Speaker 1It all boils down to the first rule of optimal health which is control carbs. I hate to sound dramatic. I truly do. Any spike in glucose activates some degree of glycation. That's absolutely the case. Plants fight back too. By claw or by chemical, everything that's alive wants to stay alive and it will use those weapons in order to stay alive. Plants are no exception. An anti-nutrients are those chemicals. Glyphosate is contributing to oxidative stress. It's contributing to mitochondrial dysfunction and even neurotoxic effects like impaired signaling in the hippocampus and some anxiety-like behavior in animals. If you just look at the amount of chemicals you're getting, will you say, "Well, the meat I'm eating was fed with grains." But even still, the process of biology eliminates it. Well, the actual amount of glyphosate you're getting from meat is about 1,000th the level that you'd be getting if you're eating a grain or a soy heavy diet because the animal has filtered that out. A plant-based diet does not spare death. There's no way around death. If you were able to get your meat from a farm that has more regenerative practices, that is probably the lowest blood shedding system of nutrition a human could eat.
Speaker 2Ben, why can somebody consume a large meal? Have tons of stored body fat on them? And then two hours later, become ravenously hungry.
Speaker 1Yeah, great question. That certainly proves the point that hunger is not driven by how much energy is in the body. In fact, one way of looking at it is that hunger is partly driven by how much energy is in the blood. And that's not the same. We have tissues, of course, that are designed to store energy. The most famous is fat tissue. But to lesser degree, the liver is two. And even tissues like muscle, while the muscle isn't sharing its energy with anybody else, it has a lot of its own energy that it can rely on. But one tissue kind of stands apart because not only is it a high metabolic rate tissue, but it also can't store its own energy. And that's the brain. And so we have to pity the brain in a particular situation that we put it in almost daily, which is some research really well done studies out of Harvard found that when you had two meals that had the exact same number of calories. So they should have the same degree of satiety here that comes with them. But if the meal had higher carbs and thus a higher insulin response, the total amount of energy available in the blood. So the sum of all calorie molecules like fats and ketones and glucose was lower. And that matters because the brain has to rely only on the fuel that it can get from the blood. And so far as it doesn't really have its own storage of energy. So you have a person who may have hundreds of thousands of calories stored on their body is fat. They might have just hours ago eaten 2,000 calories that they haven't even come close to burning off entirely yet. But because they spiked their insulin, so considerably, that the total fuel in the blood went down. The brain senses that reduction in fuel in the way the brain can correct that reduction in fuel is to put more fuel in the system. So it starts driving hunger.
Speaker 2Okay, the way I understand it, it's twofold. One, what you just said there with limited storage in the brain. And then two fatty acids have a problem getting across the blood brain barrier. Bring that piece in.
Speaker 1Yeah, yeah. So fats are not a fuel for the brain for reasons of odd biochemistry. Now fats can get across the blood brain barrier. That's a bit of a misunderstanding that people have. But what still stands true is that the brain does not use fats as a fuel source that it rather appears to use these fats as structural molecules, maybe even signaling to a degree. But the brain's two primary fuels are going to be glucose and then of course a derivative of fat burning, namely beta hydroxybutyrate, the primary ketone.
Speaker 2Okay, given what we've shared, how do we keep the brain healthy in getting a steady flow of energy?
Speaker 1Yeah, yeah. One of the best ways is to avoid the scenario that you started this with, which is one where you're eating foods and you're hungry. Again, that's coming because of this phenomenon referred to as glycemic variability, where there's no one of the reasons carbohydrates and glucose is so unique is that no other nutrient in the blood has the same dynamic potential that glucose has, where you don't have anything that spikes as rapidly as glucose. I mean, acids don't do it, fats don't do it in the blood and you don't have it drop as quickly as glucose. Amino acids will not have that precipitous drop, fatty acids or triglycerides don't either. Not even, in fact, triglycerides are not even close to having that kind of dynamic level. So one of the problems here with the glucose is what goes up must come down and with blood glucose, the higher it goes and more rapidly, usually the deeper it will get, including going below where it even started in the first place.
Speaker 2Okay, let's go into more detail there. Somebody having a high carb meal, spiking blood glucose, insulin is going to rise, bring that down quickly, and then blood glucose drops below baseline, causing the person to feel that hunger cravings and start suffering.
Speaker 1Yeah, that's right. In fact, the consequences of glycemic variability go beyond just hunger. There's pretty convincing studies to show that glycemic variability is more damaging to overall brain health, including Alzheimer's risk and even atrophy or shrinking of certain brain sections, more than chronically elevated glucose is. And so this changes the view of glucose that, in fact, it's more evidence why we shouldn't be just relying on a single measurement of glucose measured every six months or a year, whether it's A1C or just fasting glucose alone, we're primed to only see that as a problem if it's elevated, but we could have a scenario where the person comes in in a fasted state in those glucose markers and relatively reasonable. However, if they had a CGM on, we would see that their lifestyle is constantly one of these highs and lows. Again, the highs and the lows that glycemic variability actually is more closely linked to and predicts Alzheimer's disease than just chronically elevated glucose alone does as much as we focus on the latter and completely ignore the former.
