Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you should know.
I can believe how good you've gotten at this after fifteen years.
Oh yeah, thank you, Yeah, thank you.
It's amazing.
I've had a lot of practice pull something like that out here, sixteen years in fifteen whatever.
It is, sure, I mean, I'm full of surprises. I like to think.
Speaking of surprises, we want to issue a little CoA right off.
The bat here, good idea and a little trigger warning.
This topic is about intermittent fasting, and you know, there's just a lot of baggage wrapped up anytime you're talking weight loss and diet techniques, and especially fast If you've ever struggled with disordered eating, fasting can be very problematic, obviously, even intermittently. So uh, and there's just a lot of
emotion and feelings wrapped up in all this stuff. So we just want to let people know, if the title didn't give it away, we're going to talk about the ins and outs and the science of intermittent fasting.
Yeah, I've had disordered eating pretty much my whole life, and when I tried intermittent fasting, it really set it off.
Oh really mm hmm. Interesting, Yeah, for sure.
Unfortunately, and I also noticed I kind of plateaued really quickly because I was using it to lose weight. But one of the things I didn't realize, Chuck, is that I guess I did kind of realize it, but it's not at the forefront of your mind that there's a lot of other reasons besides weight loss that people engage
in intermittent fasting. Based on some studies that have come down the pike over the last couple decades and especially the last decade, that show it's quite conceivable that if you engage in intermittent fasting for a prolonged period of time, all sorts of health markers like blood cholesterol, blood sugar, insulin resistance, all this stuff can can really improve.
Yeah yeah, yeah. But you know, as we'll see, studies are problematic when it comes to intermittent fasting because there's been so many of them. A lot of them have been on mice, a lot of them, some of them have been on humans. But with any kind of diet, studies like humans sticking to a diet is tough, so it's hard to get accurate results, and results study wise have been kind of mixed.
And it also the.
Grabster helped us put this one together. But as Ed also points out that the media comes into play. So six, eight, ten years ago, even five years ago, intermittent fasting was the cool, awesome, amazing new thing, And just in the past couple of years, I've even noticed that it's like, well, I'm not so sure about this.
Yeah, is that correct? Like I have not noticed that. I guess I have, So people are poo pooing it.
Yeah, I think, But you know, I think it's like.
Any diet fad kind of goes out of favor trend wise, and then I think there are some people in the media who will then report on like only the negative studies and not like hey, overall it looks like this or that.
I think it's possible that that's what triggers the negativity towards the diet trend. It's possible is the chicken or the egg kind of thing, like does the media start poopooing it or does the problem start poopooing it and then the other one picks it up? So, uh, For those of you who have never tried to emittinfesting, that's one of the things so many people have tried to manifest because it's really really easy to start. But for those of you who aren't familiar with it, totally cool.
We're going to explain it a little bit. But essentially, intermittent fasting is not so much watching what you eat or even necessarily how many calories you eat, although both of those are supposed to be wrapped up in it. But the thing that really differentiates if for those in the know, from other types of caloric restriction diets, is that the time you eat, or the amount of time over the course of a day that you eat, is really what's important here.
Yeah, and we'll probably hammer this home a lot, but while you said and even coaight already that not necessarily counting your calories, that doesn't mean hey, I got eight hours a day to stuff my face with.
Whatever I want to. You're still supposed to eat a healthy diet.
There is no way to be healthy and drop weight without a healthy diet. Let's just say that across the board. Yep, right, But with intermittent fasting or if, as you said, there's a few different sub types. The first is also known sometimes as time restricted eating or time restricted feeding, which sounds weird because I don't have some big giant grown up that comes in and feeds me.
I don't know about you. Why not, chuck, That would be pretty great. Here comes the plane.
But this is when you sort of divide your day up into eating hours and not eating hours, and even within that. There are different ways to do it, but one of the most common that you'll see online.
If you look up, you'll.
See the number sixteen colon eight, and that is sixteen hours off and eight hours where you can eat. And that's you know, if you're just a regular daytime worker who sleeps at night. The good news about this one is about half the time that you're not supposed to be eating, you'll should be sleeping.
Yeah, because that's the thing we all fast anyway, from the when we sleep, we're fasting. This is just kind of extending it a little more, making it a little more.
