Mark sis what up welcome back to the show how you doing thanks for having me Max always good to see you and be here yes likewise likewise love any chance I get to hang with you um well we've got lots to talk about because it's been a minute since we've caught up but let's start with longevity there's a new study that came out recently that found that the average baby boomer person over 65 is popping Four between four and five prescription drugs every day just to get by but that's not even the scariest part in
fact if you look at a certain population of those that take even more about 6.1% are on 10 or more drugs gez this the concept of hyperpolypharmacy okay but you've thwarted all of that you're not just surviving you're thriving you're in amaz you get in you're like in better shape every time I see well thank you I'm you Know I'm trying and it's a it's a task at some point I just turned 71 this summer so I'm in my eighth decade I'm like that's just a mindboggling concept and your brain is sharp as ever your
brain is almost as sharp as your abs well we'll see but uh I feel like it is and you know part of that's just the the um ability to get up in the morning and have the time to do a bunch of uh puzzles and and sort of brain teasers and and brain sharpening activities and Diet and I would say um refraining from many of those uh pharmaceutical drugs that you just referenced you know the fact that um people are taking so many drugs in the chase for longevity right I first of all we have
to ask what is longevity what does it mean to lot of people does it just mean living longer CU in my in my world it's not just living longer I'm not chasing those numbers I want to Define my life in terms of quality of life like am I able To move around uh this world am I able to walk go for a walk um literally smell the roses go down the street and talk to a neighbor um can I walk to the gym and do you know full range motion body motion activities can I get
on a plane and go to Italy and do a walking tour I mean can mo mobility is absolutely one of my defining characteristics of longevity of a quality of life access to co cognition and memory so am I able to remember first of all have conversations With people and do exchanges and remember what they said and then am I able to remember what happened yesterday or last week and recall that and and and I think one of the things that defines humans through through our language is the ability to tell stories we are almost at
at the quintessential element of who humans are we are storytellers and we love stories and our whole life is about stories whether it's movies television uh fiction uh Gossip um soap operas podcast podcasts are just opportunities to people for people to listen to other people telling stories right right so so that part of cognition am I able to um engage in conversation with people and then um and then adaptability the ability to um you know take what has happened to you and not self victimized but to be able to uh roll with the pudges to
be able to uh move on from Bad events uh and and so Those three things Mobility cognition and adaptability are kind of resilience are kind of the three you know defining characteristic now let's cut back to the average baby boomer taking four medications you said between four and five that's the average that's the average so you got to figure they're taking a blood pressure lowering Med they're probably taking a cholesterol lower ing Med they probably maybe they're taking um a um uh a hydrochloric Acid lowering Med you know a PPI a PPI of some of
some uh type um they're probably taking a painkiller because of their arthritis or whatever joint issues they've got so they're taking a a non-steroidal antiinflammatory drug uh maybe they're taking I think one of the largest classes of drugs is anti-yo anti- analytic meds um I'm just going to guess that's what the average of the four are um when you know maybe a glucose um regulation Med like a met Foreman all of those things can be addressed with lifestyle this is the the ultimate irony so you know with the Advent of OIC and um and wovi
and and T epatite and all the variations of the of these um agonists um you have to ask yourself okay is that are we trying to um you know provide an opportunity for people to live a healthy pain-free life through medication and is that a good thing Maybe it is I don't know I mean I'm just going to raise my hand to say probably not I think any of these things that you can that you can address through drugs you can probably cure or mitigate much better through a lifestyle modification with a few exceptions so
where does that leave us I don't know I mean what's the my my chasing of longevity is not so much uh measuring my blood glucose every day or my blood pressure every day or being Concerned about my cholesterol levels but it's really about how do I feel like at the end of the day if I want to enjoy life and I want to feel good and I want to feel excited to get out of bed every day like like literally why do people get out of bed every day motivation passion uh purpose whatever you want
to describe it that is also a part of this longevity experience for me I mean I know so many people um you know who hang on day to day it's like oh geez another Day and you know I wake up I do the same thing I you know I watch TV I uh you know my mother who passed uh you know a couple years ago she had um uh lung cancer and uh they were for six months she's like Mark can't you do anything for me can't you help me exit because I'm in pain all
night I take the drugs I can't wait to get up in the morning I get up in the morning and I'm in pain I go lie on the sofa and watch television I can't wait to go it was a horrible Like last 6 months for her so anyway I I know you've had you know a relatively similar experience with your own mother yeah and yeah totally I mean you know and and also there's I think it's worth mentioning that there's not a physician on the planet that knows how all of these Myriad Pharmaceuticals are interacting
in a body that's growing increasingly frail with age yeah um you know it's not that there's uh it's not that we want to I don't like to place a stigma on pharmaceutical drugs but it's just that that nobody knows how these drugs are interacting with one another yeah in one system in one body and then you get to yeah 10 or 10 or 15 and it's it's a real complex equation I mean 6.1 people are taking 10 or more drugs I mean by the end of my mom's life she was on 12 different Pharmaceuticals yeah
she was on you know dementia medications she was on you know cardiovascular related Medications she was on I mean there there there were a lot and and I would have these conversations in the doctor's offices with her because it seemed at a certain point that she was on drugs that were having opposing effects on one another she was on one coleric drug and then she was on another anti-cholinergic drug yeah and it's just that there's no these drugs are typically not tested they're tested in isolation yeah it's not that I don't Take a pain medication
now and then um but you know it would be hard to predict how a pain medication might be interacting with well and so many of the meds are are just designed to counteract the side effects of the original prescriptive Med so there's a lot of that stuff going on where yeah you know um yeah I so how how have you been able to how have you managed to engineer a life that actually looks a lot more similar to how those that live in the World so-called blue zones um are are typically described how have you
been able to architect your life so as to to to mirror that but you're somebody who travels all the time you're flying all the time you you you know you you Embrace modern conveniences sure I mean I'm I'm I totally that's a good good uh point I embrace modern conveniences um I live a fairly I what I would say hedonistic life like I enjoy every bite of food I eat so I don't sacrifice any At any point in the pursuit of longevity by cutting back on my dining pleasure now I I know what not to
eat but my list of foods that I do choose to eat is so um vast right now that I never feel like I'm sacrificing at a meal um I think one of the things I've done is I've um I've realized that uh if you do things the appropriate way um I I I chase sort of this minimum effective dose of anything so what's the least amount of exercise that I can do to maintain strength and Mobility and resilience um and and V2 Max and all those things not what's what's the most amount and the more
I keep doing it maybe I'll get incrementally better but what's that sweet spot where it's a minimum effective dose of lifting weights of doing some cardio during the week of doing a little bit of stretching but not too much what's the least amount of food I can eat and that we've talked about this in the past what's not what is the Most amount of food I can eat and not gain weight and not feel like a slob but what's the least amount of food I can eat maintain muscle mass maintain strength um never get sick
and most importantly not be hungry so I I sort of use that as a okay what's the least amount of drugs I can take to offset the pain or whatever it is I'm I'm dealing with um one of the things that happened to me as an endurance athlete was I overstress my heart it's endemic in the In the community that I grew up in in the 70s where people thought that the more activity you did the more cardiovascular work you did the longer you'd live it's almost like the more miles conferred greater longevity on you
well turned out not to be true and so there's millions of people from my generation of Runners and and cyclists and triathletes who have um um a fib I have PVCs I have premature ventricular contractions so I had to take I took Medication to slow my heart rate down because of the damage I did to my heart wow but here's what happens so I have one cardiologist who says this is what we got to do this is your problem we're going to we're going to slow your heart rate down so the max you can ever
