Ep. #116: Dr. Cate Shanahan on the Power of “Deep Nutrition”

[00:00:00] Hello there. This is Mike Matthews and welcome to another episode of the muscle for life podcast. In this episode, I interview Dr. Kate Shanahan who’s an author, physician, and nutritional consultant for various professional sports teams, including the Los Angeles Lakers and Houston Rockets. She has been studying the relationship between diet and health and being for a long time now, and she actually recently published a book on the matter called Deep Health.

Nutrition. And I wanted to get her on the show because of how many people in the fitness space have so little regard for the nutritional quality of their diets. Thanks to the meteoric rise of flexible dieting, more and more people are realizing that they can more or [00:01:00] less eat like shit and still be lean and muscular, which is why you see the social medias full of such people boasting about how much crap they can quote unquote fit into their macros while still having abs as if it’s some sort of life hack or dietary achievement.

What they are failing to realize is that our bodies need a lot more than just quote unquote macros to function optimally and stay healthy and ultimately disease free over the long term. And I don’t know about you, but I’m more interested in making sure that future me is healthy and vital and doesn’t die of cancer than pleasing current me with mountains of junk food delights.

So that’s the topic of the discussion that I had with Dr. Shanann, and in it, she shares quite a few insights on how our Food choices affect our physical and mental health and performance for better or worse, including the two biggest problems with most people’s [00:02:00] diets, how eating a lot of vegetable oils and sugar screws up your metabolism, among other things, how you can use flexible dieting in a way that gives you the best of all worlds, a great physique, enjoyable meal plans and outstanding longterm health and vitality.

One simple dietary change that everyone can make to immediately improve their health and possibly even body composition and more. Now, this is where I would normally plug a sponsor to pay the bills, but I’m not big on promoting stuff that I don’t personally use and believe in. So instead, I’m just going to quickly tell you about something of mine.

Specifically, My fitness book for men, Bigger, Leaner, Stronger. Now, this book has sold over 350, 000 copies in the last several years and has helped thousands of guys build their best bodies ever. And that’s why it has over 3, 000 reviews on Amazon with a four and a half star average. If you want to know the biggest lies and myths that are [00:03:00] keeping you from achieving the lean Muscular, strong, and healthy body that you truly desire.

And if you want to learn the simple science of building the ultimate male body, then you want to read or listen to Bigger, Leaner, Stronger today, which you can find on all major online retailers like Audible, Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, and Google Play. Alright, let’s get to the show. Hey Kate, thanks for coming on the show.

I’m glad we had to reschedule a couple times, but here we are. We made it. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, so I’m excited to have you on the show because I came across you and your work through your book, Deep Nutrition, and that’s why I wanted to reach out to you because actually, I’m I’ve written and spoken a fair amount obviously about the, about dieting general, but not just calories and macronutrients, which is where it’s particularly popular in the fitness space right now.

There’s, it’s called the, if it fits your macros style of dieting, which is the I don’t know that’s like the colloquial term for it. The more technical term would be flexible dieting even though it’s not very technical, but that’s what you probably more [00:04:00] find in the scientific literature than IFYM, and and I’ve spoken a lot about that and because I think that’s a good entry point. For a lot of people that have no idea how the basics of the human metabolism even works. So it’s a good place to start. Okay. Let’s talk about energy balance. Let’s talk about protein, carbs and fats and how they interact in the body.

And let’s learn that it’s not if, when, if you’re, if your goal first and foremost is to lose 20 or 30 pounds it’s not so much about the types of foods that you’re eating. It’s about how much you’re eating. So let’s learn that. Let’s see that. And then from there though, I think that’s where a lot of people get stuck and they, cause that’s a, I understand that it’s pretty, it can be like cathartic for people that have been struggling with all kinds of diets over the years and they finally just realize that Oh, so I’m burning a certain amount of energy, I’m eating a certain amount of energy.

If I just imbalance that, if I create an energy deficit, I can lose fat and then I can finally get to my weight that I want to be at and then I can just like control my food intake. Even if it’s just intuitively. And stay there. A lot of people are [00:05:00] excited and then they just stop there and never move beyond.

There’s more to, to, to diets like our body doesn’t, it needs more than just calories and macronutrients from food. And so that’s why I wanted to get you on the show because I have written a bit about this. But this is something that you know a lot more about than I do. And I’ve touched on the basics and the obvious things, but I wanted to go into it deeper with you.

So here we are. So maybe you want to start there and obviously that’s the name of your book and what is that, what does that mean? What’s that concept? Sure. Yeah. So we called our book Deep Nutrition because I wanted to go deeper than the soundbite type of science that I learned in medical school and that we hear over and over again.

Like fat makes you fat, salt causes hypertension, like one mac, one nutrient, one disease kind of connection and not really a a integrated thought process there. So with deep nutrition, we go deeper in three ways. We go we go back in time to study what people were doing [00:06:00] before all of these disease epidemics.

Because I think everybody who studies nutrition and its connection to health comes to the same conclusion that it’s the modern diet that’s making us sick. So the question is, And as well, what did we do before? So to analyze that we go back in time, but we also go back geographically. We go deeper geographically than just like one type of diet, like the Mediterranean diet or the Japanese diet, or even the blue zones, which went to, which are clever marketing concepts.

Yeah. So when we look at all of geographical areas to find out what is it that people all everywhere did to look for what was. And just to throw a question out to you, how much do you think, looking at the just, pick a disease and it’s basically skyrocketing, especially the ones that we care most about.

How much of that do you think is due strictly to dietary conditions versus lifestyle conditions versus not exercising and stress? Yeah. People, yeah, exactly. People in general are less active than they were. We know that caloric expenditure on the whole is [00:07:00] going down as we move from the agrarian.

