Brian (0s):
Coming up on the Getline E clean podcast.
Marty (3s):
What we've done with our food system back in the thirties, forties, fifties, we discovered fossil fuel fertilizers and went, wow, we can grow. Food's so much quicker. We just dump this, you know, fossil fuel based fertilizer that comes from natural gas, but it's getting a whole lot more expensive really quickly right now, dump it into the, into the soil and make everything grow a whole lot quicker. But not only when it grows quicker, it doesn't extract as much nutrition. And when you grow things quickly, again and again, in the same soil, it depletes and you know, the, the fertilizers accelerate the loss of top soil, and there's no diversity. There's no micro microbiome diversity in the soil so that the actual nutrient content of that food is, is getting worse and worse and worse.
Marty (52s):
So we just bandaid it to make the label look better with a few, you know, bit of fortification, but it really doesn't help that much.
Brian (1m 2s):
Hello and welcome to the get lean EAN podcast. I'm Brian GRN and I'm here to give you actionable tips to get your body back to what it once was five, 10, even 15 years ago each week. I'll give you an in depth interview with a health expert from around the world to cut through the fluff and get you long-term sustainable results. This I interview the owner of optimizing nutrition, Marty Kendall. This was the second time I've had Marty on the podcast and we discussed the importance of nutrient dense foods. How minerals play a role in your health along with what's the deal with seed oils, dangers of fat and carbs combined, the importance of preparing your own food and what role coffee and alcohol will play in your health.
Brian (1m 44s):
I really enjoyed my interview with Marty. I hope you do too. Thanks so much for listening and enjoy the show. All right. Welcome to the get lean E clean podcast on for a second time. Marty, Kendall. Welcome to the show.
Marty (1m 59s):
Hey, doing Brian. Great chat again. It's been a while.
Brian (2m 1s):
Yeah, it's been a, a little over a year and a half and you must be doing some things, right? You look younger.
Marty (2m 8s):
Thanks, man. Yeah, I, I, I quit the day job in, in December. Just went, I'm a part-time casual engineer now and oh, that's it. Nutrition stuff. So yeah, live, live the dream. And just trying to walk the talk and get out on the bike and lift weights and eat as well as I can in the real world and yeah. Love and life.
Brian (2m 29s):
Yeah. Well, you know, when you can focus a little bit more time on those things, right. You start to yeah. Look younger.
Marty (2m 36s):
Yeah. All, all the knowledge and theory is one thing, but actually applying one thing at a time I learn is just, yeah. That's, that's where it's at. Yeah. One little tiny habit and integrated into life and then she put it the next one.
Brian (2m 47s):
Yeah, for sure. And it's easy to talk about it, but implementation is, is the key. So what have you been up to? I know we, we touched, we talked a little bit on before we got on live, but you're with obviously optimizing nutrition.com. Yep. Love your site as a resource. And I was looking through your blog and I know you mentioned regarding, well, why don't you tell everyone a little bit about yourself and, you know, sort of how you got into, into all this?
Marty (3m 14s):
Yeah, yeah. I'm an engineer by day happened to marry Monica who happens to be a type one diabetic. And all of a sudden we learned a lot about insulin and blood sugars and nutrition and, and yeah, way back before that, I grew up in an SDA family, seventh Adventist, and they're very
Brian (3m 34s):
Nutrition
Marty (3m 35s):
Focused and very religiously nutrition focus. So my family left the SDA church back when I was about, you know, 10. But I think that gives me a really interesting, like the juxtaposition of being an engineer, trying to help my wife manage type one diabetes, knowing that so much of the nutrition advice is complete trash and doesn't work. And it's pretty much the worst thing you can do. And then growing up in the, the hub of belief based nutrition, I'm quite skeptical of nutrition. And as an engineer, I love data. I wanna see data, data as truth. So I just wanna see more data to understand what the cheat codes of nutrition are that cut through the dogma and belief and conflicts of interest and financial motivation.
Marty (4m 24s):
And there's just rife in our food system. So yeah, that's, you know, I quit the day job in, in December cause I just got so obsessed with this and figured I could give it a crack and do what I love. And here I am chatting to you.
Brian (4m 38s):
Yeah, that's great. And I do agree. I think, you know, just being in this, in the health business and having a podcast about all, about health and wellness, I mean, you can drive yourself crazy with all the different rhetorics that are out there regarding what to eat and when to eat. And it has meat second guessing half the time, what I'm doing,
Marty (5m 1s):
What do I do? When do I eat? What should
Brian (5m 3s):
Eat? I mean, what's perfect. And I think, you know, one of the things too is like, you can test yourself on like, you know, I did a here mineral test I've done. I, you know, just did a full panel blood panel and it's like, you could do genetic testing on certain things, you know, maybe. So I'm curious, like, I, I love your, your blog and, and you know, a lot of the stuff that you talk about's really backed with science per you know, and, and backed on, you know, a big thing as satiety. Maybe explain a little bit about how you analyze satiety within different nutrients and foods.
