Food Chained

3:27 – Don’t fall for keto scams
Keto can have a lot of benefits, but there are also a lot of keto scams out there. Don’t fall for fake advertising about keto pills or food that isn’t actually keto.

“We know that ketosis is an incredible metabolic state for our bodies. We know the benefits of lowering even refined carbohydrate consumption. And because of that, keto exploded. And many people came into the space for weight loss, and they saw so many other benefits with keto that it blew up. And everything became so popular. And when that happens, you have a lot of bad apples come in and say, ‘Oh, there's a huge market that I can capitalize on who are really looking for help.’ And that's what you saw with these keto pills. You even see it with some keto products that just throw a keto label on their product, and their product is absolute trash. And it's frustrating because there are people who are really trying to benefit their lives and improve their lifestyle. And they're looking for that answer. And you see these people, like the keto pills, that will promise 20 pounds of weight loss in two weeks. And that's what someone feels like they want internally, and someone's promising that, and they're willing to spend whatever it is to get that because it seems like the easy fix.”

11:22 – Avoid fake sugar
You should try to avoid artificial sweeteners if possible because fake sugar isn’t good for you and can even affect your gut microbiome.

“The Splendas and the Equals, 99 percent of that packet is maltodextrin or dextrose. Besides the artificial component part, they have to mix it with basically sugar in order to make it suitable in a packet because the amount of artificial sweetener itself is so, so, so minute. So you have people, and I remember the days when I used to do this, it was like five packets of Splenda and I'd put it in something. That's five grams of straight dextrose and people don't realize that. And so there's new studies now coming out with artificial sweeteners, and a lot of it's animals, but I'm sure it'll start coming out in humans as well about how it can affect possibly the gut microbiome. So it's interesting to learn about that and say, if you can, opt for more naturally flavored, definitely stay away from those sugar alcohols that I mentioned and focus on things that are just better formulated.”

12:45 – Find the right alternatives
There are good, healthy alternatives to traditional sugar, but it’s easy for people to have a bad experience and get turned off to the keto diet as a whole.

“The thing that worries me most about that is you have a lot of new people who come into the space, and people want alternatives. I think keto would suck if you can never eat a piece of chocolate again in your life. So that's why I respect companies who are making some of these alternatives that are really well formulated, but imagine someone who's new coming in and the first piece of guilt-free candy that they have is full of maltitol and sorbitol. And they're like, ‘This is horrible.’ And they associate that with the diet itself or even eating low carb. And then they just go on this carb binge because they had a poorly formulated product. And so that's the part that stinks the most.”

14:11 – Change your taste buds
Your taste buds adjust to the way you eat, so if you drink a lot of artificially sweetened beverages, you could mess up your taste receptors.

“Even your taste buds change when you start to focus more on whole foods and eat a little bit lower carb. You realize how sweet these artificial sweeteners are. For some people it makes some foods so hyper-palatable or drinks so hyper-palatable. Imagine if you were to give someone a can of water and be like, ‘Hey, drink four of these.’ People would be like, after one, it would just be like, ‘All right, I'm kind of full.’ But give them four diet sodas, and they could knock that down in a day easily because it's so hyper-palatable that it can likely lead to over-consumption. There is some new data saying it could actually mess up some of the taste receptors because it is so sweet. So it can throw some things off and brain neurochemistry of your level of sweetness. But that's why I say if you can, try. If you're going from drinking five sodas a day and that's your only option. But at the end of the day, try and limit a lot of those artificially sweetened beverages as much as humanly possible.”

20:20 – Get back to the basics
Whether you go on the ketogenic diet or not, you should focus on eating whole foods and avoiding carbs.

“I could sit here and talk mechanisms and all these things, but the reality is we need to go back to the core and we need to go back to somewhat of the basics. Focusing on whole foods is probably the most important thing. And obviously I'm a big proponent of low-carb keto. I think it makes things a heck of a lot easier for people to make smarter decisions, because you're cutting out a lot of the things that just would likely lead to overconsumption and high amounts of insulin and things like that, but it doesn't have to be. It could be even a Mediterranean approach that you're focusing primarily on whole foods. It's moving more. At minimum, we should be targeting 10,000 steps a day. All of us, if you can work in some form of high-intensity interval training or resistance training, amazing, highly would recommend that. Sleeping. Sleep more. Most people’s sleep is trash. At least trying to focus on seven hours of quality sleep per night. And honestly, some form of stress management. We all went through, over the last two years, something that arguably will be the biggest stressor in our entire lives. And so people are still dealing with that. And if you can't cope with that or find ways to healthily cope with that, it's going to lead to things like bingeing and coping with it with food.”

23:05 – The downside of social media
Social media is a great place for information, but it’s also a place where anyone can become an expert overnight, so choose your sources carefully.

