#15 - Deep Nutrition (Book Review)

Moderator  00:00
Welcome to the Empowering Healthy Business podcast, THE podcast for small business owners. Your host, Cal Wilder, has built and sold businesses of his own and he has helped hundreds of other small businesses. Whether it is improving sales, profitability and cash flow; building a sustainable, scalable and saleable business; reducing your stress level, achieving work life balance, or improving physical and emotional fitness, Cal and his guests are here to help you run a healthier business, and in turn, have a healthier life.

Cal Wilder  00:34
Welcome. This podcast is dedicated to empowering healthy business, and is focused on important issues and topics of interest for small business owners. That includes financial issues at the core, but it also includes a spectrum of other topics, all revolving around business, health and personal health or business owners. As business owners listening can attest, it is very hard to separate business from personal as there is a lot of overlap. And the healthier we are personally, the more positive energy we can bring to our businesses. 

Cal Wilder  01:09
In this episode, we're going to review one of the books that has been foundational to my approach to my own health and the health of my family. This book is called Deep Nutrition. It's written by Dr. Cate Shanahan. Cate is a medical doctor and a family physician with a focus on metabolic health, known for creating and managing the nutrition program for the Los Angeles Lakers. Working with players like Kobe Bryant, she helped optimize their performance and their career longevity through optimal dietary practices. Her book really does a great job combining storytelling with rigorous science. It's it's long, but it is very agreeable, despite its length. And as we'll see, I found it very inspiring. 

Cal Wilder  01:58
Before digging into the book review, I'll share some of my own story around this topic. I was approaching 40 when I had to reassess my own health. I'm approaching 50 now, so it's been around a decade that I've been exploring and researching these topics. When I was younger, I was very active, and I was doing a lot of sports when I was younger, and, you know, that could cover up some unhealthy practices. But by the time I was 36 years old, I had two kids about a year old. I was coming off a year of your standard sleep deprivation from twin newborns needing care in the middle of the night. I was not exercising like I used to to many days. Instead of coming home from work and going out for a run or a bike ride or playing in a pickup basketball game or lifting weights or something, I was throwing some crappy food in the microwave or picking up whatever takeout I was craving, or ordering a pizza some days. Then I'd go down to my basement office and work for a few hours. I was running a business then that was in its early years that needed a ton of my time and energy. And I'd often stay up late staring at three or four bright computer screens at night until I felt too tired to keep working. And then I go off to bed, and then get up in the morning and repeat. Or if I didn't have a lot of work to do that night, I could plop myself down on the sofa in front of the TV and drink some beer. That obviously wasn't healthy either. But I was kind of stuck in this rut, I didn't think too much about the quality of what I ate. 

Cal Wilder  03:34
Organic or grass fed or free range, to me then, was more of a marketing gimmick to justify high food prices than something that really mattered that much to my health. I knew I could and should be eating better. I was educated enough to know that. And I had eaten better at other times in my life. But I was in a bit of a rut. I'd put on more pounds than than I want to admit. And I was also irritable and not terribly happy many days. And so as I was starting to look 40 in the eye, I knew something had to change. And so the first thing that happened, I think was I came across a reference to Mark Sisson's book. I think it might have been called the Paleo Blueprint, or one of his Paleo series books, referenced in Outside Magazine. I bought a copy of the book, and I took it with me on vacation and read it. And during that week on vacation, I started eating differently and making some other choices outside of of diet. And then shortly thereafter, I found Cate's book, Deep Nutrition. It went a couple of layers deeper than Mark's book and it really helped solidify what I knew I needed to do. 

Cal Wilder  04:46
If we take a little bit of a step back and think about what really drives and empowers our personal health, for better or for worse, there are several factors there. You know, diet, exercise, sleep, toxins--whether things we ingest in our diet or come through the air through our skin, stress management and mental health, and finally spirituality, whether it's formal religion or some less formal appreciation of the natural world around us. And so over time in this podcast, I'd like to tackle all of those factors, but today we're going to tackle number one, which is dietary practices. And over time, we'll tackle the others. So I'll say, as we'll talk here, the dietary practices explained in deep nutrition, they intuitively make sense to me, but my rational mind, needed to understand more of the science to really validate and have confidence that it's worth putting in the effort to adopt these dietary strategies. 

Cal Wilder  05:55
And before we dig in, I'll also offer a disclaimer, I'm not an MD, I'm not a doctor, I do have a degree in chemistry and biology from Duke University, one of the top pre-med programs in the country, and I came very close to going to medical school before veering my career in a different direction. So I'm gonna warn that this could be a long episode. In the show notes, there's the outline if you want to skip to different chapters. In my day job, I live in the world of finance and accounting, but when it comes to the science stuff I can really tend to geek out a little bit. And so this podcast will really focus on the nutrition fundamentals in the context of the Deep Nutrition book. Then in a subsequent episode, I'd really love to focus and interview somebody who's more of an expert on how do you implement these strategies in daily life. How do you go shopping for food effectively, in the supermarket, right? Because a lot of what we're talking about today is planning and background, and I think you'll walk away with enough knowledge and how to implement some of these things. But I want to make sure we're not confusing planning with doing because it's the doing that produces results. And so, I'd love to have somebody in a future episode who talks about things like their approach to shopping in the supermarket. When does it make sense to splurge for organic foods? What are some tactics for meal prep, as eating healthy usually involves cooking more of our own meals and packing more of our own lunches than we may be accustomed to. We're all busy and can't spend too many hours each week in the kitchen. And maybe some tactics for helping getting kids who are picky eaters to make some better eating choices as well. But nonetheless, I think Cate's book, and the summary here today, lays out enough info to get started if we're so inclined. 

