Transcript of Episode #91 Featuring Zane Griggs! The TRUTH about carbohydrates! NO HOLDS BARRED discussion on the polarization of carbs and HUGE misconceptions surrounding them!

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I've had the pleasure of I've been speaking with him now multiple times. We did an Instagram Live that I felt was pretty impactful. I really, really like his dedication and approach to helping people, challenging things, asking questions. Everything that I believe in, he believes in. My goal at all times is to bring people on like my guests today that have different outlooks, mindsets, and can back it up. Their motive is simply to help people. That's why he's here today, fluent to see me, which I thank you for as well, because I know that's always tricky. But he's been helping people as a personal trainer since 1998. He's got an amazing podcast, Healthy After 50. He has really reached so many people over many years, and I feel like he's making a really strong impact right now, which I want to spotlight. So my friends, welcome Zane Griggs.

Thank you, Dylan. Appreciate it. Happy to be here.

Thanks for coming to see me, bro. I appreciate it. Like I said, and I've told you off camera multiple times, James, I am very much looking forward to this. I was excited to have you here. I think you're a very quality human, and I think that your motives fall in line with mine. I don't necessarily agree with everything anybody that comes on here does, but I'm always wanting to learn from somebody else. I feel like you have a lot of keys that we need to discuss and provide to people. I want to get into all of your different types of mindsets that you've changed with your diet over the years, things that you've been working on. You have a huge knowledge base, and I'm going to drain you for all of it.

Well, thank you. I appreciate it. Happy to do it.

Let's talk about first, I don't like to do everybody's, How did you get into this? But when you're talking about fitness and nutrition, it is important to get a little bit of background on you, how you've learned, what you've gone through to get to where you're at today. Sure.

Well, I was really curious about diet and fitness early on. In my 20s, I see my relatives basically struggling with metabolic disease, and I didn't want that to be my future. For some reason, in my 20s, I got a sense of mortality. I started playing around with a vegan, vegetarian diet, back and forth in my 20s. I became a trainer in '98, like you said, and started using low carb, probably right around 2002, for my clients who wanted to lose weight. That was over 20 years ago. I started playing with intermittent fasting later on top of that in 2010. By the time I got to enter my 40s, in 2010, I had a little bit of pretty much a low carb diet with intermittent fasting, lots of fasted workouts. I was cranking that for about 10 years, almost, until I hit a wall. It was basically I could tell you, cortisol was too high. It was too much stress hormone. Sleep was not great. Virroid was working too hard. I had all the signs of high metabolic stress, and I realized, okay, well, everything I've been doing to, I think, crank everything harder was catching up with me.

It was a combination of age and time. I think if I'd been younger and smarter, I might have figured it out. But I think age helped me have to make this decision, really take a good look at myself and say, What am I doing? And is this the best strategy? And that's why I had to reset everything. That's where I am now, coming through a few years of reset.

In your view, what does it mean low carb? Is that like 100 grams of carbs? Is that like 20 grams of carbs? What's the definition of low carb?

Technically, of course, there's different divisions of it as people diet, like keto, carnival, all that. But technically, what it is supposed to be, is about 25% of calories or less coming from carbohydrates. Now, our studies that we have out there, not to confuse the issue, but we have studies out there where they say, Oh, a low carb or a low fat diet. Some of these studies, they use those terms, but they aren't really sticking to a metric. You'll see a low carb versus a high carb diet, and it's a 55% carb diet versus a 40% carb diet. Well, that's not really much of a switch, and you're not going to see a lot of changes, even with low fat, they'll say low fat coming from 40, 45% fat to 34% or 30% fat. Well, the average American is eating 35 or so, 40% fat. With 30% fat, it's not really low fat. To me, But those are the studies. So when we see these studies, it becomes very confusing. That's why it's so confusing, because it seems to be a very arbitrary term.

Yes.

But generally in the health space, nutrition space, The practitioners would say low carb is 25% or less. Then, of course, keto would be like, usually it's 50 grams, but it's usually like 10% of calories or less. So really super low. But that's generally the ballpark is 25% or less of calories.

What I think would be good is because once again, these terms ketogenic, carnivore, vegan, vegetarian, I swear these terms get thrown around a lot, but I don't think people know what that actually entails or means. We don't have to spend an hour on one diet, but could you give your breakdown on just a few of these? What is keto? What is carnivore? What does this entail?

Well, keto really takes low carb down to a level where it's about 10%, someone say 10% of calories, and some just use a straight across like 50 grams or less for most people. You're in the ballpark of both of those. The purpose being, and a lot of those carbs are often To make sure you don't hit, go too high is a lot of vegetables, really. Nothing that's too carb-rich. You have this higher fat. Keto is supposed to really increase fat. It's not just the carb level, but ideally, you have a fat makes up the predominant amount of the calories, not protein. Then you'll hear them argue within the keto space as well that someone might be saying, Oh, you have too much protein. You need more fat. There's this tug-of-war between how much protein is appropriate, because if it goes too high, some of it may be turned into glucose through gluconeogenesis, or the fat needs to be higher to create more ketones. There's nuance within ketogenic, where there's a bit of, again, some disagreement, this is normal, whether someone should be having a 65, 70% of their calories coming from fat, or it's okay down around 50, 55, and you have 25% protein.

