podcast transcript - featuring robb...

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT - FEATURING ROBB WOLF

The purpose of this presentation is to convey information. It is not intended to diagnose, treat or cure your condition. Featuring natural health experts from around the world, we share information, tools, products and strategies for living better lives in the areas of physical,

chemical/nutritional and emotional/spiritual well-being.

© 2016 The Centre for Epigenetic Expression. All rights reserved.

Dr. Acanfora: Hey everybody, welcome back to the Beyond Your Wildest Genes podcast. I am your co-host today, Dr. Mike Acanfora, and I have the distinct pleasure of having Robb Wolf on the show. Robb, how are you?

Robb: I’m good, thank you for having me, huge honor to be here.

Dr. Acanfora: Robb’s written a new book which we are going to get into right after I read his bio. The new book is Wired to Eat: Turn Off Cravings, Rewire Your Appetite for Weight Loss, and Determine Foods That Work for You.

So let me just read Robb’s bio and then we’re going to get right into the show.

Robb Wolf, for those of you who don’t know, the four or five people on the planet, is a former research biochemist, is New York Times Bestselling Author of The Paleo Solution: The Original Human Diet. A student of Professor Loren Cordain, the author of The Paleo Diet, Robb has transformed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around the world, via his top-ranked iTunes podcast, books and seminars.

Robb has functioned as a review editor for the Journal of Nutrition and Metabolism, is co-founder of the nutrition and athletic training journal, The Performance Menu, co-owner of Norcal Strength and Condition, one of Men’s Health top 30 gyms in America and he is a consultant, naval, special warfare resiliency program.

He serves on the board of directors/advisors for Specialty Health Incorporated, Paleo FX and Paleo Magazine. Robb is a former California State powerlifting champ, 565 squat, 345 pound bench and 560 pound

�deadlift and a 6-0 amateur kickboxer. He coaches athletes at the highest levels of competition and consults with Olympians and world champions in MMA, motocross, rowing and triathlon.

Robb has provided seminars in nutrition and strength and conditioning to a number of entities including, NASA, Naval Special Warfare, the Canadian Light Infantry and the United States Marine Corp.

Robb lives in Reno Nevada with his wife Nicki and daughters Zoe and Sagan.

Robb, welcome to the show.

Robb: Hey doc, thank you. With a bio like that I should be taller than 5 foot 9, but I’m not. So, thank you.

Dr. Acanfora: It’s all packed into a small package.

Robb: Indeed, indeed, yeah, yeah.

Dr. Acanfora: So Robb, the first question I ask folks when they come on the program is, we love the backstory. Can you give people a little bit of your journey?

Robb: Sure, you know, I’ve always been interested in health and human performance and it’s maybe an odd reason why. Both of my parents unfortunately were pretty unhealthy, they both smoked, my dad drank, significantly too much for his health and really all of our happiness and I saw this process kind of unfolding. I remember one day where I asked my mom, “Do you wish that you could live to be a hundred?” and my mom was like horrified and she was like, “No,” and I said, “Well why not?” and she was like, “Well you would just feel so bad,” and I mean, I was maybe like five or six years old and I was kind of looking at her and I’m like, “Well it doesn’t have to suck, it’s not just like a guaranteed deal.”

I had a couple of pretty influential folks in my life, a cousin and a couple of friends that really got into weight lifting and martial arts and I’m just kind of a geek at heart. I’ve always been interested in science and so wedding this interest in living better and living longer to my geekiness and love of science, just kind of led me forward and I did an undergrad in biochemistry, was really kicking around the idea of medical school or a research track. But at that time, this was around 1996/97, I had some really serious health problems. I had ulcerative colitis so bad that they wanted to do a bowel resection on me, I had kind of a wasting condition from that, I usually walk around about 175 pounds, reasonably lean and muscular and at that point I was about 130/135 pounds from malabsorption, and nobody could really figure out what was going on, but through an interesting set of circumstances, I figured out that I was terribly gluten intolerant, never The purpose of this presentation is to convey information. It is not intended to diagnose, treat or cure your

condition. Featuring natural health experts from around the world, we share information, tools, products and strategies for living better lives in the areas of physical, chemical/nutritional and emotional/spiritual well-

being.

© 2016 Beyond Your Wildest Genes and The Centre for Epigenetic Expression. All rights reserved.

�could pin down if I had legitimate celiac disease or not, all that stuff was a little bit unclear, but pretty reactive to most grains, legumes and even dairy to some degree.

I started noodling on that and this idea of a Paleo diet kind of popped into my head and I did some googling around in this new-fangled search engine, because this was around 1998 and literally Google had just kind of popped up on the scene and I found a guy, Arthur De Vany, and started reading his stuff and then Loren Cordain and read his stuff. At that point Art had actually had far, far more material on this kind of evolutionary medicine approach, even than Loren did, but Loren was to really come into his own and publish an enormous amount of peer review papers on this topic.

