on long term surrounding those trials. So, you know we need to accept is that those of us who gain weight easily are different from those people who aren't I mean, this is one of my Revelations and doing this work that they I told you Newton's law will be city is you get
Faculty taken more calories in you expend and that means the difference between a lean person and these person or some if you have two kids or both 17, you know, 18 years old and they're both relatively lean and one goes on to become obese and the other stays lean the difference is the one who went on to become obese eight more than the expended in the lean person didn't yeah. So that's the fundamental. That's the only if these researchers thought about it, which they don't but if they
They would conclude that the difference between a person who gets fat in the person who stays lean is just how much they exercise nothing else. No physiological difference. No hormonal differences. No fuel partitioning differences in the body. No insulin differences or pick your hormone. It's just how much eating exercise so this is insane.
And what we need to understand is that those of us who fatten easily we can't eat would lean people leave because if we do will be fat hungry tired.
Grouchy and then when we go in to see the doctors, I will accuse us of cheating on the diet because we're still heavy that's one of the epicycles if someone stays heavy and they're doing what you tell them to do. And they say that you're doing what you tell them to do then they're lying to you.
And I mean this is built into the literature 1930s. You can find doctors documenting that they're they're overweight pediatric patients are lying to them about their diets and therefore they just lack willpower. So anyway,
Do you know all this has to be re jiggered if the right Paradigm obesity is a hormonal disorder. It's a hormonal dysregulation of fat accumulation. And the linked to diet is through insulin. So you minimize insulin and you could do it by fasting for long periods of time or intermittent fasting you could lengthen this time that you're you know mobilizing fat rather than storing it which is the time that your insulin levels are low.
And you can lose the weight you stored.
One of the things I came across in my anti-aging book was that chronically low insulin was linked to higher all-cause mortality.
And chronically High insulin is also linked to all cause mortality. So I feel like there's got to be some Goldilocks zone which is like when do you need to be keto and when you need to be low or even moderate carb, but not necessarily full on keto. I mean, are you ki do all the time like with without?
I've never measured I've never and this book by the way, despite the title the case for Quito is the case for
Great screen
fattening that and then is
where you abstain from carbohydrates. If you abstain completely if you abstain from carbohydrate-rich Foods, you're probably going to be in
ketosis. Yep. It's possible to eat like a hundred percent protein and not get there. But most people over time you're going to get indicate. Oh,
yeah, so it's sort of that's that's the you know, my editors like the title kiito's A buzzword. I didn't fight it.
But ideally, you know, this was how to think about how to eat if you're you know, if you're one of these people fattens he's away, but it's the way they used to wear. If you if you if you know that you put on fat easily so easily that sometimes or all the time it seems you can't stop it from happening. Then you did knowing the mathematics, you know, obesity people are supposedly died. I read Memoirs of
You know people's writer struggling with don't be silly like Roxanne gays got this heartbreaking Memoir called hunger. Tommy Thompson, one of the great titles ever the elephant in the living
room. That is a great title
both cases. They said that Tommy weighed over 400 pounds and Roxane Gay way probably weighed over 400 pounds. They both talked about knowing the mathematics of obesity, which means if they like can somehow eat 500
Valerie's less every day than they used to be they'll lose a pound a week and they won't it doesn't work like that. It's not about math. It's about knowing them Endocrinology of obesity the effect of hormones on fat storage and
Metabolism. One of the things that happened after I met some of the really low carb people because of the anti-aging non-profit group that I run. You actually came and spoke probably before good calories bad couches had to be like 2005
6 he wrote the book. I hate didn't launch bulletproof until 2010 the the blog and I said, all right. I'm going to test this thing. I'm going to eat 4,500 calories a day. I'm going to stop exercising and I'm going to restrict my sleep to less than five hours a night and then at the end of the month I should gain, you know, whatever the math would work out to but alas like 10 or 20 pounds of fat like and I'm pretty sure why I'm controlling my insulin.
