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ICONS UNCOVERED with Stefan Garlicki
ICONS UNCOVERED is where sports, health and performance meet. The podcast is hosted by Pro Mountain biker, Stefan Garlicki. He has conversations with Iconic figures from around the world with a main focus on sports, health and performance. The goal of this podcast is to inspire and educate people to make the right choices to be successful in their sports and careers but also keeping health and longevity in mind. NEW EPISODES EVERY SATURDAY
ICONS UNCOVERED with Stefan Garlicki
The Keto Diet Expert: What's REALLY Causing Disease and How to Fix It?
Dr. David Harper is an expert in cancer research and author of 'The Bio Diet.' We delve into the critical role of nutrition in preventing chronic diseases such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and Alzheimer's. Dr. Harper highlights the ketogenic diet's potential benefits in reducing disease risk and optimizing overall health. We discuss the impact of sugar and processed foods, the importance of lifelong learning about health, and the shortcomings of current medical and nutritional advice. The conversation also covers Dr. Harper's insights on exercise, fasting, and the latest research on ketogenic diets as adjunct therapy in cancer treatment.
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First of all, thanks for being on the show. The most important single factor in determining your likelihood of chronic disease was not smoking, not alcohol abuse, not sedentary behavior, lack of exercise. Dr. David Harper is an expert in cancer research and the author of the bio diet. He believes that reducing sugar and adopting a ketogenic lifestyle will have a huge impact in reducing your risk of cancer.
Why do you think so many people are getting sick today? What do you think the biggest cause is for disease? We don't really spend enough time and effort on preventative medicine. What we do is wait till they break. What is the meaning of success to you? You could reduce your likelihood of contracting chronic disease, so cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's, by about 70%, 7 0.
If you, if you could put the most simple change, one thing that have the biggest impact on their health, what would that be?
First of all, thanks for being on the show. As I said, I'm really excited to, to, to chat to you today. I have had this, uh, sort of second side of me, I guess, uh, away from the professional sport where I've been really interested in, in, in the topic of health and longevity and basically anything that can, uh, you know, help us.
As humans to, to enjoy life better and, and perform better. And, um, uh, so, uh, and you're the first, uh, doctor that I've had on the show. So, um, yeah, thanks. Uh, thanks for being on. Oh, my pleasure. I qualified that, um, PhD as so doctor by title, but not a physician, uh, researcher. Um, but I teach, uh, you know, pre medical school, medical school sort of courses, uh, anatomy, physiology, pathology, um, contemporary health, and of course, nutrition as well.
So, you are a, obviously a big proponent of the ketogenic diet, um, you're also an author, um, with having written the bio diet, um, I thought I'd start with where, why do you think so many people are getting sick today? What do you think the biggest cause is for disease? Well, I'll back up just a bit. You know, you were introducing me, just yourself to me just before you started recording and, uh, you mentioned your, you know, world class mountain biker.
Um, I was actually born in North Vancouver, um, living in, which is a very famous mountain biking area. Lots of great trails here and a couple of world class and Olympic champion mountain bikers, uh, from, uh, from our neighborhoods. So it's something I'm kind of familiar with. And, um, you know, Whistler, BC is also a place where people come in the off ski season to do mountain biking.
So, uh, interested in that. So sorry to get back to your question again. Thanks for, thanks for having me on the, on the show. Um, I, I, you know, if I had to talk about my values, my purpose in life, it would be to help. Other people have happier, healthier lives with what I've learned, um, through my education and my personal experience and through actually a couple of hundred podcasts like this, uh, with people like you.
So thank you very much for providing me the opportunity and thank you for doing a service to everyone to, to, to allow people like me to talk about. Health. Um, and one of the reasons I think it's really important is, is that there's so much gunk out there on the internet. Uh, and so many people are trying to sell you things.
Um, so I'm not trying to sell you any other than my book, which is sitting behind me here, bio diet, ketogenic diets. But, um, uh, so, um, yeah, I would say if you, if you want to look at the Burden of disease, which I think is your question, the global burden of disease in 2017, the journal, the Lancet, um, um, published a very comprehensive global study on what was causing chronic disease in terms of lifestyle factors.
So not factors or accidents or infections, but in terms of lifestyle factors. Although I guess infections could play a part in that because of our, uh, if you're in good health, you're more resistant to them, but what they found was, uh, by far the most important, um, single factor in determining your likelihood of chronic disease was, was not smoking, not drinking.
Alcohol abuse, not sedentary behavior, lack of exercise. It was, it was nutrition and it was food you eat. And that it turns out was more important than all of the rest of those other factors put together. So there's no question in my mind. Um, also from my own personal experience of my research experience that, uh, you know, what's on the end of your fork is probably the most important health decision you make on a daily basis.
And so. That's where I decided, uh, you know, like you, I've had a sort of switch of careers. I started my career, uh, as a physiologist in, in something called mathematical biofluid dynamics, which is quite a different field. Uh, and, and I've been in the field of nutrition for about 20 odd years now. Um, uh, doing research and teaching and, and the like, and, and, uh, I think one of the things that's good about what, what, what both you and I have done is you come with a fresh idea.
A fresh approach, uh, when you come to a new space. So, um, I'm also interested in what, what you, what you've learned through your journey. Uh, I've only read the thumbnail sketch, but I, I know you had some, some injuries. Um, you've had some, some health challenges. Uh, some of which I share, um, in my case, uh, panic attacks.
That's something that I had to deal with as a younger man. And the good news is that we have, we have, Ways of addressing all of those health issues. But really we have to start with what we're eating because that's what gives us fuel and all the raw materials to rebuild us. And our life is really a constant process of rebuilding.
And if you do it right, you rebuild in a healthy way. Uh, and if you do it wrong, things start to break down. Yeah. Well, for me, as you know, you mentioned, you know, with my career and why I actually wanted to do this was, uh, because I'd had these health issues. And, um, I think a lot of people are cruising through life, blissfully unaware, you know, of what they are doing to themselves, uh, and thinking that they are doing the right things and being healthy.
You know, from what they read in the media or they see on TV. And, uh, I re I mean, I was one of those people and I had thought for years that I was, um, Was that, that I was healthy and doing everything right. And obviously I was doing a lot of sport and stuff. And, uh, I realized, um, yeah, quite abruptly that, uh, I might not have been doing the right things.
Um, and so, you know, it led me into this, into this other side. Uh, and so even though I've been still competing over the last, um, you know, since my injuries and things, and I had a melanoma diagnosis in 2019, um, and that's kind of what, you I had two broken hips back to back. Uh, so two years in a row and um, which led to a complete hip replacement on the one side and a couple of years of recovery.
And, uh, and then I had a melanoma, uh, diagnosis right after, um, So obviously there was a lot of trauma there and that led to then mental health issues and panic attacks and insomnia and, uh, chronic anxiety. Um, and it was, uh, quite crazy because I realized how fragile You know, the human body is, and I, I'd always sort of laughed it off in a way, you know, when I was younger, I was, I was like, oh, come on, you know, what are people talking about?
You know, they, they having mental issues or they're depressed. I was like, I'll just get over it. But I realized then that you know, the, The body sometimes has its own its own mechanism and there's nothing you can do about it and the symptoms you feel are very real and um it sort of shocked me also in terms of my own self confidence because I had thought that because I was Oh, because I thought I was eating healthily and doing the right things that I would This wouldn't happen to me.
And, uh, as it turns out, uh, yeah, it sort of broke my sense of reality. Um, and that led me into this, into this path of, of also pretty much every day researching what could be better in terms of diet, sleep, uh, anything, biohacking, red light therapy, cold exposure, uh, fasting, you know, meditation, you name it.
I've, I've read about it. Um, and yeah. Yeah, that's why I'm partly so excited to, to start to be actually able to speak to the professionals like yourself and, and really dig deeper into this. And, um, hopefully other people, as many people as possible to, to hear what's, you know, what the truth is and, and what they can do to actually help themselves.
Because I think the, I don't trust the medical system. As a generalization, I think orthopedic, um, you know, and surgeries for accidents, that's fantastic. But I think a lot of the way that people are treated for disease is not always necessarily the best. And I think there's always a lot of money behind it and that's on the agenda and the big farmer wants to make money.
So, um, it's not always about caring about people, uh, which is a shame, but, um, It's uh, yeah, it's the, the world today is, it needs help. Yeah, no, I, I, I hear everything you say, uh, had any of those same experiences. I think one of the great things is that, um, you're curious, you know, you're, you're, you're not stopping.
You're not just. Accepting, um, the conventional wisdom about anything you're going and learning on your own. I believe in lifetime learning as an educator as well. So I think that's all really important. And, um, you know, when you talk about healthcare systems in the West, I don't call them healthcare systems.
I call them disease management systems. We don't really spend enough time and effort on preventative medicine. What we do is wait till the break. And then we have these increasingly, you know, sexy and expensive ways of fixing things and keeping people alive. Uh, and much of that effort is in response to the fact that people have.
adopted poor lifestyle habits that eventually lead to chronic disease that eventually lead them to illness, especially, you know, in the latter third of life. And that's, you know, if it ends up with hospitalization and so on, that's the most expensive way to deal with the health issue. So we know it's far better to prevent something than to So, but, you know, I was, I was a visiting scientist at the BC cancer research center here in British Columbia, the Terry Fox lab.
Um, and, um, you know, people would ask me because of that experience in cancer research, they said, well, let's, you know, what's the best way to like treat cancer. I said, well, that's pretty treated is don't get it in the first place. Um, but I kind of say that in, in, uh, don't, you know, don't wait until you have it.
