0 (1s): Coming up on the get lean, eat clean podcast 1 (4s): Lectins today, I think have been highly problematic because many of the traditional foods that we're eating in mass say corn, rice, soy. These are very high lectin foods, and if they're not prepared prep properly, then this toxin slowly accumulates, and it's not a toxin you're going to feel. You're not going to feel it for a very long time.
0 (26s): Hello and welcome to the get lean eat clean podcast. I'm Brian grin, 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 week I interviewed Mary Rutter. Who's a seasoned medical nutritionist, researcher and philanthropist who specializes in metabolic immune and nervous system disorders. She's the director of nutrition for enable your healing. Captain soup.com, cows for kids.com, the rains method and the back to joy program. She travels the globe studying traditional diets and seeing patients online via her private practice. 0 (1m 12s): We discussed Mary's quest back to health, her morning routine, along with what we can learn from the tribes, the advantages of cold therapy, the gaps, diet for healing and what is a lectin-free diet. Anyways, I really enjoyed my interview with Mary. I know you will too, and thanks so much for listening and enjoy the show. All right. Welcome to the Gatling, eat clean podcast. My name is Brian grin, and I have Mary Ruddick on all the way from you're in Columbia right now. Correct. That's great. And how long are you there for? 1 (1m 46s): I've known at least two weeks, but maybe longer. We'll see. 0 (1m 51s): Okay, excellent. And I know you do a lot of different things, director of nutrition for enable your healing and do a lot of retreats. What, what sort of got you into the health game and, and all the different roles that you play? 1 (2m 7s): Oh, I fell into it like so many people do. I grew up as an athlete and I was teaching yoga. So I thought I was in the health game, but then I went to, I went through a very serious illness that after contracting an infection, when I was living in The Bahamas that left me fully disabled for 12 years, and really no Western medicine was helpful for that. So when, when I was dealing with my Oregon's going downhill and being bedbound, I started looking at diets more seriously and really questioning if my diet was as healthy as I thought. And it ended up after a lot of trial and error, about four years of trial and error and lots of different diets and lifestyle modifications. 1 (2m 49s): I finally got into remission through an old Russian diet and that kind of spurred this whole journey of working in the field of nutrition from there, I working with clients and then once I was in remission for a few years, I started to feel a lot more safe. And I went back to traveling and I went back to do quite a bit of research to see if, you know, people really are as healthy as they say in parts of the world. And, and if some of these things that have been written about different tribes are true. So I've been spending a lot of my time doing that, and that's why I'm in south America. Now I'm hoping to go see the Embera tribe, which lives between Colombia and Panama. And they're, they're very unique because they are one of the few tribes or communities that has never been pushed off of their land. 1 (3m 37s): You know, most of the communities we go and see, they may still be living their traditional way, but they don't have access to their traditional food a lot of the time, because they've been moved due to national park development or urban developments, and these folks are still there. So fingers crossed I can get in, but if not, there's a lot of other communities to go and see. 0 (3m 59s): Yeah. Wow. So how do you go about finding the different tribes and like, and then sort of allowing you into their life and to research and learn about them. How does that go about 1 (4m 10s): Very good question. Cause that's one I always get socially. So we might as well covered on a pocket. Really, really. It's just through a lot of research, a lot of meet and greet. It's wonderful when you travel as much as I do, you end up meeting pretty fascinating people and through their connections, a lot of times you can meet different people. So it's mostly through friendships and some of these groups are harder to get to than others. And you know, my main goal when going to visit a community is to get a proper translator. That's really what I'm looking for. Right. So, yes. So for instance, when you're in Tanzania, when, when Brian and I were in Tanzania earlier this year, there's a hundred and twenty six, seven different tribes or communities there in 127 different languages. 1 (4m 55s): So they have Swahili as a bridge language, but if you use Swahili to go visit a tribe, you're missing quite a lot. The translation is not going to be perfect. So I usually try to find someone who grew up right next to the village was playing with the kids, knows the language well enough to do, to have jokes, right? So they're very strongly commandment. And, and then we go from there and that's, that's typically how it goes. So I don't tend to do the organized tours. 0 (5m 22s): Wow. And what, what, what are some of the things you learned from like the HODs that you can apply to yourself or for maybe clients and things like that? 1 (5m 32s): Well, I think I learned a different definition of health. The, the Hudson, any other groups have this independence from striving this full satisfaction. And I don't just mean that emotionally. I mean, it physically, they don't really need water or food. I mean, they, they just are never in a sense of lack. And so, you know, they don't food for the next day and they're not worried about it. They know they'll get food tomorrow and they're not hungry, so they're fine. And with water, they can go for ages and just not thing, Tim Noakes has written on this the best. And, and I would be a rookie in comparison to him on the topic of water and hydration. 