Or industrial type of economy to the more informational knowledge economy. And and so you have sedentary living and then also like you said, stress and physical and of course a mental and emotional out of curiosity. What are your thoughts in terms of what are the how much do those factors contribute versus diet?

And then on the flip side, how much do you think? How much do, and this is something, again, the reason why I’m bringing this up is because I just know this kicks around in the fitness space as a hypothetical. And then, so as a, as another hypothetical how much does exercising regularly and especially, emphasizing resistance training, which has a lot of health benefits that you can’t necessarily get from just cardiovascular and vice versa how much can you offset the negative.

influences of poor dieting with exercise and otherwise living fairly healthily. The fundamental key piece is the nutrition because you cannot out exercise a bad diet. [00:08:00] Yeah, you can’t out, you can’t out train a bad diet, right? Is, if you are getting foods that are fundamentally unhealthy, your body’s not going to process them normally, and you’re not going to be able to your metabolism will be Disfunctional so you’re not going to be able to get the maximum benefit out of your I mean at the very best You’re not going to get the maximum benefit out of your exercise program and at the very worst You’re not going to be able to exercise for very long because you’re going to get sick You’re going to get some if you don’t get overweight, you’re going to get some autoimmune disorder And if you do get overweight, you’re on the way to diabetes So those are like the two branch points as of types of diseases that I feel like people develop is complications of weight and autoimmune diseases.

But what if you take weight out of it? And again, these are questions I’m not trying to be confrontational at all. These are things that I just know that people listening, a lot of people are going to be because let’s take weight, right? So if you take the weight part of that equation, because let’s say a person is cognizant of energy balance and they’re cognizant of, of their good intuitive eaters basically.

And in some [00:09:00] cases it’s that, or in other cases people are actually a bit I would say neurotic with their food intake and because they do want to eat. Yeah. Fundamentally, highly processed, just nutritionally bankrupt foods. They are, they track the, basically they’re willing to spend half of their waking hours hungry so they can eat mostly just shit calories.

And there are a lot of people in the fitness space that do that and sure that you don’t, yeah, so they’re not going, they’re not going to be overweight because they’re willing to be that they’re willing to get that granular with their food intake. But what’s your, for those people, what’s what would you have to say?

I know what I would have to say, but I’m just curious what you would have to say in terms of, all right, fine. You’re not going to be overweight, but let’s look at this bigger picture here and how does that lifestyle play out in a lot and keep in mind, a lot of these people are also young, so their bodies are invincible.

You’re talking about, let’s say someone’s in their early twenties. Yeah, they probably feel pretty good in general. It takes a lot to feel like shit at 21 years old, [00:10:00] but what are your thoughts on that? So there’s those two branch points. So one is the people who tend to develop weight problems and then the complication, the common complications of weight problems involve, diabetes and heart disease and stuff like this and joint problems, skin problems.

And then the other is the audit, what happens to the immune system when you. Yeah. Eat these kinds of processed foods. And so you get autoimmune diseases, you get digestive problems, you get neurological problems. And you can see this when you do the right kind of testing or ask the right kinds of questions you can hear about it.

So even in a young person, even like teenagers, some of those questions be. So it’s you get what happens when you get hungry, I mean what happens when you go between meals How long can you go without getting hungry? And you know if they say oh, I can’t that’s a problem right there that is a red flag and what it’s a red flag for is an inability to burn body fat and inability to access your stored body fat for energy and If you’re an [00:11:00] athlete and you have an issue with accessing energy, you will not be able to Your full potential athlete because athletes need energy.

That’s why we love watching sports because it’s an exhibition of healthy genes, expressing abundant energy. And we love, energetic people and how, what they can do. And so if you’re an athlete and you feel hungry, every three, four hours, you’re, you serious problem. And, this is belying a serious problem with, when we treat our serious problem with just simply snacking or eating more often.

But what is happening under the hood there, if you pry open your metabolism and take a look at what’s gone wrong when you eat. You have to eat that often. You have damage in many systems in your body. But the key is the mitochondria. The mitochondria, the energy powerhouses of the cell, your muscles.

One of the key markers of how they do research into whether how your nutrition is affecting you is whether or not it’s producing helping you [00:12:00] to produce more mitochondria because mitochondria produce energy and mitochondria have to be able to have access to saturated fat and monounsaturated fat in your body to optimally produce energy.

If they have to burn sugar, they do not function normally. They don’t live as long. They do not optimally produce energy because sugar. burning sugar has a metabolic cost and not a lot of folks talk about this because the dieticians and the nutritionists all learn that sugar is the perfect fuel for athletes because it can fuel both anaerobic and aerobic activity right and by sugar do you mean sucrose or you just mean glucose any form like you’re talking about table sugar or just a carb Yeah.

So the form that the mitochondria tend to burn the most is glucose, but your body can interconvert. So if you have a lot of fructose in your diet, your liver and other parts of your body can convert the fructose to glucose too. No, I just want to make it clear. So people understand that you’re talking about by sugar, it’s really cause [00:13:00] ultimately every carb just turns into glucose, right?

Whether it’s a green bean or a Snickers bar. Exactly. Exactly. When you are burning sugar. for aerobic exercise, right? So you have to burn sugar for anaerobic by definition. But if you’re burning it for aerobic exercise, there’s a cost, and the cost is acid in the muscle. And that comes because metabolically when you’re converting sugar into something that the mitochondria can burn, you produce 30 percent more carbon dioxide than the respiration of the sugar produces 30 percent more carbon dioxide than the respiration of a fatty acid.