Speaker 2So you brought up dementia. What about mental health challenges? Does that relate to this system we've been talking about?
Speaker 1Yeah, sure does. Yeah, so part of what I wanted to devote some page space to was people appreciating that these changes in glucose also connect with deeper concerns. Well, I'm not sure deeper is the right word, but more more unique brain concerns, things like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and depression and anxiety. So these mood disorders, these are also all driven in part, if not totally, I'm not saying that, but they're at least partly influenced by glycemic variability. These peaks and valleys of glucose where the brain is flush with energy. The body is hyperglycemic. We have this momentary burst of glucose and the brain will take it and then use it happily. And then it's it's almost like you're revving the engine up to red line when all this glucose is coming in. Boy, the brain is just performing and then it's gone. And so we're still we still have our foot on the accelerator. We're still trying to rev the engine in the red line and then all of a sudden we cut off the fuel entirely just like that's going to be bad for the engine. Of course, it's not going to be optimal or healthy for the brain.
Speaker 2Okay, given what we've shared now, we're kind of getting into some of the problems of spiking blood glucose, which relates back to carbs and sugars in the diet. How do we begin to build a plate to fuel the brain properly and the rest of the body?
Speaker 1Yeah, people would probably expect me to just say, oh, we'll go low carb. And that's certainly a very, very feasible way to do it. But when I was putting together the carb crisis and collecting all of my thoughts on this, I really wanted to try to present this as not just another anti-carb or low carb or kind of carnivore focused or adjacent book. I wanted to try to find a middle ground in that not declaring war on all carbs, but scrutinizing the type of carbohydrate and even the timing where low carb, of course, it's going to be helpful in this. And we have this, this is extraordinarily well documented, including in people with type 1 diabetes where glycemic variability or time in range is such an important marker of how well they're managing their diabetes. If you just go low carb, what is once this very loud volatile signal becomes very quiet and stable. But you can also just be mindful of the type where, of course, you focus more on the less starchy fruits and vegetables grains essentially would have to have almost no place or a very little roll here, but the less starchy fruits and vegetables. But then also what you do with them with regards to say fermentation where I am an enormous advocate of fermentation because the bacteria that are doing the fermenting take away the stuff I don't want, namely the starches and sugars, while leaving everything else intact, namely any hints of amino acids and fats, and in fact, leaving behind some short-chain fatty acids, which are metabolically very beneficial. So the net effect of this is a pretty favorable mathematics that comes with fermentation, but also the timing that I mentioned a moment ago, there's really compelling human studies to show that you can give people, in fact, the same people, just change the order in which they are eating their macronutrients, where they're eating their less starchy vegetables and their protein, their meat sources first, and then they're having the more refined grains and rice at the end of it. If those more refined starchy sources of carbohydrates are put at the end of the meal, you have a significant reduction studies to show up to almost 40% reduction in the glucose excursion or the glucose bump that you would get if those refined starches are at the beginning of the meal. So carbs come last is a good way of remembering that.
Speaker 2I love the way you structure all this in your book. You have your three buckets, carbs at the top, three problems with them, or potential problems, one being metabolic, which we've been focusing on, two being anti-nutrient, and then three being chemical. So we'll take your time and go through each of these. Let's stick with metabolic and fully hash that out. Somebody not regulating blood glucose, we've already talked about the brain issue. Let's zoom back and talk about glycation, something that affects the whole body. So blood glucose, chronically spiking, talk more to what the problem is there.
Speaker 1Yep, yep. So glucose is sticky. You can imagine, you know, you have a little toddler running through the house with chocolate on their hands or syrup, and they're just, everything they touch gets a little residue of these of the sticky sugar. Well, the same thing happens in the blood, and you have glucose, which can get stuck irreversibly. And so in other words, once it's stuck, you can't unstick it, where the glucose sticks to certain amino acids. And so you have anything with these amino acids can start to get glycated like proteins. You can almost pick proteins. This can include hormones. In fact, insulin can get glycated and thus altered and not work as well, because you've changed the structure. The thing about proteins, proteins work because of their structure. They work because of their shape. That shape like like a like a Lego piece or a puzzle piece allows it to fit in with something else and then do something else as a result of it. And if you've bound a sugar or glucose molecule on that, you've you've adjusted the shape of it. And now it's not going to fit where it ought to have or what it was originally designed where it was originally designed to fit. And so you have hormones that can get glycated. You have receptors for those hormones that can get glycated. You have amino acid residues in in your DNA that can get glycated. So when when something is glycated, you've damaged it and it is an irreversible damage. Beyond that, the you can have the glycation of proteins in the blood, which form advanced glycation end products or AGEs. And then those will bind to specific receptors for advanced glycation end products or R-AGE or Rage. And then when rage is activated, you've suddenly turned on one of the strongest pro and flammatory signals in a cell. So the advanced glycation end products, the ages or the process of glycation is not only damaging the protein that it binds to, but then it's damaging the cell further by driving pretty aggressively in flammatory signaling. And one of the reasons why I'd take some time to to point a finger at fructose is that fructose, despite the name glycation coming from glucose, actually can glycate proteins about seven times more readily than glucose can. So if I've articulated successfully what a problem glycation is, then the person is left with a bigger appreciation of how damaging fructose can be in the way we consume it, which is very processed concentrated sources.
