It’s been a long time since Mia Moore was last on the show (listen to her previous appearances, Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff, Becoming More Conscious In Relationships and How To Be More Chill from the expert herself here) and today we will be focusing on a question I have received numerous times over the years: what to do when one person in a relationship is more devoted or interested in ancestral eating than the other?

How do you get them into it? As you’ll hear Mia explain in this episode, you can’t—because when it comes to any type of diet or major life change, the person has to be ready to do it. “It has to come from them” according to Mia. She talks about her health journey, sharing what foods she eliminated first, the ingredient she loves too much to cut out entirely, how her diet has changed since meeting Brad, and advice for getting loved ones interested in eating healthily.

TIMESTAMPS:

 For a person to change the eating patterns, they have to be ready to do it. [01:50]

The first step is getting rid of the oils and sodas, processed foods from your kitchen. [04:23]

“Eating in moderation” is often used as an excuse to eat some of the wrong things that are driven by marketing forces. [06:58]

Anyone who takes a step away from unfettered access to indulgent foods is going to have a huge health awakening, [11:15]

If your sleep habits are not good…if you stay up late, it is easy to get the munchies and go for the junk foods. [16:10]

The standard western diet has been a widespread dismal failure resulting in the fattest sickest population in the history of humanity. [19:29]

Why is cereal the breakfast food that is so common? When the tobacco companies began getting criticized, they bought many of the major food companies and continued the same advertising methods. [22:18]

Our ancestors ate meat, fish, fowl, eggs, vegetables, fruits, nuts, and seeds. Grains appeared with the advent of civilization. [25:30]

Grains are a staple around the world and have been for hundreds of years. [30:53]

Of course, as we try to emulate some of the features of ancestral living, we need to adapt to modern times. [32:38]

It is very important to consume the food that is produced in a healthy manner like pasture-raised chickens and eggs. [35:42]

Some people exploring the carnivore diet, are fighting autoimmune diseases. [39:10]

In raw form, plant toxins are especially concerning. [40:21]

Your health is greatly affected by diet, but you must also look at the sleep and exercise patterns. [43:57]

Doctors are not there to be health and nutrition counselors, but sometimes they give advice in that area that may not be well-founded. [46:44]

The changes in modern society of having two parents working and more activities outside the home has made junk food almost obliterate the home cooked meals. [51:11]

In summary, look at what you can adapt from the evolutionary diet and get more movement in general. The path to fitness is not necessarily a struggle. [54:58]

LINKS:

• Brad Kearns.com
• Brad’s Shopping page
• Primal Prescription
• Metabolical
• The Hacking of the American Mind
• Brad’s Podcast with Dr. Lustig
• Jeanne Calment
• Fast Food Nation
• Carnivore Score Food Ranking Chart

QUOTES:

• “If you simply eliminate processed foods, you can’t get fat.” (Dr. Robert Lustig)
• “The greatest shift in the history of humanity was the shift away from hunter gatherer lifestyle to civilized lifestyle.” (Jared Diamond)

LISTEN: 

We appreciate all feedback, and questions for Q&A shows, emailed to podcast@bradventures.com. If you have a moment, please share an episode you like with a quick text message, or leave a review on your podcast app. Thank you!

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B.Rad Podcast

Brad (00:00:01):
I’m author and athlete, Brad Kearns. Welcome to the B.rad podcast, where we explore ways to pursue peak performance with passion throughout life. Visit brad kearns.com for great resources on healthy eating, exercise and lifestyle. And here we go with the show.

Brad (00:00:59):
Greetings, everyone from vacation, hotel room and yes, Mia Moore is gonna be brought into the show. It’s been a long time since we’ve had you on. Welcome back Mia Moore.

Mia (00:01:11):
Finally. You’re welcome, <laugh>.

Brad (00:01:14):
Yes, that’s right. We’ve been talking about doing some follow-up podcasts for a while. We’re gonna do one on relationship insights, but this one, the idea came from a ton of requests that we’ve received from people over the years where one person is super into the ancestral health scene and read our book and is attending our retreat. And then they’ll come up and asked Mark or I, Hey, can you gimme some tips about getting my girlfriend into primal eating, too? And Mark’s favorite answer is, uh, no, I <laugh> No, you can’t, you can’t do it

Mia (00:01:50):
Because you sure couldn’t do that with me. You couldn’t get me to eat primal Paleo, because it’s something with any type of diet, if you wanna call diet, the person needs to be ready to do it. It has to come from them. So when you’ve got, you know, parents telling their teenage daughter that she needs to lose weight, for example, or a spouse, which is worse, telling their wife the same thing. I mean, usually saying, do you really want to eat that? You know,

New Speaker (00:02:18):
It comes across sideways around. Yeah. You know, what do you call like an indirect little Yeah. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> not even facing it straight on, which would be a little tough to take, but at least the person speaking straight on, right? Instead you’re saying like, I’m so glad I stopped eating cupcakes. You know, stuff like that,

Mia (00:02:36):
Right? Oh, let’s go for a walk after eating that piece of cheesecake <laugh> and, and wink queen. But anyway, but I’ve always said, you know, you have to be, the person has to be ready, willing to do so and able, because let’s not forget, there’s always that fine print. You need to check with your doctor first, right? And I think people tend to forget about that aspect, although that could lead to, to another show where you yourself don’t always agree or don’t feel that the doctors are up to date or current with, you know, how to eat healthy, what’s healthy, what’s not. I mean, that could be a different story, a different show

Brad (00:03:12):
Altogether. No, don’t, we’ll be hitting that in this show, don’t worry. Okay. Because you’ve described a really delicate, um, tight rope that I personally have to walk because I’m total immersion into healthy living, diet, lifestyle, exercise, training, fitness. However, you’re wasting your breath until someone is ready to receive the information. Not, not to mention change and actually do it, but just even have a conversation. So when I try to, um, dominate the, uh, the chit-chat at a, at a gathering when people aren’t even interested, that’s a waste of breath. And then if you detect someone’s interested or they have, you know, sincerely asking me a question about the latest book I’m working on, I will jump into that mode really quickly. But then, um, you have to be careful from getting this big hammer and just hammering in your point of view, that’s, is, is the only way and everyone else is wrong. And I think we’re subjected to that now with social media, with easy dispensation of information podcast YouTube, where, um, it’s, it’s getting overboard and it’s getting to be a little bit off-putting that, uh, so many people are are expert in voicing their opinion so strongly and shoving it down your throat.

Mia (00:04:23):
Right. Well, let’s go back to like, when I first learned about the paleo diet was that day when I met you on the Southwest Air airplane heading down to Burbank. And I were talking about what we do for a living or what have you, is just pleasant chit chat that you do on the plane with the person sitting next to you. And you mentioned the Paleo diet or Primal and I, and I said, what’s that? Cause I hadn’t heard of that. And you kind of started, you, you know, talked to me about it, send me some links, follow up links. And I started slowly reading into it and I took away a few things from it cuz I really wasn’t willing to or ready to convert my whole, you know, eating habit. But little things, I think that’s how the best way to approach things, the little takeaways from that conversation.

