Paleo Baby

In 2010, with his New York Times Bestselling book The Paleo Solution, Robb Wolf presented the answers that enabled me to recover my health. His podcast of the same name launched my business and connected me with the incredible partners who helped shape NBT into an online clinic that has now helped over a thousand athletes achieve optimal health and performance. In his new book, Wired to Eat, Robb carefully examines the neuroregulation of appetite as this is necessary for eating enough to be healthy, but not so much that we see weight gain and the plethora of Western degenerative diseases such as cardiovascular disease, neurodegeneration and type 2 diabetes. Robb's primary goal with this material is to remove the guilt and shame many people feel around making changes in their food and movement. We STILL need to do the work, but if we understand this may legitimately be a challenging process, we can avoid the sense of failure and self-loathing. Mixed into all this Robb talks about sleep, photoperiod, stress, di

Jasmina Aganovic is a cosmetics and consumer goods entrepreneur who received her degree in chemical and biological engineering from MIT, and she’s back on the podcast to talk about the progress AOBiome have made with their clinical trials. In this interview, we focus mostly on the potential treatment of acne and hypertension, but trials are also underway for allergies, eczema, wound healing, migraines and temperature regulation. Mother Dirt is the company focussed on commercialising the research of AOBiome, and I’ve been using their AO+ Mist spray product for over two years for the successful prevention of nappy (diaper) rash, saddle sores, and acne caused by bike helmets. I’ve also been using the spray in the place of a deodorant, and so far my wife hasn’t divorced me. Jasmina wanted to make it clear that although my N=1 experiences are exciting, nothing has been FDA approved. Head over to Mother Dirt and take advantage of the generous 25% discount on offer. Use the code NBT25. Sign up for our Highlights ema

Since starting NBT, I’ve noticed a growing gap between what I'm doing (lots of cycling) and what I need to be doing for longevity (strength training). This year then, I plan to focus more on strength. The trouble is, I've no clue what I'm doing! Luckily, I was able to hire Dr Mike T Nelson, PhD as my strength and conditioning coach. Sign up for our Highlights email and every week we’ll send you a short (but sweet) email containing the following: One piece of simple, actionable advice to improve your health and performance, including the reference(s) to back it up. One item we read or saw in the health and fitness world recently that we would like to give a different perspective on, and why. One awesome thing that we think you’ll enjoy! You should listen to this interview to learn why all athletes, including endurance athletes, should be strength training. I started Dr Mike's programme about six weeks before recording which meant I had lots of questions and honest feedback. Here’s the outline of this intervi

This episode is syndicated from Dr Tim Gerstmar Aspire Natural Health podcast. We love Dr Gerstmar and would highly recommend you subscribe to his show. You should listen to this episode to get a fly-on-the-wall perspective of two brilliant doctors with different backgrounds problem-solving using similar techniques. Sign up for our Highlights email and every week we’ll send you a short (but sweet) email containing the following: One piece of simple, actionable advice to improve your health and performance, including the reference(s) to back it up. One item we read or saw in the health and fitness world recently that we would like to give a different perspective on, and why. One awesome thing that we think you’ll enjoy! Here’s the outline of this interview with Drs Tommy Wood and Tim Gerstmar: [00:00:48] Highlights email sign up. [00:04:02] Protocols vs. basic science education and principles. [00:06:05] Cooks and chefs. [00:07:18] Tim's previous appearances on my podcast: How to Test and Predict Blood, Ur

Sign up for our highlights email and each week we’ll send you: An interesting scientific paper we've read with actionable advice. Nonsense we read/heard this week and why it's nonsense. Something awesome we read/listened to this week and why it's awesome. I was inspired to record this podcast by a discussion that took place on the Lower Insulin Facebook group. I love the conversation that goes on over there, but like many of debates we see around the Internet, the conversation is somewhat one-dimensional. Low-carb, high-fat, moderate protein, intermittent fasting and you'll be okay. After working with close to 1,000 athletes to improve their health, performance and longevity, we know that's not always true, and we’re confident that a complete solution must give consideration to everything we outline in this episode. The five things (in no particular order): 1. Eat a minimally processed diet food free of added sugar and vegetable oils (processed fats). Because processed foods: Are less nutrient-dense. Are