Deliberate, unless you sleep walk in eat that's true.
Yeah, if you're on ambient and eat butter.
Yeah, ambien, I could remember which one it was.
There's a few variations of this that like you said, I'll fall into time restricted feeding or diet. I've heard sixteen eight more than anything to just kind of encompass this, this whole category, but there's like fourteen ten. There's o MAD, which stands for one meal a day. Essentially, what you're doing is you're just limiting how much you eat again, and when you eat it's sensible and that and doing that,
you're fasting intermittently. You're doing it every day, So the intermittent fast takes place over the course of twenty four hours, not necessarily anything longer than that.
That's right. The next way you might hear.
As a way to go about it, it's pretty common, is five in two and these are days of the week instead of hours of time.
So that means that for.
Five days of the week, you're pretty much eating your normal diet again hopefully that should be a good healthy diet. And then on those two days you're either not eating at all or you're eating really, really really low calories. I've seen two hundred to six hundred calories a day, And you probably shouldn't do this two days in a row, but I'm sure some people do it.
Two days in a row.
You actually don't really want to do it two days in a row. There's no benefits to it, and it can actually be counterproductive because, as we'll see, you can enter what's called colloquially is starvation mode, where your body starts hanging on to fat stores and slows your metabolism, which is the opposite of what you want if you're
intermittent fasting for weight loss. So you really don't want to go beyond twenty four hours, but you just do two days out of every seven, and just nonconsecutively.
Yeah, because if you, like said that, starvation mode, your body thinks you must be lost in the woods or the desert or something, right, because you're alive. You're not putting anything in me, so I'm going to slow things down metabolism wise.
Right.
The third one is called the fasting mimicking diet or FMD. It's also sometimes called the warrior diet.
I had never heard of this one.
It's essentially like a time restricted one. But really what you're just doing is eating one like decent sized meal, but again really well put together, like fats and proteins and vegetables and stuff like that. But it's a good sized meal. Toward the end of the day and then throughout the day maybe you're nibbling on some other like vegetables or nuts or something like that. So again it's time restricted. But the emphasis of this is to like keep up your nutrients just enough so that you can
stay ripped. Like if you're an athlete or you're really into exercising, but you want to intermit and fast for other health benefits, this is probably the one you should do, because we should say it's no joke that when you fast, especially if you fast more than twenty four hours, you start to feel a little weak, You start to get some brain fog, you start to notice that you are
definitely not up to snuff. Yeah, so you want to be up to snuff if you're training, but you're still on if war your diet friend.
That's right.
So Ed points out, and we should also reiterate that fasting means that you're not consuming calories. You want to drink water. You want to drink a lot of water, and you can also drink coffee. You can also drink tea. You can't dump a bunch of sugar and creamer in it.
But people also modify if a little bit and be like, all right, you know what, I'm going to eat a little bit of yogurt in the morning, or I'll put you know, I'll have a couple of carrots at noon, or maybe i'll have that creamer in the coffee, so like a little bit of calories coming in. But that's still sort of generally considered a fast, right.
That was, I couldn't do that, Like I could coast for a very long time if I just didn't eat.
I can do that too.
Once I started eating, it was all over. Like I've just wanted to eat everything in sight, so I would put off eating as long as possible.
I'm kind of the same way. I think there's a misconception like when someone like me has extra pounds that I just like eat all the time, and I don't. I can go a long long time without eating and I'm fine. I'm not like, oh I'm hungry, And I don't think it's just like mind over matter. I just I can do that. It's I have a terrible metabolism, awful genetics, and I'm learning now to eat the right foods.
But I think when I just don't judge people.
If you see someone that sober weight, it doesn't mean that they just constantly are stuffing their face because that's not the case.
Yeah, I mean, and even if they are, who the heck are you to judge them? Like? Leave them alone?
Yeah, shut up anyway.
Yeah, they're either they're living their best life or they have a terrible burden to bear in either way, just leave them alone.
Yeah. I think that's a great stuff. You should know.
T shirt is on the front, shut up anyway on the back, just leave them alone.
That's right, So new motto.
I love it.
We need a colon in between the two.
Yeah, between everything.
So do you want to talk about the whole idea behind this?