And that carbon dioxide is not just something we breathe off. It has a cost even before we breathe it off. Hey, we do have to breathe it off. That means we have to pant more. And so that means you feel worse. You don’t feel so good when your blood level of carbon dioxide is high and it affects your body’s ability to regulate things like pressure [00:14:00] and blood flow.

So your blood flow is not optimal. You can’t regulate it as quickly or as fast. And the cost in the muscle is, that you have to turn on these enzymes that try to fight the acid and eventually they, they can’t do that. And you do get acid building up and in your muscle eventually. So part of training is not just.

building more muscle. It’s actually building more of these enzymes. If you’re not a fat burning athlete, it’s building more of these enzymes that help you deal with this overload, this air pollution of carbon dioxide in your cells. So not obviously like you said that’s more, with aerobics, that’d be what more applicable to endurance type stuff versus, if you’re talking about strength training, especially proper pure strength training is it’s a very anaerobic, obviously just glycogen, it’s you there’s not much in the way of lactic acid buildup in the sense of a cyclist, you know what I mean?

Yes, it’s a different type of exercise. Absolutely. However we’ve, all the studies that [00:15:00] we’ve done are on people who don’t burn fat very efficiently. And so even in the cardio world, we’re finding out that the cardio athletes, if you give them a high carb diet, they’re still not burning fat as efficiently as if you give them a high fat diet.

So there’s a lot of adaptation that can be expected, right? Because, yeah. And if you’re doing weights, you’re not just always using those type two fibers. There’s the other fibers you’re, using as well for everything else in the hood that you do during the workout. So there’s that inability to access the stored body fat, which is going to make you hungry.

It’s going to make you tired. It’s going to make you fatigued. It’s going to cloud your concentration. And after years of doing that you can get away with it for a little while at metabolically in terms of developing more hormone imbalances. But eventually you start to see it. Issues in the blood and I eventually I don’t mean very eventually it depends on your genetics some [00:16:00] athletes if they’re really abusing their body.

They can get away with it for 10 years So and what would you consider what qualifies as abusing? If you’re having you know, a lot of your calories from junk foods sugar and carby, vegetable oil rich foods and processed foods. Yeah. So it’s the two things that divine process food are sugars and vegetable oils.

So if you’re getting a lot of your calories from those things then you’re hurting your body. And the average American gets somewhere around 80 percent of their calories from That’s crazy. I didn’t realize it was that bad. That’s why we have the average American, yeah. The average American is And that’s because, we know why sugar is added to a lot of processed foods and why so much vegetable oil?

Because it’s cheap. So And it what? It just makes stuff more palatable? It is a a flavor it’s a delivery vehicle for the other chemicals that deliver the fat-soluble flavor. Things like in Doritos and Twinkies and all this sort of stuff. , I came across what book was it? I don’t even [00:17:00] remember.

So it was the guy that invented the Cheeto. He’s a food scientist. And it was like a quote from him about he was. He was so excited and so like proud of himself that he invented what he thought was the perfect food, the perfect addictive food, and he was breaking down all the reasons why. Even one of the things that was clever in a kind of , Machiavellian way is that the mouth, like the melting in your mouth, they found that type of mouth feel or that when you’re eating it, it doesn’t trigger the same type of response in the body.

As for the calories, as. that, that don’t interact with your saliva in that way. It’s probably because I’m sure it plays into, just volume, right? So what’s going in your stomach is so low volume versus the calories if it were a vegetable or something. But yeah, so I, just people listening just know that it’s just one, I think it’s unfortunate that We have, this is just on the, in the bigger picture, we have a lot of the smartest people in the world are not figuring out how you can be healthier and happier.

They’re figuring out [00:18:00] how to make you click more Facebook ads, play more stupid mindless games on your phones and eat more shitty food. This is an example of that where they it’s a science of how to get you to get more and more, how can they deliver maximum value. Instant gratification and make it maximally addictive and also minimally satiating.

So you just want to keep eating so you can go through. It’s such a win for the Cheeto, whoever owns Cheeto is such a win. If they can go on average, we can increase someone’s consumption of one bag of Cheetos to 1. 5 by adding this chemical and making this change and they, and everyone, they, the board meetings are jumping up and down and so that’s just the unfortunate truth.

Yeah, it’s easy to sell addicting substances because they’re addicting, but it’s also figuring out how do you make them more and more addicting. Yeah, it’s really more good than the competitions, not so much Even more addicting that it’s it’s about the competition because it’s an easy sell but to get that to your earlier [00:19:00] point that you brought up about like You know manipulating your macros for maximum muscle gains and stuff like that a lot of nutrition science Starts off by getting ahead of itself.

It starts off by saying how do we prevent heart disease or how do we make people build muscle faster. But the thing that they always skip over is what is the baseline? What is a basic human diet for somebody who just wants to be healthy? They say they don’t have heart disease. They’re trying to reverse.

So they’re not trying to become, 3 percent body fat and 80 pounds of muscle. So that’s what deep nutrition does and the subtitle of our book gives away the answer why your genes need traditional food. So what we do is we define what is traditional food. And that gets back to, how we go deep around the world by looking at where, what everybody ate everywhere.

that they all had in common. And we found that there were four things, four common [00:20:00] strategies of extracting nutrition from the environment that people employed no matter where they lived, whether it was Alaska or Hawaii or Japan or whatever. So those four strategies are to eat fresh food, to eat fermented food and sprouted food.

I put those two together and I’ll explain why. To eat meat on the bone meaning including the fat and the skin and the bone and to eat the organ meat. So those four strategies were employed everywhere you look, whether or not it’s a frozen tundra or a, a sultry hot tropical climate.

