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Bonus 13: JB Back on Holy Hormones


Jonathan: Welcome to the Smarter Science of Slim, the scientifically-proven program where you eat more and exercise less to burn fat and boost health.

Carrie: Eat smarter, exercise smarter, live better. I am so ready for that!

[Show Intro 00:24 – 01:01]

Leslie: Good evening everyone and welcome to Holy Hormones Honey, the greatest story never told I’m Leslie Botha your host and of course it is Monday night at the KRFC Studio in the hormones studio. We’re going to be talking about hormones for the next hour and hope you’re going to stay with us because these are male hormones, these are female hormones, these are the hormones that affect our weight and weight is a big issue for a lot us right now.

Jonathan Bailor is back. He was on earlier this year and he was so widely received, such a brilliant guest. He is author of The Smarter Science of Slim scientific proof that fat loss facts, a proven and practical guide for weight loss and robust health and Jonathan is going to be talking about hormones and weight and all of that coming up here on Holy Hormones Honey. Andy nice to have you back on the studio.

Andy: Nice to be here.

Leslie: I know you’re pretty busy.

Andy: I am busy actually.

Leslie: It’s always great to have you here.

Andy: Well, thank you.

Leslie: I know you’re interested in this topic. I’m interested in this topic.

Andy: Sure why not.

Leslie: Sure why not?

Andy: Yeah.

Leslie: We all have an extra few pounds we are going to lose before we go into the holidays, that’s what we’re going to talk about.

Andy: Scary stuff.

Leslie: I posted this on Facebook and I had a lot of response there. I want you to welcome the new listeners to this program, community radio is really a great place to learn, listen to great music and to learn new information that affects our lives and that’s what we do here at KRFC. Jonathan Bailor, my guest this evening on The Smarter Science of Slim, coming up in just a couple of minutes, before that, let’s do some hormone news. This came out of Business Standard the press trust of India and at the London office on September 30th, just a couple of days ago, ‘hormone linked to sleep could battle Alzheimer’s’, we’re doing all things hormonal here tonight.

In a breakthrough, scientists discovered that a hormone linked to sleep cycle can be a new weapon against Alzheimer’s disease. A new study has shown that a combination of exercise and a daily intake of melatonin, the natural hormone which causes drowsiness at night had a positive effect on rodents suffering from illness. The research was conducted by the Barcelona Biomedical Research Institute in collaboration with the University of Granada and the Autonomous University of Barcelona. I graduated from the Autonomous University when I would love to go around saying that…

Andy: I would love to get some sleep.

Leslie: Yeah we’ll do that too. I’m sure Jonathan shed light on that one too. After six months, the state of the mice undergoing treatment was closer to that the mice was no mutations, I’m skipping around here; then to their own initial pathological state. From this, we can say that the disease, Alzheimer’s significantly regressed once the melatonin hormones was introduced into the mice. According to the natural medicines comprehensive database, the molecule is probably effective in sleeping disorders and children with autism and mental retardation and in blind people and possibly effective in cases of jet lag, sun burns and preoperative anxiety.

That’s a lot, melatonin, natural hormone. Even though more studies and clinical tests are still required to assess the doses of melatonin which will be effective for a wide range of diseases, the anti-oxidant and anti-inflammatory properties of melatonin means that it use is highly recommended for diseases which feature observative stress and inflammation such as Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease, and again that all came out at the University of Granada, it’s a study that was published in the journal ‘Neurobiology of Aging’, fascinating.

One other piece here, tying right into our show, lack of sleep leads to insulin resistance in teens. This is a biggie, especially since kids are back in school now and college kids are here and everyone is gearing up and the first thing to go, sleep, second thing to go, diet and all of those things combined, what do I want to say, they cause hormone imbalance. This came out of Science Daily. A new study suggest that increasing the amount of sleep that teenagers get could improve their insulin resistance and prevent the future onset of diabetes. High levels of insulin resistance can lead to the development of diabetes said lead author Karin Matthews, PhD of the University of Pittsburgh, Department of Psychiatry. “We’ve found that if teens that normally gets 6 hours of sleep per night get one extra hour of sleep, they would improve insulin resistance by 9 percent.” The study appearing in the October issue of the Journal Sleep, track the sleep duration and insulin resistant levels of 245 healthy, high school students.

Participants provided a fasting blood draw and they kept a sleep blog and wore a wrist ActiGraph for one week and that was during the school year. Sleep duration based on actigraphy average 6.4 hours over the week the school days, significantly lower than weekends. Results show that higher insulin resistance is associated with shorter sleep duration, independent of race, age, gender, waist circumference, and body mass index. Wow.

According to Matthews, the study is the only one in healthy adolescents that shows a relationship between shorter sleep, insulin resistance that is independent of obesity. The authors concluded that interventions to promote metabolic health in adolescents should include efforts to extend nightly sleep duration. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine reports that most teens need a little more nine hours of sleep each night and that all comes back to hormones.