Yeah?
All right, So fast thing basically is based on the idea that when we metabolize energy, it usually comes from the food we just eat, and if we have some leftover, some of that glucose is really what it breaks down to, is stored in our muscles is something called glycogen, which is a really quick available burst of energy that we can release if we need be and then beyond that, once those glycogen stores are replenished, it could be converted to fat for like long term storage. Basically, that's the
way you can look at it. If you don't eat, then you don't have that initial amount of energy to burn through to power you through the day. So you have to go from the beginning to your glycogen stores, which you can burn up quite quickly if you're exercising. Yeah, that's really what they're for. And then after that you're gonna start burning fat. And when you burn fat, something
called ketones are released. And if you're into intermittent fasting, this is the sweet spot that you feel like hitting.
Yeah, And if you've ever done like Atkins or any other sort of slow carb or no carb kind of eating, then you know all about ketones. They talk a lot about ketones and ketogenesis. You could also refer to it as the metabolic switch. And that's the point where your body switches over and says, Okay, I need some energy and the only place that I can get it here is the fat stores. And you have entered ketosis at that point. And that's a big part of a low carb or no carb diet and a big part of yeah.
And key tones are basically what replaces glucose. When you burn your fat, the key tones are released, and that's what you're running on energy. But the thing is is your body's not set up to run on key tones for very long, which is why intermittent fasting is much safer than fasting fasting because as keytnes build up in your blood, it makes your blood acidic, which ipso facto, can eventually lead to coma and then death. And for people who are diabetic, especially I think type one diabetic,
but I'm pretty sure for all people with diabetes. It's really hard for your body to balance keytnes in the first place, so they build up much more quickly than for other people. So that makes it even intermittent fasting
very dangerous if you have diabetes. And I don't know if we said this or not, but I mean it's it's very smart if to number one, find a doctor or some sort of healthcare provider that you whose opinion you trust and look up to, and then number two talk to that person about whether or not you specifically should undertake internet and fasting. Yeah, and if you have diabetes, I'm guessing they're probably gonna say, nay, probably shouldn't.
Yeah.
I have a great GP now that I've had for a number of years now, and I finally sort of got to the point where I've locked in a GP that has gotten to know me, and it's that relationship with a doctor I always wanted where I feel like he likes me and cares about me and like knows me and my.
Health to a degree, you know what I mean.
Yeah, that's cool.
So it's really good and worthwhile.
I don't not want to go to him, in fact, I probably And he's got a great messaging system, which is awesome because you don't feel like you have to make an appointment for everything. But I probably bug him too much and I'm too proactive about health stuff, if
that's possible. But it's really beneficial, you know, like to have a doctor that's invested in you, because then you can and say, you know, hey, doc, I'm thinking about trying this, and they'll they'll know you and they're not just reading from a script, and they'll say, you know, it's probably not a good idea to do that, or this might work for you. Give it a shot, and maybe come see me in three months and we'll do some blood work and check you out.
Right. Good stuff.
That is great stuff. You're very lucky, very fortunate, Chuck.
Yeah, I feel like I went many years without having a good GP. And didn't go to the doctor a lot because of that.
Well, that's an excellent reason not to go to the doctor. Like you said, you don't want to go to the doctor. And then either the doctor might be making you feel bad about yourself, which is a terrible, terrible thing for a doctor to do, or if you feel like they're phoning it in and just kind of giving you boilerplate advice, right, that doesn't really make you feel any better either. So yeah, I mean to finding really good doctors. Man, hang on to that guy.
Yeah, and he cusses in front of me, which I love.
Oh yeah, and he recognized and complimented my pavement shirt last time I was in.
Oh, so, like he took all the boxes.
Wow, yeah, he really does. What a dream boat.
Yeah, Doctor Ramsare'll shout him out.
He's great.
So I say we take a little break and we'll come back and talk about what studies say about all this stuff.
Let's do it.