1 (6m 16s): But it's quite fascinating because with each of these groups that I go to, although they each have different lifestyles and different diets and different cultural beliefs, they don't require much water. And none of them are in food scarcity, which is the opposite of what we would think. 0 (6m 32s): Yeah. Is it because they're so full in other areas of their lives that they don't feel like they need to be filled with food all the time. And, and, and they know that eventually they've probably gone days and days and days without food and water and been completely fine. So they don't really panic or anything like that. 1 (6m 50s): I think they're very well balanced. I think they have so many amino acids, right? They have these great proteins, which make their feel good chemicals and you've done fasting. So when your, when your blood sugar is balanced and you fast, you don't even think about food, you forget about it. And when your blood sugar is imbalanced and you fast, it's difficult, you're hangry, you're terrible to be around. You know, your mind is on a loop of what you can eat as soon as your fast breaks. And so I think they're actually just very chemically well-balanced from the way that they eat and live and, and, you know, the emotional support helps as well. But I really think it's more the physical balance that they have. 0 (7m 31s): Yeah. And what, what, what were the things that they, what were the main things that they were eating and, and if they weren't drinking water, were they drinking something else? 1 (7m 40s): No, not really. They all drink very small amounts, which is finally answering a question that I'd had for a long time, because the disease that I had made me incredibly thirsty, it offsets your vested precedent and your parasympathetic and sympathetic system. And so you're just constantly dehydrated and wanting to drink. And I remember going into antique stores and wondering like, this cannot be historically correct. All the antique stores have tiny glasses. And when you travel through Europe, water is rarely served. It's small amounts. What is going on in America, where we're carrying around jugs of water and we're competing with who can drink more each day. So I've always kind of wondered about this. 1 (8m 22s): I think they're not dehydrated the way we are. And I think there's a few factors for that. For one with the tribes, like the Hudson who are primarily eating mostly meets at least three seasons of the year and fat that doesn't dehydrate the body, right. A carbohydrate requires four times as much water to process as a protein or a fat. So depending on what you're eating, you're going to have a different water requirement. But what I think plays more into it, if I'm honest and again, this is my theory. So this could be wrong is that we're constantly around the world. And not even in ways we realized like light pollution and sounds, and not being around family. 1 (9m 4s): We have a lot of stressors that we wouldn't think of as emotional stress and when we're stressed, we get dehydrated. So I think that's really playing into our higher need for water in addition to the modern diet. 0 (9m 18s): Interesting. And is this something you've implemented with yourself where you're like, wow, I don't need to drink as much water or cause you know, it's such a mixed message, right. That we hear. 1 (9m 31s): Yeah. I think for me, it's really changed through the years. If I think if you're thirsty, you should drink. I mean, being dehydrated is a terrible thing. And most people I meet have very imbalanced electrolytes, so they're not uptaking water into the cell properly. So I see a great deal of dehydration. So it's certainly not that we should just stop drinking, but I have noticed the healthier that I get and the longer I'm out of illness, the less I need water. So for instance, I never would have even gone to the grocery store without a bottle of water before and now I'll get on a 13 hour flight and not think about it and not have water so I can go longer periods of times. And sometimes it's more challenging. 1 (10m 11s): Like there was one episode I was hiking Mount Olympus and I didn't know I was going to be hiking Mount Olympus. So I didn't bring anything. And I was very thirsty. We left in the morning, so I hadn't had water yet. And so I just practiced the Russian method of dry fasting and that, that was a mental challenge, but it worked. Whereas usually it's more natural, but if I'm thirsty, I will drink water. 0 (10m 35s): And, and how do you, like, I know you're traveling all over. How do you maintain a healthy lifestyle to travel? I think that's like a common question that comes up along with a lot of people is what, what things do you do to prep yourself, to live a healthy lifestyle while you're traveling? 1 (10m 50s): That's a great question. I start off every day exactly the same. So I maintain a morning routine and I build my life around that. So that really helps to keep my stress low. And it's a good barometer for me to see if I'm getting tired. If there's any burnout. If I need some rest, if I need to not do so many tours and take a day off. So I work out every morning, I meditate, I do a gratitude journal. I get outside. It's nice. I'll go for a walk or I'll do light therapy, cold shower. So I have a big morning routine that I do every day. And then that honestly keeps me happy. Cause when you, I don't know about you, but if you start your day thinking of nothing, but what you're appreciating, it's hard to look at anything you're going through as a negative. 