Ep. 515 Stop Following Bad Nutrition Advice – The Most Eye-Opening Diet Myths Debunked with Robb Wolf
- Cynthia Thurlow
- 8 minutes ago
- 36 min read
I am delighted to reconnect with my friend and colleague Robb Wolf today. Robb is a former research biochemist and a two-time New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-selling Author of The Paleo Solution and Wired to Eat.
In our conversation today, we examine the pitfalls of diet dogmatism, the lure of oversimplified health narratives, and the effects of Giardia. We unpack the seed oil debate, exploring how the longevity craze might actually be making us sicker, and we highlight the benefits of sun exposure and targeted lab testing. We also touch on the neuroscience of obesity and how food exposure shapes overeating and palate fatigue.
As always, my conversation with Robb is insightful, practical, and packed with knowledge, so I know you will find it both inspiring and invaluable.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN:
The problem with dogmatic diets
How Giardia impacts gut health
How aggressive screening often creates risks, stress, and costs without improving outcomes
The health benefits of adequate sun exposure
Why consuming seed oils occasionally is not a huge concern
The overwhelming impact of our modern food environment
Why palate fatigue could cause overeating
How our culture has normalized constant indulgence
Some simple lifestyle actions that can yield massive health benefits
“If 80–90% of your diet is ultra-processed foods, start reducing that.”
– Robb Wolf
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Submit your questions to support@cynthiathurlow.com
Connect with Robb Wolf
Transcript:
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:00:02] Welcome to Everyday Wellness Podcast. I'm your host, Nurse Practitioner Cynthia Thurlow. This podcast is designed to educate, empower and inspire you to achieve your health and wellness goals. My goal and intent is to provide you with the best content and conversations from leaders in the health and wellness industry each week and impact over a million lives.
[00:00:02] Today, I had the honor of reconnecting with friend and colleague Robb Wolf. He's a former research biochemist and two-time New York Times Wall Street Journal bestselling author of the Paleo Solution and Wired To Eat.
[00:00:41] Today, we spoke about why diet dogmatism is so problematic, the impact of Giardia, why we are primed to oversimplify health topics, the context of seed oils, how the longevity craze may potentially actually be making us sicker? Why sun exposure and specific labs can be very, very helpful? And the neuroscience of obesity and how food exposure drives overeating and palate fatigue. As always, an insightful, helpful knowledge-packed conversation with my friend, Robb Wolf. I know you will find this to be truly invaluable and, as always, inspiring.
[00:01:23] Robb Wolf, welcome back to the podcast. I've been so looking forward to this conversation.
Robb Wolf: [00:01:27] Me too. But clearly you didn't learn your lesson like you asked me back. [laughter]
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:01:32] No. You're one of my favorite people to engage with and learn from across social media. [laughs] And I would love to initiate this conversation around diet dogmatism. Why is it so problematic? Why are we getting in our own way? Why are we becoming an echo chamber?
Robb Wolf: [00:01:51] It's a really good question and I oftentimes step back and try to reflect like how much of what's happening now is a ripple effect from me 15 years ago, figuring out my own health issues is really the driver of what got me doing all this. I almost died from ulcerative colitis 28 years ago now. I've been fiddling with this low-carb, paleo, ketogenic way of eating to deal with a host of my own health issues from autoimmune disease, neurological issues like essential tremor. So, I've been dealing with this a lot.
[00:02:24] And when I first landed on the scene, which was a long time ago, there were not that many people talking about the gut and the gut microbiome and its effect on things. And there was still a time where you could very easily find doctors that would say that leaky gut or intestinal permeability was pseudoscience. And now it's the hottest area of immunological research, so a lot of things have changed.
[00:02:52] And I think in that beginning time, I just wanted people to know that there were options out there. And before we started recording, we talked a little bit about the mainstream approach to things, which if you get hit by a bus or something like that, emergency medicine's amazing and you want it. But if you have anything on the chronic degenerative nutrient deficiency side of things, man, you literally which doctor might do you better than allopathic medicine.
[00:03:21] So, on the one hand, we have this very broken medical system. It doesn't have the time, it doesn't have the resources to go deep and ferret out these problems. And so, you have to push back against that, but then folks have this tendency to get entrenched in these kinds of diet tribes. And again, I am known as kind of helping to launch the paleo diet concept. I've been very deep into the keto kind of peri-carnivore space. I wrote one of the first really favorable pieces about the carnivore diet. It was 10 years ago where I was like “This sounds really crazy,” but I got in and just did some research around things like do people with colonoscopies-- People who are-- Not colonoscopy. Colectomies, people who've had their colon and large tracts of their digestive system remove do they fair poorly and they live as long as everybody else despite that intervention. So, things like well, maybe fiber isn't essential. Maybe it's beneficial in certain circumstances and maybe it's detrimental in others. And these are important nuances to discuss, but it is interesting.
[00:04:31] A lot of this clicked for me when the movie The Social Dilemma came out, 2000ish. And we had a lot of insanity going on then anyway with Covid and all kinds of other stuff. But it really made sense to me that the social media platforms, they learned that the happy video about a mother cat rescuing a baby puppy out of a storm drain or something, that made it around the Internet pretty well, but outrage trumped it like a 100x. And anything that provoked outrage increased engagement.