All, right, Chuck. So, there have been a tremendous number of studies on intermittent fasting, going back. I think to the sixties is when it really started to kind of get underway. But it really picked up in like the twenty tens. Yeah, and that's when everybody was like, oh, this stuff is so great, it's amazing, and like one study came in and said it's great, so now we're all going to try it. Since then, things have kind
of leveled up a little bit. Like you said, people have, if not started to pooh pooh it, at least started to look at it with a little more skepticism as you should anything like that. Yeah, agreed, But if you look at the major meta studies that look at really high quality studies together, it seems like it's backed up that there is something to this, especially in realms outside of weight loss.
Yeah, and we'll kind of go through those in a sec. But Ed did point out that, like what you're looking at is calorie restriction in general is what IF accomplishes. It's just sort of in the way that it does it. So calorie restriction is going to improve You know, you're gonna lose weight if you've taken less calories. It's kind
of a no brainer. You'll probably end up with better health markers as a result of fewer calories, and a lot of studies say like, hey, this is sort of like any other calorie restriction and that you're gonna.
Lose some weight. But if is.
Easy easy to follow, or I guess it's say easier to follow for some people than calorie counting. There's a lot of great apps out there, a lot of great fitness trackers where you can enter the foods you eat, enter the drinks you have and stuff like that, and all the snacks and your exercise, and it'll keep track of all that for you. So it's easier than ever before to do that, but it's still really hard for
some people like me to do that. I go through periods where I'm really good at entering all that stuff, and then I got to the point where I was like, I know how to eat, I just need to do that. I'm really tired of I can get off my phone every time I put something in my mouth. So it's not a great fit for me. But something like intermittent fasting is just sort of you know, if you're doing sixteen eight, that's all you got to remember and then just eat sensibly.
Right. The upside of the whole thing is that the recommendation is eat fewer large meals, and scientifically speaking, a large meal is a thousand calories or more cut some of those down to six hundred calories, seven hundred calories even, and you will start to lose weight, especially if you convert the fried I think they call it an obisagenic diet lots of sugar, lots of fried foods are also
called the American or standard American diet. If you convert that to healthier stuff and you're knocking some of the calories off, you really will see good results, especially if you can change your attitude toward food and come to appreciate that, then you can make it like a long term adaptation. The point here is it doesn't matter how you approach that, whether, like you said, counting calories and staying within a certain window every day or just doing
it through intermittent fasting. That's a good way to cut out a thousand calori. Just don't eat past a certain time and make sure that that time comes before you typically would eat a thousand calorie meal.
Yeah, and A and I guess there's you know, just a lot of first hand accounts in this one, because I've struggled with weight for a lot of my life. But for me, it's like I had to get to that point that I've only just recently gotten to where it wasn't about like denying something that I craved, but it was about looking at something that I really loved to.
Eat and been like, ugh, God, now I can't eat that, you know what I mean?
Yep.
Like now, when I see a big like cheese, greasy cheeseburger.
And fries, I don't go, oh God, that looks so good and I want it so bad, but I can't have it. I look at that and I go, my god, that looks like, you know, a heart attack on a plate.
I can't like.
It's not appealing. It's a little bit appealing, but it's not as appealing looking, you know what I mean.
Yeah, And I'm glad you yourself, because I don't think it is meant to be a switch where you go from oh my god, I want that burger to gross I'll never eat that again. I'm sure that happens for some people, but I don't know that that's realistic for the majority of people. Instead, like a really well crafted burger like that is pretty rare. We talked about this in the Fried Chicken episode. If you just held out for really genuinely good fried chicken and that's the only
kind you ate. You would automatically start eating less fried chicken. Same thing with the cheeseburger, same thing with anything that's unhealthy or bad for you. I'm making scare quotes right now. Yeah, if you just stick to the ones that are worth it, if you set a bar for yourself and say that is not worth it, this is worth it, and you indulge in the worth it stuff once in a while, then you find like that makes the whole thing so
much easier. It's just denying yourself time after time after time. No one can keep that up. Yeah, it's not even worth trying. It's finding what's modern for you, and then from that point on you can build like a different relationship with food. I've been through the same stuff as you, and I'm actually I'm pretty good at exposure where I'll go through the grocery store. I'll purposely go down aisles that I don't need stuff from, that has snacks and treats on it, just just to be like, this isn't
worth it. I don't. It's not going to look anything like it does on the box. It's not gonna taste anything like what the ad is making me think. It's gonna taste like it's literally not worth it. And I've actually kind of gotten pretty good at that to where every once in a while I'll be like, no, this is actually totally worth The slice of Public's cake is worth it. I'll take that once in a while, but certainly not every time, and certainly not with any snack I passed in the grocery store.
