Craig Emmerich: An Engineer's Guide to Optimizing Health - #96

He lost count of the number of books that he and his wife have co-authored together , has a great background in biochemistry and science, and looking forward to maybe geeking out a little bit on some of the deep scientific stuff that we don't necessarily get into on a regular basis on the show here .

So with that , craig , why don't you introduce yourself to our audience and tell us a little bit about how you got involved in nutrition , how you got interested in nutrition ?

Ted Neiman used to be an engineer and is prior to being a doctor , and I think we look at things a little differently , kind of a systems approach , look at the whole system versus little inputs and things , and I think that has helped me as I transitioned to this space And I did that 15 years ago and it was all led by my wife , maria .

She was going down this path to heal herself . She had all these issues, health issues and she found that through her research and reading that she was trying things and this low-carb approach helped her . It reversed her PCOS and her acid reflux and helped her lose weight , which was the extra weight that she was trying to lose at that time .

She was doing all the traditional low-fat , healthy whole grains and running marathons . She still had all these health issues and everything And as she did this to herself with her own diet , all that stuff went away And the extra weight went away , even though she stopped running marathons , so myself took a little longer to come around .

On the diet side , i have a strong German background and grew my own beer and it was hard to move away from some of that kind of stuff . But about five or six years after her , which was about 17 years ago now , i fully came on board with the diet . So if she's been eating this way for over 20 years , i've been eating this way for like 17 .

And we've never looked back . And I tried to dive into the science of it too .

Is there a story behind how you finally got on board with Maria ?

The weight loss is just a bonus to how good they feel , to the medications they got off of , to symptoms going down or away for different diseases and things , and so that's why they stick around .

And I think what happens is the husband tends to see all the health improvements and how much energy she has all day long and all these things And they're like well , maybe I should try that .

And that's kind of how it happened for me , in that she would make my lunches for work And during the week I just ate whatever she made for me , and then the weekend came and I'd kind of eat whatever I wanted to restaurants or whatever , and I just started to notice how crappy I felt on the weekends , you know , and how good I felt during the week And I

had that mental clarity all week And I wanted that all the time , and so that's when I switched to eating this way full time .

You know , perhaps Maria , most people might recognize more as the face of it For anyone who really , you know , has been sort of following what you two have been doing . You know all the books that you've written together And you know you're certainly very much involved in everything that's been built .

You know , in the background I was , you know , as a technical guy , so I was keeping her website going and , you know , doing any help with the website or any that kind of stuff we needed . So I would just be helping from the back .

But as I , as we transitioned over and I came to help full time because it made sense , we we , you know the people we're seeing and the more and more people that we had coming to us we , you know , we wanted to dedicate more time to it And the books that we were publishing .

You know I was doing the back end stuff on the books too , like helping with layout and editing . But then I , i , as I dove into the science and got a stronger , stronger understanding of that , it made sense for me to start contributing , you know , to the and all of our latest books .

You go back to our book , keto , the Complete Guide , which was our first like joint collaboration , where I actually wrote about half of that book . So all the science and a lot of the first few chapters I wrote to . You know the more recent books , all of the front matter . I've been doing So .

You know our carnivore cookbook and our kids book I do all pretty much all the front matter , which is all a kind of sciencey type of stuff .

And then after that we have our recipes and Maria's the recipe coin and she she is a wizard and a chemist in the kitchen of figuring out ways to make different combinations Healthy , and so it makes a really , really good partnership in that way and that we work so good together .

But I'll just tell you a little quick story that the type of relationship that we have , she growing up she would get annoyed , if you want . she's very much . She liked to be alone . She would go camping by herself And you know when she would date people . It wouldn't last too long .

She would like , kind of done with this person , to get annoyed by their , whatever By their presence . Well , she was just .

you know , she liked to be on her own and went on a hiking trip in Colorado where we were going to hike the Colorado trail , like I don't know how many 200 and some miles we're , you know , out there with their backpacks and that's it . And her mom said if you come back from this and you still like him , you're going to get married .

