Time for some interesting Q&A from devoted B.rad podcast listeners.
Thanks for the thoughtful questions and comments that make a great contribution to the overall enjoyment, knowledge acquisition, and community spirit with podcast listeners from around the world.
We’ll cover the logistics and benefits of limiting digestive function to a maximum time window of 12 hours (for example, how caffeinated beverages, herbal tea, and even supplement pills like multivitamins interrupt the fasting process), and how the body works most efficiently (in terms of cell repair, immune function, anti-inflammatory) in a fasted state. We hear from an old-time endurance athlete wondering about how keto aligns with endurance training, and also how to reconcile the enthusiastic voices promoting disparate dietary strategies, from plant-based to ancestral. We talk about the validity of the one-mile time trial as an excellent longevity predictor at age 50 (Cooper Institute research), and the rationale and benefits for consuming a maximum nutrient density diet featuring forgotten gems like organ meats—or taking organ supplements if you can’t seem to include organs and bone broth in your diet. Send more comments and questions to podcast@bradventures.com!
TIMESTAMPS:
Raymond has a question about drinking water in that 12-hour fasting window suggested in the book, Two Meals a Day. Give your digestive system a break every day. [02:13]
Your eating is tied to your circadian rhythm. You should think about trying to put the evening meal before dark when possible. [04:27]
There are studies about “dry fasting” but that is for the extremely advanced. [07:22]
Scott asks “Do you really think Keto is the way to go these days?” Brad compares the carnivore diet with the plant-based diet and asks the individual to experiment to decide what is best for them. [09:34]
Consuming refined sugars, grains, and industrial seed oils is the biggest problem. [15:50]
If you are going to go keto, be sure you get your electrolytes dialed. [18:44]
If you under-consume protein, you are going to experience intense cravings for high-protein food. The same goes for carbohydrates. [24:26]
Ewan is asking about his urge to run a mile after he has done his sprint workouts. He wants to go for time. [26:37]
Ewan also mentions how he is eating liver and feels great. But use caution if you are eating raw liver or egg yolks. Brad talks about eating animal organ supplements. [30:00]
LINKS:
- Brad Kearns. com
- Brad’s Shopping Page
- Two Meals a Day
- How to Improve Your Triathlon Time
- Podcast with Rip Esselstyn
- Chris Kresser on Joe Rogan
- Brad’s Morning Routine
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B.Rad Podcast
Brad (1m 30s): Okay. Okay. Time for Q and A, Listeners. What do you say? We have some great questions today. Thank you so much for writing in to podcast@bradventures.com. Let’s get to them. And this will be a big challenge for me to answer a bunch of them and not go off on 12 minute tangents to frame an entire show, which is what I did last time we got going on Q and A. Hopefully all agree to wonderful benefit because the topics are really important. And my main goal here is to cover questions that are of broad interest rather than specific. My left knee hurts when I go upstairs, what do you think? Brad (2m 13s): I think you should go see a doctor. Okay. There’s that one, not a big interest to the broad audience. So amazingly the listeners are doing a great job, teeing up some really important and thoughtful questions that bring to light important issues for all of us to reflect. So that’s my intro. And then we go to Raymond who says, I just finished the book Two Meals a Day. I loved it. It was so much more than a nutrition book and question regarding the 12 hour window recommended for no digestive function. Does that include not drinking water for those 12 hours? Well, no, because the water would be the prime example of something that does not require a digestive effort. Brad (2m 59s): And so it’s everything but water and the term to describe it, I believe used in the book was anything, any Xenobiotic substance, anything that requires the digestive system to break down and metabolize. So that would include herbal tea. That doesn’t have calories that would include caffeine. That would include a vitamin pill that doesn’t have calories. All these things require digestive function and they turn on the digestive system thereby turning on your clock for purposes of time-restricted feeding, and time-restricted digestive function. So the research from Dr. Panda at UC San Diego, talking about time-restricted feeding and the health benefits and the critical importance of giving your digestive system in general a break every day. Brad (3m 48s): That’s why we get this 12 hour maximum time window for digestive function each day. So you do not want to activate digestive function on a longer timeframe than that. This was an interesting one because a lot of people were tripped up, including myself, including Sisson, where we’re looking at our daily pattern. And let’s say, you’re up in