But, but even that, you know, Um, you know, Stefan, let me, I'm going to, I'm going to give you a pop question. Um, if you think about our lives, you've had melanoma, um, you know, it is the second leading cause of, of, uh, morbidity and mortality after cardiovascular diseases. But, uh, how many thought, if you live an average lifespan, say 80 odd years, uh, what's the likelihood or how many times do you think an average, average person would develop, uh, potentially metastatic cancer in those 80 or so years?
Okay. Just give me a number i'm putting you on the spot completely Wow, uh Geez, I you mean where it actually? metastasizes into real cancer or you meaning the cells where it's cell division and uh, I mean, so i'd heard something that You have cell division, don't you have cell division sort of every day or sort of on an ongoing basis in your immune system?
Yeah, of course, cells, cells are dividing every day. I mean, some cells don't like nerve cells, muscle cells, but the rest of them do. Um, and, uh, you know, epithelium connective tissue. So the answer is you develop cancer cells. About two or three times every day. Um, they don't become cancers that are diagnosed, uh, and treated because we have this amazing immune system that detects them and realizes that they are our own cells that have gone rogue and then destroys them through a number of different methods.
Um, so much of. You know, preventing that is related to, uh, maintaining a healthy lifestyle that maximizes or optimizes your immune system. I shouldn't say maximizes, optimizes. I don't, I don't like it when I see people talking about immune boosting, because you don't want to boost your immune system too far, because there's all kinds of, you know, inflammatory diseases like arthritis and MS and so on, that are a result of overactive immune systems, uh, maybe even diabetes type 1, but, you know.
we want to have an optimized immune system that's able to identify and destroy things. Of course, as we get older, uh, everything sort of slows down and, and the, and the vigilance of that immune system slows down as well, which is why we see more cancers appearing later in life typically. Um, but I think a lot of that can be avoided.
Um, if we adopted better lifestyle change and they're not, you know, you were a professional athlete. Um, obviously, professional athletes are physically very fit and strong, um, depending on if you're a world class athlete, you're probably overdoing it a bit, which is how you become world class when you're competing at that level, is you have to push yourself beyond the normal limits of humanity, right?
Um, I have a lot of students that are triathletes and the first thing I tell them is, you know, that's an obsessive compulsive disorder, right? Like normal people, normal people don't do that stuff. And even though you can do it, it doesn't mean your body is designed to do it every day for 10 years. So you have to keep things within reason.
Um, so, uh, yeah, I think about if, you know, my back of the envelope calculation is that If we look at the chronic diseases that, that provide most of that burden of more mortality and morbidity, it's really cardiovascular disease, cancer, uh, diabetes, Alzheimer's, you know, and then all the rest are much less, uh, incidents and prevalence.
And I think you can reduce your risk of, uh, That, um, with some simple, simple lifestyle changes, uh, and I'll get to the most important one, nutrition at the end, but, you know, making sure you get adequate sleep and rest. We talked about athletes that kind of overdo it and you need to get rest as well. We're learning more about that in the science, exercise science, how important rest is and recovery.
You need to get regular exercise. You need to move. Um, I, I, I call it Stefan, my, my salmon theory, you know, we have salmon here in the West coast, you know, at the end of their life, they, they keep swimming like crazy up these streams and find the place where they're going to lay their eggs. And then they just die.
So think of yourself like a salmon. As soon as you stop moving, you're just going to die. You're, you're sending signals to your body that, you know, things are up now and we don't really need to continue. And we're just, You know, in a biological sense, we're consuming resources that our children and our grandchildren could be using.
So, but if you keep moving and it doesn't have to be a lot, you know, just take a walk after a meal and, and, uh, You know, ride a bike once in a while. And, and, uh, you know, they say 150 minutes a week. That seems to be a pretty well confirmed number, which isn't an, you know, that's not a whole, that's only two and a half hours during the whole week.
So I probably exercise like you probably an hour to an hour and a half every day. Um, different, different forms of exercise half an hour. That would be, um, would be like stretching and yoga type exercise. I do some meditation as well. Um, and then so, so you have your sleep and rest, you have your exercise and then, and then it's, it's food.
Um, maybe before we get to that, we can talk about stress management a little bit too, because that helps the neurological system. But, but my back of the envelope calculation is that you could reduce your likelihood of, of contracting chronic disease. So cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's by about 70%, seven zero.
Uh, you, if you adopted a healthier, healthier diet and, and, uh, if you want to start there, we can, we can look at what our policy makers slash governments tell us is a healthy diet. And the first thing I would argue, which goes back to your very first question is, I think that's the problem right there is what they've been telling us is a healthy diet is in fact not a healthy diet.
And I think it's, it's the root cause of much of the burden of chronic disease today. It's uh, it's so interesting that they, what you hear and read is, is just about opposite. You know, the, the food pyramid is a big scam and they should just flip it upside down. Um, so do you think that exercise or diet, you think diet is more important than, than exercise?
Um, for what, in terms of, in terms of, you know, health and longevity. Yeah, well, both, but, um, you know, you, you have to eat, um, uh, Daniel Lieberman at Harvard wrote a really good book called exercised. I don't know if you've read that stuff and it's a really good book because he's a researcher and he, he sort of takes an anthropological approach to exercise, um, most, most animals out there.
I'm a biologist by the way. So all of my perspective comes from my understanding of biology. So in a biological evolutionary sense. There are no other animals that exercise. They sometimes they play, but they only move around for purpose. They don't just run for the sake of running. Um, it all has some purpose now that it's a bit of an extreme viewpoint, but I do think moving is something because of the technological advances we've had that we no longer do.
So in our evolutionary past, we would have to hunt and gather. And that would be a tremendous amount. You know, probably they're saying 16, 20, 000 steps a day, you know, and a lot of running around and climbing things. And so we don't do that anymore. So we are designed to do that and we should do that. So that's why we need to exercise.
I agree. Um, but there are people that do almost no exercise and manage to maintain their health. You know, part of that's genetic, but, um, but if you, if you have a poor diet, you know, all the exercise in the world, isn't going to help you. So we say, you know, you can't, you can't outrun your diet. Um, and. That is the fuel you put in your body.
Now, so if you're asking me, which is which in terms of weight management, and frankly, a lot of people that buy my book, bio diet, or that come to a ketogenic diet, it's because they've heard it's very good at weight loss, fat loss in particular, very good, um, for, for body composition and so on, which is the fat to lean mass.
And I, I realized that. And, and in fact, if you look at, you know, sort of combining all of the research, it's about an 80, 20 rule. So your weight and your body fat is about 80 percent due to diet and about 20 percent due to exercise. Wow. Okay. So, so that's why we say you can't run a bad diet. And I, I, I have lots of friends that are, you know, one friend in particular is a world class triathlete retired now, but he, he thought the opposite that, you know, you can do it right now.
He's got some cardiovascular issues. He's got some diabetes starting because he has carbo loading for too long. He's had two hip replacements by the way, uh, he just wore his body out, but he also, you know, fueled himself with beer and spaghetti, which isn't really the best way to fuel yourself, it turns out.
From my experience, and I mean, being a professional athlete the last, uh, you know, over the last decade, um, I, I really don't think that professional sport is particularly healthy. I don't know what your view is on that, but I think, uh, exercise for sure is, is good. But, uh, I also have some friends that are, that are triathletes and things and, and the amount of, of wear and tear in the body that you, you know, and stress on the body that you're putting on.
I don't know if that, if the bodies were designed to do that. Um, especially, yeah. Good point because professional athletes, They're not, they're not competing to be healthy. They're competing to win. And so anytime you win or make any decision in life, there's consequences. So if you're going to raise your physical ability to the level of professional athlete, you're going to have to compromise on other things.
And some of that, you know, typical example would be NFL football linemen who are now regularly mid 300 pounds. That's not healthy even for really big people. It's just not. And so their average lifespan is, is, you know, in the fifties, it's like 25 odd years, so, but you get paid six or 8 million a year to, you know, stop other guys from getting to the quarterback.
So that's the, they're, they're, they're excellent, amazing athletes at what they do. We could throw sumo wrestlers in there too, but it doesn't mean that that's healthy just because they're an athlete they're, they're competing to win. And that's different than trying to, uh, make lifestyle changes to be as healthy as you can be.
To optimize your health is the term I like to use. Your, um, I see your, your book there behind you, uh, I mean, you're, you've advocated for the ketogenic diet, um, and I mean, as a lot of, you know, a lot of other people have as well, which received a lot of pushback, uh, you know, especially initially, um, like professional, uh, professor Tim Noakes, uh, for example, in South Africa, when I remember when the Banting diet came out, uh, many years ago, but, um, you know, You know, how was it, how, how has it been in the, in the industry and have you, what sort of challenges have you faced, um, you know, pushing this diet and, um, obviously, which is high fat and, and going against a lot of what the medical industry had been telling everyone for, for the last decade.
Um, yeah, it's get back to the sweat and the salmon. I feel like I'm swimming upstream sometimes. Um, uh, the, I haven't had, I mean, I, my hat's off to Dr. Noakes, who I know, you know, through, through meeting him at a few conferences. Um, You know, he and a few others have been dragged through the muck and, and sued, you know, in a long and elaborate case, uh, where he was charged criminally for basically telling a person to eat a healthy diet, which is kind of a lack in and of itself, but there we go.
Um, and, and, um, so I came into this like we do when we change careers with a whole lot of energy and excitement. And I said, wow, I've just discovered this amazing thing. And it actually started with that same question you just asked me. I was on a radio show with, uh, Another fellow who is a professor emeritus of medicine at UBC, the University of British Columbia here.