Marty (5m 39s):
Yeah. Yeah. Just going back to your point there about, there's so many things you can test and everybody's got test and then a magic supplement that'll cure that ill that you didn't know you had before you listen to sponsored podcast. It's just crazy. Everybody wants to sell you, convince you you're sick. And then the queue with their expensive one pill, little yeah. Pure ills. But yeah, no, I think one of the biggest things in nutrition, it's what you eat. And when you eat to some degree, cuz if you're eating too often, you're eating too much and you know what you eat and when you eat are definitely interrelated, but satiety is basically, you know, I've been at a quest to understand what are the foods that make us satisfied and happy?
Marty (6m 25s):
What, what are the foods that our body needs that contain the nutrients we need that we need to thrive? So really the more I dig into it, I see that it's all about our body just keeps on eating until it gets enough of the nutrition. It needs particularly protein, but when you dig further, it's all the other minerals and vitamins that we need enough of. So if we don't get enough of those from our modern, you know, hyper palatable, hyper processed ultra process, crap diet, we just keep on eating. And I think that's a very simple way of understanding it. And then with enough data, you can then understand what are the factors that are quantifiable in that, you know, particularly protein as the big one, but also we see significant responses to potassium and sodium and calcium and folate and all, and even fiber, it's hard to over eat a higher fiber diet.
Marty (7m 26s):
So as we, you know, we can use that information to cut through the dogma, to design a diet, to, to optimize foods, to rank foods and say, you know, is this better than this? And what should I try next?
Brian (7m 41s):
Yeah. And it's interesting. I was just pulling up some of your articles, the one regarding minerals. Yeah. I, I think that's something, I, I think it's something that gets overlooked sometimes and I actually just did a hair mineral test and, and through upgraded formulas. Yeah. And I actually had someone interpret that chart because it was actually fairly confusing to understand. And he was really good. He was actually on my podcast, Matt Terry, and I've done it. I did it once. And then I retested about like five months later. And it's interesting what came back. I mean, yes, I was definitely a bit dehydrated in the sense that sodium potassium magnesium were like the main ones that stuck out to me for, for that I was deficient in I'm I'm sure that's probably common.
Marty (8m 31s):
Yeah, no, definitely potassium is a massive one, calcium magnesium, but it's really the ones that we can't put into a pill or add to our food system as fortification. And we've got these B vitamins that we add to everything and iron and ate that we add to our food system, but it's really hard to supplement with potassium. And, and so me and, and like the amount of powder you have to ingest is, is massive. So you really need to find a way to get those minerals from your diet, otherwise, similar to protein. I dunno if you heard of the protein leverage hypothesis with professors, Robin hammer and Simpson, basically they said that they noted that in every organism we basically eat until we get enough protein, but you, you see a similar nutrient leverage effect that within every mineral and vitamin, to some extent we keep on eating until we get enough of those minerals, particularly.
Marty (9m 29s):
So yeah, it's really critical to make sure you've got enough sodium potassium, calcium, magnesium in your diet.
Brian (9m 37s):
Yeah. And are there certain, you know, like obviously there's a big, low carb craze with keto and now you talk a little bit about on your blog. I'm, I'm sort of implementing actually more carbs into my diet. I've been pretty low carb and fasting for quite a while. And, and I, I find that adding in, you know, good nutritious carbs, like whole food carbs, not, you know, I'm not going out and having pizza every night, but I I'm just, you know, I'm a big fan of like self experimentation, finding out what works and, and what, what are your thoughts around, around, you know, carbohydrate carbohydrates and how maybe sometimes if you do low go low carb for, for quite a while that you could be deficient in certain minerals and, and, and, and things like potassium.
Brian (10m 26s):
And
Marty (10m 27s):
Yeah, definitely. I mean, everybody's lower in potassium on a processed food diet, but unless you're getting a lot of green non veggies on your version of keto, then you're not gonna be getting a lot of those minerals. And then as the insulin drops, as your blood sugar drops on a keto diet, you tend to, you know, release some of those minerals from a kidney as well because the insulin helps your kidney hold onto the minerals. So you'll, you'll sort of lose those minerals. So that's why a lot of people feel lot better when they supplement electrolyte minerals. But yeah, I mean, pure fat that, that back five years ago, we're all chasing elevator keytones and testing keytones and our expensive $3 strip meters and trying to get our keytones keytones higher thinking that if we ate more fat, elevated, keto turns would magically lose weight, but I mean really pure fat.
