Part 2: How Amino Acids Play A Vital Role In A Fasting Lifestyle – With Robb Wolf

Dr. Mindy
Let’s move to a different nutrient in our body that I think we’re deficient in. And I know you’re a big fan of chatting about this one, which are amino acids. So tell me where amino acids do we get them only in animal protein? Can we get them anywhere else? And where would they show up in fasting, we’ve been experimenting with a combination of the electrolytes with amino acids, putting them together, and it’s killing hunger during a fasted state. And helping people actually, you know, be able to go longer. So help me understand amino acids and protein and why everybody appears to be amino acid deficient as well.

Robb Wolf
If folks are definitely not eating enough protein, and there’s a lot, my third book, sacred cow, which I think it’s great, but the other day in Rogers really did the my good friend and a registered dietitian, brilliant woman, she really did the bulk of the heavy lifting on that looking at the health of populations that consume adequate protein versus inadequate protein. And really what it what a lot of things boil down to is if one consumes inadequate protein, inadequate amino acids, then one will over consume the other nutrients, protein or you know, carbs, or fat. There’s a scientific concept, the protein leverage hypothesis, which suggested all organisms tend to eat to a protein minimum, because protein rich foods, whether we’re talking about Clover for cows and horses, or whether we’re talking like fishing chicken, for omnivores, and carnivores, protein rich foods tend to be also very nutrient dense. And so the main nutrient that the body is sensing is protein, and specifically amino acids. And when one consumes enough of that, then we tend to be satiated, we tend to not be hungry, if we under consume protein, then we will tend to over consume all these other foods. And you know, we’re in an environment now, where we’re told that animal husbandry is unethical, it’s bad for the environment, it’s the primary driver of climate change, you know, it causes cancer causes diabetes, cause all this stuff. But when we really dig into the literature looking at, say, like vegan and vegetarian diets, it’s interesting, they’re very similar to what we see in developing countries where people have no or limited access to animal products, in that the people tend to over consume starchy carbohydrates, that over nutrient deficiencies, iron seeing various B vitamins, magnesium, so it’s a, you know, it, people can think of a lot of different ways. But you know, what we’ve found is that if body composition is a primary concern of somebody who’s not in the pair of skinny jeans, they want to be in or you know, what have you, the person never is eating adequate protein ever. I mean, we do

Dr. Mindy
if you’re overweight, like so what i Sorry, that was just too powerful. Because if you are struggling to lose weight, it’s eating more protein, that’s going to help you drop weight is that to lead to to linear connection,

Robb Wolf
that’s it. And you know, that that is, in my opinion, the most important starting place towards towards facilitating that whole process, because you will spontaneously modify your appetite, you will tend to eat fewer of the other foods. Now, if if all the foods you still have around looks like a buffet, and it’s ice cream and this and that, like you, you can still eat good protein. And then if you have shoddy options around, we will still tend to overeat. But even that said, people will tend to eat less of these these bad foods, so long as as protein is adequate, you know, on the extending the fast side, could you know I could see that potentially benefiting people I wrote my first article on on fasting in 2005. And I gotta be honest, by 2006, I regretted releasing that article. Because I saw people go nuts over the fat, it mainly went out to the CrossFit community. So you had people that were training six or seven days a week, they started intermittent fasting 22 hours a day because 16 is good and clearly 22 hours a day is better. And they ate five grams of carbs a month and you know, they felt good for two weeks, and then their hair started falling out and they had no libido and I was like, well, you took a potentially good thing and then you made it terrible because there were all these other Allostatic stressors, you know, allostatic load, just total stress load on the person So I, I’m really in this spot where I love fasting, I think it’s an amazing tool, I just discovered that I have a neurological condition called Essential Tremor syndrome, which I’ve eaten a ketogenic diet, but I’ve started doing a little bit more like one day two day fast to help manage that definitely helps. So the little bit of irony there, because I’ve actually been kind of pushing back on the fasting stuff, because I see people, in my opinion, potentially doing a bit too much of it. Like there’s all this interest in autophagy, and different things like that. And I think that that’s great, but I’m not sure how much more upside there is, versus lifting weights two or three days a week, eating a protein, adequate diet and figuring out a way to just eat such that we don’t over eat like it. And that’s a that’s a big lift. Like, you know, I acknowledge, I just say that flippantly and it’s hard for people to get to that. But um, I. So you know, within that that thing of like, do you need amino acids to extend the fast? Why do you need to extend the fast? What is the goal, and this is something that I think is really important, regardless of what folks are doing. It really needs to be goal driven. And maybe the goal is like, Well, for one time, I just want to see how long I can fast comfortably. Yeah, great, great. But then above and beyond that, it’s like well, is your if your goal is autophagy, you could drink a cup of coffee, you could lift weights, you could get sewn on your skin, and that all stimulates autophagy, too. And so, and lifting weights, builds bone mineral density, and it builds a hedge against aging. sarcopenia is the loss of muscle mass as we age is one of the most concerning things that I have. And although I know folks like Jason Fung will say, Well, you release lots of growth hormone When you fast, but you’re still losing lean body tissue, including, you know, organ and whatnot. We’re also whittling through our stem cells. And sometimes doing that is good. Animals that are fasted too aggressively end up dying young from multiple organ system failure, because they have no stem cells to repair their their heart, their lungs or kidneys and all the rest of that. So it’s it’s a, for me, it’s a really powerful tool that I I would encourage people to be very outcome driven and very goal driven. What is the specific goal you’re hoping to achieve in doing this? You know, and then wearing 100%? You know, where do you off ramp then, okay, you’re doing these fasts? Where are you going to off ramp like, or, you know, or if somebody just they landed a spot where they’re like, I’m not going to change what I eat, but I will eat between the times of 9am and 4pm. Great. right there with you. And if they get more metabolically healthier, they get to a healthy body weight and all that stuff that that’s great. But I just see a lot of folks kind of doing it to do it in absent a goal absent. And that goal is something and I know I’m just talking like crazy man today. But that that goal for me is how we assess outcome. What is it that we’re trying to do? And so then when we start doing it, we can say, well, that worked really well based off of what I wanted to achieve here. But I don’t see enough people really sit down and delineate what is the goal that I’m trying to achieve here?

