Transcription
Coming up on the GET, LEAN Eat, Clean Podcast.
Hello, and welcome to the Get Lean Eat Clean podcast. I'm Brian Gryn, and I'm here to give you actionable tips to get your body back to what it once was, five, 10, even 15 years ago. Each week I'll give you an in-depth interview with a health expert from around the world to cut through the fluff and get you long-term sustainable results. This week I interviewed evolutionary biologist Brad Marshall. We did a deep dive into human metabolism and Brad's new Emergence diet, along with ways to test your metabolic rate, Brad's theory of eating low branch-chain amino acids, supplements that may help improve your metabolism, how Brad decreased his fasting blood glucose, fats you should cook in, and much, much more. Really enjoyed my interview with Brad. I know you will too. Thanks so much for listening and enjoy the show.
All right, welcome to the Get Lean Eat Clean podcast. My name is Brian Gryn and I have Brad Marshall on. Welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me. I'm excited to get into it.
Yeah, I appreciate you coming on. I've, I've listened to you through the years and I've checked out your, your Fire in a Bottle website and, and products. And so I'm, I'm curious, what, what led you down this road? I know, I know you've talked about your health journey in the past and your weight loss journey. Maybe give the audience a little bit of background of that and, and what led you to where you're on now?
Right. Well, I'm fat. That's the thing. And tell us, really, how it is. And so, you know, and, and I, so, right. And so this has been a lifelong struggle. And I am also happen to be a, you know, a molecular biologist trained at Cornell. I've worked on, I did cancer research at Memorial Sloan Kettering. So I've, you know, so I have, I have a very strong molecular biology background. I'm very interested in evolutionary biology. And so, you know, I, I'm sort of. And what, what I've always seen is that like, to me, you know, everybody talks about, you know, obesity is about, you know, calories in, calories out. Right? And when I look around the world and just watch, I'm an observer of like what people eat around me, right? I, I love food. I'm also a, a total foodie. I went to the French Culinary Institute. So those interests all kind of like dovetail into Fire in a Bottle world. And well, what I've always noticed is that there's some people, and I noticed these people in my life who are just like, like the leanest people. Like there was one guy who was a great friend of mine in high school, and he wrestled in the 145 weight pound class. But really he could, he was taller. He was like five 11. And he would like, usually he actually weighed like 138 pounds. He couldn't even, he couldn't even stay at, at 145 pounds. And that guy ate more calories than I've ever seen any, like, we would go to the, we'd go to the, this place in Clyde, New York. We'd go to the bowling alley. 'cause they had 25 cent wing night. No, maybe it was five, I think it was 5 cent wing night. Oh, wow. This was the nineties. And, and he would get 40 chicken wings, 40, and he would just, they were gone in like 10 minutes, like just this, like ravenous, you know? So I see these people with these like ravenous extraordinary metabolic rates. And then, and then on the other side of the coin, you see these people that are trying to lose weight and they're like starving themselves and it's not working, right? And so when I look at those two individual groups, I'm like, clearly this is a metabolic rate issue. Like, something isn't working right in, in this group of people that is working in this group of people. And that's not to say that, that's not to say that we, you know, sure. Maybe we shouldn't be eating all of our meals at, at McDonald's. you know, there is, there certainly is an element of, of, you know, Americans dietary choices could be better for certain, but I don't think that explains the whole thing. you know, I think there's, you see these clear changes historically in obesity patterns. We know that something's changed. Obviously some of the things in the food system have changed. The oils that we used have changed. And so, but at the, at the end of the day, I think, you know, I'm very interested in the, in the metabolic side, what causes the changes in metabolic rates, what, you know, what allows us to be insulin sensitive or not? What are the seasonal changes? What are the food changes? you know, what can we do with supplements to try to help, you know, anything we can do to give ourselves a lever, right? To kind of get metabolism going again. Right. How do we, yeah.
Yes. It, it could be very complex, right? And oh, It's extraordinarily complex. Your weight loss journey. I know you've tried a lot of different things. It's almost like a, you're using yourself as like an experiment, would you say?
To some degree? Absolutely. Yes. Absolutely.
Maybe I know your new one, the Emergence diet, we we're gonna get into that one soon, but what, what in what have you tried in the past and what are your thoughts around that?
Sure. So I've done keto a lot of times in my life, right? Like, that was, that had been my go-to, and w the thing I noticed that keto didn't work as well, like once I hit 40, keto was not as effective for me as a weight loss strategy. And I also felt like the problem with keto is that I could never stay on it. Like, I can do it for six months, I can do it for a year, but inevitably, you know, I go away from it. And I just felt like, you know, again, thinking about people in my life, I'm like, when I think about all the people I know, there's, at most 25% of them would ever do keto, right? Just knowing that person, like there's no more than one out of four that I could ever see doing keto, right? And so I started to think, one, I'm not sure keto is, is the best for long-term weight loss. And two, or just for sort of sustainability purposes. And two, like I think there's probably some other better strategies out there. And I'm also a huge proponent of things like, I mean, it's sort of a running joke with my friends that I've had the, there's this thing called the China Health Study, and it's like this, like, it's like 800 page long of just like the raw data, not the cheesy paperback novel that Colin Campbell wrote, but the actual data is like in this like lithograph, it's like 800 pages. And I bought it years ago for like $200 at a used bookstore. And it's sat at my coffee table for the last 25 years and I'll open it up and flip through it and just started looking at some of these correlations of like different dietary trends and very interesting. So anyway, so from that reading that book, I was like, well, something obviously, you know, keto doesn't have all the answers because obviously you have all these people in China and they're eating all this rice and they're not obese, so obviously there's more to it than that, right? And so that was the first thing. And then I did the croissant. So then I did the croissant diet because I was looking at the effects of something called stearic acid, which is a saturated fat. It's a 18 carbon, it's a long chain. It's basically the longest chain length. you know, fats come in different lengths and different saturation levels. And stearic acid is the longest and most saturated of all the fats. And it's common in things like cocoa butter. And it's common in things like beef suet, like the kidney fat of ruminants. And in mice, if you feed mice a diet that's mo all the fat is from stearic acid, they get lean. And so I thought I'd try it. And, and, and the mouse diet is like, you know, it's like 40% of the calories are from starch and a bunch of the calories are from the stearic acid. And I said, we could make croissants out of those. And so I, I made this very high stearic acid croissants, and I started eating those and it actually worked, you know, I, I lost sign, I lost inches off my waist. I lost a bunch of weight in a pretty short period of time. And so that was kind of a eureka moment that was like, okay, look, we can, you know, if we understand the science better, right? We can make more informed decisions about what might or might not work from a weight loss perspective. Because that, you know, the, the, the right, the, the really interesting thing about the croissant diet is it wasn't really about macros. It was about right. The types of fat and Right. And then on and on. And so
Now I, When you did that, when you did the croissant, is that pretty much, well you said 40% of your calories were coming from the stearic acid. Is that?