get is 130 beats a minute um and I did that for 5 years and it sort of uh resolved in the short term my my premature ventricular contractions which which would result in a skipped Beat every every third beat so every third beat would be skipped when I got past 90 beats a minute it was anyway it was alarm it was scary it wasn't like threatening so then I go to see a new cardiologist and and I get a EKG workup and he says uh Jesus he says you've got second degree AV node blockage I'm
like okay what do you think about that he said well if he had third degree node blockage we'd be installing a pacemaker tomorrow I'm like okay so what do we do About it he said well what drugs are you taking I said well I'm taking this this one drug that the previous guy uh you know put me on for the PVCs he goes well that's what's causing your AV node blockage so I I had to drop that drug it was crazy so this is the treadmill that you find yourself on when you start going down
that route and and so many people do that I mean you know the classic that we talk about we've talked for 10 years is these PPI where people Say I can't digest food or I get I get heartburn and I get heartburn and I and so the doctor gives you PPI to take all the time well now you now because you're cut your pH of your of your stomach uh you've raised the pH of your stomach now you can't you can't digest food it gets worse so then you have to take something else like a
Tums to alleviate the short-term acidic thing it it it's it's a weird rabbit hole that people come down you know to it's hard to get out of It yeah it's hard to get out of it yeah yeah that is uh that's a problem yeah so so so endurance so running like endurance style marathon training you've discovered over time not well it's not it's not it's not ideal for health in fact marathon training is antithetical to health I would say so I have a new book coming out here's my plug uh it's called Born to walk
and it's a real indictment of the running boom of the last 50 years as having been Pretty much wholly inappropriate for all but maybe 2 or 3% of the population so most people who are running with the idea that they're going to live longer as a result of that or they're going to lose weight as a result of that or they're going to somehow improve their their cardiovascular performance and reduce stress are actually not achieving those goals through running uh so we you know we do a real deep analysis onto how this came to happen
like the idea that In the early when I started running in the 60s and 70s the only people who ran were Runners right you were skinny you were adapted to being a runner you were genetically gifted to be a runner and so so Runners were just pure runners in the in the 60s and 70s all the way almost through the through the 70s and the shoes we had were were thin either I started running in Chuck Taylor and then there was a shoe that uh Phil Knight imported from Japan it was the um an Atsuka
Tiger shoe that was real thin it would be called a minimalist shoe today and those shoes while they um they were what Runners wore they sort of made made it clear that you couldn't run more than 50 mil a week because you're feet would tell you when it's time to stop running right so then Along Comes Phil Knight and he develops this thick cushion running shoe that enabled good Runners great Runners to do more miles these when I say great Runners they had good Form they were midfoot Landing they didn't get injured um at nearly
the result at the rate that other people would get injured and so these shoes came on the scene in the mid 70s along with um another sort of um Perfect Storm of Frank Shorter winning the gold medal in Munich in 1972 in the marathon um Bill Rogers you know winning Boston um uh Jim fix writing a book on running making it you know Ken U uh Dr Cooper writing a book on uh on a road Coining the phrase aerobics and saying the more running you did the stronger you'd be all these things came together and
then what happened was in the next few decades people said oh this is this running thing is great and I'm going to now that even though I'm not a good runner I'm not necessarily suited to running these thick shoes allow me to run with I don't jar the ground I don't I don't hit these you know get this this painful thing on my feet when I run but Then what happened was these thick shoes encouraged bad running form and so people could go out and do 30 40 50 miles a week in their training trying
to lose weight um and with these shoes they they were able to do the miles but then they'd get other injuries so so even with a high tech uh aspect of these new running shoes that were you know coming on the scene the number of running injuries has never in in the 50 years has not decreased one iota it to this Day 50% of Runners um are injured at some point 26% of Runners are injured at this moment in time you know all the time it's like it's a worse injury rate than the NFL has
wow well it's like you you'd think that your feet starting to hurt would be the check engine light that would that would exactly but because you're because your feet don't hurt because of these thick cushion shoes feet are supposed to feel the ground you're supposed to feel Everything you step on and that's that ground feel what we call Ground feel which is available as in bare feet or thin shoes is completely negated when you have thick um stiff uh running soles in your running shoes so the ground feel when you do have the ground feel
by the time you wait that forward foot the brain already has all the information it knows on exactly how to scrunch the arch to absorb shock how to roll the ankle out a little bit how to bend the knee in The right way how to turn the hip all of these things what we call the kinetic chain um work perfectly on somebody who's who's Barefoot so you can take a a non-runner or an overweight person you say okay take your shoes off and run down the sidewalk they will run perfectly because the body now all
of a sudden knows exactly how to absorb the shock without slamming the heel into the ground with every step you put shoes on That same person and now they're just heal running heal running heel running or they're you know you see them spending twice as much time on the ground as they are in the air and all of that Imports um these uh for es up through the kinetic chain through the body so then the knees fall apart or the hips or the lower back problems or whatever all of this by the way um is
unnecessary because you we we are so the book the book is called Born to walk so The idea is everybody should be walking a lot as much as you can that's the quintessential human Movement we are born to be able to run but that doesn't mean we should run metronomically at 8 minute mile Pace every day day in or day out our ancestors certain did not do that some of the original work done anthropologically on humans as Runners suggested that we were um pers what we call persistence Hunters right we'd go out we'd that that
that's how we got our Big brains that's how we became the top of the food chain was we had this ability through a nucal ligament in our neck and our radiation system with sweating to be able to run in the Heat and and track animals long distances and then stick a spear in them and dying but what what that doesn't say is first of all that didn't happen every day because you you couldn't do that every day um they didn't train on the off days to go train for hunting their life trained Them they walked
and they sprinted a little bit and they lifted heavy things which is all Primal activity but they didn't have to train for running to be able to track a beast in fact persistence hunting should be called like persistence walking stopping stooping smelling tracking jogging sprinting cutting the tangent over a two-hour period rather than you know grinding out 6 Minute miles or 8 Minute miles while you're hunting the Beast so That's sort of Point number one about this persistence hunting Theory and the other part of this is that is that every one of those prototypical human
beings was genetically able to they were light enough to to run with perfect form if they had to run and were not overweight and didn't you know carry all of the burdens that we carry today so the book is designed to kind of uh not just explore all of this weird um again Perfect Storm of things that got Millions of people running that who probably should not have been running it's giving Runners permission to walk it's telling everybody that you should walk and how to walk and how to and then of course how to eat
right to to burn the fat that you thought you were burning when you were running many Runners um you know like I came from the carbo loading era where access to carbohydrate was so ubiquitous it was everywhere that you said okay I'll run 20 miles today and then I'll I'll carbo load tonight and I'll run 15 miles tomorrow and I'll carbo load tomorrow and do it every you know every day again if you're going to train to win a world championship go for it do that but if you're trying to lose weight you want to
burn fat you don't want to burn carbs but if you haven't trained how appropriately how to burn fat if you haven't reset your fat burning mechanisms in your body when when you go Out to run as an overweight person you're just going to burn off glycogen glucose carbs and so you get home and you're like I'm thirsty I'm I'm tired I'm hungry I'm going to overeat I'm going to consume more carbs to to um be able to do this again tomorrow and it's this sort of NeverEnding cycle of of consuming carbs never tapping into your