Dr. Mindy
Don’t you think the goal I totally agree with you because I do a weekly q&a on fasting, and I get the question all the time. How long should I fast for X condition? How long should I fast for this? And my, my comments always are what is your goal? And what are you eating? And there’s more to that it’s not something as simple as what I can answer on a live q&a. But I I think that what we’re trying to do with fasting, and the way I teach it is fasting variation is we are trying to mimic our cave person day where we went through times of feasting, and we feasted on healthy food. And then we went through times of fasting, and that there was a lot of variation to that. We may have gone through the whole summer with so much food, but then go into the winter and we had to go into more of the ketogenic energy system. So if you just mimic that, that was not a very linear experience for cave people. It was random every single day and that I believe, based off what I’m seeing, and the people who are applying these principles is what we want to get back to. It’s not fasting the same time all day. It’s not eating the same talk time all day. We need variation. What are your thoughts on that?

Robb Wolf
Are you agree and I disagree. I, I mean, I’m like the Paleo guy, right? So the bulk of the research is, so I have a talk that never got around much because COVID happened. And the title of the talk is longevity, are we trying too hard? Maybe what I’ll do, I’ll send it to you, and he can share it with your, your community. But when I really I’ve been interested in again, like my first published article on fasting was 2005. And I’m really intrigued by this stuff. But as I started digging in, and a so when animals are fed a species appropriate diet, and are fasted, intermittently fasted, they live shorter lives, they die younger. And so when we so that’s a chunk of data, when we look at what animals are fed, in a lab setting, they’re universally overweight, like they you have to really work to take a lab raised animal and, and do something to them, they have to be overtly calorie restricted to just not give them cancer, give them diabetes, cause them to be overweight. And the more and more I dug into it, I was just kind of like, well, if some of these animals were being fed a very poor diet and feeding them less of the very poor diet is better like that, that that makes sense. But again, when we start poking around and looking at more of like a species appropriate diet, I don’t I’m not sure how much upside there is waiting on the backside of a protein, adequate satiating diet that people spontaneously find calorie maintenance, like there might be some, but I’m I’m not sure, and I’m super in the minority on this, like, everybody is really geeked out on this stuff. And I fully acknowledge that that, you know, fasting can be a great tool to get people in and started down these roads. But then I, I’ve seen folks that were avoiding protein because of mTOR. And IGF? Yeah,

Dr. Mindy
you’re going to the extreme people.

Robb Wolf
Yeah, well, but there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of a lot of fasting, and they you know, and then when they do eat, they avoid protein. And these folks were cold, they looked, they didn’t look like they can handle themselves in it. Like if somebody tried to mug them, they were the mugger was getting their wallet for sure. Because there was no fight there. If this person’s car slid off the road and went down an embankment, I don’t know if this person was like climbing their way back up the hill and hiking to to get help. And so this is where I am much more than that, that camp of like resistance training, adequate protein sun on your skin, and it and I do some time restricted eating, like I probably have about a, you know, a six to eight hour window most days, some days. It’s not that I my digestion seems to be better as a consequence of that. But it’s um, I’m, I’m just not super sure how much more upside exists be on that spot. Now that said, though, if we can’t get somebody to modify the type of food that we’re eating, if we can’t get somebody to modify the amount of food they’re eating, other than some sort of constrained eating window, different story, we’re using it in a very targeted fashion there, but it’s a Yeah, like, I get people cranky and angry with me all the time. Because I’m, I’m not sure how much more upside there is in some of these scenarios. But again, for many people, that first experience of fasting, maybe the first time they’ve ever experienced legit ketosis, and they’re like, Oh, I could feel this clear headed all the time. Okay, sign me up for this, you know, just the first time that they’ve been able to drive really powerful, chronic, you know, chronic inflammatory conditions, basically into remission. Okay, like you, you’ve got my attention now, you know, so, so I acknowledge that this thing can be a really powerful tool. I just hope that people wield it more like a jeweler’s hammer than like a sledge hammer, you know, and I see a lot of sledge hammering with it out in the interwebs. Yeah,