Speaker 2We'll come back to fructose. You dedicated a whole chapter to that. I want to make sure we cover it. But when it comes to glycation, how much does it take of spiking blood glucose to actually have that negative impact? Yeah, not a lot. Okay. Cause somebody could be pretty metabolically healthy, eating pretty healthy, having stable blood sugar. But then go off the rails one day and eat a couple of pieces of birthday cake and have a big spike. Or they could just be eating moderately, which I know you don't like this word moderation within the diet. I don't like it either. And have say a moderate like glucose all the time. So how much does it take and how often to have this glycation?
Speaker 1Yeah. Yeah. Well, I hate to sound dramatic. I truly do. And so I'm happy for people to take this with a grain of salt, if not sugar, then any spike in glucose activates some degree of glycation. Now, is it going to be itself a very damaging level? Well, I guess that's up to how much is already there. The human body is certainly designed to handle a certain amount, because glucose is just glycating stuff all the time in the background, and hopefully at very modest levels. But yeah, any spiking glucose increases or you'll see a subsequent spiking glycation.
Speaker 2Okay. So far we've covered glycation, ages, energy issues with the brain. Before we move on from glucose, any other major challenges in the body when we're spiking it.
Speaker 1Yeah. Oxidative stress is one. In fact, I'll go back to the metaphor of the engine that's burning in red line when you are you are forcing the mitochondria. It's almost like your force feeding. So now we have an instance where we're forcing more fuel in the engine than the engine can adequately burn. And we have some of that fuel that's sputtering out of the engine without being fully combusted. That is, if you will, that's analogous to the mitochondria of a cell being overfed glucose, and it can't keep up. And so the result of that, the sputtering out of the fuel, as the engine's being forced fed, would be the production of reactive oxygen species or ROS. And then these Ross molecules, of course, are like wrecking balls. They're bulls in a China shop, just damaging anything they bounce into.
Speaker 2Okay. Coming back to fructose, this is metabolized different in the body versus glucose. Let's talk about major sources people are taking that in and walk through the metabolism of it.
Speaker 1Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Major sources are going to be fruit juice. That's probably the most concentrated source of just pure fructose. And then other sources are going to be anything with sugar or it's close cousin high fructose corn syrup, which is just slightly more fructose than just sucrose or normal sugar has. And then any of its other names, there's so many different clever little names for sugar in certain varieties now, so that ingredient labels don't have to call it all sugar. They almost have to admire it if it weren't so damaging to us. But lots of readily consumed sources of fructose. Fructose is unique in a few ways. One is how it's tissue handles it, and that's the liver, where the, now the gut will metabolize some of it itself. So the gut can take fructose and use it as a fuel, although not without consequence, and I'll come back to that in a second. But then second, the liver will then get the the lion's share of all the remaining, all the fructose that gets absorbed. It goes from the gut straight to the liver and the liver is the primarily, in fact, it's essentially the only tissue that can burn fructose now from the blood. But with all of that comes a quirk of how fructose is metabolized, which is unregulated as much as I have developed a name for myself, pointing a finger at glucose as a problem and the subsequent insulin response. And too much of that is a problem, but it's at least regulated or trying to be regulated by insulin, where insulin will dictate what the cell is doing with fuel. And if there's a lot of glucose coming in, insulin can tell the cell, hey, store some of that for later use as glycogen or turn some of it to fat and store it for later fat use. What with the liver primarily and the gut cell, again, is that insulin can even determine how much glucose is being burned. There's no way to turn off fructose burning because it's unregulated. And as fructose burning is running unregulated, it has to break down a tremendous amount of ATP, the main energy currency or main energy molecule in the body and in every cell of the body. As it's breaking down ATP so rapidly, a couple biochemical steps later ends up generating a lot of uric acid. And so the primary source of uric acid with the most obvious consequence of that being gout is fructose metabolism, that if someone's worried about their uric acid levels, you should be worried about how much fructose you're consuming. It's not people want to pretend that the primary source of Uric acid is coming from meat, and it's protein metabolism and that is absolutely not true. It's coming from fructose metabolism, and you can lower if someone's fructose consumption, you will lower their Uric acid in pretty short order. And then with the gut, one other thought is that one of the consequences with fructose coming to the gut is that it changes how molecules come from the gut into the blood. Where normally, if a molecule is coming from the gut into the blood, it does so by moving through the cell itself. So the gut cells are acting, you know, they're bound tightly shoulder to shoulder, like bouncers at a bar, and they can look at the molecule and say, "I recognize you, you can come in." But they don't unlike the bouncers at the bar, they don't come in by the bouncers stepping apart from each other, they pass through. So the cell is able to recognize it, take it in, and then release it on the backside of it. So it has to pass through the guard cell here, if you will. But the problem with fructose is that it increases the distance between them. So now you have the two bouncers, and they step apart from each other. Now you have molecules that have no business coming in that if it was left up to the cell, the guardian itself, the sentinel, it would have looked at it and said, "You don't belong here because I don't recognize you, so I'm not going to let you in." And if you can't come into me, you can't come into the party behind me, into the blood. But now with fructose, you've had these sentinels step away. So now there's a gap, and things are able to slip through like endotoxins. Endotoxins are these gut bacteria derived very prone flammatory molecules, one of the most famous is lipopolysaccharide or LPS. But suffice to say, with more fructose comes more leaking of these molecules from the gut, or leaky gut, which will lead to substantially more inflammation in the body, and then back to a topic I can never seem to get too far away from, with more inflammation comes more insulin resistance.