So it was like, it was, yeah, a little bit, yeah. So it was, no, I would say 40% were were coming from the, the starch. Right. Okay. Because it was, that was making with regular wheat flour, just all purpose flour. Right. So I think the starch was about 40%. And then the, you know, the the stearic acid on its own is like, it's like hard wax. So you have to like, so I was mixing it with butter to get the croissants to where they were like edible, at least somewhat edible. They were still pretty waxy. So, so the fat was around, you know, 60%, but
How long did you do it for?
I did that for about six weeks, I think. Okay. And I, and I changed up towards the end. I was just making pancakes instead of croissants. 'cause croissants are a pain to make consistently. Yeah, I imagine. But yeah, so that was a very, that was a mixed, what what I, what I'm, what we're now calling a, a swampy diet. That, this is a term that Denise Minger actually came up with that I stole from her. But she, she talks about, there's this great experiment that John Speakman did in mice, and they, they basically put mice on all these different diets, and they raised the level of, of fat from like 10% of calories up to like 80% of calories. And. what you see is that the mice that were the fattest were in the like 30 to 60% of calories from fat range. And the, the, the very low fat mice were leaner. And then the mice that were up at like 80% fat that were more on a ketogenic diet, like they were leaner. Hmm. And so then the idea is that area from like 40 to 60% of calories as fat is the, is is the swampland. Hmm. So, we, so that's been become part of the, the language of the sort of Fire in a Bottle. And, and we have, we have a, there's also a discussion thread that's, that's actually a really good discussion thread over on Reddit at r/saturatedfat where people talk about a lot of these things too. That's a good place if people are interested in this. But yeah, so, so the, the croissant diet really was a very swampy diet, which is interesting because, you know, there's evidence, right? And the, and the standard American diet is exactly that, right? It's like 40% of calories from fat, I think 16% from protein. And then what whatever's left 40% ish is, is carbohydrates, right? And, and some of that sugar and some of that starch. But, but that's kind of the classic, right? That's happens to be very similar to the diet that you can use to fatten up a mouse in the lab is that, you know, biscuits, right? Yeah. Yeah. Toast with butter.
Well, what I think's interesting about like what you've done and with your, you know, your research through the years as far as like looking at it from the lens of like a metabolic standpoint. 'cause like, like you said about the calories and calories out, like it's something that I've gone back and forth about. 'cause you know, there's a lot of, you know, authority figures per se. Like we talked about, like, you know, Lane Norton and individuals who they, that's like, they, they just simplify to that. But I just think calories and calories are, is just too simplified.
Yeah. 'cause like you said, I, we all have a friend, right? I have a friend who actually just came over like a week or two ago, but I have him over like once a month, we play chess and I feed him, and when I tell you he eats like, and I'm bigger than him, I'm 185, you know, almost, you know, five 11, right? He's probably 145 and we're the same height. Right. And he, he ate three times. He can eat three times as much as me and, and not see any of that. Right?
Yeah, totally. Absolutely. Yeah. So where's this, where's this coming from? Well, he's obviously just burning through this, right? I mean, metabolic rate has gotta be part of it, right?
Right. Yeah. And, and there's another, there's another really, there's another very interesting paper also by John Speakman. He went to China and they studied people who were the leanest. And what they found out was that the leanest people had the highest resting metabolic rate, and were the least active because their, their metabolic rate is so highly tuned that they're just shredding all their calories and then like, they don't even have enough energy to then get off the couch. Right? Like they're, they're super lean, super high metabolic rate and, and they just don't move that much.
Yeah. I'm sure you're familiar with like Dr. Ray Peat.
Yes. Yeah. Okay. Because like, I've had J I've had Jay Feldman on, I dunno if you know Jay or Georgie Dinkoff. Yeah, sure. Yeah. These are so they both come on and, and talked about obviously body temperature. Yeah. Resting, resting pulse. Was it, there's a, you know, a few different measures that you can sort of take on a daily basis to sort of get a feel for where you're at. Big one was body temperature.
Yeah. I do my body temperature all the time. Yeah. It's, and have you found, have you found that correlating to anything or?
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So I, I, yeah, so I do a lot. I've tried a lot of different supplements right. To see like, and, and yeah, some of them really, you see the difference. It's like, you know, I do, like, I sell something on the, on my blog called SEA steroid, Ethan Olamide. And it's involved in kind of the, the endocannabinoid system. And the endocannabinoid system actually has a lot of effects on your metabolic rate, your thyroid, and whatever. And so that, you know, I started taking that and I was taking probably more than I should have been. I was taking 1200 milligrams a day, and like my resting body temperature went over a period of about a week. It went up to around a hundred. I was like, well, maybe this is too high. Wow. So I, so I had to back off. Like, I felt like, did you feel? I felt like I had a, I felt like I had a flu for like two weeks and I backed off and And, now it's now, and then you hit the right amount and you're like, okay, now it's kinda normal. But like, experimenting with pyruvate is another one. So, you know, I talk a lot about redox balance, which is a scary sounding word. And, but pyruvic is another one that can sort of gives you a temporary boost in your redox state, makes you more oxidized, less reduced. It's essentially like getting more oxygen. And that one, the first time I tried it, I mean my, you know, it was like after a meal, my, again, my temperature was at like 99.8 or something. And so there are things that really, you know, you can, you can rapidly see the effects. And over time, I feel like, you know, with the things I'm doing and the changes I'm making, like, you know, when I first started it was pretty common for my body temperature be 97.5 or 97.3.
And are you measuring it like first thing in the, or like middle of the day, or is there a time to measure it?
I kind of measure it whenever I think of, you know, some days I'll measure it five times, some days I don't think about it. It's pretty random. Okay. I'm not, I'm not that, that regular of a person. This is a bit of a problem if you're a, a, a self-hacker, but that's what it is. And so, but yeah, like in the morning it's usually right around 98, but like an hour after a starchy meal yesterday it was 99.2, like, you know, an hour after a big breakfast. And, and you can feel it like when you, when you become more aware of it in response to certain meals, I can actually sort of feel myself start to sweat like, you know, 15 minutes, half an hour after I've eaten, and then I'll check in reliably. It'll be, you know, 98.6 at least, sometimes, but sometimes higher. Sometimes o often I'll get 98.8 is a very common post-meal body temperature. And so
Yeah. I was just gonna say, what, what would you say would be some, obviously you mentioned a few supplements, but like, what would you say some lifestyle? I don't know.