Dr. Mindy
yeah. You know, that how my whole YouTube channel got started is I was just teaching the science that I was finding on fasting. And all the people who had read the obesity code had become I call them the Oh matters, where they had become the one meal a day and they told the exact scenario that you said where they got great results, and then their health started to fall apart. And I was working with my patients, teaching them how to bury their fast and very their foods. And I just started teaching that on YouTube. And I found to your point that there are a lot of people that get so obsessed with it that they do do it in the extreme amount. So I would agree with you on that. Then I look at things like the New England Journal of medicines meta analysis that came out and said, Well, we now have decided in intermittent fasting based off the research we’re looking at is good for diabetes, obesity, neurodegenerative, Alzheimer’s, things like that. And I think in that study, to your point, they were looking at people who are eating a horrible diet. And then they all they did is add in fasting, and then they saw some improved some incredible metabolic changes. So what I hear you is you’re sort of taking the conversation to another level where you’re like, Okay, that’s great. But then once you’ve got your diet really dialed in, and you’re adding in more protein, and you’re building more muscle through working out, then where does fasting fit in? At that point,

Robb Wolf
it may not need to be your primary tool. But if the if the individual is just like, I’m going to eat what I’m going to eat, but I’m open to eating between this time and this time, then that’s that, in my mind is where fasting is a public health tool. Yeah, yeah. What do you think? Yeah.

Dr. Mindy
What do you think this 12% of Americans metabolically fit should be completely unacceptable to us? What do you think our way out that that number it came out last year that study, or at least became popular last year? And I found that so disturbing, and then when you look at the immune damage that happens when when somebody is metabolically unhealthy, and we’ve only got 12% of Americans metabolically healthy? I look at that statistic. I look at the New England Journal of Medicine, meta analysis, and I say, Okay, let’s just get people intermittent fasting, so we can improve metabolic health. What I’m hearing you say, though, is that there’s more to that story. What do you think would get us metabolically healthy right now, that’s, I

Robb Wolf
think we need to know, I think your point is super well made. And I think that intermittent fasting can and should be a piece of the puzzle. And I think that this is what has been frustrating is that there’s been a one size fits all message coming generally from kind of mainstream dietetics circles. It’s like a low fat, high carb, high fiber. And that works okay. For some people, like just for me my digestive issues, that that approach crushes me just from my ulcerative colitis thing, like it does not work, it doesn’t provide appetite control, I get hungry, I get sick, literally hungry, like it’s a terrible experience for me. Some people do really well with low carb diets. Some people, you know, this time, Peter T. A did a great, you know, this stuff has been hidden in plain sight. But he was basically said, we can encourage people to eat less of whatever it is that they’re eating. And that works for almost no one. But it works for a few people, we can encourage people to eat different amounts of the foods that they’re eating, and this could be high fat, low carb could be high carb, low fat, and that works for certain cross section of people. And then the other piece is temporal, its timing. And so when and how are you eating omad, fasting, mimicking diets, you know, etc. And so, you know, given the abysmal state of maybe 12% of people are metabolically healthy, I would say after COVID, that’s probably more like 9% of people, because virtually everybody got sicker and fatter, being at home and being scared and terrorized, and everything. So we need every tool that we can at our disposal to address this stuff. But I guess in this, you and I are talking at a pretty high level on this, because we’re both practitioners dealing with this stuff. And sometimes I hesitate saying anything because it can be confusing when people are just in the beginning bottleneck of this, which direction do I go, and they just need something they need a life jacket. Doesn’t matter what color it is, you know, but I do see folks that that get some benefit initially, from any one of these interventions, whether again, you know, people in the Keto scene, they get geeked out on the autophagy, and the fear of mTOR. And this promise that like, if we just suppress him toward that, you know, we’ll never get cancer and we’ll live forever. And it’s a lie like it, they’re really taking a very myopic view of a highly complex scenario, and they end up like losing significant muscle mass. So now they’re frail at a young age. And if you okay, maybe you do or don’t get cancer, I don’t think that modifying mTOR in the way they’re describing is going to affect that at all. But guaranteed if you slip and fall your likelihood of being institutionalized after that because you’re incapable of caring for yourself just went through the roof because you lost all your muscle mass and your bone density sucks, you know, so, so these are the kinds of nuanced things that I’m trying to inject into this this story so that so that we can sift and sort people into more appropriate buckets but also provide them these these different tools which clearly they need, you know it, given the ubiquity of crappy food. It’s some of the temporal part may be the the only tool that we’re really able to use at the end of the day. And from a public health perspective, it could be that some amount of intermittent fasting or time restricted eating may be the only thing that averts like, the looming catastrophes we have on neurodegenerative disease, type two diabetes and obesity related issues. Yeah, yeah,

Dr. Mindy
I had it. The peak last year of the pandemic, had a principal at a high school reached out to me and said, If she was in South Carolina, and she said that her teachers were really scared about COVID had just come through their town and what I get on a zoom call with her teachers and talk to them about what they can do around their immunity. So of course, I went in and talked about metabolic health. And when I got to some of the lateral changes, I was talking about just swapping out your oils for good oils versus bad oils. This one teacher brave man asked me, he said, I, if I’m standing at the peanut butter aisle, and I have a choice between a peanut butter with good oils, or bad oils, that’s an $8 difference in that jar of peanut butter was the way he explained it. And he’s like, that’s $8 that I do not have. And then another teacher said, the way my life is so full and busy being a teacher, that the only way for me to even be able to eat is to drive through McDonald’s, grab some food, and so they kind of push back on me which was was really interesting, but it gave me a perspective that’s different than we’re talking about, and made me realize we do need a free tool. We need something that everybody can do and even if they’re they’re going to persist with eating McDonald’s

