Ep 104 - Dr Paul Mason | The FASTEST Way To Lose Weight & Prevent Disease

Do you think exercise is the best way to lose weight? No, we've been taught this mantra that it's just calories and calories out. Basically, people are being gaslit by the medical profession. Dr. Paul Mason is a world-leading sports medicine physician who has helped thousands of people lose weight and fix disease. He will help you burn fat like never before and it starts with a high fat diet. In effect, we're telling the patient, if you cannot lose weight, that just means that you're greedy and lazy. I've had doctors as patients, I've had elite athletes, I've had CEOs, I've had all sorts of people. They're not lazy. The most powerful influence is something called hormones. Insulin is actually a hormone of obesity that tells the body to store fat. And this is what a lot of people can't get the head around. They think, well, if I've got too much body fat, it must be because I'm eating too much fat. In actual fact, the fat that you eat, the body burns very readily. As soon as you put carbohydrates and highly processed foods into the equation, you're releasing massive amounts of insulin that just puts our body into fat storage for. There's no such thing as a one-size-fits-all diet. There are some diets that are going to be universally unhealthy. Is there a minimum amount of protein that women and men should consume? I will generally recommend they have at least two grams of protein per kilogram of body weight. What about fat and how much fat? So in terms of fat, well, some fat can be toxic. I want to ask you about fiber for weight loss. Do you think fiber is good for weight loss? Well, no. This episode features Dr. Paul Mason and he'll explain the only proven way to lose weight and prevent disease without counting calories or excessive exercise. And once you know this, you'll never be on a diet again. Now, if you're learning from enjoying these free episodes, please hit the subscribe button because we know that food is medicine. And by the simple act of subscribing, you can help share the message to millions more people that need to hear the truth. And now for the episode with Dr. Paul Mason. Dr. Mason, welcome. Thank you. Thank you. When you look around us, most people want to lose weight. And you'll see hundreds, if not thousands of ways, to lose weight online. But 99% of people fail. And they fail because they're getting the wrong advice from doctors, from social media, even chat GPT. So today, Dr. Mason is going to share his evidence-based approach to lose weight and also heal chronic inflammation. And it's probably going to be different to what you've heard before. So Dr. Mason, my first question. You're a highly qualified doctor. You have three bachelor degrees of fellowship and you train Olympians and athletes. So if anybody could answer this question, it would be you. No. I mean, that's a very short answer. But we like to say you can't outrun a bad diet. So a lot of people say, well, we've been taught this mantra that it's just calories and calories out. So if I have a patient come in and usually, you know, they say, I'm coming here for weight loss. And I'll ask them full, well, knowing what their answer will be. I say, well, what have you done in the past? I've done weight watchers. I've tried calorie control, like exercise, so on and so forth. And we talked to them about the advice I've had from their doctors. And it invariably comes down to this calorie counting model. You need to eat less and exercise more. Now, but if we pause for a second, so we're putting the complete responsibility back on the patient in terms of two behaviors. One eating how much you eat, which is greed and one how much you exercise, which is lazy. In effect, we're telling the patient if you cannot lose weight and clearly you're sitting there, you're overweight, you don't have the ideal habitus, that just means that you're greedy and lazy. Now the thing is, I've had doctors come in as patients. I've had elite athletes come in. I've had CEOs. I've had all sorts of people and people who are type A personalities who are incredibly driven. They're not lazy. They don't lack self control. They're up at 5 a.m. every morning doing boot camp right before they go and run their, you know, thousand employee organization. These people have got their stuff together. It's not just down to an attitude. So basically people are being gaslit by the medical profession. So then the question is, okay, if we understand it's not because you're greedy and it's not because you're lazy, then what is it? And the most powerful influence is something called hormones. And people really underestimate the power of hormones. I mean, if you've ever seen a dog on heat, you'll have a little jack Russell. He'll scale a six foot fence. Purely on the basis of hormones, chemicals circulating around their body, chemicals stimulating the brain. And in actual fact, hormones are so powerful that they will control our behavior, our eating behaviors, but they also control what our bodies do in terms of fat storage. It's fair to say that there's one hormone, which is called insulin, without which most nobody would be overweight. Insulin is actually a hormone of obesity. It tells the body to store fat. And then we have these other chemical influences in the brain that drive eating behaviors. And we can understand it's not so simplistic as just eating less and exercising more. It's what in our lifestyle influences these complex hormonal interactions. So I'll give you an example. So everybody will think that when you pick something up and put food in your mouth, that that's a volitional action. So that must be completely in your control. Sure. Can you just take a deep breath for me and hold it? Great. So you've proven to me that you can control your breathing. Perfect. Now hold your breath for five minutes. There's no way you probably won't. But why not? The drive to breathe is just controlled by chemicals, right? It's just controlled by oxygen levels, carbon dioxide levels. It's just under chemical control. And we've got conscious control of our breathing. And yet at some point in time, that unconscious desire to breathe becomes irresistible. And it's the same with food. It's the same with eating. And if we don't put ourselves in the right situation, give ourselves the right tools to control food cravings and desires, then you'll really know more in control of your eating. Then you are, if you're breathing out, that's a bit of an extreme example. There's obviously more bad things will happen much quicker if you don't breathe than if you don't eat, but they still will happen. So food now is incredibly, incredibly addictive. I just went to America recently for a conference. And I was at the Statue of Liberty and I had to happen to be standing next to a lady in the queue. And I got chatting to her and she was just a scientist and she worked for a large donut company. And I was kidrous and I was, so what do you do? You know, food scientists don't come to me. That sounds very interesting. And she talked through the process of, you know, how they would craft the food and that have taste testing panels and whole teams of people to make the food very addictive. You know, the right combination of sugar, salt and sass. And all got to get the mouth feel right. And she was also incredibly proud how they can add all these preservatives to a donut. So that you could have a donut that was three weeks old, that sitting out in the open air and was completely indistinguishable from a fresh donut. But that's beside the point. The point is these foods are addictive. And as humans, we have evolved to respond to addictive stimuli. So the two behaviors that the human species, knee, is dependent on for survival, is pro-creation and eating. And both those behaviors are driven by serotonin and dopamine, which are two, you know, happy chemicals. We call them neurotransmitters in our brain. They get released. So if you've sort of got deficient levels of these chemicals, which can happen for, you know, certain health reasons. If you've got an ion deficiency or what we call chronic inflammation, which is a bit of a broad term, but if we have these issues in our body, that lowers our neurotransmitter levels. But we're hardwired as humans to chase these chemicals. So what do we do? What's our most really access to get us apply these chemicals when we're deficient? Well, in our modern environment, when we're surrounded by addictive foods, we just go to addictive foods. So that's a huge drive. And we think we're in control of that eating, but we're often not. And then the consequences are not just that these foods are addictive, but what they do to our hormone levels. So with all these sugar and carbohydrates, we know they release a hormone called insulin from our pancreas into our bloodstream. And insulin is the hormone of obesity. So without insulin, our fat cells cannot get fat. That's our fat cells can only store fat under the influence of insulin. You know, in actual fact, they did a very interesting study on some adolescence. And they measured their insulin levels. And they just put them into four