1 (11m 31s): And with, with my lifestyle being such a blessing and such a choice. I mean, this is, this seems like a dream come true for a girl who was in bed for so many years like this, this is amazing. So it's a little hard to be like, oh man, it's, it's tough to be in Columbia right now. I can't really complain. So that really helps. But the other ways that I maintain health is through what I eat. So I try to keep my stress low through reframing rather than changing the circumstance and the stances and then what I eat. So if I'm in a tropical region, like I am right now, I'm going to be deep in ketosis. I'm going to have like a six point I know of good ptosis and I do intermittent fasting. 1 (12m 12s): And I've done that for a very long time. That's really helpful for the immune system. I'm not rigid about either of these things. So if I'm suddenly hungry, one morning I will eat breakfast, but, but on the whole I do the intermittent fasting and then I maintain deeper levels of ketosis. If I'm in a tropical region with lots of infections, like I'm in the rainy season right now, which is when all the bad stuff is here. So if I'm in France, I may not be, I may go out of ketosis. I don't need that antiviral quality as much. 0 (12m 43s): Right. And then as far as well, I love hearing that you have such a regimented morning routine, because like you said, if you, if you start the day, right, it's hard for it to, you know, things can come up. Right. But when you, when you really get after it, like I was just in California and just getting up and walking along the water and the beach and jumping in the water, which no one else was going in. The water I was jumping in, it was like 50, probably mid fifties. I was like, wow, what a great way to start the day. I mean, do you do a lot of cold shower or cold plunging where your places you go, 1 (13m 17s): So I've never done cold pumpkin. I would love to, but I've been cold showers for the last 15 years. 0 (13m 22s): Yeah. Which is easy because everyone can do that. You're not always going to have a cold tub to jump into at least. Right. 1 (13m 29s): Exactly. I've never had that. And I think because I move around so much, I've never been able to find it. And then when I was, when I was sick and learning about cold therapy, I honestly learned about it through IRS Veda. And, and so there were no called therapy centers. Now there's lots of them. I I'm really behind the ball on that, but I just do the cold therapy and then pull dips in the ocean whenever I'm by an ocean. Yeah. 0 (13m 50s): Yeah. It's such a great way. I mean, you don't, you go, you do that. You don't need any caffeine to start your day. 1 (13m 57s): Oh no. And you know, that's actually part of why I started it. So with the condition that I had, not only could I not tolerate a hot shower, but the cold would wake me up when nothing else did. So there were many days where I would take six, eight cold rinses a day just to get like a little boost, you know, as I was getting better, it's a crate little energy starter. If you're tired. 0 (14m 18s): Yeah. It's such a great like pack. That's easy. Everyone can do it. Everyone can take a cold shower, you know? 1 (14m 24s): Yes, exactly. And for, for the ladies out there, it's not like you have to get your hair wet, you know, you can go next down. 0 (14m 32s): Yeah. It's funny you bring that up. My wife's like I was, I would go in and in the ocean and in, in the morning it was cold and she, she was all up for doing it, but she didn't want to get her or her head wet. But I will say it is a little bit of a difference when you get your head wet when you're doing a cold plunge, as opposed to keeping your head above water. But 1 (14m 50s): That's so much more refreshing, but oh my gosh, does it take an hour or two to dry her hair? So I understand. 0 (14m 58s): Yeah. And then the journaling I love and meditation, how do you implement that? Do you, do you have a gratitude journal? Yeah, 1 (15m 4s): I do. I, I take it everywhere with me. I use this remarkable and I write for about half an hour, a day, what I'm appreciating and what I'm grateful for, because I really found when I was sick that I could have a beautiful life despite the illness, if I framed it differently. And if I got my head in the right space and so I've kept that and it's, it's really kept my stress low, whereas otherwise this could be considered a high stress life. So I can't imagine it's something I'll ever abandoned. 0 (15m 33s): Yeah. And, and you talked about, you know, your own, it was how many, how many years it was 12 years. Did you say, and, and you got out of it just from changing your perspective and changing the way you ate, would you say yes. 1 (15m 48s): Yeah. Lifestyle and diet. It was really both. I had been implementing the lifestyle things for about four years before I found the appropriate diet, but had I not been doing those, I don't think I would have gotten through the diet that healed me because it was, it was so incredibly difficult to do that diet. It's simple, but it was very, very hard. And so if I didn't have the emotional fortitude and the mental fortitude brought through from the lifestyle things I would have failed. So they were both very necessary. 0 (16m 16s): And what, and you said it was a Russian diet, I'm just curious as 1 (16m 19s): It was a Russian diet, it was a Russian soup diet created by Dr. Natasha McBride called the gaps diet. It's called either gut and physiology syndrome or gut in psychology. And I did it. You can do a hundred different versions of the diet. There's some main principles like zero starches. You don't feed bacteria and these kinds of things. But I did a, an unusual version. I did a ketogenic version where you just eat a soup for each meal. 0 (16m 44s): Wow. And I notice you have a company, is it called captain soup? 1 (16m 49s): Yeah. It's not my company, but I make their recipes. 