Yeah. Like, so, you know, I think a lot of it is All right. So the, the dietary choices make a huge difference, right? So, you know, starch is more thermogenic than fat and protein is actually more thermogenic than starch, or at least it, it can be if you are good at burning protein. And so your food choices make a huge difference. And, and this is one of the things that turned me around, right? I said, I used to be a, a keto guy. And. now I'm much more starch-based, or I'm very starch-based at this, at this particular moment. And one of the reasons for that is looking at a bunch of research, there's a super interesting recent recent paper where they show that it, it you, right? So without getting too deep into the weeds, your mitochondria redox balance is basically like how many electrons in there, which is really just energy, right? And people talk about like energy toxicity, right? And so what happens is your mitochondria get too reduced, and that just means there's too much energy in there. There's too much, they're trying to burn too much food all at once. And there's not enough oxygen. Like I liken it to a carburetor, if anyone remembers carburetors, cars don't have 'em anymore. But the carburetor is the thing that mixes the, the gasoline and the air. And so what happens is, if you have too much, if you put too much gasoline into your engine and not enough air, the whole thing bogs down. And that's when engines like backfire and you get black smoke coming out of the tailpipe and the thing isn't running right? 'cause you have too rich of a mix of fuel to air. And that is the my favorite analogy for what happens in people's mitochondria, right? We're trying to send in too much fuel and there's not enough oxygen. And so there's this great study and they, they were taking continuous blood samples of these people and they had 'em eat a whole bunch of carbohydrates. And. what they showed was that as they continued to burn carbohydrates, they actually, their redox, their mitochondrial redox balance became more oxidized, which is to say they were actually getting a better gas feed, you know, air fuel mixture in their mitochondria, basically as they burned the, the carbohydrates. But what was even more interesting is that they had normal weight humans and overweight humans. And the overweight humans took a lot longer to, well, they, they had, they had a worse balance to begin with. So they had this reductive stress or this pseudo hypoxia in their mitochondria to begin with, essentially a lack of oxygen. And it took them a lot longer to start to burn the glucose. And when they finally did, they never caught up to the lean people. The lean people had much more, you know, an oxidized state, much more better oxidative. Yeah. They're better at like glucose, they were better burners of glucose. Yeah. And so and so, but, but if the, but if the heavier people ate enough glucose, it did improve their mitochondrial redox state over the two hours of the experiment as they sat there and ate that glucose. And so I, I looked at that and I was like, well, that's actually, I mean, if you can get yourself to burn glucose, that's actually a pretty good lever to get yourself out of this energy toxicity state, this like low burning, low metabolic state, right? And so that experiment as well as, there's a whole bunch of experiments from the eighties and nineties where they, they, they were just doing these like massive carbohydrate overfeeding experiments and they were putting people in these metabolic chambers. And there's some of them where they like, was it like The, the rice diet? Like, well this is, this is after the rice diet. This is like, I don't even know why they were doing these, but, but like So, they, they built these little metabolic chambers that's like a tiny, it's like a studio apartment, but like all of the airflow is controlled. So you can live in there for like 10 days. And I don't know, somehow they pass the meals through. And. you know, they, they have an air, there's an air intake and an air outlet and So, they can very precisely determine, it's like a calorimeter. They can very precisely determine how much oxygen that you're burning and how much CO2 you're exhaling over the 10 days. Hmm. And So, they just fed these guys increasingly increasing amounts of carbohydrates. So to the end, after the 10 days, they were eating like 5,000 calories a day of like nearly pure carbohydrates. And. what happened is the whole 10 days in these metabolic chambers, every day their metabolic rate increased from the beginning to the end. Their metabolic rate increased by 900 calories a day.
Really? Just because they were consuming massive amounts of carbs, their metabolic rate increased by 900 calories a day.
Is not a small amount.
Amount. No, no. Yeah. I sort of have done that a little bit for experiment on myself where I've increased my calories by like 600 and majority of that has been like fruit, right? Yeah. Like, just like, so I don't know what carbs they were eating. Do you know what carbs they were being?
I don't remember. It was a mix. It was a mix of starch and sugar for sure. I don't, I couldn't tell you exactly, but yeah.
And so, and so it was these kinds of experiments that got me thinking, you know, I should reconsider the starch thing. 'cause I like starch, you know, I like, I mean obviously this was after the croissant, this is after a lot of things that, that that incorporated some starch, right? But I wasn't, I sort of hadn't gone all in on it yet. I was on the fence. And so I did a couple of days of, like, I was like, right after I read these overfeeding experiments, I was like, okay, you know what? I was like, I'm gonna, I am going to eat a thousand grams of starch a day for a little while and just see what happens, right? Because my, my keto brain is screaming, if you eat a thousand calories of starch or of, of, you know, not just starch carbohydrate, I should say, you know, you're gonna gain grams, you're gonna gain 20 pounds in a week. Right? That's what my brain is saying. But I was like, I'm gonna do it. And I went down to the grocery store and I bought like, you know, things that were like low fat and high in carbs. So I bought like pretzels, gummy bears.
Yeah. You weren't holding back, so?
Right. Well, I mean, my goal was to, I mean, that's 4,000 calories. Yeah. That's a lot fewer carbs. That's a lot of carbs. So I was like, I got, we're go, I was like, if we're going for it, we're going for it, right? And so I think two days in a row I ate a thousand grams of carbs. And then, you know, and I kept it up for about a week, and by the end of the week I was down to like 600 grams. 'cause that's a lot, right? It's a lot to just continue being. Yeah, you must have been. Yeah. But, but I didn't gain any weight. That's the thing, right? Like I, I, everything in my sort of logical brain was like, if you do this, you know, you'll gain weight. But that didn't happen. And I was like, okay. And for me that was like a mental, doing that experiment was like a mental shift of like, okay, let's, let's more thoroughly consider this starch concept. Like what's, what's happening here? Like there's a lot of evidence that there is some benefits to doing this. And yeah, that was, that was what turned me down that road to.
Was that what led you to that Emergence diet that you, that you talked about?