Cal Wilder  07:47
So without further ado, now on to the book review. There's one paragraph toward the beginning of the book that sums up the approach to the book. And I'm just going to read that. Kate says, "I subscribe to the school of nutritional thought that counsels us to eat the same foods people ate in the past, because after all, that's how we got here. It's how we're designed to eat. Epigenetics supplies the scientific support for the idea of rare providing molecular evidence that we are who we are, in large part because of the foods our ancestors ate. But because healthy genes, like healthy people, can perform well under difficult conditions for a finite amount of time, there is an effect a delay in the system. Since nutritional researchers don't ask study participants what their parents ate, the conclusions drawn from those studies are based on incomplete data. A poor diet can seem healthy if studied for a 24 hour period. A slightly better diet can seem successful for months or even years. Only the most complete diets, however, can provide health generation after generation." The book then proceeds to dig into historical accounts of the health of our ancestors and their dietary knowledge and practices. It starts to set the stage for digging into the modern science and nutrition in later chapters. 

Cal Wilder  09:17
And so I think, anybody with a little bit of knowledge of biology and chemistry can create stories to support whatever current practice they want to advocate. And so Cate really digs into the actual cuisine of communities in the world that still eat similarly to how their ancestors ate hundreds and 1000s of years ago. Or maybe they that way until the last 100 years or so until our standard American diet became more prevalent and people abandoned their ancestral practices. We can't go back 100,000 years to see what our ancestors were actually eating then. Speculation and educated guesses are good, but they're not 100% accurate. And so I like Cate's approach of going back as far as we can, using actual communities that still practice historical cuisine, seems very reasonable to me. So think Anthony Bourdain's show No Reservation, where he traveled the world finding pockets of local cuisine, that frankly, most of us would think it's gross and think there's no way I would ever choose to eat that stuff. But really, that's how everybody used to eat in the world. 

Cal Wilder  10:29
And so kind of following human activity and lifestyle and dietary choices, starting from a million years ago, to a few 1000 years, to 100 years ago, somewhere along the way there, we humans veered into very new and different eating habits. Contrast that with animals living in the wild, you know, they still kind of eat what is in their natural habitat that they've been eating for 1000s of years. It changes over time, but animals just intuitively know what to eat and what not to eat. They know what they need to eat to get the nutrients they need. And they're generally pretty good at avoiding eating poisonous things. And they know how much to eat. There aren't fat animals in the wild. And when we start to domesticate them that we need to worry about our pet dogs and cats eating poisonous things in our yards or in our kitchens or pantries and, and then our pets get overweight, just like us as humans do. Right? 

Cal Wilder  11:29
Cate goes really back into tribal knowledge from a time back when ancient humans live more like other wild animals, and were just so in touch with their environment in their bodies. There's an anecdote, in the book around 1930 or so when there was a European explorer, who went to the Arctic, and with a Native American there, and talked about how the Native people have prevented scurvy, which was an illness that at the time was still killing many European explorers, due to what we now know was a vitamin C deficiency. And so the native gentleman explained how when you kill the moose, you would cut out two small balls of in the fat above the kidney, and you'd eat those. And we now know that those two small balls were the adrenal glands that naturally contained vitamin C. So back then life was simple, you know, folks had plenty of time to focus, they didn't have to worry about keeping up with social media and how to pay for their kids college and how to look after and protect and care for slew of material possessions like we do today. And so they certainly didn't know how or why those adrenal glands prevented sickness, they just knew that they did. 

Cal Wilder  12:48
Our ancestors didn't really measure wealth in terms of how many dollars were in their brokerage account or retirement account, or how large a house they lived in, or what schools they sent their kids to, or what cars they drove. They really considered wealth in terms of long healthspans. And healthspan, it's different than lifespan, you may be aware of the difference. But for those who are not accustomed to these terms, let's contrast healthspan with lifespan. Let's say two people live to be 75 years old before they pass. One of them can be chronically ill for the last 20 years of their life with a lot of daily discomfort and limitations in their activities and just kind of be unable to really be physically active and enjoy life. And then the other one, lives to the same 75 years old. But up until the last year or two of their life, they can remain very physically active without very much limitation in their daily activities. They still feel good. They have very little pain and discomfort until the last couple of years of their life. And at that point, they were very long healthspan of maybe 72-73 years of healthspan before they pass at 75. And so I think it's important to appreciate the difference between healthspan and lifespan. And in the book, Kate goes into a lot of detail about how you know there are in traditional hunter gatherer societies there are very many left on the planet, but in those that are the elderly are very much active going out on hunts and working alongside younger members of the tribe. 

Cal Wilder  14:28
There's also another anecdote around that same time. I forget whether it's in in Deep Nutrition or another book that I've read, but there was a White House physician and who ended up being President Eisenhower's personal doctor, Dr. Paul Dudley White. He graduated from med school in 1910. And he took an interest in cardiac medicine. And, you know, quoted as saying he did not see his first heart attack patient until 1921. So he graduated med school in 1910. And it took I'm 11 years until he saw his first heart attack victim. And so that gives us a sense for how rare heart disease was about 100 years ago. It's really over the last 100 years that Cate highlights how our health and eating habits have gotten off track significantly. 

Cal Wilder  15:20
The genetics of a large population, like us humans, takes many, many, many generations to change significantly, many 1000s of years. And so our genetics today are virtually the same as they were 100 years ago. But yet we are faced with so much chronic disease and illness, and much shorter healthspans. Although our lifespan thanks to sanitary practices and emergency medicine and healthier childbirth results, has certainly extended the average lifespan, our healthspan has been in trouble. So what has changed over the last 100 years? So let's step back and consider, we're starting to get into some of the science here, the difference between genetics, which is the genes in our bodies that we really cannot change, we're born with them, and we have them for our life. And there's nothing we can really do about what we have in our genes. However, epigenetics is a very different matter, we'll talk about. And so before we get into epigenetics, and what that really means, and why that's so powerful. Those of you around my age, I was going to college in the 1990s, and at that point the US kicked off our human genome project. We were going to sequence and define the entire genetic sequence in human beings. This was before a lot of advances over the last couple of decades and in laboratory equipment and computing power. So it took a few years to sequence the entire human genome, and it was completed around 2000, or maybe a couple years later. The idea at the time was once we define the human genome, and all of the genes in our body, we'll then be able to immediately start to target using that genetic information, very specialized treatments and eradicate diseases that we thought had a genetic origin, like cancer, for example. Unfortunately, with all this knowledge, 20 years later, we're still not even close to living up to that promise. So it turns out that knowing our genes is not nearly enough to improve our health. 

