Well hello ladies and gents, Robert Sykes, Keto, savage.com. Today I've got two special guests, Wade Lighthart and Matt Gallant. They are the the head honchos behind the Bio Optimizers brand of supplements. They also just recently came out with a book called The Ultimate Nutrition Bible and we dove super deep into digestive health on this episode. We talked quite a bit about natural bodybuilding calorie modulation. It's interesting because Wade is a plant based athlete.
He follows a raw vegan diet. Matt is more of the carnivore keto in the spectrum. So both guys having success with their their physical endeavours, their health and coming out from totally different ends of the spectrum. So very interesting to kind of go back and forth, figure out what they think as a potential nutrition and why they eat the way they do, what successes. They found the pros and cons of
each dietary protocol. We talked quite a bit, like I said about digestive health enzymes and different supplements that they offer to help aid in that digestive process. And we just talked quite a bit about intuition and performance in its totality. So third, enjoy the conversation that both these guys are a wealth of knowledge. I've got no debt that you will take something from this. So that further delay, sit back, relax and do the podcast with both Wade and Matt
and we are live. Wade and Matt, How are you fellas? Great. And you? I'm doing a wonderful well, I'm excited to chat with y'all y'all. Are the the brains behind bio optimizers correct the two of y'all collectively? Yes, Sir. I I use Y'all's magnesium supplement every night before I go to bed. Same. And y'all, y'all have got a a background. I don't, I don't know both y'all's back story. I know I got Wade's one sheet. And you've got a past in natural
bodybuilding, correct? Yeah. So I I competed, you know, early in life all the way, all the way up to being. My last contest was at 50. I came out of retirement to go do that. So yeah, it's a long time. What? Was that like coming out of retirement and then stepping back on stage as a master? Well it's it's two things. One, you know you don't know how long it's going to take you to get in the kind of condition that you feel is ready for this
stage. And I would say that's a lot longer than it did when I was in my 20s and so so that was the biggest difference. You know you you despite whatever you do your metabolism, your age does impact the ultimate outcome. But ultimately I was satisfied with results and felt great, grateful that I could go do it and you know, prove that what we've been advocating for all these years actually works in there in a in a independent.
You know, it's everybody can look good on Instagram or everybody can make things look good, but it's it's pretty hard to look good on a bodybuilding stage if you're not doing what works. 100% and I think it's. Just to add to that too, Wade did it, naturally, then ran a marathon six months later. His first marathon ever. So. I love it. I love it. I think competing 'cause I I compete on the natural
Federations too. I think there's definitely another level that, you know, comes along with that. But to do so in the Masters category when everybody else is suggesting that, hey, when you Crest, you know, 40 years old, you got to be taking a whole bunch of gear in order to maintain proper health and function. So you're kind of dispelling all the rumors there, which is pretty awesome. Yeah, thanks. And you know, it's it's, I'm not against people using those
things. But what happens, I think when you see a lot of people in the biohacking or or whatever dietary advocacy, they're not revealing if they're augmenting their diet and their training with peptides and hormones. And for the average person, if they're not doing that, then it's really distorting the information. And I think that's a disservice to the public. Like I said, I'm not against people doing that. I think do whatever you can for your health.
But I wanted to be able to lay claim to, OK, these are what's happening in an, you know, a non interventionist situation and then you know, see what the results were. Yeah, I think, you know, again, I don't have any issue with people, you know, to each their own, so to speak. But I think being transparent with it and just being honest and upfront, so people that are trying to emulate similar results and find their own path in life can have a realistic expectation as to what's possible.
Are you saying that not everyone can look like Michael Hearn? Not everyone can probably look like Michael Hearn. He he's, he's always been in the, the circles. I don't even know how old he is now, but he's he's getting on up there. He's in his early 50s or he's around my age. Wow. And I see him at the gym regularly here at Dole's and you know, whether he's enhanced or not, I would probably say that he's on the enhanced side. I think it's probably safe to
say that. I mean, the guy's a a, a, a, a physical specimen at any age, let alone being in his 50s, people can say whatever they want it. It takes a lot of work to to look the way he does. Yeah, 100%. I got respect for people that are in the gym and putting in the work, whether they're on gear or not. And as long as they're honest with it, you know, like, like I said, to each their own.
But you know, doing doing the the gym thing, being on top of your nutrition like that is not a trivial endeavor. And whether you decide to go to the enhanced rat or not, like you still have earned my respect by living that lifestyle for. Sure. Yeah. How? How did y'all get connected and they? So yeah, we're both from a small city in Canada, Eastern Canada called Moncton, NB and we were
both personal trainers. Wade's mom used to come to the gym and then Wade came back to visit his folks, and Wade and I just connected. I was already planning on moving to Vancouver. Wade was living there. So Wade was kind of living my next dream and we just bonded. The next thing you know, I moved to Vancouver.
Wade hooked me up there. We were two of the most successful trainers at Rural's Gym, downtown Vancouver, and then Wade was winning National Natural Bodybuilding Championships as a vegetarian like 20 years ago. So I'm like, that's pretty weird and unusual. And I was building online businesses. This is in 2002, 2003. And then I said, well, why don't we try launching an info product? So our first product was called Freaky Big.
Naturally, we put together a really comprehensive training program and nutrition plan with some audio CDs and all of that stuff and we launched it and it was successful right out of the gate. And then Fast forward a year or so later we met a man named Doctor Michael O'Brien that really taught us about enzymes and probiotics.
So we did his protocol and we were just blown away by the results to the point where we're like, hey, I think we need to sell enzymes to the world cause at that time protein would had really exploded. I mean, if you bought a bodybuilding magazine, you probably had 40-50 pages of protein ads. And the the missing link that I think a lot of people don't understand is that you don't want protein, you want amino acids.
And how do you get amino acids? Well, of course you have to consume protein and your body has to break those down using proteolytic enzymes to break down the amino acids into absorbable components. So we decided to build our first supplement which was called Mass Symes. It was and still is the strongest protein digesting enzyme blend that's ever been built. We know because we've tested all of our competitors in the lab and it's just a game changer in terms of utilizing the amino
acids from the protein. And Wei's got a great story that he can share around how how many grams of protein he was consuming as a plant based guy, which I think really illustrates the power of them. Wait. Yeah, so wind the tape back to, you know, most guys are following a pound per gram, a pod body weight. And you know, I'd compete around 175 S, walk around right at 200 lbs. And you know, in a diet situation, you'd go to maybe up to 250.
And when I did do that 250 and try to do on a vegetarian side, you couldn't do it. You had to do a lacto vegetarian. And I was using whey protein and I got myself into a digestive disaster after my first Mr. Universe in 03 and that I gained 42 lbs of fat and water after the contest in 11 weeks my digestive system and we we started using enzymes to offset the problems of high protein diets or indigestibility etcetera.