groups. You're in the bottom 25%, the top 25% or one of the two middle quartiles. And they followed them for eight years. And then at the end of the eight years, they measured the insulin levels again to see who was in the bottom, the top. And they found that if you were in the top level of insulin at both points of time across that eight-year period, then your chance of becoming a beast was something like 36 times greater than the people with the lowest insulin levels. So we've got very strong prospective data. Any type one diabetic has a doctor, we're condition called type one diabetes, which is where the body releases not enough insulin. The pancreas, the beta-ilit cells and the pancreas, which makes insulin actually die, and you can't produce insulin. So how does a type one diabetic present? Well, they're emaciated, they waste away. And it's not just fat, it's muscle two, that their whole body is waste away. Essentially, they'll die. So we treat them with insulin injections, which is life saving, which is another facet. And then, so what happens? Where do we tell them to inject? We say just inject in your lower abdomen. And if they use large doses of insulin, because they're, you know, for whatever reason, and they don't rotate their insides, they're always injecting into the same science in the lower abdomen, well, you get these mounds of fat tissue forming there. We know in type one diabetic, except where they inject, they develop fat masses. And we're not just talking about a little bit lumpy. If you want to Google this lipo, meaning fat hypertrophy, hypertrophy, meaning excessive growth, you'll get some fascinating images. It looks like mammary glands or breast tissue, which is plastered onto the lower abdomen. You, they're really quite prominent lump. So the evidence that we have that the hormones driver obesity is absolutely huge. So you've got these two factors. We've got addictive food and often we understand we're hard wired to chase dopamine and serotonin, which these addictive foods provide. And especially if we're in a state of ill health, iron deficiency, B12 deficiency, chronic inflammation, what have you. Then, and we're going to be relatively depressed. We're going to be living in a black cloud or a grave ale. And the way that we get transient release out of that is by eating these very addictive foods. We get a squirt of dopamine and serotonin into our brains and transiently will feel good. That is so such a strong driving force. You know, just because you're thinking, oh, this is a volitional action putting food into my mouth. No, it's not under your volitional control. Eventually, you will fail. And if then the food that we choose to eat to break, that is releasing huge amounts of insulin into our bloodstream. And that's what people don't realize. That as soon as you put carbohydrates and highly processed foods into the equation, you're releasing massive amounts of insulin that just puts our body into fat storage for. And here's another thing. You think with all that energy coming in that you'll have energy to burn, that your body will say, hey, I've got heaps of energy here. I'm going to be very active. No. In actual fact, what the insulin does is you've got a choice, that energy that comes in. Your body can stuff it straight into the fat stores or it can direct it to be burnt for energy. And insulin takes it away from that available energy and stuffs it into fat stores. So even though you've got all of this energy coming in, your body doesn't perceive that it's available. And this is why you might feel lefagic at the same time. So we've actually done research where we've put people on diets that will lead to lower insulin levels. And we've found that even for consuming the exact same amount of calories, the calorie controlled diets, that people on the lower carbohydrate diets will burn at rest, just sitting down 300 kilocalories more per day. Now for reference, that's the same as if you were going for a bike ride for an hour. So when it comes to weight loss, it's not just eat less and exercise more. Now, if you could eat less and exercise more, that could lead to weight loss, but that doesn't tell you how to do it. The fact is these things under the drive, the chemical drive of dopamine and serotonin in the brain, and then what you do with those chemicals is under the hormonal influence of insulin. And if you're having a diet that is excessively addictive, you're just going to want to eat that. And then leading to all of these chronic inflammation, nutrient deficiencies, and high levels of insulin, your body's just going to store it as fat. I'll get another element here, and I'm sorry if this is going to be getting a little bit too complex, but there's just a third concept to it. And that's a concept of nutrition. So I just briefly talked about nutrient deficiency. So are you familiar with what we call total printural feeding? No, what is that? So it's what happens. Let's say if you had a problem with your throat or your stomach and for some reason, you couldn't eat, but we'd still need to give you nutrition. So we would just take one of your veins and would put in a large cannula, and we could feed you all the nutrition that you needed through a vein. So, and presumably, if we provided you with every nutrient, micronutrient, macronutrient, that you needed, then you could stay healthy. Makes sense. So in the 1970s, they did a fabulous study where they experimented with what would happen when they manipulated the micronutrient composition of what was coming in. Now, the thing to understand is that through urine tests and blood tests, we can actually, we have markers that tell us how much fat you're forming, how much bone and muscle you're forming or whether, indeed, you're breaking things down. And we found that if we say, took away sodium, which is salt, that's found in sodium chloride, which is table salt, if we took away the sodium, then we could reduce your ability to form muscle and bone by about two thirds. If we eliminated potassium completely, we could basically completely stop all bone and muscle formation. So these little things are actually very necessary for our body to build lean tissues. Now, and it's pretty obvious, if you imagine that muscle tissue contains potassium, and you completely eliminate all potassium from your diet, then how is your body going to make muscle when you take it in? It's like if you're trying to build a complex recipe and you take three key ingredients out, you can't just add more of the other ingredients and make that recipe. It's if you're missing something substantial, you just can't do it, it's essential. So if we take potassium out of your diet, then you really are deficient in building muscle and bone. And this was an absolutely huge insight. But then what happens, you're still taking the same amount of energy. So where does that energy go? Well, in this study, that excess energy that was no longer able to form muscle and bone was turned into fat. So there's multiple factors here that influence whether or not you gain fat. Now, the corollary of that is that we just have to do that in reverse to lose weight. And it shouldn't come down. You shouldn't have to be white knuckling it and say, and resisting. We know that these type A personalities who can be very driven, they can actually control things to such a degree that, you know, for often extended periods of time, they can control their weight. But eventually it's like trying to hold your breath. Eventually you have to take a breath and eventually you will fail. And that's where the whole calories in, calories out, falls down. And then to just throw something else in, just as an aside, the people who can actually succeed will say you've got a middle-aged female who's been able to control her weight for 20 years, you know, with extreme regimen of exercise and extremely low calorie diet. If we actually look at her, she would have often what would consider to be disordered eating. So the simple fact there, I see this in a lot of my patients, a lot of the people who are able to control their weight, it's such with the standard device, it's so extreme what they have to do to go to success, but basically they have an eating disorder. That's not healthy. - I want to ask you moving on, because I think people, they've heard a lot about insulin and then the byproduct, when you have too much insulin, insulin resistance. - Well, hang on, let's just, bring just back up there for a moment. So you've just actually raised something that is very commonly thought of in the low carb community, which I think is wrong. And it's the connection between too much insulin, causing insulin resistance. And I know that is cited and by some very credible people in this field, but the more I look into the science of it, it just doesn't make sense. So the notion is that let's say if you go to a loud concert and you're hearing a lot of noise and you walk out of the concert and the, your hearing's a bit muffled afterwards. Your hearing's gotten used to the loud noise as it's not that sensitive. The same if you go into a room with a bad smell. If you go on a hike in the snow for a couple of weeks with