Andy: I would love nine hours of sleep.

Leslie: We’re going to have to get you nine hours of sleep.

Andy: Yeah I usually do, actually. I’m in bed at a good time and I’m usually up by 5:30 in the morning so…

Leslie: Well, this study makes sense because if kids get off track with lack of sleep as we mentioned, diet and then that carries on into adulthood, that’s hormone imbalance and it just gets worst and worst. On that note Jonathan, let’s bring you right in on the conversation. What do you think?

Jonathan: Well hello…

Leslie: Well hello this is Jonathan Bailor, The Smarter Science of Slim. We’re talking about hormone imbalance, early ages and teens that could lead to onset of diabetes, insulin resistant in teens. You talk about a lot of this in your book.

Jonathan: Let me raise the stakes a little bit if you don’t mind, regarding younger people and how hormones can be negatively impacting them, if you don’t mind…

Leslie: No, I want you to and then I’ll introduce you formally, go right ahead, jump in.

Jonathan: Working on some new research for an upcoming new book and one of the areas I’m looking at is an area called epigenetic, is the study of how health of the mother even prior to pregnancy or during pregnancy with [inaudible 08:06] genetics expressions of her fetus, translating this.

Researchers have shown that for example when a resistant or diabetic mother, what happens is her baby in utero is flooded with glucose, however the insulin from the mother is not able to pass the umbilical cord into the fetus. The fetus’ will develop a pancreas has to work overtime and its cells become insulin resistant and its pancreas starts to breakdown even before it [inaudible 08:41]. Studies have shown that these children are astronomically more likely to become pre-diabetic and diabetic when they reach the age of maturity, thereby [audible 08:55] what could be an endless cycle of this potentially fatal disease, so no joke here. No joke.

Leslie: Hormone balance is becoming the silent epidemic and we’re going to be addressing that tonight with Jonathan Bailor. He’s the author of The Smarter Science of Slim, Scientific Proof Fat Loss Fact. Bailor has a proven track record and a passion for solving tough problem. He’s an accomplished public speaker with a knack for entertaining while he educates.

Bailor speaks to and consults with Fortune 50 companies and has done so for the past decade. As an entrepreneur, he has started successful businesses, authored the critically acclaimed book, The Smarter Science of Slim, produced a promotional magazine, helped develop a radio show, holds more than 20 US patents and invented the Marquee feature in Microsoft Office 2010. This book has been a 10 year odyssey to analyze thousands of scientific studies and he interviewed top medical researchers, regarding the proven science of the long term health and fat loss.

Upon discovering a disturbing disconnect between what the scientific community had proven about wellness and what we as a society are told. Bailor committed his life to work with top doctors and scientists around the world to make the research he gathered accessible to everyone. Pretty impressive, and if you’re just joining us, of course this is Holy Hormones Honey, the greatest story never told. I’m Leslie Bothe, your host, Jonathan Bailor is my guest.

Jonathan, I posted an article on my blog in 2009 and it was titled What is Hormone Imbalance? I got a couple of hits on it, a couple of women commented, they’re having problems and then in June, this is three years later, the article is now archived and it’s buried, someone really have to be searching for it and all of a sudden between June and September, I’ve had over a 200 comments from women suffering horribly from what they’re beginning to realize is hormone imbalance; anxiety, fatigue, hair loss, weight gain, agoraphobia, depression, manic depression, irritability, rage and of course, the cycle goes on because these women are being put on drugs. You just read their stories and you can see, well this is just one, like a domino effect going on and these women are keeping and getting more and more imbalanced because the drugs just mask the symptoms.

They are getting nutritionally depleted and some doctors are even telling them to get pregnant, so they feel better again and then what happens on the other side is their hormones drop after the pregnancy, they’re more severely depleted, they’re nutritionally depleted and they’re even more messed up anxiety wise. This is a huge issue and then we have weight gain and obesity all wrapped up into this. Can you explain what hormones are, what hormone balance is, and what…how important is rhythmic dances in the body?

Jonathan: Leslie, I think maybe a good way to characterize it is, hormones are going to be the calories of new millennium, over the past 30 years, you’ve been inundated with this talk of calories. We can all talk about calorie counts and we can all talk about calories in and we can talk about calories out, we can talk about counting calories.

We talk about obesity, we talk about many calories and we talked about all kind of that fun stuff whereas, the science is discovering is that really calories are a bit of a red herring and that calories only matter because of their impact on the hormones and that so many other things impact hormones. And the reason hormones matter so much is they are essentially the language that our various parts of our body [Inaudible 0:13:00], so right now, I’m speaking English. You and your listeners all are understanding, so we can communicate via English. Our muscle tissue and our gut and our intestines and our nervous system and our brain, they all communicate via hormone. That’s what they speak. They speak hormone.

We want our body to communicate something different and what I mean when I say that, for example communicate to burn fat rather than store fat or if we want our body to communicate, feel energetic, rather than lethargic, we have to change that hormonal conversation. To be clear, there all obviously genetic components here but we do have a surprising amount on our hormones. The three biggest control mechanisms we have are; the foods that we eat, the exercise we get and then things like resy, things like that, lifestyle factor.