Marty (11m 25s):
You know, we need some, a omega3 and a little bit of a omega six, but it's not that much. And, and that pure fat doesn't contain amino acids and as many vitamins and minerals. So you really need a balanced diet at a micronutrient level in terms of carbohydrate. I don't know, you're pretty active. So if you're at golfing all the time and really moving a lot, then your blood sugars are gonna be dropping, you know, after workout, your body wants that glucose to replenish that activity, your muscles need to refill with glycogen. So you'll sort of crave that higher carb food. And if you don't, we find some people in our data driven, fasting challenges. When they go back to adding a little bit of carbohydrate when their blood sugar is low, they, they go, yeah, I'm, I'm satisfied and satiated cuz my blood sugar bumped back up into the normal range and I'm not craving anymore.
Marty (12m 17s):
I'm not eating as much, particularly at night when blood sugar is on a low carb diet, I tend to drop a little bit lower. So yeah, it's interesting. You don't wanna overdo carbs and like you say, you don't wanna overdo the, the pizza its of handfuls of, of nuts or whatever, which are really carbs and fat together. But you know, a little bit of carbs when your blood sugar is low to replenish the glycogen after you've actually done some activity is not gonna be a bad thing for most people.
Brian (12m 45s):
Yeah. And it is interesting looking at the charts with the, with your nutrients, like calcium and phosphorus and the inverse relationship between that and obesity.
Marty (12m 54s):
Yeah.
Brian (12m 55s):
You know like how there's been this decline in use of let's just say calcium and, and like you mentioned, potassium is a big one and how obesity's gone on the right. I rise. And that's probably a combination of just the in industrial in, in Indi, I'm gonna try saying this, the industrialized food system. Right. Of like just, you know, the more something's processed, you're taking out the nutrients, right?
Marty (13m 23s):
Yeah. And what we've done with our food system back in the thirties, forties, fifties, we discovered fossil fuel fertilizers. I'm like, wow, we can grow food so much quicker. We just dump there's, you know, fossil fuel based fertilizer that comes from natural gas, but it's getting a whole lot more expensive really quickly right now, dump it into the, into the soil and make everything grow a whole lot quicker. But not only when it grows quicker, it doesn't extract as much nutrition. And when you grow things quickly, again and again, in the same soil, it depletes and you know, the, the fertilizers accelerate the loss of top soil and there's no diversity, there's no micro microbiome diversity in the soil.
Marty (14m 7s):
So that the actual nutrient content of that food is, is getting worse and worse and worse. So we just bandaid it to make the label look better with a few, you know, bit of fortification, but it really doesn't help that much.
Brian (14m 21s):
Yeah. Yeah. That's another topic that probably doesn't get discussed as much is just the soil quality. Yeah. So even if you're master, right. And so it's like, even if you're buying your, what you're thinking are foods that are maybe higher in, in nutrient density and have these maybe, you know, the, the sodium and a potassium that you would necessarily want. They might not even have that percentage because of, because of the, the bad soil.
Marty (14m 46s):
Yeah. You really wanna seek out the, the foods that taste amazing, cuz they've got the nutrients that, you know, that are actually extracted from the soil. And those foods are often grown in a, you know, regenerative environment where animals and plants are sort of more combined together that actually builds back the, the, the life and, and the, the microbiome of the soil because that plants and animals are together rather than, you know, our modern food system has just separated completely and both have become liabilities, cuz we're trying to do it so quickly. It feed so many people. But how long is that gonna last with, you know, the resources we've got.
Brian (15m 27s):
Yeah. And turning subjects a little bit about, you have an interesting blog about factors that influence Satie regarding carbs, fat fiber, alcohol, sugar. Yeah. Caffeine. I'm like, oh these are all things probably people are interested in. So you touch on hair, do carbs, make you fat. I'm curious your opinion of that. I know there's a lot of differing opinions regarding that.
Marty (15m 53s):
Yeah. Short answer is, is no, as long as they're within the overall energy balance. But what happens when we overdo carbs, we overfill our glucose fuel tank. We get blood sugar goes up, blood sugar falls down below what we're used to. And at that point we tend to have more intense cravings and make poorer food choices. So it's not really that the insulin is making us fat from that one carb meal. It's more that, Hey, you get hungry or when your blood sugar crashes. So people who are insulin resistant, we in our challenges, we guide them. If the blood sugar rises more than 30 milligrams per deciliter, 1.6 milli after eating to dial back the carbohydrate just to get a more stable energy level, but swinging to the other extreme.
Marty (16m 43s):
Isn't great either if you go all carbs are bad. Even protein spikes, insulin, I'm just gonna drink fat. Fat is not satiating as well. And you can see that post that basically the more, the higher percentage of fat in your diet, the, the more you're gonna eat. It's pretty straight relationship where whereas with, with carbohydrate, the, the greatest intake is between like 40, 50% non fiber carbs. And that's really, the rest is, is fat. And then that's the donuts and pizza and cookies that we all love to eat. But once you get down to, you know, 10 to 20% non fiber carbs, that seems to be optimal point where people tend to eat less.