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Speaker 1Yeah, my views on fruit have actually long been pretty reasonable and even favorable. Primarily, the difference with fruit versus fructose is the amount in what it comes with. That someone could go eat a whole orange, and you're getting a very modest amount of fructose coming with that orange. Compared to a glass of orange juice, where you now have drank four oranges, it'd be hard for me, as much as I actually like oranges, to eat four oranges. I'd feel quite full, but I would feel full in part because of the fiber, and that's the other point that I was making that it depends what it comes with. Fructose has a friend, and that is fiber, in nature. In nature, there would be no source of fructose without fiber. That's how we should eat it. In our love of all things sweet, and we juice these things, we've removed the fiber from the fructose, and that is not a good divorce. These two things are supposed to be happily married, so when we get the fructose, it should come with fiber. It's optimal spouse, metabolically speaking.
Speaker 2When it comes to fiber, how differently do you look at, say, a handful of blueberries on some yogurt, versus putting that in a blender, and making it smoothie, and pulverizing it, changing its structure? Obviously, when we're chewing it, it changes, but to a much lesser degree.
Speaker 1Yeah, yeah, no. When we, with high-speed blenders, you're sharing these fibers. You're changing as much, there's a spectrum here, if you will. On one end, we have the whole fruit. On the other end, we have the purely juiced form. In the middle would be the smoothie form, where we've kept the whole fruit in there, but we've drastically changed the structure of the fiber, and we've compromised its function. It's still going to be better than just the fruit juice alone, but not as good if we were just eating the whole fruit.
Speaker 2We're going to move away from metabolic. We have two other buckets, so I want to make sure we cover. Before we do, you've talked about order of eating these foods and the importance there to lessen the burden. I know one of the other things in your book you talk about is vinegar, specifically apple cider vinegar. Talk about how somebody could use that, and then we can move into other ways to lessen that burden if somebody is going to include a healthy amount of carbs.
Speaker 1As much as I am a fan of apple cider vinegar and I am, someone would, they don't need to go to the whole apple cider side of the vinegar. It's the acetic acid that appears to primarily carry vinegar as a metabolic champion here, but the apple cider portion of it is good because it brings with it the bacteria itself, if it's a raw and filtered version of it. Acetic acid or vinegar will dramatically change the glucose absorption and with a delayed glucose absorption comes a reduced insulin secretion. That's a win. That's one of the reasons why a person who is wanting to control carbs, which is always my first interventional step. One way they can do that is by consuming two tablespoons of vinegar in ideally in water, you know, you've mixed it into something you can drink, and then you eat your high carb meal. If that's the meal that's coming up, that's the perfect way to do it.
Speaker 2Okay, let's talk about muscle, building muscle, building up that metabolic sink, what that means and why it's so powerful.
Speaker 1Yeah, yeah. In fact, just as I was answering the question about vinegar, I actually was just this close to mentioning muscle as well, where someone could proceed their high carb meal with two tablespoons of vinegar, and even to take it one step further, even better, they could get up and go on a 10 minute walk after their highest carb meal. In fact, I'm an enormous advocate of that. If a person's circumstances allow it, whatever your highest carb meal is of the day, and I would say ideally that's probably lunch, let your let that be followed by a walk of some kind of getting up and doing something. And not have to be dramatic. In fact, don't make it dramatic because then you have too many barriers to just doing it, just do something, and then the muscles act like these sponges that just start soaking up the glucose. And by mass, muscle is the heaviest tissue in our body, and then when you combine that with its very dynamic metabolic demand, it becomes a friend where in this, I mean, it's a friend in every possible way, but including in most especially now with controlling glucose. That if you get up and go on a walk, not only have you started moving your biggest you're now. leveraging your biggest tissue in the best way, which is its metabolic demand has gone up. Muscle is interesting because it can go from having a fairly modest contribution to our total metabolic rate, like with you and me right now, our kidneys and our brain, actually, or maybe even our heart, has a higher metabolic rate than our muscle. But in the moment we get up and do something, muscle just immediately goes to number one. And that's what we want to do here. We want our number one muscle, that moment to be carried by when our glucose is going up, we start moving our muscle, and then we can correct that glucose excursion much more rapidly. And indeed prevent it from getting as high as it would have otherwise.