And we did So , you know . rest is history .

So I had a mild bit of annoyance and I don't remember which book it was , but I got into one of the books and I was mildly annoyed because I had to wade through so many words before I got to the , to the recipes . I'm totally going to go back and read it , but let's let's talk about the sciencey , nerdy stuff now .

Before we started recording , you mentioned that you love to talk about the metabolism of the body , about the energy and what happens and all that kind of stuff . Phil , this is where I depend on you to ask the smart questions And I'm once again going to represent the average dummy in the audience , or maybe the below average dummy .

you know , i've had the you mentioned at the beginning about , you know , the engineers that have sort of gotten into the nutritional space , and we've had we've had Dave Feldman , and I've certainly had conversations with some of the others that you've mentioned And it has intrigued me as well the difference between how the engineers look at things and the physicians and

the clinicians . You know , kind of come at this .

So maybe let's go back to sort of , you know , as you were getting in field and Maria had started these dietary changes and you know you know the results and started thinking about doing it , but how did your engineer mind , you know , come at this , and what were some of the early , i guess you know , maybe tips or early clues looking at this from an engineer

that she was on the right path and that this made sense from a biochemical standpoint .

You got inputs going in , you got outputs coming out right And , depending , if my chip is working right , if I give it the right inputs , it should give me the right outputs . Right , and I think of the human body a lot the same .

You know , if you give the body the right inputs , it's going to generally do the right things with it and give you the right outputs .

And the you know , in our keto , the complete guide , i drew this disease tree right where it's like the roots of this tree are the inputs your nutrition , getting you know common sense , sun exposure , you know vitamin D levels , doing things like not smoking , but you know exercising . So that's like a negative input and a positive input .

You know all these different things that you can do as inputs then lead to the outputs . What are the outputs If the inputs are wrong ? there's autoimmune disorders , there's cancer , there's Alzheimer's , there's diabetes .

You know all of these type of problems right , and so I look at it kind of in that way , in that if you change the inputs and the outputs are now correct and they're doing right , your new input was the right input , right Like you're giving it the right thing and the machine is doing what it's supposed to do and the outputs will fix themselves .

She goes into the doctor and the doctor that she went to said those are the cards you're dealt , there's nothing you can do about it . Here's like three prescriptions to deal with the symptoms And that same week she goes our dog was losing patches of its hair . We go to the vet And the first question is what are you feeding it ?

And it's like the doctor , i never asked me that once , and yet that's a very important input , right That could affect these outputs , and so I think that was kind of the connection that was made there .

So if it was that was the solution , you'd see some output change , like you'd see the cancer rates go down . But we don't see it . And one of the common areas in I saw study in Japan one of the common areas for skin cancer was the bottom of the foot . I don't think that gets a lot of sun , you know .

But the other issue too with it is you know there what populates the skin is a lot of fat right In the skin . You've got quite a bit of fat that's in the skin And that fat , if it's saturated fat and it's very stable fat , it's not going to get oxidized as easily .

If it's an omega-6 fat , which is very easily oxidized and so you're eating a lot of vegetable and seed oils and that's the kind of fat you got populating your skin . Guess what ? That's easily oxidized , especially by the sunlight . So that is potentially to me .

I believe that's the bigger problem is that when you get those vegetable and seed oils , the omega-6 is getting populating too much of the skin and now they're getting oxidized in the sun , causing the problems . I mean , think about it from an ancestral standpoint .

Were our ancestors dropping dead like crazy of skin cancer , you know , 50,000 years ago , when they were in the sun all day long ? No , i mean , this is you . Look at the rates . It's a more recent phenomenon that's increasing and increasing . So it's something else and I think it's back to food again .

you know , pre widespread introduction of seed oils , you actually demonstrate that outdoor workers had lower incidence of skin cancer than indoor workers .

And you know it's only the more recent studies that have you know again , in an environment that's primarily omega-6's and lots of vegetable seed oils , that you then start to see that increasing incidence of skin cancer among the outdoor workers .