And I also switched to a raw food diet at that time, which is really hard to get a lot of protein on a plant based diet, but on a raw food diet it's even more difficult. But over the course of four years using mass signs and also P3M which is a proteolytic probiotic we use and some HCL, we were able to take my protein load down to 85g and I went back to the World Championships in 07 on 85 grams of protein a day on
it from a raw food sources. So that was about the limit that I could go to. Below that I would start losing muscle mass and and by the way, I actually had more muscle mass in my that four years later than I had in the O3 contest. So O3 to O7 now, years later. When I came back last year, I was running between 120 and 150 grams As I've gotten older, even despite all the good, you know, digestive components that I'm using, you know, and I don't think that's a digestive issue.
I think it's actually just a cellular issue from, you know, aging and degeneration and, you know, cellular damage and stuff. I had to increase the protein to still maintain that same body weight that I did before from a lean body mass perspective. So that's just the evolution of life over a long period of time. But you know, had I not used mass signs and P through OMI, don't think I could have been competitive at this age.
Well, I definitely think that there is a massive void in the in the informational space within the realms of bodybuilding, specifically about the significance and importance of proper nutrient absorption and digestion. Like everybody's, like you said, is on their high horse with regards to how much protein to consume. There's, you know all different types of protein supplements and mass gainers, but you could have your macros perfectly dialed in.
But if your body's failing to absorb what you're consuming, then it's all for naughty. And I feel like that's just my people pay that no mind, which is a massive misstep on their part. There's another big piece. Interesting. Oh yeah. So go ahead, man. So I'm pretty good friends with Ben Pokolski and I remember having breakfast with him.
For those of you who don't know who Ben was, he was one of the top pro bodybuilders in the world, you know, weighed around £300 at, you know, 5 foot 10. I mean he was, he was massive and we were having breakfast and I'm like, you know, what's the hardest part of being a pro bodybuilder? And he said it's eating the food in the offseason. Like, you know, dieting. Yeah, it's a bit challenging.
Training's a bit challenging. But, you know, for anybody who's trying to gain a lot of weight and you're trying to consume 3456 plus 1000 calories a day, it puts an incredible strain on your digestive system. And when we launched Mas Dimes, we had guys like almost bragging in our forum about the ability to go consume 8, nine, 10,000 calories a day, take a ton of
mass times and feel good. You know, not not be bloated and maybe Wade. You can talk a little bit about some of the, you know, the bad stories that have occurred in the bodybuilding world with people blowing out the digestive systems. Yeah, you really started to see that happen. And this, which is interesting since, you know, we were talking about keto diets and stuff. There was a fellow that introduced the use of medium chain triglycerides as an energy source.
His name was John Perillo and he had a lot of success in the late 80s, early 90s by, you know, leveraging it. I actually wrote a paper in university on the carnitine shuttle and MCTS and how it could bypass that and stuff. It's very interesting, 'cause I was fascinated with the topic and some of his clients, you know, he had Dennis Newman that had some health challenges and he ended up with cancer that he had Michael Francis, also a guy that blew out his digestive
system. And then as you started to go through and this kind of came with the Super loading of drugs in combination with the Super loading of calories to support this, you know, the mass monsters. And you started to see more that, you know, the distended stomachs came out and people were getting bloating and and then, you know, a whole assortment of errors. And there's always been a lot of conjecture of what what was
causing those things. And you're starting to see now I return backwards to those physiques and you look and look at no further than say, Dexter Jackson that recognized his digestive health issues were a problem and he was able to correct those, you know, later in his career as a as a, you know, masters. Mr. Olympia. Yeah, Natalia Coelho is one of the tightest waistlines in Miss Olympia. She's, you know, using her
products for the same reason. Big Romney also had some digestive health issues and got wind of our stuff to help fix some of his issues and what we're and even if you go back to Ronnie Coleman, when he introduced his protein, he started adding enzymes. We were probably the first company to start talking about enzymes in the sports world. So it's nice to see that it's going out there.
The problem is most companies are using white label cheap enzymes and saying yeah we got enzymes too and once again the consumer is taking the right action or the OR is deploying the right strategy, but it's not going to get the the right result because they don't have a quality based enzyme. And so the variance, you know the the devil's in the details and the variance in quality is absolutely significant. We've proven some of the things in the lab.
Maybe you can talk about some of the lab results about converting protein to amino acids relative to other leading brands, Matt, so people can understand their difference. So there's a laboratory test is considered the gold standard for laboratory digestive testing. It's called Info Jest. And we can basically simulate the digestive system and measure how much amino acids have been broken, how much protein broke
down into amino acids. And when we compared, you know, just putting in food in versus putting food plus mass times, there was 1200% more amino acids and peptides in 30 minutes. So that's it. We're not talking a twenty, 3040% difference. We're talking, you know, 1200% more amino acids and peptides in just 30 minutes. And you feel it that if you go consume a big meal with or without mass signs, you know, wait 30-40 minutes, you'll feel like, wow, I don't feel bloated. I don't feel gas.
I don't feel this heavy cement feeling in my gut and I know this is a keto podcast, so maybe we can switch over to talking about lipolytic enzymes, which is really critical for anybody on a ketogenic diet. So it's a bit of background on me. I've been doing keto since I'm 16, I'm gonna be 47 next month. So I've been doing keto for a long time, mostly cyclical keto and tried every variant of keto.
But you know, it's kind of my go to and and what I do the majority of the time and I realized, you know, having a lot of clients try a ketogenic diet that some people could not digest fats properly and then awaits one of them or cue them up in a second. So that was a big clue that some people just didn't have the lipases or produce the lipases that they needed in order to break down the fats into essential fatty acids and then absorb them and utilize them.
So I I went to work, I built a formula called K pax. It has four different lipases, also has L carnitine, and has Co Q10. So what we're trying to do, what we are doing is breaking the fat down into essential fatty acids, then helping the body absorb more of those fatty acids, transporting them to the mitochondria and then utilizing them. And if you take 4 to 5 capsules in the morning on an empty stomach, you'll get 6 to 8 hours of energy boost, maybe a 1520% energy boost with zero stem.
And I realized the first time I ever got the samples, I did that experiment at like 3:00 PM and next thing you know, it was like, you know, one or two in the morning. And I I was still wide awake. So it definitely works for an energy boosting component. Again, there's no caffeine,
there's no stimulants. It's just really a mitochondrial booster and it's just it's just a game changer when you're eating high fat meals and I know you have a keto brick, which I'm a huge fan of that product by the way. So when you're consuming a lot of fat like that for some people, and even if you do break it down, you'll get a lot more out of the fat keto brick for an example, consuming it with K pex
than you would without. And the last comment I want to make is there's been a lot of paranoia about seed oil. So what we did in the lab is we we ran a bunch of experiments. You know, we imported a bunch of seed oils and we started testing all of them. And the big question is, well, what's so bad about seed oils? Well, there is a molecule called maldealdehyde, MDA is the acronym.
And if you look at if you Google maldealdehyde and gene toxicity, you'll see that you'll basically there is a lot of genetic damage, cell damage that occurs with Maldealdehyde. Now a couple of points, One is there was a lot of seed oils that didn't have that. So again, there's just a lot of throwing the baby out with the bat water with seed oils.
