How do you balance a passion for ancestral living with pursuing optimal modern peak performance?
This episode is all about how you can achieve that balance by utilizing and adapting the ancestral model to modern times while striving for optimization. In this show we will be discussing the benefits, as well as the effects and the necessity of certain elements of the ancestral model—you will hear about my experience with fasting, time-restricted feeding, and low carbohydrate dieting, and why I made the decision to cut these practices out of my life. I also discuss when things like fasting and time-restricted feeding are appropriate and helpful, why my goal now is to perform and recover, perform and recover, and stay fit while staving off the disastrous accelerated decline we sadly see as “normal” these days, and the benefits of taking an “eat more and move more” approach to diet and lifestyle.
TIMESTAMPS:
Eric Frohart points out that exercise is the single most potent driver of health and longevity and averting disease risk. [00:50]
A protein-centric diet supports muscle growth, development, and muscle maintenance. [02:57]
The hunter-gatherer, by definition, did the bare minimum necessary in order to survive. [05:07]
It’s a stress mechanism to kick into ketone manufacturing to replace the glucose that’s not coming from the diet. [10:37]
Don’t misinterpret what you hear about the amazing scientific benefits of eating less food or fasting for long periods of time. [14:01]
Brad is now getting fully fueled each morning, having changed from his period of morning fasts. [19:18]
You may notice when you have those days where you are not eating the normal big meal in the morning, your body temperature cools down in the afternoon because your thyroid turns down the temperature to conserve energy. [28:39]
Our biological drives can be destroyed with too much stress in our life. Reproduction, repair, growth, and locomotion are what we need to maintain. [30:46]
Go out and find the maximum amount of nutritious calories and move. [34:16]
LINKS:
- Brad Kearns.com
- Brad’s Shopping page
- B.rad Whey Protein Isolate Superfuel
- Human migration
- Brad’s Cold Exposure
- Why I Stopped Fasting (Mutzel)
- Keto Reset Diet
- Rayn Baxter Podcast
- John Gray Podcast
- Beyond Mars and Venus
LISTEN:
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B.Rad Podcast:
Brad (00:00):
Exercise is the single most potent driver of health and longevity and averting disease risk. I love that.
Brad (00:11):
Welcome to the B.rad podcast, where we explore ways to pursue peak performance with passion throughout life without taking ourselves too seriously. I’m Brad Kearns, New York Times bestselling author, former number three world-ranked professional triathlete and Guinness World Record Masters athlete. I connect with experts in diet, fitness, and personal growth, and deliver short breather shows where you get simple, actionable tips to improve your life right away. Let’s explore beyond the hype, hacks, shortcuts, and sciencey talk to laugh, have fun and appreciate the journey. It’s time to B.rad..
Brad (00:50):
Let’s go. And the first one comes from Eric Frohart, my wonderful former podcast guest and former Navy Seal. Who can forget the memorable insights that he provided about his, uh, life changing career direction, where he decided one day he was sitting in a college dorm room watching a movie about the Navy Seals. He stood up and told all his buddies, you know what, I’m gonna drop outta school and go do that. And my favorite takeaway was that he just made up his mind that he was going to become a Navy Seal no matter what, and he gave himself no plan B. And he went for it and did it, and did so many amazing events, especially with extreme mountaineering where he had no preparation, no experience, but he just went for it. And for example, I think he said like El Capitan was his first rock climbing outing of his life besides going in the gym or something.
Brad (01:47):
So, shooting for high heights, believing in yourself, and then just taking it one step at a time. Love those messages from Eric fro Hart. And we had some good back and forth about, uh, emerging health topics and trends. And Eric says he listened to the Mike Joiner episode on the podcast, Peter Attia’s, the Drive podcast where they were emphasizing this really beautiful emerging idea that exercise is the single most potent driver of health and longevity and averting disease risk. I love that because it simplifies everything down to if you just get moving more frequently in everyday life, you are going to sail along, uh, to a better impact, a better significance than any other lifestyle intervention. So you can tweak your diet around all day. You can take a bunch of exciting medical breakthroughs and, and, uh, prescription drugs, but there’s nothing like simply being active and making that a consistent part of your life for the rest of your life.