Yeah, I just judged a I was a oh yeah, a quote unquote celebrity judge. Yeah, at the Kirkwood Spring Flings Wing Fling. And first of all, it was so much fun. I would be a judge in any food contest ever because it's I've never done it before and it was just really fun to sit and taste the food and like to rate it according to the scale. Had a really good time. But it was fifteen chicken wings.
Some of these were the big, huge double wings, you know with the drum and the flat and you know the one I like probably five of them all the way through because they were that good. But the others I just like ate a bite or two and tasted. But then I looked at the plate at the end and all of those wings and I was just like, how did. I used to sit down and just scarf through twelve to fifteen chicken wings like it was nothing. It's like, that's just so much stuff.
Yeah, and that's just a mental hurdle.
I guess I finally got over. But again, you know, stiffing for everyone. And I'm not saying my problems are solved. It's it's where I am right now, you know.
Yeah, And I wanted to say something for those of you who are into a body positivity believe that you know, diet culture is very harmful. I totally respect that. That's You're right. We're not speaking to you, We're not trying to convince you to think otherwise at all at all. This is not for you. But there are plenty of listeners out there who are in the same boat that you and I are in, Chuck, that want to lose weight and have struggled with us for so many years.
And yeah, I guess we're just sharing what's worked for us, which may or may not work for you. But I just don't want anybody to think like we're shaming anybody who's not trying to lose weight, not at all. Hopefully you know us that well or well enough by now to know we wouldn't do that, but I feel like it's worth it's worth pointing out just because it can be such a sensitive subject for people. Yeah, understandably.
So yeah, I mean, I do believe that you can be very healthy at a range of weights.
I'm talking about for me.
I don't mean I want to look good in my bikini bottoms. I like have some poor health markers at my age. You know, it's just inevitable. And I want to be around for my daughter, and I want to be around to record this dumb show.
You'd be so mad if I dropped dead.
I would be pretty upset. I would kick your corpse.
You bet.
Yeah, you just had to eat that last fried chicken cheeseburger, didn't you.
I'd put your ashes in a punching bag and I'd box it.
That's a really great idea. Yeah, not for you, but I'm saying, like, if you're a boxer, you could definitely do worse with your ashes.
Oh.
I thought you meant, like, you know, did you hate your parents? Put them in a heavy bag and beat them up for the.
Rest of your life.
That works too, man.
Uh, this got really dark, all right, So let's look at some of these metas studies and what they've revealed, because, like I said, a lot of these have been done on mice and stuff like that. There's less research on humans,
but still a lot. I think ed said there were like three hundred IF studies last year alone, But in twenty twenty, NIH looked at a bunch of studies that went back several decades and said this, Hundreds of animal studies and scores of human clinical trials have shown the intermitt and fasting can lead to improvements in health conditions such as OBCD, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancers, and neurological disorders. So you know, there you go, that's a meta study analysis.
Yeah, by the NIH, which I mean they typically hopefully don't throw their weight towards something that's illegitimate.
Yeah.
I mean, it's so hard to find anybody to trust. Everyone's got such an agenda these days. But I mean, if you're going to trust somebody, it might as well be the NIH, right. So yes, they basically said you there are other health benefits out there besides just losing weight, and that it could conceivably be worth trying. One of the things they pointed out was that when you release keithnees, it basically triggers your body to go into a defensive state,
anti inflammatory state, Your immune system kicks in. There's all sorts of of things that happen and change in your body when you start burning fat. And one of the things that it does is it starts kicking off your defenses against metabolic stress. I didn't know what that was. It's not metabolic syndrome where you have like insulin resistance and basically pre diabetes or maybe diabetes. This is different. This is what happens when you exercise and you start
tearing up your muscles. That actually triggers your body's defenses to rebuild and repair and build more muscle. It's the point of exercising your resistance training, and that one of the things that happens with keytnes is it actually helps that process go more smoothly of repairing and building muscle. So at least one study is found that if you exercise using if that it can actually help build muscle. That's one study that we turned up. But it makes logical sense if that's what ketones do.