Cal Wilder  17:36
Scientists think they're around 20,000 genes, and genes primarily code for proteins. And then those proteins have certain functions in the body. We don't and we can't possibly have all 20,000 genes active at the same time, all producing their own proteins at the same time. Epigenetics refers to those factors that determine which genes are turned on and off, and for how long they're turned on or off, and in which circumstances, they're turned on or off, and how much they're turned on and off, right. Tt turns out that epigenetics are inherited as well. Not 100% inherited like our underlying genes, but to a large extent they are, and this is a relatively new area of research. But, it seems to help explain why parents with certain really good or really bad habits or conditions, disproportionately have children who sear those same habits, or conditions. On the negative side of this heritability, we hear all about how parents with obesity, or cigarette smoking or alcohol use disorders, have children that have a higher prevalence of those issues or conditions as well. And on the positive side, the children of great athletes are usually said to have inherited great genes. But since we're almost all genetically identical, perhaps those sons and daughters are Olympic and professional athletes are also inheriting some epigenetics that caused their bodies to express genes for muscles that allow them to run faster, or farther or jump higher, right? Or maybe part of it is they observe and learn the attitudes and behaviors from their parents that drive healthy gene expression in themselves.

Cal Wilder  19:34
And so epigenetics causes us to think well, what's causing these genes to turn on and off? It's really the environment in which we live that drives the expression. Everything from our food to our activities we engage in or don't engage in, to exposure to toxins, to our stress levels, exposure to sunlight, being on our feet versus sitting in chairs, all those factors within our environment provide information and instructions to our body. Our body then takes in that information and reacts accordingly and causes certain genes turn on or off as a result of the environment in which we put our body. I think this is great news. Because the things we can control, our environment, can have a tremendous impact on those things that we cannot control, our underlying genes. Most of us are not blessed or doomed based on our genes. In lottery terms, and extreme cases of genetics, there are a few winners and a few losers. There are some Olympic athletes and NFL players who are "genetic winners" in life. And no doubt, there is a large genetic component in in those outliers. However, Cate in the book tells stories about how when European explorers arrived to North America, the Native Americans struck them as being like superhuman incredible athletes. They had very taut ankles, toned muscles, they seemed like they could run forever, they could get shot but they kept fighting after getting shot. It was just more commonplace back then to have folks who seem to have hit the genetic lottery, it was more common. But in our population today, there certainly are some winners and some losers genetically, so to speak. But those are relatively rare. Most of us find ourselves somewhere in the middle. And so, the powerful concepts in in the book revolve around what we can do to influence the environment, so that we can optimize our health potential. 

Cal Wilder  21:55
When we're young, we really can't control the environment that our parents put us in, that it's in our home, or what we have to subject ourselves to in school, for example. But parents can make decisions that impact the epigenetics of themselves and their children. Eventually children grow and make their own decisions. And so in the world of epigenetics, our health is as much a function of our choices as well as our genes. And that's the powerful thing. 

Cal Wilder  22:25
In the book, Cate spends a good chunk talking about how physical appearance correlates to health, and standards of beauty, with its bone structure and facial structure and symmetry and muscles, etc, kind of defining the commonly accepted standards of beauty. I kind of look at it more like I know what when I see it, it's hard for me to digest all of those structural changes or structural issues that that Cate goes into detail about. I'm not much of an artist, and maybe that's part of it. But she talks a lot, provides a lot of anecdotal evidence, around how physical appearance correlates to physical health. But it didn't seem like there are a lot of rigorous studies that see quotes, and I haven't independently researched this. But she does make some interesting arguments to consider. 

Cal Wilder  23:17
Putting aside the whole beauty equals health question, which may be more controversial and need more study, she does talk in some detail around how birth order could have an impact on the health of the subsequent children who were born later in the birth order. The theory is that there are fewer nutrients available in the mother to nourish subsequent children. Centuries ago, the tribal elders would advise couples who are planning to conceive and have children to take one year prior to conception to get as healthy as possible, eating super nutrient rich foods to maximize the health of the parents. And that's both parents, father and mother, prior to conception. And that's important for us-- prior to conception. It's not starting to take vitamins after we get pregnant, because in the world of epigenetics--that's important-- but it's a little bit late. It could have been influencing the health well before the unborn child began developing. And so impacts for today, things to consider today, are the spacing of children over time and nutrition and supplements prior to conception. When the father and the mother are exhibiting healthy epigenetics that can pass those down in the eggs and the sperm and in the mother's womb during those nine months of pregnancy. That's something to consider. I hadn't ever really thought of that before reading this book. 

Cal Wilder  24:58
Moving on, we start to get into this idea that food equals information. It's not just calories to power energy or protein to maintain, build and maintain muscles. It's really information about the environment in which we're in. And in many ways, food is as powerful as medicine, both with potential beneficial impacts, as well as potential negative side effects. It can be nourishment that helps us flourish, or it can be toxins that destroy our health over time. Dr. Shanahan goes into detail on two primary big disruptors, or toxins. We'll spend some time on each of these right now. 

Cal Wilder  25:44
The first is vegetable oils or seed oils. These are your canola oil, your olive oil, your soybean oil, your corn oil. 

Cal Wilder  25:59
We're gonna have to get into a little bit of chemistry to understand how these can be potentially toxic in the body. This harkens back to my days sitting in organic chemistry classrooms in college. We learned that fats are chains of carbon based molecules. These carbon atoms are bound to each other along a chain with hydrogen atoms on the outside of the chain. And at the end of the chain, you have some oxygen atoms. The carbon atom normally forms for bonds with other atoms. And when we say bond, we mean one atom shares electrons with another atom so that the positive charge of the protons in the nucleus of each atom is balanced with a negative charge, and the electrons that revolve around the nucleus. So one when carbon binds to four separate atoms, we call that "saturated". It's a very stable molecule. Think of something like a tub of butter, or tallow or lard, or the fatty parts of a steak. Those are solid at room temperature. If we heat them, the fat will melt. And we have to heat it pretty hot, 400+ degrees, in order for that saturated fat to start smoking and reacting. 