Speaker 2Independent movement, is there still a metabolic benefit of having more muscle volume on the body when it comes to glucose coming in? And that was the same part I wanted to get you to elaborate.
Speaker 1Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. So insulin, a moment ago, I was sort of defending the role of insulin and glucose management. And so insulin's one of insulin's jobs, not its only job, one of its jobs. And in fact, it's most famous is to lower blood glucose. And it does so by opening these glucose transporters on various cells of the body, including muscle. So if you just have more muscle, you have more doors for insulin to come and knock on, more doors to open more doors through which glucose can go. And thus you more easily control your blood glucose. You don't have to fight that as much. The more muscle mass comes an easier control of blood glucose.
Speaker 2Okay, I think we did a good job covering the metabolic challenges of carbs. Let's move into anti-nutrients. Yeah, what are the top ones people are eating when they're including carbs in the diet and maybe not even knowing it?
Speaker 1Yeah, yeah. So anti-nutrients, that was you'd mentioned a moment ago that in the book, I outlined three burdens that come uniquely with carbohydrates. And we've discussed the metabolic and that's certainly the what people associate. If they know my name at all, they're associating it with the metabolic burden, even if they wouldn't have called it that. What I wanted to do in the book is actually further point the finger at dietary carbohydrates as the primary problem in the modern human diet because of these two additional burdens. And the anti-nutrient burden is one that almost sounds more myth because it's it's it just comes across as almost ridiculous. But let me frame this in a way to just help impress upon everyone listening that everything that's alive wants to stay alive. That's just a feature of nature. When we want to get some protein and fat from an animal, we have to chase that animal down and or overcome its defenses. If we can chase it down, maybe that was its only defense that it can't really fight back. And now we've won and everything we get from that animal is very usable. If the animal can, it will fight back. But plants fight back too. And by claw or by chemical, everything that's alive wants to stay alive. And it will use those weapons in order to stay alive. They use chemicals because they don't have claws. So the anti-nutrient is a chemical in a plant that helps the plant survive. In part, it's a defense mechanism where people know this intuitively. If you and I were to wander through the forests of Ontario and try to survive, well, we're surrounded by plants. Why don't we just eat the plants? In fact, we'd probably die through poisoning by eating those plants. So the majority of plants on the planet are going to kill us with so much toxins and anti-nutrients in them. And even the ones that don't kill us overtly are going to make us regret it because it will either make us a little sick. It'll make an immune response in the body, or it will simply prevent us from absorbing the nutrients we think we're getting. Like some of the anti-nutrients, like phytic acids, will block the absorption of minerals. So we think we're getting a lot of iron or magnesium and oops, nope, because we're getting them with phytates and the phytates will bind those minerals. And now we can't absorb them. So we're becoming increasingly iron deficient, for example. Or alternatively, we are eating some plants with anti-nutrients that block protein digestion. And so we're trying to get our plants from our proteins from plants. Or even if we're eating protein from an animal source, which is best, but then coupling that with a plant source of anti-nutrients that are in that's inhibiting protein digestion enzymes, well, now we're not even getting as much of that protein as we thought we were getting. And so all of these from either subtle to strong are ways that anti-nutrients are going to try to make us regret eating the plant. It's the way the plant fights back.
Speaker 2Okay, so what are the biggest categories we want to be on the look out for? And I think when you talked about fermentation, you may have briefly touched on the fact that this can help with this. But let's get into methods of processing when it comes to plants that can help bring these anti-nutrients down.
Speaker 1Yeah, yeah, yeah. So some of the primary ones I mentioned, you know, like phytates. Another one is oxalates from like these much beloved leafy greens. Someone should never be juicing or drinking these. Oxalates can form, in fact, that's one of the common sources of kidney stones and crystal formation in the body. So you get joint pain from these and you get kidney stones from these. Tannins, I mentioned a moment ago, lectins even, lectins are combined and compromise the intestinal lining. So a lot of these are, they're very abundant, they're very problematic. And some people are more sensitive to them than others. But yeah, there are some natural ways to help reduce the amount of those and help the plant naturally get rid of it. One way is some of them is through sprouting, soaking can do some of it where you want to eat oats. Well, you soak those oats with other grains that have phytase, a natural enzyme, like buckwheat. What I used to call kasha growing up when I grew up in Alberta, we called it kasha from a Russian word from my grandpa's Soviet Russia line. But you can soak it with different, so soaking helps get rid of the anti-nutrients. Sprouting can help if this is something that can sprout. And then fermentation can activate enzymes that break down a lot of these. And then even just simple pressure cooking where the heat and the moisture can help degrade these anti-nutrients as well. So all of these are natural time-tested ways of helping diminish the amount of anti-nutrients or in them or in the plants.