Yeah, I agree.
Other people have come out to just to point out that since intermittent fasting isn't just one thing, and there are quite a few different subtypes and ways to go about it. That it also can complicate studies because you know, some people might qualify five to two or sixteen eight or the omad was it omad?
Yeah?
Omad or warrior diet as intermittent fasting. So you know, for a study, you should be comparing apples to apples.
Yeah. One other big criticism of the enthusiasm for interment fasting is a lot of these studies they leave off like in mice or you know, in rats. So like, for example, there's a there's big talk about converting white fat to brown fat. Brown fat is much easier to burn, and it's how you lose weight. Basically, it's how you burn fat, and that intermittent fasting helped turn more white fat to brown fat in mice. That's not necessarily something that you see in humans, but at least in mice
with intermittent fasting, it is. So if you hear like, oh, yeah, it helps you burn fat faster, ask yourself like, wait, how, and then secondly, how did they figure that out?
Yeah, that's a good good point. Should we take a break, Oh, sure, sure, all right, let's take our.
Second break, and we keep kind of teasing a little bit some of the more positive health outcomes that you can have, and we're going to get to those right after this. All right, we're back with some promised bullet points as Ed has them. And you already talked about the brown fat and mice.
Don't take the brown fat.
That's right. I had never heard of white fat and brown fat. It seems crazy.
Brown fat sounds kind of tasty, you know, like fatty gravy is what it seems like to me.
We love the brown fat, though.
I think brown fat like is your body's way of like heating your body up right, like you're upping your body temperature.
Yeah, so this is totally me armchairing this, but from the research putting together different threads of research from this topic, white fat is probably the deep storage of energy and then the process of burning that fat. Part of that is converting it to brown fat. First, That's my.
Guess, which you do in a cast iron skillet.
That's right, you brown some fat.
That sounds good, all right.
In mice once again, and some of these are in human and we'll point that out. But in mice, it did show that you had improved metabolism and improved intestinal function with an IF diet.
And specifically intestinal stem cell function. And they think that at the stem cell intestinal stem cell level is where disorders like type two diabetes, obesity, and colon cancer happen. And it's from an excess nutrient uptake, they think, which releases way more hormones than normal, and thus it leads to all these problems. And so what they were saying in mice, it actually curbed that, which is really helpful.
Yeah, and you know, it's reducing inflammation our old friend.
That we just talked about exactly all right, I guess our old enemy, I said that wrong? What else? All right? This one's in humans.
It can lead to a reduced resting heart rate, lower your bad cholesterol which is the LD, and reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease.
That's right. Also reduces fasting blood glucose and insulin levels, so that reduces your diabetes related symptoms. One too in humans. Yeah, thank you for pointing that out. Sure, what about the next one in mice?
Reduction in oxidative brain damage. So what we're talking about is potentially a reduction in symptoms of Alzheimer's.
Yeah, and they found something similar in humans, not necessarily a reduction in Alzheimer's symptoms yet, but at least an increase in cognitive performance, which kind of contradicts what I've experienced where you get brain fog after a while. But what they've kind of traced it to is that it helps mitochondria function in the brain. Mitochondria the little powerhouses of the cells, and that it also aids in neurogenesis, so it's actually help you're actually developing more neurons than
you would if you weren't. Intermittent fasting is what that study showed.
Yeah, I hope you can pronounce this next word, what ketogenesis can release?
What is that at aponectin?
Hm?
Okay, very nice? What is that?
At a Pnnectin is a homeostatic signal hormone, And basically what it does is it helps regulate glucose levels, helps in lipid metabolism, helps in insulin sensitivity, It helps move insulin into the cells where it's the where the insulin is carrying the glucose, helps an insulin production. It's basically, you want a decent amount of adiponectin in your in your blood stream because it's a very helpful balancing act balancing hormone.
All right, So those are some positives. Ed pointed out that there's there are a lot more bullet points he could have included, did you have any extras you want to throw in there?