There's a little bit of that back and forth, and some will argue one is better than the other for ketosis, but the carbs stay low. Carnival is, generally speaking, zero carb. That may For some, may include high fat, zero carb dairy, so like a cheese, possibly. But primarily it's meat and fat, basically, butter, things like that. There is even a degree of that, which someone has to make it even harder, the lion diet, which is meat, salt, and water. It's really a bare bones. I understand for a elimination diet, someone who's encountering a lot of inflammation. Mikaela Peterson is the one who coined that because she was dealing with rheumatoid arthritis and you're not going to reduce inflammation. She was really the big proponent of the lion diet. But even recently, I've seen she has added in some other foods like sweet potato, mango, and coconut. But that was basically the purpose is an elimination diet. Let's get rid of anything that may be irritating the gut, it may be causing inflammation, reset the brain if you've got some food addiction. There's always those little factions within carnivores saying, Oh, you shouldn't have dairy, you can't have dairy, you can't have...

But it's pretty much just meat and fat.

Too much.

It's a lot. Vegan, when I was doing vegan back in the '90s, so back then, vegetarian, we didn't have eggs. That was like a lactoover vegetarian. They had to say lactoover if you had milk and eggs. And then pescetarian. But it It was just like you had a little bit of maybe some cheese here and there, but the vegans were straight up, obviously, just no animal whatsoever. When I was doing that diet, I basically ran to the ground with my immune system. I did it for three and a half years, and I just got weak. I lost a lot of muscle, a lot of weight, was hungry all the time. Kind of tired. I wasn't recovering, but I was having to eat constantly until I got this virus that my doc said, You know what? Your immune system is a I think it's your diet.

How was your training on that type of diet?

I had to back off. I couldn't train as often. I was still in my 20s, so we can abuse ourselves in our 20s. Sure. We can take a beating, but I was just very thin. I added in some whey proteins, some salmon, and some eggs, which a lot of people say, Oh, that sounds like vegetarian. It wasn't thin. It wasn't vegetarian. But a little bit of fish, whey, and eggs, and I felt like my brain lit up within a week. It's just like everything, the fat came back in, the protein was there. I felt myself recovering better. I was sleeping better. I was awake up in the morning and just didn't even reach for coffee. I went three days without coffee and didn't even realize it. It's just one of those things where it's like, Oh, I was definitely missing this. It's another way I had to learn the hard way.

Yeah, that deprivation, man.

Yeah. For some reason, I get to gravitate to these things. Yeah.

Hey, I've done it. You don't even want to know. We'll get into that. We'll get into that later. Mine's brutal. What about a paleo diet? What is that? Is that lower carb or what is that?

It tends to be lower carb, but not as... Not like keto, but it's a little more like going back to what would have been available Paleolithic. Right. So very whole food is a good way to look at it. A very whole food diet. So plenty of meat, saturated fat, maybe some tubers, maybe some roots and fruits, as they say. Got it. And some leaves thrown in there, probably, but mostly roots and fruits. So it's a counter-gatherer diet, is what you think of. It's a good way to clean up the diet as well without going in too much of an extreme one way or the other.

Then lastly, because this is the one where what I find most people go to is the Mediterranean diet. They'll just say, We'll just do a Mediterranean diet. I get that all the time. If people are trying to go, I disagree with that highly, but I want your thoughts on it because to me, that's like, huh? When I hear that, it's really broad.

That's what I'm seeing. It's The Mediterranean diet. It really was popularized through marketing as a way to market olive oil. They say, Olive oil companies invite these doctors out to the south of France, basically, for a nice little vacation. Oh, come out here and we'll put you up in the south of France and we'll let you taste all these olive oils, and we'll tell you how healthy these olive oils are for you. And then you can go back and tell everybody how healthy. And then so basically, I created this olive oil campaign to sell this olive oil from Spain and Italy and France and so forth. Again, it was somewhere in the Mediterranean, but they basically flew these doctors out. I think that was in maybe the '70s or so, '80s maybe. But it was a beginning of a marketing campaign for the olive oil. Then that's when you see all these articles for the Mediterranean diet. You put enough money behind something, get some doctors on board, have some articles written, and there you go. You've got a Mediterranean diet. Now, are there worse ways to eat if you actually ate the way people eat on the Mediterranean?

No, it's a great way to eat. I mean, it's a little bit of everything. It's like Greece. We have two blue zones in the Mediterranean, right? Yeah. Sardinia and Ethic, wherever that little Greek island is. I can't remember off the top of my head right now, but basically, you have meat, you have olives, you have garlic, you have olive oil, you have... I mean, there's homemade bread, there's all sorts of things. It's a very broad diet. Fruit, obviously. It's all whole food, though. It's hard to go wrong if you're eating all whole food, am I fair? Yeah, I agree. But I don't know how many... Depending... The ratios you could have in that are so nondescript. It's all over the place. You could be eating 80% carb in Mediterranean, or you could be eating 80% fat in Mediterranean. I mean, if you really tried, but it's just...

It's a free for all.

It sounds really tasty, but I don't know how much of a change you could make. If you're healthy and you're eating this broad diet, this whole food, you're probably great. If you're metabolically unhealthy, you might need a little more of an intervention, in my opinion, to change things at a distinctive pace. You can get healthy over time with whole food only, for sure. It would definitely change the way you live, change your health. But if someone's like, I really need to lose 100 pounds or I need to reverse diabetes, you may want to have a little more oversight over ratios, in my opinion, of how much fat, protein, and carbs you're eating, just to help move that along at a pace that keeps you interested, keeps you on board.

I'm sure you noticed this, but every single diet we're running down here, aside from that Mediterranean one, it's got something in common. It's always low carb. Everything is lower end carb. Is there a high carb diet that you ever talk about or that's out there?

I'm personally talking about a high carb diet right now.

But is there one named diet that's out there that's higher carb?