the morning at 7:00 AM with a bag of herbal tea. And you’re drinking that thing and doing your crossword puzzle. And then at 8:30 PM, you’re having two squares of 85% dark chocolate. As you enjoy evening leisure times. Brad (4m 28s): Oops, you just busted outside of the 12 hour window, even though the herbal tea didn’t have any calories. And even though you might not have eaten anything until 12 noon as a devoted fasting person in the 16/8 window, but you lit up your digestive system in the morning when you first consumed the, the tea or swallow the pill or whatever. Now, I don’t want people to get too fixated on this. And the fact that you’re going outside of your 12 hour window for a couple of squares of dark chocolate in the evening, and a bag of tea in the morning in the grand scheme of things is completely minimal, right? But it’s just something to think about, especially the idea of toning down digestive function in the evening. Brad (5m 14s): And so it’s now being more and more established that all organs in the body, including the digestive organs are very strongly aligned to your overall circadian rhythm. We usually think of circadian rhythm in terms of light and dark cycles and sleeping and waking up. But the liver, the digestive tract, even the, the heart, lungs, the muscles, there’s a good time to exercise. There’s a inferior time to exercise when your body’s less adaptable to exercise. All of these things are strongly tied to circadian function. And so the digestive tract is preferring to rest when it gets dark outside. Brad (5m 56s): So if by as well as you can try to get the majority of your calories before it gets dark. Now, if you’re in Stockholm or Edmonton or New York city in the winter time, and it gets dark at 4 45, and you’re usually sitting down with the family and trying to enjoy your life and having dinner at 6:30 or 7:00 PM, that’s, you know, that’s, that’s going to be okay, we’ll, we’ll live to see another day. But as, as, as best, you can try to put those meals earlier in the evening and allow for a nice period of winding down in concert with the setting of the sun in your environment year round. Brad (6m 40s): So that means in the summer, yes, you can way with late summer evenings by the swimming pool and having a picnic or a barbecue, and you’re not finishing, eating until 8:45 PM whereby in the winter, it’s been dark already for five hours. That’s going to be a little different, right? A little more of a health objection. So aligning your sleep habits with your circadian rhythm, as well as your digestive habits. So that was Raymond’s question. Does that include not drinking water for 12 hours? No, it doesn’t. So if you need to sip some water, as soon as you wake up or before you go to bed, we’re not counting that on your clock. As an interesting aside, they have some studies on dry fasting. Brad (7m 23s): It’s now become a popular biohacking category where not only are you not consuming calories, you are not even drinking water. So you’re providing a hormetic stressor to your body. And in turn, the body responds with this kind of optimal stress response, optimal fight or flight stimulation due to the stressful nature of lacking water and calories. And you’re getting these purported benefits. And some of the research has showed that the spurs fat loss, this spurs improved glucose tolerance has an anti-inflammatory effect. And there’s a lot of data from Ramadan, the Islamic holiday, where people are not consuming food or drink until sunset for 40 days. Brad (8m 14s): So that’s a big deal. And the Ramadan observers come out pretty well with the research. I remember the great runner Elgar Ruse from Morocco talking about how he’s trying to train through Ramadan and having kind of a tough time. And if I’m my memory serves me, I believe there was a lot of food and drink consumed there. As soon as that sun went over the mountains, the guy who’s done, you know, 12 times, 400 meters in 54 seconds with a 200 jog recovery. That guy wants to go rehydrate and refuel. So funny stuff there, but I would put the dry fast in the extremely advanced “don’t try this at home” Brad (8m 54s): category and probably something not even to consider until you’re well down the road with exploring deep into the world of fasting and how your body responds and certainly drinking and hydrating appropriately for the duration of whatever fasting your experimenting with. That said, the word fasting is often misused and grammatically. It means not consuming any calories, right? So when you hear people talk about their juice fast, or their brown rice fast, or this kind of fast, or that kind of fast kale smoothie fast, that’s not really fasting. And so let’s reserve the use of the word for times when we’re not consuming calories. Brad (9m 34s): Okay. We all agree. Thank you very much. Okay. Here is the next one. Oh, we’re moving at such a pace. And this comes from Scott with a nice long reminiscing of his days back in triathlon times as a former Hawaii Ironman. “I have your old book,” Scott says Breakthrough Training. Yes. It’s now