And we were asked that question, I was the kinesiology professor, that's my title. And asked, you know, what's better for weight loss? Is it exercise or? Or, uh, is it, um, is it diet? And so I started off on the, well, you know, obesity, you know, overweight, if you want to look at that is a very complex, you know, multifactorial condition that has psychosocial factors and hormonal factors and genetic factors.
I need to sort of wait until I finish talking. He said, no, it's not. He says much simpler than that. It's your body's natural response to excess carbohydrate in the diet. And I, and I was, I did this on, on, on radio. They call that dead air. Same thing in podcasts. Cause I was flabbergasted because you've got to remember I've been teaching like physiology for more than 20 years.
And what he said when it was registered in my brain completely made sense with, you know, I've been to have a PhD, I've been to Cambridge, done postdocs, studied physiology, and I just never thought of it that way, which is to me, terrible on my part, because I'd also been teaching that policy based standard American diet, we call it, you know, the high fat food pyramid, the high carb, low fat diet.
I've been teaching students for 20 odd years, and I thought, Oh my God, what if I've been wrong all this time? And, and so that took me down the rabbit hole, that, that same question took me down the rabbit hole and I spent years trying to research where those guidelines came from. And the answer is not from science.
And, and then I looked at the emerging field, uh, I should say re emerging field because, uh, you mentioned Banting. Banting was in the late 1800s. Ketogenic diets have been used in the 1900s, early 1900s, in particular for, for children with epilepsy very successfully. So it's the reemergence of a very low carbohydrate, um, what we now call a well formulated ketogenic diet, uh, as a way of treating and maybe preventing disease.
So this, so this was something that. First thing I did was I, I said, okay, well, certainly saturated fats cause heart disease, right? Because that was the whole start of the first food recommendations was Ancel Keys in the United States in America. And he had this so called diet heart lipid or diet heart hypothesis that it was, it was saturated fat and cholesterol in the diet that was causing heart disease.
Um, and, and that was, A nice hypothesis. And he had some mind you kind of cherry picked and doctored information to support his hypothesis. Um, and he did actually test it himself, but never published the results because the results were what we call a, uh, didn't support rejecting the hypothesis, accepting the null and rejecting the hypothesis, but he never published that.
Um, but that's what we're stuck with, Stefan. And we've been stuck with this for about 40 or 50 years. So I would argue. Since 1980, when those first dietary guidelines came out in the United States, and all the other countries in the West followed suit because, you know, the Americans must have it right, and we all started recommending these very high carb, very low fat, very, very low fat saturated fat diets.
Um, it's been an experiment on people in the West, on, on, you know, hundreds of millions of people, and we have the results. And the results are that we have these absolutely epidemic increases in obesity and overweight and the corresponding increases in diabetes and cancer and cardiovascular disease. And yes, there are other factors involved with that, but I think if you look at the root cause of chronic disease, you have to look all the way into the body's metabolism and the um, organelles within cells that are responsible for that, mitochondria in particular, but, but other organelles, obviously the nucleus and.
And the light but um, if we look at the mitochondria, which is an energy converter within the cell Um, you're really going to be about as healthy as your mitochondria are and your mitochondria are like, uh, You know high performance race car if you feed them good fuel, you know high octane fuel. They're very happy Um, and and and if you feed them gunk like and literally it's like putting As kids we used to joke about putting sugar in somebody's gas tank, right?
Because it would gum up their their Engine well, you kind of do the same thing when you eat a lot of Sugar and carbs and all carbs, by the way, become sugars by the time they're digested and absorbed. You're putting sugar in your gas tank and you're gumming everything up. And when you gum it up, it sparks inflammation.
Uh, it causes insulin resistance. So the simple model I've came, I came up with very simple model for chronic disease, which by the way, I've presented all over the world to researchers and physicians and, and, uh, all kinds of, uh, conferences I've been invited to in the is that chronic disease has three major components to it from a causative aspect.
So looking at the root cause, not, we can talk about diabetes in a second as, as treating a symptom, but the root cause at the, at that level is, is obesity, which is a disease. And it is not, there, there are no, Obese animals in the wild. The only obese animals are humans and our pets. So obesity is insulin distance, which is a little harder to detect and measure, but this is our, um, our body's response to, uh, excess of sugar in the blood.
And then inflammation. And I'm talking about chronic inflammation, not the kind of inflammation you get due to an injury or infection, but chronic inflammation. And those three things together. And I, I encourage your listeners, try and Google them, you know, just go, or go into, now it's ChadTPT, right? Ask ChadTPT, you know, what percent of diseases are related to any of those three things, and the number about 70 percent will come.
So, my theory, which, as I said, is just a back of the envelope theory, because it would be virtually impossible to prove, is that if we address chronic disease by addressing those three things, obesity, insulin resistance, and inflammation, Uh, then we will reduce the burden of chronic disease, both as individuals and as societies, and our health care costs would drop dramatically.
And, um, so, it all comes down to sugar, um, pretty much. I mean, carbohydrates, carbs. Any carbohydrates, whether it's a potato, pasta, bread, uh, or a candy bar, all turn into sugar. Um, the question is, do we, do we actually need sugar at all? And even from a, even if you look at it, not just from a longevity standpoint, but from a, uh, performance standpoint, do you think there's actually any benefit, uh, to humans having any sugar or do you think it's totally Just it's just terrible for us.
Yeah. Well, let's leave performance aside for a little bit because again If you're looking at people that are just competing to win and not competing to be in the best health They can be that it's a bit of a different bit of a trade off But yeah, so it's all that starch we call it You know potatoes pasta rice that starch are just a bunch of glucose molecules connected together Uh, when they're all connected together, they don't have really any taste at all.
Um, but they do provide a source of glucose and glucose is, uh, an important component that that is our blood sugar. So everything we eat that isn't, it's converted into glucose in the blood. Um, now it's an interesting point because you mentioned, do we need sugar? And so when we talk about sugar, I'm going to say carbohydrates.
Um, there are really three main classes of macronutrients, which are proteins, fats, lipids, fats, and carbohydrates. Um, and you, there are essential proteins for sure because there's amino acids we can't synthesize and there are essential fatty acids as well, the omega fatty acids we can't synthesize. So we do have to eat sources of those.
There are no essential carbohydrates and people are surprised by that and they say, what do you mean there's no essential carbohydrates? I say, you don't have to eat any carbohydrates at all and you'll be totally healthy. And they will, how can that be? Because how do we get our blood sugar? Well, we can produce it ourselves like cats and dogs who don't eat a lot of pasta, rice, almost all other animals.
We can produce it ourselves through a process called gluconeogenesis, which literally means making new glucose. So you're making it from non carbohydrate sources. You're making it primarily from amino acids and from the glycerol part of fatty acids. Um, and, and so for the amount of glucose we need at any point in time, which by the way, I'll, okay, I'm going to put you on the spot again, Stephan.
If I had, if I took all my blood out. Right now, and I measured how much glucose was actually there. So my blood would be about 5 liters of blood in a typical average sized person like me. So if you measured it, as you would measuring something when you're baking, how much sugar do you think would be in my blood at any point in time?
I think I might have heard this before, but I'm not 100 percent sure, but I don't think it's very much. It's not something maybe like a teaspoon or something like that. There you go. See, it's exactly, it's about, it's not even, but it's about a teaspoon. So a teaspoon of blood. So think of those big, you know, four liter jugs or something like that.
And put a half a teaspoon. That would be it. And as you can. Imagine it's not a lot. So we have the ability to produce that glucose all the time through this process, which has done mostly in the liver, but also the kidneys and some other tissues to a lesser degree. Um, and we do that happily. It's not a stress on the body.
It's what, it's what we do at night. Um, and, and so, like other animals, we can live happily without any carbohydrates. Now, people would say, well, what about fiber? Isn't that essential? Um, fiber can be a good thing. Uh, the fiber of, that, that's included in carbohydrates doesn't get digested in the same way that the other carbohydrates do, so it doesn't have the same effect on insulin resistance and inflammation.
So, and you can get fiber in sources that don't include the starch. So eating things like, you know, chia seeds and psyllium husk and so on will give you some, uh, and, uh, uh, and other foods that you eat in small amounts on a ketogenic diet, like nuts are high in fiber. Some berries like strawberries tend to be high in fiber.
Um, but you don't actually need fiber, but if you eat it, it's, it's, it, it helps. So, but it's not, it's not essential. So that's the first thing is you don't need any of that sugar in your body. The second thing is we've been told for 40 years that that's what you should get the most of is something that you don't actually need.
So when you force something you don't need on a system, the system is going to have to deal with it. So if you put all this sugar in its various forms, this glucose into our bodies, it's It gets, it gets broken down and gets absorbed and it's a massive amount of glucose that the body has to deal with.
And, and first of all, it has to get it out of the blood because if it stays in the blood, it creates havoc, which is the end results of diabetes where you can't control your blood sugar. So, you know, loss of limbs, blindness, what we call microangiopathy and other issues. Um, so your, so your body is designed to get that sugar out of the blood.
So it, it does, and it tries, it can only store a little bit in muscle cells. It can store more in the liver, but it tops out at about, you know, 500 grams. And then after that, all it can do is turn it into fat. And so, uh, and by the way, when you, when you eat a lot of sugar, you secrete a lot of insulin. When you secrete a lot of insulin, it biases your body to produce fat.