But the interesting thing, at least for me, was that I had decided that I didn’t really want to pursue the conventional medicine route, when I had this kind of evolutionary biology, evolutionary medicine, Paleo diet concept a little bit figured out. This was right around, I guess 2000/2001 and there was a new thing that I found online called CrossFit and I really got into this stuff. My buddy, Dave Warner, who lives in Seattle, and I was living in Seattle at the time, we were doing this CrossFit workout each day and we started dragging some people over to Dave’s garage and before we knew it we had about 20 or 25 people doing it and so we reached out to the CrossFit founders, Greg and Lauren Glassman, and I wrote, what is apparently, the first affiliate enquiry email ever to CrossFit and it was basically, “Hey, we want to open a gym, we want to call it CrossFit, can we do that?” And they said, “Yes, please, go, be, achieve,” and there was no contract, no nothing. It was very, very early in that whole scene.

So, I kind of took a 90 degree turn from academia and conventional medicine and started doing the type of, what I call my flavor of medicine, which is a gym and I was able to talk about sleep and food and exercise and then the dynamics of the gym provides this really amazing community support and it’s just been kind of off to the races since then.

The interface that I had with people in a brick and mortar setting, and I’m sure you experience this with your clinical practice, you just learn so much. Like you can have all kinds of theory that sounds great when it rattles between your ears, it’s a very different thing when you try to explain it or share it with someone and they look at you like you’re growing arms out of your head.

So the process of running a gym and learning how to find how I could share this information with folks in a way that helped them and didn’t just make them want to run away screaming, that was really helpful and that helped me to write the first book, The Paleo Solution.

The purpose of this presentation is to convey information. It is not intended to diagnose, treat or cure your condition. Featuring natural health experts from around the world, we share information, tools, products and strategies for living better lives in the areas of physical, chemical/nutritional and emotional/spiritual well-

being.


�Then, I guess about five years ago, sorry this is going on long…

Dr. Acanfora: Not at all.

Robb: But I’ll just button all this stuff up.

Dr. Acanfora: Not at all.

Robb: About five years ago we moved to Reno Nevada and we were only in town a couple of weeks and a guy… I got a phone call and the guy on the other line said that his name was Greenie, which I thought was kind of odd, but he said, “Hey, call me Greenie, but my name’s Dr. Jim Greenwell,” he’s a retired, formerly pretty darn famous orthopedic surgeon, and he said, “We’ve got a little clinic and we have something going on that I think you might find interesting.”

So I went down to the clinic and I walked in and up on the bookshelves there were my books and Gary Taubes books and Loren Cordain’s books and they explained to me that they were just wrapping up a two-year pilot study where they worked with the Reno police, Reno fire department, and they found 35 folks at high risk for type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. They put these folks on a Paleo diet, modified their sleep and exercise as best they could, but based off the changes in their blood work and their health risk assessment, it’s estimated that they saved the city of Reno about $22 million with a 33 to 1 return on investment.

I was pretty impressed with that, so I managed to get in on the board of directors and help start stewarding this process and we’ve been working to kind of scale this up and take it out to the masses since then.

That kind of brings me up to date I guess. Then, more recently I wrote this second book, Wired to Eat.

Dr. Acanfora: You and I talked about this on our initial Pain Relief Project, back in January of 2015, the work that is done with your civil servants, that is work that is imperative to the health and welfare and the ripple effect that that has in helping people stay well, is just amazing. So I love that aspect of it, as my dad was a police officer.

Robb: Thanks.

Dr. Acanfora: And my wife’s dad was a firefighter.

Robb: Okay.

Dr. Acanfora: My dad’s version of health was, “Well I take these diabetes medications so that I can eat what I want.” The purpose of this presentation is to convey information. It is not intended to diagnose, treat or cure your


being.


�Robb: Right, right.

Dr. Acanfora: “Well dad, that’s actually not the way it’s supposed to work,” but he was old school and thought, “I’m just going to do things the way I want to do them.”

Robb: Right, right.

Dr. Acanfora: So I’m glad… did you say 33 to 1 return, with a $22 million savings?

Robb: Yeah. So $22 million savings prorated over 10 years and a really conservative 33 to 1 return on investment. And the way that that’s calculated is that, if you have, particularly a public servant, like a cop or a firefighter, it depends from state to state, but in Nevada, if a police officer or a firefighter suffers any type of a cardiac event, a stroke, a heart attack, you know, some sort of like transient ischemic event or something along those lines, it’s assumed, or not assumed, it’s understood that their work environment is guaranteed to be a contributing factor to this.

So then it becomes a Workman’s Comp, L & I claim, and these can be really, really expensive, if the individual survives the event, the cheap person is the person that dies, which is really horrible, but then you have that brain drain and all the damage to the families and all that stuff. But the cheap person is the person that just keels over and dies, the expensive person is the individual who has that cardiac event, has that stroke and then they need to be medically retired and the on-the-books cost for that is about $1.5 to $1.8 million over the theoretical lifetime of the individual. But the real cost can be 5 to 10 times more than that.

Dr. Acanfora: Wow.

Robb: And if you do a little poking around about underfunded pensions, underfunded medical programs, this is where a lot of communities, local communities, well really all of them, from state, from local all the way up to the federal level, there’s an assumption of how much money these things are going to make from the stock market and money going into it and all that stuff, none of the growth matches the needed expectations and also the costs are increasing, at essentially an exponential rate. So these entities are really grossly underfunded and it’s really going to be a pretty scary, chickens coming home to roost moment at some point.