a group of people, then you're all gonna be a bit ponging at the end of it, but you don't notice it because your body habituates to the smell. And the notion is that insulin is the same. If you just expose yourself to a high level of insulin, the body gets used to that level of insulin. But the evidence actually suggests that that doesn't happen. and. without going to the details too much. It actually looks like the problem of insulin resistance happens from too much sugar and too much seed oil in general. So insulin is a chemical that circulates through the blood and it goes to a cell and that cell has what we call an insulin receptor which has a particular affinity for insulin. It doesn't want to see any other chemical. The only chemical it wants to see is insulin. And when insulin comes in and joins to that receptor that triggers a whole downstream cascade of cellular machinery doing stuff, you know, such as saying, "Oh, that store fats on and so forth." Now what happens if we've got that receptor that takes insulin and then we just fill it with join gum? Insulin comes along and can't activate the receptor. Then you have a problem. So the problem of insulin resistance is actually a broken receptor. And when I'm looking at the literature, it's actually fairly clear how the receptor gets broken. So the receptor is actually sitting in a special section of the cell membrane that's sitting, think of the cell like a ball and you've got this, these little areas of cell membrane they're called lipid rafts. And they're extremely dense in cholesterol. So we know that cell membranes contain a lot of cholesterol, but the lipid raft range and actually contains more than five times the amount of cholesterol is a surrounding membrane. So these little lakes or rafts of lipid, that's where the insulin receptor sits. And when you consume too much sugar, your liver produces a compound which is toxic to the lipid raft called a ceramide. And when you consume too much seed oil, there's actually a plant form of cholesterol. It's a plant analogue of cholesterol. It's close to human cholesterol, which means it can be absorbed by the body in small amounts, but it's different enough that it doesn't work the same. And this too goes to the lipid raft and damages the function. And once this lipid raft is destabilized, then the insulin receptor in the lipid raft can't work. So insulin comes along and it doesn't activate it properly, but here's the problem. We have slightly different types of lipid rafts between muscle tissue, liver tissue and fat tissue. So guess which tissue doesn't get as affected by these? That's the fat tissue. So you impair the signaling to the liver and the muscle, but the fat tissue can still work. So the fat tissue, insulin's acting on that and that can still take up all the energy, but the important benefits of your muscles taking up energy to burn will that's less efficient and the liver taking up the sugar to store as glycogen, well that becomes less efficient some and so forth. So this is the real problem of insulin. It's not to do with a chronically high exposure to insulin. It's primarily due to a very high carbohydrate diet, especially sugar diet because that tells the liver to produce something called a ceramide. You may have heard of this process called denovolipogenesis. So denovolipogenesis basically is the liver making fat. And what does it make fat out of? It makes fat out of carbohydrates. And this is what a lot of people can't get their head around. Inactual fat, the fat that you eat, the body burns very readily. It's very hard for the body to break down fat and then to restore it. It's much easier for the body to actually make fat from carbohydrates. That's the fat that typically gets stored. But it's also that's the fat that when you produce that fat, it's a particular type of fat that's called a parmatate that turns into this ceramide chemical called ceramide parmatate and that damages the the lipid raft and that causes insulin resistance. So that's the actual mechanism of insulin resistance. And this also speaks to the age old argument. I'm sure you've had people say, "Oh, oil's there, the devil." And people say, "It's all about the carbohydrates." And it's almost like we've got two camps of people in the low carb community. Some people are afraid to sugar some people are afraid of seed oils. Well, in actual fact, they're both toxic and it's just a dose that informs us about the poison. It's like if you have more seed oils than you do carbohydrates and the seed oils will be worse if you have more carbs and seed oils and vice versa. But on average, when we look at the literature, it appears that for a diet that's about 50 to 70% carbohydrate, that would have about the same impact on your health as a seed oil, a diet that had about 6% of energy coming from seed oils. So if you understand that, then consider that the average Australian gets about 13% of the energy from seed oils. It actually looks like seed oils may actually be even more problematic in the diet than carbohydrates for most people. As Dr. Mesa mentions, if you want to lose weight, you need to eat more fat and avoid carbohydrates and seed oils. Now, what you eat is so important for overall health and to lose weight. But one big thing that stops people from losing weight is past trauma, stress and emotional eating. Now, this is something that I suffered with for most of my life. Severe emotional eating. I was even reaching for healthy sugars just to feel okay. And what I found completely fixed this along with a high fat kind of diet was to understand my emotions through therapy. Now, through speaking with a therapist, I was able to understand my triggers that led to emotional eating. And my therapist came up with incredible strategies to help me fix my emotional eating, things like relaxation techniques like guided meditation, slow breathing and gratitude, just to name a few. Now, this has helped me so much and that is why I have better help as a sponsor of today's video. Better help is on a mission to make starting therapy easier. All you have to do is fill out a questionnaire and you'll be matched with a therapist in as little as a couple of days. One of the best features about better help is that if the first therapist doesn't feel quite right, you can easily switch to another one until you find someone that you truly connect with. They're all about creating the best experience and support for you. So if you're struggling and you think you might benefit from therapy, just click on the link in the description of this video or head to betterhelp.com/primalpodcast and get 10% off your first month of therapy. We spoke about insulin. You corrected the insulin resistance. Fantastic. Thank you so much. Pretaining to hormones, there's also a leptin and cortisol. Does that play a role in people's inability to lose weight? How important are those? So for most people, not that important. So there's an interaction between leptin and insulin. So in effect, if you deal with the insulin, you're going to be dealing with the leptin. So I used to test the leptin levels on every patient and that was academically informative, but it didn't change management because we just saw this relationship between what's happening with the insulin and what's happening with the leptin. We just know that we fix the insulin and we don't need to worry about the leptin and the reference intervals that the laboratories will give you for leptin are just so nonsense. It makes it if you're interpreting it based on the reference intervals, you're going to be out of luck. In terms of things like cortisol, for some people, that is hugely important. So I've got condition called cushing syndrome or cushing disease. If you take too much steroid because you've got a chronic inflammatory illness or you might have a problem with your adrenal gland where that secretes too much cortisol, then that absolutely will cause obesity as well as a bunch of other side effects. But occasionally, I do cortisol level testing in most of my patients who come in because I don't want to miss this. But the reality is for most people, it's actually not that important. But there are other hormones that we have to always test. So take the thyroid gland, for example. So what we call subclinical hypothyroidism, which is really a euphemism for saying an undirective thyroid that standard blood testing doesn't detect. That's really what it means. That is very common and that absolutely contributes to weight gain. And it also will contribute to elevated cholesterol levels and elevated triglyceride levels. So we'll see a lot of people come in. And I'll say, "Oh, my doctor put me on a statin because I've got high cholesterol levels when you look at them." And the way I think about cholesterol is not as a disease. If we treat it like a disease, you've got high cholesterol. Here's the drug you need. No, it's as a symptom. If you have high cholesterol, it's because there's something else going on with your body. Now, and I'm not talking about, you know, just mid-range cholesterol that the reference intervals call high because we know that, you know, the very basis of, you know, the