Brian (17m 26s):
Okay. And what are your thoughts around vegetable oils? I just did a little bit of a, I, you know, I feel like the arrows starting to point towards, towards these over consuming vegetable oils, these seed oils and these high amounts of omega six, you know, little, little lake acid as, as it could be like the main target with regarding obesity. Yeah. You know, cuz it's like the potato necessarily might not be bad, but once it's fried and oil in these oils, then it, that that's when it really can cause some inflammation and, and be sort of the culprit regarding, you know, obesity.
Marty (18m 9s):
Yeah. I suppose the potato chip, the, the baked potato is that magic combination of carbs and fat that drive dopamine at a really high level. You get a dopamine response from eating carbs, you get a dopamine response from eating fat and they fill your, your carbs fuel tank and your fat fuel tank at the same time everybody gets, I love this food. Just keep it coming. It'll help us to survive winter. So I think that's the,
Brian (18m 32s):
Regarding the potato chip.
Marty (18m 35s):
Yeah. Yeah. So all those hyper palatable ultra process foods are this magic combination of fat and carbs together. So if you're gonna avoid anything, it's that, you know, hot carb part fat food, that is a big deal, but there's a lot of people that talk about the, the dangers of seed oils and poofs poly unsat fatty acids. And they've definitely gone from about 3% of our food systems, about 8%, but they're not a big contributor at the same time. The way that mono unsat fatty acids are. And if you look at fat overall and mono saturated fats over the last hundred years, it's just gone up and up and up and up and up as we've gone, Hey, we can take our industrialized food system, take our seeds and all these different canola and seed and, and et cetera, et cetera, etcetera, and create oils from them that we can sell and put into our foods.
Marty (19m 35s):
And they're really, really, really cheap and they're even subsidized. So I think that's the bigger driver is just that food manufacturers have found. And these mono and saturated seed oils are just incredibly cheap to put into ingredients. And they've just kept on as, as we've realized that, you know, people didn't want their high fructose corn syrup said, okay, we can replace that energy with seed oils, with flavorings and colors and et cetera, et cetera, and just create really cheap foods that we love to eat.
Brian (20m 6s):
Yeah. It's amazing. If you start looking at labels, when you go to the store and like, you're just, I mean, Palm oil and soybean oil and sunflower and grape seeding, you know, cotton seed, it's like, you know, it's probably in like 90% of packaged goods. I would imagine even the ones that you think are even healthy.
Marty (20m 27s):
Yeah. It's crazy. And like, if you look at the label of an Oreo cookie, it's, it's basically Palm seed oil, bunch of refined starch, refined grains, sugar and flavors and color. And there's not much else, but that's the basic formula for everything in the center aisles of the supermarket. So if you've got a food with a label that contains those three ingredients, it's basically designed to make you over.
Brian (20m 55s):
Yeah. What, what type of good fats should people maybe look for when they're either cooking or, or eating as opposed to these, you know, these, these seed oils.
Marty (21m 9s):
Yeah. Interesting question. Definitely. Amiga three from fatty fish is something that most people don't get enough of.
Brian (21m 16s):
Yeah.
Marty (21m 18s):
Interestingly, our Satir analysis indicated that cholesterol, you know, as much as we feared and demo demonized cholesterol, when we eat foods that naturally contain more cholesterol, we tend to eat less. So it's just crazy that going back to the SDA dogma and the whole food system, dog mother said, you should fear saturated fat and cholesterol. And that eliminates most animal based foods instantly. So therefore by our refined ultra processed agricultural products, thanks to the, you know, us department of agriculture, who's promoting the products of agriculture.
Marty (21m 58s):
So yeah. So it's just, wow, but I don't think you need to go out of your way. If you wanna lose weight to prioritize saturated fat or mono saturated fat or, or any particular fat, it's just, you know, if you're trying to lose weight, then dial back the total fat intake and you're trying to gain weight and you run around your golf course, then be really active. Then you know, a little bit of extra energy from fat will do a great job of feeling that.
Brian (22m 29s):
Yeah. I mean, if you look at the list of foods that contain like, you know, the most cholesterol, like you got egg yolk liver.
Marty (22m 36s):
Yeah.
Brian (22m 37s):
Caviar shrimp oyster through
Marty (22m 39s):
Great foods. Not that you shouldn't avoid them because they contain cholesterol. Right.
Brian (22m 43s):
Right. What, what about, well, omega threes, you mentioned so I mean caviar actually on top on the list there looking at at 23% cholesterol. Yeah. No omega3 rich. Yeah. Yeah. Sardines. I like sardines oyster salmon muscles, tuna shrimp.
Marty (23m 4s):
Yeah. They're all the foods that we're not getting enough of. And when up omega three and omega three to omega six ratios, crazy imbalanced. So yeah. We're not absorbing our omega3, that's so important for our brain because it is drowning in omega six feed oils, right. From all those refined ultra process products.
Brian (23m 24s):
I also just did a, a, a little micro podcast on, on tips for eating out. What type of tips would you give someone that's eating out? Because I would imagine that restaurant's cooking in these seed oils. Yeah. But I'm just curious, like what, what steps would you tell someone if they're eating out what to do?