And it wasn’t just like these were just like add ons to their diet. This was the full, everything in their diet pretty much could be described as one of these four pillars. And so each of them has a standout benefit and so the, and our genes depend on this, right? So in deep nutrition, we talk a lot about epigenetics, the science of epigenetics, which is the new and improved field of genetics, basically it talks about the [00:21:00] relationship of You want to just quickly for people epigenetics is, give a quick, what is that?

Yeah, the best definition is it’s everything that makes your genes come to life, right? So your DNA is made out of genes. That’s only about 1 percent of your DNA. The rest of it is regulatory segments and stuff that’s accumulated over the billions of years. That, that control how those genes function.

And what your genes and all those regulatory segments function Based on your diet, and of course every lifestyle factor you can name too, like whether you smoke or not, how much you sleep, and exercise, and all this. And the fact is that over the generations, our genes have built up these expectations in terms of all of that stuff.

And if they don’t get something that they expect, that’s when we get sick, or we don’t feel so good, or, we ultimately can even lead to a genetic mutation in the next generation. There’s a lot of intelligence built into these billions and billions of letter code [00:22:00] information that is, is our DNA.

And, when so the reason it’s important to understand how complicated that is, I guess I haven’t said that it’s complicated. It’s really complicated. If you string together the DNA in all your cells from end to end, it would reach to the moon and back multiple times. So there’s a lot of information in there.

And it is a information repository system DNA. It’s a survival mechanism. It is the ultimate survival mechanism. Nothing beats it because it’s been around. If you’ve been, if you’re here, That means it goes all the way back to the beginning of life on earth, which we think is 3. 5 billion years of trial and error and perfecting the performance of life.

And so that’s why fertility is actually the best way to define or to identify a healthy diet, right? So a lot of these books and people that talk about and you say that’s for men and women. Yeah a lot [00:23:00] of the books that talk about, pro vegan actually are and vegetarian are from the Seventh day Adventist community where they do have a lot of longevity, but these are people who also do a lot of gardening they were like the macrobiotic folks in the 70s, they did fermenting and sprouting and they do eat meat.

They just And they tend to get healthier meat and they have a lot of control there. They don’t eat a lot of junk food as a group. And they do live a long time. That’s wonderful. But is their fertility any better than anyone else’s? No. The fertility aspect is what DNA really cares about.

And the modern diet folks say a lot of folks who are in this kind of Oh, I don’t want to think about it. I’m going to die of something. Everything in moderation. We’re living longer now. So how can our diet be so bad? Or even as science is moving pretty quickly, I’m sure by the time I’ll be able to just pop a pill.

I’ll be good. Yeah, so yeah, maybe but in terms of actually a marker of health we can’t if we look at longevity so maybe the modern diet maybe [00:24:00] will turn out to be okay We don’t know because the modern diet hasn’t been tested yet. It wasn’t employed really until the 80s and 90s and those people You know are still only they’re younger than me.

So they’re not like, long longevity markers yet, but we already know that the fertility of in America is declining drastically. Aside from in vitro fertility and that need for that going up the cesarean section rate. Going up somewhere around 25 percent to 30 percent and a tiny, they call it.

So a lot of folks think cesareans people do that. It’s an elective, right? If they choose to have a cesarean schedule it. Just because you schedule it doesn’t mean your body could deliver naturally. So the reason these are scheduled is because there’s some problem that is picked up during prenatal screening.

And this is how we’re preventing people from dying during pregnancy without these cesareans. You could argue that our neonatal death rate might be, a hundred times higher than what it is, might be as high as 10%, 20 percent who knows because these [00:25:00] cesareans are scheduled for a reason.

Yeah. It’s only the emergency cesarean. I know. I don’t know. I don’t know the big numbers. I know the people that the people I know personally that have scheduled was because that’s what they wanted to do, but I’m sure that’s not in the normal, like they were just like, Oh yeah, whatever. I don’t want to, I’m just going to schedule.

Yeah. Yeah. That’s very not the norm, right? There’s not a lot of OBGYNs that do that, and not a lot of women choose that. Especially now with all this stuff about the the flora, they don’t get the flora. Also it’s a pretty broad spectrum.

Brutal surgery. It’s not

A lot of recovery. It’s not nice Yeah so anyway, what I was getting at is the baseline normal diet, right? So we have this it’s a four pillars of world cuisine and each pillar has this one Specific benefit. It helps your fertility, it does help you live longer. But so on top of that, what you want to do, if you’re an athlete, is you under want to understand how to tweak that.

Baseline now. [00:26:00] To do something. That nature really never intended you to do, okay? And so that’s the fact, right? So nature really never intended us to exercise intensely four to five hours every single day. If you go back historically, you will find that people did do obviously more exercise in general than on average than the average American now.

But if nothing else just moved more, right? Because of work, because they were, working industrial type jobs as opposed to just typing on a computer or whatever. Yeah. Yes. But even so there would be periods where people who are herder gatherers would migrate, across mountain chains across the entire range.

Yeah. So it would be like a month every day you were on, on that, in the height trudging through the snow, carrying something all day, every day. But that would be one month, one way, another month, one, and the rest of the time you’re hanging out and, skipping and frolicking and collecting flowers and watching your goat herd.

So it was a pretty easy life except for that. [00:27:00] So it wasn’t this, all day, every day with the all year, right? Or how, I want to find out how, what are my what’s my, how far can I push my body until it breaks? That’s a more modern thing. So to answer those kinds of questions, we don’t really have very good science at all.

It’s all trial and error. So this is why I have a lot of respect for the people who are bodybuilders who’ve found a way to do it because you’re pushing, you’re the edge of the envelope here of science because the fact is, the reason I say we have no good science is because or very little is because very little of the science that’s done on bodybuilding is done on people who are fat adapted.