But this is the way that this stuff is calculated and I say that that 33 to 1 is really conservative because what we’re basing it off of, very concretely, is if we can change certain health parameters and blood lipid parameters, we know for a fact that we reduce the likelihood of diabetes and cardiovascular disease, basically stroke and heart attack. The purpose of this presentation is to convey information. It is not intended to diagnose, treat or cure your


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�What is implicit in that though, but we don’t yet have the data to fully back this up, we know that if you reverse insulin resistance, that we also reduce the likelihood of a number of different cancers, of neurogenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, we reduce the likelihood of various autoimmune conditions and so there’s a lot of other issues that, you can make a really strong case for but we don’t quite yet have the data to support it. But it’s possible, a program like this could be more like a 300 to 1, or a 400 to 1 return on investment, because when you look at the way that the western degenerative disease kind of undercut our medical system, if you were to remove most of that, people would just live a long time and then die. Like they have a very brief period of decline, instead of a decade’s long decline, which needs to be medically managed for humanitarian and social reasons.

So, the implications could be really huge. The challenge that we’ve had is that the way the medical system is set up, the way that just our world is put together, all the incentives are very much aligned against a process like this. So as good as this has been, we’ve found it very, very challenging to find adoption, either at like federal levels, or even more local levels. It’s been a really fascinating process, because it’s kind of like, you’ve got the keys to the kingdom, you’ve got a solution but nobody’s really buying it. So it’s been a very interesting experience.

Dr. Acanfora: You’ve hit the nail right on the head. I was just listening to Jimmy Moore talking about fasting and why it’s not more popular, and it’s because nobody can make any money.

Robb: Um-hum, um-hum.

Dr. Acanfora: You know, there is no end…

Robb: There’s not even a cookbook around it, yeah.

Dr. Acanfora: Yeah there’s no… it’s an epitome.

Robb: Right.

Dr. Acanfora: But truly, like…

Robb: Just a blank sheet of paper, yeah.

Dr. Acanfora: Yeah, exactly. Here it is, this is it, this is the whole thing. But that dovetails perfectly into your new book. Talk to me about, what’s the difference between Wired to Eat and your original book, The Paleo Solution, which I loved?


being.


�Robb: Oh thank you, thanks. You know, I wasn’t sure if I was going to write a second book, like this is how naïve and what kind of a knucklehead I am. When I wrote the first book, I looked at my wife after I sent this off to the publisher and I was like, “Wow, we need to figure out our next career, like this is going to solve all the medical blows of the world and I don’t know what to do next.” Like I literally believed that, you know? And for the folks that give this type of stuff a shot, it’s been really profoundly beneficial and so that’s been really cool. But I wasn’t really too sure what the other angle was that I would take on this stuff, you know, and I didn’t want to do kind of the… and I love Barry Sears, but you know, he had like The Zone and Mastering The Zone, and The Soy Bean Zone and The String Bean Zone, you know, and I was like, “I’m not going to do that either.”

But I always compiled research information and I’m always reading different stuff and there was a paper that popped up on my radar, let’s see, I guess late 2014 and that fired me up to do a talk for Paleo effects and it was talking about, kind of brain evolution and the omnivore’s real dilemma and what it was talking about were these ideas of optimum foraging strategy and palate fatigue and that basically we’re wired, genetically hardwired, just like every other organism on the planet, to eat more and move less and to seek out novel food sources and this is the way that we exist today, because our ancestors ate everything that wasn’t nailed down. Once they had that food, they went and crawled under a bush and slept and relaxed and didn’t burn excess calories.

What struck me on this was that, if this is really the way that we’re wired up to eat, there’s absolutely no reason that we should feel guilty about the fact that changing our diet and lifestyle is hard. You know, it would be silly to assume that, if we’re wired up, at a genetic level, to seek out as much food as we can get to be, what we would call lazy, to not burn a lot of excess calories, and then we live in this modern world where you can order food to your front door, you can pop it in the microwave. Our not so distant ancestors used to walk 5 to 10 miles a day, which is about 10,000 steps for 5 miles, some days, some people, and I am in this group of people when I’m really in a hard work block, because everything is so technology based, I’m going to walk a couple of hundred steps in a day.

So the world has shifted in a way that it plays so contrary to our basic genetics, that it really shouldn’t be surprising that this is a tough thing to deal with.

So, I was needling on this and what I thought I had was an opportunity to diffuse all of the guilt, the sense of failure that people have around this stuff, you know, it’s basically, if you live in this modern world and you’re not fat, sick, diabetic and broke and you’re kind of screwing up, like you’re doing something wrong from a biological perspective, and so the flip side of The purpose of this presentation is to convey information. It is not intended to diagnose, treat or cure your


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�that is if you do suffer from those issues, if you find that stuff challenging, it’s really not your fault, this is a completely reasonable situation, now we need to make a choice of, do we just rollover and show our underbelly to the world and let it have its way with us, or do we decide to do something different.

So that was really the impetus for the book and the difference is that I definitely started that Paleo Solution from this basic idea of a Paleo diet and our Paleolithic ancestors, both archaic and a more contemporary studied, a hundred gatherers, appeared to be remarkably free of modern diseases until they started eating more westernized foods, and it’s a pretty compelling argument but there’s a lot of backlash to the Paleo idea. Like people just have this raw emotional response to the idea on the one hand. Unfortunately, also this basic Paleo template kind of got turned into religious doctrine, where people spent a ton of time asking, “Is this Paleo? Instead of asking, “Is this good for me?” you know, like coffee and tea are good examples. You know, you’d see these epic debates on the interwebz, it’s like, “Well coffee’s not Paleo,” and it’s like, well I guess technically not but every epidemiological study, every clinical intervention has shown that coffee is generally a health positive, same as green and black tea. There’s some caveats in there, you can overdo it and it can disturb sleep, but it’s one of those things where it’s definitely a Neolithic item, if you want to get specific about it. But it’s good for you, for the most part.