Cal Wilder  27:14
Alternatively, a carbon atom in a fat molecule may form a double bond in the chain with a carbon atom next to it. In this configuration, the carbon atom is bound to only three other atoms. Because only three out of the four potential bonds are being used, we say it is "unsaturated". This double bond creates a less stable molecule that much more easily reacts with other atoms and molecules to break apart or "oxidize" at the site of that double bond. It might sound like a double bond sounds stronger than a single bond. In reality, it's weaker or less stable. To use simplistic terms, when our automobiles rust, that's a form of oxidation. So unsaturated fats are prone to rusting. And we certainly don't want our body rusting on the inside. The other thing to note is unsaturated fat molecules do not pack together with adjacent fat molecules as tightly as saturated fat does. You can see this with vegetable oils being liquid at room temperature and smoking at significantly lower temperatures than saturated fat. They start to react at much lower temperatures. And as a side note, most of us have heard about the importance of antioxidants and how we can get them from fruits and vegetables. Or we can take vitamin C pills to get more antioxidants through supplements. And so those are part of the equation as they combat oxidation and the resulting damage to body tissues.

Cal Wilder  28:54
Unsaturated fats can be "monounsaturated", meaning there's only one double bond, or they can be "polyunsaturated" with two or more double bonds. As you might assume, the more double bonds, the less saturated the fat is, and the less stable, and the more reactive that fat molecule is. There's a term that refers to fat with multiple double bonds. They're called polyunsaturated fatty acids, meaning more than one double bond. Polyunsaturated fatty acids, or PUFAs. Certain PUFAs such as omega three and Omega six are critical to our health, but in excess they're toxic or their breakdown products when they do react in the body, are toxic as their double bonds break and are oxidized. Inflammation is often associated with the byproducts of oxidative PUFAs. Inflammation is a common term but what is it really? It's really basically the immune system and the natural repair system of the body taking action to respond to the toxin to remediate the situation and protect and repair the body. If I cut my finger or I get a splinter, it often gets infected and it swells, it gets red, it gets sore. That's my body responding to protect and repair that injury. And similarly, if we eat a lot of soybean oil with a lot of that polyunsaturated fat, inside my body, whether it's in my arteries or in my organs or other places, I get inflammation as my immune system and other repair mechanisms of the body respond to the PUFA-driven toxins try to protect and repair my body from them. It's also kind of scary to think that our brain tissue contains a lot of fat. And so the brain is not immune to the effects of this oxidative damage caused by unsaturated fat. We usually think in terms of artery damage and heart disease and obesity and things like that when it comes to fat issues. But the brain health is also significantly impacted by the kinds of fat that we eat. 

Cal Wilder  31:12
In terms of the natural mix of monounsaturated polyunsaturated and unsaturated fat, when we measure the fat that's found in wild animals living in their natural habitats, like, you know, bison buffalo, cows, or wild boars, pigs and their ham, their fat is approximately 50/50. 50% saturated and 50% mono unsaturated, with only tiny amounts of polyunsaturated fats. Now, over the last 100 years, we've seen the rise of vegetable oils, also known as seed oils. These are being consumed in tremendously larger volume now than they were 100 plus years ago. And so these are your soybean oils, your canola oils, your coin oils, etc. These oils are very high in polyunsaturated fat and very low in saturated fat and relatively low in mono unsaturated fat. The key is they're high in PUFAs. There are a few exceptions like olive oil and avocado oil that are predominantly monounsaturated rather than polyunsaturated. Avocado oil is a popular one in circles these days for cooking with because it has a much higher smoke point. So you can heat it relatively high before it starts smoking. Or olive oil generally is considered a healthier oil, because it's mostly monounsaturated fat, but it has a relatively low smoke point and it's not something we want to cook with at high heat. We can also think intuitively about you know, trying to squeeze and get oil out of olives and avocados. We can see how you could squeeze those and press them and get some oil out of them kind of naturally enough versus corn or soybeans. What do you think we need to do to extract the oil from corn and soybeans? You can't just squeeze them, right? You've got to subject them industrial processes, to a lot of pressure, a lot of heat, solvents, et cetera. Thinking about it, it just doesn't seem natural to try to get oil out of corn and soybeans, for example. But over the last 75 to 100 years, we've been told primarily by food and oil manufacturing companies, big agricultural companies, and then government and nonprofit agencies that are largely funded and influenced by industry, that saturated fat is unhealthy and bad, right? Saturated fat clogs the arteries, and we should really be consuming vegetable based oils that are so much healthier. And so although that's completely at odds with what our ancestors ate, it's been the message for the last 75 to 100 years. 

Cal Wilder  34:01
It's only now that with some of our modern science methods starting to be applied by independent researchers into these issues, that we're now starting to validate some ancestral practices. It's now pretty commonly accepted by pretty much everybody that eating eggs and all their cholesterol has very little negative impact on the body. And also that saturated fat is not necessarily the big driver of heart disease that we've been told it was for the last several decades. And so, without going further into the science -- hopefully I haven't lost too many listeners by this point -- I'm just going to summarize. When it comes to vegetable oils that an understanding of the science and modern terms is really starting to explain why those ancestral eating habits are healthy, which are focused around eating fat that naturally occurred in animals that was primarily saturated fat and monounsaturated fat with very little PUFA. 

Cal Wilder  35:04
The second big metabolic health disrupter that Dr. Shanahan goes into detail about is processed sugar. They are different sources and types of sugar. But ultimately, pretty much all of it is broken down and digested in the body and converted into glucose. Glucose is one of the two primary energy sources for ourselves, our mitochondria can "burn" glucose for energy. The second primary source being fatty acids. You can burn glucose for energy or we can burn fat for energy. 

Cal Wilder  35:43
The issue with processed sugar in foods is-- there are multiple issues there. The first issue is foods that are high in processed sugar often contain few nutrients of value-- we're thinking about pasta, soda, candy bars, etc. You know, they give us calories, but beyond that, they don't give us a lot of nutrients. And many of them are also laden with PUFAs-- polyunsaturated fatty acids and vegetable oils-- for kind of a double-whammy. We may enjoy eating these foods, but our body really doesn't need much of anything that's in them. And they're foods that our ancestors did not have available to them and certainly thus were not eating. 