targets for cholesterol have just lowered over the years. And it's basically, it seems to have basically been done to increase the amount of people who take lipid lowering therapies. The number of people over the last 20, 30 years who are eligible for cholesterol medication has actually increased 600%. That's just because we keep moving the goalposts down. So I'm not talking about just slightly high cholesterol. I'm talking about proper high cholesterol. But if you've got proper high cholesterol, then I'm going to say, We don't shouldn't look at it like a symptom, well, we should look at it like a symptom, sorry, and not a disease. So it might be that you've got an undrafted thyroid gland. It might be that you're actually deficient in B12. How many doctors realize that low B12, of course, is the body to increase production of cholesterol, for example? Often we see high triglystriol levels in people who have what we call hemochromatosis. And it doesn't mean that you have to have both genes for hemochromatosis. You could just have what we call a carrier state where you've got one affected gene. And that will frequently lead to elevated liver enzymes, for example, elevated triglystriol. So we do need to have visibility of these things across the board. So for most people, the key is insulin. But there is a certain subset of people who do have other hormonal disturbances. And that would probably be in the vicinity of 10 to 20%. So most people, they're not issues, but they're certainly worth checking for. So the 80 to 90% solution is to fix your insulin if you want to try to lose weight, because it's a hormonal issue, not the calories issue. I have further questions around that, around the calories, because people are going to say, well, I-- so can you eat 5,000 calories a day, but keep your insulin low and lose weight? So it's very hard to eat 5,000 calories a day and keeping your insulin level low. So now, one of the things is, even on a carnivore diet, for example, people don't realize that meat stimulates a reasonable insulin response. Now, it probably gram for gram. The insulin response from meat is-- or calorie for calorie-- is probably about half that a carbohydrate. So it's significantly less. But are there still significance? So you'll remember earlier on I talked about the type one diabetic who doesn't produce any insulin at all. I said they come in amaciated, no fat. And I also said no muscle, because insulin is a very important growth hormone. Insulin is important. We don't want zero insulin at all. It would turn into a type one diabetic. You need it for muscle tissue as well. Which is why somebody builders-- say, probably still do-- will inject insulin. It's an anabolic hormone. Builds muscle. You obviously just have to control what you're doing from the fat. So in terms of-- I'm not sure if that really-- It made sense because I understand. Because when-- see, people, I'm just thinking about people in the comments what they're going to be saying that I believe in the calorie counting theory or hormones matter, but also calories matter as well. But what about these females with eating disorders who can stay lean on an insulin-simulating diet? You can-- the calorie theory can work. The problem is that it doesn't control for calories. If the diet has to allow you to control your calorie intake, so when you lower your insulin level, you lower how much energy is being pushed into your fat stores, you've got more energy available, you're just going to be less hungry. So the hormones actually control the drive to eat. Avoiding addictive foods will allow you to control the drive to eat. So the calories in, calories out model is theoretically correct. So anybody who's level-ost weight on a carnivore diet has done so under the orthospices of them eating less and exercising more, or eating less than they're burning. And that's absolutely true. But the issue is one of control. So the standard low-fat, high carbohydrate diet makes you hungry. It drives you to eat more. You're not providing your body with nutrient-dense foods. Your body's going to be needing more and more food to control for that. Whereas a healthy diet, if you're now 5,000 calories a day, now I honestly don't know how many calories I eat, but I will tell you, I eat to satiety every time I eat. I'm never hungry. Literally never hungry. I'm a bit of a hedonist because I don't like to, why would I want to make myself hungry? People say, do you fast? And I think the benefits of fasting, by the way, are seen in people predominantly who are on unhealthy diets. And if you're on a healthy ketogenic diet, then I don't think the benefits of fasting are going to be significant. So it doesn't, it comes down to, does your diet make you hungry and does your diet make you overeat? Of course, if you overeat, you will gain weight. Now, you can probably be, for example, going to carnival diet. And if you force yourself to eat, of course, you'll gain weight. But the whole point is that we just want people to eat to satiety, eat when they're hungry, donate when they're not hungry. And for the most part, people eating healthily will lose weight even when eating to satiety. If you've ever traveled through the savanna in Africa, and you'll often see where the lions have killed some deer or antelope, and you'll see the carcasses just left there. They don't keep eating once they're full. They just leave it. I want to ask about carbohydrates, because that seems to be the main trigger, that we, the main thing that we need to control, or lower, if we want to lower the insulin, they're full lose weight. So then how do you know how low to keep the carbohydrates and what diet to do? So it really depends on the person. So you, you raise a really important point there, what diet to do. So this is, there's no such thing as a one size fit tool diet. However, there are some diets that are going to be universally unhealthy, and there's going to be some diets which are going to be universally healthy. But there are extremes. And the question is, whereabouts on that do you need to go the extreme low carb diet, high fat, faxana, so forth, or can you be a bit more relaxed and still get the results you need? And when I say it's no one size fits all, it's on a continuum. So if I've got an athlete, they might be able to have 100 grams of carbohydrates a day, which is a reasonable amount, and still be in perfectly good health. Whereas somebody else who's extremely insulin resistant, they've been metabolically damaged over decades, they can probably look at a donut from across the road and have an insulin spike. So my favorite tool for that is a continuous glucose monitor, which is a little device. It's about the size of a 20 cent piece. It just sticks onto the back of your arm, and it communicates wirelessly with your phone. And you get real-time readouts on what your sugar response is to the foods that you're consuming. And this is absolutely fabulous. So some people come in and say, well, can I eat this particular food? And I also, well, how many grams of it, how rapidly is it going to be at the start of a meal, or at the end of a meal, because data affects how things are digested as well? So the only way to know whether you can consume a particular food in a particular amount at a particular time, so your personal metabolism is to actually assess whether it's causing a spike in your blood sugar level. And we know that if you're getting a spike in your blood sugar level, then that's a reasonable surrogate market to say, well, you're probably going to be getting insulin spike and some dilatirious effects going on. So the question is, how many carbs can I consume? It has to be answered by personal experimentation. And we're fortunate now that we've got these beautiful devices, the continuous glucose monitors. You don't have to wear one continuously. You get one wear it for 10 days or 14 days, but depending on the country, you're in, they have different durations. And use it and learn from it. If you see particular food spike your sugar levels, you should not consume that food, or at least, be mindful of what it's doing to you when you consume that food. And if you're seeing that you can consume bacon and eggs for breakfast and your sugar level stays perfectly level, then that's absolutely fine. Now, just a couple of words of caution on the continuous glucose monitor. They don't measure the concentration of sugar in your blood the way the fingerprint glucose does. They don't actually sit inside your blood vessels, they sit in the fluid around the blood vessels called the interstitial fluid. And so basically the sugar level in that fluid reaches an equilibrium with the sugar concentration going through the blood vessels over about five minutes or more. So it just delay behind a, I think, a prickly glucose measure. But also because it doesn't measure the concentration, it measures the amount of sugar being delivered to the fluid around the blood vessels. It's affected by blood flow. So what does that mean? And so if you increase your circulation, say if you're exercising or if you go and have a hot shower or a sauna, then the blood flow around the sense is going