So maybe just start with you know what is protein sparing modified fast thing and what unique advantages do you think it might have over other forms of fasting ?

But what it is is they found this goes back you know decades They were doing fasting studies where they people ate nothing , right , they just drank water for you know days , weeks , and they found that , you know , obviously they lost weight and it worked well for weight loss , but they also lost muscle , lean mass , and so they created a protein sparing where it

spares your body's protein , modified fast . It modifies a fast to spare your body's protein And basically all it is is essentially zero carbs , just enough protein for your lean mass . So you can calculate how much you need based on how much muscle you have , how big you are , and then maybe 30 grams of fat And that's it for the fat .

So it's not zero fat And you're still getting some fat to absorb fat soluble vitamins and make , you know , healthy hormones and that kind of thing . But it's a minimal amount so that you kind of mimic a fast in that there's not much energy .

You know protein isn't generally used as energy , carbs and fat are , so you dial the energy way down and you get some of the speeding up of weight loss effects while maintaining your muscle , and so that , for us , we just that's a tool .

It's something that we think is better than an extended fast in that , you know , you can get a lot of the benefits without the negative of losing muscle . Because muscle , let's be honest , as we get older , you know , leucine is the amino acid primarily responsible for triggering muscle synthesis .

So building muscle , and as you age , the leucine curve , the threshold to start building muscle shifts and you need even more to start building muscle as you get older . And that's why so many people , as they get older , start to , you know , sarcopenia and they start to lose muscle .

Well , if that's true , and I'm looking at it today , I'm thinking , you know , it's gonna be hard for me to maintain muscle in the future , much less build it .

So if I can maintain and or build more now , it's kind of like an investment on my future vitality , right , like I'm investing in my future as I get to be 60 , 70 , 80 years old to still have the strength and mobility that I want , and so that's kind of how we look at it is it's not a diet , it's not a lifestyle , it's a tool .

But if you're , instead of doing it three day fast , do two or three days of protein sparing modified fast , and it's a tool in that way .

And you know , loosing becomes one of the challenging points when you're trying to work with people that are , you know , afraid of eating animal protein or avoiding animal protein , because it's hard to get loosing from non-animal sources . So what's unique about loosing and what are some of the best sources of loosing ?

And so it's almost like a signaling molecule now And in that way it can also be important probably more important for your first meal to have enough than consecutive , because once you hit that and the body is like okay , today we're building muscle .

You know you can accumulate and keep adding amino acids and maybe not have quite as much complete , but that first meal , if it's real complete , it'll be helpful throughout the day .

That being said , you know , yeah , the amino acid profile of different proteins is going to be very different And that will result in very different results for building muscle and whatnot . And especially when you start talking about plant proteins , you know there's like pea protein , i think , is .

You know , if you look at the different indexes and scores , like the PDCAA amino acid profiling scores , where they I think it's 0.6 for pea protein , where you know like whey protein is like one , so it's very complete . You know beef is like 0.9 or something .

So if you empirically think of that , that means you've got to get 40 , 50% , almost 50 , you know , almost twice as much pea protein to trigger muscle protein synthesis as you would have whey right , because it's 0.6 versus one . So that means you need a lot more of that amino acid .

So let's say your protein goal is 100 grams , you might have to get 160 grams of you know 180 grams of pea protein before you're getting the same completeness of you know of amino acids to build the same amount of muscle . And that's real important , especially when you talk about plants .

I remember I saw a meme of the perfect starter kit for a vegetarian and it was like 30 eggs to start your day , because that was the only complete protein you know that you could have . But yeah , it's really important to get enough of the complete amino acids to build and maintain muscle . Again , especially when you're aging , you need more of it .

So getting a lot is important .

So , beyond the preservation of muscle mass or lean tissue mass , what else do you think is unique about protein ? You know , when we're looking at it from a weight loss standpoint , you know , and just overall health maintenance , you know why is protein so important to our bodies ?

They were taking calcium supplement . The ones that ate below the FDA , rda protein had actually continued to lose bone . The ones that ate at it maintained and the ones that ate above it on protein actually built more bone , reversed some of the osteoporosis . So I mean , protein is very important for so many pieces of it .