And, uh, that's just a very simple physiological explanation that should be enough for most people. You know, eat a lot of sugar. Yeah. You know, I know what insulin does. Yep. And insulin will cause you to put on fat. Yep. So. Back, reverse that, if you have a lot of fat on your body and you want to get rid of it, well you stop eating the carbohydrate, the insulin levels go down, you start metabolizing that fat through what we call beta oxidation.
And you lose three pounds of fat for every one pound of muscle when you lose weight on a ketogenic diet. And that's been confirmed, oh, for many, like, I, probably hundreds of studies over the last, uh, decade or so, that, that the weight loss is three pounds of fat to one pound of lean. By the way, um, you know, on something like ozempic, one thing they don't tell you about ozempic, I'm sure it's popular in Germany as it is here in North America, Um, you know, the, uh, semi glutide is that you lose one pound of muscle for every one pound of fat.
Interesting. Okay. And I'm starting to see it on some of the Hollywood, cause Hollywood's all over this semi glutide stuff. Yeah. You look at some of the older men like my age, they're trying to lose weight. You know, maybe they've got a bit of a potbelly, look at their legs. And you'll see these skinny little legs because they're losing too much muscle when they're losing, like they may lose 20 or 30 pounds of fat, but it also means they're losing 23 pounds of muscle along with it.
And that shows up mostly in their legs. So, just a little hint for people out there who go, It feels good, but her legs look a little skinny right now. I don't know. And, again, um, So, yeah, that's my, that's my theory. I call it the axis of illness. It's inflammation, uh, obesity and insulin resistance are, you know, forms a triangle.
And what's interesting about those is that if you have any one of those, it will make the other two worse. So, that's what we call a positive feedback, uh, cycle, and positive feedback cycles always end in catastrophe. So, what happens is, you're going to be more obese, you're going to be more insulin resistant, that's going to make you more inflamed, it doesn't matter what causes what or what's served first, they all make each other worse, and so they'll just continue to make each other worse until it comes out as a chronic disease of one sort or another.
So, if the blood sugar is too high, we call it diabetes. blood vessels are getting inflamed and they're getting atherosclerotic plaques, we call that cardiovascular disease. If your brain is not functioning properly because it's getting all gummed up and inflamed, we call that Alzheimer's disease. And if your cells Uh, are not, uh, if your immune system isn't vigilant enough to, to find and destroy cancer cells, you'll end up with tumors.
So we call these different diseases, but it is kind of arbitrary. And if you look at the root cause of those, there is a common root cause at that metabolic level. So, so, so what we're seeing now, Stefan, is a, is a big movement in experimental medicine, at least, and hopefully it'll end up in medicine to look at metabolic disease.
And, you know, causing metabolic disease, how do we measure it and how we treat it. So we have a pretty good idea of what it is. But it's what causes it and how we treat it. That's sort of up for debate. The medical system, as you've mentioned, will want to make money, so they'll come up with drugs and some of those drugs working from them, they'll all do something, but they all have side effects and, and, uh, they may not be the healthiest thing, but my thought is.
If you can just change your diet and have a better effect than any drug out there, why not give that a try first? I mean, I'm 100 percent on board, uh, you know, with, and to me it makes so much sense, uh, the whole ketogenic movement. Um, although there have been questions raised, you know, in things like, for example, performance, can you perform at the same level on a ketogenic diet?
And the other thing is, um, quite a few people have said that, you know, They have high cortisol on a ketogenic diet and carbohydrates lower cortisol. And so, I mean, what's your, what's your take on that? And, uh, you know, is that an issue and how can you get around that? If you are one of those people that does have, uh, you know, higher cortisol, higher cortisol levels on it.
on a keto diet. And not just that, sometimes high triglyceride levels, uh, uh, what's common in women, about a third of women post menopausal have high LDL cholesterol levels. Um, there are changes, because you're making metabolic changes. Um, we're all different, I mean, ultimately we have to personalize our diets for what works for us.
Um, and, and that's very important and, and the only way to do that is to, is to monitor what you're eating and see how you feel and how you perform. Uh, I'll, I'll address the performance one first and, and, um, uh, my colleague at, at Ohio State University, Dr. Jeff Bullock has done a lot of work on this. He comes from a kinesiology background as well.
Um, I combined, I teamed up with him to work on our breast cancer studies. So ketogenic diets as an adjunct therapy for breast cancer, but he's done a lot of work with, uh, with college athletes and professional athletes. And a lot of very high end professional athletes like the, you know, Tour de France cyclists.
They have the, the financial capacity to hire the best. And, uh, also from the cycling world, I'll give you an example of, of a guy who was a pretty average, but world class, you know, wasn't top of the field. Um, and all of a sudden just, he just changed physically. He changed his ability, changed, and then he won the tour de France three years in a row.
Uh, and that was Chris Froh. And, and he wouldn't tell anybody what he'd done, you know, training, training, whatever. And then after a while, people sort of figured out, he said, yeah, I adopted a ketogenic diet and on a ketogenic diet, you lose body fat. So if you're thinking about, you know, they'll spend tens of thousands to take a few grams off their bike, but if you take it off your body, it has the same effect, so if you become more lean through a well formulated ketogenic diet, that's a benefit, but also you metabolize oxygen better.
So, so the, the ability to perform. aerobically is really the ability to get oxygen to the muscle cells and for the muscle cells to use those to produce ATP and, you know, fuel the muscle contractions. Um, and if you can do that with less oxygen, which you can do when you're adapted to beta oxidation as your primary source of, of energy production or energy conversion, um, then you have an advantage.
And so, you know, I don't know, I'm not, I'm not, you know, consulting for any of the Tour de France athletes or anything like that, but, but my understanding is, uh, there are not just them, but there are a lot of other athletes out there that are professional athletes, you know, name the sport and I'll give you some names who, who have adopted ketogenic diets.
So that's one aspect of it is an increase in aerobic performance. Anaerobic? And I would put your, you know, like an into anaerobic for sure. Um, the, so the probable thing is you need, you can train low, train on low carbohydrate, but you probably need to perform high. So things like basketball players, hockey players, probably mountain bikers would want to.
increase carbohydrate in their body just before they perform. And if it's a long event during that performance as well. So, you know, gel packs and so on are probably a good idea. And we have measured, um, they're both their performance, but also, you know, changes in insulin levels and so on because they're performing at such a high rate, the amount of glucose that they're intaking.
In whatever form doesn't really affect any of that metabolic stuff. It just gets burned right away in other words. So it's not cause massive increases in insulin, like, you know, eating standard breakfast would. So that's one thing. Now, the other thing I can tell you, it's a bit of a trade secret, um, from people who have been coaches in the premier league in Britain and the like.
There are some, uh, soccer teams who are very much interested in ketogenic diets. And the reason there is the aerobic capacity is one, but the other one they've discovered is injury recovery. Is athletes that are keto adapted have half the general time for, for, uh, injury recovery. And this is usually soft tissue recovery, you know, so tendons and ligaments and the like, so much faster recovery times, probably because the inflammation is controlled on a ketogenic diet.
It's one of the things that it does. Um, and on the other hand, you know, uh, and I, you know, call it a vegan diet, but I, I, you can be vegan and be ketogenic. So it's a vegan diet that's high in carbohydrate athletes that have adopted that. Uh, and there's a list now. It's a growing list that's online. There's hundreds of them that, you know, they snap their Achilles tendon and their life is over.
It's an athlete. Um, so it doesn't seem like taking all that fat out of your system is particularly good for your connective tissues when they're under extreme. And, of course, on a ketogenic diet, which is a high fat diet, you don't have to worry about that. So. So that's the performance aspect or what I, what I know of it.
Interesting. Um, I, I've, you know, with the, with the ketogenic diet and there's also been this now big movement, um, into carnivore diets, plant based diet. You know, there's this, I think with social media, there's been this sort of explosion over the last few years of this is better, that's better. I mean, for, I've been looking at, to be honest, I've been looking at potentially doing a carnivore experiment for, uh, you know, for a month or so just to see how I feel, um, I'm, I'm very open to experimentation and stuff, uh, you know, what do you think about, uh, about the carnivore diet versus a ketogenic diet?
Uh, well, a carnivore diet would be ketogenic. Um, yeah, it is ketogenic, but obviously removing the, the vegetables and yeah, I mean, I don't do that. I think it's, I think it, you know, you have to make sure that you're getting it. So when I say a well formulated ketogenic diet, I mean, that's also a balanced diet.
People don't understand the word balanced from a nutritional perspective. That means you're getting all the nutrients you need. So as long as you're assured that you're getting all the nutrients you need and most animal Products are way higher concentrations of vitamins and minerals than any plant stuff.
You know, you'd say, Oh, what's something good in vitamins. People say, Oh, you know, apples and oranges and stuff. You go, yeah, but beef would be way more vitamin C than Oreos. So if you're eating a piece of beef, you probably don't need that. And. So yes, so here's some short answers. We don't really know yet.
We were now investigating people in ketogenic diets. And when I say we, I mean the community that's into nutrition science. Then I call it the new science of nutrition because almost everybody. That is now, um, uh, uh, conducting scientific experiments is working on ketogenic diets. Nobody, nobody works on vegan diets or low fat diets other than, other than by comparison because there's no, there's no identified benefit to it from a scientific perspective.
But what's great about a ketogenic diet is we know at the cellular molecular level what's happening. In other words, we know the mechanisms, whereas a lot of these other diets are supported by what we call epidemiological evidence. You know, it's a joke about epidemiology, which is, it's a statistical thing, which is, you know, epidemiology is the plural of anecdote.