Robb Wolf
right yeah and I mean you know the we see this within the meat elitist seem like people will say it should be grass fed meat or nothing and it’s like okay, so the family of four trying to raise kids and trying to provide nutrient dense food for their kids the the Walmart or Costco meat is just god damn fine. And it’s it’s way superior to a bowl of cereal or, or goldfish for those those growing kids, they get tons of nutrients, they need the protein to grow the you know, the iron, the zinc, etc. And so this is kind of a funny thing like the seed oils, it’s kind of like, yeah, like, you don’t want to guzzle the stuff by the gallon. But at the same time, like if you if you have a big jar of peanut butter, and you like peanut butter and it’s satiating, and it get you know, and you eat that with a piece of fruit as part of your two meals a day because you’re doing some, you know, to meal time restricted eating, and it’s got a little bit of safflower oil in it and we’re going to shake that person down over that we’re idiots like that is dumb that is so so missing the the bigger picture, the person going through the drive thru at, you know, McDonald’s, get an extra burger patty, or to ditch half or all of the bonds. Um, you know, that’s a huge win and instead of a sugary soda, do a tea or even God forbid, a diet soda, just don’t drink a ton of sugar on top of that, you know, and then people start freaking out about like, what about aspartame? It’s like, well, aspartame is probably not great. But worrying about aspartame relative to high fructose corn syrup is worrying about your dripping faucet when your house is burning down. It is. So Miss allocate, you know, resources there. So and I think that this is our continual challenge, you know, taking these big picture things to get people moving forward. Our seed oils great. No. But should that should you go crazy trying to avoid seed oils, or if you have really complex health issues, and like that’s kind of where you’ve ended up maybe. But for the lion’s share of people that just they’re not doing a bagel, they’re not doing nachos, like they’re doing peanut butter and apples in some chicken. That’s a win like that. That is win win win all day long. Like we can see it metabolically the person feels better. They look better, they perform better. So yeah, see, but this is

Dr. Mindy
I think that that was golden what you just said there because, again, I’m going to go back to this 12% Because I have obsessed on how sad that number is. And I realized that we got to help the person who it doesn’t have the financial resources and help them understand what they can do to become metabolically healthy or we’re never going to bring that number We’re up. And as more emerging viruses appear, and we go through more of this chaos, this metabolic health has to be the thing that we address, but we have to be able to address it for all socio economic backgrounds. So I love what you just said, I think that is so powerful.

Robb Wolf
We did a piece. I think I shopped exclusively for a month at Walmart. And it was like paleo, and and it was easy. It was easy. And like, there was tons of grass fed meat there. And there was this and there was that and you know, but the was all the produce organic, no, doesn’t matter. Like it doesn’t matter, particularly again, relative to the family of four just getting going. both parents are working, the kids are in school, they’re sending school lunches if they even still can, because schools get so squirrely about like sending tree nuts and different things. So you’re trying to feed your kids well, so that they aren’t, aren’t crazy. And those folks are like, we know, we need to eat better. We want our kids to be healthier. And so they are only going to be allowed to shop at Whole Foods and everything is organic and gret the meat is it organic and grass fed. And it’s $32 a pound. It’s like this is ridiculous stuff. You know, it’s I see people, one dismiss ideas, like fasting and keto and paleo and they’re like, well, that’s just elitist, that’s for wealthy people. And I really find that repugnant, I was I have a, I just moved my office around. I don’t know if I have it. But I have a I have a food stamp from when I was five years old. And I went shopping with my mom. And I was like, Hey, Mom, what are you using there? And she’s like, I’ll tell you when we get in the car. And she was like, so we’re poor. And the government sends us money. And this is some of the money we used to buy food. And I was like, Okay, I’m never going to do that as an adult, like I just like, um, but I kept this thing. And some people are in situation where they have to, and it’s great that we have safety nets. But when people just dismiss the notion that someone who is comparatively poor, has no capacity to change their situation, I find that so incredibly disempowering that I literally want to throttle. Yes, and saying it, it’s like, I get that they may have challenges, let’s figure out how we facilitate the ability to change that situation and support the individual, not just explain away for them how they’re going to fail this from the beginning. Like that’s ridiculous to me. So, yeah, and this is, um, you know, whether socio economic stuff or COVID, or whatever, like these minorities and low socio economic standing, these are the people that are hit the hardest by all this, like the wealthy and the middle class. Yeah, they absorb it, they’re able to absorb it, you know, but those are the people that we really should be thinking about. I don’t know, this is always and I’m just averting here, and I’m sorry, if you want to cut this out, you can absolutely no. But um, I’m not gonna go there. I’m not gonna go there. So I’ll hit better judgment right now.