The closest one that was popular right around 2010 was called the Zone Diet. Barry Sears, I remember that. Yes. It was 40, 30, 30. It was 40 carb, 30 protein, 30 fat. Great for an athlete. Yeah. Everybody else, you'd put weight on.

A hundred %. I'll tell you what, those bars, they were not good for you, but man, they tasted good. Those chocolate of peanut butter went on the bar. They were so good.

They were a treat. They sold the bar. But if you were to eat whole food that way, there's plenty of... I don't know. I think you'd have to be a very active, lean athlete to make that work, in my opinion.

I agree.

We can get into why. But basically, you're the middle. But there's probably a lot of studies that have been done in that middle section that it seems like the swamp land of macros, where it's all merged to almost the same. Yeah, most people wouldn't survive there with all the processed food we have.

You're right.

If it was a whole food diet, be one thing.

There's been so many damn diets. I remember South Beach diet. There were so many things that were just going through the pipeline that were marketing tools.

That's a marketing one for you.

Yeah, of course. Oh, my gosh. Well, I want to talk to you about one more before I get into more aspects of carbs. This was my lane that I lived in hell for 15 years or 20 years, which was just a straight low fat diet, which to me, we'll talk about this later, you and me, I feel like this is the worst thing ever. Personally, I was as miserable. I think that the need for fats and overall health in terms of our cellular membranes and brain function, I'm not saying... I disagree with that carnival diet where it's so high in fat or I don't like that either, but I feel like just eliminating it, I feel like, to me, it's one of the worst things ever for a long-term health.

How low was your fat? You were tracking, right?

15, 20 grams max.

15 or 20 grams? Yeah, max.

Oh, wow. It was only coming from peanut butter. Only for years.

Yikes.

I'm a nutritionist, but one that suffered an eating disorder for many years in a complete fear, even I was teaching people the polar opposite.

That would be like a spoonful, though.

It wasn't anything.

I mean, that's 15 or 20 grams of peanut butter.

Nothing.

It's nothing. It's like a teaspoon. It's nothing.

Wow. Now I eat about 130 a day. Okay. Yeah. We'll talk about me later. But you interview me. Sure. I learned so much over that experience. I feel like that's some of the reason I had some heart conditions. I feel like it's a reason why I had so many blood markers off. I know it's I was a crabby prick a lot of the time and couldn't focus. My whole world changed when I made that change. But I want your thoughts on why that was brought into existence and why it was so out there for so long, and what's your thought on keeping fat super low?

Well, that's very low long term. Yes, you definitely have some downside to it. And peanut butter, of all things, not even a very nutritious fat. Horrible. Absolutely horrible. It's like there's no nutrient value in that fat. I'm surprised you were able to get protein in with that little fat. But I think there are... When I think of low fat that's somewhat sustainable, like what I would use for someone who... The way I'm thinking now as far as someone who would reverse, and we can get into this, but reversing as an intervention to reverse disease or lose weight, you can use low fat, but low fat would be more like a 15% of calories, not 15 grams. There's a big difference there. So 50% of calories on the low end would definitely make a big lever pull while getting enough fat to maintain some of those functions that you're mentioning, like brain function, hormones. Even then, it would be an intervention. It would be something you'd toggle up and down from. You go too low, I think that was That sounds like a bodybuilder, like gym Bro. That's what it was. Yeah, diet. I think where we're sacrificing a goal of an esthetic over health, and that is dangerous.

I mean, that's what you said. You had a bit of an eating disorder because you can't eat a normal natural diet like that.

No. A lot of egg YTS, a lot of fat free greet yoga, a lot of protein powder, a lot of the lowest fish, cod, for example, or the leanest cuts of chicken that you could possibly find. That type of thing is how I got all the protein in because I had to make sure of doing all the training and the working out. There were steroid use and everything. So you combine all that together, and it's a recipe for disaster.

Yeah. I mean, organ dysfunction, all sorts of things going on.

I had to reverse a lot of things, man.

Did you have any heart palpitations with it?

I still am recovering from it still to this day. Everything's back in line now, but to reverse that for all that long time and term is not easy. It's a lot of long-term damage.

Yeah. When you go super... Some people feel the heart palpidation is from super low carb as well. They just get that arrhythmia of carnivore or very low carb. They're more sensitive to it. Low fat. The heart likes burning fat. Now, does it mean it only needs fat? It works well with carbs as well, but it needs both to rhythm, electrolytes. That's it. Electrolytes, organ function. I mean, all these things that we're not... We have all three macronutrients for a reason. Thank. We can toggle We can build them and we can play with them. Eliminating them is going to have... It's going to have consequences. We see this because when we eliminate either carbs or fat, when we have too little for what our body's needs are, we can make each of them. Our bodies can use protein and shaving off some glycerol to make glucose, glycerol from triglycerides to make glucose. Our bodies can make use carbs or glucose to make saturated fat, which can then, if it needs to be converted to monounsaturated fat. So our bodies can make either one. So if we're at a point where our body is working really hard to make the majority of either one of those, either carbs or glucose or fat, we're at a point that is not, in my opinion, long-term sustainable.

A little bit of that on the edge and it ebbs and flows a little is one thing, but where it's such an extreme where the majority of the fat that you needed was being converted from the carbs you were eating. What little fat you were getting had very little nutritional benefit, unlike butter or tallow, which would have some nutrients in that fat, whereas peanut butter is just void of everything.

I went back and did the math because I wasn't doing it properly. I was eating about 14 to 15 servings of vegetables a day, right around there. Then it was like two and a half to three servings of oatmeal with the protein powder in it, same with the yogurt protein powder in it. You see the pattern. I'm trying to get it however we can here.

That must have been.