Yeah. Right. And so the Emergence diet was right. So, so I was, I was coming out of that. And the, the term Emergence is, comes from torpor research. So this is where they look at animals that are hibernating and So, they go into and, and animals can go into a state of torpor without necessarily hibernating or even being hibernators. And, and torpor is a state where, where animals can shut down their metabolic rate or reduce their metabolic rate by up to 90%, right? And, and, and lots of different animals do this. There's like 177 mammals that are known to go into torpor, and we know how to induce it in lab mice and right. Mice are not a hibernating species, but they, you can put them into a temporary state of torpor. And so in the spring when hibernating animals are coming out of their torpid winter slow metabolic state, this is called Emergence. And so that's, that's where the name of the Emergence diet comes from. The idea is, you know, get out of this, get out of this torpid low metabolic state that I think a lot of us, you know, I, I'm not necessarily saying like what, what I actually, what I actually think, you know, I use torpor as an analogy, right? Because if you look at the metabolic changes that happen in a hibernating animal as winter is onsetting, you can see all those same changes in, in an obese human. And I'll just give you a few examples so people know I'm not just, so one of those is upregulated desaturase enzymes. So that's SCD1, and that is D6D or delta-6 desaturase and D5D delta-5 desaturase. And so these are all things that they desaturate your fats, they're involved in polyunsaturated fat metabolism and monounsaturated fat metabolism. And that's just, that's just a single example of something that you see is upregulated both in the mammalian state of torpor and in an obese human, right? And so, so that's an example. And so I'm, I'm thinking about ways of getting out of this torpor. And, and so I was looking at, I spent a lot of time this videos about this, the first Emergence diet video that I did, if you go back on my videos, on my, on the Fire in a Bottle YouTube, I was looking at what do, what do grizzly bears eat when they come out of, you know, when they come out of their layers in the spring? What does a grizzly bear eat in the spring, right? As it's emerging from torpor? That's an interesting question. And, and they eat a lot of protein-rich foods. They're, they graze. So they're eating a lot of grass. People probably don't realize that grass is actually a pretty high protein food because there's not a lot of carbs and there's not a lot of fat. And so most of what's left in there is, is so like, you know, it's like 30% things like clover, especially can be like 35% protein in the dry matter. you know, once you remove the water. I used to be a farmer, so I, yeah, I know a lot about forage analysis anyway. And so, and so the bears are eating that and they're eating elk. They catch and kill like elk as they're born. So they're, they have like elk and grasses and they eat some tubers. So they're getting some starch and they're getting some sugar out of the tubers. And the grass has some starch and sugar, but it's a pretty high protein diet. And so I, so I talked in those videos about, you know, the advantages of protein and the advantages of whey. And, and I tried, I tried for a little while, I did another strain. I was like, okay, well let's do, let's try this, this concept of a really high protein diet, right? I went out, I got a bag of whey powder, I went out, I got boneless skinless chicken breasts, and I got a bunch of salad greens, right? I was like, okay, well I'm a grizzly bear. It's spring, I'm eating this lean meat, I'm eating, you know, I'm eating all this lettuce, these green things. And it just didn't work. It just didn't work. But in the process of making those videos, I also, in looking at protein, I also ran across this other really interesting research coming out of the lambing lab. And they were actually restricting protein in, in mice. And, and they were showing that by restricting branch chain amino acids, they were restoring these metabolisms, they were restoring the metabolism of these mice. Hmm. And I was like, man, that's really interesting. It's sort of backwards from what you expect. But then I was like, but wait a minute, we're talking about the bears in the spring once they've woken up, what were they doing in the months before that? Well, they're, they're living off their own body fat, which is obviously a high fat diet, but they're also not metabolizing protein in that time period. And so then I was like, okay, well let's, let's play with that. And so, and I, and I actually posted, I think it was in that same video where I posted about, well, the grizzly bears are eating all these protein. I posted it as an aside. Oh. But there's this interesting counter research of, of the lambing lab. And look, they fixed these, these mice lost all this weight on a, on a branch chain amino acid restricted diet. Well, anyway, onto that video, some of the people on the r/saturatedfat message board on, on Reddit saw that, and they started doing it. They started restricting protein. And all of a sudden people were like, no, this really works. Like this is great. Like my blood glucose is down, I'm losing weight by actually restricting these branch chain amino acids. And, and branch chain amino acids, by the way, are high in most sources of dietary protein. So they're high in muscle meats, they're high in plant proteins, but they're very low in connective tissues. So, they're very low in collagen, you know, collagen, pork rinds, pig's feet, beef tendon, things like that. And so, and I also had known that there was a lot of advantages to these connective tissues. They have a lot of glycine, for instance, that's the main amino acid. And, and glycine, it turns out there's a sort of a landmark paper from 1969 where they just measured circulating amino acids in normal weight humans and obese humans. And. what they showed is that the obese humans have high circulating branch chain amino acids, and they have low circulating glycine. And just in the past few years, another paper came out that said, well, actually, the, the high branch chain amino acids are actually causing the lowered glycine. And what the glycine is doing is it is in your muscle tissues. Glycine is actually used to bind to a lot of the unburnt fuel. So like when I was talking about energy toxicity, And, you know, your, your metabolism is burning cleanly. You've got this unburnt fuel. The glycine actually helps remove that unburnt fuel from your skeletal muscle. And so it looks like the branch chain amino acid and the glycine are kind of these, you know, like counteract each other sort of, or they counteract each other. And the, and the branch chain amino acids are a, are a signal to be anabolic, right? They activate mTOR. And if you are a weight, if you're a lean, if you're a weightlifter and you want to add bulk, branch chain amino acids are a great way to do that, right? Which is why guys use whey powder in the gym. On the other hand, if you're fat, you probably don't wanna be anabolic because mTOR controls both protein, you know, protein anabolism as well as as fat anabolism, right? So, so mTOR can make you add muscle. It can also make you add fat, right? So if you are in the state, if your metabolic state is set up to add fat, well, if you eat a lot of whey powder, it's gonna just, your body's just gonna pack on more fat, right? Because that's what you're interesting. That's what you're optimized to do, right? And so and so, yeah. So all these threads were coming together and I was like, well, I mean, you know, I ran a butcher shop, right? And I, I ran a pig farm, and I love, I've always loved pork skin, any dish that has like crispy pork skin or pig's feet. And I was, I would have these parties and make all my friends eat the pig's feet. And so to me, I was like, well, what if we combined, I mean, everybody knows that broth is good. And, and then, you know, again, you can look in mouse studies and you can see that indeed there are a lot of metabolic benefits to supplementing with glycine. If you feed mice a lot of like collagen peptides, you can reverse a lot of the effects of diet-induced obesity. And I said, well, I mean, this makes sense, right? Like from, from all of the ways, right? I'm like, first off, if you think about traditional