Mia (00:05:09):
My takeaway was no vegetable oils, you know, limiting that in my diet or canola oil and all of that using butter, avocado oil, coconut oil. That was my immediate takeaway. I’d already been doing other things. I had a son who was working out and meal planning and, you know, eating healthy. So we had already eliminated, you know, all sodas from the household, um, and eating, you know, just cleanly. You could, you know, soda to speak, vegetables, chicken, you know, meat. But so that conversation was getting rid of all those, what do you call them? I’m not

Brad (00:05:48):
The processed foods, I

Mia (00:05:49):
Guess that, well no, the vegetable vegetables

Brad (00:05:51):
And all that stuff. Industrial seed oils, vegetable oils. That’s a good takeaway cuz that is the number one thing, right? Especially if you, you have a quick interaction with somebody if they can, if they can take away that, that’s the number one change anyone can make in their diet is to eliminate those,

Mia (00:06:05):
Right? And that’s the first thing I did then later on slowly was sugar. Did I eliminate it in my diet? No. Cuz I can’t, I mean, I just love sugar. What can I say? Right? But I can reduce the sugar intake in my diet easily. I mean, I had reduced it before by not having sodas. I drink a lot of iced tea, unsweetened, you know, that type of thing. But if there’s a cheesecake put in front of me, I’m gonna probably eat. It ice cream? Why not <laugh>? But again, that’s goes back to eating everything in moderation, which I don’t know if you and I agree with that. You used to talk about, I don’t think you were a big fan of that, cuz that’s sometimes what doctors tell you. They’ll say, oh, you know, you, your cholesterol level is high, but, you know, just, you know, limit this, that, or the other. Or just eat it in moderation. Sometimes I think I would hear you say, don’t eat it at all.

Brad (00:06:58):
Yeah. It’s a slippery slope. When we traffic in these notions of allowing an indulgence here, an indulgence there, or even verbalizing that phrase. Everything in moderation starts to get me off now because the baseline is so disastrous. And we have so much influence toward unhealthy eating, consuming processed foods, driven by marketing forces and engaging in all kinds of other unhealthy behaviors. And so if we walk around saying, Hey, everything in moderation, we’re talking about an average human who is the fattest, sickest in the history of humanity, history of recorded history. And so I believe that we need an extreme approach to healthy and living just to counterbalance all of the disasters that are in our path everywhere we go and every restaurant we sit down to, whether it’s, um, fast food, whether it’s shopping at the grocery store, fine dining, medium chain dining, um, we’re looking at an onslaught of health objection foods.

Brad (00:07:59):
And so if you, you know, don’t educate yourself well and don’t think about it constantly, you’re gonna drift pretty far down. And then if you start to use the everything in moderation playing card, then you’re gonna drift below the, the midway point and we’re gonna be into the path of disease and and demise. And we have the stats on type two diabetes growing at such an accelerated rate that, you know, it’s gonna overwhelm um, western society in, in the decades ahead. Dr. Doug McGuff in his book, Primal Prescription cites research that it will bankrupt the US Treasury. Caring for Type 2 Diabetes alone will destroy the healthcare system as well as the entire, the entire government due to the cost of caring for people.

Mia (00:08:41):
Right. Um, and you know what you’re saying about the processed food, I, to me the biggest I noticed, I’m speaking for myself here cuz I’m not one that can speak about other people for other people, but for myself, eliminating fast food, cuz I used to eat a lot of it, either as a kid or traveling for work for years, it was pretty easy when you arrive late to a city to grab a whatever cross junior chicken sandwich. Um, and then later in life not eating as much as that cuz there’s no need for that. I noticed a change, I mean as far as you know, weight and all that, just by not eating fast food, whether it’s salt, I don’t know what it is, it just, you know or eating cleanly. Like, like I said, I have a friend who, or you had mentioned a friend who does the Scarsdale diet for years and would mention it to me and I never did it cuz I just really wasn’t ready.

Mia (00:09:35):
Cuz it’s very regimented as far as what you can eat for the first two weeks, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. But one day I just thought, you know, I’m just gonna do it. I was ready to do it. And I know in two weeks, I mean they say you can lose a pound a day unless I think 10 pounds in two weeks. Plus I was also, you know, kicking up my exercising, you know, doing it daily rather than, you know, a few times a week. Um, and so in those two weeks I’m not eating anything from, you know, bought at some, didn’t go out to a restaurant just at home, plain

Brad (00:10:06):
Food. Right. You stuck, stuck to it like, like, uh, glue. It was incredible really. Cuz I don’t think too many people can make that type of commitment to eat exactly what stated there. But the mere act of doing that was, uh, tremendous because you were locked in,

Mia (00:10:20):
Right? It was easy. I didn’t have to think about it. I knew every morning was gonna be half a grapefruit and a piece of heat closet, protein bread, but I just did wheat toes with low sugar or no sugar in it. I looked at the ingredients every morning, didn’t have to think about that. And usually had, didn’t eat breakfast, remember I would, I would never eat breakfast. My first meal was always, you know, noon or, or one sometimes. But I, for these two weeks I did this, you know, I followed it to the tea. My lunch, you have a choice of things to eat or you can have a cup of cottages cheese with some fruit, blueberries, blackberries, and three or four pecans. It was very limited, but, so I would cut it in little pieces to get a crunch on in every bite. But that’s what I did. And my dinner was, you know, you have to choose one day you can have chicken or fish and then as many vegetables as you want, which I know that you’re not into vegetables anymore, <laugh>, but I, so I would have my veggies.

Brad (00:11:15):
You could be doing worse than following this regimented diet that kept you in, in complete regulation. And I think that was the biggest insight for me watching was like, anyone who takes a step away from unfettered access to indulgent foods is gonna have a huge health awakening, Really. And I think that’s where we get these people saying how great the whole food plant based is because they have their kale smoothies and their salads and their lentil soup and they feel fantastic. And in comparison to stopping off at Carls Jr and having donuts in the morning and, you know, just bombing yourself with processed foods for years and decades, it’s gonna feel great to make any change. Even one that I would categorize as high risk, like a whole food plant base. But the Scarsdale diet for people who don’t know, back in, I think it was the seventies.

Mia (00:12:04):
78,

New Speaker (00:12:05):
it was a bestselling book and it was, it was the thing for a while. And um, here it is dusted off with great success by a couple enthusiasts.

Mia (00:12:14):
Right? And the good thing about that, you only do it for two weeks mm-hmm. <affirmative>, and then you’re off it for two weeks. If you need to lose more weight, you do it for another two weeks, but I did it for two weeks, felt great a month or two later. I may do it for a week or so if I feel I need a, you know, kicking the pants or what have you. But it worked for me. And so part of what you and I have always talked about is, you know, yeah, there’s primal paleo, um, carnivore diet. There’s all these different diets around and I think there’s not one diet for everyone. Everyone has to find what works for them, which I’ve always told people. But, um, anyway,

Brad (00:12:51):
Well, I mean, the more sophisticated the discussion gets, it seems like a lot of people are landing on that insight that there’s a lot of personalization that is necessary. And so it’s a big vote for, um, having the courage to experiment for a month and see what happens. And if you’re suffering from nagging autoimmune and inflammatory conditions and digestive disturbances and, uh, nothing’s done well with, you know, traditional treatment, medication or just that you’ve been hanging with this stuff for years and decades, a 30 day restriction diet, the carnivore being the best and easiest one to follow, that it eliminates all those plant toxins. There’s thousands and thousands of people reporting amazing health turnarounds now. Should they stay on that forever or should, should anyone, um, you know, think that’s the end all? Of course not. But if you got troubles, uh, the first thing to do is eliminate processed foods, then you’re gonna feel fantastic.