Brad (02:57):
Dr. Joyner is an expert on protein, so he emphasizes the point that we need this protein centric diet to support muscle growth, development, muscle maintenance, especially as we get into the older age groups. And Eric writes, I’m definitely fascinated by the idea of being able to work out more and move more but to do it in a smart way. And obviously he points out that everyone’s different. And if you’re a sedentary person right now, you don’t really need to worry about your VO two max score. That is a laboratory test that identifies the maximum volume of oxygen that you can process, uh, in per minute, uh, per kilogram of body weight. So they can measure, uh, the top, you know, Olympic and Tour de France athletes and see who’s the most efficient using oxygen. And it’s also a great metric for your overall state of fitness.
Brad (03:50):
And so you can take an average person and go into the lab, and if they can elevate their VO two max, it’s gonna help them with, uh, disease risk and aging gracefully. But again, if you’re sedentary now, Eric points out, you don’t need to worry about your VO two max. You need to start by just effing walking, and then maybe someday you can progress to the point that you can be, uh, pursuing fitness goals and so forth. Uh, so I, uh, comment back to Eric where I’m also appreciating how the ancestral health paradigm is expanding a bit, I think from this, uh, perhaps unhealthy obsession with, uh, our ancestral, uh, lifestyle patterns and trying to, uh, mimic those today. And I’m particularly thinking of the fascination with fasting, time-restricted feeding, calorie restriction, carbohydrate restriction, and calling upon the example of our ancestors as the rationale for, so for example, skipping meals today, or, uh, diligently cutting carbohydrates to kick into ketosis and, uh, avail all these wonderful health benefits.
Brad (05:07):
So I think it’s important to, to lay this out, that the human, when stressed, for example, with starvation, with lack of energy, is going to kick into these wonderful survival mechanisms that prompt and assortment of health benefits. So when you are in a fasted state, your immune system, your metabolic function, your cell repair, autophagy, all these things work at a heightened state because the body is starve, the cells are starved of energy in the body, and so the body has to get really smart and really efficient. In contrast, you could point the example of being constantly overfed, where now we can start to kick into disease patterns because we’re feeding ourselves too much energy. The body doesn’t know what to do with it. But what about pursuing something in the, the middle, toward modern lifestyle optimization? So I know that my ancestral past humans suffered through cold, dark, harsh, brutal winters where they didn’t have food and they had to soldier on and, and fight to survive, and perhaps, you know, lost a bunch of body weight while they were starving, and then they were able to succeed and pass on their genes to the offspring.
Brad (06:21):
So humans got really good at things like cold adaptation, right? Adaptation to cold temperatures, adaptation to calorie carbohydrate restriction, intermittent eating patterns and things like that. But today, we no longer have to suffer through those hardships and ordeals. So what we can do is kind of model the example, but bring it into modern times and strive for optimization. So my goal today, as I’ve said many times on the show, is to perform and recover and perform and recover and get fitter or at least stay fit as long as possible and stave off that disastrous accelerated decline into disease and demise that we see today as normal. But it’s really driven by adverse lifestyle practices. For example, consuming too many calories and not burning enough calories, or simply not pushing and challenging the body with a strenuous exercise. So if I have access today to incredibly nutritious foods on a year-round basis, I can go and get my papayas.
Brad (07:31):
I just went to Trader Joe’s and bought four giant papayas here in the middle of winter, flown in from distant lands. Uh, all these things that our ancestors could not do, and therefore they couldn’t perform anywhere near the level of today’s peak performers, athletes, competitors, elite athletes. Even the average fitness enthusiast is likely vastly fitter in almost every way to some ancestor who was living the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Dr. Tommy Wood makes this point beautifully when he actually cites research showing that today’s elite athlete, uh, has six times more energy expenditure than the busiest hunter gatherer in the history of humanity. So, as the great work from anthropologist Marshall Salan, uh, validates, he called the hunter gatherers the original affluent society, because they had just what they needed and they didn’t aspire to anything more because they couldn’t hoard possessions and things like that.