So you know, instead of getting wrapped around the axle of that type of stuff, I really try to coach all of this in terms of the neuroregulation of appetite and how we are just kind of wired up at a genetic level, to live a certain way that is different to the way that we’re being encouraged to live today and hopefully that, again diffuses the guilt, the sense of failure. So, if we can just get past that layer of the emotionality, then we can really get in and start doing some good work.

Dr. Acanfora: You know, in the book, you bring up, and that leads right into the question, you bring up personalized nutrition. Could you explain that a little bit to the audience?

Robb: Yeah, yeah. You know, the last couple of years we’ve had just this explosion in information about our physiology and our health, back around 2000/2001 The Human Genome Project really just came into its own and we had full sequencing of the human genome and it wasn’t too long after that we really started understanding that the gut microbiome, the bacteria that live in our gut and also on our person, are incredibly influential to our physiology and our health. And as all of this is motored forward, we’ve started to understand it, based off of our genetics, and also kind of the epigenetic signaling that occurs from the gut microbiome that we carry. People respond very, very differently to different foods, and there has been The purpose of this presentation is to convey information. It is not intended to diagnose, treat or cure your


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�years of, like 60 years of macronutrient wars, where you’ve got these two kind of polarized camps; the high-carb folks and the low-carb folks and they will just adamantly claim that their way is the one true way. And when we look at the data, I would say that it actually kind of leads a little towards the lower-carb camp as probably being the more appropriate diet for humans, but that’s not 100% crystal clear and it gets kind of murky as to, comparing apples to apples and whatnot.

But when we look at some of the anthropological examples, when we look at pre pre-westernized cultures, we see folks that eat very, very high amounts of carbohydrate and relatively low fat and they are completely healthy and largely free of the western degenerative diseases and then on the flip side we see people that eat very, very little carbohydrate and they are also largely free of these western degenerative diseases.

So it really then starts begging to question, you know, is there really one true like perfect macronutrient ratio, or is this more of a story of individualization?

There was a study that came out of Israel, I guess two years ago now, just barely two years ago, and what these folks did is they took a large group of people, 800 folks, and they put a CGM on them, a CGM is a continuous glucose monitor and it samples the blood glucose once a minute. So they had a large number of people and they started getting a massive amount of data about their blood glucose status and they sequenced these folks their gut microbiome, they did a full genomic analysis on these people, so they knew what their genetics were, they knew what the gut microbes looked like, and then they started feeding them different meals, but standardized meals, like everybody ate the same stuff at different mealtimes. It wasn’t quite a metabolic ward setting, but you know, people would show up at the clinic and get their brown bag breakfast or lunch or what have you, and then they would record their other meals.

So it was really a very nicely done study. It was a nice middle-ground between like a metabolic ward, which is a really onerous intervention and very, very expensive versus a lot of these retrospective studies where people would try to remember what they ate two weeks ago, which is just ridiculous.

But what they found is, that these folks had just massive variation in how they responded to different foods. Like some people would eat white rice and they would have a barely perceptible increase in their blood glucose levels, other people would eat white rice and they would go into peri diabetic blood glucose levels.


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�And then there were some really wacky things, like hummus, which even though I’m like The Paleo Guy, I would be hard pressed to say that hummus would cause much in the way of a blood glucose response, but in some people it would just peg it to the ceiling and this was really perplexing to these scientists.

But they had all this data and then they crunched it through this process called, machine learning algorithm, where it’s super high level computer processing, trying to find trends in this information, and they started finding some trends, and what they did then, is they took a group of a hundred people, did their gut microbiome, did their genetics, put a CGM on them and they said, “Based off of what your genetics and gut profile look like, we think, if you eat A,B,C, your blood glucose is going to do X,Y,Z.” And it was just bang on.

So this paper really influenced my thinking a lot and it’s actually the inspiration for the second phase of the intervention in the book. The first phase of the intervention in the book, the first phase of intervention, after we tell people about how they’re wired to eat and their genetics and digestion and whatnot, then we get into a 30-day reset and then after the 30-day reset, there’s this thing called the 7-day carb test. And this is where I encourage people to do both subjective and objective kind of measurements, based around a battery of carbohydrates that they want to test, and we check their blood glucose using a glucometer. Or you can do an objective measuring, you just see how you feel between meals, and that’s a pretty valid way to go too, but clearly a little less quantifiable.

But this is the whole idea of The Personalized Nutrition, and it’s a really exciting potential, because no matter how good you try to make recommendations, I’m sure you experience this all the time. You have folks who want to be healthier, but they’re not super sophisticated about nutrition and biochemistry and that’s good because not everybody should be detail on that stuff, but you know, you need a simple story to tell these folks to get them moving in a good direction, but often times that simple story is too simple to really address all the needs of the folks.