Marty (23m 43s):
Yeah. I suppose choose foods where you can see, you know, there's a steak and there's veggies and you can see the, the food that it's not this massive processed lop, but it's fascinating when we go out, you know, I've got two type one diabetics in the family. Now my son got type one in, in December and you can see the added everything on the continuous glucose monitor instantly. And it's like, this is just stuff is full of sugar and the, the vegetable. So yeah, it's really hard to, it's much harder to eat well, if you're not cooking at home and at home, so go out, enjoy yourself, a few meals out, won't kill you.
Marty (24m 28s):
But if most of your food's out and you're trusting other people who are making food for a price to give you your food, you're entrusting them with a lot. And it's probably gonna be filled with cheap refined products. That aren't gonna be great for you.
Brian (24m 45s):
Yeah. I, I think that's like top of that should be top of mind is, is preparing your own food. I can understand, you know, people who have, you know, obviously kids and they're busy and they're working and, and it can be difficult sometimes when you're trying to get that meal. And towards the end of the day, when you're trying to feed like five others, I always say if the best thing to do is just to try to make something like big, like on Sunday, right?
Marty (25m 13s):
Yeah. Do a big batch cook and pre prepare. And then you you're limiting all that decision fatigues through the week. What I'm gonna eat. Well, I've got a salad that I made five of on the weekend and I can just, you know, win a in the office. You can take the, the salad and throw some canned tuna or whatever you like on it. And then you get a great meal or leftovers and yeah. Cook up big at home.
Brian (25m 36s):
Yeah. That's a good point. I think when you're like decision fatigue when it's through the end of the day and, and you have limited options, I think that's when bad things can happen. Totally,
Marty (25m 45s):
Totally.
Brian (25m 46s):
And like, and like you said, like I have an instant pot and don't use it as much during the summer. We tend to grill and, and do things like that are outside, but like the instant pot for the winter, I mean, you can make a lot of food and it can last a long time. I've actually been looking into an air fryer. Do you have one? Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
Marty (26m 6s):
We use it for the kangaroo patties and just about everything the Oven's broken at the moment. So we use the air fry all the time. It's a great way to have.
Brian (26m 14s):
And so how does it work? How does that, how does it just, how does it cook? It just,
Marty (26m 19s):
Just
Brian (26m 20s):
Forces hot magic
Marty (26m 21s):
Over it. And the, the it's on a grill sort of thing. So the fat falls through it. So even comes out a whole, you don't have to add a whole lot of extra fat,
Brian (26m 32s):
Which
Marty (26m 33s):
Is good. If you're, if your goal is, is weight loss.
Brian (26m 37s):
I mean, you can probably make almost anything on that air fryer, right?
Marty (26m 41s):
Yeah. They're great. They're great. We, we use it a heck. Heck of a lot. Least the wife uses the heck a lot. She's the amazing cook. I do the numbers with the food.
Brian (26m 49s):
Oh, she's the cook. Okay.
Marty (26m 50s):
No, she's amazing. Very lucky.
Brian (26m 53s):
Well, let's talk about two vices that a lot of people have. Yeah. Alcohol.
Marty (26m 58s):
Yep.
Brian (26m 58s):
And caffeine.
Marty (26m 60s):
Oh yeah. I, I was, was pleased to see that caffeine, you know, when people, a lot of people in our challenges go, oh, my blood sugar went up is, is the after my morning coffee is that are gonna spike insulin and make me fat, et cetera, etcetera. So, but it was interesting to see in, in that analysis with about 20,000 days of, of data from the optimizers, but people had a higher caffeine intake per calorie tended to eat fewer calories. So, you know, it's not like caffeine's making you hungrier. Obviously if you're having caffeine all through the night and your sleep is trashed and you wake up next day and you're having the coffee in the bagel to pick you up, that's not gonna be great.
Marty (27m 44s):
But you know, that caffeine is, is largely not a bad thing. And there's other beneficial things in coffee. So yeah. Don't necessarily fear the caffeine and enjoy your caffeine. Alcohol is, yeah, that, that was interesting analysis basically when we're inebriated where disinhibited and tend to, to eat more, we, we is often with friends and we celebrating and we just tend to make poorer food choices. So I don't think alcohol is a fuel is, is a bad thing other than it's basically pure empty calories, but we just tend to be more lapsed with our diet and tend to overeat. So yeah, the analysis showed that as the alcohol increases, we just, you know, tend to eat more and yeah.
Brian (28m 31s):
Yeah. And that, that seems to make sense. I mean, so do, would you say if someone has a glass of wine, like, you know, you, you're talking about getting inebriated, but what about someone that just has a little bit every night? It, did you find any with your research? Anything regarding that?