[00:05:08] And I had historically had this sense that when we’ve all interacted on forums and whatnot, like, I could maybe make some progress with people. And I definitely learned a lot from people too. But you could have this long form discussion and kind of hash some things out and make a case. And people, okay, I see where you're coming from. And it just seemed like there was a spot where that just absolutely stopped. And the only people that I was interfacing with were folks that were angry at what I had to say. And when it clicked the virtually the totality of the modern online environment, which is very social media driven, has an incentive behind it to promote engagement, but that engagement is basically born of outrage.
[00:05:50] And so the algorithm is able to figure out, like if Cynthia says something, Robb says something, there is a profile in the interwebs that will almost guarantee be outraged by whatever it is that we're talking about, whether it's perimenopausal. Women maybe need to modify their diet to some degree because they begin disproportionately absorbing dietary cholesterol where normally that's not a problem, and suddenly it becomes a problem and maybe you need to change something. And my God, you'll get nailed to the cross for making a statement like that.
[00:06:22] And so, I don't know how much deep insight I have on that other than it's a thing. And I've been perplexed about how to navigate it because we do then end up with basically, you know the tribe that follows us. And our own situation is somewhat of an echo chamber because anybody that doesn't like--
[00:06:41] And funny thing also is everything that we say needs to fit 100% within the sensibilities of the person. If they agree with 90% and disagree with 10%, then we're a pariah and we don't know what we're talking about. And gee, if we were only educated about something, then maybe we would see the light. And it's a fascinating place to be and I still really, really enjoy helping people. But what I've noticed is that I've focused much more on my local community here.
[00:07:07] We moved to Bozeman, Montana, and so we've been getting plugged into the local functional medicine scene and the gyms and really trying to help support them, to run better businesses and support them anyway that we can so that at that human interface level, there is someone that can meet folks where they are and try to help them. And that's really where I've shifted a ton of my time.
[00:07:30] I haven't done my own podcast in six months because I feel like anything I want to talk about usually has some sort of a sticky widget attached to it. It gets politicized in some way. And so, I'm just like “Well, I don't know that I can win on any of this stuff.” So that's why I was in just a little bit. I'm like “Oh my goodness, Cynthia was foolish enough to let me back on here.”
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:07:49] [laughs] No, I think it's so interesting and telling that in many ways we get pigeonholed. This is the vegan bucket, the carnivore bucket, the low-carb keto bucket, the fasting bucket, the non-fasting bucket. And I think in many ways our followers, our community, get used to us fitting in one bucket. And if we change our mind or pivot. Very transparently, after my dad passed away last year, I was like I need to really be super conscientious about building muscle in order to do that I can't fast as much. And I've shared that very transparently that entire journey.
[00:08:26] For the most part, people have been very positive, but I occasionally will get pushback, especially about carbohydrate intake and-- Well, if I'm lifting more and I'm working on diligently depleting glycogen stores, which predominantly for me is my muscle, I've got to replenish what I'm utilizing. And sometimes people get upset when they're like “Well, you had rice or you had sweet potato, or how much carbohydrate do you consume a day?” And so, it becomes this almost antagonistic exchange, which in many ways you're like “I'm just trying to be transparent about what I'm doing now.” And I think for each one of us, the power of the N of 1.
[00:09:04] To your point, you healed yourself from ulcerative colitis. And I healed myself from being sick in the hospital and having chronic, let's be honest, chronic unrelenting loose stools for six months after being hospitalized and I went full carnivore because that was the only thing that stopped the loose stools. But I did not stay carnivore because I like vegetables and frankly, I like fruit and I need some variety in my diet. And so, I would imagine that for people who maybe healed their diabetes or healed their poor metabolic health, if they were to pivot off of the paradigm that healed them, they might be surprised they may actually do well. And this is where I think encouraging people to do some experimentation is so important, because I don't-- think this is my personal opinion as a clinician, as a human being, I think that we have to get stop being so rigidly dogmatic. I think it is so important to entertain the possibility that we may change our mind multiple times throughout our adult lifetime. And I would actually argue that the people that stand rigidly dogmatic, they're missing opportunities to try something else out that may work better for them.
Robb Wolf: [00:10:10] Without a doubt. Again, before we rolled, we talked a little bit about some of my experience on this because my gut has been a mess. And there's kind of an interesting story behind that. Unbeknownst to me, I was running around with Giardia and a roundworm for six years.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:10:25] I had Giardia.
Robb Wolf: [00:10:26] Yeah. Oh, I've had Giardia three times. Giardia and I are good buddies [Cynthia laughs] and I just am never going to swim in non-saline water, I think, ever again. But I was just on this grind down, chronic giardiasis and that roundworm was just killing me slowly. But in theory, I'm one of the savvier people about gut health. Every day, I did peri-carnivore, all this stuff and it was actually a good friend who was like “Hey, let's just go back to brass tacks.” I had done four ova and parasites, O&P tests, which on the FDA website it says that it has a 50% error rate. So, it's literally a coin toss.
[00:11:07] You know what we did is a stool sample that went to a university in Africa that deals with parasites all the time. And it was like an $800 test, mainly because you have to get a live sample from your doorstep to Africa in under 48 hours. So, you're paying for this shipping. But they found Giardia, a roundworm that's typically found in goats and sheep. And I also had Candida overgrowth. And the Candida was probably an opportunistic thing because my gut was absolutely destroyed. So, then I went through standard pharmaceutical intervention to treat the Giardia and the roundworm. Did fluconazole the first time on the Candida felt much better for about a month and then just fell off a cliff, I mean, just absolutely fell off a cliff. Did retesting and discovered that the Candida had come back. And it was at a level that my doctors were like “I've never seen somebody with Candida this high that they were not hospitalized.”