to increase. So the delivery of sugar to the sensor is going to increase. I often have patients come to me and say, oh my goodness, I'm worried about exercising. Every time I exercise my sugar level spikes up through the roof, it's absolutely crazy. And it's like, well, that's actually a bit of a spurious finding at the delivery of sugar to the meter has increased. But your sugar level almost certainly didn't. And if you cross reference that with a finger prick, you would see the truth. So just be mindful there are certain things about it. And in terms of the absolute level of it, it's simply not as accurate as a finger prick. But that doesn't really matter because we're not really worried about the absolute level. We're worried about avoiding the spikes that occur with the dieth. So it's very similar to, as a doctor, when we were learning about ECGs, there's something called a T-wave. And if you. you've got too much potassium that can affect the shape of the tea wave. And we were taught if it looks like you wouldn't want to sit on it, as if it looks like a spike, then it's probably pathological. And I think we can probably say the same thing about glucose biking on a continuous glucose trace. That's so interesting because I experience the same thing. If I'm stressed, the blood glucose spikes or or nervous, or if I exercise, I want to ask you a question around if people have lower the carbohydrates, depending on what their blood glucose monitor recommends and what foods are good. So they found that right carbohydrate level. And then they're losing weight. Have you experienced with your patients or your clients that you might see, they hit a weight loss stall and they can't understand why they can't lose weight. What's happening there? I think you know, they're answering here, but we call it non-scale victories. And that's what we want to have relevance to remember that feeding study where we put the drips in people's arms and we fed them nutrients and we could control how much muscle a bone they were forming. So on a healthy diet, you're likely to be reversing hopefully pseudo process building lean muscle at the same time you're losing fat. So if you've got two tissues going up, two tissues, which by the way, strongly associated with longevity and health, then that could offset any apparent weight loss on the scale. So there's a couple of different ways to look at this. So number one, the mirror test, how do you look in the mirror? I mean, the mirror doesn't really lie. Number two, you can do what we call the waist circumference measure. Now, the waist circumference measure is actually my preferred measure, but you need to do it in a certain way to make sure it's reproducible and accurate. Now, the way we get taught in medicine is that we tell people to measure around their waist and sometimes it's between the bottom of the ribs and the top of the waist. And it's all very varied and it's very difficult to get a reproducible measure. And also if somebody has what we call a pendulous abdomen where the stomach hangs down, then how do you know you're getting it around the maximum girth? And as people lose weight, are they measuring it at the same level? Now, if you lie flat on your back, then the pendulous abdomen goes away. Gravity just brings it back and you just end up with a vertical mound that is perfectly centered. And then if you wrap the tape measure around at the level of your belly button, then that is completely reproducible. You can always hit that level every time you measure. So my recommendation is to lie on your back, wrap a tape measure around the level of your belly button. Just give it a bit of a sense. So it's always the same tension and that is your measure. And that will tell you about these non-scale victories. Because a lot of people come in and they say, I'm still losing weight, my clothes are getting looser, but I'm obsessed about the scale and the scale is not moving. And the whole point is that that's because you're probably getting healthier. You've probably got more muscle than you used to. You've probably got more bone density. You know, we frequently see bone osteoporosis actually reverse. And this is something that in medical school, we were taught never happens. But how many people know what bone is made of? Every you ask people what bone is made of and they'll say one thing, calcium. But calcium is only a fraction of it. So in actual fact, bone is a scaffolding of protein in which you have other minerals like calcium and fancy thing called hydroxyapotite phosphates on and so forth that get impregnated into that protein scaffolding. So you absolutely need a high protein diet to build bone. And this has actually been proven in a randomized controlled trial. It was some Australian research. I think it was back in 2002. And they came up with a, that was still back when everybody was saying, oh, it's all about calcium. So they gave some people with osteoporosis. So these were males and females over the age of 65. So postmenopausal. They gave them some calcium. And because we know that vitamin D helps you absorb calcium, they get the vitamin D as well. And then they look to see if they could reverse osteoporosis. And what they found is that it reduced the decline in bone mineral density. It redrew it controlled the progression, but it didn't seem to reverse it. And that sort of makes sense because our bodies, if we need more calcium, our bodies will break down bone to get at that calcium. Our bone is basically a calcium back. So it will break down. But if you're having regular calcium coming in, then you reduce your bodies need to break down bone to get at that calcium. But if you're not putting in protein, you're not giving the body all the ingredients. Remember this whole recipe thing we talked about missing ingredients. If you're not putting everything in, then you're not allowing the body to rebuild the bone. So then these researchers did something very clever. They divided the study participants into three groups based on their protein intake. And what did they find in the group with the highest protein intake, the top tertiale? They actually were reversing their osteoporosis. So you've got postmanopausal females who are growing more bone density in their hip joint, in their hip bone, what we call the neck of the femur. So this is just absolutely fabulous. So and it just gives visibility to this whole thing that you actually can build these healthy tissues on a healthy diet. And of course, that's going to be shown on the scale. So your weight will sometimes go up. So let's not focus on the number. Let's look at the way circumference. Very, very true. You mentioned protein. So I want to ask you a question about protein and fat because that's the other macronutrients that we have to consider. And also what about fat and how much fat is appropriate? Well, let's go with both of those. So is there a minimum? I mean, the thing about protein, we think of protein as just a nutrient right. But we've got 20 odd amino acids. We've got essential amino acids that the body can't make. We've got non-essential ones. We've got conditionally essential ones that the body can only make enough of under certain circumstances. So it's not enough to talk about protein in just terms of a number like that because what happens if you're having plant protein, which might be deficient in certain amino acids, then no amount of protein is going to save you from that. If you're having a complete animal protein, then that's going to put you in a better position. So it's a bit, it's a bit academically disingenuous to say you need to have exgrams of protein per kilogram body weight per day without having consideration for the source of the protein. And we know we have different scores for the bioavailability of protein. And essentially, we know that animal protein will have better scores for bioavailability than plant proteins. And that's that's the fact. So in terms of how much protein should you be having? So the studies they did, they working out how much protein is recommended with the dietary guidelines, they were based on college aged males. And they were based on protein solely as what a substrate for structure. Basically, they remember I said that we can measure, we can get an assessment if your body is breaking down protein, a forming protein by looking at other metabolites in the body, in the blood and the urine. So they were looking at these metabolites and they found the minimum amount of protein at which it looked like, you know, you were maintaining your level of muscle and bone. And that was something like 0.8 grams per kilogram per day. But that also overlooks the role of protein. The enzymatic role of protein and proteins have a lot of other roles in the body besides just building stuff. It's pretty handy that they build stuff. But their immune proteins, their enzymes, on and so forth, so a bunch of other important stuff. So it really looks like that recommendation in college aged males who probably absorb it far better than most other people. They may actually even have less requirements, say, pregnant females on and so forth. Or, you know, there's going to be, there's