But what was amazing is when we took K pax and we exposed it to these bad seed oils, we were able to break down the mount of the aldehyde into fatty acids and essentially eliminate that, that toxicity. And wait, maybe you can Share your story around, you know, your struggle to breakdown fats.
Yeah, so back in the so one of the unique aspects that Matt and I have is that we, because of our goals, our genetics, our unique, you know, preferences which have both a biological and psychological base, we have chosen different dietary pathways and their boat is polar opposite. In fact Matt's gone full carnivoire and I've gone full raw vegan to to to go to the variance on that.
So and what makes it unique and we cover all these items in the ultimate nutrition Bible. All the different rates is when I was attempting to do a keto diet, when I would hit a certain amount of fat in the diet and it wasn't that much relative. It certainly wasn't significant enough to really get me into what most people would call a, you know fat adapted ketogenic
kind of dietary lifestyle. I'd start having fat in the stools, I would see the oil in the stools and I didn't feel good and I was explaining to that to Matt and that's what led him to investigate the fats. And what was interesting also is I was running a holistic health clinic in Vancouver and when we started giving people who had skin conditions lipolytic enzymes, that's lipase based. So lipase breaks down fats,
proteases, breakdown protein. You know, amylase base breaks down carbohydrates and I mean the cellulose base brings down plant matter and then there's kind of branches off of those. Well, turns out there's not just one type of lipase, there's about four different types of lipases and there's a variety of reasons of, you know, the pH environments and things, why they work or the fats that they actually work on.
And so he put that product together which was really unique to the ketogenic market and as soon as I did that, I could increase my fats and I didn't have the digestive distress anymore. So it solved that problem. Now in the long run, it turns out that genetically I'm not as suited to a fat based diet as I am a carbohydrate diet, which I think is the inversion of what Matt's genetics have. And we didn't know, we didn't have access to genetic tests
back then. These are just observational things which are slow routes to get there. Now we know this. And so The thing is, is you can be successful on any diet that you want through whatever preference, whether it's religious or psychological or emotional or social reasons, if you are using the right digestive aids to overcome what may be your genetic weaknesses or some sort of damage that you've taken on.
Ideally you would correct any damage and then you would optimize for your suitable, you know, goals. What's that sport or etcetera. Makes total sense. I'm curious, I'm not anti supplementation by any means. I can definitely see the benefit to digestive enzymes, but why do you think we as a species now need to have digestive enzymes in order to fully absorb the food we consume? You think that was always the case?
Or do you think this is a result of just a a shift in our Physiology and environmental factors that now creates the the more inherent need for it? Yeah, I studied this extensively because I was curious as well. And so here's the historical aspect, 'cause I I want to take one caveat to a lot of people say, well, if you take enzymes, your body will stop producing enzymes. That's not correct. You can stop and discontinue enzymes and your body resumes producing them from a digestive level.
But the body produces enzymes on a systemic level, and the enzymatic capacity of an Organism is inversely related to the duration of life of that Organism. And that's a tenant out of Doctor Edward Howells. Enzymes for health and longevity. Or if you want the, you know, more readable version, you can go to Enzyme nutrition. Those two books are very powerful in illustrating how your enzymatic capacity now every single species on the planet eats its food in a raw
state. Whether you know it's tigers eating zebras, you know horses eating grass, you know bears eating salmon and blueberries, you know that's the basics. You know, herbivores, omnivores and carnivores, they all eat them in a raw food state. Now, why is that important? Well, you actually get the enzymes and probiotics that would naturally occurring with that species with it. Humans don't do that. Now, I'm not here to condemn the improvements of the modern world.
You know, we've solved a lot of the problems that took out our ancestors largely in part mass starvation and a lot to do with death due to infection, whether that's parasitical or bacteria infection. But particularly after World War 2 when we had a mass migration into the cities, before that as well over 90% of the people had their local, had a, had a, you know, farm access to food on their farm. We moved into conventional or big commercial conglomerates
that were producing food. The governments of the world stepped in to address the potential for famine by creating government regulatory bodies and monoculture farming. Now there's no place in the world that historically went with monoculture farming. If you look at Aryuvedic medicine, Chinese medicine, if you look at all the farming practices around the world, you would rotate the crops and that would re tool the soil so that you had all the nutrients.
You also didn't have herbicides, pesticides and fungicides. All of those disrupt the enzymatic activity of both the plants or any other you know pathogen. Also the bugs in the soil. And then we add fertilizer which grows the food at a faster rate, which diminishes the nutrient content including the protein content within plants. And so one of the reasons like hemp has been an unadulterated plant source. It hasn't gone through the conventional mechanism and it has higher levels of protein.
Same thing as you see of superfoods, most of them haven't been altered by conventional medicine. Well if you go down the, you know the last 60 years of or 70 year almost, I guess we're getting into the 80 year range. Since that's happened, we've had a massive degradation of our food. For example, an orange today you would need 55 oranges to make up the nutrient content. So we've had a calorie version of the dietary regulation we've had, We've had conventional conventional growing.
We've got chemicalization of the plants. We've got accelerated growth that is and and then we have all these downward pressures on the enzymatic content that we would normally consume under a raw food situation like every other species. So we've offset the advantages of the modern or the disadvantages of the modern world with optimizing our digestive system.
And why is that important? Well, if you look at the data, 12% of the emergency hospital visits today, emergency hospital that's going to the hospital and ambulance like a heart attack or a major accident, 12% of them are related to gastrointestinal issues, 100 million people in in the United States alone, that's almost a third of the population in any given day is suffering from digestive health and about 25% of those are on permanent prescription medication for that.
All of that is largely in part because of the changes that we've made in our dietary practice. If we were living in a rural environment on super organic food and eating in that environment, we probably wouldn't exhaust our enzymatic capacity of production. But the fact is, we are, and we're so far removed from what humans normally and naturally ate that it's virtually impossible to get everything you want out of the diet.
It's virtually impossible to get enough enzymes and to be able to optimize your gut Biome so that you can, you know, be successful in the diet you're following and avoid disease. And that's why our company stepped in the gap. We fixed these problems for ourselves. We fixed them for our immediate clients and then we started a company because we understood that this is going to be not a diminishing problem but a massive problem. And we're seeing the side effects of people not taking
this into account. So I don't think we can get out of our modern diets without supplementation anymore. Yeah, it it is kind of crazy, man. Like I've tried to make it a point to return to as primitive a means as possible with regards to my, you know, procuring my food. Like a hunt for a lot of my food. We we started raising our own animals that we've got our own chickens, sheep. We're doing like rotational grazing with them, doing our own gardening. Like it.
It's a lot more effort, but in fact it's a lot more rewarding because you don't have to you can just bypass all the the noise the modern societal system brings to the equation with regards to where their food comes from. But it's, I mean not everybody can do that. So it's not really a scalable practice so to speak.