[00:12:01] I was a hot mess. So, we did itraconazole the second time. And I also did this host of different anti-biofilm agents because the thought was that the Candida, whether it gets into your joints or subcutaneously or whatever, it's very good at creating a biofilm so that your immune system and antifungals can't reach it. Went through that and that was absolute hell. I was in pretty bad shape just with the Candida overgrowth, but the treatment was worse, arguably, like much worse. But came out the backside of that, and I've discovered that I can eat a little bit of carbohydrate, that I actually do better with some fermentable carbohydrate. And this is something I couldn't do for the better part of a decade.
[00:12:41] I've had the-- Looking back, I know where I caught the Giardia and the roundworm, and I had it at least six years, going on seven. And any type of fermentable carbohydrate was a disaster in that scenario. But then I healed my gut in a really significant way. I still have some problems, I'm not perfect. I still have celiac, and I probably have 200 years’ worth of mileage on my gut,-
[laughter]
[00:13:04] -given what I've been through. But I've been able to expand my diet, and I've actually noticed that I feel better with a little expansion on my diet.
[00:13:13] And then tangential to that, my wife, who we've always known is more metabolically healthy than I am, better gut health. She was getting chubby eating because I cook 95% of the meals in the house and I would orient towards these very fatty cuts of meat and things like that, because I wasting away, so I had to get stuff that was as easy to digest as possible, as calorically dense as possible. And lo and behold, my wife, even though she would weigh and measure her food frequently, it was almost impossible for her to not overeat. And so, we rejiggered what I cook. And so, I still personally kind of lean towards fattier cuts of meat, but I'll cook her a sirloin or a chicken breast or something like that, and God forbid she'll have some rice, sweet potatoes and some yams and some fruit and whatnot and she leaned out. She lost 15 pounds just instantly and her exercise performance improved and all this other stuff.
[00:14:09] And so a person with a healthy gut, man, they're good oftentimes at extracting the nutrients out of their food because they have an intact intestinal barrier. They've got this diverse microbiota that can pull a lot of nutrients out of the food that they eat. And mine was a hot mess. I had super low diversity. I had clearly intestinal inflammation. And so that intact intestinal barrier was a problem. And when my wife was eating the way that I ate, it almost didn't matter what degree of food restriction she introduced on that. She was still having difficulty maintaining the weight and the body composition she wanted and now it's pretty damn easy because she eats a-- it's not low fat, but it's much lower fat than what it was previously and she does great with it.
[00:14:56] Her A1c is fantastic. She's heading into that perimenopause state too, so we're figuring some stuff out with that. But she is markedly healthier and feels better by diverging her diet away from the way that I had to eat when I was sick. And now that I'm not sick, I don't benefit from eating that way either. So, the thing that you do when you're ill may be quite different than what you need or will benefit from when you hopefully get some resolution with that. And the funny thing is, as far back as my first book that came out in 2010, my greasy used car salesman pitch was, “Do it for 30 days, see how you look, feel and perform, maybe do some blood work before, maybe do some blood work afterwards, and then just assess it critically. Are you looking, feeling, performing better, or are things going retrograde? And then you can adjust from there.”
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:15:48] It's so important. And the irony is, when you brought up Giardia, Giardia is hard to diagnose. I believe that I picked up Giardia in Morocco in 2018. I wasn't officially diagnosed and we did multiple stool studies, nothing picked it up. When I say multiple, I was doing two to three a year and nothing picked it up. And our mutual friend, Gabrielle Lyon, I was at an event, just happened--
Robb Wolf: [00:16:12] It was Dr. Lyon that tracked mine down. Yeah.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:16:14] Yep. And we sent my poop off to a lab in New Mexico.
Robb Wolf: [00:16:17] Okay.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:16:18] And when it came back-- and I remember, I think it was $1,000, I kept thinking, this better be the best lab in the world to send my poop to. And I remember she called me and she said, “You've got Giardia. And I'm not the least bit surprised.” I had Giardia, E. coli, and Candida. And so, by that point, I was convinced I had SIBO. I had gas and bloating. It was miserable. Got treated with antibiotics. My husband got treated with antibiotics because Candida likes to share. And so, long story short, I remember within two weeks, I felt so markedly improved.
[00:16:51] And then the more reading I did about Giardia and how opportunistic this infection is, you can have an acute phase infection and then it can become chronic. And normally this happens in third world countries, but if you travel to enough interesting places, you may pick up a friend. And I jokingly say I had wonderful memories of Morocco minus the food poisoning that I picked up, which then led to multiple other issues. And to your point from 2018 to probably 2022, it was all about working on the gut microbiome and experimenting to see what I could tolerate. I went through a period of time where I couldn't tolerate fiber at all. And now I'm at a point where I can have all sorts of fibrous foods without any problems. And so, I think that we have this give and take throughout our lifetime. You were more susceptible to Giardia, much like I was, because I've got a couple chronic-- Well, chronic in remission autoimmune conditions.
Robb Wolf: [00:17:47] Mm-hmm.