So it's not what I would call science. Um, science, you need to, you know, test the hypothesis and then see what happens and then also explain the mechanism. And so if you look at the mechanism, I think it's pretty clear. So if you look at. Carnivore diets, um, from what we've seen on the limited studies we've done so far, we have had no adverse effects, and these have been ongoing for quite a while.
So nobody on a carnivore diet, strict carnivore diet, has shown any adverse effects that you would, that you would say we have to stop this intervention from an ethical perspective because it's making these people sick. They're not getting heart disease and not putting on weight. They're not, you know, in fact, all this stuff is reversing.
They're actually finding themselves healthier. So I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that someone who adopts the carnivore diet is doing anything harmful. Um, but I don't, you know, on a, on a one on one basis, I don't know what they're eating. So, uh, you know, if I can suggest someone to have on your show, there's a, uh, an amazing young guy named Nick Norwitz, And, uh, uh, Nick is, uh, he did his, um, PhD at Oxford.
I won't hold that against him. You know, I was at Cambridge, but he's American. He's at, he's at Harvard now. He's doing a PhD MD at Harvard. Okay. And very smart. And he does these N equals one experiments on himself all the time. He's very smart. He's very, you know, he's got way more papers than I do, even at my age, uh, on metabolism.
And he's very much into promoting metabolic health. So one of the things he did was he said, well, I'm going to eat, uh, two dozen eggs every day for a month and see what happens. So he ate 720 eggs, but he ate, it's, it's an egg every hour. You're not awake every hour. So he's eating an egg every hour for a month.
And he's totally fine. In fact, some things improved. There was no like cholesterol issues or LDL issues, whatever. Um, and, and that makes two points. One is that there's, you don't have to worry about saturated fats. In the absence of, of high glycemic index carbohydrates, saturated fats have no effect, no negative effect on your health.
The second one is there's no relationship between red meats and, and, and colon cancer. Or, you know, digestive that's, that's just, there was never the, that evidence was so weak based on a few papers from 30 years ago, and it stuck with us. And I don't know why, but I know, but, but it's so crazy because I, I mean, I have, I know a couple of people that are doctors and.
Even they they are now adopting vegan diets and trying to avoid meat because they think that meat is going to give them cancer and From what i've seen, um, and obviously i'm not a doctor myself But you know just from what i've seen and all the latest research it just seems clear that that's not the case Um, but still these medical professionals are under this belief So so when you're asking me about you know, am I getting pushback?
Nobody's nobody, you know, i've been doing this for a long time. Nobody's ever called me out And said, you know, Dave, what you're saying isn't true, here's why. Ever. Nobody's ever said that. But people's, people will say that. Well, what about, you know, the relationship between saturated fats and, uh, and heart disease?
Okay, what is that relationship? Well, saturated fats cause heart disease. Instead, cause heart disease? Okay, how do they do that? Because if you look at a saturated fat, it is the cleanest burning fuel you can put in your body. It's just carbon and hydrogen, no double bonds, no wacky stuff. It's completely benign in terms of a health risk.
But yet we still believe that and most physicians, most cardiologists still believe that. And the reason for that is that physicians and, and, you know, I have, I have great respect for physicians. We, we, we can criticize the medical system, we can criticize, but don't criticize the people in it. They're, most of them are in it for the right reason.
They're trying to do the best job they can. But in med, they don't get any training in nutrition in medical school. In the United States, the average is two to three hours during their medical program of four years for nutrition. And it's usually, what can you do in two to three hours? We'll do more in this conversation in a half an hour than they get in two or three hours.
And all they do is they tell them there's three macronutrients, you got to get vitamins and minerals, and here's the, they call it the food plate in the United States, right, or here's the food pyramid, and that's what you should teach your patients. And then, you know, if we want to talk about diabetes, they'll go, well, diabetes is related to obesity, so you need to reduce your body fat, and you should do that through a low fat diet, because fat, eating fat makes you fat, because it's energy dense.
And even, even that, can we talk about that for a sec? The whole calorie? Yeah, sure, sure. I just wrote an article about it, because So here's another thing that happens. So I'll be eating something. Oh, isn't the men have a lot of calories in it? Yeah. What do you mean? Well, it's, you know, you're eating something like, you know, avocado or, you know, butter, something like that.
It's got a lot of calories in it. I go, yeah, it's a good thing. You need calories. And then that'll make you fat. And I go, well, why? Well, if you know, if you, if you eat more calories than you burn, then you're going to get fat. And I go, there is some sense to that, but let me ask you, I'm putting you on the spot again, Stefan.
So this is the third time today. What is a calorie? Like what is It's, uh, I mean, I would imagine it's, it's a source of energy, uh, in, yeah, it's a unit of heat. It's the amount of energy it takes to raise, you know, a millimeter of water by one degree Celsius. It's a heat, it's a, it's a measurement of energy.
Okay. So when you gain weight, that's not energy, that's mass. So every, every nanogram of mass on your body went through your mouth. We don't, we don't add mass any other way than eating it. And, you know, the air we breathe, we breathe it back out again. So the only way you can put on weight is by eating more and, and, and, uh, eating more mass.
Now, if you, if, but we do need energy, roughly 2000 calories a day. So if you want to get the most energy, but eat the least amount of mass, then you want to eat the most energy dense food, which are fats, which are more than twice the energy density of proteins and carbohydrates. So by that very argument, you should say, well, you should be eating more fat and less of this other stuff.
If you want to lower the amount of mass you're putting into your system and still get the same amount of energy. I mean, that's great eight science, but nobody thinks about it that way yet. It's so simple to understand. And we're so brainwashed into thinking, Oh God, Saturated fat causes heart disease, and oh God, things with lots of calories are bad for me.
So, so we don't, that, that calories in, calorie out, the caloric sort of model is, I think, I could argue, is pretty much debunked these days, and it just doesn't work, because all calories are not, the foods that come with those calories are not treated the same way when they get in your body. So proteins are metabolized differently from fats, which are metabolized differently from carbohydrates.
And the one you don't want to have a lot of in your system when in your diet is carbohydrates, because. Because it will, you know, when you raise your blood sugar, the other thing that happens is You promote the production of these things called, uh, advanced glycated entities. So the glycated is from the gums.
And that, that is, going back to our analogy about putting sugar in the gas tank, those advanced glycated entities are the gum. They're the gum in the system. And they, they cling on to arterial walls, and they cause inflammation, and they gum up DNA, and they prevent proper gene expression. They do all kinds of gummy things through your system.
I'm really trying to talk in simple terms here. Uh, but they cause inflammation. And, uh, and, and so, so now we even call it inflam aging. Like, inflammation could be the key component to what we call aging. And one of the things that promotes inflammation is the production of advanced glycated, glycated entities, which are a result of over consumption of carbohydrates and too much glucose in your system.
So, um, you, you, you turn, uh, you turn your system against itself by creating this chronic inflammation and by continuing to eat a high carb diet, you just maintain that high level of inflammation. Now, what does your body do during inflammation? It starts releasing cortisone. So, those cortisone changes you were talking about earlier could be temporary phasic cortisone changes.
Again, we're talking about individuals, so I can't really comment there. Um, but if you are inflamed, uh, you tend to release cortisone. Cortisone tends to break down tissues, so we don't want it at a terribly high level for too long. It's not going to be there to protect us from, you know, sudden traumatic injury.
But a better measure in your blood, next time you go for a blood test, is something called C reactive protein. Or high sensitivity C reactive protein. Uh, and this is a very good proxy for your, uh, overall chronic inflammation state of your body. You want it to be very low. So that's one way you can kind of measure.
We talked about biohacking. That's one good biohacking tool to measure your, um, your, uh, state of, of inflammation generally. That's, uh, yeah, that's what I've, I've had that checked quite often. Um, obviously with my, my, with my injuries and things, I've had a lot of blood tests over the last few years. Um, and that also, you know, uh, prompted me to get further blood tests.
And, and I actually, cause I would like to do this experiment, um, and I would like to do a longer fast. And that's what I also wanted to ask you about as well. If you, if you do any fasting, um, I would like to do a, you know, a longer fast, sort of three days, uh, three, four days, something like that. But I thought it might be.
beneficial potentially to be ketogenic or you know in a ketogenic state for a while beforehand to Maybe make that transition a little easier than to just go cold turkey and just stop eating for for a few days not I mean, I am quite aware of the carbs that i'm eating and i'm the carbs I eat generally are are Healthier carbs in terms of you know, vegetables and potatoes and things like that.
I try to avoid anything processed but You I have still been, you know, I still eat carbs. So, um, I mean, what do you think would be a, a good, uh, transitional protocol for me, uh, you know, going into something like that? Well, there's a lot wrapped up in that question, so I'll try to get down a little bit there.
Um, so, so one of the reasons I wrote the book, Biodiet, uh, with way, who's a journalist, so she took my, like, 1, 200 page tome and said, nobody's gonna read this, because it's all just gonna go away. It's like everything I knew about nutrition and metabolism. So we made it into a book that's very user friendly.
Uh, the first half explains why ketogenic diet works. The second half is how to, so you're asking the how to questions. Asking about, about intermittent fasting. So, um, so just to, if we can start from the beginning Yes. A lot there. So the first thing I would do is I would get sugar outta your diet. That's the first thing I would say to anybody.
You don't need sugar like sucrose. Mm-Hmm. . And one of the main sources of sucrose is fruits that we eat. So most of the fruits are not natural state fruits. They're very, very sweet and they're sweet because they have lots of sucrose, which is plant sugar and plant sugar has fructose and fructose is a known hepatotoxin and it causes all kinds of problems.