Marty (28m 50s):
I mean, a little bit of wine is probably not gonna be a biggie. And interestingly drops blood sugars. When my wife enjoys wine, I actually don't tolerate alcohol very well and feel a bit trash the next day, but
Brian (29m 2s):
Oh yeah. I'm like the same
Marty (29m 3s):
Way. When, when, when the wife has some wine, you actually see her blood sugar drop because the system holds back all the stored energy, including the glucose to allow that alcohol to be burnt up first. So you just gotta understand that it's, it's empty calories, it's a recreational right thing. It's not gonna provide you with nutrition and it may make you a little less disciplined with the rest of your diet and your habits may not stick as well at that point.
Brian (29m 33s):
Yeah. Very true. Yeah. My wine, my, my wine, my wife likes to drink wine almost every night and I'm like, I just, I don't do well with alcohol. I don't know.
Marty (29m 44s):
Yeah. Yeah. Me, me too. She seems to handle it fine, but yeah, I enjoy the taste occasionally, but right. The next day I'm always like, my brain is not quite as sharp and it's like MIS thinking really clearly keep bring that back. So me that's valuable. So I try not to indulge too
Brian (30m 1s):
Often. Yeah. Now I hear you. I know you touch up quite a bit on protein. Yeah. And it's yeah. I don't know if it's a highly debated thing. I think in some circles it is. I I've had quite a bit of protein individuals on here, like Dr. Don layman who's study been
Marty (30m 16s):
Studying. It's good, good interview. Yeah.
Brian (30m 18s):
Oh yeah. It was great. And he talked about the importance of amino acids and, and in particular losing. And I'm just curious your take on protein intake and amino acids.
Marty (30m 31s):
Yeah. I mean, I really liked his comment that rather than seeing, you know, protein, we need to see it as the individual amino acids. And they definitely all have a different role and you need enough of each and different foods have a different amino acid profile. And that's where the animal based foods and the whe protein tend to have a better outcome, that they tend to be more complete protein source. You're gonna get all the amino acids you need in that protein. But, but largely if you're getting enough absolute protein, you're gonna be okay. So if you're getting, you know, 30% of your diet from protein, 30% of your calories from protein, you don't really need to worry too much about the minutia, but right.
Marty (31m 17s):
When it comes to protein as a macronutrient, it's definitely the most satiating factor in your diet to increase your protein percentage. That's not necessarily more protein in grams that might, you need to, might need to prioritize protein. But it's more a matter of thinking about let's dial back the carbs, let's dial back the fat and prioritize protein, make sure I'm getting enough protein. And that increases the protein percentage. It's not about eating more butter or more bacon or more donuts to get your protein, cuz there's very little protein in that. You just have to progressively change your protein sources to just bump up your protein percentage slowly, but not too quickly.
Marty (31m 59s):
If you go too quickly, your body says, Hey, I needed some energy, gimme some energy. And this protein is really hard to convert to energy. So I'm gonna have some mega carb cravings after a few days of 50% protein. So it's like work out where you are now, are you taking 20% protein? Let's go for 25. Once you're happy with that and can sustain that for a week. Let's get 30%. If you're trying to lose weight and people just go, Hey, I'm this is great. I'm not hungry. I'm not thinking of food all the time. I don't have to think about restricting. I'm actually satisfied. I'm satiated and I'm not having those safe same cravings at the end of the day.
Brian (32m 36s):
Mm. Yeah. It's interesting. You, you talk about it a little bit on your blog and you show a picture of a piece of salmon and, and a and a donut and they each have the same amount of calories, right? Yeah. So they should just do the same thing, right? Yeah.
Marty (32m 49s):
They're totally different in your body. And they have totally different society responses, different protein, different mineral, different vitamin content. And just cuz the donut might have a few fortified, extra synthetic supplements thrown in that to make the label look better. Doesn't mean it actually gives you the same effect, especially all the other nutrients that we don't quantify that are probably beneficial in whole food.
Brian (33m 12s):
Yeah. I, I think that's why like I, there there's a camp of the calories in calories out. I just think it that's too much of a simplified view of it. What are your take on what's your take on that?
Marty (33m 23s):
Oh, great question. Yeah. I mean I'm an engineer. So I believe in energy balance, I believe in the laws of physics, you know, energy balance is a thing. If you eat more energy than you need, you you'll get bigger. If you manage to restrict, if you're in a concentration camp and don't have access to food, you will lose weight, but just simply counting calories and setting a limit saying I'm gonna, you know, I went online and got the target from a calorie counter, a macro calculator, and I'm just gonna try and sit under that limit it. It just drives you mad.
Marty (34m 4s):
Eventually if you don't change what you eat, if you don't manage the macros and what you eat, what you're really trying to do is dial back the carbs and fat while getting enough protein. So if you, if you wanna use the glucose in your blood, that's building up and you're getting type two diabetes. If you wanna get rid of the muffin top around your belly, but just extra fat, you need to dial back the carbohydrates in your diet and the fat in your diet as well while still getting protein and nutrients. Otherwise your cravings will drive your mad. And when, when push comes to shove, your instincts to your Libra always, always went out. So a brain's a really metabolically hungry organ and wants a whole lot of energy.