[00:17:48] I've had leaky gut multiple times. But it just reaffirms why I think it's so important and valuable to understand that at different points in our lives, different nutritional paradigms, different foods may agree or disagree with us. And this is again why I think this conversation is so important, because I think on social media in many ways, we can get to be an echo chamber. We may follow the same people. We may not be willing to second guess what we've been doing. I think some of the only hate I get, it's not about not doing as much fasting, it's not about other nutritional paradigms. If you go from being low carb to moderate to higher carb or cycling your carbs, all of a sudden that's hearsay.
Robb Wolf: [00:18:27] Yeah. And I guess there's a saying, “There's none so holy as the newly converted.” And I do think that folks new to the scene, oftentimes they've maybe struggled for years or decades with health issues and maybe they go carnivore and it's a shocking transformation and they want to sing that story from the mountaintops. And I super appreciate that, but it's-- Folks just have to remember that can become as much of a dead end as conventional allopathic medicine, high carb, low fat, all the fiber.
[00:19:00] If you are sick or you do have some gut issues, fermentable fiber isn't your friend. FODMAPs become a thing, but then if you manage to heal your gut, the things that you will benefit from may be very, very different than what you need to avoid in your acute illness state. Yeah.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:19:20] Yeah. And it's interesting because I think there are definitely people that are less attuned to their bodies. And I say this lovingly, my husband-- This is the first time I've talked about this on the podcast. My husband had a healthcare hiccup last year and preemptively he works in the energy business. He's been all over the world. He's been to some very rural parts of the world and very poor parts of the world looking at energy projects. And what we didn't realize was that he had been exposed to tuberculosis.
Robb Wolf: [00:19:47] Oh, wow.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:19:48] It went latent and last fall it reactivated itself and I was screaming from the mountaintops, shaking, drenching, night sweats, 15-pound weight loss, cough. He was gray. And so, two hospitalizations, ended up having thoracic surgery, and we finally got a diagnosis eight weeks later. And so, he just finished six months of what they call directly observed therapy, which is when they come to your house Monday through Friday and they watch you take your TB meds because they're so toxic and not well tolerated. And he's like a duck to water. He's like “I don't feel bad.” And I'm like “You should not feel good right now.” But right now, he's feeling great.
[00:20:23] But I think for so many of us-- So, I jokingly said to him, “We're going to be working on your gut terrain for probably the rest of your life.” And all the ferments and all the different things that we're doing to support the gut. But I think there can be times in our lives where we're very attuned to the action or dysfunction of our gut. And other times we take it for granted. And I think for many people, they don't feel badly. So, they don't even think about the interaction of nutrition and dietary choices and how they feel overall.
Robb Wolf: [00:20:50] Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I think the cool thing about this modern world that we live in, despite some of the challenges of social media and whatnot, if you have a problem, there is probably someone out there that can help you figure it out, which is, I think, a very different world than when you and I launched into this stuff as whippersnappers [Cynthia laughs] with our own health issues and nobody around. There wasn't a Dr. Lyon or a Kirk Parsley or anybody around to go lean on and so we really had to figure that stuff out for ourselves.
[00:21:23] And so, I think it is awesome on the one hand that folks can track down a tribe and a person that oftentimes can help steward them through their journey. But then really, it's good to pump the brakes a little bit and then say, well is what got me. There's the saying in business, “What got you from A to B won't necessarily get you from B to C.” And it's very true with nutrition, health and exercise and all this other stuff, what you need at one point in your life may be quite different than at other points in your life.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:21:54] Absolutely, absolutely. I'd love to pivot and talk a little bit about why we're primed as a society to oversimplify health and nutrition topics in general. And by this I'm referring to seed oils, which I think in many ways this is a topic that certainly my opinion has evolved on. I've got a podcast coming out with Dr. Sarah Berry where, she is a nutrition researcher and she talks about this quite a bit. I think for many years I was like seed oils are all bad. And now I'm starting to remain open minded that in many ways seed oils are one of those topics where there's been very much a reductionistic thinking and I think my thought process is evolving. And so, listeners will hear in that podcast that I did with Sarah, her perspective and how that's kind of opened up my mind to the fact that these reductionisms of or vilifying of particular food substances, we may have a very biased perspective. There's a broader perspective to consider.
Robb Wolf: [00:22:56] Yeah. So maybe a less contentious topic. I'll use that as an analogy. I have celiac, so I have this autoimmune gluten, gliadin intolerance. Big genetic components, although they're epigenetic components. There are people that have the celiac gene that if they have the right gut microbiome, they can eat gluten. And then they may get a gut bug that alters their gut microbiome. And all of a sudden, they get this full-blown kind of celiac deal.
[00:23:25] And when I first entered into this scene, man, I was like “Gluten is poison for everybody. Everybody should avoid it.” And I could spin a yarn around that [Cynthia laughs] because all autoimmune conditions end up with some element of transglutaminase, proteins, enzymes being involved in this process. And transglutaminase is the thing that when zonulin is kind of knocked out in our gut due to the celiac process, that's where Analisi Fasano uses celiac as a model for autoimmunity broadly. That's all great, but there's kind of a reality that gluten is not the primary driver of all autoimmunity. [laughs]
[00:24:06] There's some interesting learnings from that, but man, it was a long time before I really figured out that some of the people I worked with, they pooped better when they had wheat in their diet. They were eating all these fruits and vegetables and all that stuff's great. They'd say, “I haven't had a formed bowel movement in the four years I've been eating paleo, but I'll have a piece of bread or something and all of a sudden, everything tightens up and I don't have the gut inflammation, I don't have an autoimmune disease.” And so, it was a slow process of realizing, “Okay, there's a lot of nuance to this and whatnot.”