So first thing you like, get sugar. If you want to use a sugar substitute, go for it. Um, we can talk about that as a separate issue. But, uh, the second thing. Would be to reduce all that junk food, any kind of package, anything that comes in a package isn't really worth eating. It's manufactured for somebody who wants to sell food and isn't really interested in your health.
Um, so yeah, just go around the outsides of the grocery store, you know, and eat that stuff. Um, next step would be to reduce your carbs, I would say is reduce the root vegetables. So don't eat things that grow below the ground, except for maybe onions and, and garlic. Um, I eat lots of vegetables, but it's stuff that grows above the ground that isn't a bean or a garden.
So you don't want to eat gardens. Um, I eat green beans, but, uh, you know, broccoli and all kinds of stuff, uh, a lot of tomatoes, a lot of avocados, uh, I eat probably a handful of nuts and a handful of berries every day, so I am getting some carbs, but it's, it's really low. Um, so you want to work towards that.
Stefan, and just reduce the carbohydrate burden. And what you'll find as you, you need to reduce it a significant degree in order to what we call keto adapt. You need to adapt to beta oxidation as your primary source of energy production. And in order to do that, you have to maintain very low carbohydrate for at least a couple of weeks.
And, um, when you do that, make sure you eat lots of salty stuff, because a lot of this stuff, Stuff that we eat that is high in carbs is also high in salt, like bread for example. Mm-Hmm. . And then, uh, you know, and then once you keto adapt, you can test your adaptation through, you know, urine sticks for keto sticks for urine or whatever.
But once you've adapted, they'll go to zero anyway 'cause you're burning the ketones. Um, now that's a good way to start. Now one of the good things about being keto adapted is you don't get hungry. And I have, uh, one, one fellow I know who's an emergency room physician. He said one of the best things about your diet, Dave, is that.
I can go into the emergency room for a 24 hour shift and I don't feel like I have to eat. He said, I used to work for three or four hours. I'd be starving and I'd have to take a break when I couldn't and I'd just be starving. So I'm thinking about how hungry I am. Well, somebody's dying on the gurney in front of me and you just don't get hungry.
You don't, you, you do get hungry, but not in the same way. So, so it would help with the intermittent fasting because you wouldn't have those, um, initial hunger issues. Um, now, yeah. Combining the two, I, by the way, I have no issues with intermittent fasting. Um, well, I shouldn't say that. Um, I have two issues with intermittent fasting.
One is fasting means you're not eating. And as a nutrition scientist, if you're not eating, you're getting zero nutrition. So, so when you are fasting for two or three days, yes, you're not eating, so your body's going to change its metabolism to start working as if you're, you're not going to have a source of food.
It's going to start preserving. especially the proteins in your body. And, uh, so, so it's hard. Well, it's impossible to get full nutrition if you're also, um, uh, not eating at all. The second thing is when you are eating, when you do eat, are you getting enough of all the nutrients you need during those non fasting periods?
So, Uh, from what I know, and this is mostly done on animal models that we've, we've been experimenting with, um, intermittent fasting. When you apply that to humans, it seems like narrowing our eating window on a daily basis to eight hours or less is a good thing. And, and I speak in particular of reducing your, uh, incidence of cancer.
Uh, and by the way, if I, if I was diagnosed with cancer, I'd probably look into taking rapamycin. We can talk about that later. I just wanna throw that out there. Rapamycin, iss a kind of, yeah, you probably know about it, but I would be looking at that. Um, so, so when you fast it again, it's okay. As long as you're eating all the full balanced diet.
When you're not fasting, a lot of people do something called oma, one meal a day. That's pretty good as long as it's a big meal, as long as you're getting all the nutrients you need. Um, and, uh, I would be really reluctant to fast for more than about two days in a row. I think, you know, if you fast one day a week or a couple of days in a row, it's probably fine.
Once you, it seems about two or three days, there's kind of a threshold. And what we've seen is the activation of gene pathways in the cells called thrifty gene. Thrifty. And the Thrifty genes are activated, uh, from an evolutionary perspective when our body feels like we're in a period of famine. So, uh, normally the normal human way of eating is feast or famine, you, you know, you run down a mastodon, everybody's like crazy, and then you might not get another one for another month or something like that.
So you, so, so your body is designed to slow your metabolism and it will slow significantly by as much as 40%, especially if you're going to go four or five, six days, it will slow tremendously and it's really hard to get those genes turned off once they're turned on. So, you know, those shows like the 600 pound, you know, diet and stuff where they lose a whole bunch of weight, every single person that's been on those shows put the weight back on within, you know, on the show a year previous, they've all put the weight back on and more because what they've done is starved themselves and you starve yourself.
Yes, you lose weight, uh, but your body just turns on these thrifty genes and then. Yeah. They don't turn off and so now you add your regular diet back and you just put on weight, which is why we get those yo yo diets, right? Calorie restricted diets don't work because the whole calorie model is broken, but If you're not getting enough energy in your system, your body will act to conserve energy because it's acting to preserve itself.
So, so I think fasting is good. Now, if you look at the, look at what happens at the cellular level during fasting. So they talk about autophagy, for example, being promoted. Um, you know, it's a good sort of house cleaning, maybe saying a water fast once a day, make sure you get enough salts, make sure you stay well hydrated.
Um, and, uh, the other actions that happen. Are all things that happen with a ketogenic diet anyway, so what I haven't seen yet is a study that shows, here's a group that are fasting and ketogenic. Here's a group that are just ketogenic, and here are the differences because mm-Hmm, , the, the things that have, that have fast activate are similar things to what a ketogenic diet activate.
But then the ketogenic diet goes way beyond that because the ketones that are produced are kind of super molecules that have all kinds Of other beneficial effects throughout the body in particular at the cellular level So one of the things that fasting doesn't do that ketogenic diet does So one of the things that happens during fasting is you is you start going into ketosis.
So you're producing ketones anyway, right? um and those ketones Uh, they, um, deactivate a cellular, uh, modulator called the, uh, NLR, NLRP3 inflammasome. Okay. So this is a cellular, uh, mod, modulator that actually is the root cause of inflammation. And that's one of the ways that ketogenic diets can reduce inflammation is they, they kind of turn that off.
Um, so there's another benefit there. If we want to talk about cancer, one of the things that the ketones do, um, is they, um, deregulate the mTOR pathway. So mTOR is the mammalian target of rapamycin. And that is a pathway that is really highly growthy. So it's about 200 different enzymatic pathways that promote growth.
And of course, if you have cancer cells, those are cells that are growing uncontrollably. So if you can deregulate mTOR, that's beneficial. Um, with mTOR, with mTOR, you know, I've also heard that when you're eating a lot of meat, that has an impact on mTOR and, and also, um, strength training has an impact on mTOR.
Um, and how, What, how big is the effect with those in comparison to, you know, something, you know, because obviously mTOR is not necessarily good or bad. It's just, you can't have it switched on all the time. Well, no, no. I mean, mTOR, all those 200 pathways are necessary pathways. If any one of them were to stop, you'd die.
Right. So, but they need to be regulated. So when I say dysregulated, it's not turning it off. It's, I should say downregulated. It's probably a better term than dysregulated because that implies there's a dysfunction there. It's downregulated. Um, and So to answer that question, the exercise study, you could probably look at that and demonstrate something.
The eating meat study, you can, you can demonstrate almost nothing in nutritional studies because people have to eat anyway. And what you'd have to do is get one group that just does this, get another group that just does that. You'd have to feed them. You'd have to feed them for a long enough time to see that difference.
And there'd have to be enough in the sample size on either side to demonstrate that. And so. When I say, I think a ketogenic diet will greatly reduce your risk of, of chronic disease, there's not enough money on the planet for me to do that experiment, because you'd need to take 10, 000, tens of thousands of people and, and feed them only what you want them to eat for decades and see what the incidence of these chronic diseases as they appear.
And, and, you know, our study, which had, uh, you know, less than 20, uh, people on, on the experimental side. Uh, that was just a 12 week study, actually three months, yeah, 12 week study, um, with, with about 20 people. That was a million dollars, you know, to do that kind of, it was an amazing study. We had amazing clinical tools we, we were using, but, so you, you're never going to do that experiment.
So, so, so whether or not, what we can do is, is, is, is look at people that have a disease, we can put them on a ketogenic diet, we can see if things change. So we do see improvements in cardiovascular markers, we see great improvements in type 2 diabetes. Uh, what we are trying to demonstrate is, is it a good adjunct therapy for, for cancer treatments?
And that's all very preliminary. And I, I, I should preface all this by reminding people I'm not a physician and also, uh, emphasizing the fact that a ketogenic diet is not a cure for cancer. I'm not saying that anybody that does is lying to you because we don't know that. Um, it's a good adjunct therapy in the studies we've completed so far.
There've been no adverse effects. We've seen the same metabolic, positive metabolic changes we have in the general public. Now we've seen some improvements in the hypermetastases of breast cancer in our study. And they've studied, uh, glioblastoma multiforme. Uh, we've studied some pancreatic cancer.
There's a few cancers. They're very expensive and hard to do, these cancer studies. So far, the indications are that it's a good adjunct therapy to standard of care. Um, so all the way back to, um, uh, to the idea of intermittent fasting. I do it every day because I go to bed at night. I don't eat during the night.
I get up in the morning and I eat. So I'm fasting. Um, I do try not to eat after about 8 o'clock at night. Um, there's other reasons we can talk about maybe on another show, why you shouldn't eat stuff just before you go to bed, especially carbohydrates. Um, and you can experiment with whatever works for you.
