Hey, they're healthy Ish listeners. Thanks for joining us today on this daily podcast from Body and Soul. I am your host, Felicity Harley. Here at healthy Ish, we were all deeply saddened by the news of doctor Michael Moseley's passing. The UK journalist, documentary maker and author of many international best sellers was a regular on this podcast and I personally had a fair bit to do with him over my career well, both at health Ish and when I
was editor of Women's Health magazine. So as a tribute to him, we are dropping his most listened to interview about his legendary fast eight hundred keto plan. This was from January twenty twenty two. We are also dropping his most listened to episode on extra Healthish. In fact, it is our number one most listened to episode on Extra healthy Ish where he takes a deep dive into his fast eight hundred keto plan. You can grab that where
we get your podcasts. Doctor Michael Miisley, Welcome back to healthy So it's nice to have you back.
On Brilliant to be back.
Oh and be congratulations on your new book, which is what we're talking about today. What is the Fast eight hundred kito approach all.
About sure, So you're probably familiar with keto, and the idea of the keto diet is actually one hundred years old. Oh wow, the one hundred years Yeah. Absolutely. It was invented in nineteen twenty one by a doctor in America who was treating kids with epilepsy, and at the time they had no other drugs, so they started doing what he called a keto diet, inducing people basically or at least the kids, to go into a state of kittoosis
by cutting down dramatically on their carbs. What happens normally is you are like a hybrid car you burn on you use fat, or you use sugar, and normally you burn sugar and it's only when your sugar splies go down that you switch over into burning things called ketone bodies and going to a state known as ketosis. So what he discovered in nineteen twenty one is if you did that with children with epilepsy, epilepsy kind of got
much better. It turns out that your brain likes keytone bodies and indeed it burns them in a sort of more efficient, more stable way than it does sugar. So for a long time that remained pretty much the sole use of the keto diet until actually about five years ago when people got interested in it because it suppresses appetite, so it became a sort of thing for reducing appetite, and it took off in a massive way and everyone started talking about the keto diet. Now I've always spent
a little bit, you know, ambivalent about it. Can you stick to it? And also, in order to cut out the carbs, you have to eat a lot of fat, and.
Which is a little bit scary for some, especially those who have cholesterol issues.
Absolutely, so I wondered whether it was possible to do a healthier version of the keto diet and combine it with my Fast eight hundred approach, which is one where you go low calorie. And so that was how the Fast hundred Kito was born. And the idea is that you're cutting down to about nine hundred, eight hundred, nine hundred thousand carries today something like that, but it's a keito based one, so that you're really going low carb
on those days. The recipes are designed to ensure you go into ketosis fast, and that's useful because you don't have a sort of long transition period. But it also means that because you're in a lower carriy diet, you don't have to eat as much fat, So the fat consumption is actually quite modest, the carb consumption is low, and the protein consumption you have to keep up because, as I explore in the book, protein is probably one of, well,
in many ways, the most essential macro nutrient. We argue about the carbs to fat ratio, but actually the thing which drivestite in the end seems to be protein, and you need to be around twenty percent. Therese are lots of numbers I'm throwing out.
At the moment, but now, but I think that I mean, most people you know understand how CATO works. Actually you call out protein. I feel like it's protein's moment in the sun at the moment. Why do you call it out as particularly being important and also for people who want to follow your approach, but also for people generally who are perhaps listening, you know, to your advice.
Sure, because there's some research by a doctor called Professor Steve Simpson who's based actually in Sydney, and he and his colleagues have recently demonstrated through extensive animal research but also human research that if you drop the protein content of your diet down, in fact, you drop it down to levels which are the recommended levels, then you're going
to get hungry and you're going to overeat. He did a kind of experiment where he got lots of people into a sort of hotel space and there and said.
Them, gosh, I don't know about that experiment. I don't think i'd like to be in there with all these hungry people.
Yeah, this was done before COVID obviously placed. And what he did is he fed them different amounts of He gave them meals. He didn't tell them, but essentially they had different amounts of protein in them, and the people who were eating less than fifteen percent, they ate significantly more, particularly of snacks in the two weeks they were in this space. That if you aren't getting a protein then
that really drives hunger. And so there's quite a big section in the book about protein, what sort of protein, why you need protein, and some of the studies that have been done. It seems to be particularly important when
you get older. So when you are beyond the age of sixty sixty five, that's when you really need to up your protein and pregnant women as well seem to need higher amounts protein, and so that's kind of one of the elements of the book, I mean really about it's about Quito, but it's about other things around nutrition that I've discovered over the last few years and lots of exciting research. And as you say, protein is having
its moment in the sun, isn't it so? But this is if you like the science behind it.
No, it is a fascinating book with the loads of your insights and science. But one thing I did love is in the book, you did a little study on your wife where you watched her. What are some health tips that you learned while watching her closely?
Yeah, So Claire is slim and has always been slim. I mean I met her at medical school in nineteen eighty, so that is forty one and a bit years now, and she's pretty much the same size and shape she was then. So I was curious because over that period I the forty he wasn't here. I put on quite a lot of weight and then I had to lose some of it because of you know, type two diabetes,
which I developed. So I looked at Claire and I kind of wonder what she do because she doesn't consciously can control her weight, but instead she loves the sort of Mediterranean style food. She loves food. She really loves food, so it's not that she's denying herself. And all the recipes are based on her. So what she does is she just stops eating when she's full. She's one of those sort of classic you know, she doesn't feel the
compulsion to eat everything on her plate. She has a savory tooth, run the sweet tooth, so she really doesn't eat sugary things. Occasionally she does, but she doesn't, you know, she doesn't feel like compulsion like I do. That once you've started to buy a chocolate, you got to finish it. And she eats lots of sort of veggies. She loves veggies and piles them onto her plate with enormous enthusiasm in a way that I try to copy.
Actually, the one thing, the other thing I loved is the fact that you said that she moves all the time. She's always busy, never stands still. And I think this, you know, I think, as you know a mother who has many kids a few kids as well, I kind of relate to that absolutely.
So she's constantly on the booth and she loves being active and really doesn't it down very long. I mean, we have four kids who all left home. One of them, Jack is the doctor in Melbourne there, but certainly when we had young kids she was on the go all the time, plus being a GP and now you know, writing recipes and she also writes a column for the Daily Mail, so all of this keeps her prettective as you can.
I mentioned, yeah, doctor Michael mos the congratulations on your book again and thanks for coming on Healthy.
Is Pleasure.
Once again. Our thoughts are with Michael's wife, Claire and his family at this hard time. If you do want to hear more from him, you can type in doctor Michael Mosley where if you get your podcast, and there are plenty more healthy Ish and extra Healthish episodes that will pop up. I will also leave a link to
them in the show notes. Anything else, head to body andsoul dot com dot you follow us on socials, grab our print edition which is out in your local Sunday paper, and until tomorrow, stay healthy Ish