Just as a question about that, I'm curious, 'cause I'm a big advocate of those models, what did you notice as a difference when you moved from, you know, buying your foods at grocery stores and stuff to buy, getting your stuff on in your own, from your own harvest? Well, it's kind of happened over
a pretty long period of time. Like, I've been in Keto for I guess 8-9 years now, and I noticed a pretty profound shift in how I felt physically and emotionally and like recovery and joint health and inflammation. Once I made that switch, because that by definition removed a lot of the processed foods. But then once I really started sourcing all of my meat from quality sources, like I was pretty well dialed in, nutritionally speaking at that point. So I I didn't notice a stark
contrast. My motivation for doing that, honestly, is more so because I don't want to, you know, you vote with your dollar. I don't want to pay into the system that is destroying the livelihood of, you know, rural farmers and ranchers. And I just feel like from a a Wellness standpoint towards the animals, like I'd rather provide them a better quality of life and do so in a more holistic
pattern. Plus, I mean just bringing it all the way down to my own personal well-being, like raising my family, raising my son in an environment where he knows where his food comes from, he sees the fruits of his labor and taking care of the land, being good steward of the land, taking care of the animals that we then harvest for food. Like it really just completes the whole circle of life. And I think that is how we were designed as a species to procure
our food. But we're so far removed from that, that any step that we can take to get closer to that is well warranted. Of that, yeah, me too. I'm I'm. I'm intrigued by the fact that both of our OPS ends of spectrum, though, because that that's cool. Like I've had hardcore
carnivores on the podcast. I've had hardcore vegans on the podcast and there's so much differentiation between the two but to have both of Y'all in the same conversation and on the same team, you know speaks well of both Y'all's character. I'm I'm curious in regards to gut health as that's both Y'all's expertise. You know when when you go from a vegan diet to a carnivore diet or vice versa, your gut microbiome is going to shift drastically the the need for
fiber shifts. You know making short chain fatty acids in the in the gut can y'all kind of just speak to that As far as what y'all consume and how y'all's digestive, you know microbiome is likely night and day as well. Yeah, I'll start by just talking about the differences and Wade and I argued for a very long time. I was a keto zealot. I thought everybody should be on a ketogenic diet. I thought it was the greatest
thing ever. We felt similarly with a plant based diet and we debated and we debated. But then as we went deeper, we realized that one, it doesn't work for everybody, there is no one diet fits all. Second, we found that there was common ground. And probably the 1st place we found common ground was around digestive optimization And when we started using enzymes and then proteolytic probiotics like P3, OM, and hydrochloric acid and K PAX and all these things we found, well, this will work
for anybody. Like, doesn't matter what diet you're on, maybe there's a better form of enzyme for you, but every person could benefit from utilizing enzymes. And just a quick comment, I did a gut health test, a probiotic test, and that was the experiment. I was on a ketogenic diet, got a sample, sent it, started eating plant based for about 10 days, sent another sample, and yeah, your gut changes. Your gut's incredibly dynamic.
The director of our labs, we have a lab with 20 full time people in Europe. She has a PhD in probiotics and of course it's just been a master class working with her now for about four years. And the gut's incredibly dynamic cause probiotics have about a 48 hour lifespan, which means that every meal you're eating is having some form of impact on your gut Biome. And yeah, your gut's going to adapt an incredibly adaptive environment. And of course there's certain things that will harm it.
There's certain other things that will help it and we do have a product called microbiome breakthrough that in terms of, I would say optimizing your overall gut health, probably the best product we have it. It really helps to create a healthy biofilm, helps kill a lot of the bad bugs.
We do a lot of UFC style events in the lab where we put one probiotic strain versus another, see which one prevails and sometimes they don't get along and they kill each other and we want the good guys to kill the bad guys, right? We formulated that product. P3 OM is also incredible at killing bad guys. But yeah, as far as you know, personally I'll pass it on to Wade because he is the fiber king. I'm primarily probably 4050% protein, 35 to 40% fat, and five to 10% carbs.
I will say this is a pro tip I learned from Kevin Weiss, who you know was a world champion natural bodybuilder. Wade actually competed with them, World champion powerlifter natural, and his strategy was to slowly lower the percentage of fat to get shredded. And if you look at you know if you're on a kyogenic diet, you're getting started getting to 7075% fat to really force the body to become efficient and effective at breaking down fats makes sense.
But once you're fat adapted you can start reducing that percentage and and replacing it with protein and what happens is 1. Your net calories are going to decrease. You're going to be more anabolic, right. So you're you're going to have a stronger anabolic response in general from weight training and it it's a great strategy to to still have satiety while lowering your net calories to get shredded.
So again, I've just shifted my fat percentage down and the other thing I've done is I've replaced my fats. And you know, for anybody who's in a ketogenic diet, strongly advocate getting a genetic test. One of the things it revealed for me is I don't have good genetics for saturated fats. And the one thing I've struggled to optimize on a personal basis
has been my lipid profile. So what I'm doing now is I've lowered my saturated fat intake and I've replaced that with olive oil, which is mono saturated. So I think optimizing your fats is one of the key things that you want to do on a ketogenic diet. Then I'll pass it on to Wei so he can talk about what he's
doing. Yeah. So I was always fascinated with the concepts around fat metabolism and as well as the benefits of fasting and you know the physiological and cognitive changes that happened during extensive fasts as. Well, because essentially. You're doing a a lot of what you're doing is similar to a ketogenic diet. You're basically reducing your dependency on carbohydrates so that your body starts to fuel
itself on fats. Now you can do that over an extended diet on severe calorie restriction. The problem with any severe calorie restriction, and everybodybuilder knows that is there's a point of diminishing returns. There's a point where you you're kind of like you, you're creating a you're crafting a strategy to overcome the body's tendency to overeat for survival. You're under eating to create a, you know, a subjective outcome, and you're countering all these
evolutionary measures. And so what's interesting, I think bodybuilders are the O GS of biohacking, biological optimization, whatever you want to call that. One of the technologies and techniques they were using were to overcome genetics were involved in that. And that's why I think people like myself and Matt who had a strong background in in yourself, have a strong background in bodybuilding. You're simply forced into situations to really work things out.
And so for me, what I realized is that the diet strategy that bodybuilders were regularly deploying, deploying especially back in the 80s and 90s was a high protein, high carbohydrate, low body fat. And the idea was as you're fueling your glycogen stores, but the the total calorie deficit was going to allow you to tap in those fat stores and make the fats part of your metabolic process and that
worked relatively successful. The problem is you get into blood sugar regulation issues for a lot of people, but you whether you're using either eating too much food or you have to use simple refined carbohydrates most of the most. Of the top. Bodybuilders today use like Stan Efrig's kind of stuff, where they're just manipulating right white rice, because it's for a lot of people, it's easier to digest than anything else, and you can just up it or down it,
depending on your conditioning. What I did is I chose to say, OK, well I'm not going to get as much protein in the diet. And one of the key caveats for people if you don't get enough protein in your diet, you're going to crave carbohydrates. And now in a keto jar they're they're they're offsetting that with high amounts of fats which creates satiety.