Cal Wilder  36:31
We need glucose and the body is masterful at maintaining the right range of glucose in the bloodstream. When we don't have enough glucose, the body produces it. And it can also shift to burning more fat for energy when glucose is running low. However, when we have too much sugar, too much glucose in the blood, then it becomes toxic. 

Cal Wilder  36:54
One way that it is toxic is it's very sticky when dissolved in water, and it binds to proteins in a process called glycation. And this gumming up of proteins disrupts the normal functions of proteins. It changes their shape and what they can bind to and how they can act in the body. At low rates of sugar consumption, the body is able to clean up these damaged proteins and cells, and the waste chemicals from this process are filtered out and excreted by the kidneys. At the extreme though, we think about diabetics with more trouble managing the blood sugar level and generally an elevated level of glucose in their blood over time. Eventually, unfortunately, diabetics suffer kidney damage, some suffer eyesight and blindness issues, they have high rates of cardiovascular disease from damaged blood vessels. They may have blood flow blockages and tiny blood vessels called capillaries in extremities like their toes that sometimes need amputation. Wounds don't heal well, they have much higher rates of birth defects in their children, etc. It's really a terrible, terrible disease.

Cal Wilder  38:04
And we also need to think about the fact that clash. I'm talking about cholesterol. We haven't mentioned cholesterol yet, except I guess in the context of those eggs not being so bad after all. But remember, cholesterol is not floating around naked in the blood. It's carried within lipoproteins, and there's that protein word. And so these lipoproteins that carry cholesterol and triglycerides and other nutrients throughout the body, those can react with sugar and become glycated. And so high sugar levels disrupt normal lipid transportation, the transportation of cholesterol and fats through these lipoproteins. So high sugar tends to result in high low density lipoprotein, LDL, the "bad" cholesterol and elevated triglycerides, which are the other major problem with metabolic disorder alongside high LDL. 

Cal Wilder  38:57
And then the final primary way that high levels of sugar are toxic to us is it disrupts brain function. I'm not going to go into all the details that Cate does in the book. But I'll just say, addiction to sugar is a real thing for many people just like addiction to nicotine and alcohol and harder drugs. It kind of rewires brain circuitry and emotional pathways, as well as straight chemical reactions that can cause problems as well. 

Cal Wilder  39:26
Given that sugar is toxic in multiple ways, the body over the years has evolved ways to "dispose" of excess glucose. What that really means is storing the excess sugar when blood levels rise beyond what is immediately needed for energy. We can store a modest amount in our liver and muscles. Beyond that all the extra sugar is stored as fat. We've probably all heard of the hormone insulin. It does a number of things. Primarily what it does is to trigger cells to uptake, take sugar out of the bloodstream and into the cells. And so when we eat sugar or foods that contain carbohydrates that end up being digested down into glucose, our pancreas organ releases insulin into the bloodstream so that the cells are stimulated to uptake glucose and remove it from the bloodstream. Part of that is required so the cells can get the energy they need, and part of it is to reduce the level of sugar in the bloodstream and reduce the toxicity. However, chronic overconsumption of sugar can cause most of the body sells to become resistant to that insulin hormone in the body responds by producing more and more insulin to overcome that resistance. Now, meanwhile, fat cells remain very sensitive to insulin, and we continue to add more and more fat to our bodies to dispose of all that glucose and get it out of the bloodstream. We may hear the term insulin resistance. That's the origin of the term insulin resistance. 

Cal Wilder  41:02
The other thing that can happen is, the liver can dispose of dangerous levels of sugar, especially fructose, which we may hear in terms of high fructose corn syrup that comes in soda in all kinds of candy bars and all kinds of places, it's a popular way to get sugar into food in the form of high fructose corn syrup. And so the liver converts that sugar into fat and stores it in the liver. You get these fat deposits on our livers. And there's a condition called nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. Drinking a lot of alcohol over time can also cause the liver to store fat deposits within the liver that adversely affects the function of liver. But specifically, we're seeing all-time levels of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease due to high consumption of sugar, especially high fructose corn syrup, in United States and other countries where it's just so prevalent in our food supply. 

Cal Wilder  42:09
I'll also cover one more topic related to sugar and carbohydrates, and that's the term complex carbohydrates. We've kind of been told, as we've grown up, that complex carbs are good and healthy and not harmful, right? That would be like eating pasta, for example. It's a complex carb, it's different than a can of soda. And so when we drink that Coca Cola, all that sugar hits your bloodstream pretty quickly, right? And the body is still sensitive to insulin, and the body can produce insulin and dispose of that relatively quickly. So it's a really high peak for a relatively short duration before it falls. Sometimes it falls too much, and then we become hypoglycemic, meaning too little sugar in the blood, and we get lethargic and tired after a big meal. That's a whole other topic. In terms of pasta, what happens when we eat that big bowl of spaghetti. We think that's generally a better or healthier choice than Gatorade or Coca Cola, or other sorts of sugar-laden drinks, in fueling the body with carbs. But too much pasta is also going to flood the bloodstream with glucose, just over a longer period of time. That spike won't be as high, but it will be for a much longer period of time as that pasta gets broken down and the glucose released into the bloodstream. And so we need to be very careful about the total carbs that we're eating, not just whether it's simple sugar, or more complex molecules, bigger molecules, like you'd find in pasta. 

Cal Wilder  43:39
I'm gonna put a hold on some of this heavier science and just kind of summarize Dr. Shanahan's conclusions around how how and why vegetable oils and processed sugar are so damaging and toxic to us. The first thing is they disrupt our lipid transport system, which is to say, they disrupt the body's natural processing of fat and cholesterol and other nutrients in and out of our bloodstream and cells, which causes our levels of cholesterol and triglycerides to rise to dangerous levels indicating cardiovascular and other health risk factors. The second way these things are toxic is they cause inflammation and oxidative damage. Simplistically, we're kind of rusting our bodies on the inside if we eat too many of those things. And the third way vegetable oils and processed sugar are toxic is they disrupt the natural regulation of how much we eat. Think about how easy it is to polish off that full bag of potato chips or multiple doughnuts or a box of cookies that we buy at the supermarket. It's pretty easy to polish off a big container of those things versus sitting down, and you know, you're not going to eat a half dozen apples or cucumbers at a time. It's just hard to eat a large volume of fresh raw fruits and vegetables, while it's very easy to sit down and eat a high volume of processed foods high in vegetable oil and sugar. 