Brianna Stubbs, PhD is an extraordinary woman on multiple levels. She was the youngest person ever to row across the English Channel, has represented GB at every age level and won gold at the World U23 Championships in 2013, and again at the senior level at the 2016 World Championships. Brianna will be looking to build on that success during the Tokyo 2020 Olympiad. If that wasn’t enough, Brianna recently gained her PhD in Biochemical Physiology at Oxford University where she worked alongside Dr Kieran Clarke to develop a novel ketone monoester that has recently been shown to improve exercise performance in endurance athletes. You should listen to this podcast to discover the special benefits of ketones and their supplementation. Here’s the outline of this interview with Brianna Stubbs, PhD: [00:01:10] Early rowing days. [00:02:10] Different types of athlete: rowing versus sculling. [00:03:14] Rowing training is mostly endurance, but the races are short. [00:05:00] 24 mMol/L blood lactate! [00:05:25] When Pr

Dr Ann Hathaway, MD has been successfully treating women and men with bioidentical hormones and other natural remedies since 1995. She is a member of the prestigious Institute for Functional Medicine and is a director of the Orthomolecular Health Medicine Board. Tommy and I met Dr Hathaway at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging where she presented this excellent and incredibly well-referenced talk on the role of oestradiol in cognition for women. Dr Hathaway is primarily using blood testing to assess hormone levels. However, urinary metabolites can be very helpful for mapping out the oestrogens. At around the twenty-minute mark, this interview gets quite technical, and I think you'll find it useful to look at this section of a DUTCH report while listening to the audio. Notice the enzyme names are written on the arrows indicating the direction of metabolism. The word "hydroxy" is abbreviated OH, so when you hear Ann say "four hydroxy E1," look for 4-OH-E1 on the map. Here’s the outline of this interview w

The ketogenic diet has many promising applications including better management of type 1 diabetes and as an adjunct cancer therapy. Thirty-five thousand people signed up for the Keto Summit where we talked about other applications including neurological diseases, fat loss and improved athletic performance. If you adopted a high-fat paleo-type diet, you could be forgiven for thinking that if that was good, then ketosis should be better. I know I did. Unfortunately, that isn’t necessarily the case, and recently in our practice, we’ve seen several athletes eating a diet that failed to fuel their activity. Obstacle course racing appears to be one type of event where carbohydrates are mandatory. My guest this week is client and software engineer Ryan Baxter. Ryan is a competitive obstacle course racer and an excellent example of what can go wrong when you fail to fuel for your activity. The reintroduction of carbs may have been the most important recommendation we made for Ryan. To be fair, Ryan also found over

My guests this week are two of the brightest minds in the health and fitness industry. The first is my own Chief Medical Officer, Tommy Wood, MD PhD. Tommy is currently working as a visiting scientist researching neonatal brain injury at the University of Washington. He received his undergraduate degree in Biochemistry from the University of Cambridge, before studying medicine at the University of Oxford. My second guest is Chris Masterjohn, PhD. Chris earned his PhD in Nutritional Science from the University of Connecticut at Storrs, where he studied the role of glutathione and dietary antioxidants in regulating the accumulation of methylglyoxal. He has authored or co-authored ten peer-reviewed publications. His writes a blog, The Daily Lipid, and produces a podcast by the same name. You can also follow his professional work on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat (whatever that is!). Tommy’s premise for this interview was as follows: If you fix lifestyle and environment, can you be a lot less

Several years ago, I learned about mindfulness the hard way. I was eating a cardiologist recommended diet that apparently wasn’t working for me and I failed to pay attention to any of the warning signs. The first person to draw attention to my mindlessness was the woman who is now my wife and co-founder at NBT. Only recently did I discover the decades of careful research on the simple practice of noticing, and how that can be both good for you and fun. My guest this week is Dr Ellen Langer, PhD, a social psychologist and the first female professor to gain tenure in the Psychology Department at Harvard University. She is the author of eleven books and more than two hundred research articles written for general and academic readers on mindfulness for over 35 years. Her best-selling books include Mindfulness; The Power of Mindful Learning; On Becoming an Artist: Reinventing Yourself Through Mindful Creativity; and Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility. See Langer EJ[Author] on PubMed. Her