But from a weight loss perspective , what's really unique about it is the body doesn't want to use protein as a fuel . It really doesn't . It's a very expensive fuel . You need to was it , i think , like 5 ATP , just to turn it into glucose , to then burn it as a fuel .

So you're burning , using a bunch of energy up to turn it into something that could be used as a fuel glucose through gluconeogenesis , and then burn it as a fuel , right . So it's expensive . It's an energy intensive process and the body doesn't really want to do it if it doesn't have to . And when does it not have to ?

When it's got carbs or fat around , and so if it's got one of these other fuels , it's going to use that instead . And so if you cut the carbs out and now you've got some fat , whether it's on the body or in the diet it's going to use that as fuel .

And it's going to take these amino acids and use it for all the building , repair , the autophagy and cellular turnover and all the things that it does on a daily basis , and it's just going to use the fat for fuel . But the key is the fat on the body or the fat in the diet . If you've got excess fat on the body , the body taps into that .

That's what it's there for . It's like that's your gas tank , right . And so when you dial the fat down a little bit in the diet now , you've forced your body to burn the fat on your body more , and that results in weight loss . But the third thing about protein is that all the macronutrients have thermic effect of food .

Thermic effect of food is the amount of energy your body has to expend to digest and process each macronutrient . Fat . The thermic effect is only like 3% , so only about 3% of the calories consumed of fat are needed to digest and process it and store it .

Protein is 30% to 40% thermic effect , depending on the type of 25% to as much as 35% to 40% for thermic effect . That means about a third of the calories , if you will , of the protein coming in . You need to burn that much energy just to digest and process it . So you're basically upping your basal metabolic rate , your energy , your body's .

You're not exercising , you're just digesting , but you're raising the amount of calories your body's going to burn just to the digestive process , and so that gives you a little bit of a benefit too when it comes to weight loss . So that's why I think prioritizing protein is really important for weight loss .

It's burning more calories all day because your body's doing this building and repairing activities with , with the amino acids . I would say , more of your first meal of the day .

It's important to have , you know , a good complete protein type of meal , whether that's first thing in the morning or in the afternoon , as long as it's your first meal and and it has a good amount of protein in it Okay .

And it's actually a hormone And really it's a what we call a pro hormone And it's involved as a . It's involved in so many of the different processes that goes on in our bodies . You know , and it's so . You know .

We talked a little bit earlier about the importance of sun exposure for our bodies to be able to make vitamin D And maybe talk about , you know , this might lead

into a little bit of a discussion about your thoughts around supplements versus giving your bodies the proper input . As you said you know earlier . You know when we give our body sun and essentially we aren't poisoning our bodies , our bodies will make the vitamin D that we need .

But oftentimes we've taken the approach in modern times of I can just take a pill that's called vitamin D , that is vitamin D , and expect that to have the same effect . So , like I said , maybe that leads into a little bit about your thoughts around supplementing versus getting these things from to move in from our environment .

When it comes to that , you know , like vitamins and supplements , while they can have a role , especially in disease where you may be deficient and those kind of things , it's always better to get it from your food . You know it's always better to get it from your whole foods , get the vitamins from those .

But you know again , in certain situations that's not necessarily possible .

Like there's a study I bought , i looked at recently that showed that over the past 50 years and this was a few like 15 years ago now , i think the study was the depletion of the soils had the fruits and vegetables were , on average , like 30% less vitamins and minerals And in some cases , some some fruits and vegetables 50% less vitamins and minerals .

Because we're depleting the soil with the cropping and row cropping and always depleting the soils of certain nutrients because we're planting the same crops over and over in the same spots And you know . So sometimes we can't get what we used to be able to get right , and a great example of that is magnesium .

I think , like 80% of Americans , are deficient in magnesium And big , big reason for that is we used to get a fair amount from our water supply , from springs , from natural water sources . Now , what do we drink ? We drink filtered , refiltered , bottled . You know stuff from . You know the city waters . You know all processed and filtered .