been rereleased on Amazon. So if you want a really fun triathlon book, if you’re into the multi-sport scene, it’s called How to Improve Your Triathlon Time. Go search for it on Amazon. Yeah, get it. It’s a double entendre title. Oh, isn’t that cute? Thank you. So Scott is talking about how he remembers the valley of fatigue from over-training and triathlon days. Brad (10m 18s): Now he’s 55. I would try to train like all my old heroes back in the day, Pigg, Molina, Tinley, Mark Allen, the incredible Germans that train their butts off every single day. It was amazing what some of these top athletes were capable of doing. And now he comes to a few questions. Do you really think keto is the way to go these days? I have the books that you and Sisson have have written, and I’m wondering how that lines up with a bunch of other things. One of them would be doing endurance training and trying to be keto. Dave Scott seems to have made that jump. Scott writes and yeah, Dave Scott talks a lot about the benefits of this ketogenic diet. Brad (10m 60s): So that’s interesting cause he was the carb king of the planet when he was winning the Hawaii iron mans. And then he also wants to ask about reconciling with information from people like our buddy Rip Esselstyn and his engine two diets. So Rip is the plant strong guy and he strongly advocates the plant-based approach to eating. His father Caldwell Esselstyn Cleveland clinic lotted for reversing heart disease through dietary intervention. And so these guys are firmly in the plant based camp and they are not interested in the benefits of animal foods and in fact, recommend excluding them. So that’s a pretty huge leap across the aisle to interact with people that are saying something that you know, could be considered diametrically opposed to let’s say the recent popularity of the carnivore diet and the animal-based diet where you’re putting plants on the sidelines for an assortment of reasons. Brad (11m 56s): One of them being that the animal foods are the most nutrient dense foods on the planet. Two that many people have sensitivities to the natural toxins can contained in all matter of plant foods. And by excluding those, they experienced an improvement in nagging autoimmune and inflammatory conditions. So gee, this is where we’re going to turn it over to you, the listener to do some personal experimentation and do some of your own research and critical thinking. And, and open-mindedness to see what seems sensible to you. And a lot of the plant-based folks are in that camp due to the moral objections of the industrial food complex, putting out this nasty process meats and convince KFO animals, concentrated animal feeding, operation animals that are living in dirty conditions, not friendly to the planet. Brad (12m 50s): The carbon footprint is high and the animal is not treated well and all those things. So I think trying to find some common ground here, when we talk about an animal based diet, we’re talking about doing your absolute best to source the most nutritious and sustainably raised animals. So rather than getting the tuna, the kind of tuna that’s caught in the big nets that also trap the poor dolphin, we’re talking about pole cut or line caught tuna. We’re talking about emphasizing the oily cold water fish that had the most omega-3 benefits and the least concerns with toxins like mercury. We’re talking about staying away from the predator fish at the top of the food chain because they have high concentrations of toxins. Brad (13m 30s): And on down the line with our eggs, we’re trying to source, ideally, pasture raised eggs with the distinction of humanely raised animal welfare certified all these stamps of approval on the carton that indicate the animal was treated in a superior manner to the feedlot chicken, the conventional egg that has vastly lower levels of important nutrients like omega threes due to their crappy diet and their lack of activity being cooped up in the, the facility rather than being allowed to roam free. And the true pasture raised egg that you’re going to get from the local hobbyist or farmer is running around in the open lands, getting exercise, getting fresh air,, sunlight and having their natural diet of bugs, insects high omega-3 from eating grasses and things like that. Brad (14m 20s): And so you’re having a far superior nutritional product to the mechanized foods. So I think we can all agree, whatever foods you choose, you’re going to want to go for the best source. Same with the plant kingdom. You want to go to the local farmer’s market, buy what’s in season, straight from the farmer to you, what do they call it? Farm, fork to table. And so we can make good choices within the parameters that we’ve set, but I will say this not to get too controversial, but if you’re choosing a plant-based diet, you are proceeding down a high risk path. It’s very difficult to dispute that because you happen to be excluding many of the most nutrient dense foods on earth. Brad (15m 2s): And so if you are excluding a giant swath of foods due to your moral objections or