Leslie: Can I ask you, are you moving back and forth in front of your phone because you’re kind of cutting in and out on this and everything you have to say is really important here.

Jonathan: Oh sorry no. Is this any better?

Leslie: Yeah and Andy is nodding his head as well. The dog we can deal with, everyone’s got a dog in the background but it was just you’ve got so much to say, I want to make sure everyone has to, everyone listens. Let’s go back to epigenetic, now because this is a very important science that’s coming down the pike and it’s fascinating.

What we don’t realize is, what we build up in our bodies in this toxic day and age is, passed on to our offspring. What we don’t realize that the years and the generations of synthetic birth control now, that has been ingested by millions and millions of women is now passed on to our offspring and that further inhibits hormone balance before that baby is even born, plus everything that you said at the top of the hour.

Jonathan: Absolutely and then I guess there’s good news and there’s bad news. There is a silver lining here. One can sort of say “Oh my God, this is just this massive problem and what do we do?” That’s one interpretation, another interpretation is that there is a pretty simple I won’t say easy, I’ll say that intentionally, but there’s a pretty simple solution to this and that is to eliminate these negative stimuli from our life. Sometimes people will say, you often hear the analogy between smoking and eating improper foods.

They say, well you can just not smoke, you can’t just not eat but that’s a false dichotomy. When people say don’t smoke, they say don’t smoke, they don’t say, don’t breath and no one’s saying don’t eat. All we have to do is eat food and if we just eat food. I’m going to define food as something you find directly in nature and that’s edible. If you cannot find it in nature, like bread cannot be found in nature…

I realize that the bible calls it the ‘Staff of Life’ but no matter what we try to do, for example the wheat we consume today isn’t the wheat that was consumed in biblical time, completely different plant. It has a different chromosomal make up and it causes hormonal wackiness in our bodies. On one hand, just like “Oh my God, we’re getting it from all angles.” That’s true but on the other hand, the solution is so clear, it’s just eat food, sleep and be active, that’s all we have to do.

Leslie: There you go Andy, eat food, sleep and be active.

Andy: I try.

Leslie: I know. Let’s get down to the nitty, gritty of this and I mean Jonathan, you have said before, the solution is simple, the evidence, we did not have this condition before we had processed foods; fake foods, and then combined with genetically soiled pollution obviously.

Jonathan: Exactly I even dare to say they are not foods. These are edible products. They are things that do not need to be refrigerated, they’re things that do not need to be frozen, they’re things that aren’t alive and really were never alive. There’s no bread bush in nature. There’s no such thing as living bread, bread is a plant that’s been heavily processed and refined and then given to us in bread. If we were to eat what off the stalk, well actually, we can’t, the body cannot synthesize that but things like non-starchy vegetables, nutrient dense meat and fish, and whole food fats…

Here we are, getting told that fat is bad for us when fat is found all over the place in nature and frankly, they more we’ve become afraid of eating naturals fats, the heavier and sicker we’ve become. We’ve really just had this backward approach to nutrition, which frankly has just complicated things. If we just get back to simply eating the way we ate before we had all these problems in eating food, the problems just go away.

Leslie: You’re listening to Holy Hormones Honey, the greatest story never told. Jonathan Bailor is my guest tonight and of course I am Leslie Bothe, nice to have you here and of course, you’re listening to KRFC, Fort Collins. If we just go back to eating the basics, eating plant foods, plant derived foods, a lot of these problems would be eliminated. Brenda Epstein was here the last time we did this show and she and I looked at each other the whole time.

We were just listening to you and fascinated by everything you had to say about this and Brenda was trying to lose some post pregnancy weight and I’m always just trying to lose those few extra pounds anyway. We both changed our diets and Brenda and I would see each other at the Farmers Market and say “How are you doing?” “How are you doing?” The last time I saw Brenda, well one of the last times I saw her this Summer, she said “I’m doing great, I’m dropping that weight and I’m not out jogging and wrecking my knees, I’m happy.” This works for me and it really did work. We eliminated a lot of the grains out of our diet, based on your book which you were talking about and it really did make a significant difference. Can you…

Jonathan: That’s great to hear. Two important points which will echo that and hopefully help your listeners, earlier you sort of summarized what I said, you mentioned natural foods and plants. I don’t know if you consciously left off animals, but certainly, animals are a natural food source, certainly if we avoid animals because of moral reasons or whatever, that’s fine but from a nutritional perspective, the science are pretty clear that they are very, very valuable from a nutritional, hormonal perspective assuming they are not also contaminated with hormones and toxins like that…

Leslie: Yeah it’s a big assumption, go ahead.

Jonathan: Absolutely, absolutely. In terms of the elimination of grains, so one thing I want to make clear to the listeners is generally, a key teller of human psychology is that if you tell somebody that they can’t have something, that generally doesn’t work out well. Don’t think of the color blue, what’s everyone thinking about right now, it’s the color blue.