fat stores going out and struggling and suffering and running the next day creating uh stress hormones in your body Literally um so some people who have spent a long time running and look skinny are actually skinny fat right they've they've cannibalized their muscle tissue they haven't learned how to burn fat so they're they're incrementally storing fat a little bit more every you know every year and they're like I've been running for six years how come I I haven't lost weight and I'm not as strong as I used to be well that's why because running is
Catabolic and you walking is if not anabolic it's certainly anti-catabolic walk you can walk wherever you want all day long and put in as many steps as you want and then go to the gym and lift weights for 45 minutes and get the effect of of that muscle mass and that strength and that power if you run for 45 minutes every day then try to go to the gym and lift weights it's not going to happen H and also running correct me if I'm wrong but it increases hunger Whereas walking doesn't seem to that's the
thing walking is a fat burning activity um when that's exactly what we talked about so when you go out and run you come back hungry when you walk in many cases people one of the secrets I tell people is is when you get hungry if you're trying to lose weight when you get hungry go for a walk and you'll start to start that metabolic process of of accessing stored body fat and you'll come back and you won't be as hungry I Like that the title of your book kind of takes a swing at there was
a a tone to running that was written a couple maybe a couple decades ago at this point B Chris McDougall I mean he's a friend great it was a great story it was called Born to Run and it was it really talked about this notion that we are sort of obligate Runners that we were supposed to be running that we were persistence Hunters but he also made a big point about weren running Barefoot or in Minimalist Shoes um and one of the problems that arose from that concept was a lot of Runners said oh that's
yeah I should be running in Minimalist Shoes and they went out and bought the thinnest possible shoes they could they could buy after having trained for a decade in thick thick thick fat cushiony pillowy shoes and they got hurt because they hadn't adapted their feet they hadn't let their feet tell them and inform them not only of exactly how to Land with every step um but tell them when it was time to stop running for the week it reminds me uh the you know when you take your feet out of the equation and then as
you were saying you it it ends up importing all of that um impact to other structures in the body you know you take your feet out as the rate limiting I guess variable in in your ability to run to run long distances and suddenly you're yeah you're importing that stress to the Heart to your back to your knees absolutely in fact you know when you look at what a running shoe is a typical running shoe today and and cleats are even worse I mean if you look at soccer cleats or or football cleats um they
they they constrict your toes so your toes are supposed to splay outward when you run you're supposed to roll off your big toe when you walk and when you run well if you've taken a a running shoe and or any typical shoe today and you've Scrunched the big um toe over against the other toes you've you've negated that entire part of the kinetic chain which is really where everything initiates the if you've ever been hanging out with in the gym they they call the great toe right it's the big toe is also called the Great
toe and the gy term is great toe great ass and what it means is you need to engage your great toe your big toe when you're doing squats or lunges um or anything uh heavy Like that deadlifts in the gym if you're trying to build your glute you need that big toe to be splayed outward and to engage and if you've scrunched it over this is why you see a lot of bodybuilders and a lot of guys weightlifters in the gym take their shoes off when they're doing leg days right because they want to engage
great toe great ass they want to engage that if you don't uh engage that great toe um and and and that connection to the Glutes then you wind up compromising by using some of the stabilizer muscles around the glutes to do the work because the because the big toe has said sorry I'm I'm out I'm out of this equation um people it's it's what we're trying to do is convince people that you know this entire kinetic chain does start with the bottoms of the feet and I it it would be ideal to live your life
Barefoot but that's not going to happen we can't do that we've created all these artificial Hard surfaces like you know concrete and pavement and hardwood floors and marble floors and tile and all this stuff so we can't really realistically go around Barefoot but the the alternative is to have um you know to wear minimalist Footwear and and ideally to have minimalist Footwear that has um individually articulating toes so you can actually roll off that big toe you can spay the toes outward every time you step on a rock your toes should should Accommodate the shape
of the rock the tilt of the and the texture of the ground you're walking on you know I I see in sports a lot I see a lot of athletes who are now getting Achilles tendon ruptures or they're getting high ankle sprains cuz they tape their feet up during the g games and and what what's happening is it is the foot if it's strong enough the foot should be able to initially absorb 30% of that force of that shock but if You bypass all that by wrapping it and wrapping it in a shoe and then
say okay now we're going to start all the force from the bottom of the Achilles up through the calf through the knee I think that's where you get a lot of these injuries so people should be training their feet more they should be spending more time barefoot outside they should be walking in minimalist Footwear they should be doing foot exercises and working on the resilience that way H do You have a daily uh step goal step count that you work towards so I don't um I have uh you know like different times of year like
I go to France every summer and in France I try to do 15,000 steps a day um I live in Miami Beach it's boring to walk outside so when I'm in Miami it's more like I do more fat bike Fat Tire Bike on the sand more more of that sort of cardio but I still spend a lot of time Barefoot in the sand uh I still spend a lot of time I'm I'm barefoot in My house all the time um so for me it's not just about the step count it's about it's about moving the
feet it's about strengthening the feet as a part of this entire kinetic chain so what would you say the major benefits of walking are oh my gosh so first of all um you will you will reorganize that kinetic chain so we take people who like people would say well you know my hurt when I walk because I'm duck footed or I'm knock kned or I'm I'm pigeon toed or I'm Whatever the whatever dispar self- disparaging terms they give them wide hips everybody is born with a perfect kinetic chain perfect for you provided the brain is
able to take the information from the bottoms of the feet that temp temperature tilt texture of the of ground you're walking on and then orchestrate your own unique kinetic chain whether it's scrunching the toes uh bending the arch rolling the ankle out or in um you know bending the knee In a certain way and absorbing the impact of that walking step that running step that jumping step that sprinting step that that side to side step whatever it is you need that sort of strength and you need that sort of feedback and so that's the in
in Walking you are passively without any sort of like struggling and suffering you're passively continuing to train this kinetic chain in an appropriate manner for your own Biomechanics but it it involves either walking barefoot or in Minimalist Shoes wide thin flat flexible minimist shoes so if you're walking in you know thick shoes hocas or whatever the the running shoes are you're going to you're not going to be making that sort of corrective um adjustment in your gate now you'll get you'll get the steps in and you know your Fitbit or your watch will say yeah
congratulations you got your 10,000 steps in but for me it's More about about the passively training your foot to incorporate this complete um kinetic chain throughout the body in a way that then when you decide I'm going to go run or I'm going to Sprint or I'm going to go the gym and lift weights now everything works perfectly because you've you've you've spent the time to really relax realign and strengthen that kinetic chain does walking count as cardiovascular exercise yeah so that's a it does yeah so so we Hear a lot about Zone one and
zone two I mean Peter a has been you know touting zone two for almost a decade now zone two is where most people should be hanging out all the time and if you do a lot of zone two work which is um for most people it's what we call um the fat burning Zone fat we call it fat Max in the sorry I've co-opted your name several times here but and and you're and you're not fat Max um but fat Max is that it's the maximum heart rate at Which you still you which you burn
the most amount of of fat uh without crossing over into deriving most of your energy from glucose from from glycogen glucose carbohydrate so for most people that's 180 minus your age so if you're a 40y old person um and you're in reasonably good shape 180 minus 40 is 140 so you should not be doing very much work like no more than 15% of your work maybe 20% at at most of Your work above 140 beats a minute for the entire week which means you spend a lot of time at 125 to 140 in that case