whatever, perceived health benefits, boy, you got a, a challenge on your hands, especially if you’re not genetically adapted to do things like convert the beta carotene that you get from your carrots and your other yellow and orange category foods. If you’re not good at converting that into the fully formed vitamin A known as retinol that comes directly to you when you eat things like liver and other foods high in vitamin A. You could put yourself at high risk of nutritional deficiencies. And we also have to acknowledge that this is a departure from the ancestral diet that fueled human evolution for two and a half million years, which was an animal based diet. Brad (15m 51s): Of course there was variation across the globe where humans populated and migrated and had different food sources, but by and large, we’re quite adaptable. We can do really well on a variety of diets. So we have to figure out what works for us personally. So hopefully I answered how to reconcile between the, the plant-based message of people like Ripper and then the, you know, the paleo or the ancestral diet that listeners maybe are more familiar with for my lineup of guests. But I did have a great show with Rip Esselstyn. So you can go listen to that and see how much common ground we have when we’re talking about the number one prominent goal is to get rid of the junk food. Brad (16m 31s): And that’s indisputable that we do not need these refined sugars, grains, and industrial seed oils in the diet. I don’t think anyone is out there touting that this should be the centerpiece of your diet. Well, I mean, a lot of plant-based people are end up consuming a lot of processed carbohydrates because of their dearth of choices to get their calories in every day. So I should qualify that. But in general, you know, over consuming these refined foods is where the real problem lies. And if you can ditch that stuff and move on from a processed food diet, you’re going to be looking really good. This is also a way to kind of reconcile some of the fabulous nutritional data and propaganda. Brad (17m 13s): That’s arguing that, oh my gosh, this plant-based diet is going to be a lifesaver for you. And you’re going to be come an amazing athlete and make the NFL or the Olympics like the documentary that was widely viewed called Game Changers. Peter Atia called it. I just listened to his show quote. It was absolutely horrible, disgusting example of propaganda. So if Peter Atia says that he was a pretty measured guy, that’s gonna give me pause. And I’m going to go doing further research for myself. For example, watching Chris Kresser on the Joe Rogan podcast, talk for three hours, breaking down the inaccuracies and the propaganda presented in that show with a beautiful three hour presentation with 87 PowerPoint slides. Brad (17m 60s): So think what you want, but before we jump on whatever bandwagon, let’s go and look a little deeper than the slick documentary, that’s going to try to convince you in untoward manner. Okay. How’s that everybody? And I think I covered Scott there, but yeah, regarding Dave Scott switching over to keto and trying to balance both endurance training goals with ketogenic diet, that can be a potential problem because if you’re out there working hard and burning a lot of calories and then you’re limiting your carbohydrate intake, you better make darn sure that everything is dialed in beautifully, or you have the potential to struggle. Brad (18m 44s): One thing that’s come across in the last several years of keto becoming more and more popular are the propensity for electrolyte imbalances. When you eliminate a lot of those carbohydrate containing foods in the name of restricting carbs for keto, you’re also limiting your intake and limiting your retention of important minerals and electrolytes, especially sodium potassium, magnesium. That’s why the guys at L M N T Robb Wolf, Luis Villasenor make this wonderful product, these little packets where you’re getting a huge dose of electrolytes and sodium to help keep things, right. If you do make a major dietary transition. Brad (19m 26s): So if you’re going to go keto, you sure as hell, better get your electrolytes dialed. You better eat sufficient amounts of the nutrient dense calories that are going to fuel your training in the absence of whatever carbs you’re removing from your diet. So like Dr. Tommy Wood said on his show. He counsels his athletes to eat as much nutritious food as possible until they gain one pound of body fat. And then turn the dial down a little bit. And he made the, the great one-liner talking about reviewing the, the food diaries of his athletes, and someone will say breakfast two eggs and half an avocado. And Tommy’s quick back was, Hey man, eat a real breakfast, make it six eggs and a full avocado. Brad (20m 7s): Because again, if you’re in this restrictive and narrowly focused ketogenic diet, the six eggs and the full avocado are probably going to serve you really well. If you’re going to go out there and put in tons of hours of training. So I guess my last note here is that there are a lot