a lot of reasons why that 0.8 is grossly, you know, deficient. And I'd probably suggest it's reasonable to at least double that as a minimum requirement for good health. So just because you've got something for, you know, that can keep you alive, it doesn't mean that it's anywhere near optimal. And in actual fact, I would generally recommend, you know, for my patients, I would generally recommend they have at least two grams of protein per kilogram a body weight per day, especially if they're trying to reverse osteoporosis. And, you know, the calculations are quite easily done. So in general, animal food is about 25% protein. So if you've got a 400 gram steak, there's about 100 grams of protein in that steak. So we need to think about it as something that's more than just a, you know, homogenous nutrient. It is very complex. And we also understand that when you get protein in the diet, you're not just getting protein. Where do you, so if we look at meat, that's zinc, that's iron, that's torun, that's carnitine, that's carnazine, you know, that there's all these other nutrients. that you don't get from plant foods. So protein should be considered just one mix. So we shouldn't consider meat to just be a protein source. We should consider meat to be a nutrient source, micronutrient as well as the protein macronutrient. So in terms of fat, well some fat can be toxic. So remember we talked about these phytosterols, these plant analogs of human cholesterol. So they're clearly toxic. They're toxic to our cells and to our insulin sensitivity and so on and so forth. So if we were to include vegetable oils as a source of fat in our total daily fat recommendation, you can see well that's completely counterproductive. So we do have some fats which are also considered to be essential and here's the problem. So we've all heard of the mega-three fats, you know typically from fish oil but you can get it from pastured meats as well. And we consider the omega-six fats that are often sound in seed oils to be toxic. And yes, omega-six fats are every bit as essential in the diet as are omega-three fats. And this is where I think that a lot of us mate and I used to get this wrong as well. I used to think that omega-six fats were inherently inflammatory. Now it is true that seed oils contain omega-six fats and that seed oils when we consume them to excess they appear to be quite deleterious to our health. The problem is assuming that it's the omega-six content of the seed oils that cause us a damage. In actual fact, I think there's two main factors. One is their phytosteroal content and number two is something called oxidation. So oxidation just refers to the chemical tendency to remove an electron from the outer shell, the valence shell of another molecule. And that's if we think about that's basically what rusting is if we have a piece of iron, we leave it outside at rust, it gets oxidized. So in terms of why seed oils I believe are deleterious, I don't think it's the omega-six content per say. I think it's actually because they have a lot of oxidation stress in them and we can measure this oxidation in the blood if we feed people oil, seed oils and within a couple of hours we can measure the oxidation products and it actually is even worse for diabetes. So on average they'll stone your circulation for eight hours unless you have poorly controlled blood sugar levels and then we can detect it for nine times longer for up to 72 hours or three days. So that's why seed oils are bad. So when we're talking about what fat you should have, well you should have some omega-three, you should have some omega-six. I personally think that because of the hormonal influences of saturated fat in terms of it doesn't really stimulate much insulin so on the say fourth that's a good source of energy. I think we should be having plenty of saturated fats as well. But it depends on how you're getting it. Did you know that meat also has omega-six fats in it? Now just to digress a little bit just to explain to people why I don't believe that omega-six is inherently inflammatory because we know that omega-six can be inflammatory. So what do I mean? So omega-six fats turn into this chemical called arachidonic acid. An arachidonic acid is that when we have people who get infections or what have you, we know that or injuries then there's a signal. Their body is signaling to turn this arachidonic acid into other chemicals that can cause pain and clotting and so on and so forth. What we generally call inflammation and so we're assuming that arachidonic acid is inflammatory and yet we've done studies where we put people on low carbohydrate diets with to low-in-c oils and we've actually observed that arachidonic acid which is produced from omega-six. We've observed that to increase. Now how God's Green Earth would arachidonic acid increase if you're actually lowering the omega-six coming in. And the reason is when we talked about these inflammatory signals that will then turn the arachidonic acid into inflammatory chemicals that's a signal driven pathway. You actually need to be in an inflammatory state before the arachidonic acid becomes these, you know, leukotryon and so on and so forth. So what happens if you put the body into a healthier state? You don't have these same triggers that convert the arachidonic acid and so the arachidonic acid will accumulate and it's not a problem if it accumulates because it's only inflammatory when you've got a trigger. So if you take away the inflammatory triggers because you're on a healthy diet and what have you, you might be having less grains and less pesticides and whatever else going into the body that can trigger some of these effects. So in itself the omega-six and the subsequent arachidonic acid is not inflammatory and it is every bit as essential as omega-three. The point is that we do get a heap of omega-six in our diet, though, through seed oils and we get very, very little in the way of omega-three except for canola oil which is a two to one ratio. But so I guess that's a very difficult question for me to answer how much fat we need. The answer is so much more complex but what I would say is that rather than trying to work it out on the back of an envelope, the way we have eaten naturally throughout history provides us with what we need. So if your and seed oils were not part of our natural diet so don't eat seed oils, saturated fat was and if you're eating meat, if it's pastured meat, you can get a lot of omega-three as well as omega-six. So just making sure that you're eating food that's been raised naturally and packaged naturally and you're going to get all the right components of the fat that you need. Now interestingly else I'm a holiday recently, we had a long weekend and so we went to a supermarket world sort of it's a bit of a bespoke super market in Australia it's called Harris Farm. It's sort of you know it's in nice amounts. Yeah but yeah a bit more expensive but I'd like to have a look and I was on holiday so I had a bit of time and they had some tello and they had wagyu tello and grass fed tello side by side. Now I wish I could share I took a photo of them with you. Now you had this beautiful yellow coloring in the grass fed tello and we know that wagyu is just fed grains and that was just completely white. So we can clearly see the differences in nutrition between grass fed and grain fed meat so that does actually make a difference. Now I'm not saying grain fed meat is bad but it certainly does miss out on some of the nutrients that we have in the grass fed meat so if for example you are you can only afford grain fed meat then it would be well worth making sure you're having some sardines or something like that that's going to be giving you these other fats that you're probably going to be missing out on. Okay a bit of a bold question for you to sum it up for people that want to think okay I want to lose weight I want to get healthy. What should they focus on? Meat and butter or exercise if you had to pick one. So I mean well clearly diet is more important than exercise for overall health. However the option that you have just given is not perfect for everybody the option of butter and steak. For example we know that dairy for a lot of people is a problematic food. So historically you know dairy we're consuming dairy products when into adulthood when historically we're only ever consumed them when young and not only that we're consuming a dairy product of the different species. So it's actually quite interesting that we would somehow think that this would be appropriate from a natural perspective. And the truth is that we do see lots of people who have reactions to dairy and it causes far more problems than I think people appreciate. Now obviously butter is mainly fat and you could always go to clarified butter which is ghee which has even more fat content less protein content. So it just be mindful that this is not a one size fits all diet and you know sometimes foods which are say for example considered carnival animal based some people might assume well it's animal based there for it's going to be okay well for some people those foods are not perfect. And the