0 (16m 54s): Oh, well. And did that come about because of the, your whole, what happened with yourself in using soup as healing if you want it to? 1 (17m 2s): No, it's so funny about that. So in, you know, I never met anyone who had my condition for several years and then I never met anyone else who that healed themselves through soups without the guidance of someone until about eight years into remission. And I'm living in Eugene and I have a brick and mortal Eugene, Eugene, Oregon brick and mortar office, you know, where I'm seeing clients. And one of my clients introduces me to Brian who's captain Brian of captain soup. And he had healed himself through eating nothing but soups as well. And so she introduced us and we immediately hit it off and started playing in the kitchen and creating new recipes. So it's been a really fun, playful project and a great collaboration, but no, it didn't, it actually didn't come out of my story. 1 (17m 48s): It was more of a unique kismet meeting of two souls that had a similar journey. Wow. 0 (17m 56s): And, and, and actually my thought regarding supers, that would be great if you're traveling a lot to have that, bring it with you. Right. Cause all those soups in the isn't are they all, you know, you can bring them pretty well. You've got to keep them frozen though. Right. 1 (18m 10s): It's hard though. I'll tell you what I, cause I have a lot of clients who, who need to be on the soups as well. And they're pretty easy to travel with. And for Brian, the reason why he did the soups was because he was in the military at the time. And so he would fly hundreds of Joseph's soup to whatever country he was in. And then he would eat that for me. Now, though, I have to say, you know, in other countries, kitchens, bathrooms, they're so different. Even in a kind of fancy countries, the kitchens are tiny and there's often not an oven. You have the stove. So it's much easier to eat one pot meals. So it's great to go to the grocery store and get things, just make it a pot of soup and then eat off of that. So it's, it's, it saves you dishes. It saves you time and it is easy with traveling. 0 (18m 52s): Yeah, no, that's great. That does make a lot, if someone that's trying to get into healthy eating, I feel like soups is a good way to go, you know? Cause it takes time. One thing I find actually with myself is sometimes like I eat a lot of carnivore. Keto is, you know, I'm not, you know, you can, I'm sort of a fast eater, but like with soup takes time, like you, you sort of slow yourself down and it's more intentional and you know, yeah. In the winter months I like to make a lot of soups and stuff. So I love the fact that you're doing that with that, with that company. I'll definitely put a link in the show notes for that. And I noticed you have an educational course regarding elected free keto diet. 0 (19m 34s): Is this something that you align yourself with on a day-to-day basis? 1 (19m 39s): Yeah. So yeah, I personally avoid the lectins. Must've been a restaurant I'm that rigid about it, but with my clients, I most certainly do. Yeah. My policy, when I, you know, when I first started working was I didn't want to sell anything because I wanted people to know if I was recommending something, it was genuine. So when captain soup approached me, it was different because it was like, well, I know that works. And then, and then I got so busy. My wait list was so long. So I started to try to put my knowledge into video courses because a lot of people are like me I'm if I read a book, I'll do it. Whereas other people need handholding. And those are the ones who come to my practice. Right. So I've been really working over the last few years on getting as much of this documented for people that are self-starters. 1 (20m 24s): So I have a practitioner training program where I teach doctors, nutritionists and all of that, where they do, and then they can take that to their patients and their clients. And then I have a few different courses for things like long COVID and decide to Nomia. And then I have the general ketogenic lectin-free program, which I did with Courtney Johnson. And that is just an excellent overall course, which goes through history of like cholesterol. It's a more knowledge-based course. So if someone wants the knowledge in addition to the how to, for that specific section. 0 (20m 57s): Yeah. Wow. I think that's great. I think it's all about educating yourself, right? You don't really, I just had a Dr. Bradley Campbell, he's holistic doctor in the area that I live in and I've gone to him a bunch and you know, he has all this education, but a lot of times the doctor that you're going to probably doesn't know a lot, just the traditional doctor, nothing, you know, nothing against them, but they're just not trained the same way. Like a holistic practitioner would be trained, you know? 1 (21m 26s): Yes. Yeah. They just don't have it. We have different different fields of knowledge. And so if we can merge that, then we can get this to the patients a little faster. I really like this to be household and household knowledge. That's kind of my goal so that people, if they get sick, they can turn it around quickly. Yeah. 0 (21m 45s): And what about, I'm just curious and you have another company that you're aligned with cow it's non-profit right. Cows for kids. 1 (21m 55s): It's not a nonprofit, actually. We tried to set it up as that. And instead we ended up doing it as a project. So what we do is we just pull money from donations and then a hundred percent though, towards the animals for the villages when Brian and Jay and Draco and I all four through Africa this last year and went to all those different tribes and communities, the ones that we went to that were still in perfect health, were there most likely the last generation, if something isn't done about their perfect health, because the kids are mandated now to go to government regulated schools, which we would think are good, right. But it's not great because at the schools, the government is feeding them and it's not their traditional diet. There's all sorts of other issues about that as well. 1 (22m 37s): But that would probably take some time to go into so what this organization does or, or what this project does is we pull money and then we buy animals so that the different villages can have their traditional diet in the school. So if it's a chaga school, they're having a chaga diet. If it's a Mussai school, they're having a Messiah diet, we give the first round of animals to the village. They're already raising the animals, it's their traditional diet. And then those animals have babies. So it's not something that you have to keep funding, right. It's just a starter. So we're doing that. And we've already started actually. So the we've fed 400 kids in, in Zambia, just in the last month. 