Protein also creates satiety. So when you when I would drop that down a certain amount, my cravings for carbohydrates went up and what I did to offset that is I increased my fiber components. So I take 5I, I'm, I'm about an 85 to 100 grams of fiber a day just to give you a, a, a, an indication, which is you know, both, yeah. It's about three times. What is considered, you know, what you would need to optimize for health.
And there's a bunch of studies I put on our Facebook page and stuff like that about, you know, the different types of fiber and and from longevity perspectives, and I think fiber does one particular purpose. It feeds the bacteria in your guts that allows you to produce all of these wonderful array of chemicals that they use that her body requires.
So the whole point of what I'm trying to communicate is there's different ways to slice, you know slice the onion you, but you're going to have to find some way to create satiety in the body. And for some people that's better with fats, some people it's better with protein. And for plant based people, I would say you wanna be able to do that with protein and fiber in particular because you're just gonna not gonna have enough protein to kill satiety. No, I. I love it.
I love going against the grain and kind of testing things out. And I'm 100% agreement with you in that. Bodybuilders, I mean bodybuilders, tend to operate on the extreme fringe anyway, So we like pushing the envelope to see what works and what doesn't. And I mean, we've all gotten incredibly lean. So we've all been able to prove that there's various methods or ways to skin a cat.
As the saying goes, like when I'm doing a cut, I tend to keep my fat ratio pretty high, have zero fiber, and I'll oftentimes take my protein down pretty low relative to my fat because I'm using the fat for the energy. And I feel like the ketones help from a mental clarity standpoint. And I'll sometimes transition to like a one meal a day because I think so much of hunger and satiety is also psychological.
And if you are obsessing about food and eating every two hours, as is traditionally prescribed in bodybuilding protocols, like you just constantly fixated on food, which is going to increase the desire for food. So by doing like a one meal a day approach, I'm getting a longer fasting window.
I've got relatively high fat to protein and I've taken my protein really low without a noticeable drop in lean tissue, which which is interesting because you know, you talk to traditional bodybuilders and like, if you take anything in less than, you know, 1g per pound of lean mass and you're just gonna be wasting away. And that hasn't been the case
for me once fat adapted. But I mean, there's so many different ways to do it, like like we're all three doing a slightly different protocol, but we've all found success with it, which is interesting. Yeah, I think there's big factors. There's genetic factors and methylation cycles and stuff as well. Matt, go ahead. Yeah, because. Calories in, calories out is the truth. It's the laws of thermodynamics and doesn't really matter. I mean, it was the guy who did the junk food diet.
He was eating Cheez, ITS and all kinds of junk, But I think he was eating around 1800 calories a day and he lost body fat. His biomarkers got better. Of course we're not advocating that there's another guy who did the Mcsnake, the McDonald's Mcsnake diet where he was just eating 1 McDonald meal per day, but his calories were in check. And you know, he he actually improved his biomarkers doing that for 30 days. And I think that's something that gets lost a lot.
You know, the Super Size Me documentary obviously really vilified McDonald, but the guy was, you know, over consuming calories and of course if you over consume sugar, which is a different issue, right? If you over consume sugar and your blood Sugar's out of control, that will accelerate at ageing. That will create glycation aging, you know, end products. So there's gonna be a lot of consequences to high blood sugar.
There's gonna be consequences to having an excess of calories, which is kind of independent of what diet style that you're on. Course, you can make things work better by consuming more fiber, more protein, healthy fats, which is what I think we're all advocating. But there's a lot of people trying to frame certain types of diets, whether it's keto or intermittent fasting or this or that, as some sort of magical
solution. But when you really break it down into calories, you know, ultimately if you're eating less calories, then you're, you're burning, you're going to lose body fat, you're going to lose weight, you eat more calories than you're burning, you're going to gain body fat and gain some weight. So, you know, I I think it's important to emphasize that. Yeah, totally. And just to add. To that, Yeah.
Just to add to that, if it's OK, so essentially what are what are high, you know, high performance athletes doing is they're ultimate, they're alterating their calories, burnt mode, Same thing if you are taking any type of beta 2 andrenidis drug that's
stimulating metabolism. If you are improving mitochondrial function or if you're say training at altitude or in altitude machines or you're subjecting yourself to, you know, cold water or cold therapy or or you're setting yourself up to, you know, hot temperatures so that there's metabolic things. So there are ways to manipulate your metabolism or slow cardio or multiple workouts or all of
these. And this is where bodybuilders and high performance athletes have a different model than say a lot of the biohackers which are saying, you know, exercise as little as possible and do a bunch of gadgets and you know don't even take all the drugs that you want. But these guys are doing it on the opposite side.
I think high performance health, if we're looking at that, you're looking at every which way that you can increase the calorie burn if your goal is, you know, improve body fat composition. And that's a topic that as you age, generally your metabolism slows down and you need more mitigation strategies in order to really optimize that. But the sooner people get involved in that, I think the the easier it is, is to maintain their body fat levels. Yeah, 100%.
And I think it oftentimes goes unsaid, but there's an equally important sign of the spectrum of, you know, having periods of time in a caloric surplus to ramp up that metabolism like reverse dieting and post show. So many people fail to do that correctly and they just chronically depress their metabolic rate, which is, you know, no good either. And I feel like when you're on the opposite of the spectrum, increasing your intake, a lot of people hit a threshold there.
And I think it becomes, I mean, when you're on the extremes, whether you're on a caloric deficit or in a caloric surplus, like, you are much more in tune with how your body is performing and responding to that intake. Like when you're in a deficit, you know, I obviously try to focus on nutrient densities, that my body's mineral requirements are all accounted for and everything that is there is, is there.
But when you're on a surplus side of the spectrum, like if if you're taking in a whole bunch of processed foods and just junk calories, like you're not going to feel. And if you're not absorbing those excess calories, well then you're not doing yourselves any favors there. But I think people often times fail to spend time in a surplus and reap all the benefits of that.
But I think when you do that, you know, paying even more mind to the absorption of that food that you're consuming, the types of food that you're consuming, you know, getting in those enzymes if necessary is is paramount as well, no? That's a critical. Point and you know in our opinion, in our experience like if you're at about a 300 to 500 calorie Max surplus and you're lifting weights properly 3456 times a week, you're going to link to gain lean muscle mass.
And I will say, and this is an important point that I think is is missed, especially people doing intermittent fasting. If you want to gain maximum amount of lean muscle mass, you need more protein feedings per day because of the M Tor activation effects. You know, if you're getting 3 grams of leucine per meal, say four times a day or three times a day at least compared to one time, you're spending a much higher percentage of your day in kind of maximum anabolic growth.
And there's been guys like Peter Tia and Tim Ferriss that said, well, we stopped intermittent fasting because our weight's the same, but we've lost lean body mass. And we truly believe that the reason for that is the M Tor activation piece, which a lot of people are not that aware of. And it's a really simple thing to do. You know, again, you just gotta make sure you're getting up with
three grams of leucine per meal. A lot of food will have that whey protein, will, will give you that pea protein is rich in leucine or you can just supplement with leucine straight up. It's a very inexpensive supplement. But yeah, I'm a big believer that in in reverse dieting, I've done the mistakes before. I know Wade has as well. And Wade, maybe talk about your 42 lbs of fat and water story. Yeah, that's.