diets, you're like, okay, well, potato soup, right? That's bone broth and potatoes, that's starch and gelatin. And that's something that is, right. That's a traditional food around the world in all kinds of different cultures. you know, And, you know, in Africa they might make it with cassava or yam instead of potato, but essentially you can find that same dish. you know, there's a dish in, in Latin America that's cassava and pork rinds, cassava and crispy pork rinds that served cold. It's like a salad, but it's a very classic dish, right? And so I started to see this combination of kind of collagen and starch, starch trusting being this thing, this being this global thing. If you look back at historical food diets and, and it tastes good and they seem to compliment each other. And so I thought, you know, if I just cup, and I've always been, I've always been a meat eater, right? I was, the whole time that I've been trying all these different diets and sort of, I, I was struggling with high fasting blood glucose. You know, it's, I just wanna add one thing. I've, I mean, I just actually got a big blood panel and every, everything was pretty solid. I've always, I've always had high fasting blood glucose, like, not crazy, but anywhere from like 95 to low 100s. And I was like, I never really understood that why that was. Yeah, I don't know if there's a correlation, but it's just the one thing that I was like, oh, well. So I was, I was classically my number would be 115. Right? Okay. And so, and, and it would like, like you say, that's not crazy high, but it's high. It's considered pre-diabetic, right? Yeah. And so I, and, and, and I knew that, well, I was reasonably certain, right? That the, that the high fasting blood glucose was linked with the, you know, this mitochondrial state of reductive stress or pseudo hypoxia or, you know, energy toxicity, whatever you want to call it, they're all kind of the same thing. Yeah. And so I tried, you know, 10 different approaches to try to solve that. One of which was like, you know, some of the supplements, alpha-lipoic acid. I use R-alpha-lipoic acid. If people are like, I want to, if I was gonna take one supplement, what would it be? I would tell them to take that one because it, it's essentially adding, it's oxygenating your mitochondria. And so that's R-L-A-A-L-A, yes. Yeah. R-alpha-lipoic acid. And so, you know, I tried that and, and I tried the, you know, my SEA in combination thinking that those two things together should help the blood glucose. And they like kind of maybe helped a little. And I tried different diets and I'd get, some days I was getting like better readings, like 105, you know, but, but still not great, right? And so, so I started the Emergence diet October 2nd, I think, or first of last year. Last year. And 10 days later my blood glucose was 80, 80. Well, 10 days, 10 days later. It was in the low nineties. Like I was getting like, and it was going down to, it was like 97, one day, and then the next day it was 96. And like the day after that it was like 93. And then within another week or two after that, it was 80. And now every day when I wake up, 80, 81, 75.
And that's just from combining starch and like bone broth or gelatin.
Yeah. Yes. But could be, yeah, but I'm, but I'm doing very specific. I'm very specifically restricting branch chain amino acids. So, so, so what I'm doing now is a lot of low protein starches, you know, and it's, and it's, it's confusing, right? Because when you look at the mice in the lab, the, the ones that are right when they did this, like sort of protein restriction, if you get 'em down to 5% protein in their diet, like they're, they have very high metabolic rates, very like, and, and it's fixing a lot of these things. And, and they're not using, they're not using collagen, right? They're not using gelatin. And so my goal sort of, and this sort of a moving target, right? I'm figuring out was like, what, like I don't wanna be at 5% protein, but I want the, the branch chain amino acid containing parts of the diet to be at 5% protein. And so that means, you know, muscle meats, muscle meats, grains, potatoes, most starches are already at 10%. So rice, potatoes are already at 11%. And.
Of branch chain amino acids?
Well, well, I'm talking about those are, right? Let me clarify that, what I just said. So that's total protein, right? So they're, they're at around 10% total protein. Okay? Okay. The mice did very well at 5% total protein. But I, and I'm just equating the fact that muscle meats and grains all have about the same amount of branch chain amino acids. They're all right around 17%. And it doesn't matter. Interesting. It doesn't matter. The, the protein from, from, yeah. A filet, whatever, a filet beef has the same percentage of branch chain amino acids as rice. And, and, right. And grains have more protein than people think they do, right? So it's like if you're doing a starch-based diet and you're eating rice all day and you eat 2000 calories of rice, well, at the end of the day you're like, well, that's, you know, you add it up, right? That's 400 grams of rice. You're like, well, that's still 60 grams of protein or something that's coming from the rice. And so, so if you actually want to get down to that kind of like 5% that the mice were fed of, essentially, basically what I mean is 5% is all protein, not including connective tissues, not including collagen. So I probably will do 5% of my calories is protein from collagen plus 5% of, of protein from sources of starch, et cetera. Or it's, it's probably never really five, it's probably more like seven. But the way I get down to that seven is I'm using things like cassava and I'm using some plantain because cassava is like 3% protein. Whereas, you know, rice is nine, potatoes are 11, right? And so, and so that's, that's what I've been playing with and I've been using like cassava flour, like the pancakes that I use in the morning or cassava flour pancakes, which is like, there's almost no protein in cassava. It's like the purest natural source of starch in the world.
Would you say that, 'cause I, I, I remember talking to, I think Georgie even about this, he's talked about this sort of glycine too, right? What, what am I, what am I missing?
Glycine? So Right, right. A ratio. Yeah. This is a Ray Peat concept. And, and I think Ray Peat, I think Ray Peat was exactly right on this. I think Ray Peat nailed this. And like, and that's what I'm incorporating here is, is to get that, what's, what's the ratio? What's the ratio I'm thinking of glycine to, I mean, yeah, it's basically glycine to branch chain amino acids, I think. Okay. I, I, I don't know. My, my understanding of what Ray Peat said was that, and I, I'm not a Ray Peat scholar, I haven't read a lot of his things. I, I know tangentially a lot of what he said, but my understanding is he was saying basically you should get equal amounts of protein from collagen as you do from muscle meats. And so that would actually put you at right around one to one ratio of glycine to branch chain amino acids. And so it's very possible that, you know, I'm restricting branch chain amino acids and I'm upping glycine. It's possible that someone could get similar results keeping their protein levels, you know, somewhat normal. 'cause somewhat normal, but just increasing the glycine a lot, you know, or increasing the collagen a lot.
Yeah. Yeah. That would be, we don't know that. Yeah. That would be another maybe experiment because like, like you said, like I am, my, my wife and I, we enjoy having meat.
Oh, sure. Mainly, you know, let's say ribeye or filet, but you get some collagen from the fattier meats, right? You, you're getting some connective tissue or not.
You know, it's funny, I've spent tons of time going through the literature and looking at these studies and thinking like, well, beef shank has to be like loaded with collagen and it is higher, but it's not so much higher as you, you want it to be or as you expect it to be. Some of the seafoods are better, like scallops. Okay. Very good. Are higher in collagen. you know, that scallop muscle is a weird, it's almost like a connective tissue slash muscle thing. Like, so there are some like random ones out there, but
Would you say the best way to get 'em is through bone, bone broth?
I, bone broth is a great way to get 'em. I mean, everybody likes bone broth. And
Do you make your own? 'cause it is expensive.