There's nothing left in it And so we're not getting what we used to . And so in those cases you know a supplement is helpful because you're not going to get it from your food or your water supply and sufficient quantities . But you know anything . You know like , even like insulin .

You know endogenous insulin that you make in your body is going to be more effective than exogenous that you use externally . It's always the body's always going to do a better job . You know when given the right inputs . But you know in certain cases , like type one diabetes , you have no choice , you have to do it .

But yeah , that's kind of where I would say lie with that with respect to that .

Because it is a powerful hormone that affects our immune system And a lot of tons of different bodily functions . So it has a huge role in health , for sure .

So let's talk a little bit because I think sometimes you know , especially when people are first coming to keto or the popularized , you know , keto stuff that's out there today , there isn't enough attention paid to the types of fat .

It's just all fat is kind of considered equal and you want to get , you know , as much fat as possible essentially into your keto diet .

But the problem is today , you know , you go to the store and pick up any bottle of sauce or anything And it's just a big bottle of vegetable oil . You know your , your male , your dressings , any of that stuff . It's just a bottle of vegetable oil , usually rapeseed oil , which is , you know , vegetable oil , all omega six .

And we've been told forever you want a better omega six to omega three ratio in your diet . You know , i think typical American , it's like 40 to one , 40 of omega six to one of omega three . And you know they talk about getting that to more , like 10 to one or 21 .

For me , as long as I'm getting enough essential omega threes and sixes which I can get from meat , right , i can get . You know grass fed beef is going to have a omega threes that you're going to have . You know quality eggs will have it . So sources like that butter you can get in it , but but then my energy source .

So I kind of characterizes you know the things that I need . Essential , get enough of that . Now I have energy , and energy for me is saturated fat .

Saturated fat is the cleanest energy source , i think , for the body , and it's when you digest it , it's , it's most like the fact that it's stored on your body And your body is going to store it in the way it wants it right . It's going to store it in the way it can easily use it as fuel And I think saturated fat , the mimics that the closest .

In that for me , again I come back to the engineering background of . I'm going to mechanistically look at what happens to the when I put this input into my body . Where's it go and what happens and what does it do . When you eat fat , there's only two places for it to go .

You can either get digested and then it ends up in the bloodstream , or it can go right through you . So let's look at the go right through you and that some people will claim that that's where a lot of fat is going .

If you , if there is you're going to be sitting on the toilet a lot , because even an extra 101520 grams of fat in the stool is going to be a problem . You know , remember the Wow chips , the old Lestra , remember that is a static fat that didn't get digested and went right through you . What did they have to put on the label ? It could cause ?

anal leakage because it will bowels , because an extra you know , 510 grams of fat from those chips going straight through you . So if you're getting that much fat going into the stool , you're going to have some issues , right , and there's even been studies on this .

There's a study that I can provide you the link of that buried the dietary fat from like 60 grams up to 150 grams I think it was in dietary fat , and they measured the fecal output in the stool and it was always like eight grams of fat in the stool . That was pretty much constant , no matter what , regardless of the input of the dietary fat .

It was like 68 grams up to like 150 grams . I don't know the exact numbers , but it was in that range . And so it's not really going there , okay , and you don't really want it to because you'd be on the toilet all day . So it gets digested , right . So now it's in the bloodstream , right ?

So now let's talk about where it can go from there , right , when it comes in it's , it's packaged up into what's called a kylo micron .

It's this big , you know , lipid particle that has all this fat in it And it can either go to places now from there , either be burned in the muscle as fuel or be stored in your fat cells Right , and the majority of it goes in , is stored in the fat cells . There's .

The studies have shown that not a lot of those Kylo microns are distributing energy to the cells . They're mostly dumping into storage there . They're kind of on the loop back from the liver and from the bloodstream into storage , and so most of the fat then goes into your fat cells Right . So there it can come back out and be burned as fuel .

But when it comes out you know you've got it's a triglyceride molecule . When it's stored in your fat cells , triglyceride is three free fatty acids connected by a glycerol backbone . Okay , that's a triglyceride .