There's another one that it also moderates leptin, and leptin is a hunger signaling hormone that we've talked about before, but it's produced by adipos, right, so your body's like, oh, I've been burning some fat, I'm going to release some leptin and make you feel hungry. So it triggers hunger and food consumption. And if you have too little leptin, you're going to be hungry all the time, like starving, and you're going to overeat even though you don't necessarily
need it. If you have too much leptin, your body will actually become desensitized to it and leptin resistant, and so it's going to have the same effect as too little leptin. You're going to be hungry all the time and keep putting on weight. So intermittent fasting seems to moderate your leptin levels to a kind of like a goldilocks zone of where you want it the.
Old Goldilocks zone.
It's such a great analogy.
It really is, because it means it's just right yep.
If you wondered about how it compares to other kind of more recent diets. Althout, Mediterranean is not recent at all. It's as old as the as the world.
As old as the Bronze A.
But you know, sort of talking about the Mediterranean diet has become sort of trendy lately, as well as paleo.
And there have been studies.
It was one in twenty twenty that compared Paleo Mediterranean and IF, and I think in those groups, IF lost the most, yeah, compared to the other two. Everyone lost weight training diet is a great way to eat. And I've never done paleo, but I've heard good things about that too. But one point that ed found in the study is that people on IF and Mediterranean adhere to these diets about twenty percent more than on the Paleo And it's just common sense.
It's as if.
It's a diet you're doing for health markers or weight loss and you're not sticking to it, then you're not really going to get the real result of what that diet means or how it affects you.
Yeah, and you know, I meant to point out at the very beginning of the episode where we were talking about how you know, like some there's just all diets are fads. The Mediterranean one seems to be the one diet that bucks that trend because it's been around steady since the nineties easily, I would say even early nineties is when it became.
Popular, well as far as labeling it that right.
Right exactly, but then so so non Mediterranean people trying a Mediterranean diet I think really kicked off in the nineties, and I mean people are still trying it now and some people have adopted it and kept it, and I just feel like that that's the one that's that's the most doable for people in my in my opinion.
Yeah, because it's you're not I mean, you're denying yourself like stuff like fried chicken, but you're still eating like really good food.
I mean, I guess if you cook the fried chicken as a boneless, skinless chicken breast and olive oil, that's fried chicken, right.
Yeah, but Mediterranean like you're eating good fish, like you know, those are some of the hallmarks of that diet as olive oil and fish and wine.
Don't forget the wine.
Wine and nuts and things like that, like that's all yummy tasty anyway, So uh, it's I agree he's finding good fish is sometimes the problem for if you live Inland.
Yes, it really really is. It's sad but true. Although have you been to beatlecat In? I think m M Park for a little five.
I have been there many, many times. Is one of the places that I like to take out of town guests because it's great, fun and lively and delicious and really quickly. One of my co judges at the wing Fling was Ford Fry, who's uh oh really big Atlanta restaurateur and that's one of his places.
Yeah, he's a big shot.
Yeah him.
He was next to me actually, but he and my brother are old friends. They their kids played baseball and stuff together. So, uh, sport's cool.
That's great. So you already knew him before you judged with him.
I had met him once.
He was very kind, and when his original flagship restaurant JCT was open, we had a big Mother's Day or birthday dinner there with a bunch of my family and he comped the whole meal. It's like ten of us. Wow, and uh, that was my first experience with Ford, so.
Just good dude, it's a great first experience.
What are you gonna say about Beetlecat though, Well, they have like.
The best giant shrimp you will find in the state of Georgia by far, maybe even including Inland Carolinas.
Okay, you know what that means is Ford's got a guy.
He has a great guy. And also, every once in a while people will email us and be like, Hey, I'm coming to Atlanta. Where should I eat? Just look up a Ford Fry restaurant and go to it, and there's you will not go wrong. You cannot go wrong at a Ford Fry restaurant in Atlanta. It's true.
Yeah, he's got a great Italian place, great Mexican place, great seafood place.
Yep. He kind of covers all the bases.
And I would recommend upstairs at Beetle Cat unless you're young and like to party. Downstairs as a little rowdy for me, Yeah, yeah, like it upstairs.
I've only ever been there during the day and it was not rowdy, but it looks downstairs. Yeah, downstairs, it gets a.
Little rowdy in that I can imagine for a fish restaurant.