You know, some people kind of like that OMAD one meal a day and they just have a big, you know, fulsome meal. It has all the nutrients they need. I'm a bit more of a grazer, but I, I don't eat lunch because I, I like eating breakfast. So I get, I want to get up in the morning. And then we have a meal that would look like your meal at night, but there's just no, you know, pasta, rice, potatoes, uh, or anything like that on the plate.
Um, and I don't eat a lot during the day, but if I eat, you know, strangely I'll snack on things like chicharron, which are like, uh, you know, fried pork skin, fried in lard, uh, I'll eat chicken hearts. Um, or chicken livers, like I, I'm a nose to tail kind of guy. I think that's important. Uh, but I'm not, I'm not, I wouldn't call myself carnivore, but I, but I could be, and I, I don't think there's any harm in it, but I.
I've never done the, I'm like you, I want to try some things. So I tried the intermittent fast, but the thing is, I, I, you know, I only weighed 146 pounds. I don't need to lose weight. And I do my body work all the time. Like I'm very good about my regular medical checkups and I get all this stuff done. I just had a colonoscopy.
Um, everything is working perfectly. So it's kind of like, why would I change anything? Uh, but 15 years ago now, almost 16 years ago when I started the ketogenic diet, I was still in good health, but my, you know, I was, I was 30 pounds heavier and it was mostly around my belly and I drank too much beer and ate too many cookies.
And I was starting to ache all the time, you know, and I was getting brain fog and, and I thought, well, you know, I better do something. So that's when I, those lights turned on during that radio show. And here we are ever since I've just been, so I'm a good N equals one study to show that keep Jake tight.
Isn't going to kill you. Uh, cause I've been doing a long time, but. During the day, at lunch, I have this. I was drinking tea, but when I drink tea or coffee, I drink it with full fat cream, like whipping cream. Just a warning. If you ever do that, you'll never go back. Cause nothing else will be as satisfying.
Yeah. I mean, for me, uh, I, I tried, uh, you know, this whole thing, fasting and diets and stuff was not for losing weight specifically. Um, cause I didn't have necessarily a weight problem. Although when I was a kid, I did. Um, but you know, since I've obviously been doing a lot of, a lot of sport and training over the last years, uh, that, that all changed, but, um, it was more for, from a performance and just feeling good, you know, um, in every day life and also dealing with a lot of inflammation, um, due to the injuries that I'd had and, and obviously over the years, you know, doing a sport like I've done takes its toll and you have aches and pains and stuff.
And that's why I've been really interested in, in doing, you know, some Some more longer fast and stuff, because I'd also heard about stem cell production, increasing and things like that, which, you know, and obviously ketones bringing down inflammation. So a lot of benefits there. And, um, so I've been doing, I wouldn't say I'm, I don't do anything.
I'm not like a eight, 16, eight, uh, sort of person, but. Occasionally. So some days I fast, uh, till lunchtime. Other days I eat breakfast. Uh, I sort of change it up and I do every now and again, I'll do a 24 hour fast. Um, you know, some dinner to dinner. Um, but I haven't done more than a day yet. Um, but what was interesting is when I first tried to skip breakfast, It was so hard.
Uh, it was quite a, it was a few years ago now. And I remember I was so hungry. Um, and I had, you know, I sort of didn't quite get the shakes, but I felt, you know, lightheaded. Uh, my mood was down, couldn't concentrate. And it was, it was wild. And, and now I can, Easily not eat the whole day and I could still go for a run in the afternoon and I still feel pretty okay.
Uh, I don't feel like I'm lacking. I wouldn't do anything like doing sprints or something, but, uh, anything sort of zone two, uh, you know, I could do quite easily. Um, and when I Go out with friends. Uh, they think it's absolutely mad you know if we go for a ride a couple of hour cycle in the morning and And they're like eating energy bars And they had breakfast and then they're having like three bars on the ride And then they find out when I tell them that I haven't eaten anything.
They Can't believe it. And they really concerned that, but you have, you, you have to eat, you need sugar. And, uh, I think it's just crazy how brainwashed the society is. Well, they, they, they have to do that because they're, they're carbohydrate adapted, not fat adapted. So, you know, some of the, some of the ultra endurance athletes we work with, uh, you know, they do those hundred mile runs in the desert over mountains and they don't eat anything.
They just do the run and one guy did it. He won the race and then he went and did another one the next day. Okay. Again, not, not, you know, don't try that at home, but, but no one, if you're fat adapted, cause you can only store about 2000 calories as, as, um, carbohydrate, you know, it's glycogen in your muscles and liver, and that's, if you're not eating, that's what you've got to work on.
And if you run out of that, what happens is your blood sugar drops. Uh, and they get hungry, and the more your blood sugar drops, the hungrier you get. So, then you'd be measuring those candy bars to, to satisfy that. But what that does is raise the insulin levels, and insulin will take out that sugar and more, and then they're hungry again, so they have to eat another bar.
And that's that cycle that most people are in. You know, they have a high carb breakfast, and then a high carb lunch, and then a high carb dinner, and they're just always pushing themselves above the limits. Um, so when you're fat adapted, you don't get that hunger, uh, because you're now using beta oxidation to burn fats instead of, instead of, um, sugars and, and, and, you know, it's overall improvement.
So that, that's a, that's a very good anecdotal story, uh, from, from your, your friends there too. But, um, you know, the other thing, and, and Tim Noakes will talk about this too, because, um, he was a, an endurance athlete. And he developed type two diabetes and realized that this was due to carb loading, which we do in the seventies.
You know, I don't know if you guys still do that, but still do carb loading. Well, I don't, I wouldn't do that. I wouldn't depend on carbs for my energy source. Cause you run out of gas on a, on an endurance event. But, uh, so a lot of those ultra endurance athletes, they used to carb load. They're now the rate at which they're becoming type two diabetic is like three times the rate of the general public because they really burned out their Islet cells in their pancreas producing insulin.
They just can't produce enough anymore. Uh, they're becoming insulin resistant and, uh, you know, that's that one's hard to turn back on again. Um, but, um, so, um, uh, I wanted to talk about the cancer too, if I can just relate, um, kind of the kind of basic principle that because I talked about some of the results of our study, but, um, So, and this is the analogy I like to use, Stefan.
If you think of, you know, you look out in your back garden and you see all the, you know, the grass and the flowers and the things you want to have there. Um, but if you went off, you know, touring for six months on the, on the world tour or something, you came back, you would be overgrown with weeds. Right.
And. So, uh, think of that garden, uh, the way you want it as your nice, healthy cells and think of those weeds as cancer cells. And so like we discussed earlier, those cancer cells are developing every day all the time. And fortunately we have a built in weed, weed whacker system, right? Which is our immune system, which will go through, find the weeds when they're small and destroy them before they can grow and compete the healthy plants you want to have there.
So when you're on a high, uh, so if you talk about plants, plants need two things to live. They, they need, uh, sunlight, which is what they produce sugar from. Right. And then they need growth factors, which are hormones, gibberellins, they call them that, that promote growth. And so on a high carb diet, what you're doing is you're raising the level of sugar and, and cancer cells.
Um, uh, it's, it's a theory developed by Otto Warburg. It's a Warburg theory that, that they're, they're, he called it fermentation, but they're dependent on anaerobic respiration. So fermentation, so they, they actually, the cancer cells don't have, I'm really generalizing, but the majority of cancer cells that produce solid tumors, uh, the, the mitochondria can't actually undergo oxidative respiration.
So they're dependent on this less efficient waste producing. anaerobic respiration. And so they're really dependent on glucose because that's the major fuel for that because fats aren't, fats don't go through the same pathway. They go through the beta oxidation pathway. So they're super dependent on glucose.
So that's how we image cancer cells is we, we apply a radioactive tag onto the glucose. We call it fluorodeoxy glucose. We inject that and the cancer cells will super concentrate that like 200 times because that's the fuel that they're using. So we know that cancer cells love glucose, and so if you're on a high carb diet, you're providing all the glucose it could possibly need.
And we always talked about earlier, when you increase glucose levels in your body, then the insulin levels, I'm trying to get it on camera here, the insulin levels go up to take that glucose back out. Insulin is one of the most powerful growth factors in your body. So that's like the giver elm, that's the growth factor.
So you're giving, Go back to the plants. You're giving them all the sunlight and all the fertilizer they could possibly want for that for specifically for the weeds. And so the weeds are going to grow like crazy. And, and that. That balance between your, the cancer cells developing your immune system's ability to destroy it gets disrupted in favor of the cancer cells.
Now, if you take a ketogenic diet approach and you reduce the amount of glucose in the blood to its natural level, it doesn't go to zero cause you still need glucose, but you reduce it to its natural level and then you reduce the, um, the insulin levels will reduce. You know, concomitantly to a low level, what you're doing is you're kind of dimming the sunlight and you're reducing the fertilizer available for these cancer cells to grow.
Uh, and at the same time, some of the studies we've done at the BC Cancer Research Center show that we. Have upregulated the immune response, the specific immune response to cancer cells. So, so it's a more powerful weed whacker if you like. So now we're tipping the balance in favor of your body's immune system, destroy, identifying, destroying those cancer cells before they grow.
Um, so that's how we think ketogenic diets will help to prevent cancers in the first place, because we get them all the time. It just makes your immune system more effective at identifying them and prevents them from growing too quickly. And perhaps it explains as well why high carb diets are promoting this increased incidence of cancer that we're seeing in the Western world, which we put on a high carb diet 40 years ago.