reality is there's going to be some plain foods out there that a lot of people will be able to tolerate. So and I think this actually maybe we don't have time for it now but leads to a bigger conversation about what has changed about our food supply now. We know that our the fruits and vegetables were growing today are completely nutrient deficient because of the way we're treated the soil compared to what they were 50 80 years ago. So we know for example in some regions the amount of copper and a vegetable is about 75% less than it used to be. I mean completely nutrient deficient compared to what they were and we've got oodles of pesticides through our food now. I just saw yesterday that there was another lawsuit against, I think, my Montana or something like that, where they paid out another 70 or however many million dollars for in a cancer lawsuit. And we've got, you know, if you just have a look at all of these lawsuits going on around the world with pesticides and causing cancers and so on and so forth, it's, it makes a fascinating reading and it really should ask the question, are these pesticides safe for us to be consuming now? And authorities will have us believe that they're completely safe and there's lots of legal cases on at the moment where people would suggest that they're perhaps not as safe as we would think. So the whole thing is it's not just, you know, all vegetables are necessarily bad, but perhaps the vegetables we're having now, which are depleted of nutrients and probably containing, you know, several different pesticides, that could be a problem. That's why I said it was a bold question. It wasn't to say that people should just eat steak and butter. It's too und because people are really confused because everything sounds bad and they don't know what to eat. And that's where that question was leading to focus on what you eat. Of course, move, of course, to exercise. It's important, but pertain to weight loss. It's not the best thing. It's important for other aspects of overall health. No. It doesn't make you feel full of a longer? Well, say no. There's a lot to unpack in that question. So we're often told that fiber is a central part of a healthy diet. But let's just throw back to a common criticism made against meat that it putrifies in the gut. Have you ever heard anybody making that argument? I've heard many arguments about meat, no vitamin C, not enough nutrients. It stays in your gut. You have no bowel movements. Exactly. Meat stays in the gut that it putrifies. I've heard the particular term putrefaction that it rots, that the body, you know, it just doesn't do anything for the body. Now, let's talk about fiber. We talk about what is the supposed benefit of fiber? The supposed benefit is that it feeds your microbiome. So how does it feed your microbiome? Why isn't the body digesting it? If the body did digest it, it wouldn't be there to feed the microbiome, would it? Because we've heard the term indigestible fiber, it is completely so intolerable fiber, we can't touch it. It doesn't get digested at all. So it feeds the bacteria. So what's another name for feeding bacteria? Rotting, putrefaction. The argument that's leveled against meat that it rots in the gut is not only wrong, it's gaslighting of the 10th degree because that's exactly what happens with fiber. We can't digest fiber. And it's not like we have forced, forced stomachs. We're not a permanent, like a cow. It's not the way our gastrointestinal tract is designed to ferment massive amounts of fiber. If you actually have a look at the structure of our colon, where a lot of the fermentation would occur in primates and other animals, we've actually got a relatively modest size of our colon. It doesn't, like we do have a small capacity for it, but it doesn't seem to be necessary. And it's certainly not something that's focused on within our gastrointestinal system. So when I used to work in hospitals as a junior doctor, I actually did a couple of rotations of colorectal surgery. And we would have patients with what's called colostomy bags where they'd have the bag coming out of their stomach. And that would be collecting all their fecal material. And interestingly, patients full well knew that when they'd consumed lots of fruits and veggies and nuts and so on and so forth, their bag would be falling and overflowing. And I, more than one patient, tell me about accidents where the bag overflow. And when they were eating just meat, the bag would relatively remain empty. Why? Because the body can digest everything that's in the meat. So this whole notion that you get blocked up with meat and so on and so forth just doesn't make sense. Whereas with fiber, the body can't digest it. And so when bacteria digest something, they produce a lot of gas. So which is why people will often feel bloated. The whole volume of the gastrointestinal tract is only a battle leader. And it's all in many loops of bowel, some and so forth. So if you have a bit of small volume of gas in any one of those constrained areas, that will be quite uncomfortable. So we've got very clear evidence that people who consume the most fiber will often have increased gastrointestinal distress. And when they've actually done experimental studies where they eliminate fiber from people's diets. And I'm not talking about to reduce, well, they did, they had several arms with, they'll reduce it, but also completely eliminated as far as practicable. They actually found that symptoms of constipation, including bloating and straining and so on and so forth, actually significantly improved. Now we do know that if we're looking for, if we define constipation as regularity of bowel motion or size of bowel motion or something like that, then with that artificial definition, there will be research that says fiber is good for constipation, because if you're putting in a whole heap more mass that your body can't digest, it's going to have to come out and it's going to probably come out more regularly. So that is true. So if we define constipation as just frequency of bowel actions, but if we were to find constipation as pain, bloating, actual symptoms that bother people rather than just at a tally, then the evidence is that eliminating fiber is actually beneficial for those gut symptoms. And it doesn't appear to be that fiber is necessary for our colonic health. Now the bacteria, while they do produce gas and make you feel uncomfortable and so on and so forth, they can also produce some short chain fatty acids. And these short chain fatty acids can be taken up by cells lining the colon, lining the intestine and that will provide it with some energy. But guess what these colonocytes turn the short chain fatty acids into before they use some foreignergy? Keytones. So if you're in a ketogenic diet where you've got ketone circulating around in your bloodstream full stop, then that's going to be having the same nourishing benefit to your colonocytes as wood consuming the fiber. So now it's because some people say I just need to have the fiber to nourish my bowel. Well, you probably don't need to. Now there are some people who seem to do like taking insoluble fiber and insoluble fiber certainly doesn't seem to have the same level of side effect, sorry, soluble fiber. Solulable fiber doesn't seem to have the same level of side effect as people consuming insoluble fiber. And for example, so strawberries I think are predominantly soluble fiber, whereas blackberries for example may be more insoluble fiber. So there is a a bit of nuance to it and if you are wanting to have fiber and that's just because you believe you need being told to, you may find that the soluble fiber is less disturbing. But it's not good for weight loss. Well, no, it's not, I mean, just to clear it up because that's what people hear. If you go and chat GPT and you ask how to lose weight, it's all these questions I'm asking you. Or if you go online and people see it, it's all these things that I'm asking you and then they think this. That's why I ask these questions. Yeah, which is a fair question, but because you think logically you think, well, it displaces, you know, my desire to eat must be just based on the volume that's in the stomach. In which case, if that was true, you'd just have a glass of water every time you wanted to eat and that should totally suppress your hunger. And clearly that doesn't. So, you know, why would a solid mass that stretches the stomach be any more effective at suppressing appetite than a liquid mass stretching the stomach? If you think about it, it's illogical. Okay, can I ask you about lectins? Because that might be something that people don't quite understand. That has been linked to a lot of chronic infot, I shouldn't say chronic inflammation, but a lot of problems in the body, but also linked to inability to lose weight. How does that work? And firstly, what are lectins and what are the foods that have lectins? So basically plant foods contain lectins. Now, lectins are what we call a carbohydrate binding protein. So, they're little proteins in the food that can bind to carbohydrate molecules. Now, understand that we actually have lots of carbohydrate