Speaker 2You talked about before how if we were in Ontario and the forest, we started eating different plants, we'd probably kill ourselves. So true, one thing we've done as humans is hybridized a lot of these plants. So we've brought in the anti-nutrient countdown. And we've increased the size and glucose content, which ties back to the metabolic category. Yep. So you could probably argue both ways, like there's some good and here's some bad, but if we bring the anti-nutrients down to a moderate level, and then we can still consume them without killing ourselves, maybe in the long run, we're actually doing more harm. If they were something in the past, we would have just avoided before it was hybridized. Now we're like, okay, it's in the middle ground. We can eat that on a regular basis. It doesn't kill us, but it depletes us in all these other ways. So just an interesting thought experiment. Good, very good point of what we've done.
Speaker 1But let me even still, I would add that that's a really good segue to the other burden, which is as we have forced nature to bend to our will and grow, say, a lot of corn, it is profoundly unnatural to go into thousands of acres of land that would have been natural prairie land and force it to grow a single crop. Now that, I hate to sound like I'm so universally against that because what a blessing to just feed more people overall in some way, shape, or form. So I don't mean to sound so entirely negative, but if we're being honest, we have to acknowledge that what we've forced the land to do is unnatural. Nature does not like that sort of singularity growing, and so we have to force it to grow, and that's what brings us to the chemical burden that I outlined. I don't know if we're ready to get onto that, but that's that third burden that when we are forcing this sameness in nature, we have to try to kill parts of nature that would want to stop that sameness from happening. We will get there.
Speaker 2I want to make sure we're still in anti-nutrients here a little bit longer. You talk about in the book how you've more recently had a fascination with auto immune. So this is a special group that often will find more of a challenge with the anti-nutrients. Tie that together.
Speaker 1Oh yeah. In fact, I like how you framed that. One of the reasons I first, in fact, the thing that started that gave birth to this idea in my mind, the entire book, was because of the case studies, both published and just shared anecdotally, of people with terrible autoimmune conditions, psoriasis on their skin or ulcerative colitis, or Crohn's disease in their intestinal system, and more who had total resolution of their problems by just cutting out all plants. When I first started seeing this, I thought it was, I just dramatic, that there must be something else to this. And then the more I looked into this, I realized, wow, this is a very real area of research and that was this idea that I've already articulated that the plants fight back. But yeah, there are known anti-nutrients, things like glyaden and lectins that erode those tight junctions. So the back to the sentinels or the balancers at the bar that I mentioned earlier, some of these anti-nutrients will force those apart. You can think of something like celiac disease. That's the most obvious example. But you even have a result of eating these grain-based anti-nutrients, contributing to things like thyroiditis or rheumatoid arthritis, and I'd already mentioned psoriasis. We also have various trips and inhibitors that come from things like wheat, which are known to activate this specific inflammatory receptor called TLR4. You also have glycoloids from like potato skins and tomatoes and other night shades, which are also known to compromise cell membranes and have been implicated in inflammatory bowel and skin diseases. And there was a paper published just within the past few years of a pilot trial, it was in 2022 of people with multiple sclerosis, which can be a very debilitating disease, where they end up cutting out these carb sources in their diet and focus more on high fat sources of, like with meat and dairy, and they get better. Their mood is better, their energy is better, their mobility improves, and other myriad other case studies that have now been published. And in fact, there are people who are leading efforts to publish larger scale trials, which is good as much as I appreciate an anecdote as a biomedical scientist. I also just feel compelled to want more evidence, but it's coming. -
Speaker 2I don't want to send us to far off track and drive us back into metabolic deeply, but I want to make sure I highlight that other point I was trying to make too, where fruits these days are often given a free pass, or they're looked at as the foundation of a healthy diet. But if you look at an apple from 100 years ago versus today, if people are going to make that argument, you have to at least know that what you're talking about has been propped up and hybridized by humans. And we're not even talking about the original thing that before would have been probably self-limiting due to the anti-nutrients and the sourness and the seeds and different variables. -
Speaker 1Oh yeah, that's right. Yeah, so you'd mentioned our genius in taking plants and turning them into something more edible. On one hand, I liked the way you framed it actually, and wish I would have elaborated this more heavily in the book, actually, now that you say it, that in our effort to reduce the anti-nutrients, we end up increasing the metabolic burden. So we're just sort of shifting the stones from one bucket to another. I mean, maybe the net effect is going to be positive, depending on the person, but in another person, we could say the net effect is going to be more negative. -
Speaker 2If you care about your health, you probably focus a lot on what you eat, but the air you breathe matters just as much. Having poor quality air in the home is like fish swimming in a dirty tank. It doesn't make any sense. Air is something we're exposed to every second of the day. We personally have two Jasper Air Scrubbers running constantly in our home to keep our indoor air quality dialed in. Most people assume their HVAC systems handling it, but standard furnace filters are primarily designed to protect the equipment, not deeply clean the area you're breathing. While standard air purifiers are too small to actually make a difference, the Jasper Air Scrubber uses commercial grade filtration that actually works. They have a multi-layer hepa and activated carbon filtration system to capture airborne particles and reduce gases. Things like dust, pollen, pet dander, smoke and VOCs from cleaners and paints. They have built-in sensors that monitor air quality in real time and automatically adjusts performance as needed. They're really simple and effective. Jaspers are built from cold-world steel. They come with a lifetime warranty and they actually look good in the home, which matters if they're sitting in your living space. You can save $200 on a Jasper Air Scrubber by using my link, which is jasper.co/jessie. That's jasper.co/jessie. Jasper is spelled J-A-S-P-R. Because optimizing your health isn't just about what you eat, it's also about what you breathe. Well, let's move into the third bucket now. Go a bit deeper in that. So we've gone over metabolic anti-nutrients. Let's talk about these different chemicals we're spraying on the plants. And we'll focus in on carbs as that's the thesis today. That are needed to prop up and protect these crops.