[00:24:41] And that seed oil topic, I was super hip to the Omega-3, Omega-6 ratio and thinking about it from ancestral health perspective, and you would look at some of these things like corn oil and soybean oil, and my goodness, they have a very disproportionately large amount of Omega-6s relative to Omega 3. But I had forgotten a lot of stuff. I had forgotten some things like oxidative priority, which if we're not overeating, I could eat a very Omega-6 heavy diet. But if I'm not overeating in total, my body will prioritize the oxidation of those Omega-6s, and ironically, it can make your ketone levels remarkably high. You can get into the four to six millimolar range by eating a meal really rich with Omega-6 fats because they do oxidize easily.
[00:25:37] This is one of the-- People will talk about lipid peroxidation and stuff like that. It's a legit concern and the body knows it's a concern. And so, we'll prioritize the oxidation of these short chain fats because it doesn't necessarily want them incorporated into cell membranes and whatnot. It'll do a little bit, but there's actually a remarkable amount of control around that. So just because one consumes a diet with more Omega-6 than Omega-3 doesn't necessarily mean that at the cell membrane level like when you do fatty acid analysis of our red blood cells, it doesn't mean that our red blood cells are going to be just swimming in Omega-6 fats. When that becomes a problem is when we are chronically overfed and the body then has to figure out, “Okay, where am I going to stick all of this excess calories?” And this is part of why blood sugar goes up and we gain body fat because we're over consuming nutrients. And so, the body has to-- It's literally like a hoarder scenario where you won't get rid of your newspapers so you stack them up in the aisle of your house and then they're in the attic and then people are ripping down the drywall to stick it in the walls, that's kind of what ends up happening. And what are seed oils endemic in? Hyperpalatable, highly processed foods.
[00:26:52] And so, one of my big concerns, and we could maybe go through each. It’s hexane extracted, we've touched a little bit on the Omega-6 and Omega-3 ratio, the oxidation. There's a bunch of different concerns in this topic. But the Costco muffin that's delicious and 1400 calories, is it the canola oil in it that's the problem or is it the fact that it's about the size of a hockey puck and almost the total caloric needs for a small human in a single meal who eats a half of it or a tenth of it in a sitting? And that's really been my concern is that particularly with some changes within the healthcare scene, some controversial folks in there, but if our singular focus is seed oils, but the problem is the foundational issue of foods that are engineered to be hyperpalatable and to bypass the neural regulation of appetite so that we overeat them. Is that the deeper problem or is it the fact that there's some amount of seed oil in there?
[00:27:57] My concern is that we have limited time, limited resources, and if we rejigger the food system and the Costco muffins now have tallow in them, grassfed tallow, are people magically going to stop overeating that Costco muffin or French fries or whatever? Maybe nominally using some sort of a saturated fat in a fryer is nominally healthier, but it's still fried food. It's still something that is super easy to overeat [laughs] and I think that there was a move towards suggesting cane sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup and that the ratio of fructose to glucose in these things are virtually identical.
[00:28:35] And there's still the problem that when we consume fructose in a liquid form, the kinetics when it hits the liver is totally different than what happens when we just consume fructose as part of fruit or sweet potatoes or something like that. So, it's-- I know I'm bouncing all over the place there. But man, I've had people angry at me about this. And I'm just not as-- If we just generally have this thing of fried foods, processed foods are generally bad and we know what those things are. A Little Debbie snack cake, a Twinkie, [Cynthia laughs] stuff like that, these things are a problem. Maybe that's where we need to focus. And this concern that somebody uses canola oil on a griddle before they grill your steak, is that going to kill you? Is that really the place that we need to--
[00:29:23] I've seen some other notables on the Interwebs where they will just give a restaurant proprietor hell for using canola oil or non-extra virgin olive oil to spray on the grill when-- It makes me a little crazy. And I've been working actually on a really long piece about this. And this is going to sound kind of braggadocious, but I'm going to throw it out there anyway. I did really well shorting fake vegan food like Impossible Food, Impossible Burger and whatnot. I was screaming from the mountaintop and I mentioned it, but in the Sacred Cow book and film that there's no way that this stuff is sustainable. It takes way more energy to make it than what sunlight, grass and beef produce, and I kept screaming this stuff. But you have people like Bill Gates and all these billionaires and tech geniuses investing in it. And I was like you know these things are starting to IPO, which means I can short them and you can absolutely lose your shirt shorting stuff, but I made a remarkable amount of money getting in and shorting that stuff because I knew there was absolutely no way possible that these things were sustainable. There was no way possible that the thermodynamic inputs that energetic inputs beat sunlight, grass and grazing animals.
[00:30:41] And so instead of fighting people on the seed oil topic, I've identified what I believe are some ways that the market has been deformed by this seed oil narrative. And I've been putting in both longs and shorts in that situation and some of them have already started coming back. And so, I'm doing a piece kind of arguing the biochemistry on this, but I would argue that if somebody can look at the way that not well-informed information deforms the markets and creates an airgap in there and then if you can bet against it and make a bunch of money, I would argue that you really understand the system quite well and that's what I'm doing. And at the end of the day, that's the thing that's more compelling to me than any of the biochemistry stuff because not many people understand the chemistry at a level where they could be “Okay, I really buy this or I really buy that.” If you can identify ways that the market is getting altered and then when it contracts, then that airgap goes away and that's where the opportunity is to make money on that stuff and that's what I'm doing. And people may think I'm a jerk for saying all that stuff, but that's the way that I'm couching all of this as I go forward.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:31:51] Well, I think we're all looking for ways that we can positively impact the system and that is certainly one way to vote with your dollars and contribute meaningfully. I think that if I were to think back even five years ago, I was still-- seed oils are all bad and you're inviting us to think bigger picture. We're really talking about processed foods. We're really talking about hyperpalatable processed foods and the negative net impact that they have on our lives. And yes, it's a bright shiny object to just vilify seed oils, but it's so much more than that.