Brad (08:32):
So the hunter gatherer, by definition, did the bare minimum necessary in order to survive. They did not build giant deluxe huts with numerous bedrooms because they were gonna dismantle that and move on to the next place. They were not able to store and hoard food. Uh, that’s what happened with civilization, is we were able to cultivate grains and then live in the same spot and build buildings and fight wars and grow in advanced society, and all that stuff that leads to the inexorable progress of humanity, uh, continuing today. But our hunter gatherers got just enough food that they needed to survive and no more. So in many cases, they probably had a pretty easy life. You can see from the, uh, wonderful graphic called the, uh, Oppenheimer Human Migration across the globe. It’s an interactive map where you can see the patterns that human humans took to populate the entire globe eventually from first leaving east Africa around, I believe it was, uh, 60,000 years ago as a consensus.
Brad (09:34):
And so they generally followed the shorelines, imagine that. So it’s possible that the humans got really smart and excelled at putting out nets, catching a ton of fish, and then sitting on the rocks and sitting in the sun and consuming all the nutrition they needed and reproducing, and, uh, building the human population without having to struggle and suffer and feel tortured. So if we’re making certain assumptions that we don’t need to absolutely obsessively model the most the most hardy and, um, resilient ancestors, and instead today focus on performance recovery, peak performance, and increasing fitness, then I have less rationale to deliberately restrict calories, for example, over a time period, or deliberately restrict a specific macronutrient like carbohydrates in the name of going into ketosis. As Jay Feldman said in great detail on our four podcast episodes that have aired, this is a stress state.
Brad (10:37):
So it’s a stress mechanism to kick into ketone manufacturing to replace the glucose that’s not coming from the diet. Yes, it has tremendous health benefits. Yes, it can help many people today with turning things around and getting away from the unfettered access to indulgent foods that characterizes the standard modern diet. So any departure from this decadence and this overdoing it, consuming too many calories, not burning enough calories, can be a huge win. However, these benefits that we get from fasting, that we get from ketogenic diet, that we get from engaging in time-restricted feeding, like striving for the popular 16 and eight pattern, that means a 16 hour fasting period every day, and then an eight hour time period in which all your calories are consumed, all these things are delivering benefits in an indirect manner. In other words, it’s not that you waited 16 hours to to, to eat that’s giving you these tremendous health benefits.
Brad (11:43):
It’s just that it might have kept you away from a processed foods breakfast. It might give your digestive system a break if you’re suffering from the common condition of leaky gut prompted by consuming a lot of processed foods. But there’s, it’s not the magic of the 16 eight window. The manufacturing of ketones has shown to have a profound anti-inflammatory effect, immune boosting effect, protein sparing effect, all these things are great, but we have to recognize that it’s still a stress mechanism. It’s still a fight or flight mechanism that the body kicks into in order to survive. So if we no longer have to fight for our lives through that long, dark, cold, harsh winter, and instead we can take the winter and head over to the nice-temperature controlled gym and lift weights with numbers on them and stay fit and strong and healthy, and also nourish ourselves and strive for this state of maximum cellular energy status, as Jay Feldman points out. What about that? Perhaps that is in pursuit of optimal instead of pursuit of survival, which was the characterization of our ancestral past, they were obsessed only with survivalThey weren’t worried about qualifying for the CrossFit games or the Olympics, or beating their personal best in the 10 k or the half marathon, or the triathlon. So that, for me, uh, is reframing a lot of the foundational elements of the ancestral health, uh, of philosophy and broadening the scope a little bit to pick and choose and pick and pull from the examples. For example, <laugh>, um, cold plunging, right? I love my cold therapy practice. It brings a lot of benefits for psychological resilience, which again, is above and beyond any physical or physiological comparison to our ancestral past. So I do it for the reasons of building my focus and resilience against all other forms of stress and distraction that I face in daily life, but also the physical, the hormonal benefits are fantastic because I’m doing an appropriately therapeutic short dose in the cold plunge tub, and then I’m getting out and I’m rewarming, I’m going into a warm home.