Speaker 1Yeah, so these are things like pesticides where we're killing the animals that want to come in and eat what we're growing. Urbicides where we're killing the weeds that want to infringe and eat the nutrients that the crops we're growing are relying on. And then even fungicides to a lesser degree, although that's still a big one. But this is what I refer to as a toxic harvest that when we're bringing in these plants, we're looking at them as just sources of nutrients, although they are also sources of anti-nutrients as we've articulated. But in order to force nature to grow this sameness, we've had to kill a lot of things, animals and other plants. And this is part of what's easily overlooked. But it's also something that is, because you don't see it, you don't see that death when you're eating your corn. You may see the death when you're eating a steak. And so to a person who can only see what's on their plate, they don't see the death that comes with that corn. And in fact, if you are to attempt to get a similar amount of protein from plants, as you would from say beef, you have to kill about 20 to 30 times more animals, if not more. Now that's just coming back to the, that's not necessarily the toxic harvest, although it's a part of it. But if you just look at the amount of chemicals you're getting, well, you would say, well, the meat I'm eating was fed with grains. But even still, the process of biology eliminates it. So one of the most famous chemicals here is gonna be glyphosate. Well, the actual amount of glyphosate you're getting from meat is about 1,000th the level. So you'd be getting, if you were getting it from, if you're eating a grain or a soy heavy diet, because the animal has filtered that out. And so by the time you're eating that muscle meat, you're not getting essentially any of it. And so the animal has reduced that for you. But glyphosate is not benign, that it is known to damage the body. There's this pathway that's used here called the Shikimate pathway, wherein glyphosate is contributing to oxidative stress. It's contributing to mitochondrial dysfunction, and even neurotoxic effects, like impaired signaling in the hippocampus and some anxiety-like behavior in animals. But you have other ones, like atrazine, which is sometimes referred to as a chemical castrator, where this is the famous herbicide that has been shown to make male frogs become female frogs. And of course, mammals are not amphibians, so that's not gonna happen in humans at all. But it just is a stark example of what is happening here, where there are known, the atrazines can mimic estrogen, and they have a known testosterone lowering effect. And human populations near heavy agriculture areas where atrazine is used and sprayed have much higher rates of hormonal disturbances and even in young women or menstruating women have known altered menstrual cycles. So these are not benign. -
Speaker 2One of the things I'm glad you brought up and I learned from your book, One of Many, was this glyphosate filtration when it comes to animals. Because when I think of fish specifically, we're always told eat the smaller fish on the food chain, the bigger fish are gonna bioaccumulate all the different toxins. So I would have assumed that eating these animals, if they're eating the grains are gonna have massive quantities of glyphosate, but you're saying the opposite, which is refreshing, great to know. -
Speaker 1Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah, I mean, it's certainly another reason to just appreciate animal-sourced nutrition. But my hope is, and I say this with some genuine compassion that a person who has framed their diet in a way where they want to minimize ecological harm, that is admirable. I respect it, but it's naive to think that eating a plant-based diet somehow spares the planet some harm. That in fact, you could make the case that a plant-based diet, which is so generally nutritionally deficient that you have to have a massively varied consumption of plants to even attempt to make up for the nutrition season. You still couldn't do it. You would still have to supplement with things like heme iron and vitamin B12, which you just cannot get from plants. But even putting that to the side, a plant-based diet does not spare death. There's no way around death in that if you were able to get your meat from a farm that has more regenerative practices, where it's just allowing free grazing cattle, for example. That is probably the lowest blood shedding system of nutrition a human could eat.
Speaker 2For somebody that's going to include some of these plants in their diet, but they want to do it in a healthy way. There are now realizing maybe they didn't before the amount of pesticides that can be on them. What is the solution there? Go organic. Is that enough? Different ways to wash these veggies. What do we do?