Dr. Mindy
Oh, my God, you’re funny. Again, this is why I love intermittent fasting fasting of all type is because it’s free. And it any you can give it to a CEO who has no time, you can give that tool to the teacher in South Carolina that is burning the candle at both ends and doesn’t have money. And we can start to move the needle on their metabolic health. So it takes time and money I find are the biggest hurdles to people being able to get well. So if we take that off the plate, now at least we’re a step forward. So that’s why I like again, that study just wakes me up at night. It really burns on my brain that we’ve got to come up with some solutions. And when you look at what big food is doing, it’s it’s we’re not that’s like a beast that I do not know, it’s like Big Pharma. I just don’t know how we’re going to be able to stop the damage to health that these big corporations are doing. But what we can do people like you and me is we can empower the individual to start to figure out how to create a lifestyle based off their socio economic constraints or or boundaries that is going to make them metabolically healthy. I personally think metabolic health is the number one health crisis right now that needs to be addressed. We don’t have an immune system problem. We have a metabolic health problem. And I just am searching for tools to be able to help these people because it’s unfair when the South Carolina teacher goes to McDonald’s because she doesn’t have the time and she’s teaching our youth and toxifying herself, building metabolic damage, making her more immune compromised. That scenario breaks my heart and needs to change

Robb Wolf
And you, you, you know, it’s funny, I was just talking about kind of the, the meat elitists and whatnot. But a lot of my pushback on fasting has been directed at the people who are at the outer edges of our community. It’s the people who they’ve read every Peter Atea blog, and they have Rhonda Patrick as as like a wakeup voice on their phone. You know, we’re talking about gut microbiota and stuff like that. And these are the people that I I’ve done a lot of my recent talks catered to, because I see them going overboard. And the funny thing about that is I bitch and bemoan all the time how people are looking at this, this tiny top of the this pyramid of lunatic fringe, and how that’s going to have zero impact on the bulk of people. And so it’s kind of funny, I fell prey to some of my own my own stuff there, and you make a really, super credible case to some degree of intermittent fasting time restricted eating is a remarkably democratic way of helping people reach better metabolically, you, you did some some perspective changing for me. So I really appreciate that because I’ve noodled on that stuff. But I haven’t really couched it as much in terms from like, a public health perspective. It’s like, okay, what are we going to win against big food? Probably not. Okay, if we just get people to eat it between these hours? And these hours, at least, maybe we are turning a tide of some kind. Yeah,

Dr. Mindy
yeah, yeah. And I, you know, I only have come to this place out of two experiences. And one was, when we went into the pandemic, it was I was very clear, we don’t have a virus problem, we have a host problem. So what’s going on with the host. So when I went to go research that I saw metabolic health, but then when I had this interaction with these southern South Carolina teachers, I, my heart hurt afterwards, I thought I didn’t do those people a good service, I should have just said, whatever you’re eating, the research shows, if you eat it in a 10 hour window, and you leave 14 hours for fasting, right now that you’re immune to metabolic damage. So let’s just start there, that doesn’t cost you any money, the whole class should have been that for those those

Robb Wolf
people, I would agree and that I think one of the gimmies is like, um, no liquid calories, like a diet soda in lieu of a standard soda, and then whatever else you can pull off, and I think that that and try to get a whack of protein at every meal, whether it’s baggage or, you know, whatever. And I think that that’s really actionable and meets people much more where they are. And it’s not so complex, like we’ve talked at some pretty high level stuff on this. And for the vast majority of people, that’s not what they need. They just, they just need to know how to, like, we’ll Yeah, let’s just move

Dr. Mindy
a little bit. Let’s just get into you know, your agency now a little bit, let’s just get you a little bit moving in a positive direction, because the way I see it right now is we’re moving in such a bad direction, that we got to start with the people that can’t afford stuff and don’t have the time and money. So, yeah, awesome. I have so many other questions for you. But I want to respect your time. The one The one thing I have to tell you and I have to talk about this. When I brought element into my house, I was love the taste of it. It’s, you know, easy to drink. And my 21 year old and 19 year old got a hold of it. And pretty soon they figured out that it’s an incredible tool post party. And all of a sudden, I’ve got you guys have to have a whole market for this because my 19 year olds about to go off to college next on Saturday. And they were putting his packing stuff together. And he’s like, can you get me some boxes of element. So I got him like four boxes. His girlfriend just went off last week, I brought her a care package and a couple boxes of element, she sends me a picture from her dorm room where she’s got element in some special spot. Explain why it’s good for hangovers. And you got to you need to open up the market for the college kids.

Robb Wolf
So the funny thing is, we weren’t sure if element would take as like an electrolyte product. And so we the first couple of flavors were such that we could pivot and have it be a drink mix. So like the citrus and then like the hobbit Nero lemon and you know all that stuff. And so I mean one It tastes really good as kind of a drink mix base and then most of a hangover is dehydration and sodium depletion. And so if you fix the dehydration and the sodium depletion then at significant there’s also just the basic poisoning of you know detoxifying ethanol but you know by your liver But the most of what we feel terrible from low electrolyte status and dehydration, and so it really addresses that. And I wouldn’t say it’s a total Get Out of Jail Free card, but it’s shocking how much worse one could feel if you’ve had a couple of drinks in not had element versus like wrapping the night up with one of those or like, you know, kind of going in between or again, using that as like your drink base. It’s kind of remarkable. Yeah,

Dr. Mindy
yeah, I took it and I put it in a big jar in our house. And like, I’m like, now I know how much my kids are drinking, because I can go and be like, Oh, my gosh, where’d all the oil go? It’s really, it’s really amazing. But they are like, they’re like, I feel good on it. So, you know, I always just love that nutrients go back into them. The other question that I have for you that I really want to answer I’ve talked a lot like last week, I interviewed Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, who is really big on protein, as you know, and there were two things that I discussed with her that were that I’ve been noodling on. One is that she believes when we eat protein, that you got to hit a 30 gram mark to initiate the nutrient sensors for amino amino acids in muscles in order to grow muscle. Would you agree with that?