[00:32:24] And I think that it's important for each one of us to consider what makes sense for each one of us based on our sanity, our diet, what makes our bodies feel good, what doesn't. I jokingly, but I mean this sincerely, when I travel, I no longer stress if I eat a steak in a restaurant and it's been cooked in seed oils. Because overall otherwise my diet that I have control over is so healthy that I refuse to believe that my steak cooked in seed oils or the dressing that's on a salad that I ate once a month is going to somehow derail all the other good that I'm doing in my life. And I invite listeners to not stress about some of these things.
[00:33:04] Now, if you're eating 80% to 90% of your diet with ultra-processed foods, I would encourage you to start reducing that. That you're going to have tremendous health benefits by eliminating or limiting these convenience foods as much as you possibly can. I think that's a bigger takeaway and that's something that I think most people-- In the environment that we're in, there's a lot of stuff we can stress about. I don't want that to be someone's preoccupation day in and day out. I have friends that are paranoid to eat in restaurants and tell people that they have seed oil allergies can because they're so worried. And I'm like the bigger picture is eat less processed foods. And if you need to think about that like that means if you're buying something in a grocery store and it's got a ton of ingredients you can't pronounce, that's probably something you don't want to eat with any regularity. That's the big picture as opposed to “Everything in a box, a bag or a can is bad.”
Robb Wolf: [00:33:58] Right. Yeah, I think that's wonderfully said.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:34:00] Well, thank you. Let's talk a little bit about something that you posted on Twitter was Dr. Brad Stanfield's video from YouTube talking about how the longevity craze is actually making us sicker? Do you have any thoughts about a lot of the screening apparatus that is available for consumers right now? And I say this lovingly because I have not yet been approached by Prenuvo or any of those companies that-- These screening diagnostic tools. And I know as well as the next person that every time you're exposed to radiation that can be cumulatively harmful over time. But when we're talking about the longevity craze and how people are doing, whether it's an MRI or a CAT scan, if they're doing it preventatively to screen for disease, is that necessarily a good thing? Should we have that technology available to us if it's ultimately potentially going to create more harm than good?
Robb Wolf: [00:34:56] Well, I think that video was really interesting in that it showed a real-world example. And I have a dear friend that lives in South Korea, he's a professor at one of the universities there. And Korea really takes its healthcare seriously and they will invest in paying money upfront to try to save money on the backend. They did a very aggressive intervention that was tracked, I think it was 12 years that the doctor in that video cited. And what they found is, didn't improve things at all. It actually made things worse.
[00:35:26] And part of it-- And it seems crazy like did they find some more earlier cancers? Yes, but a number of these cancers, there's some types of breast cancer, some types of prostate cancers, you could live with them for 50 years. And it's like are they technically cancerous? Yes. Is there anything you could or should probably do with it? Well, get some sun on your skin and don't eat a proinflammatory diet and you're probably going to be good. And there's a reality that any type of intervention, both on the screening side and you already alluded to that like some amount of a radiation dose that could then have untoward effects later. Biopsies, exploratory surgery, pharmaceuticals, all of these things have a risk reward profile.
[00:36:09] And what was really interesting is that this, what I think most would consider very aggressive, very interventionist state run healthcare system invested heavily in its population trying to screen for early diagnosis to lead to early treatment. And it ended up being a net loss. It was expensive and it ended up causing more problems than benefit. It didn't improve all-cause mortality, it didn't extend lifespan, it didn't save money at the end of the day. And I think that what we're seeing now on a lot of this kind of longevity testing scenarios, it's typically the wealthy that are pumping money into these various screening technologies. And I think that there's going to be a rude awakening around this.
[00:36:56] And one of my favorite economists, Thomas Sowell, said “There are no solutions, there's only trade-offs.” And I think that the more interventionists that we get with these things, the more problems that we're signing up for. I'm a huge fan of a very simple test. I think it's a $50 blood test now, the LP-IR score, the lipoprotein insulin resistance score, gives you a little insight into the types and qualities of lipoproteins that are involved with atherosclerotic progression. And it also gives you this definitive score of where your insulin sensitivity or resistance is. And so that thing is very simple, it's very noninvasive and it gives you a place to start.
[00:37:39] If your LP-IR score is poor, you have poor sleep, you're overweight and you're not exercising, then it gives you a clear path to then start investing in. And if we find a dietary intervention in which we have a good body composition, we work out a couple of times a week, a little bit of strength training, a little bit of cardio, we get out and get sun on our skin in a reasonable manner. And it's funny, people just freak out about that. I'm not saying that you need to become a leather handbag [Cynthia laughs] but you get something like a dminder app. And I live in Montana, so there's big tracks of the year where I can't get vitamin D from the sun. And so, I do some other things in that circumstance. But using this dminder app, I am 10% native, so I do tan up pretty good. And so, I will on really middle of the summer day like early August day, UV index is 10. Then the dminder app will tell me 20 minutes, 25 minutes aside and then that's it. And then I do a hat, long sleeve shirt, if I'm still out in the sun and whatnot.