of athletes succeeding in this low carbohydrate fat adapted endurance training pattern, Zack Bitter, probably one of the most prominent ones, Timothy Olson, who won Western states 100 mile twice. Also in that low carb camp, the participants in the Volek Faster study, F A S T E R study run by Dr. Jeff Volek at the university of Connecticut was amazing. Brad (20m 50s): Conclusions came out of that study that showed that athletes who had become adapted to a high fat, low carbohydrate diet could perform really well and recover really well, including restock their glycogen overnight without eating an appreciable amount of carbohydrates. So we always associate a carb loading carb reloading with absolutely essential to recover from these crazy workouts. But now if you become a fat adapted athlete, you can do amazing things. And what is the advantage? There are several, one of them is you don’t need onboard calories when you’re trying to exercise or trying to perform for hours on end when the digestive system is not in a good state to digest and assimilate calories. Brad (21m 32s): If you’re doing an all day hike or riding your bicycle a hundred miles, if you can get by on fewer calories, that’s going to be a performance advantage right there. And so when you get better and better and better at burning body fat, and then making ketones to fuel brain function, when your muscles are burning, mostly fatty acids, that most of them are on storage. You don’t have to ingest a lot of fat to ride a hundred miles because you’ve got plenty on your body, even if you’re a skinny elite ultra marathon runner. So there’s a lot of potential for endurance breakthroughs, especially at the elite level and also at the recreational level. But this is a, it’s a pretty challenging path to go on. Brad (22m 16s): One thing, one potential concern I see is the propensity for over-training and overly stressful training patterns by the majority of people immersed into the endurance lifestyle. So if you’re going to do too much as a routine, you know, beat yourself up here and there, and, you know, have these, these crashes and burns and highs and lows and training, which are so common, and you’re not going to bother to refuel with sufficient amount of carbs because you’re trying the ketogenic diet, that’s going to be a recipe for breakdown, burnout, illness, injury, disaster. Same with the CrossFit athlete, where you’re performing a very high glycolytic workout. Brad (22m 59s): That’s a high glucose burning workout because of the intensity level and the duration, and then going home and not refueling with carbohydrates. You’re going to have to get really good at a few different things. One of them is fat adaptation making ketones, and the other one is balancing your training so that you don’t show up that up at the gym in a fatigued glycogen, depleted state, and bang out yet another epic CrossFit session and go home. And yet again, restrict carbohydrates and add to the overall stress score and the stress factors at play here, because think about it, carb restriction and fasting are, are stressors to the body. You’re not giving yourself the energy that they’re used to. Brad (23m 42s): And then depleting cellular energy during a workout is stressor to the body. In my case, I talk about this a lot where I’m trying to do these high intensity high glycolytic workouts and be in the older age group. So that’s another stressor to the body that I’m trying to act like a 20 year old, a 30 year old, whatever, and still have ambitious athletic goals, even in the 55 plus age category. And if you mix those altogether and you overdo it, you overshoot your stress capabilities that can be, you know, limiting your progress and even worse, putting you into a hole. So for that reason, I am in favor of monitoring your appetite carefully. Brad (24m 26s): And if you do have those occasions where let’s say, you’re trying to adhere to whatever dietary pattern, if it’s keto, if it’s carnivore, if it’s vegan plant-based and you experience intense cravings for things like high protein foods, Chris Kresser sites, this a really important point that if you under consume protein, which is difficult to do, but possible if you’re in some extreme diet, you’re going to experience intense cravings for high protein foods. And you’re going to feel like crap, and you’re going to get emaciated and have, you know, a bad looking face. Maybe your hair is going to fall out weird, stuff like that. So the body and the brain are really good at getting you what you need. Brad (25m 8s): And the same goes for carbohydrates. I think if you’re sitting there at the end of the day, a long training session has been done and you have your little steak and two pieces of broccoli, and you’re really dreaming about a sweet potato. That’s probably an indication that you want to do a strategic inclusion of additional carbohydrates. So I guess my, my vote is that in and around your high stress, challenging workouts is probably a good time to consider increased carbohydrate intake. And I would say afterward, not before, I’ve