When you body needs some energy and says send me some fuel , so your insulin goes down , it leaves off the glycerol and you got three free fatty acids that go into your bloodstream and that's what your body is burning for fuel . Most of the energy you burn in your body is free fatty acids directly burned in your muscle and cells .

It's not ketones when you're keto . So this is all in the context of , you know , a low carb approach . It's not key ketones that you're burning , primarily , it's free fatty acids directly , and then some of the free fatty acids can go to liver and get turned into ketones for the brain , because fatty acids can't cross the blood brain barrier .

So you need ketones for that and heart , heart muscle and tissues like like ketones as well . But glycerol then can go and get turned into some glucose . So you get a little bit of glucose and a bunch of free fatty acids for energy and that's what fuels your body and a little bit of ketones for the parts that need it .

And so that cycle is kind of like to call it fat flux , where you have fat going in and out of these fat cells , right , diet goes in and it comes out and gets burned or doesn't , and then , if it doesn't , get packaged back up into a Kylo micro and goes right back into storage And that's kind of the cycle that's always happening in the body , right ?

So for me it's real simple to say Okay , if all the dietary fat I eat almost all of it gets packaged up and put into my fat cells And I'm trying to shrink my fat cells , i'm trying to get skinnier , i'm trying to lose body fat Shouldn't I dial some of the fat in the diet down so that I can burn more off the body and thus lose more body fat .

And that's kind of the approach

that we've always taken and I you know written about in our books , and that that's the important thing when it comes to fat is that you got to understand where the fat is going And what your goal is , so you know how much fat to put in the diet , right . If you're , if you're trying to lose weight , dial it down a little bit .

If you're trying to maintain , dial it up . And that's the other thing you know is a little bit of a pet peeve of mine . But people , people look at you know influencers , and they'll see what they're eating , like , for example , dr Chaffee . he's huge , he's ripped .

I'll never look like him in my life , but you know , people will see what he's eating and they'll think I'm going to eat that So I can look like him . Well , no , you're not in maintenance , you don't have that much muscle mass and you're not working out like he does , right , you need to eat a little differently to get there .

Once you're there and you look like him , then you can eat like him , right . So something that people have to understand to .

I've seen the weight kind of disappear , but I am eating a lot of fat . Where's the point ?

So what happens is , when you're a toddler , you make new fat cells , and at a certain point in your life , when you're very young , you stop making new fat cells and you just fill up the fat cells you have and shrink them right for the most part And this shows up in life right ?

You get these people that don't seem like they can gain weight no matter what they do , right ? Well , they can become too diabetic , though , and the reason is that they're fat cells . They only have so many fat cells , but the ones they have are stuffed and inflamed .

Because if fat cell you start stuffing fat in it and it gets to a point where it's like whoa , i'm gonna burst , stop putting fat in me , reject insulin , and the cell fat cell becomes insulin resistant because it doesn't wanna have any more fat stuffed in it .

If you get too many of these fat cells overstuffed and inflamed , all the fat that's coming in the diet , where's it gonna go ? Insulin's fasting . Insulin keeps creeping up because it's trying to drive this fat out of the bloodstream . It does not like all this fat sitting around the bloodstream , and so now it goes wherever it can , it ends up in the liver .

You get fatty liver , ends up in the pancreas . You are type two diabetic , even though we've had a woman . One woman was 105 pounds but she just did genetically she did had very few fat cells And so she didn't have anywhere to put it And she became insulin resistant very quickly .

The other end of spectrum you could have somebody 100 pounds overweight and they're completely metabolically normal , normal A1C , normal insulin , because they have a lot of fat cells And genetically they just have a ton of them . And there's even some rare cases of people that can make new fat cells later in age .

And I've actually got a case study on this coming out in a presentation this summer at Tennessee of a man .