Well, that's that. Essentially that what that's what happened when I competed in the 2003 Mr. Universe contest and I first got hip to the problems and and I had a diet for 11 straight months and the strategy we're deploying was kind of a revolutionary 90s strategy. It was developed by Scott, Abel, and Scott, what was unique about him, he was doing high glycemic carbs with high amounts of
protein. So the idea was, is that you're using, you're keeping your insulin levels high to drive the amino acids in the muscles so that you could recover from you know what I would call high volume type training 'cause his? His training programs were pretty significant and the idea was as over in a long period of time you would harden yourself up. Now, normally you would do a dietary phase of, you know, somewhere between. 16 and 20. Weeks. Scott always would get his
competitors like several weeks. You know, in like 5 weeks out, you were basically in shape. So he wanted it so that you could manipulate water and, you know, tightness and all that sort of stuff. That really is the difference between a gym body and a stage body. And there's a big difference. And I've seen a million guys that look great in the gym and look terrible on stage and someone that looks kind of scrawny in the gym look amazing on stage. It's the variance.
You would know this. It's it's it's hard to fathom and fathom unless you've actually been to a competition and seen the difference in the people. Now the problem was, is that year I had to diet literally for 11 straight months because when I qualified for my, the Western Canadians and I went to the national championships, then that was in the middle of the year, which was already extending me to, you know, 2028 weeks or something like that.
Then it was another four months before we were. Going to. Compete at the World Championship. So I I stayed on this hyper caloric restricted diet for 11 months and using the high glycemic carbohydrates really made you fluctuate on the blood sugar levels significantly. So when I got off that diet I literally couldn't control my eating. I was completely out of control and I couldn't get enough carbohydrates in the system, Simple carbohydrates.
And I was eating everything. I mean, it was just like mania and you know, which didn't help my digestive condition either. So I probably killed off all the good bacteria in my stomach during the restrictive dieting. And then I went and, you know, disrupted my metabolism from extensive calorie deprivation. Then I just started eating massive amounts of every kind of food that you could possibly stuff in your face. Most of it wouldn't be on the health side.
And then, you know, 42 lbs later, I felt better. Funny enough, I actually felt better. But I always say I went from Mr. Universe to Mr. Marshmallow and that's when we got wind of digestive health and how to correct that. That's when I, you know, experimented with a raw food diet.
That's when I started tweaking, you know, protein and satiety and enzymes and the things that we've mentioned here and realized there was a massive gap in the market about people's understanding about the difference between theory and practice and the consequences of extended calorie deprivation. Now to to to Scott's credit, you know, I was being pushed into a situation that was very unusual and I wasn't augmenting with hormones. Most of his athletes were.
And so that would offset some of the downside from a performance standpoint. And the other thing is, is most of the athletes that he had when you got into shape, you would just be doing a cycle diet where once a week you're you're, you know, you're tweaking your calories 3 even four times your, you know, your basal metabolic rate once a week to keep your metabolism up. So you know, it takes time to correct those things. In that case, it took me about six months to correct what I had done.
And for a lot of other people, especially on the female side, they do, you know, it takes years oftentimes to recover from the metabolic damage they do. So we suggest in our book about how to do it properly, how to, how to cycle in up calorie cycles. And then once you maintain, how to use what we call fasting and feasting strategy, like fasting for, you know, 24 or 48 to 48 hours once a week or you know
periodically once a month. And then also having cyclical like feasting sessions where you have a day that's completely off, do whatever you want. And that's actually a requisite in order to maintain your metabolism. Yeah, I think modulating. Your intake is is super important. That's why I'm not an advocate for people competing every single year. I mean, if you spend, you know, like my last prep was 33 weeks long and then I spent, you know, 3-4 months reverse dieting.
If I was to go right back into another prep, you know, like I wouldn't have any building phase. And so many competitors compete every single year, and they wind up looking worse and worse and worse when they step on stage, as opposed to better and better and better, which is the entire goal of the sport. Yeah, I agree with you and it's. What was it that caused you to come to the realization of that? I'm. I'm curious cause not everybody makes that jump. Well, I mean with natural.
Bodybuilding, especially like it takes time to put on lean tissue. Especially if you're a mature athlete and you've been lifting for, you know, 10 plus years as I have. Like any minuscule gain in actual muscle tissue, takes a long time. And if you're spending more time in a deficit than you are in a surplus with progressive overloading your training, then you're just simply not going to build you know, a reasonable amount of lean tissue to look markedly better the next time
you step on stage like I did. 5 shows this past season I probably won't compete again for there four or five years, so I can focus on just getting bigger so that the next time I step on stage it's game over. Lights out. Yeah, yeah, I've I've. I've noticed the same things and it's interesting how its natural bodybuilders are. You know, there's a perspective difference that we have than say people who are just going hog wild on the augmentation.
So yeah, it's like like. You you want to play, you know, you want to put longevity and true health as a priority. I think natural athletes tend to do that kind of by default more often than not. Not always, but more often than not. And I feel like, you know, if you're, I mean being in that caloric deficit, being sub 5% body fat is not a natural phenomenon anyways. It's very hard on your metabolism, very hard on your hormones. So to do that every single year
is asking a lot of your body. People just need to embrace each phase they're in. Like like when you're a competitor and you are sub 5% body fat and you look great on show show day, you look great in pictures. Like it's easy to want to just stay there. But you just have to embrace that extra fluff that comes with being in a in a strategic offseason and you know, appreciate that phase for what it is as well.
It's so great that you said. That I think a lot of people in the sport who are cosmetically driven in health or they they lose sight of what appears as healthy or or optimal is not necessarily what appears optimal from a visual standpoint is not necessarily optimal for health. Have you noticed with clients and stuff that the variance between their what their body's kind of comfortable at in a in a in a fat percentage range.
Like for me 12% is on a DEXA scan is where I like to walk around naturally like like to me it's easy. But I do notice as soon as I start slipping into below that and into single digits my my hunger awareness starts to up right or my ability to kind of go off and find reasons to go off the diet become more prevalent. It's a really interesting game psychologically. Now, some people, they're naturally really lean. Some people are naturally a little heavier. Yeah, no, totally. I mean the.
Whole argument of you know, having a homeostatic set point. I think there's a lot of truth to that. Like for me right now, I've just finished my reverse diet 20 weeks post show and I'm. I just got a Dexit last week and I was 13.1, which is pretty much where my body feels comfortable. That's where it wants to gravitate to. And at that body fat percentage, I mean all of my lifts are going up. I'm I'm literally consuming between 4500 and 5500 calories a day.
And it feels right. I don't fix it on food. It feels very natural to me. But yeah, I feel like everybody's got a different homeostatic set point, so to speak. Genetics are going to come into play a lot with that and lifestyle. And just the length of time you spend at a given body fat percentage is also going to dictate that too. That's just where your body, you know, naturally gravitates. So it takes time to kind of push that One Direction or the other.