Cal Wilder  45:21
Cate focused initially in the first part of the book on what not to eat. And then Dr. Shanahan moves on to focus on what we should try to eat. She introduces her four pillars of cuisines as she calls it, and these four pillars of cuisine provide the nutrients we need, at the same time avoiding many of the toxins that damage our bodies. Her four pillars of cuisine are #1 one meat on the bone--, think ribs, chicken wings, T bone steaks, turkey legs, or stews cooked low and slow for hours on their slow cooker. So that's meat on the bone. Number two is organs. You know, we all probably have been told to eat liver at some point in our life. Well, that's probably the most commonly available organ meat. Number three, fresh fruits and vegetables and animal products, relatively self explanatory. They're fresh and raw fruits and vegetables and animal products. And number four, fermented and sprouted foods, which we'll come back to in some more detail.

Cal Wilder  46:31
Returning to go into a little more detail on meat on the bone, why is that so important? Cate explains how leaving everything together allows us to consume more of the nutrients that are present in the animal. We get connective tissue like ligaments and cartilage. The more meat is processed and cut up and separated, the more nutrients end up being removed. We're talking about minerals, we're talking about fat with fat soluble vitamins, we're talking about the connective tissue that help protect our own joints and our own bodies. There's a very different nutritional profile in a piece of lean steak or chicken breast that has been isolated and sold separately to us in the supermarket, versus kind of that full leg or arm or carcass or rib that contains a lot more nutrients than the isolated piece of muscle steak. And then the other thing with meat on the bone is stews and slow cooked roasts. Those are often better than throwing the meat on the grill. There's far less nutrient destruction at high heat. And things like charring arguably create chemicals that can be carcinogenic, meaning cancer causing. So we want to be careful about charring too much of our food on the grill. The body has way to detoxify some of that, but too much of it is likely problematic. One of the benefits of slow cooking-- we're talking about 220, 250 degrees or less for several hours at a time-- it allows for cooking of tough portions of animals that are not rendered soft enough to eat from simply grilling or frying for five or 10 or 15 minutes. It's similar to low and slow barbecue. For example, shoulders, ribs, legs, tail-- these are parts of the animal that have very strong muscles that take time to break down. We need the joint materials to kind of melt and it all can kind of dissolve into that stew sauce, and then consuming that stew sauce gives us all of these materials that we really cannot get anywhere else. Even better is sometimes bone broth. It's consumed commonly ancestrally. Instead of taking a pill of isolated glucosamine and chondroitin, which may or may not help us, we can consume kind of this entire spectrum of dissolved joint materials in bone broth. So that's why Cate believes that meat on the bone is such a critical part of our healthy cuisine and points out that it's been a part of ancestral cooking forever. 

Cal Wilder  49:11
Moving onto number two: organs. Organs have the highest concentration of nutrients of really any part of the animal, a lot of vitamins, related molecules, minerals. We think in terms of liver but people also eat heart pancreas, intestines, brain, eyeballs, bone marrow, etc. Ancestors knew that eating like cures like. So if you're having trouble with your intestines, eat some intestines from an animal. That was the theory. Many of these organs tend to be low in fat, and so even our diehard anti-fat prognosticators out there who say we really need to eat low fat diets, they usually agree that eating organs is healthy. It's kind of universally agreed that eating organs is healthy. The problem for us though, is one of taste. They just don't taste good to us. We're not used to eating them. They taste pretty nasty. We don't really know how to cook and prepare them to be more palatable. They're frankly not very available in US supermarkets. You go to other parts of the world, they're much more readily available. You know, we might have 20 different cuts of beef or chicken in our local Stop and Shop, but they're almost all different cuts of muscle meat. Maybe we can find a liver here and there, but good luck finding those other organs. If we really cannot stomach the taste of organs, or we don't have the time to learn how to cook them in a more palatable way, then we can take desiccated organ capsules, which are kind of freeze dried organs, which are certainly better than the not consuming any organ products to get those nutrients. 

Cal Wilder  50:50
The third of Cate's pillars is fresh fruits and vegetables and animal products. So this means unprocessed freshly picked fruits and vegetables that retain most of the nutrients. Once we start to store these products over time, when we start to process them with heat or with freezing them and firing them or adding preservatives. Those all degrade the nutrients. And over time, nutrients naturally degrade once the once the once the food is no longer alive, so to speak, and growing, the nutrient profile starts to degrade. Just think what was the differenc is between picking and eating a fresh strawberry or cucumber in the garden versus buying one in a store that's been processed and sitting around and in transportation. Maybe it came from another country or continent and has been sitting on the shelves for a week or two. 

Cal Wilder  51:48
And so fresh fruits and vegetables and animal products also contain another category of food: raw milk. And raw milk is controversial. It's illegal in a number of states. There have been hardly any, arguably no, documented cases of serious injury or death from consuming raw milk. Unlike every year we have huge nationwide recalls for lettuce or spinach or hamburger meat that's contaminated with E coli. Certainly nobody's calling to ban lettuce or spinach or hamburger meat. Yet, a lot of people want to ban raw milk. Putting politics aside, raw milk, why is it so different thanregular pasteurized milk we buy in the supermarket. So when we pasteurized milk, typically it's done at high heat, maybe also high pressure, I can't quite remember the pressure, for a period of time in order to kill pathogens in it. That's the theory. Kill the harmful bugs that are in raw milk so milk is safe to drink. However, when we pasteurize the milk, we're also destroying a lot of the nutrients and we're changing the structure of fat globules and proteins in the milk. If you looked at raw milk under a microscope compared to pasteurized milk, it would be like night and day. The other thing was night and day, for me at least is the taste difference. If I drink some raw milk, it is so much tastier and creamier and enjoyable then, then that pasteurized milk I get from Stop and Shop down the street. Raw milk also contains digestive enzymes to help that help digest milk proteins. So some folks have lactose intolerance. If they drink milk or eat certain dairy products, they have gastrointestinal distress. Raw milk contains digestive enzymes that help digest those proteins, and it's a lot easier to digest raw milk than pasteurized milk and it's quite quite well tolerated by folks who would otherwise have lactose intolerance to process milk. By nature, raw milk needs to be you know, drunk freshly, or it will go bad because it's raw, it doesn't have those preservatives in it. And so if we're gonna preserve raw milk and save it for later, then we would ferment it into yogurt or cheese. And that gives us the added benefits of nutrients from fermentation beyond that, which is in the raw milk. 