heard people talk about, yeah, get some carbs before you train hard and that’ll give you a performance boost. And I think that’s kind of that’s, it doesn’t make sense to me personally, that you’re going to need a pre workout dose of carbohydrates. Brad (25m 56s): There’s plenty sitting there and your muscles, unless you’re starving or coming off a 48 hour fast. So I wouldn’t worry about that, but afterward I would take care of your appetite and your cravings for sure. All right. Good question by Scott. And then we go all the way down to Melbourne, Melbourne from Ewan. Brad (26m 37s): Enjoy your podcasts very much down here. Isn’t that cool. I love hearing from people all over the world and then the letters come in from Africa and Finland and Melbourne just, I can’t get it. Get over it. It’s so fun. Thank you so much for listening so far away. And also if you’re close to my base here on the west coast, that’s cool too. We’re friendly with everybody. So Ewan’s been listening for a long time to the primal podcast, primal endurance, get over yourself. And now the B.Rad podcast, incorporating many principles into his life. He’s doing my favorite sprint workout of six times 80 meter sprints. And he feels like he’s done a good job, but then as he’s cooling down, thinking that the workouts over, he has this urge to run a mile for time and see if he can do it at an impressive around six minute mile for 55-year-old. That’s extremely impressive. Anything under eight minutes. This is from the research from the Cooper Institute and Texas A and M. Brad (27m 19s): They did a huge study and they drew this incredibly strong correlation between one’s mild time at age 50 and one’s longevity and health potential. So if you have an excellent mealtime at age 50, you have a strong predictability to live till age 84 in good health and good vitality. And if you have a crappy time at age 50, you have a six-fold increase or something crazy to disease risk factors and demise over the ensuing decades. And here are the time standards that are relevant. So at 50 you go out there and we’re talking about an all out mile for time. Brad (27m 60s): We’re not talking about jogging a mile and timing it for once, but this is like a real race where imagine the people in the lab coats with their clipboards watching you, and they want to see really what you got in there. So pushing yourself pretty hard. And look, if you’re not a runner, you can probably correlate this to your activity of choice, whether it’s cycling or swimming or rowing or some all out performance test that takes you an appropriate length of time. That can give you a great indication of your fitness, especially if you retest annually or every five years or whatever you want to do to see keeping tabs on your fitness. Right? And so the Cooper Institute research said that females under nine minutes and males under eight minutes are in that outstanding category. Brad (28m 44s): And if you are a female over 13 minutes or male, over 12 minutes and 12 or 13 minutes is equating with kind of a slow jog. A brisk walk would be about a 15 minute mile. So it’s better than a brisk walk. So it’s a little bit of jogging to make it around the track four times, or let’s say if you mixed jogging with fast paced walking and back to jogging. So someone who’s in decent shape, but that’s not a ton to ask right. There is it. You should be able to run four laps or a mile down the bike path with your fancy watch that tracks distance. You should be able to get through that in under 12 or 13 minutes, even if you’re 50 years old. Now, if you’re zooming around in eight minutes, nine minutes, that’s spectacular. Brad (29m 28s): And that shows that you’ve made a tremendous commitment to fitness. That’s going to benefit you for years to come. So Ewan is busting out a six minute mile after his sprint worked out at 55 years old is the X. Brad is the extra mile impacting on the benefits of my sprint training. Would it be better to do on a different day or do it once in a while? Well, that’s a pretty fantastic workout is my answer. And I think, you know, you’re putting this into the category of a high intensity sprint workout. So you do your sprints, you run your mile. You’re 55 years old. I wouldn’t complain about anything. I’d say that’s pretty fantastically awesome. And I aspire to go out there and put in another mile time trial myself. Brad (30m 8s): I haven’t done it in several years. And I remember coming right in at six minutes. This is a few years ago now. And the funny thing for me was it felt like 4 47 did back in the old days. I mean, I was up on my feet. My stride was excellent. My power was good. I didn’t die. I was strong all the way through the finish. And I’m like, yeah, that was a 4 47. I look at my watch. It says six minutes. I’m like, what the heck are you talking about? It doesn’t make sense, but such as the way that fitness works, where your perceived exertion is still high, your perceived performance level, but the, the watch doesn’t lie. So I would say keep up the good work human. Brad (30m 48s): And finally, another