the more you spend in that zone the more you're reinforcing your aerobic efficiency your ventil ventilation threshold You're Building capillary profusion which allows more blood to access uh the muscles you're increasing what we it's mitochondrial proliferation you're increasing the number of mitochondria you're increasing the Efficiency of the mitochondria all through this low-level activity but and you have to do do a lot of it which is why we say if I go back to my original Primal blueprint from 2007 um walk around a lot move around a lot at a low level of activity always find
ways to move throughout the day with zero emphasis on calories it like it doesn't matter if you're burning calories that whole thing about weight loss and fat loss comes from your diet Right you're going to so if I can tell you that by moving around a lot you're going to burn fat but you're not going to burn a lot of a ton of calories and don't even worry about that but you're going to um strengthen your kinetic chain you're going to improve your aerobic capacity and yeah you can work up to uh a very fast
walk or hike in the Hills or what I do is I put a vest on and I walk on a treadmill sometimes if I want to really amp amp it up but even Doing that I'm not jarring my body with every step I'm not um you know courting injury further up to kinetic chain I'm not causing uh a sort of um uh a cortisol response to this life or death Sensation that I'm giving my body by by you know trying to overcome the thoughts of stopping I mean so many people we this book is 300
pages long and it talks a lot about the obligate Runner right somebody who's who just feels like they have to go out and run every single Day at the expense of other areas of their life which could be improved upon but for some reason this is in their brain brain that this is this is what I need to do it's my self flatulation or whatever it is well I actually find that a lot of people maybe you've seen this observe this you know from your own experience but a lot of people who tend to gravitate
to these like ultramarathon style endurance training uh training modalities tend to come from Backgrounds of addiction yes no it's it's um you know it is a form of addiction and you know let's be clear it's a better form of addiction than the heroin was but it's still an addiction and it still needs to be sort of examined as what is my ultimate goal here is my ultimate goal to um uh you know to to live a a a an enjoyable life where I'm yes I'm fit and yes I'm healthy but I also have a family
and I spend time with my kids and I but you know so many people that I knew in the endurance Community would that would be their you know I don't want to hang with the kids I don't want to hang with a wife I'm going out for a 100 mile ride and then I'm going to take a nap and don't bother me I'm training for an Iron Man so or you know training for Marathon there's there's that type of of Runner which or you know endurance athlete again I'm not I don't want to judge it
as being bad but I I I want People to examine their motivation why are you doing this and what is the psychological effect of this um so you know there are ways to to become really really fit without beating yourself up and that's kind of what back to the minimum effective dose of exercise what are the ways in which I can be be supremely fit strong as strong as I could be um healthy never get sick and then enjoy the rest of my life without agonizing over the fact that I missed a Day in my
log book um you know you mentioned that I travel a lot I travel a lot and so when I'm in France um two months every year for the summer have a completely different routine from when I'm in Miami Beach which is where my main house is um it's great I mean I I like mixing it up that way and I don't agonize over the fact that whatever I was doing in Miami I cannot I can't possibly do when I'm when I'm on the road or if I'm traveling to another Country and I don't even know
where I'm going to go and I don't know if there's going to be a gym look European hotels are notorious for shitty gyms like horrible gyms you know like like like an old um broken stair Master on a treadmill that doesn't work and two barbells you know whatever it's it's like okay so I bring a resistance band with me and I find ways to do it and I don't agonize over the fact that I didn't hit my numbers and I didn't you Know continue my routine I found something else to do I found a you
know a walk to take or a hike to take or whatever it was so where am I going with that it's just you know people who are um I think addicted to this type of exercise are addicted to um also the notion that if they miss a day they get to beat themselves up they get to feel guilty right so so um you know it shouldn't be that way it's also an escape I would imagine for many people Oh it's a total Escape I I I know I talked to a lot of people say but
Mark I love to run I'm like um I don't think you love to run I think you you love to have run you to have you know you love to say you're a runner you love to say you're training for something and if you run with headphones on for example you don't really love to run if you love to run you would be in that space of like okay I feel great I listen to birds how's my breathing you know how's my uh You know if I pick up the pace you know am I going
to is my heart rate going to you know be affected by that all all these different self monitoring things that you can do when you truly love running and yet most people like ah you know yeah I got to go run so I'm going to put on um you know some Metallica get me through it um so you know it's it's it is an addiction in that we talked about the runner's high right people used to talk about well I'm chasing this Endorphin rush that I get from from running and that's that's how easy it
is to cross over from say um a substance abuse addiction and then replacing that with this with this endogenous morphine like substance this endorphin that you create but you know if you look at um um biology uh endorphins are sort of a life or death kind of um neurotransmitter hormone I mean they're they're produced in life or death situations so if you're Running hard and long you're going to produce endorphins but if you're a zebra having been chased down by a lion on the Savannah and now you're being eaten alive for 20 minutes before you
finally pass endorphins are sort of what give that animal that that you know at least sense of calm and like I'm not going to you know go out kicking and screaming it's like Nature's morphine it it is nature The endorphine endorphine Rush that you get from an extended run is Like your body essentially preparing for its demise so I'll give you an example so now you're now you're a persistence hunter in um you know in the plains of Africa and you spent two hours in the heat chasing this animal and you didn't get it uh
now you've got indoor fins that are at least going to say you know well life is wonderful let's not you know it's not like a heroin type thing but it's it's like oh my God oh my God we're Going to die you know all of this other possibility because you failed in the activity so anyway that's one theory about endorphins it's a it's an an adaptation to um to loss and suffering and life or death situations that allows the body to remain relatively calm in the face of those things wow so what that formula uh
180 minus your age what does that formula represent again so that's the maximum heart rate you should train at for 80% of the work you do During the week that's the max max heart rate um below which you are mostly burning fat and not a lot of carbohydrate once you exceed that heart rate now you now the amount of yes you're burning more calories but the amount of fat you're that's being contributed to your activity drops off and the amount of carbohydrate gluc glucose glycogen goes way up so that's where we get to the point
where we we we call it a No Man's Land of training this Black hole of training where it and so many people do it where you're not training slow enough to um prompt all of the things we talked about the The increased proliferation of um uh capillary profusion of mitochondria the efficiency of mitochondria um um uh enzymes that take fat out of storage and and and combust all of these things you want to do at below that heart rate the maximum aerobic function or the fat Max once you get above that that's where We encounter
the problems of now you're burning so much glucose and and glycogen that your brain goes oh my God we have to immediately consume more calories and largely more carbohydrate to replenish what we lost here that happens in this in this no man's land where you're not training uh at a low enough heart rate to have all of the aerobic benefits but you're not going fast enough to have the glycolytic benefits and there there is a a range above Zone 2 Where yeah you should spend 5% of your time during the week doing high-intensity stuff and
the high-intensity stuff works better if you spend more time doing the low intensity stuff so you see some of the best like the guys who are running 2hour marathons now and they run at a Zone one zone 2 heart rate for 80% of their mileage um uh the um the winner of the tour you know uh pogar was on um Peter aa's podcast a while back and said he Spends you know he'll do 5 hours of Zone one zone two training you know now his Zone 2 is still putting out 300 watts on a bike
which is pretty incredible but he doesn't he doesn't want to spend too much time above zone two because it it is that no man's land all it does is make you tired and hungry and it does not improve your work ability it doesn't improve your um performance capability which is really the reason you're training you know is there a a Subjective way to know say you don't have a heart rate reader on you is there a subjective way to know whether or not you're in that zone best way is is if you're running with somebody