Fat adaptation is the baseline, right? Fat adaptation means you burn body fat when you’re not doing anaerobic exercise. It means you burn A lot of body fat, a lot more. And so when, so I was running an office called the fat burn factory when I was living in Denver and I was actually testing with the test that the really the only test [00:28:00] we have for whether or not you’re burning body fat versus sugar, the ratio, what’s the proportion of one versus the other.

Because the average American is. It’s not burning body fat very efficiently because of how often we eat and the kinds of fats we eat and how much sugar we eat. So there’s three factors there, but so the average person burns about half their calories from sugar and half from fat. And this includes actually the average athlete as well.

As an athlete is say, let’s say you’re a cyclist or somebody who does some kind of a cardio type exercise. When you start out your exercise, you start out pretty close to half and half. But if you’re not a fat adapted athlete, but as you exercise for longer, you gradually get over that that insulin, that like little bit of insulin resistance you have there, and you start burning more and more fat.

But you never get to your peak unless you’re fat adapted. And your peak is Just a lot higher than whatever people used to think. They thought we could burn maybe a gram of [00:29:00] fat a minute. But Volokh and Finney have blown that away. I think it was like more than twice that. I actually can’t remember the numbers very well at the moment but people who are fat adapted can burn.

If you’re running at a high level let’s say you’re doing a six minute mile. If you’re fat adopted, you can be burning most of those calories at a high heart rate, around 160. You can still be burning us to the trace of carbs. So you really need to. Very little. And if you want to train anything, any like non glycolytic fiber exercise, you can get a lot stronger just on burning fat.

Hey, quickly before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it? Because no amount of marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. If you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell [00:30:00] them about it.

It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say, Thank you. You can find me on Instagram at Muscle for Life Fitness, Twitter at Muscle for Life, and Facebook at Muscle for Life Fitness. It’s honestly something I don’t know very much about because I’m more of a resistance training person.

And I’ve never, my, my cardio is really just because it’s healthy and to burn energy. So I’ll, ride on my upright bike, maybe do some hits, sometimes some lifts or whatever. But performance wise. Isn’t it, isn’t a high carb diet. I’ve written a little bit about this, so I feel like I couldn’t cite anything off the top of my head, but I feel like I’ve seen quite a bit of research comparing high carb diet versus low carb with endurance athletes in particular, especially high level.

And there’s a reason why high carb dieting is so popular and that the performance is you can’t make up for the declament that comes with. And I may be wrong with that. I’m just. [00:31:00] It’s what we’re training and what we’re comparing. So the body gets good at what you’re training, right? So when you’re doing a a low carb study in order to be in the study, you have to, you’re, they’re having you restrict your carbs constantly, no matter what you’re training and when you’re training and so on.

If the longer the study, the more you are actually down regulating your bodies. Use of carbs, right? So you’re untraining your ability to use carbs. Sure So to me what makes sense is the baseline is again, we want to get to the baseline What is the baseline healthy state and then if we want to do something that nature maybe didn’t intend now we’re using food as a drug or as a performance enhancing tool, right?

So so but we have to start and understand the baseline properly. So the baseline is fat burn for You most exercise and that makes sense. Physiologically, that’s why we have fat on our bodies is it’s just an energy store. So like we should [00:32:00] be able to tap into our natural energy stores efficiently.

But that same baseline is also carbohydrate use for the glycolytic muscle. And if we are not training the glycolytic muscles at all, because we’re in this study that is restricting our carb intake so completely, then, that, you are going to lose that a little bit. Don’t do either one you have to do you have to become fat adapted And if you’re not that is a process and that is a process that a lot of people are like Primal endurance are helping people with I’m gonna be putting a program together help people with the training with our fat adaptive state But then on top of that you just use carbs as a performance enhancing tool.

So you would just backload, right? This is a very popular strategy and it has been It’s successful because it’s the smart strategy, right? You don’t force when you for load, the opposite of back load, when you have carbs before, now you have adjusted you’ve [00:33:00] altered your hormones, and you’re not at that baseline state.

We’re not meant to exercise in the fed state, and when you have just eaten a lot of sugar, that is, a state that we rarely ever were in, not to mention exercised in, right? Because we never really had access to that much sugar. And when you have just eaten a lot of sugar, you block your fat burn. Very effectively.

Because you’ve got insulin, and insulin blocks adrenaline And so you can’t help you just for a lot of reasons. You can’t access your stored body fat and burn your mitochondria can’t burn it. So you have to burn sugar. You do to some degree though, right? Because like just with RO studies, some degree, if you’re trained, yeah, of course you’re going to burn more.

This is what training does actually is it helps your mitochondria become, if you’re training, if you’re a high carb training athlete, you’re actually training your mitochondria to deal with Too much sugar all the time. So that’s part of what training is. When, when you’re doing, it’s just a crazy thing.

So you want to train to burn fat when [00:34:00] you need to burn fat. And then you want to, train to eat, to use carbohydrate when you need it. But you have to have it on board. But it doesn’t need to be in your stomach. It needs to be in your muscle. Sure. Or in your liver. The two places that store glycogen.

So that it can be released into your bloodstream on demand. You don’t want to. Have it be in your bloodstream because you just ate something. You can’t have your stomach be regulating your blood sugar. And that’s what they’re doing when they’re, telling people to drink Gatorade constantly and having all those gels and everything like that.

You, you want to have your liver, And your muscle be regulating the access of your muscle to the liver regulates access of the brain, partly. And the glycogen in your muscle regulates the access of your muscle, your glycolytic fibers to the liver. to, to that stuff. So you backload because when you, I call the glycogen stores in the muscle, like the little tiny suitcases in there that store sugar.