Leslie: Well Andy’s wearing a blue t-shirt so I kind of looking at blue.

Jonathan: The key thing to keep in mind, I find that’s very successful is to always pursue the positive, rather than attacking the negative. What I try to tell people is if we can eat so much SANE food, what I describe as healthy, high quality food; satisfying, unaggressive, nutritious and inefficient, I will explain more later, if we can fill ourselves with so much of that food that we’re too full for inSANE starches and sweets, life is a heck of a lot more enjoyable, and a heck of a lot easier.

I don’t know too many people who wants to or are willing to go through life hungry. It’s not about not eating food, in fact eat to hormonal health, I would argue, is eating an abundance of the right types of food. It is the most effective medication out there.

Leslie: I think we need to delve into that one right now. Let’s not talk about it later, let’s do it, let’s define SANE for me one more time in terms of SANE foods, then describe the inSANE food and let’s just nail this thing.

Jonathan: Sure. SANE is an acronym for the four factors that science have shown determine the quality of a calorie. The S stands for satiety, which is just how quickly a calorie fills us up and how long it keeps us full. A good example of a calorie with low satiety are, we hear things like there’s always room for jell-o. That’s true and that’s not a good thing, that’s because jell-o doesn’t fill us up, sugar and sweeteners do not fill us up, that’s why you can drink 300 calories of soda and just continue to eat an entire pizza, rather than if you ate 300 calories of food, it would satisfy you and you would be too full to eat anything else. We want to eat high satiety foods. I will talk about what these are when I get through all four of the factors.

Leslie: Sure.

Jonathan: They are all the same and that makes life simple for us, which is great. I want to talk about aggressive, we want to eat unaggressive foods, meaning we want to eat foods that don’t rush into our blood stream and just overwhelm our body with glucose. This is the most well known factor, it has to do a lot with glycemic load and glycemic index and insulin response. Basically, we want to eat foods that aren’t aggressive, that do not trigger a surge of blood sugar and do not trigger a surge of the hormone insulin. So that’s unaggressive foods.

Things that are nutritious is the N in SANE. The key thing here, people, we’re led to believe that we’ve got all the facts on nutrition and we really don’t. The way nutrition is represented to us is horribly inaccurate because we are told about nutrition from a quantity perspective. For example, if you look at a serving of whole grains, generally we’ll be told that’s a great source of fiber. What we hear is that sure, you get whatever four grams of fiber in 250 calories worth of whole grain, however if you were to eat 250 calories of non-starchy vegetables, you get about 46 grams of fiber.

The problem we hear about nutrition just from a raw quantity perspective, like how much fiber do we get in a serving of this? We don’t think about nutrition quality or how many calories is taking us get that amount of nutrition. We need to think of nutrition per calorie and when we do that, the types of foods that we actually consider to be nutritious actually changes pretty dramatically. The final factor is the E in SANE or efficiency. It is the least known factor and it has to do with how easily our body can convert food into body fat.

For example, if we were to consume 300 calories of a starch, by the time that goes to all of the chemical processes that are involve making a piece of bread and turning it into triglyceride or body fat that sits on our hips, that would burn about 100 of those 200 calories, just to do those chemical processes. However, if we were to eat 300 calories worth of protein, we would burn twice that, meaning that it is….protein is twice as inefficient as being stored as body fat, as carbohydrate. This has huge implications for our diet in the sense that if we’d eat, you shouldn’t do this, but conceptually, if you were to eat a 2000 calorie diet, that it was nothing but starch and you were to eat a 2100 calorie diet that was nothing but protein, you would store less fat consuming more calories on the all protein diet, simply because your body is inefficient at storing protein as fat and don’t do that. It’s incredibly unhealthy to do either one of those diets. It just illustrates the point.

Leslie : Because of the high caloric intake, obviously.

Jonathan: Well, and just also because it’s horribly imbalanced, you shouldn’t eat just a 100 percent starch or protein diet. That would mean a nutritionally inadequate diet.

Leslie: Of course. Yeah. I don’t think people would do that anyway, but you never know so there’s the disclaimer here. So…

Jonathan: Absolutely!

Leslie: We’re off that hook, there.

Jonathan: The summary is, eat satisfying, unaggressive, nutritious, and inefficient foods and to simplify all of that, to do that, you just need to focus on three things; water, fiber, and protein because foods that are rich in water, rich in fiber, and rich in protein are satisfying, unaggressive, nutritious, and inefficient. As common sense might have it, those are exactly the foods that you find directly in nature, things like non-starchy vegetables, things like nutrient-dense proteins, and things like whole food natural fats like nuts and seeds, and it sort of makes sense. Those are the foods that the human body runs best on, considering that they were the only foods available to us up until about 50 years ago.

Leslie: That was pretty brilliant. Right Andy, what do you think? Do you have any questions? You’re more than welcome to join in.