I don't wanna ruin my presentation , but this man is a 645 pounds , he has an insulin of three , he has a fasting blood sugar of like 80 to 90 , and he looks completely metabolically normal because his body keeps making new fat cells and he never hits that limit where too many of them are insulin resistant and stuffed And so he basically will never get insulin

resistant because he keeps making new fat cells . He's one of those rare genetic cases . But back to it . That's one of the most important things is especially when somebody comes into this space and they're already close to their fat threshold . Say , they're 100 pounds of weight and a lot of their fat cells are stuffed .

You don't wanna lot of fat in the diet because guess what happens ? The fat cells are already saying I don't want anymore , and so too much fat coming in the diet . You'll actually see , you can do their blood tests .

They'll see the triglycerides go through the roof because it's hanging out in the blood , because the body is struggling to put it somewhere , and so you really wanna restrict fat more in those people because they gotta empty out their fat cells .

Once your fat cells empty out , they say okay , i won't reject insulin anymore , i'm happy now and you can be more metabolically healthy in that way . So that's an important piece , i think , to understand from the metabolic approach when it comes to fat .

So whenever you eat food you're gonna have a spike of insulin , because the body does not like a lot of fuel in the blood . Too much glucose in the blood can kill you . too much alcohol kill you . So the body's always tightly controlling the fuel in the blood .

When you eat right now , us sitting here you've got maybe 80 to 100 calories of fuel in your entire blood volume . That's all the ketones , all the free fatty acids , all the glucose , that's it . Alcohol if you consume some , but that's all the fuel in the blood .

When you eat a meal 500 , 800 calories your body's gotta work hard to keep the fuel down in the blood , right , so you're gonna have a spike of insulin to take care of that . But if you look at again , that is somebody with fasting insulin of two and they got these spikes from eating .

Now look at somebody with fasting insulin of 20 , and then spikes of eating two .

Right , even if that person brought their spikes from eating down to nothing , but they're still at a fasting insulin of 20 , it's gonna be worlds more insulin than the person who's got a fasting insulin of two and huge spikes right , because you integrate under the curve , you got way more insulin .

And somebody eating a low carb diet like this about 85% of the insulin your body produces and uses is fasted insulin , and then you have another 15% to deal with when you eat right . So it's a fasting insulin that needs to come down . And how does that come down ?

when you shrink the fat cells , because when they're overstuffed and inflamed , they're rejecting insulin and insulin is driving . I mean , you can see this . There's studies on this as well . You'll see fasting insulin as you get close to the personal fat threshold . Fasting insulin just increases and increases .

And that's why somebody could be again type two diabetic 105 pounds with very high fasted insulin . Or somebody could be 150 pounds overweight eating keto and still have insulin of 20 . And I've seen it many times because they haven't lost the weight yet . And so that once you shrink the fat cells , i like to think of insulin .

Yes , it's a storage hormone , but I think to think of it almost more as in , like a net holding back the floodgates of energy into the bloodstream , and so it's like this net over your fat cells saying , whoa , hold back the floodgates here , we don't need all this fuel in the blood .

Well , if you've got stuffed fat cells and a lot of them , you need a lot of insulin to hold back all those floodgates . Right ? And what happens with the type one diabetic ? Everything's flooding the bloodstream . They're peeing out glucose because all this energy is just flooding into the bloodstream and the body is just dumping it .

Right , and that's why they lose weight . So that's how I differ in that I think insulin is like this thermostat controlling the energy in the bloodstream and holding back the floodgates of all this energy . And if you have too much energy to hold back , fasting insulin is high . You start shrinking those fat cells and fasting insulin will come down .

you need to lose some body fat Because , again , that fasted state your body sitting on the couch , no energy coming in , all that insulin is sitting there to hold back the floodgates , to keep all that fuel from dumping into the blood because it's not needed And you gotta hold it back . That makes sense . That's the other role of insulin .

other than storing the stuff coming in , it's also holding the energy back .

That then blocks the fat from being released , as opposed to kind of that the body doesn't wanna release the energy from those fat stores because there's already enough energy in the system .