And you empty [00:35:00] out those little suitcases when you exercise. So fill them back up afterwards, fill them back up afterwards. But if they’re full already, and now you’re eating before you’re having carb beforehand, you’re not putting A lot more, if any, in those suitcases. What you’re doing is you’re forcing the liver to store it, and the liver tends to turn it into fat if it gets too much.

So you’re turning on your fat storing, and when you do that, your liver cannot make ketones. And your brain needs ketones. To exercise. Your heart needs ketones to exercise, to pump stronger. Your heart pumps 30% stronger when it’s burning ketones than when it than when it’s not. So there’s all these advantages to being fat adapted that help you no matter what your sport.

Because your brain is going to function better and your heart is going to function better. Because your heart is the ultimate cardiovascular exercise. Right? And you need that thing to be healthy [00:36:00] when you’re a weightlifter. I agree. I do totally agree with the starting instead of looking at it cause again in the fitness space, it’s very popular to look at nutrition as a tool to just manipulate body composition and that’s about it.

That’s about as far as a lot of people go with their diets and as long as they can look in the mirror and be happy, that’s pretty much enough for them. And it’s actually something I wrote about recently that I think that’s the wrong way to look at it. And I’m putting together a series of digital courses that I’m going to be teaching Selling and stuff, and one is a deep dive into nutrition and it’s looking at it more from what you’re saying.

Let’s look at it the other way around. Let’s start with a baseline of health and what do you need to get more from just, I mean yours, what you’re talking about is actually quite a bit deeper. I’m starting with, ’cause I, again, I want to take people from, okay, so they’ve probably, let’s say they understand calories, they understand macros, they understand how it influences body composition, but they don’t even really understand the importance of the basic spectrum of micronutrients that your body needs and why.

You know what I mean? And that’s the case. If you ask most people, Hey, so like vitamin K, [00:37:00] what is it? Why does it matter? Vitamin D, what is it? Why does it matter? Vitamin A, anything, magnesium. What is it? What foods do you eat that have magnesium?

You know what I mean? When you start looking into it it’s not very good. But I totally agree with that viewpoint of let’s first build a baseline, nutritional, nutritious, healthy, that in that sense diet. And then once we have that in place, okay, so now what are you trying to do in your exercise?

And most of the people that. Follow me or I have a lot of athletes, but also a lot of people that also are looking to change their body composition for the better. And it doesn’t, it, that’s not to the not even so much bodybuilding per se. You’ve, maybe you would call it that, but it’s more everyday people that, both guys and girls that want to have, they want to be lean.

They don’t want to be unhealthily lean, but they just want to be lean and they want to have a healthy amount of muscle and they want to look like I would say more like an athlete versus. I think that’s a smart way of approaching it. And I I hope that through that course and then some other content on those lines, just to make that mentality [00:38:00] more popular in the fitness space in particular because it’s just not right now.

If anything, it’s actually demonized. It’s funny enough. It’s it’s labeled, Oh, clean eaters and the idea of it’s the people on the other end of the spectrum where they think that, they can’t eat if they have. Any amount of sugar or if they have, let’s say they, they eat one donut every two months or something that they are causing permanent damage to their body or that they think that such and such food is just going to make them fat so they can never eat it.

That’s the other end, the idea that you even pay attention to your food choices in the fitness space is is it, you’re probably more likely to just be made fun of as a clean eater as if you don’t understand, that you don’t, yeah, that you could just eat a fucking pop tart instead and you still would look the same, but it’s so mindless. Yeah, so there’s a lot of different myths out there and having worked with athletes in LA, they’re all, a lot of them are into that clean eating thing. And I think it [00:39:00] is what you mentioned, a lot of it is the idea that there are some foods that are inherently unhealthy.

going to make you fat somehow. And that doesn’t quite make a lot of sense. Like a gluten has really been demonized and I think what we have to do, if we want to bring any sense of law and order back to the field of nutrition Somebody should stand up and apologize for that because, most people don’t even know what gluten is.

Some people think it’s a carb. It’s actually the protein and from the protein in wheat that makes it gluey. And and it’s not poisonous. It’s not toxic. And a lot of folks cite certain articles that compare that, that Do that they don’t fully understand as evidence that gluten causes leaky gut in healthy people And that is not what?

that research says But what does cause leaky gut in healthy [00:40:00] people is vegetable oil and this is why? one of the things That we like to just give a just what are some common, Vegetable oils that people that are listening are probably eating. I don’t know maybe not so many of my listeners But a lot of people out there eating a lot of yeah people do eat more than they realize somewhere between 25 and 45 percent of the average American’s diet is composed of corn oil canola oil cottonseed oil some Soy, sunflower, safflower, also grapeseed and palm.

So these are bad because they are refined and the refining process damages the molecules in ways that damage our body and make them pro inflammatory there and render them toxic actually. And So beyond though even the processing in the amount that we the average American consumes them the type of fat so we’ve heard of saturated and polyunsaturated and monounsaturated the type of fat being [00:41:00] polyunsaturated is unstable inherently and when we consume it, even if it comes from whole, from food, when we consume too much of it, it’s not good for us and promotes inflammation because polyunsaturated fats cannot be burned readily for energy.

They cannot. Your mitochondria don’t want to burn them because it’s difficult. Because there’s extra bonds in there that they have to shuttle them in and out and in and out and do all kinds of extra things and they just don’t do it. And when you have too much in your diet, you don’t have enough saturated fat around and you’re having all these fats that your mitochondria don’t want to burn.