Dr Tim Gerstmar practices Naturopathic Medicine at his Redmond, WA office, Aspire Natural Health. He specialises in working with people with digestive and autoimmune problems, and has worked with many of the most difficult to treat situations using a blend of natural and conventional medicine. He treats patients locally, throughout the US and as far away as the Qatar, Korea and Australia. In this interview, Dr Gerstmar discusses the tests he most commonly uses, especially for gastrointestinal complaints. We also talk about strategies for dealing with health insurance and tips for keeping costs down. These scatter plots, sometimes called calibration plots, are the ones I mentioned in the podcast. On the x-axis is what my XGBoost model predicted for previously unseen data, the y-axis represents the measured value. When the dot appears on the diagonal line, the prediction was perfect. The model was trained using results from just 260 athletes. My hope is that is these models will eventually bring down the cost o

Coach and exercise physiologist Dr Mike T. Nelson pulled me to one side recently after seeing the results of my little experiment with a ketone ester supplement. In this interview, you’ll learn about why Dr. Mike thinks we should exercise caution before regularly simultaneously raising blood glucose and ketones. We also talk about why metabolic flexibility, not ketosis, should be the goal for most endurance athletes. Problems with impaired fat use: From  Nelson, Michael T., George R. Biltz, and Donald R. Dengel. "Repeatability of Respiratory Exchange Ratio Time Series Analysis." The Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research 29.9 (2015): 2550-2558. "Goedecke et al. (12) showed a very large interindividual variability in resting RER from 0.72 up to 0.93 that even persisted during exercise of increasing intensity. This corresponded to a relative rate of fat oxidation that ranged from 23 to 93%. This large interindividual variability in RER from 0.83 to 0.95 was also demonstrated by Helge et al. (16) durin

Tommy and I recorded this interview in person at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging where we were attending Dr. Dale Bredesen’s training for reversing cognitive decline. If you’ve yet to discover Dr. Bredesen’s amazing work, I’d highly recommend his STEM-Talk interview. My attempt to capture the impressiveness of the Buck Institute leaves a lot to be desired, but since I promised a photo during the recording, here it is: We love our supplements at Nourish Balance Thrive, and we regularly recommend them to the people we work with, usually when indicated by a test result. What we’re less keen on is expensive nonsense with no human data or even plausible mechanism of action. Oxaloacetate falls into this category, and in this interview, you'll learn enough biochemistry to understand why you should save your money. As always, we reserve the right to be proven wrong! In the second part of this interview, you'll learn about why it's essential to eat to fuel for your activity. We're huge fans of a ketogenic di

Hormetism is the application of progressive, intermittent stress to overcome challenges and grow stronger physically, mentally and emotionally. As athletes, we intuitively understand the hormetic effect of exercise but did you know that cold, altitude, plant toxins and even straining slightly to read can all be used to help us get stronger? My guest is for this interview is Todd Becker, a freelance blogger based in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he lives with his wife and two children. He has degrees in Chemical Engineering and Philosophy from Stanford University and Brown University.  Todd currently works as a staff scientist for a biotechnology company in Palo Alto, where he leads project teams and holds more than 20 patents.   Not everyone will have access to all of the hormetic stressors we talk about in this episode. The important takeaway message is that there's more than one way to get stronger. Take advantage in whatever way you see fit. Here’s the outline of this interview with Todd Becker: [00:00

Machine learning is fast becoming a part of our lives. From the order in which your search results and news feeds are ordered to the image classifiers and speech recognition features on your smartphone. Machine learning may even have had a hand in choosing your spouse or driving you to work. As with cars, only the mechanics need to understand what happens under the hood, but all drivers need to know how to operate the steering wheel. Listen to this podcast to learn how to interact with machines that can learn, and about the implications for humanity. My guest is Dr. Pedro Domingos, Professor of Computer Science at Washington University. He is the author or co-author of over 200 technical publications in machine learning and data mining, and the author of my new favourite book The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World. Here’s the outline of this interview with Dr. Pedro Domingos, PhD: [00:01:55] Deep Learning. [00:02:21] Machine learning is affecting everyone's