I, you know, I don't. Okay. I mean, you, I, I should, I used to run a butcher shop. We used to make. So we had a, this 60 gallon kettle, and that was like one of our huge products that we wholesaled bone broth across the Northeast. Wow. So I, I'm, I'm, I'm good at making bone broth, but, but you know, it's a, it's a process. It's messy. And, and yeah, so I, I've been, I've been buying mine unfortunately.
You've been buying, you've been buying the bone broth. And what a, this is different though. Is this different than just getting a collagen protein, correct? Or is it?
Well, no, the, the, the composition are all pretty similar. Right? Okay. So there's, there's, you can buy just collagen protein supplements, that's fine. There's bone broth, you know, pork rinds. Like there's the, there's the brands of baked pork rinds that aren't fried in vegetable oils. I mean, those are great sources of collagen. you know, if you want to have something that's like real food that you actually chew, you know, and I literally, there's a, there's an Asian store in Ithaca now, a big Asian supermarket that's opened, and you can buy the beef tendons. They're fantastic. They're just the tendon meat. And you just slow cook 'em. And I, I think it's delightful. you know, it's, it's, is it as good as ribeye? I mean, probably not, but it's, but it's, at least it's something that is, you know, I, I think it's, I think it's great. I put it in, in pasta sauce. I put it in all kinds of things. I've been making
Cassava, yoki. Oh wow. That's a first. The fun thing about this diet is it gives me the option to sort of like express the, the like, chef side of my background. Yeah. So I'm like, oh, I could make cassava yoki and beef tendon pasta sauce, you know, and it's like, oh, I'm running a fancy bistro now.
And would you say like the, I mean, there's a lot of collagen powders out there. Are some, some that you steer towards than other ones? Like, or, or you don't? I don't, you know, I, I don't. I got, I was just curious. I got some collagen from Carnivore Aurelius. He's online, he's got a, he's got stuff that's from Brazilian. It's all from Brazilian grass-fed beef. So that seemed like a pretty safe source. Okay. So I've been using that, but that's, I haven't, that's honestly the only thing that I've tried. I got it. It's lasted me till now. Yeah. 'cause I like, I, I like, I think finding that balance. 'cause I do, you know, like we said, you, you, you enjoy meat and it's like maybe a way to sort of do what you're doing, but maybe not to the extent of just getting rid of all muscle meats is by upping your, the collagen part of it, right? Yeah, yeah. And right. Yeah, sure.
And I, you know, I do little tricks like I will, what I'll do is I'll, you know, I'll make like a meat sauce, but it's like mostly the, the, you know, I'll take like four ounces of ground beef at the beginning and just brown it up and then you make the meat sauce with that and it, you know, it gets you that meaty flavor and that whatever there is to the thing that is satisfying about eating muscle meats, I feel like I can get that cleverly with using smaller amounts. And that's sort of what I've been shooting for, you know, things like, things like prosciutto give you, like, you know, a little bit of that flavor kind of goes a long way. So there's clever ways to sort of like, you know, use your, use your protein budget wisely or whatever.
But, so let's just touch on a few more things. I, the emergent signs seems pretty cool, so I'll, I'm sure you're gonna post updates now, how things are going for you with that. Oh yeah. What else would you say is top of mind? I mean, I know you've talked in the past about, obviously we've talked on this podcast about vegetable oils in general, right? You know, I don't know if we need to go down that rabbit hole, but what about, I know you talked with Paul A. Little bit about the Inuit and like long-term ketosis. What, what, what, what are your thoughts around that?
Yeah, well, so that, so that's a weird topic and it's a, it's a little bit complicated. So the, so there's this longstanding question. So the Inuit, as probably most listeners know, you know, they live in the far north. There's no plant foods available. They mostly eat whale blubber and seal blubber and, and, and things like trout and white fish in these northern fish. And, but they, they have this genetic change that almost all of the Inuit have that you don't see in adjacent areas. Even in, even though the adjacent areas are like far northern Canada where they also don't really have plant foods. And this mutation means that they can't go into ketosis and the mystery is why, or they can't go into high levels of ketosis. And, and the mystery is why is it that the Inuit have selected for this genetic mutation that keeps them out of ketosis? And some people have said, well, this proves that ketosis isn't a healthy long-term solution. Long-term solution. I am not a particular fan of ketosis. You probably got from the beginning of the video, but I don't think that's right either. I don't think that has anything to do with the Inuit's dietary change. If that were true, then the other native peoples in Northern Canada who are just eating like elk and caribou would also have that mutation, right? But they don't have that mutation. So I think it has to do with the marine oils and specifically, so there's something called PPAR alpha, and it controls our, well people say it's a master controller, a fat metabolism. It sort of is, sort of isn't. What it is a master controller of is fat detoxification, fat desaturation. And so what I believe is that that amount of marine oils are not super safe for humans. So in a mouse, what happens is marine oils, omega-3 fats, they activate PPAR alpha and PPAR alpha is a detox is involved in all of these detoxification pathways. And PPAR alpha says, oh, this, this is, this is omega-3s, these look dangerous. We need to get rid of them. And the mouse, what happens is they massively upregulate their peroxisomes. And so peroxisomes are a place that you can send fats and you can break them down. And they're a little bit kind of safer than sending 'em into the mitochondria. And so in a, so in a mouse, they'll be like, okay, we gotta get rid of these omega-3 fats. They have this like 10x increase in their peroxisomal activation, and they just send them there and it's fine. And so what happens is we take a mouse in the lab that doesn't have, it's a, you know, it's a null genetic mutation that we made in the lab that doesn't have the gene PPAR alpha. And if you give them fish oil, they're dead in about 10 days because, because fish oil is toxic to your liver. Like they die of acute liver failure because they can't get rid of these omega-3s. And these long-chain omega-3s are gonna cause all kinds of, well, they cause all kinds of problems in your liver if you can't detoxify them. And the problem is that humans, somewhere along the line lost our ability to surge our peroxisomal activity in the same way that rodents do. And so if you give, and so PPAR actually stands for peroxisome proliferator. And so it's something that increases activity of peroxisomes, but in humans, this doesn't really work. And that's probably, you know, has something to do that we were primates. Primates don't eat a lot of polyunsaturated fats. They maybe don't eat a lot of these other plant toxins or whatever. And so somewhere along the line we lost that, that ability, and it didn't bother us too much. And life went on and it was all fine, right? So then these Inuit go to Alaska, or go to, not Alaska, but the Arctic. And now they're eating all of this fish oil and marine oils. And this is probably not a very safe combination for humans. And, but yet they can't, they can't, you know, gin up all of this peroxisomal activity and they're sending all this fish oil into their, into their mitochondria. And so they actually developed a, a, a mutation that they can't send long-chain fats into their mitochondria because they have a defect in what's called CPT1. And so what's happening is basically they just said, okay, well since we can't increase our peroxisomes, we're just gonna not send any long-chain fat into the mitochondria, and that's gonna force our peroxisomes to do the work anyway. Right? Because now the fats will build up and even though the peroxisomes aren't 10x surging, it's still gonna push them, right? Just the fact that they have more substrate available, they're gonna work harder, they're gonna do more of the load. And so, so it's, it's essentially the, the mutation they have, I think is a way to take the load of, of these long-chain omega-3 fats off of the mitochondria and stick them back into the peroxisomes, which is really where you want to send these long-chain PUFAs. But yeah, so that's my theory. This is a total, this is a total, right? This is a, this is just my conjecture.