It was terrible. I was really doing such high carbs, and then you realize it because I was having raisins, dried apricots because My potassium was low. All of these high carbohydrate, even though it's sugar, it's natural sugar. I was eating a lot of fruit, and I love fruit. I'm not saying don't eat it, but I was eating too much. It didn't compensate the hunger and the sweet tooth that I had from not eating any fat.

Yeah, long term. I think that was the thing. I think you probably could have used that over a six or eight week period to get really shredded before you stepped on a stage or something like that. You You would have done that without a lot of harm. But it still would have been good, but it wouldn't have been as harmful. It's like, Okay, we know this is your short term. Here's where we're going to move. You would have attained the goal and then moved on. But since you were trying to stay there, that's where you started getting the body starts adapting to these diets and our adaptations. People say, Oh, you got to adapt to the super low fat, or adapt to the super low carb. The adaptations are not ideal. No, they're not. No, They're not ideal. You have thyroid issues, you have stress hormones elevated, you have all sorts of things that take place in the mitochondria that as well, when it's trying to make energy or make ATP, when you're missing these long term, there's adaptations that might make it seem like it's gotten easier to do. But what's actually happening is your body is adapting in a way that hormonally that has long term risks to, again, like I said, thyroid, how well you're making energy, how much of that energy is being burned up as heat, or is it actually being converted to ATP or the cellular energy that we need, or how much is being stored as fat.

That's where the danger comes with the difference between a extreme diet in short term versus long term. Short term, it can be tolerated before your body starts adapting adapting to it. That's why a lot of bodybuilders carb cycle. They go in and out, so they get the benefit of the shock, but they don't fully adapt to it to the change. By not adapting, they get the benefit of the change before the body starts saying, Oh, we need to compensate. Same with low-calorie. You adapt to low-calorie diet, that means your metabolism drop, and then it no longer works, does it?

That's another one.

So these adaptations in any of these extreme diets, they make it so that your body isn't under as much what it feels like, immediate stress, doing it. But long term, there is some stress or some underlying stress at a cellular level that it's actually causing. That's where people start seeing the long term, like it shows up maybe six months, a year, some people three years later. But I'm talking to a lot of people now that are finding that they stayed on in these diets, some of these diets too long.

Why are carbohydrates so polarizing? Why? What is it that has gotten people so triggered that I see that you deal with or just scared? What are the reasons why?

Oh, boy. We have an epidemic of metabolic disease, and we need to find someone to blame. This is a new thing. Like, 1900, 1901, the obesity rate in the US was 1%, and now it's 40. Type 2 diabetes, maybe even 100 years ago, 1930, impacted maybe one-third of 1% of the population. Now it's diagnosed 12, 13%, but undiagnosed, at least double that. Then prediabetic, people moving in that direction, you're probably looking at 40% of the population very easily. Fattie liver disease. Fattie liver disease used to be just for alcoholics. Now, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, which has come from our diet, is now the primary reason for when we get a liver transplant. It's the primary driver of fatty liver. It's non-alcoholic fatty liver. It's from processed. It should be processed food fatty liver. That's good. It's really we have... But we had to find a culprit. We know the story with Ancil Keyes back in the '40s and '50s, he started blaming saturated fat for heart disease, saturated fat for all these things, which we know was It was just his way of looking for a way to be the hero, basically, and to put himself in prominence, and he manipulated his dad to make that happen.

But then we had to find a new- Villain? A new Villan. You Villan, as we came into low fat. We had the low fat '70s, '80s, '90s, really. Then everything flipped, and then we had to go to the carbs or bad. Well, processed food is bad, but if we look back over the last 10,000 years, we've all been eating a lot of carbohydrates for the last 10,000 years without an epidemic of metabolic disease. We can look at current Indigenous populations, like whether they're in South America, New Guinea, Africa, where their Indigenous diet is maybe somewhere between 8% and 15% fat all the time. Their carbon take could be from 60% to 85%. But it's what they gather from environment. It's whole food, and they have no metabolic disease. There's actually one in South America, in Bolivia, they have the best hearts in the world that they found. They did CACs on them, calcium scans. They have the best, the lowest rates of houselified arteries for over 40-year-olds, and then even over 65, lowest rates in the world that they found. 70% of their diet comes from carbohydrates, and only about 12 or so % comes from fat.

These are natural Indigenous diets. Now, is every Indigenous diet that way? No. Some are as high as 30% fat. I mean, But none of them have processed food. None of them have a motorbondomal disease. None of them have ultra-processed food. That's really where... But what happens if we really say Now, there's some study I just saw floating around the internet just saying, Oh, we find processed food is impacting... No kidding. It just finally came out. But who would this impact? If it's, say, 70 years ago or 60 years ago, they said, Actually, it's processed food that's causing the increase in heart disease that was affecting the President, which was a big deal in the '50s. That's why Anselm Keyes, right? Exactly. Heart disease, heart disease, obesity. What if it's all the new oils, the Crisco, the new TB dinners that really came up, became popular in the '60s, and all this ultra-processed food that was replacing home-cooked dinners and our original simple farm food, so to speak? Yeah. What if they had known this then? What would have happened to that entire industry? I mean, how much money could be lost if we actually let everybody was convinced that processed food was the real cause of disease.

It's not a carb. It's not the fat in your steak. It's not the carb in your fruit. It's this thing that comes in a box, a bag, or a bottle in the middle aisles of the grocery store. There's a lot of money to be lost if that actually became the true villain.

Oh, yeah.