[00:38:41] Adequate sun exposure decreases all-cause mortality as significantly as a not having a pack a day smoking habit. So, there's great-- and it's epidemiological, but it's pretty robust. People who don't get adequate sun increase our all-cause mortality as much as a pack a day smoking habit. So, there's just this low-hanging fruit out there. Get a little bit of sun on your skin, lift some weights, do a little bit of cardio, do some enriching activities. I started learning Italian seven months ago and we've done a couple of trips to Italy and I thoroughly love it and it definitely is cognitively challenging at 53. These are things that we just know they benefit us now and we're pretty sure it's going to benefit us in the future. But I think this really heavy interventionist screening, I have a feeling it's going to end up having a terrible risk reward profile at the end of the day.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:39:38] Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. It's interesting, my dad had an-- they call it incidental finding on a CAT scan-- chest CAT scan probably 10 years ago. And his knucklehead primary care provider wanted him to have two CAT scans a year. And I explained to my dad, I said, “Do you understand the amount of radiation you get from one CAT scan, let alone you're going to have two a year for the rest of your life.” My father, being stubborn as he was, decided that he was willing to take that risk.
[00:40:10] And it's interesting to me that some people are really-- I guess, they're reticent to consider the possibility that these incidental findings create for many patients, they create stress, duress. It ends up costing more over the long term because they then necessitate additional screening measures. I would agree with you wholeheartedly and just had a great conversation with Dr. Tom Dayspring about the LP-IR and he would agree with you. I think that there are things of greater value that are low tech interventions that have a high yield. Knowing what your vitamin D level is completely reasonable. It's a pro hormone. It's not just vitamin D. It's involved in immune function, immune regulation, insulin sensitivity. There's so many things that it's involved in. And so I am one of these people that maybe three months out of the year, I might not need to take vitamin D supplementation, but to keep mine therapeutic.
[00:41:06] Even though I live in Virginia, I always say anytime that you're north of Atlanta, more often than not, you're probably not-- Most people are not getting enough sun exposure to actually stimulate vitamin D synthesis. And if we pivot and talk a little bit, I was mentioning one of my favorite books that I've read and like I said when I was preparing for our conversation, I know you're a fan of Stephan's work and I'm probably going to mangle his last name, but it's called the Hungry Brain by Stephan is it Guyenet? I’m going to--
Robb Wolf: [00:41:36] Stephan Guyenet.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:41:37] See, I told you I was going to mangle it. [Robb laughs] So anyway, I think that let's end the conversation talking a little bit about the neuroscience of obesity because I think this is really interesting. And in his work, he talks about records from the USDA and US Department of Commerce. If we're looking at a retrospective study from 1822 to 2005, when they kept records on sugar intake. Back in 1822, we consumed the amount of added sugar in one 12 ounce can of soda every five days.
Robb Wolf: [00:42:08] Right.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:42:10] Now it's every seven hours. What is the net impact long term of some of the dietary choices that we are making that are essentially ensuring that we overeat not just on Thanksgiving, Christmas and holidays, but every single day of our adult lives?
Robb Wolf: [00:42:30] Yeah. Let's do a generous hat tip to some of our pals like Layne Norton. They will say, “Well, if we're in an isocaloric state, then the sugar doesn't matter,” and that's absolutely true. If you lock somebody in a metabolic ward and the people entering and leaving the room are frisked to make sure-- You know their body cavity search them to make sure they [Cynthia laughs] don't have a Snickers hidden somewhere or something like that, then yeah, you can feed people almost anything. And if you don't overfeed them, then we're not going to see untoward metabolic consequences.
[00:43:03] But the reality is that very few people fortunately live in an environment like that. We live in an environment where even super modest means folks, they go into a 7-Eleven and there's more food options there than any pharaoh of Egypt, King of England had until 30 years ago, 40 years ago, we just haven't had this ubiquity of food experiences until very recently. And what Stephan lays out in the Hungry Brain, and it's funny, his book came out virtually the same time that my book Wired to Eat came out dealing with the neuroregulation of appetite. And Stephan’s about 10 times smarter than I am, which is why his book, I would argue, is probably better than mine, maybe he has a little bit of practical basis because I was running a gym at the time.
[00:43:57] But the complexity of our meals really drives our tendency to overeat. A steak is great, but you will get tired of steak at some point. Blueberries are great, but you'll get tired of blueberries at some point. Potato chips are great, but if you're only given potato chips you might overeat them, but if that's the one thing you're given, the first bag, bam, down the hatch. My daughter loves these things from Siete, the Fuego’s, there’s these hot.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:44:26] Yeah. They’re popular in our house. [laughs]
Robb Wolf: [00:44:28] You can't just eat a few. You'll eat the whole bag. But if you had five bags of them back-to-back, you're probably not going to eat five bags. And this is what is discussed within the neuroregulation of appetite, this idea of palate fatigue where no matter how tasty something is, you will end up getting bored of that thing at some point. But there's a dueling banjos on the opposite side of palate fatigue, which is this desire to get as much variety as we can. We call it optimum foraging strategy. We try to find as broad a range of nutrients as we can, different types of food. And there's kind of two thoughts behind that. Everything has some degree of toxicity to it and so if we diversify the foods that we eat, we diversify our toxicant load.