Robb Wolf
Yes. And she and I are great friends. And she is maybe even more neurotic about that preventing sarcopenia than I am. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Mindy
So you so you would say if I go and I eat a hard boiled egg, which has, like, you know, 17 Yeah, something like that. Like it’s not, it’s not huge, but it’s still pretty packs a power a protein punch. I’m not triggering muscle growth until I eat enough hard boiled eggs to get to that 30 gram. Mark. Correct. Yeah. Okay. And how many amino? How many? How much protein do you feel like people need in a day,

Robb Wolf
the bracketing that I have is a gram of protein per pound of lean body mass all the way up to a gram of protein per pound of body weight. So far, I’ve had a 200 pound, male 10% body fat could be as low as 180 grams of protein or as high as 200 210 grams of protein. And that seems to be a pretty good operating window there and part of our healthy rebellion. Community we do three times a year resets where people focus on food, sleep, movement, and, and community, kind of the four pillars of health. We have not had a single person who had body composition goals, who was eating adequate protein, not one. And this is in 1000s of people going through this. And these are people like Rob, I read your first book in 2010. And I got a lot of benefit it but you know, I just haven’t been able to shake the last 15 pounds. And then when we really get in and look at what they’re doing, we mate we have people weigh and measure their food for about a week. And they’re like, son of a gun. I was eating like 50% under the amount of protein I’m supposed to eat. And we fix that. And just magic happens with that. Yeah.

Dr. Mindy
And so do you think there’s ever a scenario where a vegetarian can thrive?

Robb Wolf
Well, so vegetarian could be I mean, I don’t exactly know what that like vegan is it? Let’s start with vegan? Yeah, there’s lots of variation. It’s going to be tough, it’s going to be tough. And what we find is that because the protein is very non dense, they eat more calories overall. And this is that protein leverage hypothesis thing to hit their protein minimums, they end up eating more calories overall, if you look at the protein in the nutrition in two or three ounces of steak, it’s like 200 calories, you need to eat 800 calories of beans and rice to get the same amino acid profile. So it’s just tough, it’s very tough to pull that off, you have to do a lot of protein concentrates, tofu 10 pe things like that. It tends to be a very monochromatic diet. You know, when we shift to vegetarian again, I’m not some people say fish work. Some people say dairy works like the, the more latitude you have, and the more access to relatively dense protein sources, then the easier it is to pull that off. But I some people have good body composition on on a kind of low protein, vegan diet, or at least they’re skinny. But I think it’s, it’s, it’s fraught with, with difficulty to really make that work, particularly over the wall. So you should you should go

Dr. Mindy
back and talk to Gabrielle because one thing that she mentioned, is that there’s a new research coming out that some people’s microbiome, actually we’ll make amino acids and those people you probably already know about this that those people may be okay on a vegetarian diet because they have the right microbes to make the amino acids support.

Robb Wolf
Yep, So it’s not just what you’re putting down piehole. But they may be making some in addition to that, yeah. Which is fascinating. And this may be some of the inter individual variation that we see like one person does it and and they do great. Another person does vegan vegetarian diet, and it just cratered them. Yeah. Have

Dr. Mindy
you explained that, and this is where I could geek out on the microbiome, because I think that’s where you explain it is that we have such variations of the microbiome. So

Robb Wolf
but the real takeaway there at the end of the day is that the person had to hit a protein minimum, whether they consumed protein specifically, or whether their gut microbiome assisted them in hitting that protein minimum, that was a non negotiable piece of that story.

Dr. Mindy
And how do you know if you have that strain of bacteria is doing that? You would only know because you might be listening to this and going well, the vegetarian vegan diet works for me. And so that would be your only clue. So yeah, yeah. Well, this was awesome. I could I could chat with you all day. I have five questions for you. Some of them we ask every guest some of them are unique to you. So let me just rapid fire these at you for the last little bit. We have

Robb Wolf
my best to rapid fire answer. I do. Yeah. Right. Yeah, it’s

Dr. Mindy
all good. I’m as as talkative as you are. Okay, we’re creating a book, a list of our guests favorite books. So at the end of the year, we’re going to put it together, what’s the one book and you can say one or two that you feel like everybody needs to read?

Robb Wolf
Oh, man, um, light it from like a health perspective.

Dr. Mindy
It can be anything. Some people have said fiction. So it’s like the book that just really like you, like opened your mind to something new. And you think God, if humans just read this, they might have a different perspective.