So this promise of personalized nutrition, is that we can still start with these basic concepts of whole unprocessed food, but then as we go forward, we start augering in and finding some really highly specific areas that we can think about, like immunogenicity of foods, like are you reactive to gluten or dairy or peanuts or something like that? What is your carbohydrate tolerance?

I’ve been going through this process and just from an instinctual level, I’ve known that I’m not super carb tolerant, like I keep my carbs probably about 75 to 120 grams of carbs a day and I do well with that. The purpose of this presentation is to convey information. It is not intended to diagnose, treat or cure your


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�It was really interesting, I tested some things like white rice and like potatoes and even sweet potatoes, and a very modest amount of those things, like a 50 gram amount, which is not that much when you look at most meals, whether at a restaurant or the way they’re traditionally prepared, it wasn’t that many carbs, but that stuff would put my blood glucose in the air at diabetic levels, and I felt terrible. So it was a really good validating piece for me, that what I’ve experienced over the year, I wasn’t imaging that, like I could tell when my blood glucose got too high, I could tell when I was in a hypoglycemic crash afterwards.

My wife went through a lot of this stuff, parallel with me. She’d eat the same amount of rice and her blood glucose would barely pop up above baseline, you know? Which was kind of like me shaking my fist at her, like “Damn you,” but at the same time like, we’d just known that, you know? We would go out for… I generally eat, pretty much ‘Paleo’ but we would go out for, say like a Mexican food meal, or if it’s Thai food and I might have some rice and I would feel really rough after that and I’d ask Nicki, I’m like, “Do you feel like kind of carb-headed or anything?” She’s like, “I did, for like 20 minutes,” but I feel that way for two days.

So there’s just a massive variation in all that and I think that we’re finally sneaking up on a spot where we’ll be able to honor the individuality of each person and we really have to move beyond this, one size fits all dietary recommendations. We can definitely start with some general principles, but that stuff can’t be written in stone as religious dogma, it’s a starting place and not where we end up.

Dr. Acanfora: So where do you see the Paleo diet fitting into the framework of Wired to Eat?

Robb: I’d still use that as the 30-day reset.

Dr. Acanfora: Got you.

Robb: You know, I still and it’s maybe a smarmy way of going about it, but you know, I’m not a particularly smart guy, I’m not a good looking guy, but that first book has sold like crazy and it continues to sell really well and it’s mainly because people try it and it works really, really well for them and they end up buying a bunch of copies of it and giving it to friends and family.

So, just from my own clinical experience and from kind of the vector that the book has gone down, I’m pretty confident there’s something very powerful there, but again, it’s just a starting place.

But what we do in the book is, we have a chapter on kind of testing and self-analysis, so that you can figure out where you are on the insulin sensitivity The purpose of this presentation is to convey information. It is not intended to diagnose, treat or cure your


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�or insulin resistance scale, and based off that, you’ll jump into a Paleo-esc type approach for 30 days, and if you’re more insulin sensitive, it will probably be a little higher carb and a little more modest in fat, and if you’re more insulin resistant, like I am, then you will do lower carb and perhaps a bit higher fat.

Then at the end of that period, I really encourage folks to get in and do the 7-day carb test, so that we can see how far off the rails you can go and still keep your blood glucose within normal parameters.

So, let’s say you aren’t immunologically reactive to rice or corn, but you get a really big blood glucose response from it, the way that you can manage that is you just have a much smaller portion of it, and it should be fairly intuitive, but it’s really not these days.

And again it’s tough, because you may have a spouse, you may have a sibling, you may have a coworker who eats X amount of carbohydrate and they do great on it, and then you try to do that and you do terribly. Or maybe the inverse of that, you reduce your carbohydrate level and you were that insulin sensitive person and now you feel terrible all the time.

So I use that Paleo diet template again as a starting point, because it reverses inflammation, it re-establishes the neuroregulation of appetite, which is such a critical feature to this story.

There’s lots of drama around, is the story of overweight and obesity and poor health. Is it just hormones, is it just calories and I think that there’s elements of both of those stories? But there’s an inescapable reality, that if we can figure out a way that people will spontaneously reduce calorie intake, then we’ve won the game. Like they will start losing weight and it’s not like we’re sending them to a prison camp to do it, it’s something that is livable and long term sustainable and that’s really kind of the holy grail with all that. And a Paleo diet does a shockingly good job of doing that.

There have been some interesting studies, and I mention a few of these in the book, but there have been some interesting studies where they put folks on a Paleo type diet and then say like a Mediterranean type diet and they check it both for weight loss potential, but then also they bring it up to a level of what they call isocaloric, basically they measure the individual’s metabolic rate and then they prescribe an amount of food that will prevent them from losing weight and what was fascinating, is in the Paleo diet group, people literally had to force feed themselves in order to eat the isocaloric level, like they complained incessantly, they’re like, “I’m just full, I can’t eat more.” But the researchers were like, “No man, you’ve got to do it.” And even though they were heavily encouraged to comply with this protocol, the Paleo diet group still ended up losing a little bit of weight relative to the


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�other dietary interventions, because they just, they were so uncomfortable from the amount of food that they were eating and they just felt full. And that’s something that really gets missed when folks are doing the dueling banjos of what nutritional approach is best.

Again, the kind of holy grail is providing something that folks are happy enough eating, you know, five days out of seven, six days out of seven, but it spontaneously reduces the amount of calories that they consume and brings that down to a reasonable level.