followup question from him I’ve recently started taking MOFO and you’ve also motivated, motivate me to eat some slices of raw liver with salt. And it actually tastes quite good. Isn’t that nice? And yes, I like to take my liver in frozen raw form, heavily salted because it’s super palatable. You don’t have that rubbery unpleasant liver taste. And so I’ll either slice those up and eat them raw, or I’ll throw the chunks. Pre-sliced chunks of raw liver into my smoothie. So I got my liver game going. That’s a good solution for me because I was never too good at cooking it. And I didn’t really enjoy the taste. And if you overcook it, like everyone’s familiar liver and onions meals from back in the day. Brad (31m 33s): That’s okay. But remember that you’re losing out on a lot of the nutritional benefits. If you cook the heck out of liver versus eating a slice of raw liver. Now eating wrong liver comes with a slight risk of foodborne illness, just as consuming raw egg yolks that also go in my smoothie. So I’m going to qualify this here and make a disclaimer that I shouldn’t even recommend something like that, unless you decide to do it for yourself, but I’m giving you the factual information that a raw piece of liver or a raw egg yolk has vastly more nutrition before it gets it’s cooked. So that said if you’re going to do something crazy, like consume raw liver, be sure that you source grassfed liver product, because we want to stay away from that animal that was raised in the concentrated animal, feeding operations, fed hormones, pesticides, and antibiotics. Brad (32m 29s): We know that the liver is the control tower for all manner of metabolic function and distribution of nutrients into the bloodstream. So guess what? That’s what makes liver the number one most nutritious food pound for pound on the planet. And it also makes liver a place where toxins and impurities can be concentrated. A lot of people confuse this to think that liver is a nasty thing to eat, and you should never touch it because of all the toxins that are in the liver. And it’s also the place where the most nutrition is concentrated, but you do want to source good quality liver. That’s going to be free from some of those objections that we see from the feedlot animals. Brad (33m 12s): And I’m also writing back in detail to Ewan that not only do I take six to 12 pills of MOFO every day, but I’m probably taking 12 to 18 assorted, other pills from assorted other Ancestral Supplements products. I like the prostate and the lung and like the blood vitality and this stuff has become super popular. You can learn all about them, just go to my shopping page and click on the link. You get a 10% discount for putting in BRAD10 as the code. And if you’re not up on your organ meat consumption game, this is a great way to cover that base. That very, very important dietary base of getting organ meats and nose to tail consumption back into your diet. Brad (33m 59s): We’ve disgracefully ignored that in modern eating habits ancestral cuisine on the other hand features a lot of organ meat consumption. And so it’s time to reclaim that instead of just focusing on the muscle meats, the, the small segments of the animals that we emphasize. And so getting liver into your diet one way or the other as we described or cooking it, searing it lightly on each side and consuming it in that form or getting it into your smoothie, consuming it raw. And if that all fails, just pound a bunch of supplements, and these really are the best multivitamins you could ever consume because they’re in the exact bioavailable form from the animal. Brad (34m 41s): They’re completely unprocessed. There’s no additives, no other agents in there, except for the grass fed cattle from New Zealand, completely pure. And the, the organ in question that they’re putting into the capsule. And so, yeah, that’s a plug right there. That’s a commercial in the middle of the show. But I’m pretty enthusiastic about it. And I believe for some reason, since 2019, I’ve had some great improvements in an assortment of health, fitness, and lifestyle markers, specifically not requiring a afternoon nap. So desperately on so many days, recovering faster from workouts, being able to perform at a higher level. Brad (35m 26s): You can see my morning routine, which is getting more and more difficult. And I have no problem doing that every day. I wasn’t in such a groove prior to now, it’s been, you know, three or four years where I’ve had a, a kind of a burst in performance. And I attribute that to numerous things. One of them is this aggressive consumption of the organ capsules. So I’m really high on this. I feel like I’m really covering all my nutritional basis and minimizing the chances of developing nutritional deficiencies, which I do believe I have suffered from in the past, despite my attention, careful attention to healthy eating because the athlete asks a lot from their body. It’s easy to get deficient. Brad (36m 6s): It’s easy to get broken down, especially as you continue to perform into the higher age group. So all those listening