Andy: Not yet, but I will, actually.

Leslie: You’re thinking. I can tell. I can tell you’re thinking over there. Non-starchy vegetables, give us some examples.

Jonathan: From a high level, think of these vegetables as what you can eat raw. Generally speaking, vegetables you can put in salads, things like any green, leafy vegetable, really, anything that’s green, and then things like cucumber, mushrooms, tomatoes, carrots. Again, think about things you can eat raw. Things like potatoes, you can’t eat raw. Things like corn, you can’t eat raw. Those are starches, they’re not vegetables. We talked about non-starchy vegetables, think of green things, things, generally, that grow above ground, things that you can eat raw, things you put in salads.

The other thing was nutrient-dense proteins. These are, by and large, things like seafood, things like organic grass-fed beef, free-range poultry, and certain select dairy products, and things like eggs. Of course, you’ve got to watch out for the hormone contamination there, but assuming they’re not contaminated…

At some point in time, our plants can be contaminated and our animals can be contaminated, so I think, it’s most helpful to say “Don’t eat contaminated food” rather than “Don’t eat animals” or “Don’t eat plants,” because they can both be contaminated and then finally, whole food natural fats which just means, essentially, nuts and seeds. It’s a whole food, and it’s a natural fat, so nuts and seeds, things like, cashews, walnuts, Brazil nuts, cocoa, coconuts, Chia seeds, flax seeds, things like that.

Andy: Hey Jonathan, I have one question about these protein diets that seems to work for some people to lose weight. What would be the consequence of that? Say if I went on something like that for six months, and just strictly ate protein, you already mentioned that, that might be bad for me or it’s just a bad thing to do. I was just kind of curious where that would take me from there?

Jonathan: Sure. Just to be very clear, the diet I described earlier, the 100 percent protein diet, really, I don’t think anyone should eat that. However, I do think protein is the nutrient which gets the least of the macro-nutrient, which gets the least attention, and should get the most, simply because, for example, our body turns over, meaning, it breaks down and rebuilds about 250 grams of protein per day. This is why many of us lose strength over time. It’s a condition known as Sarcopenia, meaning our muscle tissue is literally disintegrating in our body, if we do not consume sufficient protein.

Something that is a high protein diet is specifically, what our society considers a high protein diet. I do not consider a high protein diet, for example, getting anywhere between 100 to 200 grams of protein per day, depending on your size and activity level, my research suggests is the optimal amount of protein to consume, for many reasons we can get into.

Our culture would consider that a very high protein diet, but the historical and ancestral record would say that that’s actually what humans ate for hundreds of thousands of years, so why is it all of a sudden, a high-protein diet. There’s nothing, there’s nothing unhealthy about a “high-protein diet,” assuming we’re keeping the protein level not at astronomical levels and keeping it 200 grams and below. In fact it’s actually, quite healthy. More importantly, the key thing to keep in mind is any diet needs to do, in any way of eating, needs to provide a couple of things, right? It needs to fill us up, if it leaves us hungry, it’s going to fail. We’re not going to go the rest of our lives being hungry. That’s silly. That’s like saying, “Just sleep less, for the rest of your life, and you’ll lose weight,” like it doesn’t. “Or just don’t go to the bathroom and you’ll lose weight.” That doesn’t make any sense.

Leslie: Great. Great.

Jonathan: It’s got to fill us up. It has to provide us with vitamins and minerals, like those essential vitamins and minerals. It has to provide us with essential amino acids. It has to provide us with essential fatty acids. All of those things have to happen, or we get sick and die.

If you’ll notice though, we could do that, eating protein and vegetables, conceptually. We don’t need to eat starch, and we certainly don’t need to eat sugar, because there’s nothing uniquely nutritional about them. However, again, things like vegetables, fruits, nuts, they’re wonderful sources of nutrients, they are incredibly filling. They’re wonderful sources of essential fatty acids and then meats, seafood are wonderful sources of essential proteins that we need to maintain our health.

Leslie: I can see a conundrum here, because, I think one of the myths is that carbohydrates fill us up, and of course, we want our kids to be filled up and not crying all the time that they’re hungry and somehow we think that the rice, or the pasta, or the mac and cheese, God forbid, is what’s going to do it, plus, it fits within most of our budgets. When, honestly, what you’re saying is, it may appear to fill us up, but really, our body is still starving, no matter how much food we’re putting in it.

Jonathan: That’s exactly right. The science, in fact, in this area, the area of satiety, is something that has been researched heavily, and you can do very well-controlled experiments. For example, you can get one group of people, and you can feed them meal A and meal A contains whatever percentage of protein, fat and carbohydrates. You get another group of people and give them Meal B, which contains the exact same number of calories but contains different foods.