But I think, you know, generally speaking, if you're an athlete, if you're training with, you know, progressive overload resistance training, you know, being somewhere between that, you know, 11/12/13 up to maybe 15% body fat for a male is a relatively healthy range to be in the majority of the time. Yeah, that's what I've found. So 100.
Percent I'm curious on the the raw vegan and since I got a carnivore and a vegan on here you you had mentioned earlier about every other species in the wild eats food raw. You know there's been a push for raw carnivore that's getting a lot of popularity to get curious to get your take on that man. But then wade you know a lot of people point to our digestive tracts as a species for instance and make arguments one way or the other saying what we should or should not eat what is a
species appropriate diet. You know we don't have near the digestive tract that an orangutan does for instance we don't have like that elongated cecum. Some would argue that we're not designed to consume a ton of raw vegetation because the fermentation process is just not adequate in our digestive tract. We don't have a rumen. What? What's your take on that? Yeah, great. Question. In fact, it was that question that led me to a plant based
diet. I read a book by the fellow by the name of Swami Sri Akhteswar. He was Paramansi Yoga, Nando's guru guy that kind of really started the whole yoga movement in the West. Meditation, all that sort of stuff came here in turn of the century. And in his book he he did a really firm analysis. He he analyzed where we are in the universe and, you know, the whole Physiology and psychology of mankind.
And one of the things that he did is he did a comparison analysis between herbivores, carnivores and omnivores. And what he did is he compared the canines, the the way the
teeth are. He compared the nervous system response to, you know, the attraction of food, and then he looked at the length of the digestive canal, particularly what what very it is, is, is he. Most people have to take the length of the digestive canal not as the length of the whole body, but as the length of between the the shoulder and the your hips because leg length and arm length you know, varies extensively in the species. And So what he found is and the
shape of the stomach as well. So if we get carnivore type animals, they have a shorter intestine, they got a more bolus type stomach, they have canines that actually rip and separate flesh. Humans don't possess those. Bears have both. They have both the grinding teeth and they have, you know, the incisors that can rip flesh, which makes them, you know, very much more flexible than humans.
And the other thing was is if you take a tiger and a tiger runs out and, you know, bites into a zebra and the blood is jetting out of it and stuff, there's a nervous system response. Or even when it sees that its eyes light up, its salivary gland starts going, its nervous system is ready to do that and it readily drinks up the blood. A herbivoir will not touch if there's any blood on on the grass or anything its senses say.
I can't eat this and humans, if you know my dad used to work in a meat plant, want to become a vegetarian? Just have a dad that works in a meat plant. I mean if. You go to the kill floor where the kill in the animals and I. There's. I don't think there's. Anybody that sensory wants to be around that it like our senses reject that, as opposed to say, our senses walking through, say, some sort of fruit orchard, an apple orchard or cherry blossoms or something.
There's a salivary nervous system response and a sense of well-being. So he used those examples as determinants that it was much more likely that we were to consume plants and foods. He also suggested, though, that our sensory environment had been so perverted that some people are just not going to come back from and you should choose whatever simple diet leads to health and not worry about it too much. So I just ran an experiment.
For a couple of weeks I thought I was going to dry up and blow away if I didn't eat. Meat every meal. I would grow up in hunting, fishing, you know, high meat environment and have no issues with it. I don't have any ethical issues with what people do or not. I'm not at some vigilante, vegan or anything like that. I was just like, I did an experiment for two weeks.
I did experiment for another two weeks after the first ones was OK and then I did another month and at the two months how I felt, I just felt great and I said, oh, I guess I'm not going to eat meat anymore. I've always kept the door open on that because I don't want to follow into such a dietary rigidity that I remove my capacity to integrate a diet that would be better for me in the future.
And I think we get too overly identified with a diet or a religion or a spiritual philosophy that maybe counter to what are biomarkers and health markers. Now that's not to say I haven't had certain challenges as a plant based, but I've simply chosen those as what I call positive constraints so that I could develop technologies that would better support a plant based diet in that.
So I do my regular tasks and I do all that sort of stuff more and it's kind of a fun thing and you know it's been that way for 20. What has it been 23 years now? I've been on that and haven't had any issues, but if somebody went on to a plant based that and I've seen that happen and they're having all these issues with it, I'm like, abandon it. Like why are you trying to, you know what? Why are you going against what your body's telling you?
The key element for me is I felt good on it, but I think there's a lot of conjecture. I think a better way of looking at the Physiology of digestion is. What does your body tell? You like it's obvious that there are people that have lived long, healthy, vibrant lives on a plant based diet and there's obvious components that people have lived long healthy lives on a more carnivore diet and then everything in between. Yeah, I always respect. That I think we need to remove them.
So yeah, so I can't. Ignore, I can't ignore the success of, you know, healthy keto or carnivore people and say, you know, you shouldn't do that. I'm like, well, try it, see if it works for you, you know? Yeah, no, I totally. Totally respect that completely. I feel like, you know, we just need to have conversations and be objective and subjective to how we're feeling.
So many people are so far removed from being in tune with their body, they don't even know what it's trying to tell them because they're just oblivious to it. I think the more you know innately connected to your body you are, you can kind of finesse and fine tune what works and what doesn't work. Absolutely. So y'all's book. Was released? When? When was it released? Yeah. It was released in September. Last year, so just to talk a little bit about the book as
well. As I mentioned earlier, Wade and I argued for, debated and started finding common ground and we put spent three years crafting this book at the help of multiple PhD. On the more scientific side, we have a whole chapter on each genomics. The book's called The Ultimate Nutrition Bible. We wanted to write the most complete, unbiased book on nutrition ever. We feel we've accomplished that. We really, you know, spent a lot of time removing biases from our
own thinking. Of course, prior to writing the book and even during writing the book, a lot of that was done by looking at the science. There's over 750 scientific preferences and yeah, it's a it's a Bible, you know, it's over 460 pages of content. We also filmed Horse, so we actually filmed the content a little bit more simplified, but pretty much all the content from the book and the video formats are for anybody who prefers watching it.
You can and yeah, we you can go to ultimatenutritionsystem.com/keto Savage and it's really a book for everybody. You know if you're a nutrition nerd, you're going to love it. The book is broken down to kind of a few key sections whether your goals, fat loss, muscle building, athletic performance, cognitive performance, we're living a long healthy life. We've got you covered. We cover every, you know, popular diet type from Ketogenic which is over 30 pages of content.