Brad (14:01):
I’m able to flip open my laptop screen and get to work and be productive. I’m not out marching for 14 miles with crappy boots in the snow like our World War I ancestors had to do. So you see that, uh, expansion of the, uh, of the philosophy here. I think that’s really important for everyone to appreciate. So thank you Tommy Wood for pointing that out. Remember his epic line that he told me many years ago Now, he suggests that his healthy fit clients that he worked with, he would always advise them to consume as much nutritious food as possible until they gained a pound of body fat. And that’s when you can dial it back a bit, right? But realize that that could represent optimal as opposed to the very popular notion now that calorie restriction equals longevity. So we don’t wanna misinterpret many of these popular promoters that are talking about the amazing scientific benefits of eating less food or fasting for longer periods of time, and the wonderful, uh, cellular renewal effects you get from prolonged fasts or prolonged fasting mimicking diets, things like that.
Brad (15:16):
This is, this is not, um, this is not wrong, but it’s a stress mechanism potentially unnecessary in comparison to moving more, getting fitter, staying fit throughout life, and striving for maximum cellular energy status in order to move more, be more active, maintain that muscle mass. Uh, I am favoring the eat more, move more approach rather than trying to starve myself and see if that’s gonna promote longevity. I love Mike Mutzel’s recent video on this topic. The title is Why I Stopped Fasting and What I’m Doing Instead, and he cites research that you get this tremendous autophagy effect that’s the natural cellular internal detoxification process. So your cells go into repair mode, uh, in a, in a really profound way after a 48 hour fast. So when you’re starved for 48 hours, that’s when cell repair really kicks into, uh, high gear. You start, uh, uh, excreting or recycling this damaged cellular material that could someday turn into cancerous cells that left unregulated.
Brad (16:27):
-ou get the immune boosting effect to get the anti-inflammatory effects from a prolonged fast. But the research that he cites suggests that you also kick into an elevated autophagy state of a similar impact, a similar intensity after a one-hour strenuous workout in the gym. And then Mike’s punchline, I don’t know about you, but which one would you rather do hit it hard in the gym for an hour or starve yourself for 48 hours? Then on top of that, what about stacking the assorted stressors? As I talk about my myself frequently, when I was immersed in the ketogenic diet and working hard to, uh, write and research the book with Mark Sisson, the Keto Reset Diet. So I was hardcore keto, and I was still trying to perform my ambitious workouts on the running track and the high jump surface and, and recover, and also be populating the older age groups.
Brad (17:21):
So there wasn’t a <laugh>, a youngster, uh, doing research on the keto diet and then going to high jump practice for the college team. I was in the 50 plus age category. So I had these stress factors, uh, stacking up on one side of the balance scale, which was my age group, my desire to perform these strenuous high intensity workouts and try to recover from them, and immersed into a strict ketogenic diet where I was deliberately restricting carbohydrates, the same carbohydrates I burned during these intense workouts, and then forcing my body into these fight or flight conditions, mechanisms in order to recover. And they conspired to send me into a lot of crash and burn cycles where I was recovering very poorly from these strenuous workouts because I was going home and, and striving for maximum cellular energy status. Instead, I was starving my cells of energy in order to prompt, uh, the beneficial responses and also stay in line with the research and development for the book.
Brad (18:25):
But speaking of that, as I obsessively tracked my blood glucose and my blood ketones and wrote everything down relating to the meals I ate and all that kind of thing, I started noticing these interesting trends, and I had to go and consult with medical experts like Dr. Cate Shanahan and others saying, what’s going on here? Because I was starting to pull some elevated fasting blood glucose values. So I’d wake up in the morning after two or three days of strict ketogenic eating, haven’t seen a carb in a while, some long fasting periods as well, some pretty good workouts thrown in there. And my morning fasting blood sugar would be 121 or 114, or 133, or 109, or 104, or 127. And it was like, what’s going on here? That’s pre-diabetic state, right? That’s indicative or comparable to someone who’s eating too much food.
Brad (19:18):
A lot of it’s processed food that’s not, uh, metabolized well by the body and sitting around on the couch and seeing that fasting blood glucose rise and rise as a disease risk factor. So certainly I wasn’t that person who wasn’t burning energy, but what was going on was my body was manufacturing a lot of glucose internally through the process of gluconeogenesis in order to fuel my quote unquote stressful lifestyle, because I was indeed heading out to the running track later, or even just jogging a a simple workout, not a strenuous one, but I needed the glucose to perform and recover in my life, was not getting it from the diet. And so I was getting it from gluconeogenesis. That’s the conversion of amino acids into the glucose, a prominent aspect of the fight or flight response. That’s great for survival. It’s great when you’re called upon to your public speaking event, and you need all these fight or flight mechanisms to, to kick into gear so you’re focused and you’re energized and you’re ready to, to deliver a peak performance.