Brad (00:13:50):
And then we have these additional tiers. But, um, I’m getting frustrated with all the, uh, kind of hair splitting that’s going on as we deeply immerse into this. And so I really like to back up the conversation to say, look, if you just can eliminate processed foods, that’s gonna be your biggest win by far. I had Dr. Robert Lustig on the show, author of Metabolical, The Hacking of the American Mind, many other best selling books regarded as one of the world’s leading anti-sugar crusaders. And he said, backed by great research and his career reputation, he said, if you simply eliminate processed foods, you can’t get fat. You can’t become obese, you can’t get metabolic syndrome because our body does a wonderful job regulating our caloric intake of nutritious, wholesome foods. And anyone can relate here because, uh, you don’t go to the omelet bar and have too many omelets and then be patting your stomach and feeling terrible. You just, it’s really difficult to eat too many steaks and walk away feeling bad as opposed to, oh, I just finished another pint of ice cream after my long busy stressful day where I didn’t really nourish myself well. Those are the foods that are easy to overeat and get stuck in that spiral of needing more and more of them because your body is not processing energy. Right. Very efficiently.

Mia (00:15:06):
And the least the yeah, the, the less you eat of those, the more guilty you feel when you do eat a piece of cake, <laugh> or whatever. I know I do because I’m not eating as much as that.

Brad (00:15:16):
Oh, those, oh, so you’re saying like now that you’ve cleaned up your diet, let’s say mm-hmm. <affirmative>, you notice that you’re making a departure rather than just like, sure, sure. I’ll reach for anything

Mia (00:15:25):
Right. It’s like I gotcha, okay. Yeah, that’s my birthday month so I can, you know, that’s the excuse when it’s my birthday month.

Brad (00:15:33):
And interestingly, you seem to weather, uh, whatever treat, like you don’t notice any adverse effects where I sometimes feel like crashed and burned if I do go and hit the ice cream really hard when we’re going out to one of the gourmet ice cream shops, I kind of feel like, oh boy. But you seem to have no problem.

Mia (00:15:53):
No, probably cuz I eat more of it than you do <laugh>.

Brad (00:15:55):
Well, again, there’s that personal over and if we tested your genetics and the number of amylase genes you have 23 and I have seven or something. Right. We’re making that up. But like some people can handle a high carbohydrate intake more than others.

Mia (00:16:10):
Right. But something else I’m gonna go back to when I was doing that Scarsdale diet, it was more than just the food. It was also like my day change during those two weeks. I was, I’m one that always stays up late. And what happens when you stay up late? You get the munchies and now and at that point you’re not gonna cook something healthy. Mm-hmm. You’re gonna reach into the cupboard and see what’s there. Right. I know some people say they eat cereal, right? Because it’s easy. Someone may take a scoop of the ice cream that’s in the fridge, you never know. Or beef jerky, which is what I’ve done sometimes cuz it’s there. Um, just your munching or popcorn our favorite with lemon olive oil instead of um, butter. But still. So I would stay up, I stay up late and I’m munching. That also adds calories to you and you’re not burning those calories.

Mia (00:17:00):
Um, so with this diet that I was doing, I’m eating that breakfast, you know, after my workout in the morning that, you know, little breakfast, then I have my lunch and then dinner was, cuz you’re not eating a lot so you’re hungry earlier. So I was eating dinner at five. Again, normally we dinner at with six or seven, which is why I stay up late. So I was finding myself going to bed earlier during those two weeks and actually getting more sleep as well. So, and working out every day. So it’s that whole psych, my whole, um, day change. And I think that made a difference. And I think that makes a difference when we kind of go the other direction cuz we’re staying up late, we’re eating junk food late, we’re not working out as much or what, whatever it is.

Brad (00:17:43):
Um, yeah, there’s tons of research suggesting that eating after dark is adverse to your digestive circadian rhythm, which is so tied into your circadian rhythm overall. Um, I’m not sure I’m highly sensitive to that one. Like I don’t, I don’t have any problem eating a meal after dark or even closer to bed than that’s you. It’s recommended. Right. That’s

Mia (00:18:04):
You right. With me. I’ve found that it does make a difference. Well, I mean, everyone’s different

Brad (00:18:08):
Is what I’m trying to say. If you’re getting up past your, um, your bedtime, um, you’re gonna kick into sort of an alternative energy source, which is cortisol, the, the stress hormone that’s supposed to be dropping, dropping, dropping as you make the environment dark and you wind things down, close down your screens, all those things. But if you spike cortisol by staying up late, by getting the stimulation from a screen and from artificial light, that’s gonna prompt sugar cravings and quick energy because we’re not, you know, tapping into our natural energy sources, which are governed by exposure to sunlight and those wonderful hormone balances that occur first thing in the morning. We’re supposed to wind everything down. So it’s sort of like an override. So you’re jumping into you’re pulling over into the gas station, um, to get another fuel source for the last hour. And Yeah, that’s a good point you make that it’s available and easy and um, also,

Mia (00:18:59):
But that’s cuz it’s in your pantry. I guess if I Yeah, it wasn’t purchased in my household, I wouldn’t have it.

Brad (00:19:05):
Yeah. I’m not sure about the research on this, but maybe it’s that we really want sugar at those times and the quick easy to digest stuff rather than, you know, is the, is making some scrambled eggs as appealing at 10 30 at night as popcorn. Probably not.

Mia (00:19:21):
It is for my son, my oldest, I’ll find him at 10 30 at night making scrambled eggs after his hours. He’s

Brad (00:19:29):
Got many more hours of gaming. So that’s kind of, The couple discuss he needs some nutritious food. Okay. So we have sort of a nice, um, overview and status report where, um, the couple has obviously been discussing these things and uh, living out our healthy lifestyle dreams over the last five, six years. Right. And I think maybe with the show, um, maybe I can, um, we can kind of role play here where I take you a little deeper into the wonderful immersion of ancestral health principles and then you can see sort of how that flies with your own personal experience coming from, um, you know, your background of having a, having an interest in healthy living, healthy eating, um, but now having to, especially as you alluded to a couple times earlier in the show, you’re having to embrace this radical new information that I walked through the door with one day where you said, yeah, now I guess you’re not so in vegetables. All that kind of fun stuff. Right?

Mia (00:20:25):
Yeah. Okay.

Brad (00:20:26):
Um, so I think as we sort through, let’s say the best selling diet books of the last five decades and what the trends and patterns have been. There’s some pretty, uh, interesting trends that we really, um, should educate ourselves about and understand where things are at. And one of ’em is this toppling of conventional wisdom that has occurred at an accelerated rate over the last 20 years with the rise of the internet and the ancestral health movement and so forth. But now what’s coming to appear is that the US government dietary recommendations, which by the way have been exported across the world to all other countries. You know, we, we came up with this, flawed science and questionable research and, um, come out with the food pyramid back in the nineties, and numerous iterations of it. And we’re now realizing that the standard western diet has been a widespread dismal failure resulting in the fattest sickest population in the history of humanity.