There's a lot of industry influence in pointing a finger at a particular food group, because when we have low fat, we can make Intimins, right? Remember the Intimins of the '90s? I'm sure you ate it. You're on your low fat diet. We had all the cereals, right? Super low fat. That's the whole vegetarian push. The influence of the vegetarian group, if you want to call them, the lobby, whatever you want to call them. But all those cereals, Kellogg's, came from a vegetarian family. So We have to find a demon. We have to find something polarizing. Yeah, of course. Carbs is just the latest... I was a very big part for 20 years being part of making them the villain for disease. I'm not saying they're going to make... I never told someone fruit would make them fat. But if they're trying to turn things around, maybe limit, but definitely not eat processed food. Where I think we've had a few, very few people early on was pointing the finger at seed oils. Like Dr. Kate Shanahan, 20 years ago, was pointing the finger at seed oils, which is a major ingredient in all processed food.

And it's a very inflammatory oil. If we go Back to really the origin of disease is that oxidative stress in the cell is what causes disease, inflammation in the cell, which is usually from oxidative stress. When you think about what causes oxidative stress, because that inflammation, once you get oxidative stress in the mitochondria, that impacts your energy production. Once you impact energy production, your body has to respond. It responds by increasing stress hormone, releasing fat from your fat cells. It actually increases gluconeogenesis, so we make more glucose because it's trying to make more energy all of a sudden. This was really Kate Shannonhan's Theory of Disease of Insulin Resistence, where she She's saying it's not the carbs, it's not the saturated fat. Those things really haven't changed much over the last 120 years. What has changed is the introduction of processed food and the unique new ingredient. Yes, the processed grains aren't great. The processed sugar is not healthy for us. But it appears that these oils, in her theory of incident resistance, are the ones that uniquely creating more oxidative stress in the mitochondria, which decreases the energy output of the mitochondria and causes a stress response to the brain saying, Okay, we don't have enough energy.

Some of these cells won't live more than a handful of seconds without constant energy, so we need to put up more energy. It's the elevation of cortisol epinephrine, adrenaline, even glucagon, to release more energy into our system from the liver, glucose from the liver, fat from our fat stores, to put energy into our bloodstream. And then hoping that that brings back some of that energy that was diminished from this oxidative stress in the cell. And what we see with diabetics and people with fatty liver disease is that their fat oxidation, the fat breakdown, is about 50% higher than it would be if they were a metabolically healthy person. The fat breakdown is 50% higher, and the gluconeogenesis level is about 30% higher. They just have this flood of energy of both glucose and free fatty acids, triglycerides, flowing through their system. So energy toxicity. They have all this energy that's now flooding their system, and then they eat, and they've got more energy coming in. So it's this panic of low energy or at least more energy, high stress hormone. And then they continue with the diet that created this problem. And that's when you start seeing blood sugar levels going up.

Low energy for them cells because they still haven't fixed the root cause of the problem, which is the damaged mitochondria or the mitochondria that keeps getting fed food that doesn't help it make energy. And so this energy, this potential energy, this food is coming in their body. Instead of being converted into ATP, much of it is being converted to fat. Some of it is being converted to ATP, but not a great percentage of it. A lot is being converted back into fat. And so for a long time, you talk to many doctors who still understand this, this is what they were told in medical school, that diabetics don't burn fat. They can't burn fat. Oh, their insulin is too high, they can't burn fat. No, everything's up in these bodies. Their cortisol is high, their insulin is high, their glucagon is high, their They're releasing blood sugar out of their liver. They're releasing fat from their fat stores. It's a metabolic dumpster fire, essentially, of too much energy. Then there's all this excess energy in the tissues, and the body say, We don't need more. Muscles are saying, We're full. We don't need more. The cells are saying, We're full.

We don't need more. So that's when you see the blood sugar going up. So that's the insulin resistance. But because blood sugar is going up, the easiest culprit to blame is carbivorium.

Yeah, of course.

That's very as simple as looking at symptoms. Oh, if we give them insulin, oh, that pushes the glucose back into the cells, and that's how we lower that symptom of blood sugar, but it's not really addressing the root cause. So Elevated blood sugar is a symptom of the disease. It's not the cause of the disease.

Thank you.

When you see diabetics who have elevated blood sugar in the morning, the dawn effect, they wake up, they haven't eaten for 8, 10, 12 hours, and their blood sugar might be 130, 140, 150, 180. They haven't eaten. Where'd that come from? It came from the liver because these stress hormones are going and they're pumping out lots of blood sugar, and they're pumping out fat at the same time. The mitochondria are like, Well, we can only process so much energy. The fat oxidation of the mitochondria is blocking the glucose from entering the mitochondria. Then it shoots that back out into the system. You have more lactate building up, and then you have a backup of glucose in the system. It's like a clog sink. You have a clog sink, you got the water faucets running, you can see the water. Let's just cut the carbs Let's turn off the water. So you don't have water going into the sink anymore. Let's let the clogs fix. Let's just turn off the water. So just remove the carbs. It's like turning off the water. Oh, you just don't see the blood sugar going in. You still haven't fixed the root cause of insulin resistance at the cellular level.

You haven't fixed the clog in the sink. But it makes for a good, oh, symptoms resolved. This is where I start to go, I step on some toes. We're seeing the same thing with low carb diet. We're just removing the carbs. But are we really fixing the problem? Because you could still have high fat diet blocking the entry of glucose into the mitochondria, and so that glucose gets backed up and causes high blood sugar. So talking to a friend of mine, Brad Kearns, who wrote several books with Mark Sisson, including the Keto Diet Reset. While he's writing the Keto Diet Reset, five or six, seven years ago, and training, this guy is like, he was a top-ranked, top-five-ranked triathlete in the US, and the world, actually, in the '90s. He's now 60 years old, and track and field, he's hitting the Masters, where he's number one for the high jump, number two for the 400. He's running a 460 seconds at 60 years old. So this guy is in great shape. Him and Mark Sisson, Mark's Daily Apple, wrote probably four or five books together. He was writing the keto diet reset, following a ketogenic diet, great shape, waking up to a blood sugar level of 130 in the morning.