You force your body to start burning sugar and this is a big reason why vegetable oils promote diabetes. So you don’t have any carbs in these vegetable oils, but you eat You give them to rats, the studies that I cite on my website and in my book where [00:42:00] rats were fed vegetable oils, they developed insulin resistance.

And, that’s how you get diabetes. Even though they were not eating more carb, so we we’ve been villainizing sugar and importantly, because it’s. We eat too much and it’s addicting and there’s no, almost no nutrition in it. But we’ve been associating it as the one and only cause of obesity and diabetes.

And the fact is it’s one of two causes, and maybe the lesser cause because we’ve always. Because sugar is a natural molecule, our bodies can deal with it, but the, what the vegetable oils turn into during the processing in the factories and in, in processed food is something we’ve never consumed, like the toxins called 4 hydroxynonanol, 4 hydroxyhexanol.

These things are carcinogens and they are cytotoxic and they damage mitochondria, they kill mitochondria. If you’re an athlete and you’re killing your mitochondria by having french fries, You’re just not going to be the [00:43:00] same athlete you could be, right? It’s not going to give you a heart attack. If you’re looking to have a heart attack after you eat french fries and the failure of the heart attack to manifest is reassuring you that, Oh, see?

They’re not bad. I’m still here, so give me more. You’re not looking for the right thing. What you’re doing is you’re just missing out, right? You’re just missing out on being the athlete you could be. And sure maybe you’re Kobe Bryant and you played your best game of your career, 68 baskets after a Domino’s pizza and Pepsi.

Yeah. So what like, okay. You, if unfortunately. Then you’re Kobe Bryant who retires, not at quite as old as Kareem ab Doja bar. Yeah, . Yeah. So you’re just never gonna be your full potential. And for the people can you just share what are some common foods that are very rich in vegetable oil that, people eat a lot.

Or even if it’s types, even it’s types, fast food, right? Fast food, that’s what they cook with. If you’re getting anything fried there, whether it’s onion rings, or french fries, or Kentucky Fried Chicken that, [00:44:00] unless you actually, Chick fil A, they use peanut oil, so it’s a little bit more durable.

Chick fil A is a chain. It’s on the west coast. I don’t know if it’s out on the east coast. Yeah, there’s one right over there, actually. Oh, okay. Yeah, so they use peanut oil. It’s peanut oil, which is a little bit less degraded. So it’s a little bit better if you really have to do that, then you can go there.

But so you’re saying everyone should just eat Chick fil A. All right. You can do better than Chick fil A though. But also any kind of chip, unless it says olive oil on the front. So obviously partially hydrogenated oils fall under this as well, right? Yeah. So partially hydrogenated oils, they start with a vegetable oil and then they do another step and that generates more solid fats and trans fats, which everyone has heard about and everyone read.

Most people know that is yeah, you should pretty much have none of that. So right. And so anything that might have, that will also have vegetable oil in it because it’s made from vegetable oil and so you have chips, so other type of snack foods. Yeah, so a lot of food bars or energy bars most store bought pastries and cookies [00:45:00] even peanut butter these days.

A lot of stuff they’ll throw, even fried I’m sorry, dried fruit will have vegetable oil in it now. Dried vegetables often do, even from Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, chocolate now can have vegetable oil instead of cocoa butter and milk fat solids, which would be better. So everything that has a label, if you’re worried about it, you should look because and memorize the six major vegetable, or seven actually, if you include palm that, that might be in there.

And I think an easy way to, to keep your intake low is to just don’t eat a bunch of prepackaged foods, which I think is general. Good diet advice anyway, right? I don’t think anybody would argue with that whether you’re a vegan or a You know a low fat advocate or a lot of people don’t want to necessarily hear it or do it though Maybe they would be like, yeah, sure.

That sounds good. You do that. I’ll right So the other part that shop around the periphery type Yeah. Yeah. So you can. Another thing that makes it easier though is if you’re fat adapted, you don’t get hungry that often. So you really only need to be doing, if you’re going to have to cook it yourself, you really only need [00:46:00] to eat that do that once a day, right?

You have your coffee with cream in it or whatever, like I do in the morning, I don’t cook or do anything food wise until later in the day. And so I’m really just bothering with one meal. And it’s, So that makes things a lot easier. Great, okay are there any other, before we wrap up here, are there any just practical, actionable So if people listening are like, this sounds interesting, I want to experience it for myself though, which is also one of the kind of arguments that I have for people that I have made to people that have particularly on, just bad diets 30 days here, eat like this for 30 days, right?

So cut out all this crap out of your diet and let’s put some fruits and vegetables in there and let’s put some nuts and monounsaturated fats. Let’s like fix your diet baseline, healthy diet. Just do it for 30 days. And by the end, I think you’re going to feel a lot better. And it’s not that you have to never eat this or that again, but I think you’re going to be sold.

On like how much better you feel, you’re going to notice differences probably in your sleep. You’re going to [00:47:00] probably notice differences, maybe even your skin, nails, hair. You’re probably going to notice differences in your workouts. You know what I mean? So then And then they’re sold on it. So is there anything that what are a couple of changes people can make right now where they’re like, okay, I like what she’s saying, but how do I want to see it in action.

Sure. The way I work with it with my patients, cause I don’t have time to go over a whole meal program. I just say, let’s figure out a healthy breakfast for you because breakfast is the most important

I’m going to talk a little bit about what’s going on in the world right now, and frankly you don’t need anything else. for breakfast, you don’t need to have a lot of protein. Now, if you are trying to put on muscle, you want to have protein rich meals at least twice a day. I don’t know if three times a day is really necessary, but at least twice a day.