can you carry on a conversation and not get out of breath and so I see uh I've coached a lot of people in the gym that I frequent in Miami who are people women in particular talking talking side by side on the treadmill and for having a conversation like perfect you're in the Right Zone W but if you can't have that conversation then dial it back a little bit hm Okay so we've established the importance of movement and of and of training in that in that zone one zone two uh area where do you where
do you fit your like resistance training into your into your routine yeah so once you've had that base once you have that ability to burn fat and some of that has come from the diet in other words you've cut you've You've re-aligned you've retrained your body to be able to burn stored body fat through restricting carbohydrates and or calories through a process of either a ketogenic couple of weeks or um intermittent fasting or whatever you've achieved what we call metabolic flexibility now the good news is you don't really have to do a lot of work
to um to to get lean and buff and strong it's not like you have to go to the gym every day it's not like you have to burn A lot of calories so the original Primal blueprint which now is again almost 20 years old move around a lot at a low level of aerobic activity lift twice a week two times a week go the gym and lift heavy things um not five not six um and again this is for most of the population who want to know what the minimum effective dose of the exercise is
right like if you're a meathead and you love if you're a meat head go to the gym 5 days a week you know do whatever You're doing um if you're training for Olympic lifting or if you're training for some sport it's a completely different thing but if you're an average person who just wants to be um you know wants to achieve ideal body composition wants to be strong look good naked do all the things that we talk about doing um it doesn't take that much so in this case it's a lot of walking a lot
of low lever aerobic activity it's um lifting in the gym twice a week and when I go I Do a full body routine it if it takes more than 45 minutes I'm probably spending too much time and one of the things you realize from doing that is that um you know the body needs to recover from whatever activity you're doing so so the people who can go to the gym and lift every day aren't doing it right because you should not be able to do it again the next day and the next day and the
next day you shouldn't even be able to lift that same Body part four times a week um maybe not even three times a week uh because you need time the muscles need time to actually rebuild the point of the workout is to slightly tear the muscles down have the body respond to that hormetic stress with rest and and nutrition to come back stronger so with that in mind twice a week in the gym uh or you know if you're doing uh body weight exercises outside or whatever and then once a week Sprint and sprinting is
Another key ingredient here so now I talked a lot about the low-level activity but you want to Sprint once in a while you you so 80% or more of your of your time spent exercising should be at that um is that fat max heart rate or lower and then a little bit should be at a much higher rate like an allout rate and what does that look like um you know I got into it on the on um x a couple days ago with Ronda Patrick um you know who's talking about all you know all
These things you could do tatas and and and a minute on a minute off as hard as you can go for 10 sets it doesn't even take that much it's like if you're doing it right you should be able to do maybe 30 seconds take a two minutes rest do it again hard 30 seconds take a a 10 a two-minute rest or whatever and do it again four or five maybe six times now if you're really good at it seven eight times or if you're really good at it a minute instead of 30 seconds but
it's Not a lot of work but it just it needs the effort and you know the idea is that if you if you can do um 30 seconds hard with a minute rest or as Ronda was saying a minute hard with a minute rest a minute hard with 10 times you're not doing it hard enough yeah because you should not be able to do it that hard that's really hard I mean I was thinking about my experiences on the uh assault bike and perfect example 10 reps of that yeah is uh that's really seconds of
a Minute a minute on a minute off oh yeah yeah no so you haven't done it because it's impossible to do no again if you and so if you know you're going to do 10 on 10 off you will dial your effort back to accomplish that which is not the point the point is high intensity so um yeah so that's the that's what I call the the mix the minimum effective dose of work to do to be able then for me to play so you know I'll paddle uh I go for hour hour and 10
Stand up paddle pretty hard I'll go for a a fat bike ride on the beach pretty hard um you know those are the those are the zone three four and five workouts that I'll do once a week to make use of all of the aerobic base I built the strength and power that I did in the gym and the sprinting I did once in a while what is a full body when when you do go to the gym for the resistance training session what does that work out for me yeah for me and I don't
I don't count Legs in there very often so I'll do a separate leg day every 10 days well cuz you're working your legs I'm working my legs doing other correct correct so so um and I'm not trying to um you know I'm not building legs for explosive activity because I'm a competitive athlete anymore I'm just doing legs as a adjunct to some of the upper body stuff I do so when I go to the gym those those two days um and usually it's a minimum of 3 days between always um I'll do um you Know
p UPS uh uh rows upright rows three sets of each three sets of each yeah um close to failure uh yeah but I mean exactly close to failure I mean you know I'm old enough now that I'm I'm never going to PR again on any of these things so my main goal in the gym is to not get injured you know it's and it's tough because I still have that um you know that that mindset that drive um so I'll do uh three sets of you know 10 or or 12 um on a uh you
know I'll do so some back Work some uh bicep work some dips a lot of body weight stuff P push-ups pull-ups dips um you know chest presses things like that umus FES yeah it depends on where I'm at I mean sometimes the like the fly the deloid machine the fly machine on some gyms is amazing other times like I just do dumbbell flies um overhead presses with dumbbells compound compound lifts like that um curls once in a while uh you know tricep push Downs things like That sort of the standard you know beach beach body
up you know like like look good for the beach routine um how often do you update your routine as new data presents itself yeah well first of all I don't update my routine as much as I should and second of all I don't know that new data really presents itself it feels like so much of what comes around now has been like oh yeah Mike mener was talking about that know 40 years ago um or art Jones who invented the Nautilus Machine you know some of these Concepts that people are espousing now is oh this
new research shows it people have been talking about it for a long time yeah like everybody now is talking about um stretch mediated hypertrophy and like lengthened partials yeah I mean and I mean you got that you have Tony Horton is a good friend of mine P90X talking about um muscle confusion you know so can so do do something every every workout do something different from the Prev previous workout to confuse the muscles so they don't get used to the routine you know I'm I'm I'm not into that um that space as much anymore so
I'm like I'll do my routine my Miami routine when I'm in Miami I have a different routine I'm in Ma I trained at the Malibu Fitness Gym uh yesterday I had I had my routine there um I finish with rope pulls cuz I love the Rope pull machine in Miami I don't like the one in Kona where I'm going on Monday um Because I have a place you know that I go to in Kona so I just sort of you know I know uh what I like but I have my routine at each of the
gyms that I've set up over the over the years that's the most important thing I think there probably tons of value to not getting distracted by the shiny new data yeah you know well the shiny new data this is one of the issues I have with with what's going on in this sort of biohacking community is that is that the Data isn't impressive and it's like you know research shows that if you do this your risk of that will decrease by 27% but um that's just when you talk about risk that means that that um
you know if a 100 people do it uh and and this new strategy instead of six people having an issue only five have an issue uh and that's a 27% decrease that means nothing to me that's just a risk factor that like I'm My Own you know entity I'm an N equals one uh I'm a I'm a unique Individual and so I don't even look at those studies and go these percentages that they're throwing out it just it doesn't mean that that that will happen to you at 27% or 26% or 48% it just means
that on a general population some number of people experienced a different outcome than the than the control group it's meaningless to me so back to back to how do I feel like what makes me feel like I'm getting stronger what makes me feel like I'm getting more powerful What makes me feel less inclined to be injured what makes me feel um you know more aligned in my kinetic chain when I do this yeah totally there's something to be said for mediocre workouts performed consistently and the benefit that they have in terms of your health and
body composition compared to let's say The Perfect Workout done inconsistent no 100% I agree with that yeah I joke with people all the time I see the same People at the gym you know any gym has a membership of a thousand people and of those thousand the same 10 show up every day you know and there's another 30 or 40 who wander in once but but and you know you look at people in gym like [ __ ] here we are again another day how you feeling today ah you know I didn't want to come