Cal Wilder  54:16
Alright, so moving on the fourth category, the fourth pillar of Cate's health is fermented and sprouted foods. And by fermenting we mean allowing a solution of water and bacteria, usually a little salt to feed on and slightly break down these vegetables. Kombucha also contains yeast as part of the breakdown process. Beer and wine are also fermentation products. Though most of the beer and wine people drink today, it's a lot stronger than what we consumed centuries ago. Fermentation may have started as a way to really preserve and store food and water longer for consumption later before we had refrigeration and freezing and other methods of preservation. I remember when I was donating in Chile in in college, I was told that wine started to be made there in order to preserve and make water safe because bacteria could not grow in a slightly alcoholic medium like wine. Now we recognize scientifically, there are a lot of benefits that go well beyond preserving. And so what are some of these, these benefits? When we sprout and we ferment, we reduce the level of innate toxins that are in these foods. Plants contain self-defense toxins to try to prevent themselves by being eaten by animals. Plants have a survival of the fittest evolutionary history, just like animals. A planet tha allows itself to be eaten easily by animals, it's not going to survive and reproduce a next generation, right? So they have these natural toxins that deter animals from eating them. So beans can be very toxic. I once made a batch of homemade baked beans, very tasty. Unfortunately that night, one of my family members came down with an incredible case of gastrointestinal distress. Luckily, I felt fine and didn't have that experience. But the beans must not have been cooked quite long enough to destroy enough of the toxins to prevent a bad, bad evening in the bathroom.

Cal Wilder  56:26
Ricin is a toxin from the castor oil bean that's been used, I think it might have been used to assassinate the royalty that kicked off World War One with a castor bean oil and an umbrella or something like that, stabbing somebody killing them that came from a bean. So that's an extreme example, are other examples of toxins that are more sub-acute meaning you don't really notice that the time that they're causing you damage, gluten and grains is an example. Some people can be very gluten sensitive, but the rest of us really don't notice any problem from eating gluten. But yet, at the same time, it's kind of a sub acute level, arguably causing some minor damage over time, to our intestinal system in our bodies. And so when we sprout and ferment foods, these toxins naturally break down sourdough bread is much lower and gluten than regular, you know, whole wheat bread that we buy in the supermarket, we can sprout beans, and that lowers the level of lectins. And our ancestors figured this out intuitively. And now we're starting to understand the science behind gluten and lectins and all these chemicals that get reduced by sprouting and fermenting. 

Cal Wilder  57:43
We are also starting to become more aware and appreciative of the role of the gut microbiome. And that's the set of bacteria and other microorganisms that live in our GI tracts. Fermented foods kind of keep a healthy stock of bacteria in us. Now that the caveat is we really don't know what the most beneficial strains are, and they may vary from person to person. So supplements don't necessarily give us what we need and supplements, you know probiotic supplements we might buy at the drugstore, they don't contain the other vitamins and minerals that exist in real vegetables. And also we need to remember micro organisms are remarkable in their ability to synthesize vitamins that the human body cannot synthesize itself, right yeast is noted for being able to produce B vitamins. Imagine putting some grain or fruit in some water, letting it sit for a couple of weeks and then you've got a tasty beverage that has more vitamins in it than it did originally when you set it out to sit and ferment. We can also store vegetables that would otherwise spoil. Pickles and sauerkraut or the classic example that allow us to eat cute cucumbers and campaigns in the in the middle of the winter when they would have long ago rotted if we just store the vegetable in our closet. Many other vegetables can also be fermented. 

Cal Wilder  59:04
Alright, so let's think about you know, Cate's four pillars which is meat on the bone, organs, fresh and raw fruits and vegetables and animal products, and fermented and sprouted foods. Those kind of intuitively we can have a picture in our brain of what those things are, and if we wanted to eat them, you know what they look like if we bought them and ate them. Let's compare those and contrast those against the United States Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. FDA's recommended five food groups. The FDA defines five food groups: fruits is one, vegetables is two, grains is three, proteins four, and dairy five. OK, we get those five food groups. But, what is it about those fruits and vegetables, and what's different between fruits and vegetables and grains? I thought grains and gluten is in more toxic way. Just how do I go about figuring out what to eat from these US FDA five food groups? Right? I can visualize meat on the bone, organs. I kind of know intuitively what those are. Now, how do I visualize proteins? Proteins can be a lot of different things. Is it animal protein, is it plant protein, is it frozen, is it processed, is it-- what kind of protein is it? Is it muscles, is it joints? It could be anything, right? I know what meat on the bone is. I kind of know intuitively what organs are. I don't know what protein is, I don't know exactly what to eat to go eat protein, right. And we can think about fresh and raw fruits and vegetables versus, you know, the myriad of different forms of fruits and vegetables that exist in the supermarket through combinations of frozen, pre-cooked, fried, or otherwise processed fruits and vegetables that we find on the shelf or in the freezer aisle at the supermarket. And so I just find Cate's pillars that she goes through in Deep Nutrition to be much more intuitive and things I can go act on and understand, than trying to figure out how to interpret the US FDA traditional food groups. 