If somebody's got a fasting insulin of 15 or 20 , when they're not eating any food , that's what the body's doing is it's holding back the fuel , right , and that's the one you wanna really work on , because , again , that's 85% of your insulin during the day is your fasted insulin state .

And I'm not discounting the spikes , like I'm all in on keto and low carb and this approach . And the thing about the spikes is they drive hunger and that's a bad cycle . We all know that cycle . Right , you eat a bunch of carbs and that has a huge spike in insulin . Well , what's that do to your blood sugar ? It makes it dive after .

Well , it goes way up from the , the carbs you ate . Then the huge spike of insulin makes it dive . And guess what happens when your blood sugar is diving and it goes too low , you get hungry . That's why , two hours after you eat a flurry of 1,000 calories , you're hungry again because your blood sugar is crashing .

And that's the hormonal side of keto , that the hunger hormones , the added hunger from the cycle of carbs that we get . So I'm definitely against large insulin spikes from meals too .

When you eat a flurry and it's like 30 teaspoons of sugar , right , your body's in panic mode , right , it only wants , you know , four grams of glucose in that blood . And you've got 40 grams coming in with that amount and do and that's going to be absorbed really fast and your blood sugar is going to spike like crazy .

So insulin's now in protective mode and saying drive this out of the bloodstream before it kills us . And so insulin spikes really hard to deal with it , to drive that glucose down .

And when it does it , because it's such a rapid , you know , spike , the rapid spike in insulin is going to drive it down fast , which it needs to to prevent you from not but that driving it down fast almost always inevitably drives it a little too low as well . You know , kind of a rebound before it levels out . Guess what happens when that happens .

can also drive some hunger . And especially when it gets too low and you start diving and you know you've got this diving blood glucose and then it goes down to 60 or something before it levels out boom hunger . And now you're hungry and you're eating another meal and guess what happens ?

As opposed to someone who's eating you know low carb , ketogenic type diet , that you know there's that more constant energy level from the ketones , primarily from fatty acids , and you're not having this up and down that goes with the carbohydrates .

There's not a lot of sugar in those to begin with , especially the ancestral ones , which were very tart , nothing like today's . You know , we found some wild strawberries at my father-in-law's cabin . We spent an hour or two picking all we could find and it felt barely filled the palm of my hand .

You know probably the size of one strawberry at the store , you know so you know you get a little bit , so you get a little bit of an increase , you know , from that sugar , that glucose , from the sugar from the berries , and then it just , you know , gradually comes back down And it levels out and don't get the dip , because that's more what your body's used

to for a you know a spike of glucose . If you I mean dump 40 grams of refined sugar in a mountain dew into your body and you drink it in you know 20 minutes , it's panic mode , and when it's diving and going too low , then that's hunger .

And that's why you get that cycle Every two hours you're hungry , even though you're eating tons of calories , of you know sugar and whatever else is in the lizard or whatever you're eating .

So we we have really gotten to the point now that we have overwhelmed as amazing a machine as our bodies are And as much sort of you know reserve capacity has been built into them .

We have now , you know , so toxified our environment with all the various things , including every possible sequence with it , that we're really starting to break the machinery , and that's why we see , you know , alarming statistics , like you know , for the first time in modern recorded history , that life spans are actually starting to decrease .

Is meat and low carb vegetables safe for a kid ? Like compared to what they eat in the store today , the rainbow of crap . Like safe for a kid . But you know , steak and some broccoli is not like . That's so ironic , isn't it ?

We spend so much time and money on sports and activities and school for our kids , but the one thing that'll affect their health and longevity the most their diet and nutrition . We don't do anything . I think it has to be part of our education with our kids to help them understand what their food is and what they're putting in their mouth .

laid out .

We've been going at it for more than an hour . I've been totally loving the nerdy stuff because I love to know how things really work , and I actually learned some things today that I've wondered about for a long time , like triglycerides . I didn't know that that's what a triglyceride was . I should have paid attention in chemistry class in 10th grade .

I realized that , but there was this hottie who sat next to me all year long . It's not my fault , so that happens All right . Well , craig , thanks for being with us . How do folks best connect with you ?