but I did and I'm here and I get credit for showing up and going through the motion some days you go through the motions some days you go I am so ripped Today I'm I'm hitting it so hard today that's the day you go okay I'm going to I'm going to hit it hard um and that's again that's that intuitive approach that I have versus my uh training chart that says okay th Thursday is the day you go hard well if I wake up Thursday and I feel like [ __ ] I'm not going to
go hard um you know it's it's I I I try to because I know enough about my own body and how I've adapted over the years and how I've responded to exercise over the Year I'm able to adapt the workout like I walk into the gym and I literally don't know what I'm going to do first or second or how I'm going to do it but I put it together based on my knowledge of of of what works for me and how I feel that day I'm you know I've made a big deal about being
the the anti- Quantified Self I don't do the wearables um I don't need a heart rate variability app to tell me today's the day you're on I'm like no I know where The monor off and I know I don't need a app to tell me that I slept poorly when I think I slept pretty well it's like get in my head with that stuff it's so true true yeah I when I go to the gym and I'm feeling like it's one of those days where I just feel like I'm going through the motions sometimes I'll
just do the exercises I'll just like you know I'll drop the the routine or whatever preconception I had about the workout that I intended to have and I'll just do The things that make me feel good and happy you know I'll do like shoulders or I'll do like arms cuz something you know even a shitty workout is better than no workout I I agree I mean to the extent that you don't get injured but but but again yeah doing I would say a shitty workout is you know 80% of what you could have done if
you were really you know on it that day that's fine that all counts that's life that is consistency and consistency is a Really huge element in in this again if we look about longevity and quality of life and all the things that we're talking about consistency probably is right up there with sleep and and good nutrition just the ability to get up and and even in the face of not wanting to do it deciding you're going to go do it and now if you feel like crap when you wake up and you say I'm taking
the day off that's allowed too but that's the day off is allowed to people who train Six or seven days a week yeah the day off is not allowed for people who' you know train once or twice a week and you know and have a trainer and drank too much last night and say I I I won't be making it today charge charge me anyway yeah if you're training once or twice a week yeah yeah you should definitely be making making it to those workouts yeah as one of the most I think important thinkers in
the in the in the ntion space I always love to do a check-in With you to see you know what your current way of eating looks like areas where you may be pivoting evolving changing your your mind on certain things what does your diet look like today currently you know it's I forget if we've had this conversation in the past because it's been going on for a while with me but um you know I I read I see all of these um admonitions about protein protein protein and make sure you get enough protein and 100
gr you Know whatever it is it's a gr a gram per pound of body weight I'm like I I weigh 172 PBS right now I'm pretty fit I have low body fat there's no way there's no way I can consume 170 grams of protein a day and feel comfortable minimum effective dose right so my minimum effective dose of protein is probably around 100 100 maybe 120 grams a day and I don't notice any decline in performance or or or size or muscle mass when I have a day that's 70 G and then Another day that's
120 gram if it averages out to 100 110 over a couple of days so one of the things that I've I've I've allowed myself permission to not eat as much protein as the conventional wisdom of 2024 would suggest and it's working for me you know um I would say the U you know one of the things that's come up recently this whole uh backlash against alcohol right um a lot of people are deciding no alcohol ever and it's the worst thing you can have and put in Your body um and it's um you know it's
it's again antithetical to longevity and long and and to Health First of all in terms of longevity many of the blue zones people and Dan you know will tell you this he's your neighbor right Dan's my downstairs neighbor Dan Butner yeah and we get along great and um you know they'll say these these people drink wine every day um but this this thing about alcohol uh I've been looking at it and it's it's Really interesting because a pen pulum does swing you know a lot and I drink wine pretty much every night every night two
glasses love it it's part of my routine part of my part of the the beauty of a meal I feel like I don't digest steak as well if I don't have a glass of wine so um you know am I uh compromising weeks or months on the back end of my Life by doing that I don't know maybe maybe not but it's it's such an enjoyable part of my day and routine And I I take the edge off and I don't get drunk and I don't abuse it and I wake up clear thinking every morning
and never have you know now clearly I I drink uh dry Farm wines you know I drink uh curated wines that are that are without sugar and without um additives but you know it's funny because uh the the conversation went to ethanol ethanol is toxic and that's what you should not be putting in your body well ethanol is a fuel we burn ethanol uh ethanol has a Seven seven calories per gram and we we will preferentially burn ethanol one of the issues that people have with drinking too much is that is that then it uh
they their their ability to say no to dessert is compromised and so now they take in too many calories and then because they're drinking alcohol the body wants to burn the alcohol off first before it starts burning fat and so there's that there's that element there but but okay so ethanol is a fuel and It's toxic glucose is a fuel and it's toxic in excess so you know everything exists on a spectrum here and where do you draw the line it's it's like if you if your glucose in your bloodstream is high all the time
um I would submit that's a that's a toxic fuel that's in your body so there there are a lot of different ways you know to approach this so I'm sort of viewing what's going on in that space with um you know I again I love to See how the the terminology and the thought process behind people who want to you know kind of raise a new topic of discussion and own that space for a while yeah you know what I mean you agreed you reposted a a a post on you quote posted something on X
recently uh and you agreed to it somebody's rules for drinking they said they only drink during the day avoid after dark unless a special occasion exercise Before and um and I guess the reason for that is that exercise improves liver function and acceed alahh clearance so why why do you think it's important to drink during the day obviously you know that's like a best case scenario well that's somebody somebody put that up and um I that is a best case scenario but like I say I drink for dinner right and so I'll I'll stop at
you know 7:30 or 8:00 I'm not drinking into the evening I don't have a Glass of wine before I go to bed for instance so and why not because it impacts just it's just yeah that's so sleep is part of that so if I have more than two glasses of wine I will not I by the way I'll fall asleep great but then I'll wake up at 2 o'clock in the morning and I that's apparently according to Chinese medicine that's the time that the liver decides to start processing certain things and alcohol is one of
those so you you you can you know go to Sleep and fall asleep and do and do very well and then wake up four or five hours later and that's you know then then you can't go back to sleep that's a complaint I hear from people who drink too much yeah very interesting yeah I drink occasionally I drink a couple maybe once or twice a month it's not I'm not I'm not a frequent drinker but I'm not opposed to it yeah like if there's a good you know bottle of wine being passed around the table
Yeah the dinner Table as it often is at your house or at your dinners um and the the the the the protein um issue or topic that you've raised is it because you're is it because there's a reason that you believe that eating high protein every day is not necessarily beneficial to health or it's just that's where your tastes are kind of P yeah it's really it's a it's a matter of comfort and taste like if I try to first of all I I eat two meals a day so I don't I don't Have breakfast
so there's the first opportunity to get 35 gram of protein kind of cast aside so now I have to sort of fit the protein into two meals um and and that works for me by the way not not eating until one o'clock usually um I feel sharper I I work out fasted every time I work out I like you know I can do an hour and a half bike ride in the heat in the sand at zone four and sometimes zone 5 um you know you know the the rationale behind that Is your mus your
muscles have glycogen they're you're always filling your muscles with glycogen and as long as you don't do it every day and deplete it every day then you should be able to go out once in a while and do a hard workout and exhaust that logen and not have to have food in your belly and so if I eat if I eat breakfast and then go do a workout I don't feel good I feel you know um like I'm like I'm bloated and full and and and BL is uh being Diverted from my muscles that are