Brad (20:26):
Same with when you’re showing up to the competition or the big workout, and you wanna perform at your best, you want glucose dumped into your bloodstream to give you those performance advantages. Now, do I wanna rely on that day after day in the quest for performing and recovering? No, because it’s depleting my fight or flight resources that I’d rather direct exclusively to my athletic goals and my fitness workouts. So that was the real eyeopener for me, was the potential to stack too many stressors on one side of the equation and get into a generally an overly stressful lifestyle state, especially when you take these particular examples and then stack them on top of hectic, high stress, modern life in general. So not only did I have workouts, restrictive diet, <laugh>, higher age group, but then we have our traffic jams, then we have our divorce proceedings, then we have our business challenges, being a self-employed entrepreneur.
Brad (21:32):
All these things stack, stack, stack on one side of the stress scale. So I think that’s the big eye-opener for me. I’ve talked a lot about it with expanding my dietary goals to include healthy, nutritious sources of carbohydrate in order to support my main focus of performing and recovering physically in the interest of nailing the single most beneficial lifestyle intervention for longevity and a long, healthy, happy, energetic active life. And that is to maintain your fitness, maintain your muscle mass, your muscle strength, and your cardiovascular function, all those great things. So this could be called the eat more move more approach in contrast to the calorie restriction, calorie efficiency approach. And I should mention, uh, a wonderful, uh, counter, uh, or, or, or a, um, a supporting view that was offered up by Mark Sisson, who’s a big proponent of metabolic flexibility. I believe he coined the term years ago, and that is being really efficient at fasting, uh, at restricting carbohydrates and making energy internally.
Brad (22:46):
And when you get really good at that, through the hard work of, uh, becoming fit and optimizing diet, you should be able to skip a meal very gracefully and continue on with alertness, energy, and no ill effects. So when you have these attributes of metabolic flexibility or metabolic efficiency, it’s not that stressful to, for example, skip a meal or restrict carbohydrates if you’re pursuing, uh, a, a ketogenic period, which is a great idea to do, um, as a, as a, as a cleansing experience. Let’s say in the book, we talk about a six week annual, uh, ketogenic binge in the winter, and, um, you know, getting these health benefits and then maybe, uh, easing back into, uh, a, a more varied diet, for example. So systems’s important point that, um, when you’re, when you’re good at burning energy, you can sort of get away with, uh, all kinds of different things, including slamming a hot fudge sundae once in a while at your kid’s birthday party and not falling out into a diabetic coma.
Brad (23:50):
So that’s a really important counterpoint where you don’t have to obsess in either direction where, hey, maybe sometimes you’re gonna fast, you’re too busy to eat in the morning, it’s no big deal, and maybe other days you’re gonna make a concerted effort to go looking for, as Dr. Tommy Wood recommends the maximum amount of nutritious calories until you gain a pound of body fat. And so, uh, when you stack up Tommy’s suggestion with Mark Sisson`s often repeated, uh, mantra, which is, what’s the least amount of calories I can consume and still feel active, energetic, happy, satisfied, it actually means the same thing, right? So, um, if Sisson`s trying to hit all these checkpoints of being healthy, active performing and recovering and not, not concern himself with overeating, of course, um, it’s the same as eating the maximum until you gain a pound of body fat.
Brad (24:45):
So that adding body fat is surely an indication that you’re sufficiently fueled and in fact, over fueled a little bit at a certain point in time, uh, due to the, the effort. And speaking of that, starting in May, 2022. So I’m here at the nine-month count of my devoted experiment to try and consume more total daily calories, especially more nutritious carbohydrates inspired by Jay Feldman and our early interviews. Back then, I said, okay, I’m gonna test this out. I’m going to trade my morning period, which has historically been a period of fasting until around midday, and then I would go and prepare, uh, a nutritious meal, but I would generally be fasted in the morning hours, maybe nibbling on some dark chocolate to be in completely accurate, transparent. So it wasn’t a complete fast. I would typically enjoy a square two or three or four, but not really consuming a lot of calories until midday.