Speaker 1Yeah, awesome. Yeah, good. That's really, I'm glad you brought that up. Yeah, because throughout the book, again, I don't mean for people who would hear what we're saying and say, well, and I just have to go zero carb. I don't think that's necessary in most people, indeed, the vast majority of people. But yeah, there are ways to try to mitigate and get rid of some of these chemicals if you are still eating a plant. Organic can be a good way, although what's considered organic covers quite a range of things nowadays. That name is sometimes lost. It's meaning, but washing in certain ways like with vinegar or baking soda can help peeling, depending on what you're eating, peeling the fruit for or the vegetable can also help. If it's something that's growing in the ground, it may tend to be more spared. The chemicals, in fact, on average it would because you're not spraying it in the ground so that can help, although it can kind of soak down into it or grow down into it through the leaves on the top. But yeah, there are ways to do this that can reduce it. Different forms of washing, like I said, different forms of peeling are very, that's low hanging fruit, if you will, to try to get rid of some of those chemicals.
Speaker 2What about grains, flowers? Things that have been processed down.
Speaker 1There's no way to get rid of them in that case. When you're getting flower, for example, as much as you are baking with it and you want those starches to help give you a nice plump loaf of bread, the chemicals are there. Unless you can find out that you're buying the grain from an area that has not been sprayed or treated with the chemicals, there are ways to do it. It's going to be harder to find and just more expensive generally. But boy, if you have the time and the means, then that's the way to do it. If you can ensure that these flowers from the grains have not been treated with these herbicides and pesticides, then that's a better way to do it. Now, you're still not avoiding all harm. Just the simple fact of plowing and harvesting is still killing a lot of animals that live in the ground there. Nesting birds, gofers, ground squirrels, mice, you're killing all of those things quite aggressively. Please remember that you're never avoiding death, which does not need to be a problem. All life exists because of something that died, whether it is a plant that is thriving on the leftover material of a dead animal or whether it's an animal that is thriving on the substance of a plant that was once alive. Everything that was dead was once alive. It wants to stay alive. Everything that's alive, again, as I said a moment ago, does so by benefiting from something that died. There's no way around that in this fallen world in which we live.
Speaker 2Isn't it true when it comes to glyphosate? A lot of it is used right at the very end to dry out the crops, as they're harvesting.
Speaker 1Yep, that's right. Yes, especially with the grains, like you just said. That's probably what you were kind of alluding to. But yeah, glyphosate is used in a lot of different ways, but at the end, that's one way in which grains and its subsequent flowers get heavily concentrated. It's just because of the process of trying to preserve them and get them to market.
Speaker 2Okay, somebody now aware of the different problem areas when it comes to carbs, but they're still going to include them in the diet. Talk about different populations, whether it be different ages, male versus female, and how they can handle carbs differently. And then we'll get into how somebody figures out the amount that can still be healthy for them.
Speaker 1There are populations that have a higher carb tolerance. Like a growing child can handle carbs more readily than the grown adult. And that certainly touches on the metabolic part of it, where they can use those starches and sugars as a fuel. They may still need to be mindful of the anti-nutrient burden, depending on their own immune response to these chemicals and nutritional status. They may still need to be mindful of the chemical burden. But also with pregnancy and lactation, that woman's got a much higher metabolic demand than she used to. Again, still need to be mindful of the other burdens.
Speaker 2Maybe feeling overwhelmed now with all this information, but they're inspired. They're going to make a change. What are the top three things they can do to get the ball rolling after taking all of a sin?
Speaker 1Yeah, yeah. One way, it's nice. If they have access to a CGM, which is increasingly available, they could just try to determine whether they fall into the metabolic burden group. Where if they eat a few pieces of bread and they find that their glucose levels are back down to normal at about 90 to 120 minutes and they only rose about 10 to 20, maybe 25 points, that's a good sign. That you tend to handle the metabolic burden quite well, or rather that it's not really a burden. But if you eat those same pieces of bread and your glucose spikes by 40 or 50 points and it's still not down by two hours, you carry that metabolic burden. You need to be mindful of the starches and the sugars. Now, the other person who doesn't have a metabolic burden may have an anti-nutrient burden. They may be the person who's struggling with Crohn's disease or psoriasis or rheumatoid arthritis. They're not concerned about the starches and sugars. They're concerned about the anti-nutrient. They want to get sources of plants that have been fermented, or for example, soaked or sprouted or otherwise treated to try to remove the anti-nutrients. To me, it all boils down to the first rule of optimal health, which is control carbs. Now, I present in the book that it's more than just eating less. If you will, it's kind of eating smarter, that the type and the timing and the treatment of those carbohydrates all influence the impact and whether the burden is substantial or minimal.
Speaker 2All right, Ben, we're going to end here for today. Love the new book. We're going to link it up in the show notes. Your original book is still one of my top 10 favorites. Everybody's got to get a copy of both of those. They're going to be linked up together. Your social media, your YouTube channel, everything's going to be there for people. Thank you for coming on. Thank you for writing this book. I learned a lot. I know others are as well. Keep doing the great work. Thank you. Awesome.
Speaker 1Awesome. Thanks, Jesse. Always good to connect with you.
Speaker 2Thanks again. Now that you're finished with the episode, head on over to jessiechapis.com for detailed show notes, including links to everything we discussed. Thanks for listening and have a great day.
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