Brian (34m 44s):
Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. You show some great diagrams and, and just show like, you know, if you're doing 10% protein of your total calories, you know, bumping that up to 40 50%, right there can make a huge difference cuz you gotta sort of take it from something. And if you just dial back the fat a little bit and maybe dial back the carbs, you know, that can make a profound impact.
Marty (35m 8s):
Yeah, totally, totally. Yeah. And most people are down at the 15% protein, 15% is the average protein percentage, which also aligns with the maximum calorie intake. But if you just go from, like I said, where are you now? Let's bump it up just a little bit. If you make great progress, if you're losing it between half and 1% per week, tick don't change anything. But if you stall out and need to dial it in a little bit more, let's dial it up to 20% for this week. And that's what we do in the macros masterclass. And it just helps people to, to lose weight at a sustainable rate that doesn't drive them crazy from a lack of energy. That is unsustainable.
Brian (35m 47s):
Yeah. Well that's a good point. Well, besides protein, what are the, what other sort of are the, I guess the low hanging fruits that people can dive into as far as, you know, losing weight, maybe having more energy, like what, what I know we talked a little bit about the micronutrients. What are some of the, the, the things that sort of come to your top of mind when it comes to, you know, losing fat and maybe just having more energy?
Marty (36m 17s):
Yeah. I mean, definitely get enough protein from whole foods and that'll come with a ton of other beneficial nutrients. Non-starchy veggies are also great. They're really impossible to overeat and they're really filling, give you all the, the vitamins and minerals that are, are hard to overeat. The, the seafood is fantastic. Yeah. And, and it can be helpful to track that in chronometer for a little while and go, what, how much protein am I getting? Am I hitting my minimum nutrient target? And how can I, you know, what foods can I prioritize emphasize to get more of those? Another thing we've been using is data driven, fasting, which isn't really fasting.
Marty (36m 57s):
It's just sort of designed it to, I saw a lot of people overdoing the extended fasting, believing that fasting for longer is better, but when they get to the end, they end up really ravenously hungry. And if they're just saying, you know, I'm eating keto, keep my insulin down, they're overdoing the fats at that point. So not only if they missed out on the protein while they're fasting, they're overfilling their fat stores and not getting nutrients when they refe. So this can tend to lead to loss of lean muscle, mass and disorder to eating eventually. So after a couple of years of watching mainstream fasting figured that you could use basically a, a simple glucometer to measure your glucose before you eat, to understand what you need to eat and whether maybe you should just wait.
Marty (37m 47s):
So it's a really powerful indicator of do I need protein? Cuz my blood sugars a bit high, I've got plenty of glucose on board. So I don't need to eat carbs or is my blood sugar low? Maybe I can, little bit of carbs. Wouldn't be a bad thing to bump my blood sugar back up. If my blood sugar's way above normal for me, I could just wait a bit longer and wait for it to come back down to use that internal stored energy until I actually need to eat. So it's a really nice way of guiding people to dial in when they eat in the day to align with their circadian rhythm and their workouts and their, their family meals and the like to, to optimize the eating routine.
Brian (38m 30s):
Interesting. And, and I, you talk a little bit about Chron meter. It's actually something I, I never was one to track and I've been, I've been tracking and it's it's, it takes a little while to get used to it and like get into the habit of doing it cuz you're, I, I just never, it's not, so I never track calories and yep. But I think that it's, it's, it's a nice exercise to do for anybody, even if it's just for a few weeks, you know, just to see what, where you're at, what you're getting. Cause I, I found that I was undereating for the most part protein and probably even calories in general. I know calories are sort of,
Marty (39m 7s):
You need energy to run around the golf course. Right?
Brian (39m 11s):
Well, I, yeah, I don't run around the golf course, but, but I I'm, I feel like I'm always doing something, so I'm pretty active. So I felt like I was probably, you know, undereating and also undereating protein. Yeah. So I've been, I've been trying to up it and see how that makes me feel. And, and that's another point I always bring up is just sort of that self experimentation. Yeah. That's fascinating. You know, there's people like I'm gonna interview someone tomorrow, who's carnivore and it's been working for him, but you know, there's other people who run better on carbs on a higher carb, you know, whole food diet than maybe someone like individual I'm interviewing tomorrow. So I think there has to, there has to be a little self experimentation also taking, you know, getting blood panel worked on and you know, you know, sort of tracking things just to see where you're at.
Brian (40m 0s):
Right?