He's eating a keto diet. He hadn't eaten for 12 hours. He's waking up to blood sugar of 130. What's going on? It was the elevated stress hormone, the elevated gluconegativity. He's working out, so that's a little more stress. Then the high fat blocking the entry of glucose into the mitochondria, causing the blood sugar to go up because when he's... It's normal to have some cortisol elevation in the morning. Well, yeah. But because of the position he's in, he's exercising, he's on keto, he has a little more stress going on, and the blood sugar would just go up in the morning. With a normal cortisol response, it might go up in the '90s. It's going to 1: 30, which is diabetic level. He didn't have diabetes, but his blood sugar, because of the high fat diet, because of the stress on the liver, he had that backup of glucose in the system. It's become clear over the last few years that that low carb diet and all the intermittent fasting and all this metabolic stress I was creating was putting a dependence on fat oxidation over glucose oxidation to the point that my blood sugar was in the '90s, which is something to say, Oh, that's not bad.

It's not bad. It's not great. I'm metabolically healthy. I want to be between 70 and It was 90. I knew there was something wrong. I was like, Why is my blood sugar high if my fasting insulin is low? What's going on here? That's where I had to start digging in. Adding carbohydrates to my diet, significant amount of carbohydrates to my diet, has now brought my blood sugar down where it's around 80, my fasted blood sugar around 80. Yeah, it's perfect. It's right where I want it. My A1c is 5. 3. It's lower than it has been. My fasting insulin is still It's between two and a half and three, 2. 5 and still really low. But my thyroid is better now, and I don't have the high stress markers. I'm recovering better, sleeping better. This is where I'm like, Why? Why is this happening? I had to dig in and start looking for some history on how have we overcorrected for these problems with obesity and diabetes, and how were we able to have these low fat, high carb diets for the last 10,000 years prior to the 20th century in the United States. But for the last 10,000 years without diabetes, without metabolic disease, without obesity, if carbs caused metabolic disease.

Yeah.

You just kept digging and asking questions.

I kept digging, asking questions and trying to... I had to roll back things I've been saying for two years.

That's what it's all about, man. That's how you learn. We're not going to know everything from this.

No, but we get stuck. Yeah. Oh, yeah. We get in ruts, we get stuck, we think we got it figured out, and we run with it. Then we put on the T-shirt, we put on the hat, and we call ourselves something, or we change our handle, and we put strategy on our... We put a tool on our brand. When we put a tool on our brand, then everything's about the tool. If all you got is a hammer, everything's nail. That's right. You just want to hit everything with the hammer. Sometimes you need a screwdriver. Sometimes you need... What I'm seeing, we start putting strategy ahead of health outcomes of the people we're trying to help.

I refer to scripture a lot in the Bible and how I learn now, and people wonder how that's possible because it seems like it's so straightforward. But it's this thing called pride that you learn about in there. Then you realize pride has multifaceted definitions. One of being being stuck in your ways. That's a prideful sin, essentially, because it's a wrong. What you've been able to do, and what I've been able to do, is take accountability for the mistakes we've made, or not even so much on purpose, but just look back and go, Hey, let's revisit this. Let's look at other things. I'm I've seen things. Because I used to do this, Zane, a lot when I was first starting into the whole fitness space. I hated to get challenged. I thought I was always right, and I would figure ways to twist and turn to make it how I wanted it to be. Now, I meet a guy like you and I go, Oh, shit. Let's talk. Show me. Teach me. What am I missing? I'll tell you what I see. You tell me what you see, and let's compare. I love that. Yeah. It doesn't mean you're right.

It doesn't mean I'm right. Maybe we're both right. Maybe I take part of what you take, you take part of what I take.

Our understanding of the truth is such a single-digit usage. Truth has not completely revealed herself to us yet. No. I think it was like we're looking We all have a jigsaw puzzle in front of us, and we're trying to find the... We're going to try to solve this puzzle. Some of us start with the corners, and some of us start in the middle. We start with, Oh, this is a bright yellow thing. I'm going to put the bright yellow thing together in the middle and then work out from there. And so we're all just working with the pieces of the puzzle that we have that we like to work with. And some of us start the same way, and we, Oh, yeah, I like working from the outside, working in, too. I like working from the inside out. And so we start grouping together, but we're all We're all trying to figure out the same puzzle. What we should do is start getting angry with other people who are learning their puzzle from a different position because they'll have different perspectives.

I agree, 100 %. And I love learning constantly, and I love being pointed out to things that I'm missing because we're always missing something. I don't care how much you think you know or how good you are at something. There's something you're not doing. Of course. Always. I think that's That's very important. I've got a couple. I don't think they're simple questions. It's more of your experience because these are questions that I think most people ask or they don't understand. For instance, what I want to ask you is What are your most either the ones you recommend or the best sources of carbs? And maybe one might want to avoid that could actually be on the problematic side of carb. What are some of your staple carbohydrates and one are you some that you are maybe likely avoid or tell people, Hey, be careful here or look elsewhere?