After a rocky start to the season, NBT client Bob McRae turned everything around using our performance orientated functional medicine program for athletes. "I had the best race of my life yesterday, beyond my imagination." said 47-year old McRae, after his first age-group win (by 14-minutes) and 6th overall at IRONMAN Boulder. Bob is now the number one USAT ranked athlete in his age group.   Listen to this podcast to discover how Bob used a combination of blood chemistry, urinary organic acids and hormone testing, stool culturomics together with diet and lifestyle modification and NSF certified nutritional supplements to achieve peak triathlon performance. Here’s the outline of this interview with Bob McRae: [00:04:22] Dr. Phil Maffetone. [00:09:06] Quest Diagnostics. [00:09:22] Fat Black podcast. [00:11:26] IRONMAN Boulder and Kona. [00:11:47] Bob was unable to elevate his heart rate. [00:13:10] GI symptoms affected racing. [00:13:38] Blastocystis was found on a BioHealth 401H stool test, gone on retest. [00

This year in the United States, over 22,000 people will be diagnosed with a primary brain or spinal tumor. Of these, more than 13,000, many of them younger than 21 years old, will die of their disease. New treatment modalities are critical in the battle against cancer. Adrienne Scheck, PhD, is an associate professor of neurobiology at Barrow Neurological Institute. Dr. Scheck’s expertise includes neuro-oncology. She is a member of the American Association for Cancer Research, Society for Neuro-Oncology, American Association for Cancer Research, American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Women in Cancer Research, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Scheck’s work consists mainly of translational research to develop novel adjuvant therapies for the treatment of brain tumors. She also use various molecular and molecular genetic techniques to investigate why current therapies sometimes fail.   See Scheck AC[Author] on PubMed. Here’s the outline of this interview with Dr.

Barry Murray is a sports nutritionist and member of the Irish Ultramarathon Team currently working with Pro Tour cyclists. Barry has won several ultra-distance (70-200 km) running races, The Mourne Mountain Way, The Abbots Way, The Giants Causeway, The Wicklow Way, The Kerry Way, all without eating anything for breakfast. How? In a word, fat-adaptation. In this interview, Barry describes his work with the pros and six much overlooked factors for high-performance ultra-endurance training: sunlight, cold thermogenesis, DHA from seafood, grounding, and water quality. Here’s the outline of this interview with Barry Murray: [00:01:56] BMC Racing Team. [00:02:06] Ultramarathon. [00:05:39] Low-carb, high-fat, ketogenic. [00:06:14] Fasted state training. [00:07:16] Sirtuins. [00:12:38] AMP kinase. [00:13:35] Beta-oxidation. [00:13:44] Mitochondrial biogenesis. [00:15:20] Acetyl-CoA. [00:15:38] Peter Attia, MD. [00:16:03] Stepwise adaptation. [00:18:38] What are the pro cyclists doing? [00:19:35] Nutrition is the new

Dr. Keith Runyan, MD is a retired physician previously in private practice in St. Petersburg, Florida. Dr. Runyan specialised in internal medicine, nephrology, and obesity medicine. He practiced emergency medicine for ten years before starting his private practice in 2001. In February 2012, he began the diet for the treatment of is diabetes and learned that this diet was also effective for the treatment of numerous other conditions, including obesity. He added obesity medicine to his practice and became board-certified in obesity medicine in December 2012. Dr. Runyan completed an Ironman-distance triathlon on October 20, 2012, in a state of nutritional ketosis and feeling great.   In 1998, he developed type 1 diabetes at the age of 38. Dr. Runyan controlled his diabetes was fairly well with intensive insulin therapy but was plagued with frequent hypoglycaemic episodes. In 2011, while training for an Ironman-distance triathlon, Dr. Runyan was looking for a better way to treat his diabetes and perform endurance

Chris here, writing the show notes for this episode presented by my wife and food scientist Julia Kelly where she interviews Mickey Trescott, and Angie Alt. I’ve talked a lot about ketogenic diets on the podcast, but the truth is ketosis is a hack to improve my cognition and athletic performance. Autoimmune Paleo (AIP) is the diet that enabled me to recover my health, and since then, we’ve coached hundreds of other athletes in our practice using a very similar approach. With the diet cornerstone in place, I became curious about what else I could do to improve my health and athletic performance. Shortly after came my discovery of functional medicine and the hundreds, if not thousands, of other lifestyle factors that needed to be in place in order for me to have what I enjoy today.   The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook addresses the most important of those other lifestyle factors. Authors Mickey and Angie introduce a complementary solution that focuses on seven key steps to recovery: inform, collaborate, nourish,