Dr. Acanfora: You know it’s really interesting. In our own office we’ve actually done 30-day Paleo challenges and borrowed your phrase, “Let’s see how you look, feel and function after the 30 days,” and the remarkable thing is, the weight loss of, I think it was 10 pounds on average, is one thing, but having the ability to look at the totality and being able to measure, for example, heartrate variability, when combined with the Paleo diet and chiropractic as part of this, it increased like 26%, like in its efficiency.

Robb: Right.

Dr. Acanfora: Switching you from being in the fight/flight, over to the parasympathetic or right in the sweet spot with the best combination of both. That’s after 30 days.

Robb: Right.

Dr. Acanfora: People literally getting off of their diabetes and heart medication, going back to their doctor and saying, “Let’s measure,” and the doctor’s saying, “Well, I don’t know what you’re doing, but it’s really working.” I mean, that’s in the field, in the trenches and it works, it’s been remarkable. The tough part, as you say, and that’s what makes this different, is you kind of slide back to that old lifestyle, where what you’re saying is, if we can do this 7-day carb test, we can actually pay attention to what is actually working and what isn’t working.

Robb: Absolutely yeah, yeah. And then it becomes just kind of an informed decision on your part. You know, some people feel like smoking through their tracheotomy whole as a win for them, you know, and I just wish that they were not aggregated under my insurance policy, but that’s just the way of the world.

But I’m very, I guess egalitarian and libertarian about this, like my goal is not to proselytize with this stuff so much, as to provide an option. Like there have been so many people that though that standard of care was their only option, that whatever nutritional approaches that they’ve tried was the only thing out there. So my goal has just been to tell as many people as possible, you’ve got options, and within those options you’ve got a rubric, where it’s The purpose of this presentation is to convey information. It is not intended to diagnose, treat or cure your


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�kind of like a choose your own adventure, where within 30 days, you can find the sleep, the food, the exercise that works remarkably well for you and then at the end of that process, you can look back and say, “Man, that’s really worth it. Like the little bit of inconvenience I have is totally worth it, given how much better I feel.” Or you can say, “Man the hookers and cocaine were so good, I’m just going back to that life way.” And that’s fine, I’m cool with that, but I have just seen a lot of people die early, suffer needlessly because they weren’t told that there are options out there.

So, I think that that makes it a very transparent, very honest, you know, that my greasy used-car salesman pitches, “Try it for 30 days, see how you look, feel and perform and then evaluate it if it’s worth it for you.” And I’m hard pressed to think of a more transparent kind of process than that.

Dr. Acanfora: Absolutely. Hey Robb, I’m really cognizant of your time, do you have time for two more questions?

Robb: Absolutely yeah, for usre.

Dr. Acanfora: Two of the things that are near and dear to my heart these days, as a former 300 pounder, living in a small person’s body now of about 190 pounds, are ketosis and fasting, and you dedicate a chapter in the book. Could you talk to our audience about that, some of the benefits and potential pitfalls of ketosis and fasting?

Robb: Absolutely yeah. You know, I don’t know, if people do follow my work they’re sometimes surprised to find out that my first foray into what I would call ancestral eating was actually a ketogenic diet and it was a complete game changer for me.

Up until I discovered a lower carb way of eating, I had been on a carbohydrate rollercoaster for, man, basically my whole like childhood and early adult life. Like, when I would eat one meal, I was planning the next meal because I knew when I hit that low blood sugar ebb, I was going to be a basket case, like shaky, angry, what I call pangry, both hungry and angry, you know? It wasn’t so much that I chose to eat every two hours, I had to eat every two hours, or I had serious problems.

This was completely resolved with this ketogenic diet, a very, very low carb diet where your body shifts from running primarily on glucose to using fats which get converted into these things called ketone bodies, which become water soluble and can fuel the brain and it was the most liberating thing I had ever experienced, because I went from being shackled to my food, to being able to go, if I didn’t want to eat for a day, I didn’t have to eat for a day, and it didn’t affect my cognition, it didn’t affect my physical performance, like it was pretty magical.


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�Is was so magical that it created the most profound of confirmations biases in this scientist/coach and I assumed that ketogenic diets were appropriate for everybody. Although we had great success with many, many people on low-carb, ketogenic type diets when we were running the gym, it wasn’t appropriate for everybody and I ended up breaking a few people, particularly folks that were kind of in the CrossFit kind of scene, like these really heavily glycolytic carbohydrate dependent sports, they need some carbs. They maybe don’t need as many as many as what folks sometimes think, but they needed some carbs.

So, reality had to hit me upside the head with a wet fish, to kind of wake me up to that. But ketogenic and diets and fasting are incredibly powerful, they press some genetic reset buttons within our physiology that are really profound. They stimulate a process called autophagy, which is basically damaged cells that are not quite functioning properly that may be releasing large amounts of inflammatory cytokines into our system, which creates a feed forward mechanism that makes other cells not as healthy and it’s really kind of the beginning of the downward spiral with a lot of health situations. But fasting and ketosis can reverse that process and it actually causes damaged or diseased cells to spontaneously dive the process, called apoptosis and then these proteins and cellular pieces get recycled, so it makes the body very, very efficient.