Brad (00:21:26):
And some of the highlights there have been the introduction of processed foods and the heavy promotion of these processed foods as actually healthy and superior to some of the centerpiece foods of human evolution. And amazingly, a lot of this information holds strong today, even as the research and the ground swell of information and, um, success stories and failure stories have come about. But you still will go to the doctor and they’ll say, Hey, you should cut back on your eggs cuz your LDL cholesterol, quote unquote bad cholesterol is looking a little high. And some of these in some of these notions are about 40 or 50 years flawed and dated from what the news was back in the sixties and seventies.

Mia (00:22:10):
I mean, like, who made cereal the thing to eat in the mornings? I mean, to me that that’ll, that’s like the grossest thing, cereal.

Brad (00:22:18):
Oh

Mia (00:22:18):
Boy. You just, you look at the ingredients,

Brad (00:22:19):
You just set me up for a good one there because Kellogg was this evangelical, um, health freak and he invented cereal, um, as a way of quelling the desire to masturbate in young youth that he wanted to indoctrinate into his religious values. And that is no joke, that’s why cereal was invented because he knew that stuffing, the human with, um, this processed food would, um, diminish libido. So that’s kind of a funny start to the, the cereal lifestyle. Uh, but what we have today are these, multinational giant companies spending billions of advertising dollars starting when we were little kids watching cartoons in the morning. And Dr. Lustig talked about this a little where the tobacco companies started to see the writing on the wall in the sixties when they were getting shut down cuz people were dying. And so they started gobbling up food companies and using the same advertising strategies to, to create lifelong consumers of the processed food, the high profit nutrient deficient processed food. And now we have companies like RJR Nabisco RJR is RJ Reynolds, one of the great tobacco companies, the giants where they, you know, merged and bought up all the, all the brands.

Mia (00:23:35):
Philip Morris Kraft, I remember I audited them back in the day. They’re Philip Morris, right?

Brad (00:23:40):
Yeah. So we got wise to cigarettes. It’s been great to see in our lifetimes the decline in smoking. I remember being a little kid and I for some reason just hated smoking and hated cigarette smoke. And, um, now it’s great to live in a world where it’s, you know, largely diminished and is, you know, now getting exported to the third world countries that, um, you know, aren’t as sophisticated as to the health risk. But here we are still succumbing to a massive onslaught of advertising and flawed science and flawed government information. And then even the pillars of education, for example, like today when you go and get a degree in dietary science, nutrition, your certification are largely aligned with the government policies, the USRDA dietary recommendations and

Mia (00:24:28):
Right, but let’s go back there cuz I know you have your food pyramid and there’s the US food pyramid. I, I don’t think the problems with the food pyramid, really, I think it’s the food that people are eating that are not really within the food pyramid. Do you know what I mean? It’s like

Brad (00:24:43):
Yeah, that’s a good point. I mean, the biggest problem is you’re not even on the pyramid. Right? But the pyramid itself is a disaster as well because it’s recommending that you have grains as the centerpiece of your diet. And these are high calorie nutrient deficient processed foods, whether they’re whole grains or refined grains, they really have no place in the diet. And that’s where the big fork in the road occurs with ancestral health movement and Mark Sisson’s Primal Blueprint. The early leaders Robb Wolf, and if we go back with proper credit, there was a, uh, a researcher named Boyd Eaton in 1988 put out a paper showing the dietary practices of hunter gatherer ancestors. And, uh, Westin A Price did it back a hundred years ago. He traveled around the world studying indigenous populations and saw that they consumed things like organ meats and, uh, they didn’t have, of course, any processed foods a hundred years ago.

Brad (00:25:30):
And they were super healthy compared to, um, civilized humans that were eating flour and sugar and making bread and, uh, you know, living in, you know, modern times. So this ancestral health movement then, you know, really took off in the early two thousands. And the big takeaway to make a short story was that we eliminated the foods that occurred after civilization. So we’re talking about a paleolithic eating experience and the familiar list of foods that humans evolved for two and a half million years were meat, fish, fowl, eggs, vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds. And by the way, they also ate a lot of insects. And largely noticeably missing from that list were the grains that were the centerpiece of the advent of civilization. That’s why we were be able to become civilized, is we started to cultivate corn, wheat, and rice across the globe. Then we could grow crops live in one space, uh, advanced society and also get much less healthy because these, these calories were going in that were not hunter gatherer fare, which are vastly more nutrient dense. And so, um, a grain-based diet has been really the biggest disaster. And also including the refined industrial seed oils as we, we went away from natural fats that we used to cook with and eat.

Mia (00:26:47):
And remind me again, the, the bad thing about grains.

Brad (00:26:50):
Well, they’re high calorie, high carbohydrate, very little nutrition in comparison to a steak, an egg, a sardine, a salmon, you know, the, the true nutrient dense foods of the earth fruits. And so basically we’re filling up our, um, our mouths with a lot of calories that don’t do much for us besides overwhelm the delicate system of insulin production because we’re not used to, as humans, we’re not used to ingesting 100, 200 grams, 300, 500 grams of carbohydrates in a day. Okay.

Mia (00:27:23):
But what if there are all these other countries that rice is a staple in their, you know, their diet, they’re not obese, you don’t have a, a lot of obesity there. Is it, they’re more active probably? Out walking and, you know, working the fields, whatever it is that the difference, you know what,

Brad (00:27:41):
Yeah, very good question. It’s really, um, what we get into these days are the back and forth about people citing an attribute of the Mediterranean diet or the traditional Japanese diet and look how long they live and look how much healthier they are. And so we can pick and choose all kinds of positive attributes and negative attributes of any civilized, you know, no one’s perfect. Even the, the longest live humans in the secret pocket of, uh, the Blue Zones, which is a popular book and lifestyle movement where they went and found areas where there was a lot of people living to a hundred. And it’s been, you know, widely, um, criticized and discredited by people that, uh, that object to it. And then it’s been widely touted as like the greatest thing. And um, this, you know, this whole industry has been built around the blue zones and I like to, um, look for common ground so we don’t just argue all day long and realize that people who live to be a hundred, they’re doing a lot of things right.