molecules on our cells, as cell receptors and so on and so forth. So, we often call them glycoproteins, where you've got a bit of a protein with a glyco or a carbohydrate cap to it. and lectins can actually bind to that. Now, interestingly, there are some lectins. So we talked about insulin receptors earlier and how insulin comes long in it and this receptor really just has an affinity for insulin. Now I was probably a little incomplete because there's some chemicals that can actually bind to the insulin receptors and their lectins and some of these chemicals have actually been shown to bind to the insulin receptors even more avidly than insulin itself which is quite astonishing. And when you activate the insulin receptor, well, especially in fat cells, one of the effects is going to be weight gain. So this notion about how lectins might possibly contribute to weight gain is very well established by basically by activating the insulin receptor. They do a whole lot of other deleterious things too though. So you may have heard, well, let's talk about reflux. So a lot of people find that when they eat a lot of grains they get reflux. If we feed grains to cows, we actually have to give them copious amounts of calcium. Otherwise they could potentially even have stomach ulcers that burn holes through this stomach. Brains is not a natural food for cows and my preference would be that cows wouldn't be fed grains. So the way this actually works is that there's something an immune molecule called an IgE molecule that they get react to the grains, the lectins in the grains. And these IgE molecules basically stimulate a series of pathways in the gut that release stomach acid. So eating grains actually stimulates a huge production of stomach acid or release of stomach acid. And Dr Eric Westman did a fabulous study some years ago now where they actually stuck naivogastric tubes down into the stomach of people, feed it through the nose down into the stomach and they were actually measuring the acid levels. And they found that they had a significant drop in pH within six days of stopping eating grains. So these lectins, they have so many effects, you've probably heard of gluten. Well, gluten, we know that causes something called leaky gut. I think CXCR1 and Zonulin and there's all these molecular things we don't need to talk about the names, but we know that and it's not just in people with celiac disease. We can measure this in so-called healthy people taking gluten leaves the leaky gut in most everybody. It's just that the severity is worse in people with celiac disease. And gluten is electone. So these chemicals, let's talk about red kidney beans for example. Now there's a reason you can't buy raw kidney beans. It's because if you were to eat raw kidney beans, then as few as four could potentially be a lethal dose because they contain lectins, which is why this is why we boil and soak a lot of our foods because that actually makes them naturally safer. It sort of breaks down some of the lectins. Now there is a bit of confusion out there because people are well aware that traditional methods of food preparation like soaking and boiling and tonne is so forth will actually break down a lot of lectins. But the reality is you can reduce the lectin load, but that's not as same as eliminating it. So my suggestion would be, well do you want to make it safer or do you want to make it safe? So there's a condition called pharvism. So our bodies have natural antioxidant defenses and one of them is called G6 PD. That produces something called glutathione. And glutathione is our most potent antioxidant that's released in the body. It is absolutely fabulous. So remember we talked before about oxidation stress and electrons being pulled away and rusting. So our body is constantly protecting itself against oxidation stress. It's just unfortunate that our bodies work on oxygen, which naturally generates oxidative stress. Now people with this condition called pharvism, they actually don't produce enough of their natural antioxidant. And when they eat pharvibines, that can be absolutely deadly for them because these generate a large amount of oxidative stress. Now for you or I, that wouldn't kill us because our bodies would ramp up the production of glutathione to protect us. But people with deficient glutathione production, we actually do see the deleterious effects of some of these foods. So electrons is a huge topic that we could probably talk about for two hours. It goes across multiple domains of health. But in essence, yes, they can cause lots of inflammation. They can cause, they absolutely have proven mechanisms to associate with weight gain as well as other side effects. I just want to ask with that because I think people don't know all these small other things that might make them gain weight, especially if they're or not being able to lose weight, especially if they're eating foods at a high inductance. And I will have the foods, a bunch of foods listed in the description of this episode so people can see what foods are higher in inductance. A final question for you. So if people are eating meat and higher fat foods and lower carb foods, let's just say those that they can tolerate. When it comes to fat cells themselves, can they shrink or what happens to the fat cells? Do they shrink or do they multiply and then get destroyed? So in general, there are a couple of variations for this. And I used to believe that you had the maximum amount of fat cells you ever had at age of two. And any change in your weight following that was just due to an increase or a decrease in size of the fat cell. Now under some circumstances, you actually can form new fat cells. But it is still largely true that the bulk of change in your weight is not due to growing more fat cells. It's just due to the changes in size of your existing fat cells. And so I assist in neurosurgery once a week and it's very interesting when we're actually making incisions. And you actually go through the skin and then you get to the fat layer and we actually have you can actually see in very big people who are quite overweight. You can see these large globular fat cells and then very lean people. You see they're more sort of like grains of sand. So it's actually it's very interesting and something we can actually see macroscopically with the eye as well. So when somebody loses weight, do their fat cells decrease in size? Strength. It's like with deflating bloom. Oh okay. But then it can inflate again if you eat more carbohydrates and sugars and seed oils. Absolutely. I think people think that fat loss is like really difficult and hard. But from what you're saying, it's very very simple. It's a science. You just follow the science. If you understand, you've got the chemical influences in the brain that can drive you to eat. You've got the hormonal influences in the body that will determine what you do with what you eat. And if you just control for both of those factors, weight loss can be quite reliable. Wonderful. Well, Dr Mason, thank you so much. That was incredible. I think I definitely learned more than from you than I've learned 20 years and anything I've ever read or learned. If people would like to find you more, where can they find you? So I've got a website which is slowly in the process of being updated. I do Twitter or what is now known as X. So I think it's Dr Paul Mason MD. And I've got several lectures on my friend's website, low-carb down under which is a YouTube channel. And that was founded by my friend Dr Rod Taylor and there's lectures from lots of people in the low-carb sphere talking about everything from I don't know sunlight to diet from lots of fabulous speakers. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for your time Dr Mason and I'm sure we're going to see you very soon. Well, thank you. Really appreciate you having me here. It's wonderful for you to finally connect. Thank you for joining me today on this episode with Dr Paul Mason. Now, if you want to know more information about how to lose weight, everything is in the primal labs. All you have to do is go to the description of this video. There is a link there where it says learn more about how to lose weight. Open that up and there is so much information there about how to lose weight. Now, if you're learning from enjoying these free episodes, please hit the subscribe button that is an excellent zero cost way to support this free health podcast. Now, you can also find me on other social media accounts. I'm on Instagram and on ex formerly known as Twitter as I generally share different information to what you'll see here on YouTube. You can find me on those social media accounts under the name of the primal podcast. And finally, if you love this episode, you'll enjoy another episode I did with Dr Jason Feng. Dr Feng is a kidney doctor but specializes in how to lose weight and intermittent fasting. Dr Feng will discuss the number one way that you can lose weight without counting calories and how to start intermittent fasting the right way and some common mistakes that people make. Finally, thank you for your interest in rich horse healing and I'll see you next week.