[00:45:19] The other side is nutrients. When you're eating a broad spectrum of foods, then we tend to get a broader spectrum of nutrients. So, on the one hand, we and all organisms will tend to get bored of a particular type of food and if we have more options out there, we will tend to eat more. And this is the buffet effect. If you've got access to 50-- if I had options of like 15 different entrees and desserts, salads and salad dressings, a really well-outfitted buffet, I am absolutely going to eat more than if I made chicken and sweet potatoes and a salad and that was it. That's a great meal, but I'm not going to do three plates of that. Whereas if I could do a little bit of enchiladas and I can do a little bit of this and I can do a little bit of that, each time I feel like I'm done eating, then it's like, “Well, there is that other thing over there,” and suddenly I find that some part of my [unintelligible 00:46:19] has a hole in it that I can fill this stuff up.
[00:46:21] And I've tried to help people that I work with by understanding this. And then, they'll start with protein, then some veggies, then some fruit, then maybe some starchier carbs. And then if you want something at the end of that, like some sort of a snacky, sugary whatever, then I have that. But it's a speed bump method where you do the protein, you do all these things that are highly satiating. So even though you're introducing more complexity there, which will foster a tendency to overeat, we're also giving our appetite mechanisms time to kick in. Ghrelin, peptide, PYY and all these things that regulate the neuroregulation of appetite. All these things start working. And so, the tendency to just totally crush a dessert is less.
[00:47:03] And so this is the role of all this and maybe going back full circle and even talking again about the hyper focus on seed oils, there clearly can be situations in which the seed oils are a problem. But again, is that the singular problem or is it the fact that we can walk into any store, again like a 7-Eleven and just have every palate option you could possibly imagine. And this one gets a little bit far afield, but my mom had-- it wasn't Betty Crocker, but it was like who was the advice columnist? It wasn't Dear Ann, but it was something.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:47:40] Oh, I'm trying to think.
Robb Wolf: [00:47:42] There's been a series of these advice columnists over the time. And our parents were-- It was a really common feature. There was this really popular advice columnist from the 1920s and 1930s and she ended up producing a cookbook also. And so, it's not just the recipes for the new wife and the homemaker, but also advice. And one of the things, I remember flipping through this thing, it was really interesting. The woman was asking for advice. She said, “My husband wants dessert every night of the week. Is that okay?” And this was again like late 19-- basically depression era and so you have that as a little bit of a thing to inform this. And the advice columnist said, “Absolutely not. That is so gauche. We have some dessert on Sundays when we have our time with family and our day off and that's it. And the rest of the week it's a protein, a starch and a vegetable and that's it. And your husband needs to come to terms with that. And also, by the way, it's unhealthy.”
[00:48:41] And so, it was just fascinating that there was a time when that overconsumption was gauche and we weren't just like “Well you be you and you do you, and everything will work out.” There are consequences to everything. And so, it's interesting that early advice was “No, one dessert a week is fine and he can get along with that. You're otherwise providing him with three meals a day and sound nutrition and all this stuff.” And I just thought that was interesting and that would be such a gauche, frowned upon perspective these days. It's like “Well, people should be able to have whatever they want,” and I guess they absolutely can, but there are just consequences to it. And this is, I think part of what both you and I try to do is to just let people know, “Hey you do you but there are just consequences associated with that. And if you don't have the type of health that you want, the type of energy that you want to sleep, the restoration and everything, and our diet's a hot mess, then this is low-hanging fruit to go in and try to fix all that stuff.”
[00:49:43] And I again think that this understanding around the neuroregulation of appetite is a biggie. And I will shut up in a minute. But one other thing, Japanese food is very interesting in that historically they had very relatively few items to use. They had some fish, they had some seaweed, they had some rice. But you know island nation, not actually a massive amount of variety. And it became an art form to make the food look different, have a different textural experience. You're basically using a white fish three different ways to try to get it-- One would be crispy, one would be saltier, one might be a little bit sweet or whatnot. And that was actually an effort to alleviate the food boredom because of culture and geographical situation that really limited the options, but now with a globally networked food system, we can get anything from anywhere, and that's awesome on the one hand, but it's just something that I think almost like a self-defense kind of thing. You have to recognize that that's real. Nobody is really wired up for self-defense, but the self-discipline necessary to avoid cracking open the ice cream or the potato chips and all that type of stuff. If you have those ubiquitously stacked in your pantry, that's going to be a really tough fight to win.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:51:03] Absolutely. Japan's on my short list for a variety of reasons, but that just reaffirms why I'm excited to eventually explore there. I think for so many people we forget that the food landscape is designed to be as enticing as possible. And if you're not actively working against that, it becomes easier to overconsume food for sure. Well, I so love this conversation as I always do. Please let listeners know how to connect with you outside of this podcast. Obviously, you have great book resources, you are active on social media. I don’t want to say--
Robb Wolf: [00:51:37] Lately, I haven't been on there much.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:51:39] I was going to say you’ve been quieter-- you've been a little quieter, but probably because you're working on things behind the scene. But please let listeners know how to connect with you.
Robb Wolf: [00:51:47] Probably the most updated material is my Substack. I think it's substack.com/robbwolf. And anything that I think is nominally worth checking out usually lands there.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:51:58] Awesome. Thank you again for your time.
Robb Wolf: [00:52:00] Great to see you.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:52:03] If you love this podcast episode, please leave a rating and review. Subscribe and tell a friend.