I typically eat mostly fruit, sweet potato or some potato, and then white rice. I like a simply digested or easily digested carb with not a lot of Phytonutrients, or not Phytonutrients, like lectins, phytates, things like that. So easy digest, limited the plant toxin, if you want to call them, the things that could disrupt digestion. So I I tend to avoid lagoons, and nuts are like something I would maybe indulge around Christmas or some just because I like the taste of them. But that can be a regular part of my diet because of that digestive issue. But fruit, white rice, some potato. Then I always say, look at how you digest them. What is easy for you to digest? What tends to be difficult for you to digest? Maybe it's just an adjustment. Maybe your biome just needs to adjust. But if it seems to be over time, you don't digest that well, may not be the best one for you. Most people can handle digesting fruit because it's pretty easy to digest. It's a simple soluble fiber, and the glucose is easy to process. The fructose, I think, is beneficial as well. There's a lot of nutrients in there, like antioxidants and so forth.

They're very hydrating. They're very good. They're Casey. I think there's a reason for that. Why do we have We have a sensor for sweet on our tongue if we weren't supposed to use it? Exactly. As well as salty, as well as savor. Then when something is so bitter that we want to spit it out, that tells us something as well. Vegetables, like real vegetables. I mean, someone wants to eat leaves or like broccoli or something like that, I would definitely say cook them because they're just too hard to break down. I think some of those lectins and fita and so forth that can be problematic for digestion.

Which vegetables do you prefer?

I don't eat a lot. I eat more low sugar fruits. Some people think of as vegetables, like squash, tomatoes, peppers. Those are fruit, technically, because they have seeds inside them. Olives are great. But I got to the point, even in my... Maybe 10 years ago, where a big salad would disrupt my stomach. I just couldn't digest it anymore. I'm like, Okay, something's tell raw. Lots of raw veggies. Not ideal.

No, no thing. No. I don't touch salads or anything. I eat a lot. I told you I was eating 14, 15 servings of vegetables.

Yeah, I bet you're like done.

Now, I- Check the market. I still like them. I'm an Italian background, so I love peppers. So I like green, red, orange. So I have peppers, mushrooms, and onions pretty much every day. And onions, both green, onions, and white. That's about what I normally have for my vegetables every day in there. Eggplant every so often, but not a lot. But that's the ones I prefer. Then a little bokchoi here and there.

Sure. You can get a bokchoi.

But I don't eat salad or any. I never do. I'm not a salad guy. I like tomatoes, but- Yeah, those are all technically fruit, by the way. And supini.

Yeah, those are technically fruit. They have seeds in them, so they're just lower sugar. But I think there is some of that room for digestive and your microbiome and how well it adapts to it or how well you digest it. And that may be regional, it may be genetic on some level. I think humans, we've become the dominant species on this planet, not because we're the biggest, not because we're the strongest, we're not the fastest, but we are the most adaptive.

Yeah.

And so I think in our digestion, in the way we live, we make tools, we communicate, obviously. But I think we're extremely adaptive, and we are omnivorous, and we've been able to survive because we can live on... Our diet can have a lot of room for variety or be very limited for extended period of time, and we will still survive. Exactly. We may not be thriving on a limited diet, but we're surviving. Then to get us to the point, but too long, and we'll adapt to that. I Again, we over-leverage these adaptations. That's when we start to run into problems over time. Something I would love to just bring out where carbs have been made a villain, but at one point, there's been interventions where they were used to reverse diabetes, reverse obesity, reverse hypertension, and even heart disease. There's a study that a lot of people haven't heard about. It's a study, actually. It was an intervention that was conducted at Duke University starting in for 74 years. All but 10 of the 74 years, it was conducted at Duke University by this German guy named Walter Kempner. Came from Germany right before World War II, landed at Duke University, and he started with a group of people that had hypertension.

Now, back then, there were no hypertensive There was no medication for high blood pressure. You would be more likely dead in six months, maybe a year. It would kill you to have heart disease. He wanted to reverse hypertension, and he put these people on a pretty much called the Rice Diet. It was mostly rice with fruit, fruit juice, and allowable, even table sugar, processed sugar. It was 92, 93% carbohydrate, maybe 4, 5% protein and 2% fat from the kernel in the rice. They were in a ward. They were in this ward in Duke. He reversed hypertension. We're talking about people with 200 over 150, and they're back down to normal hypertension. Then it was they tried it with diabetes and renal failure, so the kidney issues that come with metabolic disease. Right, of course. Reversed. Even some level of retinopathy was reversed on this diet. They're not under eating. 2,200, 2,400 calories Some of them, they had to give them more because they were losing weight or trying to help them maintain their weight, or they just killed after they didn't want to eat. Now, he did have a weight loss component as well, and he did cut the calories for them.

They were around a thousand to maybe 1,400 calories. Same diet: rice, fruit, fruit juice, and sugar. These people, he put forth a example of what he did in 1974. I mean, 18,000 people came through this program, but in that 74-year period at Duke. And two-thirds of them were considered successful. That's a pretty good numbers. Yeah, absolutely. So he showed of 106 people that he had treated with this, They had an average... All of them had lost at least 100 pounds. They had an average weight loss of 140 pounds. One guy lost 300 pounds in just over a year. Most of these were losing this 100 plus pounds anywhere from six months to a year's time on this diet. Now, is this a sustainable diet? No, it's an intervention. But at the time, hypertension was not sustainable either. You would die. I would argue that diabetes, obesity, heart disease, these really sustainable. We've made them sustainable with drugs. But I wouldn't want to stay in that chronic disease state. I would rather eat rice and fruit for six months than be diabetic or obese, personally. Absolutely. This was an intervention diet that was not meant to be forever.