I'm probably only going to gained three pounds and I lost three pounds. I was getting sick of eating too much food, which is not good for you. I don't recommend it. But as forcing myself to eat more that I wanted and I was either losing weight or maintaining weight. My energy levels were up. I felt good and that was one of the early blog posts I made and it was also kind of stress testing the principles of the diet that I developed which is Quito it is core, but it also don't eat inflammatory fats and you know, don't eat
he vegetables and stuff like that that are still hotly debated by various people and I think if you hadn't have written so convincingly and the good calories bad calories. I probably wouldn't have done that experiment that really cemented for me. Okay. I got this and even to this day I can still put on fat like no one's business, but I can eat a hundred grams of carbs a day as long as they're the right carbs and I don't gain any fat and if I wanted to lose a little bit of fat, I just 70 grams, or maybe I go keto for a week I faster, but it's
Not hard, there's no pain or like I would just remember the struggling and the suffering and you know, just the intense hunger and all that crap. It doesn't been a part of my life for so long. I you know, I don't want to go back to that ever and every time I see someone who's, you know, really overweight everyone knows they're overweight when they are they're trying to do it. They haven't had access to you know, your books and just to this whole body of knowledge and he seems in there drinking a diet soda, just like I used to man. It's not going to work. It just won't
don't and then
yeah, I remember sitting what we're doing this experiment with new see the nutrition science initiative. So we would have meetings quarterly in Bethesda, Maryland next to NIH at this DoubleTree hotel and after one of the meetings I'm sitting having dinner before I was leaving for the airport and I was sitting in the this lousy little restaurant that he had next to this family of four that was saying in the hotel and it was a mother and a father and maybe a thirteen-year-old lean
Daughter and a 15 or 16 year old obese daughter and the mother and the father are eating normal meals and the 13 year old was eating a normal dinner and the 16 year old girl with obesity was eating like, you know, a low-fat mostly planned vegetable plate with maybe 400 calories for dimmer and in hating art and hating it. I know hating or sister and her sister.
Probably hating her cause she's not you know, it's just you could see the burden of this obesity and then starving herself on something that ultimately wasn't going to work because it wasn't fixing the problem and the problem wasn't too much food or too much fat. It was in effect any carbohydrates for her.
Wow, and
you know, I want to reach out to and I have tried to like Roxane Gay this wonderful heartbreaking book just came out why?
What we don't talk about when we talk about fat by a young woman whose ways I think she said 340 pounds and her struggles and the burden and the social ostracism Haitian and the psychological issues that you could see her struggling to eat healthy, right which the her means low fat foods and skinless chicken
breasts. Yeah. If you're empathetic you feel a lot of compassion for them, especially if you've seen it so many times or if you've lived.
And it you know, it's one of the things that gets me up in the morning is I don't want anyone to go through. I went through starting around 16 through about 25 because man, it's is a miserable existence and you think it's your fault.
Yeah. I know that's at the end but
Hitting the weird thing is Workforce if still perceived even by these people as
cracks.
I always liked that because I'm not a medical doctor. So if you call me a quack, you're promoting me to the field of Physicians, and I'm not even license. I'm like, thanks Stephan Barratt. I love you brother. Whether that's guy runs quack watch. He's a total quack himself.
And I agree. I've had I've had been ahead explain to me that I don't rate being a quack because you need to be an MD to be a quack and
it's like, okay it was on my bucket list scary to be listed on quack watch. It really works is every doctor. I know who's made a difference has been attacked.
Quack watch and when the USA Today use stephenbaird to discredit what I was doing. Yes, this is like a serious career life moment. I finally, you know, I made the list of big-time people who make a difference.
So now I'm gonna have to go look to see if like, what am I chopped liver? I don't get on the
list.
Although I do try to be relentlessly honest about what we know and what we don't you mean that's the essence of good science is never over interpret the data.
So as long as you say exactly what you can defend and nothing more than the relatively safe, so even in this book, I'm arguing we can say that you're going to live longer if you're going to ketogenic diet because we don't have that evidence. What we know is you're going to get healthier. We've got clinical trials and you know hundreds of thousands or millions of anecdotes that in the short term. This is going to make you healthy and the short-term and the nurse
Certainly people who can keep it up for life. It's funny writing about diabetes means writing about Richard Bernstein and dr. Bernstein's Diabetes Solution and like Bernstein was diagnosed at age 12, which was 72 years ago.
And he's been on his diet since early 70s which was so 40 plus years that hasn't killed him yet. So that's a good sign. So he might just be
you know, it is indeed a
clinical trial but it's a good
sign. It's a good sign. Well speaking of good signs. I'm seeing lots of people interested in your new book, and I I certainly enjoyed getting early access to it.
I think you have a special gift for explaining things in a way that's that's really accessible and it's just full of integrity and I want to thank you again for the last 20 years of work and for continuing to be on the case in this case the case for Quito and I want anyone is listening to this if you appreciate good writing having things spelled out well for you with a hundred percent just certainty. I will tell you Gary is a better science writer than I am. I've been on Gary.
I've been on the monthly New York Times science bestseller list. It was the highlight of my career as an author and it was a big honor but I am nowhere near the science author you are so I'm just telling you guys you need to read the case for keto even if you are to see I know keto works, there's stuff in there that you don't know that you want to know and because you don't have to be in ketosis all the time. You don't have to be on the zero carb diet, but understanding the mechanisms and the mechanics it's hard to do and reading a book that makes it easy to
Stand is very difficult. And this book is worth your time and Gary. Thanks for being back on bulletproof. Radio. Just keep doing what you're doing. I absolutely love your
work. Okay, Dave. Thank you have made my day. And now I'm going to go have a bulletproof coffee.
All right, it's a deal.
It's okay. Thanks.
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