1 (23m 19s): And, and that's been really good in a small, in a small village and now we're working on a Maasai village. So we have the funding for four of the main. And then I tried to take this worldwide so that we can continue to keep these pockets of areas that are in perfect health. So we do that and it's a lot of volunteer time on Brian and I, because we don't take any of the money we pay for on flights, we pay for everything ourselves, but, but we're also including a educational program to counteract this food pyramid, this vegetable oil movement, this kind of thing for them to understand the importance of their own traditions. And that's it. So they'll be educating themselves. We're just going to help them implement that with the children and see like, you know, this food that our ancestors have been eating, there's reason for it. 1 (24m 6s): And this keeps us healthy in this way. And this is why we're strong and, and all of that, so that they have some of that knowledge and it doesn't get lost. 0 (24m 14s): That's a great cause. So are you seeing that with a lot of the tribes that you visit that they're just getting influenced by Western society? And eventually these tribes will just get a lot of maybe that, you know, which is sort of the sad thing, get a lot of the disease that's happening in, you know, in the states and things like that. 1 (24m 36s): Yes, yes. So that is what's happening. As they're getting pushed off of their lands, they're really being influenced by modern foods and, and the illnesses are slow to creep in. So what I usually see is kind of European history in the last 300 years. So if you go back 300 years ago, you'd see people getting infections, but they still lived into old age. It was common to die from old age, even in our grandparents and great grandparents generation. It was pretty common to die from old age. And when illnesses start creeping in, it's usually a few generations in, on the modern diet, at least one, but often two to four generations in. And that would be like the diabetes and things like that in old age. 1 (25m 17s): So we're talking like above 70, you'll start to see that, but they still tend to live to about 90. And then there's a huge shift that changes after that were the chronic illness sets in. The neat thing to watch though, is that when they're on their traditional diets and living in their traditional way, they are immune to the infections. They don't get the African sleeping sickness, the malaria, any of these kinds of things. They don't die in childbirth. So you can really see the pattern. And it's, it's quite clear the more places I go to, it's the same pattern over and over and over again, which I think is pretty empowering for us to say that we can do a lot with our foods so that we're not susceptible to both chronic disease, but also immediate colds, flus of COVID, things like that. 1 (26m 1s): Yeah. 0 (26m 2s): Yeah. And also too, like the difference, I was just talking to someone else that I met on my trip, the difference between the regulation that's being done in the states first or first Europe, like Europe, is banning all these artificial flavorings and, and, you know, just colorings and things that go into the foods as opposed to the United States is like a little bit behind from that. You can eat certain things in Europe and it's fine. And then eat the same thing in the United States. And you might not feel good. 1 (26m 32s): It's totally different. And I think it's cultural. The more I travel, the more I see the archetypes, the countries then how each has this kind of beautiful benefit and then downfall the beautiful benefit of most of Europe is that still rooted in tradition. They really honored traditional foods and tradition. The downside of that is that invention. Isn't great, right? You're not encouraged to do new things, whereas in America, oh, you want to invent something great. What was your background? We don't care. You doing something awesome. Now this is fantastic, right? We really liked that kind of invention. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps and the loss of tradition with that. We're allowing all these modern foods and we get excited about anything new, like a beyond meat or a food coloring. 1 (27m 18s): And so I think it's very cultural actually, instead of conspiratorial, as to why we have this problem with our food and, and why we've really lost touch with any sort of tradition in, in, in ways of eating. 0 (27m 34s): Yeah. Loss of tradition perhaps, and then driven by the dollar perhaps a little bit too. 1 (27m 39s): I completely, I mean, we are a financial system and the food industry is an industry. And by definition industry, its goal is financial. So yes, absolutely. 