“We're flooded with information, but starved for knowledge. That's the best way I can put it, in that the reality is everyone is, because social media has many great things, but social media has some downsides where everyone's an expert on social media now. And so you have people who don’t deserve to be talking about nutrition all of a sudden growing a huge following on TikTok telling people that eating the grass out on your front lawn is the only thing you should be doing, and people buy into it. And there's so much information that it's so hard to sift through the noise and say who do I trust? And my biggest thing for most people listening is, I tell people, just find your anchor, one person or a group of people, and anchor to them and try and block out the rest of the noise. Because it's the shiny object syndrome. It’s ‘Oh, I heard this person on TikTok say this.’ You can get so distracted so easily. And when that happens, it usually hurts more than it helps.”

25:56 – Don’t overload your body with sugar
The amount of sugar in a single soda is usually more than the amount of glucose that’s circulating in your body at a given time, so it’s very easy to overconsume sugar.

“If you look at how much circulating glucose is in our body give or take at any one time, it's about four grams. Think about four grams. That's less than a teaspoon. And one soda, how many teaspoons are in that? You look at it and you're like, ‘Why would I need that much?’ And the reality is you don't. And you look at the studies, what's even more alarming for me. And I know it's a big cause for you as well, is that you look at these studies in animals, and unfortunately you can't do them in humans this would be super unethical. But in animals, they’ll take pregnant rats. They will give them high amounts of sugar. And the minute those babies will come out of the womb, they'll literally put them in an environment where they can have regular drinking water or sweetened drinking water. And if the mom consumed a high amount of sugar while she was pregnant, the babies coming out of that are already predisposed to want the sweetened drinking water more than the regular tasting water. And it's like, you're putting kids at a disadvantage before they've even been introduced to the world by having tons of sugar. And we wonder why we're having the epidemic of child obesity.”

28:25 – What is type 3 diabetes?
Type 3 diabetes is insulin resistance in the brain, which can cause cognitive impairment and even Alzheimer’s disease.

“We all kind of know what type two diabetes is. It's when the cells are resistant to utilizing insulin, insulin is not responding. Imagine someone knocking on the door. And have you ever had someone knock on your door at home and you don't hear it? And someone's like, ‘Hey, I've been knocking for like 10 minutes.’ And you're like, ‘I didn't hear it.’ That's really what's going on in our body is our cells are becoming deaf, so to speak, to the insulin knocking. And so what happens is you need another person knocking on the door and another person knocking on the door. And eventually, you need so much insulin that they start giving it exogenously to try and overcome that, to pump more in. Which I don't think is the right way to treat type two diabetes, but type three diabetes is that same principle, but for the brain. Meaning that certain receptors, certain cells in your brain, aren't responding to that knocking or aren't responding to insulin the same way. So it's hard for glucose because insulin opens the door for glucose to come into the brain. So glucose isn't getting into the brain. And so the brain is starving for energy. And so that's why we're seeing higher instances of Alzheimer's, higher incidents of just mild cognitive impairment. And I think a lot of that is attributed to this concept known as type three diabetes, which is really just insulin resistance in the brain.”

30:18 – Metabolic health is linked with cognitive function
Getting older doesn’t necessarily mean losing cognitive function. If you take care of your metabolic health, your mind can stay sharp.

“Typically the mild cognitive impairment happens slowly over time, which is even scarier. It's the silent killer, so to speak. By the time it's actually diagnosed as mild cognitive impairment, there's four-ish levels, mild cognitive impairment is number three. And then number four is Alzheimer's. And then ultimately severe Alzheimer's and dementia. But people are like, ‘Oh, I'm starting to forget my keys.’ Occasionally, once in a while, yeah, we all do that. But if that's happening more and more, it's probably a problem. And it's something that you probably want to get looked at and be like, ‘Hey, I might need to dial in,’ because we all can see when you break an arm or you break one of your fingers or your toes. It's like, all right, cool. I know what to do. I fix it. But a lot of people’s brains are slowly breaking because they're starving for energy and it just gradually happens over time. And we hide it underneath this umbrella of, ‘Oh, I'm just getting older.’ That shouldn't be the case. There are people who are a hundred years old and very, very, very sharp. So aging is not the explanation for that. We can certainly reverse aging, and we should be doing that. But a lot of it underlies what is your metabolic health?”

31:49 – Lower your inflammation
If you want to increase your metabolic health, the first thing you have to do is lower your overall inflammation.

“Things that lower inflammation and provide an alternative source of fuel are probably going to be your two best strategies. So high dose fish oil, high dose omega-threes, lowering out a lot of these inflammatory oils that most people are cooking or eating high amounts of, going on a walk. There are studies showing that just walking can improve mild cognitive impairment. Obviously, a big fan of low-carb ketogenic diets has shown tremendous promise. And then this is an area where we're actively studying exogenous ketones, because again, you're utilizing a different tunnel, so to speak. So if that tunnel that utilizes insulin and glucose is blocked up and there's a lot of junk going on, there are other tunnels, and those tunnels take up and utilize ketones. We just need to be able to provide it to the body. And so periods of intermittent fasting, ketogenic diet, and exogenous ketones are definitely strategies as well.”