Brad (00:28:36):
One of ’em is picking the right parents cuz it’s now known that there’s a lot of people that can live to a hundred. I’m sidetracking for a moment, but it’s interesting to note there’s like a half a million people alive today around the world that are over a hundred. Wow. However, how many people live to be 110? Very, very few. There’s, there’s like, there’s 17 or something right now, so there’s a half a million live to a hundred, 110? Ain’t happening. And with the research on the Supercentenarians it’s called 110 plus, um, the genetic attributes are so profound that it’s almost like you’re not gonna get there unless you have the genes and all these awesome lifestyle habits. Of course, there’s probably a lot of people that have super centenarian genes that live to be 73 because they smoked and whoa did

Mia (00:29:22):
Whatever. There’s the French lady, didn’t she smoke

Brad (00:29:24):
Jeanne Calment? Yeah, she smoked, she she quit smoking when she was like 115 or something like that. Right. Like that she finally quit. Anyway, back to the

Mia (00:29:32):
Um, oh no, I’m gonna talk about my grandma too. My great-grandmother lived to be over a hundred and she drank, she had a shot of some hard alcohol every night and that’s what she attributed her

Brad (00:29:43):
Long life too. So a great-grandmother living to be over a hundred is a stunning performance. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> cuz I said today there’s a half a million centenarian in 2022, but if this great grandma was living in the, coming into the 20th century and that’s it, like mm-hmm. <affirmative>, when did she die around? I’d have

Mia (00:30:00):
To ask

Brad (00:30:00):
My dad that. So it was in the eighteens and nineteens then, if she’s your great grandmama, that’s incredible cuz back then, yeah, maybe she was one of the few around. Sure. Um, so the, um, what I was saying before I got excited about that the a hundred year old people was, oh, so we’re looking at all the attributes of different diets and different cultures and trying to get these common ground. I think clearly the lack of processed foods gives you a fighting chance to have a long, healthy, happy, productive life. And so anyone who’s consuming these modern foods that have accelerated in their offerings in the last 30, 40, 50 years, um, that’s a disaster. You’re just slashing your lifespan every single day that you pull into Carl’s Jr. Or Ben and Jerry’s pints or, uh, the, the potato chips and the stuff that’s going in. So, you know, we’re past the point of like optimal, uh, longevity potential because we have way more processed foods than our, our parents even and our grandparents.

Brad (00:30:53):
Um, so that’s the, that’s the first note. And the second one is cuz you asked about, um, the, the, the, the presence of grains and how they’re a big staple in civilized society across the world, and they have been for 10,000 years. So again, this is how civilization started, was the ability to grow wheat, rice, and corn. And so we don’t want to go back to hunter gatherer times where we’re all going around looking for food for five or six hours every day. Um, that’s what the Hadza and Tanzania are doing right now in the other primitive populations around the globe. They’re super healthy, they have amazing statistics, but they’re also having to get up and look for food all day. So assuming we wanna exist wonderfully in modern life and, and enjoy our lives the way we are, um, looking to an ancestral diet has become very popular for a lot of reasons.

Brad (00:31:40):
One of ’em is that the food is more nutritious and it’s more aligned with our human genetic expectations for health. So like in the primal blueprint where we had to initially present this very controversial and difficult to sell story, we’re talking about how we evolved as homo sapiens and before that homo erectus. So we’ve been around for millions of years eating these kinds of foods, meat, fish, fowl, eggs, vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds. If you look at that list and calculate what carb level is in that list, it’s by comparison to today a very low carbohydrate diet. You get plenty of carbs from fruits and vegetables and so forth, but by comparison to having grained being a centerpiece of all meals all day long around the world, that’s a big shift. And it’s getting us back closer to our human genetic expectations for health, which are not to slam orange juice, toast, oatmeal with brown sugar on top and all those things that we’ve come to see as routine.

Brad (00:32:38):
Okay. So as you can, as you can tell listeners, I’m, I’m trying to sell the, the story and that’s what the, the fun of the show that I, I thought would be, um, you know, how does that fly to you? And that ancestral example of eating, I think is the, it’s the centerpiece of the movement. So it’s a pretty important thing to grasp, especially when, um, you know, I wasn’t really aware of an, uh, you know, evolutionary anthropology to the extent where, you know, we had this big fork in the road, what’s his name? Jared Diamond, uh, Nobel Prize-winning UCLA professor, uh, bestselling author. He said it was the greatest shift in the history of humanity was the shift away from hunter gatherer lifestyle to civilized lifestyle. And with that was the greatest shift in dietary practices in the history of humanity too. And we’re having a difficult time dealing with it based on the, you know, global statistics of, um, you know, obesity and the, those population statistics.

Mia (00:33:35):
Right. And then a shift in activity level too, I would think. Yeah. From hunter gatherers situation.

New Speaker (00:33:39):
So if you look at this ancestral health movement, and we’ll talk on the other aspects like diet, sleeps, circadian rhythm, we’ve talked a little bit, but, um, we’re talking about getting back to the original, you know, human healthy lifestyle and of course making all the adaptations into modern life because we’re not living in caves anymore. So instead we hear a show from a sleep expert saying, we wanna have your room temperature down between 60 and 68 Fahrenheit because we’re meant to sleep in a cool environment. And that’s how the body, uh, gets to sleep and stays asleep. So all these cool little tips and tricks to become more ancestral, Hey, jump in the cold water. I have a chest freezer in our, in our yard, or I jump in the lake. I’m the only person in the lake in the winter. That’s also an ode to how our ancestors dealt with a lot of temperature stress and became strong and resilient accordingly by dealing with long, dark cold winters and learning how to burn body fat more efficiently. So that’s what we’re doing with these a adaptations and little tricks. A lot of people call ’em biohacking and so forth,

Mia (00:34:46):
Like the mattresses,

Brad (00:34:47):
Right? The, the temperature controlled eight sleep mattress, which we’re excitedly getting started on. Uh, but on the important point of diet, it’s pretty difficult to dispute that if you go looking for the natural foods of the earth, um, in the plant kingdom, in the animal kingdom, you are going to be on a healthy path. And because we’ve made it this far two and a half million years, consuming a lot of animals and a lot of different plants as well. People who are objecting to our egg consumption or consuming red meat because it’s so unhealthy and it’s gonna clog your arteries and give you a heart attack are I would say gracefully and nicely. Um, you’re kind of rejecting the evolutionary anthropology model, which is the longest and most severely scrutinized scientific study in history. So it’s known, it’s not disputed, it’s known that we did eat a lot of meat and eggs and fish.

Brad (00:35:42):
And in fact the access to this nutrient rich food that’s found in animal foods was what allowed us to grow a bigger and more complex brain and branch off on the family tree from our ape cousins. Today the gorilla spends 11 hours a day consuming around 40 pounds of plant matter, chewing it and digesting the fiber and getting the what minimal nutrition it needs to fuel a brain that’s a third of the human size. And so that’s an illustrative example of how important and valuable it is for us to find the most nutritious foods to fuel the brain as well as the body.

Mia (00:36:19):
You sold me right there with that statement with

Brad (00:36:21):
The gorilla <laugh>. Yeah. Why do we wanna be like a gorilla? Come on. Um, so here’s where the problem occurs, I think, or the sticking point is the industrialization of our food supply today. And you can go watch a documentary of how nasty the animals are treated and all the crap that they feed the cows in today’s feed lots and make a decision, oh my gosh, I’m never eating that garbage again. I’m just gonna stick to kale smoothie, salads and stir fry and be more healthy and be more sustainable and more clean. And the experts in the the ancestral health roam will help you counter all those objections. Paul Saladino has great shows talking about regenerative agriculture where the cows, when they’re allowed to live in their natural habitat, in their natural manner, they sequester carbon into the, into the earth. So they’re doing like a net positive for the greenhouse gas rather than this horrible, you know, that you hear about them farting and causing a, a huge problem for, uh, climate change and all that. And so I think we can reconcile the objections to eating animal foods by finding the very best sources of animal foods available today. The most sustainable you would call it, right?