0 (27m 49s): Yeah. I just a small micro podcast on, on how snacking is becoming like an well, not becoming, it has grown, you know, in the seventies, people were just having three square meals. Now, you know, big food wanted you to think that snacking was actually healthy and that, you know, you should have six meals a day and obviously that's just a good environment for them to sell more food. 1 (28m 10s): Yes. And it's one of the worst things we can do for our health. Because even if those aren't unhealthy snacks, even if they're not junky snacks, every time we eat, no matter how low carb it is, it's spiking your insulin, which sets you up for insulin resistance. And that can turn into type 1, 2, 3 diabetes, along with all the other conditions associated with that kidney disease and many of the chronic diseases of age. So the snacking is really one of the hugest problems that I see. 0 (28m 37s): Yeah. And what would you say some of the talk about like the blue zone myths that go on w w what, you know, the blue zone was studied a while back, right? It was regions of land that just showed like how they ate. Cause they like were like the longest living areas, but what are some of the myths that came out of that? I know there were some misconceptions regarding that. 1 (29m 3s): There's so many, I mean, one let's take the one in Greece because I spent the most time there in academia or eco Ikaria, as we would say, it's an island in Greece. And, and to be honest, it's not that different from a lot of Greece. If you go to most Greek villages, people are very old when they die. They're very old. So I'm not so sure it's the oldest living place in Greece, but it is the one that was spotlighted. And, you know, they were highlighted as this kind of like being eating culture and the grapes honestly eat it all. They eat all the foods. So you can't classify them under any diet, but they missed a lot of things on the questionnaire through loss of translation. 1 (29m 44s): Like they didn't ask them about dairy consumption, which is massive. They eat a block of cheese between each meal for each person. All right. They all make their own cheeses as well. So that's, that's a large part of their calories. They did not factor in several of the animals that they eat on a regular basis that it Koreans hunts, pork and meat is abundant. There seems to be this pervasive myth, that meat is a hard to get thing in the world. And that certainly people would have lived off of crops instead. And that's actually the opposite in regions. Like this crops are very hard to grow on an island like this. You're not going to have wheat. You're going to be eating things like sheep and goats and fish and dairy and wild greens that grow three times, three seasons of the year, mushrooms, fruit in the summer. 1 (30m 34s): That's what you're going to be eating. So in some root vegetables. So there's a lot of misconceptions. People really just get kind of, it's like a, an ear worm that, that meat was hard to get, or animal food was hard to get and everywhere I go, it's actually quite the opposite. So, so there, it was quite meat heavy. And to be honest, I didn't expect it to be, I thought it would be more accurate from the book I really did because Greeks do eat a lot of carbohydrates throughout the main land. They're not a low called carb culture. They do nose to tail eating, always. There's always liver and you eat the eyeball and all of this. 1 (31m 16s): And then there's honey, there's yogurt. I mean, it's, it's nose to tail eating with seasonal plants and that's normal. So I expected to see a lot more beans and things like that. And so we stayed a lot in houses. We went to dinners. What surprised me the most were the restaurants. I thought the restaurants would cater to this kind of blue zone ideology. And so I thought, okay, well maybe in the houses, they eat like this because the grandma's cooking, but maybe in the restaurants, we're going to see more of the beans and all of these things we've been told. And even there, it was like poor kids, stew and liver as the special. So, so it was really quite, quite different. And I don't, I don't think it was intentional. 1 (31m 58s): I think it's just when people haven't had an eye for studying food history, it's easy to, to misunderstand what's happening. For instance, in the blue zone in Costa Rica. One thing that nobody looked at is what, as the cooking fats that will tell you a lot about a civilization. I was just saying, yes. Yeah, exactly. I was just in Mexico visiting some of the Aztec ruins and our guide was talking about how they ate a lot of plants there. And I was like, okay, what did they cook in? And he's like, oh, duck fat. And I was like, okay, so they were eating duck. And he was like, oh yes, yes. But they never talk about that. Right. So if you go into what fat is being used, you find a lot like within the Costa Rica that I just mentioned that blue zone, it was pork fat. 1 (32m 43s): That was the traditional fat. So, so you can see that it's small things can be missed that make a big difference as to whether you think it's plant-based animal based or it's a real mix, which is often the case. 0 (32m 56s): Right. So some of them were eating plants, but they were cooking get in, in duck fat. So it's sort of both, right. 1 (33m 3s): That's right. That's right. 