So we're now seeing the results of that mistake we made. And, and, you know, is glucose the only fuel source for cancer, or does it use other fuel sources as well? Um, okay, so cancer, there's hundreds of different types of cancer, and there's, you know, solid tumors is what we've been working on. Um, Uh, even there, there's different genetic phenotypes and so on.
So, the, the types of cancer cells that are wholly dependent on anaerobic respiration, um, the Vorberg effect would be between 60 and 90 percent of those solid tumors. So, not all of them. Uh, some types of tumors, can use other sources of fuel to a lesser degree. They're all somewhat dependent on, on fermentation, but, um, uh, and then there are others which can happily, you know, metabolize ketones and so on.
So the ketogenic diet is not a, it's not a blanket cure for cancer, but what it's doing is at least putting your body back into the optimal state of detecting cancers when they're early. Um, part of what you're saying goes into the treatment effect. So there are some cancers we wouldn't want to treat with a ketogenic diet because we wouldn't want those ketone levels, uh, be high and they're, they're quite rare, but you know, that's why you should always talk to your physician and your oncologist about this stuff because I'm neither of those things.
So I just do the bench science, you know, I don't even really do that. I have graduate students that do that and I just kind of talk to people like you about it. So having the opportunity to do that is great because then, you know, hopefully lots of people listen. And, uh, you know, and thanks again for doing the show.
It's great. But, but hopefully it's a, it's a common sense kind of approach. And I think the problem is that people have these notions in our heads that we were talking about earlier, you know, saturated fats cause heart disease, eating red meat causes colon cancer. What you have to do is be curious and ask yourself, well, how do they know that?
And if you go and look for the actual evidence, you'll see that it's, it's, it's either so flimsy or it's not there. What it is is. Somebody in the past has grabbed onto that, thought it was a good idea and ran with it. And, and that, that's, you know, in science, whatever, we'll find them out, we'll expose them, we'll get rid of them.
But what they did was they penetrated public policy making. And politicians and journalists and so on, they're not usually highly trained in science. So they. They don't have the time or the understanding to, to, to understand a conversation we're having like this. Um, I wish they did. Uh, that's why I'm trying to explain it in simple terms as I know so that the average person out there can go, that makes total sense.
And you know, so some of the things they can take home are the notion of high glucose diets are not good for cancer. I, there's a report out from the American Diabetes Association today recommending that first thing to recommend was lower carbohydrates. It took us like 10 years to get them to do that because they would, they would argue, no high, low fat is what you want because people lose weight.
And it took us 10 years to get them to understand that that was making people worse, not better because they have a glucose intolerance and you're asking them to eat more glucose. How does that make sense? I don't know. They'll lose weight and it'll make them better. You gotta stop thinking that way and open your eyes and listen to the science and, and, and, and hopefully I've helped to make it simpler so that people can understand it.
Um, it can get really, Really interesting and complicated. But the more I learn and the more I dig down into it, the more I realize that this is absolutely the right track to be on in nutrition science. And if we go back to the biological perspective, this is the diet on which we evolved. So we evolved on, there were no cornflakes and pizzas, you know, or up in the North, you know, where Inuit live and eat diets.
There are 69 percent saturated fats and have on their traditional diet, have no cancer, no diabetes, no heart disease. They live long lives. You know, you put them on our diet and they get diabetes, they get obese, they get cancer, they incur and they die like seven years earlier. So, you know, go back to our natural state, turn your body back into its natural state, understand what that state is and fuel yourself accordingly.
And by the way, It is considered a restrictive diet because I don't eat much, you know, high glycemic index carbohydrate. But it's a very satisfying diet that I eat because it's high fat, which is where all the flavor and all the textures and so on. And I eat lots of, I eat a very, I'm an omnivore, I eat a varied diet.
Um, but pretty much everything I eat is, unless you consider wine, which I drink a little of. Or cheese, you know, those are processed I guess, but nothing I eat is processed. It's all just natural food, uh, that is, you know, grown by hopefully respectful farmers. Um, you know, I try and borg buy organic and buy animal friendly food products and so on, and, and make sure that the chickens are from free range.
And, you know, I do my part as an individual. But um, but it does worry me the sort of counter movement about no, we should all just be eating plants and that'll make the world a better place. And I, I just totally disagree with that. I think that's just, that's just politics and it's got nothing to do with health.
I can tell you that.
Uh, for the, for the average people that are listening to this, that, uh, you know, perhaps just stumbled across this video and, and don't watch endless health videos and are not really into this. If you could put the most simple. Change one thing that that you would recommend that they could change today to have the biggest impact on their health What would that be stop eating sugar?
I'll give you a few one would be stop eating sugar like get sucrose out of your diet including Even plant sources of sucrose like really sweet fruits and bones So I'd be one two would be don't eat processed food, especially ultra processed food Which is the stuff that comes in packages because it's almost certainly not good for you Um, and I would avoid inflammatory seed oils, maybe is the third one, but, uh, I think if you do the first two, just stop eating sugar and stop eating crappy ultra processed food, you're already halfway there to a healthier life, right?
And so that's kind of, you know, we started off, I said, I'm in this game to have people live happier, healthier lives. And, and I think, um, health is the most important thing. If you're not healthy, as you've learned, if you're not, everything else gets compromised. It's everything else takes the center. It's, you know, second place to your health.
So let's get in good health and stay in good health and, and, and if we do have a circumstance we're not in good health. Let's take the right steps to put ourselves back on the right track and not depend on the healthcare system to keep fixing things that are going to keep breaking. You know, you really have to rethink it from square one.
What, what am I as a human being? How did I evolve? And, and, and the most important lifestyle decision you make every day is on the end of your fork. So. If you keep that front of mind, then I think we're, we're, we're on our way. It's, uh, it's interesting that you said that because I think a lot of people, whether they're an athlete or in business or, you know, people get so wrapped up in their own, in their own worlds and, and, uh, just forget about the simple things, you know, and just take everything for granted.
I learned, you know, when, In a way, as much as my injuries and things, uh, were, were horrible at the time, I'm actually in some ways, very grateful that it happened because it taught me a lot more about myself and, and, uh, you know, what's important. And without your health, really that needs to come first for everyone.
It, you know, it needs to come before even your loved ones, because if you're not healthy, you can't. You can't help anyone else or share anything with anyone else either. So, um, which doesn't, which doesn't help. So, um, and I think people, you know, if I look at what people buy in the grocery stores, you know, when I'm standing there and it's just like frozen pizzas and sweets and package this and package that, and I just think people have no idea and, uh, you know, I hope that we can, Make some sort of an, an impact, um, over the, the coming, the coming years, you know, I think there's been a big movement, but through people like yourself and, um, yeah, because it's, it's scary, you know, people just living in.
So you said the right word there, because I think what, what you've experienced, and I'm going to kind of paraphrase Nietzsche not very well, but we feel most alive when we've truly faced death. And it's only when, when suddenly something breaks that you actually rethink it all. And I just wish people would not wait till it breaks, that they would make those changes beforehand.
And it does take a little bit of planning. It takes a little bit of determination, um, takes a little bit of grit, you know, you got to stick with it. And, and, uh, and, and I wish, you know, I, I think it's, I think, you know, you're seeing the silver lining of the experiences you've had, which is you've now found a pathway to a healthier life, which is great.
Um, and you know, hopefully people will realize that before things go wrong, but unfortunately it's just not human nature because it's our ability to see risk, right? We, we don't see the risk in something. If the, if the, if whatever that risk is, it's realized down the road somewhere. We only, it's only the hand on the hot element.
We can do that pretty well, but if the risk is like five minutes away from what we're doing now, we're just going to do whatever we want. So we're just not wired very well for that. So we just, you know, I'm a, I'm an educator. You got to educate people and let them know. And, and, uh, every single person that comes to me comes to me after something's broken.
They go, you know, I've had your book. I read your book. I kind of ignored it now. I'm thinking maybe you're right. You know, I should, I go, yeah, well, we're five years now, late later than we should have been sure. So it's, it's almost like saving for retirement. You know, it's one of those things you can, you can have your fun now or, or you can have it later.
So I, I plan on living a long, healthy, happy life so far so good. Dr. Harper, we, we, I haven't, I have a question that I ask, uh, everyone at the end of the podcast. Uh, I asked every guest and get their, their take on it. And that is what, what is the meaning of success to you? Um, you know, uh, everyone's got a different outlook on this, uh, it could be, you know, their own agenda, but, um, yeah, I'm interested to, you know, to hear what would you consider for yourself?
What would make you successful? No, that's a great question. Um, and what came to mind was leading a life with purpose. I think if you, if you, if you can identify a purpose and, and align that with your own experience and talents, uh, we all have God given talents, uh, or whoever, whatever hyper intelligent pan dimensional being you decide to worship.
Um, but we all have talents and, and, and I think leading a life with purpose seems to be really important, at least in my health courses, I emphasize that. So. So that again, coming back, my purpose is to try and help people have happier, healthier lives. And I'm an educator and a scientist. So I try and bring those to The table and then I couldn't do it, uh, you know, without people like you, Stefan, that give me the opportunity to talk to folks.
So thank you. Thank you very much for that. Thank you. And thanks so much for, for, yeah, coming on the show. It's been really a pleasure, uh, to chat to you and, uh, you know, uh, find out about all the things that, that have been on my mind. I mean, I've honestly, I could talk to you for, for the whole day, probably, uh, and not get bored.
Um, so, uh, yeah, thanks so much. And, um, Yeah, I'm looking forward to, to potentially doing it again in the, in the future. Absolutely. I'd be, I'd be delighted.