Yeah, so this is how four Fry's restaurants work. I think we were right. Now, seriously, you got anything else on intermittent fasting? Oh wait, there is one more thing?
Go ahead, Yeah, yeah, we should talk a little bit about circadium rhythm fasting. It is another subtype of intermittent fasting. And it's almost like the eighteen six is it eighteen six six sixteen eight, sixteen eight, but the whole key with the and they found really good results and I'll let you kind of put the cherry on top of that result with the mice. But what it really means is doing restricted eating like that, but really focus on
the morning. So like maybe an eight am to six pm is when you're eating, or even five pm, and like literally nothing after that.
Yeah, every once in a while you'll find somebody who's like, no, you need to have your biggest meals earlier. I've heard it put is eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a queen. And I can't remember the last one, but basically not royalty for dinner.
Dinner like the guy who sweeps up the hoop and the horse.
Exact exactly right. So, and the point is you're just eating your highest energy food earlier, and that's actually tied to circadian rhythms. And one study on time time restrictive feedings found that mice lived up to thirty five percent longer lifespans if they did circadian timed feedings. And I think they were doing this, like they were probably testing the mice as hormones to determine whether they should be
fed right then or not like that level. But you can still do it by what you just said, like start eating a little earlier, restrict your food in the evening, and then eat the most towards the beginning of the day. That would qualify as or circadian timed food or circadian
timed feeding. And if you did that, if you're an average person in the United States average lifespan is seventy seven years, you'd add twenty seven years onto your life if that worked out for you like it did the mice in that study.
Yeah, and we should point out in that study that was thirty five percent longer for specifically the circadian rhythm model compared to ten percent longer for just regular intermittent restricted feeding.
Yeah, still nothing to sneeze at.
Nothing and you know ten percent? Do you really want to live thirty five percent longer?
I mean, if it's healthy and you don't care about your loved one, sure, yeah, I'm just going. Or if you make new friends really easily. Yeah, you got anything else?
I got nothing else.
I don't either, which means, of course, everybody, it's time for a listener mail.
All right, I'm gonna call this one a listener from the Czech Republic. Oh nice, Yeah, this is a good one. Hi, Josh, Chuck and Jerry. My name is Otakar, and I live in the Czech Republic. I started listening to the show about two years ago when I started a forty minute commute and I've never listened to I had never listened to any podcasts before, so I asked Google to give me some options, and that's how I found stuff you should know.
Thanks Google, That's.
Right, it was exactly what I needed. I really like the way your podcast is basically a normal conversation between two guys we're from the same generation as I am, about so many interesting topics. Maybe I wouldn't find some of the topics interesting myself, but because you research the things and talk about them in such a great way. There's always something worth remembering for me.
Nice, thank you, it's very nice.
This whole thing is just a very sweet letter.
I love it.
I've always been curious about things and good and remembering random facts that I've heard somewhere, So your show is just the perfect way for me to find out something new that I might want to look a bit more into later. I often wonder if teaching at schools should actually be done by two people being a conversation about a subject.
How about that pretty cool? I mean, wasn't that like? Isn't that Platonic or Aristotelene like? It's some form of probably Socratic, Socratic Socratic. Yea, so great, it.
Is so great.
I guess there's a very little chance that you're going to do a live show in the Czech Republic.
That's probably right.
But if any of you would ever travel to Prague, let me know. I can give you some hints about where and when to go see the best of Prague.
So thank you very much for what you do.
I find the fact that there are people like you who like to explore things and talk about them in such an enthusiastic kind and often funny way very comforting.
Best regards, O Takar.
Man, O Takar, that is a very sweet, very sweet emil. Thank you very much for sending that to us. And Prague is definitely on my list for sure.
I've been, but it was a long time ago.
Yeah, you need to go back. You were like broke and backpacking, weren't you. Yeah, thank you.
Something besides bread.
I'm pretty sure sure it's a different nation now, even from the last time you were there, so check out out.
It was newly the Czech Republic, then.
The the what would they call it, the Velvet Revolution?
I don't know, but it was not Czechoslovakia. I do not remember that at least think.
It US Okay, well, at any rate, I think we lost O Tacar even by this point. So if you want to get in touch with us, like O Takar did, you can send us an email to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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