Ketogenic diets and fasting have been used for a wide variety of afflictions, ranging from epilepsy to neurodegenerative diseases, some types of cancers, and I believe the title of the chapter is, Hammers, Drills and Ketosis: The One Tool Your Doctor Will Never Use.

I make the analogy in the book, my dad was a contractor, and although there were tons of pissing matches going back and forth about the right or wrong way to do things, you never saw somebody suggest that you should use a hammer when a bandsaw was the appropriate thing. I mean, it’s kind of like the right tool for the right job, you know. People would argue about pitches and grades and you know, different stuff like that, but there’s always reasonable consistency and consensus about when you used a hammer versus a saw versus a drill. And within the medical community, Ketosis is associated with a really serious condition called ketoacidosis, which typically occurs in poorly managed type 1 diabetics, and it’s a life threatening situation, it’s no joke. But most of our medical professionals forget their fundamental biochemistry and never peel back this story to a deeper degree. So they really don’t understand the difference between ketosis and ketoacidosis, and so the therapeutic potential of these low-carb diets, and/or fasting, is just lost on these folks completely.

Out of anything that we could do, that could potentially halt aging, that could really press a reset button in our immune function, ketosis and The purpose of this presentation is to convey information. It is not intended to diagnose, treat or cure your


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�particularly like short fasts, like 3 to 5 day fasts, maybe done twice a year, are just stunningly efficacious and have huge potential.

A researcher, Valter Longo has developed a thing called a fasting mimicking diet, which is basically a very low calorie diet which is eaten for 5 to 7 days, it’s largely ketogenic ratios, more fat, very low carb, modest protein, but they did some interesting studies in folks with multiple sclerosis and they put them on a fasting mimicking diet, for 5 days and then put them on a Mediterranean diet for 6 months after that, and they had about a 25% remission rate with this fasting mimicking diet for the multiple sclerosis. I would throw out some questions there, you know, if instead of the Mediterranean diet, which still contained grains and legumes, like if they went more of an autoimmune Paleo diet, would they have better success than that? But it’s kind of neither here nor there, it’s something that somebody will look at, at some point.

But these are really powerful interventions and it really doesn’t cost anyone anything other than the time and the effort to do it.

But with that said, there are folks that are really not appropriate for ketogenic diets and fasting. Some times of athletes do well on a low-carb ketogenic approach and these tend to be more the ultra-endurance athletes, people who play soccer or do boxing or MMA or jujitsu, CrossFit. These highly glycolytic sports, they tend to not do so well on super low-carb diets. Some people still play around with it, and I’m hoping somebody cracks that nut at some point, but I haven’t seen a ton of success with that.

Then, on the fasting side, the people that I’ve seen, who are willing to do intermittent fasting, are often times the people who do 6 CrossFit workouts a week and Hot Yoga and they go for a hike and they’ve only eaten 6 grams of carbs in the last 4 months. So the people who are willing to do fasting are probably the people who shouldn’t do fasting, because they’re already wound so tight and they’re doing so much stuff, it just ends up being too much.

I think that, if one does some fasting, you need to do it in a period of time when your stress levels are modest at best, you’ve got good control over your environment, you’re not trying to set personal records in the gym. You may do very, very light physical activity, but you know, nothing like hard CrossFit workout, even lifting weights, it would be very modest. I think there’s an argument for doing some resistance training to prevent as much muscle loss as can happen in the first few days of fasting, but the experience that I’ve had is that unfortunately the folks who are willing to do the fasting, they maybe aren’t appropriate because they’re just wound too tight. They’ve got too much going on and fasting is a stress of sorts, but if your bucket of stress is already overflowing, and we can see this on the The purpose of this presentation is to convey information. It is not intended to diagnose, treat or cure your


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�HRV, which clearly you guys use, if you’re already just about maxed out, fasting may be the one… if you needed 12 things, this might be number 13, you didn’t really need to do that.

Dr. Acanfora: Right, right. So in the book, I mean, you dedicated a lot of time and space to sleep, exercising, community and for me personally, it’s about the food. But can you talk, let’s pick one, let’s say, talk about community and how important that is.

Robb: Yeah, you know it’s an often overlooked piece of the stories. There’s a research project called The Blue Zones and it was turned into a book a number of years ago and people really hold this in high regard, and it’s very interesting stuff.

Basically these researchers went around the world and looked at, particularly long lived populations, and they seemed to find some consistencies, that small amounts of confined foods and I think it gets kind of twisted and inflated that it’s a largely vegetarian diet they eat, which is not accurate, but that’s kind of the drama that goes back and forth. But something that is really missed in this whole story is that these people that are studies, they have these extended families and really tight knit communities. It’s placed in Peru and Italy where it’s a small town and everybody knows each other, and everybody has social support.

There’s a drama that goes into having an extended family, like it’s not always butterflies and unicorns, it can be a pain in the ass sometimes, but when life is hard, when someone dies, when you have a traumatic life event, when you have these extended communities, it’s a remarkable amount of support. And what scientists have dug up in studying this stuff is that individuals that lack adequate community are as at risk of morbidity and mortality as a pack a day smoker.

Dr. Acanfora: Wow.

Robb: So the individual that has enough social contact and social interaction and social support, it’s as if they’re a non-smoker and then the person who doesn’t have enough of that stuff, you know, it’s like they are a pack a day smoker.