doing the work to the mesentary and and and the and and my gut my digestive tract trying to figure out how to you know uh absorb and and digest this meal so um anyway so that works for me so now we're down to two meals a day and and can I eat more than 50 grams of protein at each meal I can but again it doesn't feel that good and I like other Foods I like I like a variety of foods so I'm not a carnivore I'm not just eating a a Large steak for each
of my meals I'm eating a small portion or not small but a a reasonable size portion of meat for a meal and then some kind of crunchy vegetable or some kind of salty steamed whatever I like the you know the combination of tastes weren't you doing no vegetables for a while yeah I was doing fewer vegetables for a while and what the the the big thing the big shift you for a long time you were a big advocate of the daily big Ass B ass salad but then you kind of pivoted you flip-flopped a little
bit and now are you are you back no I'm not I'm not back to it but I'm but I'm I'm I when I flip-flopped I'm like I don't need a big salad every day and then it was like okay then then um because it gets in the way of the comfort of being able to take in enough protein so when I'm when I'm eating only two meals a day I also want to be sure that I'm um you know I'm saving space for the right Amounts of other macronutrients and things like that so um you
know and and back to the protein thing I just I I don't drinking a protein drink right now um just cuz you offered and it's and it tastes pretty good 20 grams of protein in 100 calories it's pretty unbeatable it's pretty unbeatable shout out to slate slate milk yeah um yeah so that's the protein thing and then you know I don't do a lot of uh supplementing with with uh vitamins and minerals and Antioxidants anymore big collagen fan though right big collagen fan yeah still yeah yeah and partly because um you know ancestrally we ate
nose to tail we ate the gristle and the skin and the and the knuckles and all of the stuff and then we M you know we we didn't melt we we boiled down the carcasses and got the broth and everything that our grandparents did and maybe even our our parents did over the years that's sort of Gone by the wayside and so we don't Really in our current configuration of of dietary options we don't have a lot of options to take in collagen collagenous material even into the 70s and ' 80s people ate Jello-O you
know and Jello is collagenous materialis it's it's collagen peptides gelatin right and so so every kid had Jello at least once or twice a week and every every mom brought a an aspic you know a Jello-O a Jell-O mold of something to uh a bake sale or a PTA Hefty serving of red 40 Yes red di 40 yeah yeah yeah but but so kids even into the 70s and ' 80s kids got their you know collagenous their peptides from those different sources the moms were taking nox gelatin you they' take it for skin hair and
nails to to have stronger nails when when uh there was a backlash against Jello in the '90s and and in early as for the sugar content the red dye number whatever 40 um then all of a sudden every aspect of of getting some form of Collagen peptide was kind of devoid from the diet and that's where bone broth started to come back in and but I started to notice that a lot of injury uh that were to connective tissue whether they were Achilles tendonosis or tontis or torn acl's mcl's uh sprains maybe had something to
do with this lack of raw material that people were were taking in as part of their diet to repair that connective tissue You know um collagen represents a large portion of the protein content of the human body whether it's fascia uh again tendons ligaments cartilage bones to a certain extent uh skin hair and nails there's a lot of collagen that's used as a raw material in the human body if we don't take it in as a as on a routine basis the body kind of has to go to plan B like I had Achilles tendonosis
that was my first real signal that I needed to increase my ecollagen Intake I had this thickening of these tenons and I was playing ultimate frisbee and I was like I'm a I was a sprinter and I was I couldn't Sprint I for a year and a half two years almost I was like my career is over as a top level ultimate player at the age of 58 or whatever it was and um uh you know and then I and and then I went to an orthopedic surgeon and he said well yeah you got severe
tenos and both kiles and I said what do we do he said well we're going to Slit you open down the back and we're going to you know scrape it down and pack it and cast it for three months and then you're going to do nine months of rehab and you'll be back to 80% I'm like screw that so I went back and I went back to the drawing board and I said oh my God that's like I haven't been taking in any collagen for the last decade that's the raw material that my achilles need
to to repair themselves to Be so in the absence of these raw materials the body always has a plan B Plan B is scar tissue let's make some Scar Tissue let's thicken this up to at least you know um offset the potential damage for now um you know uh people get diabetes because of Plan B the body goes you know it's too much glucose coming in and we've exhausted all of the opportunities we have to get rid of it through um you know through depositing it in the fat cells so now we're just Going to
create you know type two diabetes Well yeah because the body starts to store the fat in in nonprofessional sites of fat storage like your pancreas your yes yeah and that's where insulin resistance develops right but it's Plan B because because because rule number one is do whatever you can to get that glucose that toxic fuel out of the bloodstream wow so how many grams of day collagen are you taking do you take it Every day yeah pretty much I mean uh I'm I'm pretty fractal in in my taking of any supplements so I take vitamin
D once in a while large doses and then I don't for a while it's a fat soluble vitamin so it it it hangs out um I think pretty much the same with with collagen I'll do 20 grams minimum per per dose um sometimes I'll make a a collagen drink with element collagen and creatine just before a workout because uh it turns out that um when you're doing explosive Activities um because much of the connective tissue in the body does not have a good blood supply the only way you can the best way to infuse it
is to is to take ingest it before a workout and then while you're squeezing those those uh tendons the the the flushing of the of of the space around the the collagenous material will take in the uh the peptides there was an interesting study done it's probably 15 years old now but where they labeled um collagen Peptides and uh gave a gelatinous drink to people 15 minutes before they jumped rope and then they jumped rope for six minutes and then they measured the uptake of the of the labeled colen peptides in the Achilles it's pretty
cool that's so cool I'm going to start I'm going to start I'm going to experiment with taking a pre-workout I've never thought of that but that's uh that's very interesting one hotly debated topic on social media um these Days are is seed oils the um you know which is not a monolith there's a lot of nuance I think that needs that um is now thankfully being brought to the table uh but you're somebody who's who's talked about you know the the potential harms to come from overc consuming these kinds of Novel fats uh for a
long time you were very preent um in your talking about this issue so is there anything that you want to you know address with regards to them I mean like are they Would you say that they're the dietary Boogeyman that they're often made out to be on social media so you you the term nuance and that's 100% true all these things exist on a spectrum so oils are a good example of you know there's not just great oils and horrible oils there are fine and adequate and good oils somewhere in between much of it uh
depends on the use of the oil so you might take a you know a a gr oil and then um and cook with it Beyond a smoke Point and and turn it into a horrible Choice um you might take some of these seed oils that are middle of the spectrum like sunflower holic sunflower oil which I think is a pretty interesting oil and I I would not shy away from it under most circumstances um and you know I I could see using that in certain you know prepared meals and prep and and salad dressings and
things like that I totally agree I wouldn't I wouldn't use it in Place of extrav virgin olive oil but it it has a fatty acid profile very similar to avocado oil so I would I would correct conceivably use it you know if if I had to for whatever reason use it in place of like an avocado oil yes exactly and um and some of the oils you know the corn oil the soybean oil the the the canas they've been more castigated for the methods of the processing methods than for the you know the the the
Linolic acid content or the um you know whatever Franken uh oils that are in there as a result of having gone through that processing so you know what we're seeing again is we see the pendulum swinging back so it was like in the 50s and 60s you know margarine was the way to go and and then the 60s and 70s and 80s you know get rid of butter because it's horrible for your heart and then then it turns out margarine wasn't so great didn't taste good to begin with um And then butter came in and
that was great and then the seed oil thing which I I helped promote and I think Kate Shanahan was probably you know the the leader of that whole thing and now I'm starting to um be open-minded to the notion that there are some of these oils that were in this horrible list might be okay under certain circumstances right and and it's the methods of preparation it's the it's the choice of use um as a Factor in whether or not they should be you know avoided at all cost yeah very interesting I um there's a new