Robb Wolf
Okay. Thomas soul economics in one course. Oh,

Dr. Mindy
okay. We’ve not we haven’t had that one. And that’s why

Robb Wolf
it is ill informed as folks are on nutrition and probably rightfully so they just live their lives and everything. People are shockingly, ill informed on the basics of economics, that in economics isn’t just money, it’s resources in the way that resources get allocated around the planet, like the way a termite mound operates. Is it an economic engine and you know, resource, reallocation engine and a, in my opinion, a lot of the problems that we face societally are an outgrowth of people operating from an emotional spot of what they think the world should be versus the logical reality of life economics and resource allocation is and Thomas Sol is one of the my favorite people in the world. A black man born in very humble means, got a PhD in Economics ended up at Stanford and has been a luminary in economics for 50 plus years. So amazing man in a very accessible short piece that. Again, I think that 80 or 90% of the problems that we face today are, at least to some degree, an outgrowth of people just really not understanding economics and or the reality of economics being so at odds with what their emotional thoughts about what the world should be versus what it is, and it creates it ironically, a lot of where people go wrong is in my opinion, is they want to do good by people. But the path to hell is oftentimes paved with good intentions. Yeah.

Dr. Mindy
Yeah. And we are willing to just take a headline or a social media blurb or clickbait of some kind and then call that truth I, that I also think we just on every topic, we need to teach people how to go deep in their thinking. I heard recently that actually in Finland, they’re doing this with kids, where they are teaching kids how to critically think and that is missing in our education system,

Robb Wolf
for sure. Well, you know that it just has a little bit of funny backstory, if you do some research on where the Finnish school system came from. They sent researchers to the United States back in the 1950s and found the when all over the country and found the best practices being used within our school system, and then consolidated it down and systematized it. We never systematized a lot of the good stuff that was happening here. And then we went down all these other kind of squirrely routes, but they developed a lot of the finished school system off of observing. Like there was a time where like, we had a really robust, Gifted and Talented program, we had a very deep special ed program. So there was a lot of customization to meet the kid where they were and over the course of time it’s become a one size fits all which ends up serving no one

Dr. Mindy
Yeah, yeah, we even had some PE programs to back in the day. Okay, what’s the craziest thing you’ve ever done for your health?

Robb Wolf
For my health, man, um,

Dr. Mindy
or it may have ended up not being for your health, but you’re willing to give it a go.

Robb Wolf
I mean, if the most disastrous thing I did was a vegan diet, and it’s trying to trying to do that while doing a graduate program, and it nearly killed me. I thought I could just get by on three hours asleep and live in Seattle and never see the sun and and eat a diet that it was on digestible, for me that was catastrophic and killed me. Yeah,

Dr. Mindy
yeah, that makes sense. I can see that. If you if you could give a concise definition of health. And I’m not saying that because you like to talk. I’m just saying that we don’t have a good definition of health for people. What would your definition be?

Robb Wolf
The ability to do most everything you would like to do and feel good doing it?

Dr. Mindy
Amazing. I mean, I think that’s, that is a perfect definition. I have found people think it’s like a like a, like something that you’re going to get to, and you’re going to ride that. And one of the things I’ve been teaching my community is I feel like we shouldn’t look at health as a noun. And that’s how it’s used in the English language. It’s a verb, it’s an action. So we got to redefine it, which is why I love what you said. So the pandemic was crazy. But a lot of good came out of it for me either lists of good that came out of it for my family, what’s a big aha, and, and something good that came out of it for you?

Robb Wolf
Ah, oh, man. Um, I mean, our family has been very fortunate during the whole thing. But we’ve seen a lot of people that really had a very rough sledding during all this. It’s not really that positive of a thing, but it uh, it made clear to me that social media may end up being the undoing of Western civilization. Right? Yeah. And I, I have social media accounts. But I finally I really like working with people. I like helping people. But I have 100% constrain myself to doing podcasts and then being in my healthy rebellion, community. And that’s it, like I just can’t do the other stuff. I post things that I have my assistant posted, but I don’t interact, I don’t check comments. And it kind of guts me, because I’ve done that for like 23 years. I love doing that. I love interacting with people. But when I learned maybe a year and a half, two years ago that the algorithms are tweaked to promote conflict, it made a lot of sense, because when it was just back in the old forum days, I would chat with people about economics or you know, socio political stuff or health or whatever, we would start off at very different places. And I wouldn’t say that I convinced everybody to believe what I was saying. But at least I got, man that is a very reason thoughtful thing. And I’m going to give that some thought at least I got that sometimes I got You’re an asshole and just go die. You know what? Screw

Dr. Mindy
everybody on social media gets that yet. But that’s

Robb Wolf
all that we get. Now, you know? And it was interesting, because I’m like, Wow, am I like losing my mojo? Do I do do I not care? Am I not empathic anymore? Because I just couldn’t, no matter how hard I work to make a case and like just to get some dialogue, yes, no dialoguing, you know, and then when I think it was the social dilemma film, and then just some, some articles talking about how these companies figured out that, you know, cat memes are cool, and they make the rounds and you know, good news stories are okay, and then make the rounds. Nothing spreads like wildfire, like figuring out what makes someone upset. And so even to the tune that these things figure out, well, Rob doesn’t really get along with Nadia. So we’re gonna make sure that Nadia sees as much of Rob stuff as possible to get her inflamed or to get him inflamed. And when they figure that out, I’m like, This literally could be the undermining of what we consider Western liberal civilization. And with some of the censorship, like I, my website was censored back in 2017, as part of the Google owl update, like way before getting censored was was like the first people to do it. And like overnight, 97% of my site traffic disappeared because Google viewed my material as being dangerous and credible, you know, material that it would refer people to was WebMD and some people might share that. I have lots of folks that I disagree with, you know, the You know, whatever, I would be horrified by seeing these people D platformed. And removed. And so I know that again, that was like, yeah, the concise answer at all. But,