So there’s some really huge implications there and this is why I like stuff like martial arts and even CrossFit, because you get some exercise if you have a well-run facility, they’ll talk about food, they might even talk about sleep a little bit, because those are all really important in health, but then baked in the cake, baked in the process of going to a CrossFit gym or participating in a martial arts program, you have community.


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�You know, there was a time when people went to churches more often, or they were involved in civic groups more frequently, and now, because we work so much more than what we did, even maybe 20, 30 years ago, there’s just not really that much time left over. So then we kind of stagger home and we may be engaged in social media, which kind of feels like have social connectivity, but the research is pretty clear, social media is a stress, it’s not a palliative deal, you know.

Dr. Acanfora: Yeah, yeah.

Robb: So you get the sense that you’ve got social connection, you flitter away the time that you could have spent in social connection, and you get none of the benefit and probably even, you would have been better off looking at a blank wall or going outside and taking a walk.

So that’s kind of the story on the community side and I think it’s just an often overlooked piece of the story, that inadequate community can be really, really challenging.

And then the flip side of that is that, when people are trying to effect change, often times the community that they do have may not be particularly supportive of that change, you know, it’s kind of the crabs in the crab pot trying to drag that last one back in.

So, I talk about that a fair amount too and it’s not an easy solution to that, but I do make the point that if the people in your life, that claim to love you, if you’re trying to make some positive change, they should support and not stymie that process.

Dr. Acanfora: Yeah, that is brilliant. I go back to, you know, we need to belong to something greater than oneself.

Robb: Right.

Dr. Acanfora: And that’s key. I think community is a really big deal and as our kids age and grow up in this age of technology, unlike ourselves, it’s even more important. My point to that was, with my son, he’s like, “Hey dad, I think…” and Jack’s 12 and he said, “I came up with this idea,” I was like, “Okay, what’s the idea dude?” and he said, “I’m going to stop playing basketball on the X-box and I’m going to play basketball in the backyard.” I was like, that’s awesome.

Robb: That’s great.

Dr. Acanfora: But I said, “But we don’t have a basketball hoop,” he goes, “Oh, you and me are going to go to Walmart and get it.”


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�Robb: Nice, nice.

Dr. Acanfora: But since we’ve got it, he’s out there 2 hours a day.

Robb: That’s awesome.

Dr. Acanfora: With his friends. So there’s the community.7

Robb: Right.

Dr. Acanfora: And we’re that house where everybody grew up and everybody comes to their house, both my son and my daughter, all their friends like being here. It has nothing to do with me whatsoever, it has to do with my wife. Her mission in life is to ping everybody. She’s looking at, what do you say, rainbows and unicorns?

Robb: Rainbows and unicorns, yeah.

Dr. Acanfora: Yeah, that’s her. That is absolutely here.

Robb: Nice.

Dr. Acanfora: Hey Robb, thanks so much for sharing your time with our audience today. I am greatly appreciative of it. Can you tell folks where they can find you and where to go for your book?

Robb: Sure, robbwolf.com is where everything that I do is located. The book will be released on March 21st, so it will be in bookstores everywhere and it will launch from like Barnes Noble and Amazon Online and then prior to that it’s just available for purchase anywhere that books are sold.

Dr. Acanfora: Fantastic. That’ll all be in the show notes folk, and I can’t let Robb go without, and we’re all really terrible at accepting compliments, and I believe there are story tellers in all of us, so I just want to leave you folks with a story.

I was fortunate enough to read The Paleo Solution, back when I was really heavy and right after my wife was diagnosed with cancer and the book came into my life and that’s why I’m so grateful for Robb, because it changed everything. My thought was, “Oh my god, my wife might not be here,” and even as a chiropractor, I had worked and functioned as an athlete, a prior athlete, and kept eating like a prior athlete but wasn’t actually working out.

So it really did not go well and at the time I was probably, I had lost a couple of pounds, so I wasn’t 300, I was probably like 270. And from reading that, I got my wife to buy in and we’ve been living this way for the last, oh god, 8 years or so.


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�Robb: Oh wow, nice.

Dr. Acanfora: It has been dramatic. Her thyroid straightened out, it got wonky, that straightened out. Cancer free. I’m down to 190 pounds and what’s really interesting is it’s just, this book now really fits into the paradigm even better, because you have got to see what works for you, and very much like what Robb said, is there are times when I may, just like Robb said, I’ll go to the Mexican restaurant and I’ll see these chips and they look amazing and I’ll have a couple, but then I’m not going to feel so great. So how do I look, feel and function? And the next day, not so good because of a big giant bowl of chips.

So I really try to stay away from that stuff, but I am grateful for your work, I am grateful that you wrote the first book and I’m sure the second book is going to be just as well received and I love the idea of personalized nutrition.

So thanks Robb.

Robb: Thank you doc. A huge honor to be on the show and you’re just doing amazing work and I can’t describe how gratifying it is to know that I’ve had some modicum of help or influence in your life, that’s huge. So thank you.

Dr. Acanfora: It is my pleasure.

So folks, if you like what you heard, please go to iTunes, leave a 5 star rating, it helps us to help you and people to get to see our little podcast here. And I appreciate you all and will talk to you soon. Have a great day. Ciao.


being.


Hosted by:

Dr. Michael Acanfora Dr. Noah De Koyer Dr. Wanda Lee MacPhee

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