Brad (25:47):
So I traded that for a devoted effort to get up, of course, first, do my 40 minute morning exercise routine, and then go slam a huge bowl of fresh fruit and a huge high protein birad whey protein super fuel smoothie with all kinds of performance ingredients in there. Besides the protein in the creatine that’s in my product, I would put all the supplement pills that I’m currently taking are presently taking at whatever time, especially the organ supplements from ancestral supplements, and many other products. So I’d put in maybe 20 capsules, blend those things in there. I would also put, uh, frozen fruit. So frozen bananas, frozen tropical fruit would be part of my smoothie, uh, frozen chunks of liver. So I’m also getting the, uh, the, the, the organ meat game elevated through this morning smoothie, but it’s a lot of calories, a lot of energy.
Brad (26:36):
And same combined with the fruit I’m getting fully fueled every morning in contrast to nibbling on dark chocolate. And so that was my experiment, and I took it really to the extreme, or I’ve taken it to the extreme where I go around even in the evening, deliberately looking for more calories to consume again in the name of performance and recovery. So, an interesting thing to report after so long is that my body composition, my body weight is the same as when I started when I was that devoted fasting person. And of course, uh, keeping a nice organized and, um, you know, not, uh, a gluttonous approach to diet. So I wasn’t overeating or engaging a lot of bad habits or eating processed foods or indulgent foods ever. Uh, but now, uh, the, the sheer, uh, uh, volume of extra calories has not generated an increase in body fat.
Brad (27:34):
I have not obsessively kept track of the, uh, pre-ex experiment, total daily calories and total daily carbohydrate grams versus, uh, my, my current experiment, however, former podcast guest Ryan Baxter has, and it’s absolutely fascinating to listen to that show and hear how he has tracked everything. He’s an engineer by trade, so he has spreadsheets, he’s recorded everything he’s eaten and the calorie and the macronutrient values for, for many years. And he performed a similar devoted experiment where he went looking for extra nutritious calories every day. And for one year, he ate an average of 700 additional calories every day. And mind you, the important factor here is this is all nutritious foods. He was not going and getting an extra slurpee every day or having an extra couple scoops of Ben and Jerry’s processed nasty ice cream. Uh, so in the interest of, uh, science, he recorded everything, and then a year later, he did another DEXA scan.
Brad (28:39):
So he got the exact stats and results, and he was virtually the same with his body fat percentage, his body weight, his body composition. So the question might be, where did the extra 700 calories go? And I think the only reasonable answer is that he turned up assorted metabolic dials to perform and recover to a better level, and to have better thyroid function, to have a more stable body temperature, for example. And I notice now when I have those days where I’m not eating my normal slam in the morning, I’m obligated to fast because I’m out and about running around. I didn’t have time, whatever. I start to get cold in the afternoon if I haven’t eaten my typical large load of daily calories. And it’s really interesting, it’s happened 10 times now, so I can validate it. And that’s the thyroid turning down body temperature to conserve energy.
Brad (29:37):
So we have these important dials: repair, reproduction, growth, and locomotion, and that’s the dials that we arguably want turned up for the duration of our lives. So we can be happy, healthy, alert, energetic, and fit for as long as possible. Of course, the dials, the flames are gonna turn down gradually as we get through each passing decade. But reproductive fitness is often regarded as a great proxy for your overall level of energy, vitality, and health status. And it’s also very commonly, it’s one of the very common flames that get turned down when your life is too stressful for whatever reasons. So, the most prominent, the most glaring example is the elite female endurance athlete or any elite female athlete with low body fat levels. And they experience amenorrhea, the cessation of menstruation. So they become reproductively unfit due to expending an excessive amount of energy toward athletic peak performance goals.
Brad (30:46):
And remember, the female’s most prominent biological drive, whether she’s interested in having a family or not, right? The female’s most prominent biological drive is reproduction, as is the males. So when the male, uh, loses libido or is testing blood and delivers lower levels of testosterone, that is likely because the overall stress level of one’s life is too high. Remember, cortisol and testosterone antagonize each other. So when you have chronically elevated cortisol, uh, representative of an overly stressful lifestyle, might be that you’re training too hard, might be that you’re consuming too many processed foods like industrial seed oils, refined grains, sugars, things like that, things that can tank your testosterone if you’re in a dysfunctional, romantic relationship, as John Gray talks about with such color and detail on our podcast, and in his book Beyond Mars and Venus. A dysfunctional romantic relationship can tank your testosterone as well as a shitty job, a long commute, a bad diet, insufficient exercise, or too much exercise.