But it doesn’t have to be breakfast. So what I go over with people is, OK, what’s a pretty high fat breakfast that you’ll eat? Whether it’s a smoothie that has a lot of vegetables and, coconut as the fat base or avocado as a fat base or macadamia nuts ground up as a fat base or like a yogurt kind of thing.

That’s a full [00:48:00] fat yogurt and you put a bunch of nuts in there and add a little bit of creme fresh. If you put creme fresh and whole yogurt and then add a little bit of coconut shavings and chocolate or cacao nibs and a couple of nuts, that is a really delicious smoothie. Or some people in Hawaii, they would just slice an avocado in half and put a little salt on it because avocados were fresh.

So it was really good. And coconut cream on top of that. That’s a great high fat breakfast. Or what I have is a variant of the whole I started doing this before bulletproof coffee, but I just have like coffee with a lot of cream in it. some milk and that’s super simple or eggs, right?

If you have eggs and you cook them in some, you just add plenty of fat to it, like not more than maybe one or two eggs and no carbs maybe a little bit of non starchy vegetables. Those are some really great ways to start your day. Breakfast sausages, that’s good. But start your day that way and I can guarantee you that you will feel better different than if you started your day with a very high carb, low fat kind of, just like some croissant from [00:49:00] Starbucks or some shit.

Yes. You will not be as hungry by lunch. You will not be as distracted with thoughts of food. And you do that day after day. And now you can maybe see. Start to make a healthier lunch. Or maybe you’re like I’m not even hungry and I’m so busy. Maybe I don’t have time for lunch. And this is, again, not gonna be a great idea if you’re in the process of trying to build a lot of muscle.

Sure. But if you’re just a regular person trying, and you can still tone up and have plenty of muscle doing this you just skip your lunch and then just make sure that your dinner has a lot of protein in it. Sure. Yeah, I mean you can stimulate muscle protein synthesis with multiple meals, but you can also stimulate it with just one really big meal.

If you’re fat adapted and you’ve exercised and you sleep well. So I, there’s, I’m not clear that you really need to do the multiple small meals yet. I don’t think we really do have research saying that you definitively do. We, you may be able to just be fat adaptive and have one big high protein meal.

Yeah, I’ve written about this. I’ve read a bit about it. I’ve spoken to a few people like in the bodybuilding space in particular. One guy is Eric [00:50:00] Helms is his name. He’s working on his PhD, very smart dude. Another guy is Lane Norton who did PhD research on protein metabolism. I think particularly leucine actually is really what he was looking at.

And I would say from the bodybuilding space and among the evidence based crowd, the argument right now looks like the weight of the evidence is more on that it’s not that you have to eat eight protein meals a day, but that three to five is probably better than one to two. And there are various reasons for that in terms of like refractory effects from leucine and so forth.

But yes, I would say absolutely. So that’s more applicable to people that are trying to maximize muscle growth. But for the average person that, wants to, like you’re saying, they want to look good. They train their muscles and they, yeah, it’s not that big of a deal. It’s much more, let’s say that it’s much more important that you get enough protein every day than it is, how frequently you’re getting it.

Yes, absolutely. And the reason I say I’m not clear that we have good evidence on the multiple small is because we haven’t done it in fat adapted athletes and we have not, that, if you’re not [00:51:00] able to burn fat, you’re going to process your protein differently. You’re going to burn a lot of it.

And So it takes more, stimulus. Yeah. So anyway, so that’s a simple, so everybody listening, if they want to try, like they’re there you can see then. And I think I also like that concept if that’s how, if everyone listening, if that’s your experience, if it helps blunt hunger and just take food off your mind, that is.

It’s just going to help with dietary compliance regardless of anything. So that’s, if that’s a simple way to to go about this and to dip your toe in it, then I could see that being very beneficial. Yeah. And it’s just, it’s easier, right? So many people are working and I just can’t get breakfast is usually, it’s on the go.

And what does that mean? Usually it doesn’t, it’s not the kind of stuff you’re talking about. Yeah, exactly. So that’s how I work with my patients just because I don’t have the time to go over a full program. So I say, Let’s start with this and then come back and we’ll talk about what to do next. Yeah, that’s great.

Okay. So talking about net, what to even do [00:52:00] next, how can, so people listening, where can they find you find your work and if there’s anything in particular that you’re working on or that you have available besides the book, which you can, everybody, we’ve talked about that, you want to let everybody know about let everybody know about it.

Yeah, so right now I just have my website, which is drkate. com, D R C A T E dot com. That will link you to the books that I’ve published. I don’t have the the fat burning program put together yet, but it’s coming soon. I’m probably going to be working with Primal Blueprint on that and yeah, I’ll do some videos and that will help you burn fat.

Awesome. And then the book is deep nutrition, which you can buy online everywhere, bookstores, everything. And audible, you can listen to it too, if you like listening. Yeah. I’m big on audio books. It’s such a great it’s a great way to use downtime, like driving or preparing food and stuff. So I’m a big, I’m a big fan of audio books.

Okay, great. This was awesome, Kate. I really appreciate you taking time. And it’s, again I’m glad to have someone, this is a subject that’s been on my list of I want someone to talk about this, somebody that knows more about it than I [00:53:00] do. And I appreciate it. Thanks again.

Thanks, Mike. It’s been fun. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. Hey there, it’s Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did and don’t mind doing me a favor, then please do give this video a and leave a comment down below. Not only do I like to hear from everybody and I jump in and reply to As many comments as I can.

It also helps other people find their way to the show and learn how to build their best bodies ever too. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then just subscribe to my channel and you won’t miss out on any of the new content. Thanks again for listening to the episode and I hope to hear from you soon.