in the higher age groups and still have athletic goals. Like the wonderful Ewan down in Melbourne, you got to pay close attention to your eating habits and do everything you can to kind of throw in some of these performance supplements that have been proven to be really helpful. So for me, not even that, I was asked this question, but I’m mentioning my devotion to animal organ supplements, especially the MOFO formulation that I co-promote with Ancestral Supplements that contains testicles, prostate, heart, liver, and bone marrow, specifically to improve male hormone function, male hormone optimization. Brad (36m 50s): That’s my that’s my go-to of course my favorite, and then a bunch of other ones that I mentioned, and also getting that raw liver into the diet, the egg yolks from my super nutrition smoothie, and then some other favorite products that I’ve been taking on a consistent basis are collagen at the behest of Mark Sisson taking 20 to 30 grams of that every day. Dr. Cate Shanahan places tremendous importance on this, that she contends that your college and health, your connective tissue health is directly correlated with your longevity. And unfortunately we build most of those building blocks in the first 20 years of life. Brad (37m 30s): So if you were born before 1950, she had a great insight in one of our shows and we ate real foods back then before kind of the, the mechanization of food and the processed food that came after the world war. If you had that stability to get really collagen enriched foods in very diet, when you were young, it will benefit you the rest of your life. If you were born after 1950 and grew up on TV dinners and space, food sticks, and all the crap that came into, especially the standard American diet, the emergence of fast food and all those things you’re fighting against that clock. And so here as we get over 30, 40, 50, 60 years old, supplemental collagen peptides can be a huge help research shows that these molecules have a heliotropic effect in the body. Brad (38m 19s): They go to the areas where they’re needed most. So if you have a raggedy, taggety Achilles tendon from frequent injuries, dating back years, and it still feels tight and stiff a lot, and it gives you trouble and you consume supplemental collagen, the collagen . We’ll go to support the connective tissue in that area of the body where it’s been identified to be frayed or inflamed or imperfect. Isn’t that interesting? So college is a big one for me and creatine, probably the most research performance supplement of them, all, all of them validating that not only does it have the performance benefits that you hear about helping you add muscle mass and get stronger, it also has neuro-protective benefits. Brad (39m 0s): So it actually benefits and protects the brain from stress and inflammation. Those are just a couple, and we’ll be talking more about that in the future, especially if you have questions about it, but I think this is a great place to wrap up some really cool questions and get out a lot of good information about how to fight the battle and do it well. So thank you so much. And Hey, spread the word about the show. I love tapping into new listeners, welcoming new people when you’re looking at the, the download rates and seeing a nice steady increase. So I appreciate your help spreading the word. And we’re also seeing people going into the archives and listening to some of the favorite shows, and those are living forever accessible at all times. Brad (39m 48s): And a couple of recent recordings that I did with Jake Steiner about some of my favorite highlights. And then we’re also publishing some more highlight clips from past show. So hopefully that’ll inspire you to go back and look at stuff that you missed. That’s still super relevant and interesting, even if it was recorded a year ago or two years ago. So that’s that. Have a nice day? Yay, bump, bump, bump, bump. Thank you for listening to the show. I love sharing the experience with you and greatly appreciate your support. Please email podcast@bradventures.com with feedback, suggestions and questions for the Q and A shows, subscribe to our email list of Brad kearns.com for a weekly blast about the published episodes and a wonderful bimonthly newsletter edition with informative articles and practical tips for all aspects of healthy living. Brad (40m 41s): You can also download several awesome free eBooks when you subscribe to the email list. And if you could go to the trouble to leave a five or five star review with apple podcasts or wherever else, you listen to the shows that would be super, incredibly awesome. It helps raise the profile of the be read podcast and attract new listeners. And did you know that you can share a show with a friend or loved one by just hitting a few buttons in your player and firing off a text message? My awesome podcast player called Overcast allows you to actually record a soundbite excerpt from the episode you’re listening to and fire it off with a quick text message. Thank you so much for spreading the word and remember B.rad.