Brad (31:54):
So we wanna keep these important dials turned up reproductive drive repair growth. So that would mean like, you know, performing a workout, stimulate your muscles and having them come back stronger, not necessarily bigger. Don’t worry if you’re a female listening and you don’t want to get huge from, uh, doing an ambitious workout schedule in having fruit and protein smoothie in the morning. So we want reproduction, repair, growth, and locomotion. Locomotion, of course, encompasses all manner of movement, exercise and moving through your day and through your life. So we wanna optimize for those by any means necessary. Of course, prioritizing sleep, eating nutritious foods, and being very, very careful when we go into, uh, uh, restrictive type diets overlaid against this desire to live an active, energetic life. That’s a whole show talking about one middle comment from Eric Frohart. So we will, uh, return to the Q and A format next time.
Brad (33:00):
But I think this is such an important point. And rethinking the obsession with ancestral adherence is the next level, the next frontier of the progressive health movement, the ancestral health movement. So hopefully you’re with me and you can always broaden your perspective rather than an overly narrow, uh, for example, perception of how fasting more is better type of thinking. Same with, uh, calories are, uh, evil and, uh, calorie restriction equals longevity. It does not equal longevity. You might have heard rat studies referenced frequently, because we can’t do a lot of calorie restriction studies on humans, uh, being inhumane or lack of willingness, right? But when you starve a rat, they’ve shown and, and other species, the sea elegance, sea creature, Jay Feldman talks about that. And he also talks about how most of the rat studies are extremely flawed, because when you’re studying a rat in a laboratory and doing a calorie restriction experiment on a rat, what you’re talking about is giving a rat an excessive amount of their rat junk food or restricting the level, the amount of rat junk food that they’re eating.
Brad (34:16):
But in both cases, they’re eating this laboratory chow that is not healthy and nutritious. And so if you restrict the amount of junk food that you’re eating, you’re going to live longer, whether you’re a rat or you’re a person. But that has really little comparison to, again, the pursuit of the optimal human life experience today and the optimal human diet. So we’re going back and referencing Tommy Wood go out and find the maximum amount of nutritious calories. So the avocado, one of the superfood of the planet, um, he made that joke where he’s looking at athlete food diaries and it says, breakfast, I had two eggs, half an avocado, blank blank. And he says, wait, what’s, what’s that? Why don’t you eat a real breakfast? Why don’t you make it six eggs and a full avocado? Then you’re getting so much more choline and B vitamins and the wonderful things that are offered by the egg yolk, one of the most nutritious foods on the planet.
Brad (35:09):
Same with the avocado and the great levels of monounsaturated fat, and all these things. If you consume more of them, you stand to benefit more, as long as you can perform and, you know, lead an active lifestyle because it’s, it’s possible to sit around and eat the most incredibly nutritious diet and add a pound of body fat, or two pounds of three pounds if all you’re doing is sitting around. But if we can kind of optimize for nutritious food and active energetic lifestyle, that’s when I think today we are gonna be advancing the human species far beyond the ancestral example of, you know, surviving survival of the fittest and passing on genes to offspring. And that would be the essence of their experience. Where today we want more, we want a richer, more meaningful lifestyle. We want to contribute, we want to do incredible things. Climb, climb tall mountains and sail rough seas. And then, uh, be really productive in our career direction. All these wonderful things. So perform recovery, consume nutritious foods. Don’t get too obsessed with the suffering that that was the representative of our ancestors. And boy, there you go. Pretty simple, straightforward. Go for it. Thanks for watching listening.
Brad (36:27):
Thank you so much for listening to the B.rad Podcast. We appreciate all feedback and suggestions. Email podcast@bradventures.com and visit bradkearns.com to download five free eBooks and learn some great long cuts to a longer life. How to optimize testosterone naturally, become a dark chocolate connoisseur, and transition to a barefoot and minimalist shoe lifestyle.