It's a lot of stuff we didn't get into that I think people would benefit from plant based Paleo if it fits your macros and a few others. And then we cover kind of all the universal nutritional strategies that people can use no matter what diet you're on to make it work better. And everything is covered by our 365 day money back guarantee and URL is Ultimate nutritionsystem.com/keto Savage. And also if you go to buyoptimizers.com and use Keto
Savage you'll save 10% off. And I would strongly advocate or advise. Try mass signs, try K Pex, try magnesium breakthrough. Those three products will will truly take your health and your performance to another level. Not passed on to Wade. Yeah, you know. I think the most important. Thing for people to understand is we all have biases. Matt and I were lucky that we had different dietary backgrounds and philosophies and
both a little bit stubborn. So we're OK if we can go against the grain and argue those points and go research those points and and and build compelling arguments about it. But fortunately what happened out of that is it allowed us to help us identify the biases of a lot of other experts in the world. Because once we understood our own, we could see that proliferating all dietary strategies. And that's why we created the
book. We created the book to understand that, you know, the diet that works for you today may not be the diet that works for you tomorrow. And there's a lot of evidence about that. The other thing is, is there's a tremendous amount of breakthroughs in the dietary industry that are happening right now and they're not well fleshed out about how you can make integrations as you get older or as you your goals and
routine strength. That's why I went and ran a marathon after the bodybuilding show. I said, Oh well, I realize the demands of that's completely different than anything I did. And I I wanted to do a real world experiment. And I learned some things that were shocking. Yeah, I learned some shocking revelations. And our idea is to expose yourself, to create a world where we're a little bit more open and flexible as opposed to proving why I'm right or someone
else is wrong. It's better to find what are the common elements. And the one thing I would say that's true across all dietary philosophies is about 80% of the fundamentals. Forget the the the macro side of the equation, but the fundamentals of. The drivers for long? Term success are the same, they're the same. And the variances I think, are applied to genes, psychological, emotional and spiritual preferences. Yeah, I totally agree.
I think it's. Awesome that you all broke all that down in a book that's a resource for people and you tackle all different ends of the spectrum to show that common ground, common denominators so people can find success with it. So I will definitely link out to the book for sure. And and how long has Bio Optimizers, Bio optimizers, the company been in existence? Well.
We started the. Company the origination of this in 2004. The idea was born in 2003 when I got back from the Mr. University start working our book. We came out in 2004. I think our first product was what 2005 Matt, correct? Yeah, and then? Later on is, you know, I was a hardcore bodybuilder and we were having fun yelling into the mic and you know, exposing a lot of the fraud and lies inside that. And we had a cult like filing
for a lot of while. But as we got older and this is what happens to just about everyone, we realized that we branched into a more health and longevity focus. You know, we had kind of mastered aesthetics. We kind of did the bodybuilding world learned our lessons and,
you know, moved beyond that. And that's when we decided, well, we wanted to help millions of people around the world live their best life to go from sick, you know, to superhuman or whatever, you know, better health or optimize health or superhuman health. And we had a partner by the name of Dame Ruel. He helped us rebrand the companies by optimizer. I think that was around 2017, I think, Matt, wasn't it not. Yeah, we started well.
Reworking on the brand 2014 and yeah, around that time, yeah. And so time goes by really fast and and since that time we've you know started with the digestive health suite because and the variances on that we have enzymes for plant based people, enzymes for keto people, enzymes for the general men, coral, those people who have gluten intolerances, we have a ray of probiotics. So we have probably the most robust digestive health spectrum.
We've got that covered. But then we moved into things like you know nervous system regulation sleep, you know mineral deficiencies like magnesium as well as you know a a variety of other products that we're continuing to develop that we see holes in the market and we see that there that. What's available? Out there in the world is subpar and we do that through our, you know, almost psychotic investment in, you know, R&D. So we do have that Matt.
Matt mentioned the labs. We also have a another, you know, prototype factory where we're cranking out all kinds of weird things. Not everything makes it to market and we have a few things that are really awesome, but there's no market for it. But that's OK. But we just keep running these experiments because, you know, by Optimizer's mission is to create an alternative health paradigm to what's available to people. Because what's available to people is making them sicker.
It's making them addicted to pharmaceuticals and medications and surgeries and lobbyists group. And so we're taking the Buckminister Fuller path and we're creating a model that's so far superior to anything else. Eventually it'll get acclamation and that's what we're going to spend the rest of our lives doing. I love it. Well, I can totally get.
Behind that messaging goal for sure, I feel like there's so many different supplement companies popping up now and y'all been in the game for quite some time. So you've you've seen the ebbs and flows. Like what's Y'all's biggest frustration within the supplement industry as a whole right now? People that don't care enough. Yeah, you know, people that don't care enough to innovate or spend time working on a product. There's so many me too products, There's a lot of white label
products. And you know, to create a great product, it takes time, I'd say on average takes us about two years, sometimes more, sometimes a little less. To go from an idea to doing the R&D in the lab to prototyping it, to getting feedback from our little VIP group and then changing it and optimizing it and then we don't stop, you know, even once the product's released, we keep working on it.
And that's because we care, you know, we care about every part of the customer experience from the moment they order the products. We we provide a ton of free education. We have a 365 day money back guarantee. We want every product that we do to be best in class. And then Waze has done a world class job leading the customer support team. So that if there is something that's that's not up to par we
get a customer support ticket. We answer within 20 to 30 minutes and we get a 99% satisfaction rating from those support tickets. So yeah, we just care a lot just in our in our nature. And you know that's definitely my biggest peeve in the in the space is that there's so many just basic formulas and people could just do more if they cared more. Yeah, no, I totally. Totally agree. You gotta be in it for the right reasons and that that shows through pretty quick if you're
not in it for the right reasons. So I commend y'all for for being in it and fighting the good fight that you are. Thank you. Thank you. Well, gentlemen, it's been an absolute. Pleasure. I could probably sit here and talk with you for another two hours and just learn more as we go, but we'll have to do a follow up around 2 podcast 'cause this was super interesting for sure. It was a great. Conversation and I I knew you were our guy when I saw your name.
Keto Savage. I'm a big fan of of savagery in the right places. So it was a great episode, yeah. I knew that. Too and I saw that paper thin skin on your on your pictures as of like OK this is the guy that knows what he's talking about I can't wait to get in a conversation with him so thank you for thank you for having us it's been it's been great and hopefully we'll get to do another round because I love sharing these insights.
I think, you know, bodybuilders like yourself that have put in the hard hours, and it's hard hours, 'cause you're fighting all those, you know, those biological tendencies, evolutionary survival tendencies, to get to that. And the benefit of that is the level of awareness that you have about your body and the variances that you know, food and diet and training and all these different things impact it. So, you know, keep the message
going. It's it's great that you're doing this and it's it's I just love you know participating with people such as yourself doing that because it's the it's the real world stuff that you're not going to find in an in a double-blind study in a medical lab in some pharmaceutical. This is the stuff that everybody can benefit from and and that's it's solid info. Yeah well I'm I'm definitely. Boots on the ground kind of guy and and y'all are as well obviously. Clearly, I think we need more of
that for sure. And I I appreciate the fact that you're coming at it from different angles, different dietary protocols, and you find out what's working for you and you're just relaying that message to the masses. That's what we need more of. So I truly appreciate the time, fellas, and let's definitely do around 2. And until then, if there's everything I can do for you all, just let me know. Thank you. Yeah, take care.