You do that at breakfast, for example, and then you see how many calories those people, then, eat freely throughout the day. It’s very easy to test which foods are the most satisfying. The foods which are the most satisfying are, by and large, foods that contain the most water, foods that contain the most fiber, foods that contain the most protein, and foods that contain some fat. Fat is a critical component in terms of hormones, which actually trigger a feeling of being satisfied in our body. This is why many of us could eat a giant salad, a massive salad, that makes our stomach feel incredibly full, but we’re like, “I don’t feel satisfied”. You don’t get that feeling of satisfaction. So might get…[inaudible 32:59] but you feel satisfied.

Leslie: We’re having a problem. Okay. We’re getting a little breaking up there. Speaking too close to the phone, do you think, Andy?

Andy: It might be a little over-modulated.

Leslie: So I think that we’re back on track. Of course, you’re listening to Holy Hormones, indeed the greatest story never told, breaking down the myth about weight gain, obesity, with Jonathan Bailor, The Smarter Science of Slim. He is the author of that book is making its way around the country, getting rave reviews. I imagine, it’s even going international at this point, is that right, Jonathan?

Jonathan: It is. Yes. It is distributed in all English speaking markets.

Leslie: Oh, very excellent. Let’s go back to the fiber, what are fiber protein [indiscernible 33:44], and the non-starchy vegetables and the proteins? I didn’t hear you talk about cheese. We’ll go back to that and then the nuts and seeds, and the fat, essential fats associated with those because our brain is made up of trillions of fat cells, and so I imagine that the nuts and seeds are crucial to brain health as well.

Jonathan: Absolutely! Our body, at a very high level, is water, protein, and fat, so it’s a good idea to “eat what we are,” in a sense then, so, absolutely, yes.

Leslie: So it’s not “we are what we eat” but “we have to eat what we are.”

Jonathan: Exactly, exactly.

Leslie: Actually, both of those make perfect sense but, I like what you said about this is how the body was initially designed. Is to eat basic foods, so we don’t muck up the communications system, the functioning that’s going on within the body and like you said, in the last 50 years, we’ve really mucked up everything with throwing chemicals into the mix, processed foods…

Andy: Preservatives…

Leslie: Thank you. Preservatives, there’s a big one right there and one can only begin, well one can really begin to understand why the hormone system, why the hormone regulation starts breaking down.

Leslie: Did we lose you there, Jonathan?

Jonathan: I am, yes.

Leslie: Oh, you are there. Okay. Do, would have any comment on that as well? The simpler we eat, the better off we’re gonna be?

Jonathan: Well I would say, I mean, again, keep things simple. It’s good not only for your body, but also for your mind and again, from a high level, it really makes sense, right? If you take a car, and you put kerosene and canola oil, if you just put anything other than the fuel the car is designed to run on in the car, it’s going to break down. It might not break down immediately. If you put 90% gasoline in your gas tank and 10% water, the car may actually run okay, but over time it’s going to break down and what we’ve seen happen over time is that our diet has gone from 100% food, to like, today, maybe, it’s 30% food, 70% edible products.

If you look at a child’s lunch, the percent of food relative to non-food is shockingly bad. If we just get back to eating those foods, and putting the right fuel into our systems, it’s going to run correctly and please don’t view this as “Don’t enjoy food”, “Oh my gosh, we have to live a life of monotony and deprivation.” That is not at all the case.

My research shows that if we have a robust system, if we can keep our metabolism up and running most of the time, we can deal with the occasional hiccup or treat. Think about it like your immune system. If you have a healthy immune system, and you get a cold, you’re not going to die. You will just recover from the cold, because your immune system is healthy and can get you back on track for you. If you’re eating food most of the time, and you want to have a treat, or you’re at a party, and you want to have a treat, that’s fine, because it’s a treat and you otherwise, conditioned your system to handle that appropriately.

Sadly, we’ve moved into a culture where these poisonous foods aren’t even treats, they’re just like what we eat every day, and they’re not even that tasty. My mother is a very smart woman and she used to say, “Make sure it’s worth it.” If it’s just some crappy candy bar, that’s not worth it, but if you’re at a wedding, and they have this beautiful wedding cake, yeah, of course you should enjoy that! Those special occasions are a lot more rare than when we put these inSANE foods into our bodies nowadays.

Leslie: On a daily basis, and the body would be able to break it down easier. Going back to the wedding cake concept. If you have that every now and then, and again, the body is functioning well enough to be able to break it down without just storing it as fat, correct?

Jonathan: That’s correct. Or you may, again, the body is designed to automatically regulate everything, if you think about it right, our blood pressure, our heart rate, our breathing rate, these are things that we can temporarily elevate or temporarily lower, but over the course of our lifetime, our body is fundamentally balancing it out. We all learned in high school biology classes, this concept of homeostasis and every living organism that is functioning properly, always seeks to be at homeostasis. If we can just keep our biology working the way it’s supposed to, we will achieve homeostasis without even trying.

I know that might sound like something too good to be true, like, “Magic! You can lose weight without trying.” If you think about it, the concept of calorie wasn’t even into the chemistry community until 1824 and it didn’t make it into the mainstream until the 70’s. However, for hundreds of thousands of years, before we knew what a calorie was, we avoided obesity and diabetes. How did we do that? By doing the same things we need to do today, to do the same things we did back then. We just ate food, and our body took care of the rest.