Marty (40m 1s):
Mm. Yeah. I mean, blood panels are interesting just cuz once potassium and sodium and your nutrients in your blood are low, you're really in trouble. Cuz if you kidney can't retain the sodium potassium and calcium in your bloodstream, your kidneys broken, basically it's not a sign that you have a lower intake is too low necessarily, but a sign that you've got kidney issues. So a better way to do it, like you're saying is to tracking chronometer and say, am I giving my body what it needs to do? What it needs to do? And if you're giving a little bit too much, then really not too much, you know, too much micronutrients from whole foods.
Marty (40m 45s):
It's not really a thing, right? If, if you get too much, your body will just flush it out and say, thanks for that. I didn't need it, but you really need enough of all those micronutrients to make sure you can do everything your body wants to do everything it needs to do in the short term and the long term, which is really important. I think a lot of people are just getting enough to survive and they feel okay, but the body doesn't have enough micronutrients to prioritize the long term repair mechanisms that are critical for long term survival. But yeah, the, the do we need car or plant based? It's all fascinating. And you different people seem to thrive. And that's been fascinating for me to say, what are the common elements and the carnivores.
Marty (41m 25s):
That's great. Cuz they're getting heaps of available protein. So it works like magic, but you got Paul Saladino now adding honey and whatever else, cuz he needs that glucose to be really active and fuel his activity. And yeah. So fascinating to watch the belief based dogma in the, in the nutrition scene and go, what's common to all these people. What, what did they actually need from their diet? Why is it working for them?
Brian (41m 53s):
Right. Yeah. I, I, I, I tend to like try not to, to be dogmatic on like my podcast and try to just bring guests and let other people make their own decisions. Yeah. And I don't think, and like even like with Paul Saldino, you know, I give him credit cuz you know, came out with a book and you know, full on carnivore and realize that, you know, who's giving, having, I think poor thyroid and you know, maybe adrenal fatigue, but whatever it was, you know, adding back the fruit and the, and honey, I believe he added back really has helped him, you know, thrive. So
Marty (42m 31s):
Yeah. Yeah. And everybody's on their own journey and it's interesting to experiment.
Brian (42m 35s):
Yeah. Well this is great. Marty, what, any lasting tips? I, I know you're at optimizing nutrition.com and I get your email. So I know you have like you get, you have a great blog, so definitely check that out. What do you have going on? As far as I know you have the data driven fasting and you have some micros and macros classes. Yeah. What can people learn about? Yeah,
Marty (42m 58s):
Yeah, yeah. Datadriven fasting challenge just using your glucose to guide when you eat and that's been fantastically popular. People just love the simplicity of just checking their blood sugar before they eat, to validate their hunger. And yeah. Then we get the macros and micros class dialing in your macros sounds simple, but it's actually quite complex for a lot of people. So just to guide people to track what they currently eat and just nudge that in the direction that they need to go for a few weeks. And like, as you said, tracking sucks forever, but occasionally doing it for months, learning about your diet, adding new foods that work for you can be really helpful.
Marty (43m 39s):
And then you can live in the free world without it cuz you understand what actually works for your body. And then with the micro is masterclass, which takes that to the next level to help people dial in all their micronutrients and assess what their current intake is and what foods and meals will help them fill in their priority nutrient gaps, which is that the people that dives into that love it. And it's completely fascinating. So I think hopefully that's the next frontier of nutrition that that's the common element that works. Everybody, everybody who's thriving is getting all the nutrients they need from their food. And everybody who's not thriving is, is probably under eating nutrients and having to overeat food to get those nutrients that they need.
Brian (44m 22s):
Yeah. And it's, and, and just on, on the micros, like sodium, something like that, it's really like, you mentioned tough to overdo it. Your body's just gonna excrete it.
Marty (44m 30s):
Yeah. And if you try to have it by the table spoonful, you'll be off in the toilet and getting rid of it really quickly along with all the other seeds, your apes, so, right, right. Yeah. Your body automatically regulates how much you retain and how much tastes good. And hopefully once you get rid of all the processed hyper palatable colored and flavored foods, you can go, okay, I actually have a craving for that right now and cuz that's what your body needs. And that was probably how it all works before we had this industrialized food system.
Brian (45m 1s):
Yeah. Excellent. Well Marty, thanks for coming a second time around. Glad to, to see that. Glad to see that you've gotten younger over the years. Geez dude. And probably from your, you know, quitting your day job and just focusing on some things that you love to do here, right?
Marty (45m 19s):
Yeah. Cheer. Yeah. Pleasure to talk to you Brian,
Brian (45m 22s):
And definitely check out his micro masterclass that that's something that I think would be worth everyone's time. So yeah. Well great. Glad we could connect and thanks for coming on the show.
Marty (45m 34s):
Cheer. Thanks Brian.
Brian (45m 37s):
Thanks for listening to the get lean E clean podcast. I understand there are millions of other podcasts out there and you've chosen to listen to mine and I appreciate that. Check out the show notes@briangrn.com for everything that was mentioned in this episode, feel free to subscribe to the podcast, share it with a friend or family member that's looking to get their body back to what it once was. Thanks again, and have a great day.