Mia (00:37:27):
Pasture raised eggs

Brad (00:37:28):
Yeah, there you go. So pasture raised, that term implies that the chicken was out running around eating grass, eating worms, eating insects, and developing this egg that is way more nutritious than the chicken that’s fed in the chicken coop who lives in a tiny little cage. They keep the lights on 24 7 so the chickens don’t go to sleep cuz they can’t sleep if it’s light. And then they feed them hormones, pesticides, antibiotics. So they grow really big. The guys I just had on the podcast Meat Mafia, they have a graphic on their Instagram where the, the size of the chicken in 1940s was like two pounds and now it’s 10 pounds. Wow. Because they stuff these up and they breed them genetically. And so it, it really is highly objectable

Mia (00:38:10):
They sellable them to Costco for rotisserie chicken.

Brad (00:38:12):
Yeah. People like those bigger ones cuz they look like they’re getting more meat. And then you go to the farmer’s market and you find a truly pasture raised chicken from a local farmer and it’s tiny and it’s $17 instead of 5 95 at Costco. So there’s some budget concerns. There’s a lot of concerns about speaking of sustainability, if everyone all of a sudden went to this ultimately highly sophisticated animal-based organic diet, we would, wouldn’t have,

Mia (00:38:39):
we’d run out,

New Speaker (00:38:40):
Wouldn’t be able to support.

Mia (00:38:41):
Right.

Brad (00:38:41):
Especially the population today at 7 billion. When our fathers were born, it was, um, 2 billion and now it’s 7 billion. So we got all kinds of issues. But when it comes to scrutinizing your own diet and trying to be as healthy as possible, um, that’s where we can try to focus in and say, let’s find the most nutritious foods that are the easiest to digest that don’t cause problems. And they’re minimally processed, minimally labeled frozen package box wrapped, all that crap.

Mia (00:39:10):
Well, I don’t know if you’re gonna talk about this on this show, but my biggest, well my, I was really fascinated when you start talking about or interviewing folks also about who were carnivore and the reason they went carnivore was to either there was an anti-inflammatory reason or the people that had certain autoimmune diseases. I found that pretty fascinating. Yeah,

Brad (00:39:32):
Me too. Because I was hit with these insights in 2019. So I feel like I was really on this ancestral health kick for many years since hook up with Sisson in 2008. And prior to that I was saying kinda like you described at the outset of the show, like, oh, it’s very health conscious since I was 18 years old as far as diet, I read all the books. I tried to get the best whole wheat bread and whole wheat pasta and stay away from the wonder bread and find the peanut butter that didn’t have the processed oils in there, but I was eating what would probably be called a, um, a high carbohydrate grain-based diet, had my giant bowl of cereal in the morning. But guess what cereal was in there? It was the best natural granolas with no additives and, you know, the whole cooked oatmeal rather than the instant bunch of fresh fruit on top and all that sort of thing.

Brad (00:40:21):
And so switching over to eliminating all grains and kind of going into quote unquote the low carb category just by default, that was, you know, a huge, a huge transformation. And then, um, when Dr. Paul Saladino came out and Dr. Shawn Baker came out promoting this, um, this meat-based diet or this carnivore diet, um, that was an eye opener to hear about the potential concerns with the natural plant toxins that are contained in all plants, especially and and most concentrated in the categories that we celebrate as the most nutritious. So the leafy greens, the cruciferous vegetables, this is where you can find higher levels of the natural poisons that your body can potentially a react adversely to in the form of autoimmune and assorted inflammatory conditions. As well as digestive complaints like gas, bloating, transient digestive pain problems with elimination, which are so common that I believe most people just think that they’re normal and you’re gonna go through the month, let’s say, or the year with some rough days where you’re bloated.

Mia (00:41:27):
You’re not that cute when I met you Yeah, yeah. And you were eating all these stir frieds with cabbage and kale or

Brad (00:41:34):
Giant that stuff. Salad, giant stir fries. Um, then I got going on my green smoothie from the viral YouTube video of Dr. Rhonda Patrick showing how she’s stuffing in all this raw celery, spinach, kale, beets and carrots. And so in raw form, um, the plant toxins are especially concerning because they haven’t been treated, processed and neutralized and throughout history, what humans have done with plant material is prepare them so that they can be ingested without killing us. So if, if you, uh, think about olives or cashews or things like that, if you eat that raw, you’ll die. It’s very poisonous, right? So we have to soak, sprout, ferment or cook many plant foods in order to render them not only, not only more pleasant, but you know, non poisonous. And so we’re on this spectrum now where if you’re having a raw kale smoothie, you are indeed getting high levels of certain antioxidant compounds and the things that are touted, but you’re also getting high levels of these poisons, which can cause autoimmune inflammatory and digestive problems.

Brad (00:42:37):
How do you know? Well, you can assess for symptoms or you can do that elimination where if you cut out, um, and the idea would be to cut out all plant foods for 30 days and see, see how you you perform. That’ll be good indicators. And then when you’re scrutinizing your plant intake again for the first time, because this is sort of new information to me, you can start to tier your, your risk factors, I guess cooking things and cooking things well will neutralize more plant toxins. Of course it lowers the nutritional value when you cook anything. That’s why these raw food diets have been popular over time where people contend that they’re getting the most nutritious sources because they didn’t cook their kale. Um, but that’s, you know, again, a very high risk situation. And so my, my smoothie to finish the point here, um, I would drink it and then my stomach would pop out for four hours every single day and it would be kind of sore to touch and be, be sticking out. And then it would finally correct and I’d be okay. And then I finally had that awakening like, this can’t be healthy even though it’s supposed to be super healthy and there’s all kinds of scientific papers showing how healthy, uh, the raw kale is and all that. Um, and that was a nice, you know, kind of transition to be a little more sensible, uh, with these, you know, extreme efforts to be healthy. Right?

Mia (00:43:54):
But it’s doesn’t affect everyone the same way,

Brad (00:43:57):
Right? And so if you have the genetic makeup or whatever your good fortune is, you have a in intact gut lining is another big one. So if you have some leaky gut, uh, symptoms that have developed over a lifetime, you’re gonna find your allergic to 27 different foods from your food test and you gotta watch out for this and you gotta watch out for that. And that could be, um, attributed upstream to having, um, a, you know, a, a gut that’s inflamed and dysfunctional and allowing in unwanted agents into the bloodstream to prompt allergic reactions. So once you get super healthy and heal your gut, gut heal your inflammation, including all your other lifestyle habits that promote inflammatory balance, then you might be more resilient with your diet. Like your example, I think you can go have your cheesecake and ice cream because you have good gut function and a basic level of general health. Same with skipping a night of sleep. I don’t know how you can do that, but you seem to do it just fine.