Leslie: Alright. What is the process then, if we do, indeed, have a diet filled with “inSANE foods”, to use your term, and I’m feeling so bad for mothers whose kids have been conditioned by television and commercials about snacks and cereals. The media’s training our kids not to eat well right from the get go but what happens when we have a lot more of these inSANE foods in our body, what is the process of digestion and then what happens?

Jonathan: Well, maybe what would also be helpful, and tell me if it’s not, is really, how do we transition? We live in an inSANE culture. You’re exactly right. We live in a culture where if you go in the grocery store, literally, 90 to 95 percent of the things sold there are inSANE. It’s the center aisles. The entire center of the grocery store is, by and large, inSANE. It’s the perimeter, the stuff that needs to be refrigerated or frozen, that isn’t inSANE. Those are the same things, generally speaking, so how do you transition from insanity to sanity in an inSANE culture?

Leslie: That’s a good one.

Jonathan: My recommendation is to focus on just two things. Let’s simplify this, focus on two things: first and foremost is non-starchy vegetable consumption. Forget about everything else, just for 21 days focus on these two things. Consume however is possible for you, at least 10 servings of non-starchy vegetables per day. I know that’s a lot of non-starchy vegetables. There’s many reasons why it’s valuable. I hope we can get into that, if we have time.

The second thing you have to do, and I’ll give you some tips on how to do that because I know it’s a lot, and I know, it’s not… the average American consumes about one, so it’s a ten-fold increase. The second thing to do is to consume, 30 to 50 grams of protein and depending on your size, three, to four, to five times a day, again depending on your size and your activity level. If you just do that… Let me tell you why that’s so important.

First, the non-starchy vegetables are going to flood your body with so much nutrition and so many things that help to detoxify you, not only things like fiber and chlorophyll, but just vitamins and minerals, and all kinds of other good stuff. They’re also going to take a massive amount of room in your digestive system, so it’s going to be very difficult to eat inSANE food. You will literally be too full for dessert. We’ve all had experience. We can have it again.

Now when it comes to the protein, this is going to help to satisfy you. It’s also going to stimulate muscle protein synthesis, meaning, your body is actually going to create new tissue and this doesn’t mean you’re going to grow giant muscles. It just means your body is essentially going to create… Think about it like it’s going to freshen up the tissues in your body, it’s going to refresh them, and what’s so profound about this is it can burn a dramatic, dramatic number of calories. You can almost think about it as when you eat protein of these doses of 30 to 50 grams, it does to your muscles kind of what exercise does, meaning, it makes them burn more calories.

It also fills you up, and again, both of these things put together, make you too full for inSANE foods. It is much easier to say “no” to the rice and it is much easier to say “no” to the dessert, when you have so much main course, high-protein main course, and so many non-starchy vegetables, that you just don’t even have, your plate is full. There’s nowhere to put the roll, so it’s like, “Skip it. I don’t want it. I’ve got enough food.” There’s no need to have dessert, because you’re like, “Oh my God, my stomach is so full. I can’t eat anything.”

Leslie: It’s 30 to 50 grams of protein. How many times a day?

Jonathan: Minimum of three. I would say, maximum of six if you’re like, an elite body builder, but three for most people.

Leslie: Well, I’m not an elite body builder.

Jonathan: Think breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Let me quickly, if it’s helpful, step you through breakfast, lunch, and dinner, a SANE transition of breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Leslie: Go ahead.

Jonathan: So breakfast, for example… Again, you’ve got to have some non-starchy vegetables, so one way to do that is either to generally cook like an omelet or something with a bunch of green, leafy vegetables, because they cook down. They’re tiny. It is very easy to eat three servings of cooked down spinach or kale. You could throw in some peppers, some mushrooms, some onions, in there. Delicious! So very, very tasty. You could also do something like a Greek yogurt with some fruit, some low-sugar fruit like berries for example. Blueberries are a fantastic choice or some cottage cheese with some blueberries.

If you’re really short on time, you could make smoothies. This is going to sound a little bit odd but, I promise you, if you try it, it’s really not that bad. You can do something like some spinach. Again, you’d go, “Oh my God! Spinach in a smoothie!” Just trust me. Just trust me. Just try it once. Take spinach. Mix it with some citrus, like an orange, or some strawberries, and potentially some protein powder, like a vanilla whey protein, potentially and it creates a delicious strawberry, green, vanilla smoothie. You really don’t taste the spinach too much. So, that’s for breakfast.

Lunch can be, really, any number of things. A popular option is a giant salad topped with either salmon, or some sort of poultry. Of course, you could have eggs. Again, you could really have any kind of nutrient dense protein, a bunch of vegetables, and you can enjoy whole food natural fat, so nuts and seeds and then dinner, again, so many options. Even things which are traditionally inSANE, like spaghetti.