This is your theory. So you're not a fan. I've talked, Jay, I've like Jade Feldman's not a fan of omega-3s, like supplementation or even even consumption. Is, is that where you lie? Or with, with a small caveat? I think there is some, you know, a, a lot of the problems, like I said, that we see in Toper that we see in obesity is this desaturation system of, of D6D and D5D. And there is some, some negative feedback of, of DHA, which is the longest, most unsaturated omega-3, you know, biological systems work in, right? In these pathways. And often the end product shuts off the enzyme that's making the end product because, you know, there's already enough of it there, right? And so we have all these feedback loops, negative feedback loops that are stopping the thing that's making the thing that's, that's building, otherwise you would just make it forever. And so anyway, the, the DHA seems to have a pretty potent effect at negatively feeding back on that chain of omega-3 desaturation. And so DHA, I think especially if you can get it in phospholipid form is something that I'm, I think it's probably good. The other omega-3s I would say avoid, especially avoid alpha-linolenic acid, the plant-based omega-3. Our body hates that fat. Our body does everything in its power to get rid of that fat as fast as possible. So to me, that's not, it doesn't.
Where, where, where do we get most of that from? I mean, flax seeds are a really good, are a big source of that, obviously. Like, but people supplement flax seeds, right? Like canola oil is probably for most people, just in their not trying to supplement linolenic acid, canola oil would be a big source. Also, soybean oil is like 7% alpha linoleic acid. And so yeah, some of the use, I mean, probably for most people, the largest source of alpha-linolenic acid is soybean oil in America. Because every, because every restaurant you go into is cooking with it and heating it. And it's in every, you know, if you go through the snack food, it's in every snack food too, you know?
Yeah. So what do you cook in? Coconut oil or? Well, these days I'm, these days I'm doing pretty low-fat cooking on the Emergence diet. So I'm doing a lot more like boiling. I'm doing a lot of like, you know, boiling things in bone broth. Oh, okay. But when I do cook, I use butter. I mean, that's butter. Or when I, if I, if I am gonna use a cooking fat, I use butter. That's my, that's my go-to, you know, my other go-to would be beef suet. Beef suet is another hot, very high stearic acid. So, so beef suet, the kidney fat specifically of ruminants are the highest fats in stearic acid. Butter is the most saturated fat. You know, we, we have this whole confusing language around fats, right? It's like, oh, well lard is saturated. Well, not really. It's 40% saturated. You know what, what other thing is 40% of something? And people are like, oh, that's totally that. It's like, no, it's not. It's, it's less than half. It's like well under half, right? So like, whereas butter is like 70% saturated. So butter is an actual saturated fat. It's the only one really. Beef fat is, yeah, 40 to 50% saturated. And then, and, and then, but then the beef suet can be approaching the levels of butter. It can be like 60 to 65% saturated and maybe 20 to 25% oleic acid. And so that beef, so, and, but if you want to keep, so my sort of thing about sat, like, I like saturated fat. I feel like saturated fat is what our body makes. And saturated fat to me is kind of neutral. It doesn't really, it doesn't really act as a signaling molecule. It doesn't really, it's just kind of like, it's just kind of like diesel fuel. It just kind of, it's there. It doesn't really do much. It's just kind of, it's just kind of a source of calories, right? Whereas if you look at monounsaturated fats, like, you know, when you olive oil, when you eat olive oil, when you eat monounsaturated fats, well, you're activating PPAR alpha. And that has all kinds of downstream effects. It's clearly evolved, it's clearly involved in the progression of obesity. It, it actually activates delta-6 desaturase and delta-5 desaturase. So the more monounsaturated fats you eat, you are activating these desaturase enzymes, which you know, is maybe a problem if you're eating it with starch. And then when you get into the polyunsaturated fats, well, they're the things that are actually getting desaturated by delta-6 desaturase and delta-5 desaturase. Right. And so it's like the, the, they're kind of the yin and yang in my mind of metabolic dysfunction. And so, yeah. So I go with butter, which is 70% saturated, and there's nothing in there that I'm really scared of. Yeah. Or beef suet. It's good. And ghee, ghee is okay too, right?
Yeah. Ghee is just clarified butter. Just butter without the milk protein, which is especially good if you are lactose. Well, if you're allergic to dairy, then ghee is a better source than better choice than butter. Or also just from restaurant supply stores, you can buy clarified butter. Ghee is when they make ghee, they, they, they brown the, the butter solids first. So it's this long slow cooking process. They make, like if you've ever seen like brown butter, they basically make that. Yeah, my, my wife just made these brown butter chocolate chip cookies. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And, and brown butter has its place and it's great, but like, because of the fact that that's how ghee is traditionally made, ghee has a very specific flavor profile. Yeah. If you buy clarified butter from a restaurant supply store, it's essentially the same thing as ghee. But it doesn't have that brown butter step. So the flavor is a little bit more just like regular butter. FYI people who are shopping for butter.
I, I've been cooking, I've been cooking in coconut oil. A that's okay, right? I mean, that's been? Yeah, I, so coconut oil, right? So I, I have a very, I'm still trying to figure out coconut oil. I actually did a coconut oil thing last summer, I guess. And I, I didn't, it, I, to me it was a fail. I tried it for a pretty long time. The issue with, so coconut oil is all saturated. The problem for me with coconut oil is the main fat is lauric acid, which is a 12-carbon saturated fat. And that is another thing that activates PPAR alpha because, because essentially any fat, I think what PPAR alpha's role is, is to get rid of the types of fats that the body doesn't wanna store. And so we don't store a lot of lauric acid, right? So when you consume lauric acid, you, you're kind of forced to either metabolize it right away or you have to like turn on the de novo lipogenesis machinery and you have to break it down because we can't, you know, it's funny, the fats that we eat, a lot of 'em, if they activate PPAR alpha, what happens is we break 'em down and into acetyl-CoA. So, you know, fats are made out of these two-carbon units called acetyl-CoA. And you just link 'em together like a chain. And like when you eat, especially alpha-linolenic acid from, you know, which is the plant-based omega-3, I, if, if humans eat this within 24 hours throughout the body, if you, if you label that, if you put a radio label on that, on that alpha-linolenic acid throughout the body in 24 hours, you're finding it in palmitic acid all over the body. And what that means is that, so, and palmitic acid is saturated, right? And we can't remove double bonds from it. We can't make alpha-linolenic acid into saturated fat. So what happens, you eat ALA, it triggers PPAR alpha, it upregulates the machinery to do de novo lipogenesis, and it upregulates the rate at which fat is flooding into the mitochondria. And so the mitochondria gets overwhelmed with all of this fat flooding in, and all this acetyl-CoA, and it gets rebuilt into palmitic acid. Right? And that really is the job of PPAR alpha. And so, you know, when I talk about, you know, our basic problem being this energy toxicity or overload of fuel in the mitochondria, anytime that you activate PPAR alpha, you're, you're adding to that. And so, so the PPAR alpha is saying, okay, we can't store any of this fat, send it all into the mitochondria, break it down and rebuild it as something that we can store, rebuild it into palmitic acid, rebuild it into, you know, oleic acid. That's what comes out of de novo lipogenesis. Right? And so, and so I think that that's, that's a problem with coconut oil to me, is that that 12-carbon, and of course that process every time that you're turning on that machinery.