Cal Wilder  1:01:18
We're approaching the end of the review of the book, but before we conclude the review of Deep Nutrition, I do want to include kind of one more issue that may be a question for some folks. And that's what's the role of vitamin supplements. Cate notes that we can get most of the nutrients we need by following those four pillars of nutrition. However, supplements are really so prevalent in a lot of our lives, right? We go to Walgreens and it's got a couple aisles dedicated exclusively to supplements. So are they necessary? Well, if we're eating what we call the standard American diet, which is a lot of food that's devoid of nutrients, on one hand, that also contains toxins that our body needs to detoxify and get rid of on the other hand, and then supplements become more clearly important, right? But what about if we're eating, "clean" according to Cate's four pillars. We'll probably need to define another term called micronutrients as part of this discussion around supplements. Macronutrients generally refer to that protein, carbohydrate and fat, and the ratio of those could be your macronutrient ratio, and people spend a lot of time on what percentage of your calories come from fat versus protein versus carbohydrates. For Cate, she doesn't really worry too much about that, because eating according to the terms of her four pillars kind of naturally would result in her mind, in a healthy balance of macronutrients. However, micronutrients are those vitamins and minerals and other chemical compounds that our bodies need. And, for a number of reasons, Cate does suggest a small number of supplements. 

Cal Wilder  1:03:10
Based on our agricultural practices in the US and other "developed" countries, we practice what we call monoculture agriculture. We have entire fields that are dedicated to growing corn, year after year. Farmers use a lot of fertilizer, containing primarily nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, in order to provide nutrients to grow that corn because previous generations of corn over previous years have sucked a lot of the nutrients out of the soil. So the soil naturally is devoid and lacking in important micronutrients because they've all been sucked out by the corn that's been cut off and shipped off and eaten by us. And so the soil is not particularly healthy anymore. And the farmers have to use a lot of fertilizer in order to continue to grow the same crops year after year. And the fertilizer, they use relatively narrow spectrum, it doesn't contain the full spectrum of minerals that our bodies need. So that's one issue that drives the need for supplements. And then the second issue is, you know, we're probably not gonna be perfect in eating exclusively according to Cate's four pillars. When we continue to eat some amount of processed foods and foods that are low in nutrients that we need and potentially introduce more toxins that we need to process or removed from our bodies or part of our diet is still kind of processed in that way. Then we are going to be a little bit deficient in those micronutrients. And if we just can't tolerate organs and we eat mostly muscle, then we're missing some of the micronutrients that we would otherwise get in organs. 

Cal Wilder  1:04:44
So Cate does suggest a short list of supplements that everybody consider taking. The first would be vitamin D, which unless we naturally get a lot of sunlight exposure on large surface areas of our skin, then most of us benefit from a vitain D supplement. The second supplement would be magnesium. Magnesium is a critical mineral our bodies need in a non-trivial significant quantity. Most of our soil is depleted of magnesium, so we're not getting as much in our diet as we need. Zinc is another supplement Cate recommends. She didn't really explain a lot behind why zinc itself is on the shortlist, but I suspect it probably has to do with soils being depleted of zinc over time as well. And zinc is not a big part of fertilizers that farmers put on their soil. So zinc is on the list. And then the fourth thing she suggests is a multivitamin that contains 100% of the US RDA for vitamins and minerals to compensate for what's missing in our diets. I know from other research, there are some issues around this in that multivitamins might give you too much some some things and too little of others. It's not really tailored to what you personally might need. But I suspect Cate would probably argue that a multivitamin giving you 100% of the RDA, it's better than nothing. And the benefits of taking one of those a day or at least one of those once or twice a week, probably, those benefits probably outweigh the risks of, of doing so.

Cal Wilder  1:06:18
To at the end of the book, Cate does provide some brief suggestions on meal planning and recipes. Rather than extending this podcast and trying to cover that topic as well. I'm going to save that for another episode and perhaps bring in a guest to make it a little more engaging. So it's not just me talking about it. So we'll put that on the back burner for the next episode. 

Cal Wilder  1:06:37
I'm going to close out this book review by reiterating what I said at the beginning, which is I found this book to be inspirational. We might find that counterintuitive, because as a society, unfortunately, we are sicker than ever, we're taking more prescription medications than ever, we're starting to take those medications and increasingly young ages. We're spending an incredible and growing percentage of our income on health care. And unfortunately, we don't have a lot to show for it in terms of increasing healthspan and lifespan. So it might be easy to be pessimistic about this situation. But I actually see, after reading this book, reason for a lot of great hope and appreciate opportunity for the future. Because as I said earlier in this episode, genetics is not the problem. You know, it's the epigenetics that are driven by our environment that we put ourselves in, that really are driving our health. And it can be reversed in just two or three generations. It took us two or three generations over the last 75 or 100 years to increase the prevalence of chronic illness and disease tremendously. And over two or three generations over the next 75 to 100 years, well, I think the reverse can happen. That's the beauty of epigenetics. We can reverse a lot of these chronic illnesses and diseases, through changes to the environment in which we put our bodies, ourselves, our children and their children. And imagine what our great great grandchildren could look like and experience 75 or 100 years from now. And so, to summarize, the takeaway from this book, you know, within two to three generations of eating foods that are aligned with what our bodies are ancestrally wired to consume and thrive on eating can largely reverse the scourges of the past 100 years. So just tremendous potential. However, we must overcome the inertia and the conflicting marketing that we get from food companies and doctors, many of whom are not trained in nutrition and who may be taking instruction from food and pharmaceutical companies, right? And we've got, you know, decades of our own ingrained habits, both conscious and unconscious, and beliefs. And you know, it's hard, right? I want to contrast what seems simple on paper, versus what is not easy to do. It seems simple. And Cate's four pillars seem simple, but they're not easy, right? So simple, but hard. Hard to do in reality. But it's possible. And that's the message of the book. It's possible. There's a roadmap to do it. And that's what's so exciting and inspiring about this book. 

Cal Wilder  1:09:35
Reference show notes and find other episodes on EmpoweringHealthyBusiness.com. If you would like to have a one-on-one discussion with me, or possibly engage SmartBooks to help with your business, you can reach me at Cal@EmpoweringHealthyBusiness.com or message me on LinkedIn where I am easy to find. Until next time, this is Empowering Healthy Business, the podcast for small business owners, signing off.