one you know the the algae oil which is a I think algae oil is probably has the best profile of any oil I've ever seen it's like all mono it's all oleic acid it's all mono and it tastes like butter but it's buttery I should say so it doesn't have this biased uh taste that it imparts to food like coconut oil has a you know is great to Cook with but you know you got to have the right food you're cooking with otherwise you know it tastes like baloney fudge ice cream or something you know
so yeah um yeah my my stance is that I I I agree like hyic sunflower oil I think is is fine but um I would still have concern I I I definitely avoid you know the soybean oil the corn oil I see no reason to bring them into my house the primary oils that I use are extra virgin olive oil and avocado oil and um And I still and and and also there are seed oils like Sesame SE seed oil which I think is a very healthful culinary oil sure in the right context it's amazing
yeah I still definitely will I I still have concern about the you know the consumption of these highly refined refined bleached and deodorized High OIC acid High I'm sorry linolic acid um seed oils because they I just don't think that we have I think that the observational data That a lot of the pro seed oil Advocates will use is confounded yeah it's endlessly confounded um by healthy user bias you know a lot of these oils corn oil still are Ador adorned in the supermarkets by the heart check logo right so it's hard to tease out
like the healthy user bias um aspect there that a lot of people have been told that they're the healthier alternative and so they'll buy they'll they'll preferentially use those Along with you know maybe being more inclined to exercise take a multivitamin Etc and also some of the healthiest foods you know in the supermarket are rich in linolic acid so like nuts and seeds yeah I think are a perfectly healthy food so I think like the observational data is you know confounded and the and the RCT the the human clinical data I think is equival like
it's kind of all over the place and I I simply just like you know it's it's Hard for me to trust um they're all they tend to be shortterm um they tend to to fixate on one you know singular biomarker that's proximately related to cardiovascular disease right like LDL cholesterol like yes they reduce LDL cholesterol compared to saturated fat we know that but what about you know and by the way even that is like okay does that make it a good thing like LDL chol olol reduction isn't necessary like what does it du to the
Quality of the LDL particle that's still question that there's that and there's still the the overarching question is is lower LDL necessarily across the board a better thing I'm not sure it's a better thing it's just it's a different thing but is it a better thing and does it you know demonstrably uh lower your risk for cardiovascular disease for instance yeah you know I had a Kevin on the podcast Recently who's a scientist who we've become friends and he said something super interesting he said that humans because we're bipedal we tend to have higher blood
pressure and that promotes atherosclerosis like atherosclerosis might be sort of one double-edged sword aspect of what it means to be human to some degree I mean it's no it's no secret that it's the number one killer you know of of Americans today and so the idea that we should be you know Striving towards newborn levels of apob and LDL you know doesn't really make a lot of sense because what at what cost right would those levels be achieved yeah well you'd have to probably you'd have to go vegan to achieve those levels and um and
uh and we know that being vegan is associated with a whole slew of other risks you know worse mental health worse bone health less muscle mass yes and uh the necessity to rely on Ultra processed Foods to meet your protein targets and so um so yeah so I'm not uh I I still maintain and like you know and again like the these seed oils are primarily the the the quote unquote benefit of consuming them is in a very specific and narrow context and it's a context that relies on a few I think assumptions like the
Assumption as we've talked about that lower LDL is inherently better but we don't know how that we don't know how these seeds Affect these uh fat s affect the brain long term they have very easy entry into the brain they generate you know these um oxlams oxidized linolic acid metabolites which we know are are harmful they um production often you know the the the high heat that they're often exposed to in the cooking environment which is the context in which they're promoted for for use right generates really noxious compounds like alahh like acryline for hydro
ool which Is associated you know you doing your research we see higher levels in the brains of that um in people with Alzheimer's disease and so I just think to say that these are like what Whole 30 recently did that gave them the universal green light I think that's irresponsible and I think that's uh yeah I don't think that's the way to go yeah so as I said I'm I I think these exist on the Spectrum um I'm open to examining each one on the merits of it and for Example hinic uh sunflower flow possibly
safflower and as you go down the line let's let's look at them um individually not just for their uh fatty acid profile and their manufacturing uh uh process but the use by which they are for which they are intended because you can you know there are certain uses that may be uh more benign than others yeah I'll happily you know drizzle sesame seed oil on my seared AI yeah um I'm trying to think of some other SE Black seed oil I know has some peanut oiled benefits peanut oil yeah but I see no reason to
to use them in the house now do I freak out do I think that they're causal with regards to obesity as some people often claim independent of the calories they contain no I think that that's primarily a likely a calorie issue do I freak out when I'm exposed to them in the in the in the restaurant setting no do I carry cards with me that say that I'm allergic to canola oil like Some do no I don't think it's good to have fear around these around these you know foods but it's worth remembering that there
ultr processed food ingredients that are highly marketed highly commercialized and for that reason I think it's better to default to the for that reason and others I think it's better to I to the precautionary principle and and that precautionary principle would suggest that we know for a fact that that extra Virgin olive oil and avocado oil are indeed healthy so at the very least we know what we can use and get away with if if in the absence of anything else we have access to those yeah yeah well said I'm glad we got to clear
up some misconceptions about these fats I I had uh Sarah Balentine on the podcast recently who um we had a a conversation it was like a friendly debate yeah you know but I I I think the more information people have to make their Own decisions the the better I agree I agree and you know like I say at the end of the day it comes down to how do I feel and if I feel good about going out to a restaurant and not caring for that meal uh you know what was used the preparation of
my salad dressing because it's otherwise a great a great salad and a great meal that's where I'm at it's like as long as for the for the remainder of of the rest of my life and my lifestyle I kind of adhere to a set Of principles and a set of guidelines right and you and you spent a lot of time in France right yeah in traditional French kitchens there are they using any of these highly refined oils or no it's almost always uh EXT oil and the Mediterranean dietary pattern it's associate it's like laed in
the medical literature no the best piece of fish I ever had in my life was at a tapis grill in Barcelona and it was just olive oil and fish and I watched them make it I'm Like oh my God that's what's possible in the simplest context with some salt and pepper yeah yeah cook like uh yeah I think F the the the Mediterranean Paradigm for for eating I think is a really good one I mean it's been kind of maligned with like this overemphasis I think on grain products and there's this misconception that it's like
a low meat low protein diet which I don't think is true no correct me if I'm wrong no it uh you know it's it's uh you know We get back to the blue zones conversation there about like like what you would choose to eat if you could afford it and it was available versus what you have to eat um you know because of the the the conditions of the local access and things like that and uh you know the Mediterranean diet has a lot of fish a lot of pork a lot of some goat in
it some yeah beef yeah all that stuff all my favorite foods yeah exactly love it Mark thanks for coming Out brother good to be here yeah always good to see you um remind listeners where they can follow you on social media I know you've got this exciting new shoe company you've got a book that you're working on yeah how can people support yeah so um I'm Mark sisen Primal on Instagram and I'm I've been the last year I've been pretty good about posting something on a regular basis this will be up there some clip of
this um a new book is called Born to walk and it's Available for pre-order on Amazon right now uh the shoe company is called Pala we make uh the best looking five toad minimalist Footwear out there and uh people are loving it and we're getting you know more and more great reviews all the time so uh go to go to pva.com to check that out I guess that's it that's the way the cookie crumbles that's it yeah all right man hey if you like that video you need to check out this one here and I'll
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