Yeah, go ahead. Now, now you eat, now you a potato with that. And, and the glucose of course also gets converted to acetyl-CoA. And it also just gets rebuilt into that fat, right? Because you're, you, you have all these enzymes and they're just, the more acetyl-CoA that's around, the more they're gonna just turn out fat. And now it doesn't. Right. And, and so because that system is upregulated essentially everything, protein, glucose, fat, it's all gonna get rebuilt into these fats. Wow.
I've been sauteing my potatoes in coconut oil. Well, well, having, I mean, having said that, like there are, there are a lot of interesting things about coconut oil. Like I say, like, I tried and, and last summer it, hey, I can use, it's a, it's a very, it's a very interesting fat. And there's a lot of benefits in the, the, the fast burning of the MCTs is interesting. The, I think the idea that you can actually, I think that the 14-carbon fat and coconut oil, we can actually store that. And so what happens long term, what you see is that, you know, in societies where they eat mostly coconut oil, they actually have the most saturated fat out of any, out of any society. And what happens is that saturated fat displaces the monounsaturated fat and the polyunsaturated fat, right? In their tissue. And it's mostly that, a lot of it is the 14-carbon myristic acid. And so that's super interesting. And I think if you, if there was a way to, like, if there was a way to capture that and do it in, in the long term, I think it's, I think that's a really interesting approach. And that was why I tried doing it for a long time. It didn't work for me, but coconut oil is super saturated, and so it's, you know, I just figured I'm on the fence about it. I'm not gonna say, don't eat coconut oil. Coconut, don't throw, don't throw it out. Bad. Okay. I'm, I'm just, I'm just.
You're on the fence. I'm on the fence. Yeah. Because butter is okay, if it's even in higher heats, it's okay to use butter. I mean, yeah. I mean, I, I sauté with butter. I mean, I wouldn't, you know, I wouldn't deep fry in butter. Yeah. Right. But for just general sautéing and general cooking, I think it's fine. Yeah. Okay. I mean, that's the classic, you know, I'll switch that. I don't mind it. I don't mind it at all. Yeah. I just had a big tub of Coke. I'm like, I gotta use this somehow. Sure. So now I'll just send it to you. I'll, I'll mail it to you. Yeah. Okay. Well, this was fun, Brad. I feel like we could keep going. Maybe we'll do a part two down the road. Yeah. Maybe I'll get you and Georgie on. I think that'd be really fun. Yeah, that's fun. Georgie and I did, did a show together. Okay. Oh, maybe a year or two ago now on, but, but yeah, no, Georgie and I, I got along really well. It was a fun show. Yeah. Yeah. That'd be, that'd be a lot. I, I, I have my differences from Georgie, I'm sure. And, and he thinks about, he thinks about these problems in a very different realm of, you know, he focuses a lot on the, the cortisol system and, and a lot of the, the, the thyroid stuff and the stress response and. Right. And that's not where my brain is. My brain is a little more low-level and like how do the various macros affect flows of energy in and out of the mitochondria. So there is kind of overlapping.
Be a lot of talking. It'd have to be a two-hour, yeah. At least a two-hour show. And I'd say about five words, which would be fine. But this was fun, Brad. I appreciate you coming on the show. Where's the best place for people to find what you're doing?
Yeah, so the blog fireinabottle.net. I don't update as often as I did, 'cause I've been focusing a lot more on the YouTube channel, which is just Fire in a Bottle on YouTube. I'm on, I'm, I'm relatively often on Twitter, which is fire_bottle. My, I, I've been trying to push more videos onto Instagram on Fire in a Bottle, and I think that's the same. I have a TikTok channel now. Oh my God. I don't, that's a very new, not a lot of followers yet, but I'm, I'm seeing, I'm dipping my toe into that water to see how it goes. And then the, the, I've already mentioned it, but the Reddit discussion thread at r/saturatedfat is a good place. There's a very active community there. And they, they're, they're pretty smart group of people. They're, they can, they can help you guys out in a lot of ways if you head over there. So, on Reddit.
Okay. And then I do wanna ask you one last question that I ask pretty much all my guests. If you were gonna give one tip to an individual that was looking to get their body back to what it once was, what one tip would you give that individual?
Oh, man, that's a tough one. I know. I, I pigeonholed it. You know, I would say this, I, I would say this and I, and, and the reason that I'm saying this is that, 'cause this has like made a big shift in my thoughts over the last year is to, is to just reconsider starch and reconsider like, you know, because I think that like carbohydrates in general and starch have gotten, have obviously taken a lot of bad publicity. And I'm now thinking like maybe that, maybe we should reconsider, maybe that should be sort of the, you know, whatever the, the, the sort of dietary cornerstone, which was the case traditionally, if you look at classic America in, you know, the, for the hundred years preceding the year 2000 or the forever essentially, like America and European diets and African diets, they're, they're largely starch-based. And that has worked for a long time. Right. And, and a lot of the metabolic dysfunction that we've seen has happened in the last hundred years as we've sort of moved away from that. So that might be my piece of sage advice for the world.
Love it. Love it. Well, thank you Brad. I appreciate it. And yeah, have a great rest of the day. I appreciate you coming on.
Yeah, thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to the Get Lean Eat Clean Podcast. I understand there are millions of other podcasts out there, and you've chosen to listen to mine, and I appreciate that. Check out the show notes at BrianGryn.com for everything that was mentioned in this episode. Feel free to subscribe to the podcast and share it with a friend or family member that's looking to get their body back to what it once was. Thanks again, and have a great day.