It reversed this disease by basically improving their insulin resistance. They basically improved their glucose tolerance. Their blood sugar came down. They no longer... The people who were diabetic no longer needed insulin. Is this to say this is the best intervention we should have? No. Is this a great diet? No. What this shows me is that carbohydrates do not cause metabolic disease. Of course. Because they were used in pretty much a 90, basically 100% carbohydrate diet to reverse them. How could we blame them for a disease that we can use if they ate 100% carbohydrates to reverse? There have been a vegetarian, like Pritiken came from the '60s and '70s. Ornish was a vegetarian diet that also was very successful at reversing diabetes and obesity. Am I advocating for those diets? No. But they show us that wholefood carbohydrates or even with sugar. He was using sugar, like 100 grams of sugar a day on top of their rice and their fruit. They were still losing weight and still reversing the disease. That tells me, carbohydrates are not causing this disease. And so that was a light bulb moment. Okay, this just flipped the script on me completely.

I need to understand why, how, what's impacting this on a cellular level. Because looking at symptoms, looking at blood sugar going up and down and saying, Oh, that's bad. We need to fix that. It's not the whole story.

That's it. That's the problem is people don't look at the whole story. They take the bits and pieces that they want.

Doctors are taught this way, and I'm not trying to be critical of doctors or medical school, but they're taught, Here's a easy method you can apply to a lot of people that works most of the time. I know. It's rinse and repeat because they've got about 10 minutes with somebody.

That's it.

It's true. It's like, This works most of the time, seems to help the symptoms. Write them in the script, tell to do this and then and just repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. It's true. It's 100% true.

I'm laughing and smiling because you say some of the same shit that I say all the time. It makes me smile because I love it. I can't believe we're almost done.

Oh, wow.

I want one more question. Sure. What is, and tell me this because I talk to Ben about this all the time, and it's his thing, but what is metabolic flexibility? Why is it important?

Do it quick. I don't have the same answer as Ben.

No, you don't have to. That's why I'm asking.

No, you're talking about Ben Azadi, right? Yeah. And we are buddies.

Me too. But that's why I'm asking you because I want a different answer.

Metabolic flexibility, in my opinion, is that you can switch between glucose and carbohydrate, or glucose and fat, flexibly. That's right. But take someone who's been on a keto diet or a carnivore diet for a year and put glucose in their body, what happens? They will fail a glucose tolerance test. Their glucose will go through the roof. That, to me, is not metabolic flexibility. That's metabolic rigidity.

Thank you. That's what I'm saying.

We're always burning fat. We are always using fat. From a diabetic, we are always using... The misconception is that, Oh, if we're eating sugar, we're not using fat. No, we're always using fat. We're always using both. If we're eating both, and our use of it will move with our diet. If you're at 30% carb and 30% fat, that's about how much you're going to burn. If it's half and half, you're going to be burning both.

And you're training, right?

And you're training. But even if you're not, you're using both because that's how our body works. It always uses it. It has a useful structure, nutrition, and energy. It's not just all energy. We're looking at everything just from an energetic point of view, it's too small. When we can use both, we can flow back and forth without a glucose spike, then you have metabolic flexibility. Right.

And that's what we want.

That's ideal because then your energy systems are working together seamlessly and you'll have plenty of energy. But if you are on a high fat, super low carb diet, and when you consume glucose, your blood sugar goes through the roof and things are out of range, that's a sign you are not metabolizing glucose properly. That's not metabolic flexibility.

Dude, I swear we're going to have to do another one of these because I didn't get through a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of That's what I wanted to do.

Well, come to Nashville. We'll sit down there.

I will. I absolutely will. We're going to do several of these. I've got to talk to you off camera about a lot of stuff here. I really appreciate your insight and your level-headedness and your willingness to discuss, your willingness to go out on a limb, and the data that you have to back it up, and the amount of time that I can see that you've put into it, as well as your accountability, because this is one of those things that I feel is lost. It's not just our community, it's everyone. Accountability is something that I value highly, and I had to work on it myself a lot. That's how I feel like I became more successful was being more accountable. I can tell you're an accountable guy, and I love that. I relate to you in a high regard in all of these things. I just want you to know, just for me, that I appreciate that. I'm sure everybody else does, too. But on a personal level, it's refreshing, man. I love that about you. I'm glad that we met and talked and that we are developing this relationship because it's valuable to me.

Appreciate that. Thank you. Yeah, I know. I love having someone I can go back and forth with. That's how we, like you said, that's how we uncover new things. That's how we think, look at things differently and see different patterns.

That's how we learn. Tell everybody the best places to follow you and how they can maybe even get in touch with you or watch you because I think it's important to- Sure.

I appreciate that. My website, zangrigs. Com, would have all my socials on it. I'm most active on Instagram at zangrigsfitness and on YouTube at zangrigs. Then in my community, the Metaflex community, where I have it like, those are my people. I dive a little deeper. I can answer some questions, do Q&A, and get a little deeper with helping people. That's why I'm choosing to work with people more so now than when I was one-on-one a lot in my early days of training. I'm really digging in the community aspect of it because I think it's really important for our health as well. To stay connected in this world that's sometimes just way too digital. I know. But to have these real conversations in community. That's why I shifted to more a community aspect of my business. But those are the best places. Instagram, you can see all the haters coming at me. So show me some love, if you would, at Zane Griggs Fitness, and then YouTube, of course, Zane Griggs.

You know I got you back. I appreciate it, brother. I really do. This is part one of probably many. All right, everybody. That wraps up another one. I hope that you enjoy this. Take it to heart, learn from it, implement it, try it, be open to new ideas and new methods, because that's the key, and that's how we make changes and get better. So that being said, stay tuned for plenty more to come. Dylan Jameli and Zane Griggs signing off.