Dr. Mindy
you know, don’t worry about the long answer, I think you’re spot on that we people don’t realize the information that they’re that they’re how it’s being manipulated and brought into their brains. And like you one of the things that I saw through the pandemic was a to, to be able to put content out there, and then distance myself. So I’m not attached to how that content is being used on this free platform. And then I’ve been like, let me get people into like, you have your health rebellion grip, I have a reset Academy, like, get them there so we can have conversations. So we actually started, I started a coffee talk with my group on Zoom every Saturday morning. And it’s so freeing, because we’re on Zoom, I’m just bringing the information that I’m seeing as it pertains to metabolic health and immune system, and we could have a really cool dialogue, and that we can’t have on social media anymore.

Robb Wolf
Right. Right. And that maybe we will my wife and I were talking and I was like, you know, if we went back to like, forums, and blogs, yeah, that was kind of the golden age of the internet in a way, because you can find a lot of information you can find some community, people could be jerks, but it wasn’t it wasn’t this weaponized thing in with the emergence of things like substack and medium and and, you know, doing these, these kind of, you know, private communities, maybe we will turn the corner on that. And we’ll we’ll, we’ll get something more akin to that, because I, part of what I loved about, you know, interacting with people on Facebook, and Instagram and stuff like that, I learned an enormous amount, because you get, you get several 1000 People who are sharp, and they’re reading all the papers, and they’re listening to all the podcasts and like, Hey, Rob, have you heard of this? And like, No, I haven’t heard of that at all, like, Tell me more. And, you know, it was, it was, it was a good way to get smart, fast, you know, by having a smart group of people around you that, you know, supported that. So maybe we we maybe that is the silver lining and all this stuff.

Dr. Mindy
Yeah, and I think you and I both come from the space of we’re not trying to get people to think like us, we’re just trying to show you some evidence, and then you make the decision for yourself. That to me, like should be what social media stands for, but it doesn’t stand for that anymore. But in our behind, like, you know, in a podcast in a zoom call, we can start to get people to think again that you know, outside of metabolic health, that’s my next quest is like, let’s get people to think about this deeper. Let’s help them find their their NF one. Let’s just we got to go back to that. But if everything on social media has been censored, and put into a really big box, it’s just not that’s really difficult, because you’re getting one message. And that’s it. Yeah. So Okay, last question. And again, I could chat with you forever. But if you had one message for the world, like you could get into everybody’s brain, what would that message be?

Robb Wolf
Oh, man. This is geeky. But and I kind of alluded to this, I really think if everybody had a high school physics level understanding of the way the world works like, like thermodynamics, energy inputs, and outputs, a basic economics perspective, you know, like this economics in one lesson, and then a basic understanding of evolutionary theory. Like it doesn’t give you all the answers, but it allows you to at least beginning begin asking questions. And in my opinion, absent those three things, evolution, economics and thermodynamics, the world is effectively magic for people like they literally have no idea whatsoever why things work. So like we did this sacred cow book and one of the examples I use in there, ethanol is held up as this green fuel. And people in corn states are going to cheer that but it costs more energy than what it gives you. The people raising corn for ethanol, drive their tractors on diesel and gasoline because it’s a it costs more than what it gives. And so it’s a boondoggle. It’s a it’s a complete farce to say that this is a green thing. And, you know, when we talk about climate change and food policy and all kinds of other stuff, again, I see people you know, for misaligned financial reasons for kind of simplistic emotional reasons. They will look at something like well, is ethanol a good, good, viable fuel and they’re like, Well, yeah, it comes from corn. That’s got it. Great, and it’s like, well, it actually costs more energy than what it takes. And I think if people had a basic understanding of that, like, this is gonna sound super hoity toity. But for a lot of people, I don’t even think they know enough to ask the right question. So they’re not even on the right planet to get the right answer. They’re not even. They’re not in that, you know, we’re in a Zoom Room, they’re not in even in the Zoom Room of getting the right answer, because they haven’t even asked remotely a reasonable question yet. And I think that people would struggle a lot less, they would find a lot less negative surprise in their lives, because they kind of Intuit and anticipate a lot of the things that are happening around them instead of it happening to them. And one of the best ways that you can win or flip this around, one of the most stressful experiences people have is a lack of agency sensing a lack of agency and inability to do anything to change their situation. But if you just allow people the ability to understand what it is that’s happening to them, like I’ve been a little bit of a doomsday prepper for like, 15 years, like, I was the one that thought that the the housing market was going to blow up in 2005. I couldn’t believe it took until like, 2008. To, to go I was just flabbergasted, but I knew that was going to happen. I just didn’t know when and the timing is really important. But when it did happen, it wasn’t as stressful as it was for people. I didn’t make the decisions that got me in trouble. I missed a lot of opportunities, but it’s for stuff like that it’s better to be early than late, you know, so, and even with this pandemic, I’ve known for ages that the potential of a pandemic or an EMP pulse or something like that was real that food, food distribution could be interrupted that you know, you could have social unrest and all kinds of other things and it doesn’t insulate you from all the effect but you’re not in that terrified paralyzed moment. Because it’s a complete surprise. How on earth did this happen?