0 (33m 5s): Yeah. And I think, you know, it can go a long way if you cook for yourself or if you, even, if you go to a restaurant and you ask them what they cook in, like I was at a restaurant last night. I don't love to go out to dinner, but sometimes, you know, it's a social thing. I just asked them to saute whatever I was. I think I was, they were taking like broccoli or mushrooms. I guys just asked them that sauteed in butter and not oil. And, you know, it's just those little things that you can do that can go a long way. 1 (33m 35s): Huge way. Yeah. Because there are fat informs our cellular membrane. And if your listeners have not gone into the cellular membrane, get ready to get your mind blown, your fatty acid layer. There is very important. So, so yeah, small things like that, getting food steamed cooked in butter will go a very long way. 0 (33m 53s): Yeah. And why don't we touch a little bit on lectin-free eating? I think, I mean, I, this is not something I probably even do on purpose, but you know, I've gotten away from grains and things like that. Maybe explain to the audience a little bit about what that's all about 1 (34m 12s): And if you're having to, so lectins are one of the plant toxins, plants have many different ways to defend themselves and some are pesticides or herbicides. Some are to protect themselves against mammals, lectins, Arthur protect against mammals. And there is short living toxin that goes into our body. It's a sticky protein. So it will stick to the walls of our gut. And in layman's terms, it will Pierce a hole. Now there are good and bad lectins. So I'm not talking about all lectins here. There's not a word to discern the two, like there's a lectin and avocado that doesn't hurt us. So, so not all of them are bad, but they're sticky proteins. And they deregulate the nervous system and the immune system. 1 (34m 54s): So they can cause a lot of problems there. Now in traditional societies, all the ones that I've studied, they either didn't eat lectin, rich foods, or if they did, which many did they had cooking methods or preparation methods to remove the lectin. Furthermore, they did a further step, which was eat another food alongside with it that would actually block the lectin. It would stick to the Lexan and pull it through the guts so that it didn't touch yourselves. So lectins today, I think have been highly problematic because many of the traditional foods that we are eating in mass say corn, rice, soy. These are very high lectin foods. And if they're not prepared prep properly, then this toxin slowly accumulates, and it's not a toxin you're going to feel, you're not going to feel it for a very long. 1 (35m 38s): And but when, when it creates a problem, it's a real problem. Now, typically lectins were in and out. It's an in and out toxin, it's water soluble. It goes through the kidneys. So if you have kidney disease, it's not a good idea to eat these guys, but they, they go in and out pretty quickly. However, since we have been bringing in foods from all over the world and importing foods from different regions, we now have another issue that is that we are combining plant toxins that really should not be put together. So for instance, if we were just eating lectins, that would be one thing. But when you combine a lectin with a solani, that's found in say tomato or potato, that Solon Nene is fat toxic, and that's going to stay in your body for 30 to 90 days. 1 (36m 20s): So now you've got a lectin that stays in your body for 30 to 90 days. So the loss of the food processing of our ancestors has really caused a huge problem because we, we could say we're eating a similar food, but what it's doing to our body is completely different. 0 (36m 37s): Yeah. And some people and correct me if I'm wrong, obviously are more sensitive than others to lectins probably. And it's probably based on their background, their tradition, you know, you know, like for example, like nightshades, right? Some people are more sensitive to those. They've probably grown up eating tomatoes or whole lives and eggplants. And it's not an issue which you probably see in some cultures, right? 1 (37m 1s): No, actually like my fiance is Greek Greek, and he grew up eating a tomato salad every day. He was so proud of it. He had one of the worst cases of psoriasis. I've never seen, he's had it for 30 years. It was just bleeding and weeping. And he pulled out just the, the lectins that's it w we're traveling. Right. It's he couldn't do the diets I prescribed and it reversed in three months and he's never had it come back. So even if you grew up eating some of these foods, it doesn't mean you're safe. I think, I think it comes down to people's detox systems. When, when I get people in my office with chronic illness, usually their liver detox systems don't work quite as well as others or their kidneys. 1 (37m 42s): And that has a lot to do with your microbiome and a number of other things coming into it. It also matters what you're eating with those foods. So for instance, if food combining is actually very important and we've, we've lost, what's important with this. When we step out of traditional diets. So take the Japanese diet, the traditional Japanese diet, they use Steve Tarro as their starch. And then they moved to white rice and pork and fish. Well, if you eat white rice important fish, you're fine. But if you just happen to not like pork, which some people don't, and so you eat the white rice and you don't eat the pork, you end up with berries, Berry, which is a thiamine deficiency because the white rice has a thiamine binding protein. 1 (38m 25s): So there's lots of things with traditional food combining that we didn't understand. And honestly that we probably still don't understand that if as soon as we step out of those, we can get into trouble. 0 (38m 38s): Yeah. And you talk about food combining is there, do you have any thoughts around, like, I've heard this, I've heard mixed opinions on this, but like eating fruit alone or are mixing it with other things. What are your thoughts around that? 1 (38m 51s): Yeah. I, you know, I know a lot of people are really jumping into the fruit bandwagon these days. I'm still not. I think if you're healthy, it's fine. If it's seasonal, but I've seen fruit does do quite a bit so delivers. And I've seen people reverse their liver disease by pulling it out. So I'm not on this big fruit dose bandwagon. I'm also not anti it if you're healthy, but with, with things like fruit, I think timing is the most important thing. So for instance, if you were to have a bowl of same mangoes in the morning, it's going to spike your blood sugar and cause an inflammatory cycle for the day. Whereas if you have lunch at noon, whatever that lunch is, as long as it's lower carb, and then you have that same bowl of mangoes at 3:00 PM, it's just going to give you a molehill. 