Mia (00:44:50):
Well, I’ve never skipped a night of sleep. I may just get four hours the day before a early morning flight cuz I’m packing <laugh>. That’s

Brad (00:44:59):
About it. Yeah. That would put me out for the entire vacation probably. So again, having that baseline health foundation will help you, um, navigate whatever’s coming down your, your, your pipe with your diet and with this, with this rise of the animal-based movement, um, a lot of people are seeing good benefits from, you know, toning down that intake of the, the plant superstar foods or preparing them, uh, properly or picking and choosing the stuff that’s more agreeable to them. Now, the other part which is interesting to me, I wouldn’t say I was a huge sufferer. I did notice from those smoothies cuz that was an extreme dose of natural toxins. And then, you know, my bloating and digestive problems coming when I was making those massive red cabbage stir fries, it wasn’t great, but it, I wasn’t in the hospitals when I’m saying

Mia (00:45:49):
No, you weren’t in the hospital, but you were standing upside down on your head or <laugh> in the evenings just to kind of help your

Brad (00:45:56):
Yeah, it was, no, it was no joke. The other part that was really, um, you know, an eye-opener to me was that in fact, if you were to look at the nutrient quality of these wonderful plant foods that we’ve been convinced our whole life or should be the centerpiece of the diet, you know, what’s healthier than a kale smoothie in the morning, a salad for lunch, spinach stir fry for dinner, full iron. How’s that? Right? Right. All those great attributes that we’ve been convinced forever. In fact, the true nutrient superstars of the planet are from the animal kingdom, not the plant kingdom. And again, that’s pretty disputable. Now, I could get a guest on here that would say, well, no, there’s nothing like, you know, a a a kale for the sulforaphane and broccoli is, is off the charts and, um, so forth and, and all that.

Brad (00:46:44):
But, um, objectively speaking, if you were to get a macro micronutrient analysis of various foods and you put a four ounce slice of liver up there with a stock of broccoli or a kale smoothie or a giant salad with all kinds of whatever colorful plants and nutrients on there, there’s no comparison. The liver blows away any plant food as well as the other pasture-raised eggs, the grass fed beef, the oily cold water fish. That’s where humans have obtained the majority of their nutrition for two and a half million years. It’s not from the kale smoothies. And so the people that have difficult time embracing that, um, a lot of this has been a wonderful marketing push, especially in recent years for the, the plant-based community being more sustainable, more nutritious, and staying away from all those killers like red meat and eggs that are clogging your arteries. That’s been unfortunate because it’s just not grounded in good science and it’s a lot of unwinding and deprogramming even today in traditional educational paths or in the physician world where I take a special exception because your MD has not necessarily obtained any training whatsoever in nutrition.

Mia (00:47:56):
Maybe one class

Brad (00:47:56):
Maybe one class. Yeah. Dr. Joy Kong the, the stem cell doctor. Um, she said she had like one, not, not a, not a, not a semester class, but one day of class mm-hmm. <affirmative> where they talked about nutrition at UCLA medical school. Wow. So that’s not to criticize anything about the medical community because they’re there to, um, to treat and, and, uh, care for disease and illness. And we need those people. When my appendix needs to come out, I’m super happy to go see the surgeon and all the other reasons that we go see the doctor. They’re not there to be, um, health and wellness nutrition counselors. But the problem occurs is when they ascend to that role somehow and believe themselves to be the authority on all matters of healthy living and dispense dietary advice that’s backed by US government dogma that we’ve had for decades, where we want you to, um, cut back on your eggs because your cholesterol’s too high.

Brad (00:48:50):
And we can break that down at every level where, for example, the Framingham study, the longest and largest study, um, it’s called epidemiological study, uh, like your daughter’s course of master study, but that means a study of lifestyle on health conditions. Um, it’s been going for something like 80 years and they’ve concluded there’s no correlation between dietary cholesterol intake and blood cholesterol levels. So if you cut back on your dietary cholesterol, your body will just make more, cuz it’s an important component for all manner of hormonal functions and making sex hormones and all these important things. And so same with the red meat causes cancer headline that’s been pounded into our heads for decades. It’s just not associated with anything that’s, that could be called respected science.

Mia (00:49:36):
What about organ meat and cholesterol level or cancer causing, what’s the science there? Because, you

Brad (00:49:42):
Know, yeah, I mean, the problem with a lot of the scientific conclusions that the government has been touted as, um, policy for the last many decades is that all this research comes in the, in the crucible of unhealthy, modern lifestyle habits. So if you have a high processed foods diet that also happens to be high in red meat, right? Um, you are gonna cause all kinds of trouble for those eggs and those steaks that get washed down with, 7 up and, ice cream and so forth. So if you have this inflammatory diet that’s high carbohydrate high in the refined industrial seed oils, you’re gonna develop these conditions like metabolic syndrome, right? And then have a much more likelihood of accumulating plaque on your arteries and having a heart attack. And in fact, cholesterol is part of that story. Uh, but as some, uh, people like to use this analogy, you hear it a lot like, um, there’s firefighters at the fire, but it doesn’t mean the firefighters started the fire. So there’s cholesterol involved in your heart attack, the same stuff that came in the egg, but to make those associations that it was that high egg intake that caused too much cholesterol in your body to start collecting in your arteries is 50 years old, flawed science.

Mia (00:50:57):
Okay. Going back to,

Brad (00:50:58):
so the organ meats you asked about too

Mia (00:51:00):
Yeah. Organ meats. So is that high? Are they high cholesterol meat? Yeah, sure. I grew up eating organ meats. Yeah. Stripe and yeah. Kumbucha and, you

Brad (00:51:08):
Know, all that stuff. So traditional Latin, Latin American cuisine,

Mia (00:51:11):
eating liver

Brad (00:51:11):
Liver and traditional cuisine for anywhere around the planet has all these amazing, fantastic attributes that have been shoved aside only in the last 30, 40, 50 years. Um, there’s a great book called Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser, written in like 1998, and he talks about how the rise of fast food culture destroyed the fabric of American society, which was the family home cooked meal of eating, preparing and eating nutritious foods together. And now instead people could do more work, make more money, uh, get food more conveniently and show the love to their family by going through the drive-through and handing them some hot fries rather than everyone having to slave over peeling the potatoes at home and doing all these things that represented a lot of family togetherness.

Mia (00:51:56):
No, they’re showing their love for their family because they’re busy taking their kids to soccer practice. What, you know, whatever it is, boarding events after work has now both mother and father have to work right to survive in this world and buy a house, and they also wanna make sure their kids do all these other activities. So you’re kind of stuck, I’m just saying, you know?

Brad (00:52:16):
Yeah. Oh, it’s, you’re observing The change of culture and the progress, quote unquote progress of society where, yeah, the kids are better at soccer today than they were 50 years ago, I’m sure because of all the coaching and the videoing. Um, and the standard of living is higher. Perhaps you could say we’re taking, um, whatever it is, living in bigger houses, taking better vacations than the classic American dream story. But we’ve discarded some amazing culinary traditions that served our ancestors all the way up to your mother’s time and so forth. And so this bringing back the traditional cuisine that should be highly embraceable by almost anyone who has a memory or a grandmother hanging around that can, you know, reference back. Um, you know, my mom talks about how liver and onions was her favorite thing growing up as a kid, but we were never served that because we had more McDonald’s available.

Brad (00:53:09):
And so kind of taking a few backward steps from this massive accelerated progress of modern times and returning to some of these ancestral traditions, like taking a walk and walking more in general, rather than driving everywhere and toning down that obsessive consumption of screen entertainment in favor of, let’s say, playing card games or doing, uh, art or doing some family togetherness where you’re actually communicating rather than everyone interfacing with the screen. And then when it comes to food, like appreciating that local movement, which is great, that’s come about now and, um, you know, people are trying to source local a lot of times that gets, unfortunately interwoven with like a plant base and staying away from the local, uh, animal products. But all in all, all that stuff is, all that stuff is good. And, you know, we’re compelled to, I think, wake up to these, these big picture ideas that you gotta stay away from that processed food cause it’s gonna kill you.

Brad (00:54:06):
And we’ve all been touched, every single family has been touched and every individual’s been touched either personally or in, you know, with loved ones with cancer, heart disease, and the major killers of modern times, which are, you know, largely preventable and unnecessary. It’s, uh, who said it? Maybe it was McGuff like 90, is it 97 or 99% of all cancers are lifestyle related and 1% are genetic. You know, some, some people, some young, young people are born with a cancer and they’re in children’s hospital from ages of zero or at age four or whatever. And then the, the other 99 are the stuff we, we, we put in our, our face the rest of our decades. Interesting. Okay. Maybe we should try to summarize the bouncing round of the important point. So I think we talked about the first step, the first gateway for anybody, whatever level of enthusiasm they have is to eliminate the processed foods,

Mia (00:54:58):
Right

Brad (00:54:58):
And then arguably, um, but a very strong argument to, uh, harken that ancestral tradition and understand the example of evolutionary anthropology where we ate a certain way for two and a half million years and now we’re trying to be convinced otherwise by looking at a food pyramid that was put out by what has now been exposed as disastrously, flawed and, uh, manipulated science and propaganda from food lobbyists and so forth. Putting that bottom base of the pyramid, uh, and showing things like, um, you know, non-fat milk and uh, all, all kinds of stuff like that. So if we can kind of back up a bit and look to our ancestral example and stick to those foods that come from the earth that are minimally processed and sustainably source. Now we talked about that too. So if you are gonna go, um, embrace red meat and eggs and fish, especially fish with all the concerns about pollution and all that, you’re, you’re making good choices with the most nutritious foods on the planet, you can go download the carnivore scores food rankings chart that is present on our refrigerator, uh, at bradkearns.com and that will show you how to prioritize the most nutritious foods.

Brad (00:56:07):
So we talked about that and getting, getting more movement in as far as, we didn’t talk about fitness and exercise and all that stuff, but if we want to get quick there, a lot of experts are now contending that just moving more is more important and more beneficial to health than hitting this hardcore devoted exercise regimen where you’re getting yourself to the gym at 6:00 AM several days a week and you’re working out for an hour and then the rest of your life is on the subway in the office or on the couch, right? Just moving around more is a better win than getting your points at The gym,

Mia (00:56:40):
Right? I mean, you can go to the gym like, I like to go and take classes and these classes kind of doing all over. You do a little bit of cardio work, not heavy, some weight work. It’s all about just doing, you know, some, what, what do you, what do you guys call it? Weight resistance.

New Speaker (00:56:55):
Sure. Yeah.

Mia (00:56:55):
Movements and stuff. But you don’t have to be lifting 50 pound weights or whatever, you know, uh, it’s just getting out there moving. Um, I, you know, on the daily if you can, I think, cuz that’s what we were doing back in the day, right? <laugh> walk in wherever we were going and lifting heavy things. What is it that you guys say all the time?

Brad (00:57:15):
Well, you made a good point there because um, there is a danger of getting too extreme with our fitness pursuits today. That’s a small amount of the population, but it’s definitely out there where people are pushing too hard thinking that the path to fitness is struggling and suffering, right? So if you can work within yourself right, and just go and lift some things and they’re not that heavy or whatever you prefer

Mia (00:57:36):
To do, go for a long walk, but at a brisk, brisk, um, pace, right? I find myself after an hour of walking brisktly, Hey, I feel like I had a good workout. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. Yeah. That’s what you need to do.

Brad (00:57:47):
It’s, I think there’s a lot of benefits to doing things that are super brief and also explosive and high intensity. So we need to challenge ourselves, uh, in order to age gracefully, otherwise we’re just gonna get a a little slower and a little less balance and a little less functional right? With the passing of time. And so that’s the whole primal blueprint fitness template was to move around a lot. Put your body under resistance load and lift some heavy things or light things in your example,

Mia (00:58:15):
Right? Light things, a lot of light, you know, light things but repetitive.

Brad (00:58:19):
Yeah. And then finally do something explosive. And so that could mean, uh, a set of kettlebell swings where you can only do it for 10 or 15 seconds cuz it’s too difficult and you gotta stop or sprinting on the bike. My bike. Yeah. Yeah. We have the Carol bike, which is a wonderful technology because the whole workout’s only eight minutes and it includes two 20 second sprints and if you go all out, even for short time like that, you get tremendous fitness benefits, uh, in a different way than taking that hour walk. Right. They’re both super important.

Mia (00:58:50):
Well, that’s one workout. I like the 15 minute workout. Yeah. That has like

Brad (00:58:54):
Short and 20 challenging strength. Yeah, that’s the main point. Um, and then finally we talked about a little bit of circadian rhythm in terms of eating and as well as just living in that way where we want to tone things down after dark because that’s when our genes expect us to wind down and start making the sleep sleepiness hormones and start, you know, just turning the brain down and getting a good night’s sleep. And so the way to do that is to minimize your technology, your stimulation, and your light sources in the home in the hours before bed. And that one’s pretty difficult with all the stuff we’re dealing with in modern times. You’re staying up late packing, you need the light bright so you can see the right clothes to bring mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Um, and I think interestingly for both of us, like we have no problem falling asleep even if we’ve been watching a show right before it goes, you know, right before bedtime, I’m tired, I need to go to bed, it can be right after a show. I don’t need this perfect wind down where I’m meditating for the final 30 minutes. So that’s good. But a lot of people struggle with sleep and then we’re talking about a whole different story.

Mia (00:59:58):
Right. No, I know you when it comes, when it’s 10 o’clock all of a sudden I know your whole body. I could see your whole body just shuts down. I mean, you’re done.

Brad (01:00:06):
I feel drugged when it’s 10 o’clock. I really do. I’m like, I can’t even talk <laugh>, my speech pattern goes off. Yeah. Which is a nice gift. And it starts first thing in the morning setting your circadian rhythm starts first thing in the morning by exposing yourself to direct light and getting those hormones switched on, which will then, uh, however many hours later start to recalibrate because you have aligned yourself with the rising and setting of the sun. Wow. Did we cover a ton on this show? If it wasn’t, if it was a flight, it would’ve already landed. They’d be kicking us.

Mia (01:00:37):
It wasn’t very organized, but

Brad (01:00:38):
That’s all right. That’s why we have Mia Moore on the show. Go go with the flow. Thanks for listening. Everybody send us some comments, maybe some follow up questions.

Mia (01:00:47):
All right. Well thanks for having me on your show.

Brad (01:00:49):
Thank you for listening to the show. I love sharing the experience with you and greatly appreciate your support. Please email podcast brad ventures.com with feedback, suggestions, and questions for the Q and A shows. Subscribe to our email list at bradkearns.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. 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 B.rad 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 sound bite 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.

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