1 (39m 34s): So I think timing is very important in many regions that I go to that are fruit consuming, say the Greeks in the summer, they eat a lot of fruit in the summer. It's typically their desserts, right? We don't, they don't think of it as a breakfast food or an all day food. It's a dessert. And so the timing of that I would say is quite, 0 (39m 54s): And honey is pretty, is pretty popular, right? With the Greeks or with some of the tribes. Yeah. 1 (40m 0s): Oh, absolutely. But that again is seasonal. And typically if we do these foods, seasonally, it's not a problem. 0 (40m 8s): Okay. What would you say if some is a common question I ask, well, how to guests, you know, if someone's, you know, want to get their body back to what it once was, you know, like 10, 15 years ago, and they've tried a different, a lot of different things. What would you say some good first steps would be for that individual to, to start with? 1 (40m 30s): I would start with a morning routine where you get up each morning and you do something to reduce your stress. So whether that's a gratitude journal, a meditation, and then I would also get outside. Even if you live in a cold cloudy region, I'd be outside for at least half an hour. The light in our eyes gets our dopamine and serotonin going. And you're going to need that for any kind of lifestyle change. So I would do those two things first. Then I would personally reduce carbohydrates. Anything under a hundred is going to be helpful. So even if you don't want to go full ketogenic or do some of these more heart, more difficult diets, I'm yet to go to any regions that eat more than that. And I think if we go over a hundred or so, we start to get into the inflammatory cycles, the immune deprivation, those kinds of things, but also because we want to fill ourselves up and not be hungry. 1 (41m 20s): So if we're trying to lose weight and get strong, we want to eat foods that trigger the say shitty hormone and that's fat and protein. Now you can get there through eating a good amount of protein, or you can get there through eating a lot of fat. But if you eat a lot of carbs, you're going to be hungry. And if you do the carbs with the fat, you're going to gain the weight. So it's easier to reduce the carbs, go for the protein and the fats. And then it comes a bit more naturally with less willpower. 0 (41m 45s): Yeah. I love that. Yeah. I always talk about prioritizing protein in your meals, right? 1 (41m 49s): Always. Yeah. Also because protein makes seller feel good chemicals, right. So if we're not getting those amino acids, we're going to be grumpy, moody, and then we need to emotionally eat, which we don't once 0 (42m 2s): We don't want that. And also if you're doing some fasting, which I know you do some, especially cause the travel I'm sure. Like, like when I was traveling to California, like you're not going to eat the plane food. So it's a good time to fast right. 1 (42m 16s): At the perfect time to fast yet. My plates are always fasting times. Even if it's a 70 hour flight, I just do fasting. And I try to do a three-day fast usually either once a month or once a season, but pretty regularly. And then the 20 hour fast. Almost daily. 0 (42m 33s): Yeah. Okay. So you have like a four hour eating window. 1 (42m 36s): Yeah. It's not rigid, but yeah. It's just kind of happen naturally. Yes. 0 (42m 39s): Yeah. I hear ya. Yeah. Well this was great, Mary. We could talk forever. I'm glad we got together and you're in Columbia and I'm in Chicago and we can make this happen. What's the best place for people to learn about, you know, where you're traveling and all the things that you have to offer. 1 (42m 58s): So definitely my website enable your healing.com is a great place to start. And then I do have an Instagram. It's disorganized. I'm not 0 (43m 8s): Married. 1 (43m 9s): I'm not a professional Instagram, or I'm too busy in the office with my clients. But one day I'll make it pretty, but that does keep you up on where I am and that's Mary Reddick CNC. And then I have a YouTube channel, just Mary Reddick again. And for that, you'll see Eileen called my podcast. So this podcast will be there and you can find my other podcasts there as well. Okay. 0 (43m 28s): Excellent. Great. Well, I'm loving all the travels and everything you're doing. I'm definitely gonna check out the cows for kids. I think that's such a, that's such a great movement and I really appreciate you coming on. 1 (43m 39s): Thanks for having me. It was so nice chatting with you. 0 (43m 43s): Hey, get lean equally nation. Are you a man between the ages of 40 and 60 years old looking to lose inches around your waist have significantly more energy throughout the day and gain muscle all while minimizing the risk of injuries? Well, I'm looking for three to five people to work one-on-one with in my fat burner blueprint signature program, which I've developed by utilizing my 15 years experience in the health and fitness space. This program is designed specifically for those committed, to making serious progress towards their health goals. Over the next six months, we will focus on sleep stress, nutrition, meal, timing, and building lean muscle. 0 (44m 24s): If this sounds like a fit for you, email me@bryanatbriangrin.com with the subject line blueprint. That's brian@briangrin.com with the subject line blueprint. Thanks for listening to the get lean eat 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@briangrin.com for everything that was mentioned in this episode, feel free to subscribe to the podcast and share it with a friend or family member has looking to get their body back to what it once was. Thanks again, and have a great day.