Well, you’re not going to eat spaghetti, but you could use zucchini to make faux spaghetti noodles or spaghetti squash, to make faux spaghetti noodles. If you want to eat something with a rice dish, you don’t have to eat rice, you can use a cauliflower ricer to make the non-starchy vegetable, cauliflower into a rice like substance. Even pizza, just use almond flour, instead of flour, so, really, we can SANE-itize. Get it? SANE-itize…

Leslie: That’s good.

Jonathan: You can make almost anything by making these simple substitutions.

Leslie: Alright. You mentioned yogurt and then I did want to discuss cheese and milk. This is the first dairy product that you have mentioned and why is Greek yogurt different from regular yogurt? Maybe we should go there first.

Jonathan: Sure. The reason I recommend the two dairy products, Greek yogurt and cottage cheese is because of the ratio of protein to sugar. So for example, if you were to look at, say, milk, the standard eight ounce glass of skimmed milk. That contains 12 grams of sugar in the form of lactose, and eight grams of protein. There’s 50 percent more sugar than there is protein.

One serving of, let’s say, Greek yogurt, will contain about 24 grams of protein and about 7 grams of sugar. There’s approximately 300 percent more protein than there is sugar. You can see milk, 50 percent more sugar than protein, Greek yogurt, 300 percent more protein than sugar, so it’s a great source of that protein which we need in those 30 plus gram doses I talked about earlier.

Leslie: What about other cheeses?

Jonathan: Other cheeses can be, so cheese, by and large, with the exception of cottage cheese, is fat, primarily fat. It’s usually 60 plus percent fat which, again, doesn’t intrinsically make it bad for you. I generally like to think of cheese as a… Again, your focus of your eating should be non-starchy vegetables and nutrient dense protein and then you fill in the rest with low-sugar fruits, and whole food, natural fats, so, can you eat some cheese as a treat to help satisfy you? Yes. Should the main portion of your meal be cheese? No. It’s one of these things where enjoying in moderation is just fine.

Leslie: Right. Exactly. I think that’s great. When you to talk about the concept, and I’m watching the clock here too, Jonathan, about internal starvation. What is that all about?

Jonathan: Internal starvation is when our… I have to back up a little bit because it has to do with insulin, and insulin sensitivity, and things like that. When we eat food, it digests in our stomach and breaks down into, fat breaks down into fatty acids, carbohydrates break down into glucose, and protein breaks down into amino acids. Now, for us to get amino acids and carbohydrates into our tissues that need it, like our heart, and our muscles, to function in our brain, not for our brain but we need insulin. Insulin is essentially the key that unlocks the door to the cell. We’ve got glucose running around in our blood stream, and it goes up to a muscle cell and it goes like, “Hi, muscle cell. I’m here to fuel you.” Unless there’s some insulin along with it, it can’t get in, so insulin gets released. The glucose gets into the cell, the cell is fueled. We continue to function. Good news.

Now, when we become insulin resistant, or pre-diabetic, essentially, what that means is, we need more and more insulin to unlock the door to our cells, meaning, our cells basically start ignoring insulin. Insulin’s knocking at the door, the cell’s like, “I don’t care.” Two little things of insulin conceptually need to start knocking on the door and eventually, if we become too insulin resistant, we have so much insulin flowing in our bloodstream. We have so much glucose in our bloodstream because our lean tissue is not taking it up, our body has a safety mechanism built into it, and that safety mechanism is that fat tissue, will always give t glucose a happy home.

Glucose gets through the door of the muscle cell with a bunch of insulin, but the muscle cell’s, “Nope, not going to let you in because I’ve become insulin-resistant.” We just go to the fat cell, and the fat cell always gives us a happy home but now the problem is, so now we’ve got all our energy going into our fat cells. We also have this abundance of insulin in our bloodstream. Well, insulin, for all intents and purposes, makes burning fat impossible in our body. It’s just, you can’t mix oil and water. You cannot burn fat when you have insulin circulating in your body.

We have all of our fuel going into our fat cells, and then we can’t burn it. We can’t burn our fat tissue for energy, thanks to insulin resistance. If you think about it, we’re eating food, but we’re starving internally, because we eat food, all the glucose and energy goes into our fat cells, and then we can’t burn our fat, so what does our body have to do? It has to tell us to eat more food, so we eat more and more and more food, and we get fatter, and fatter, and fatter, but we’re actually starving because the only cells that are getting nourished are our fat cells, which we then can’t burn, which is a really unfortunate state.

Leslie: I think that was a good description of everything and you mentioned something, the first time that you were on, about wheat and sugar and being a bad combination. Of course, I’m thinking breakfast cereals, and most American children, and children everywhere start off with cereal on the table and… Did you link that right to diabetes last time? Am I getting this right? It’s just coming into my mind.

Jonathan: Yeah. InSANE foods are, in short, starches and sugars, so starches and sweets are inSANE. They’re dry. They’re low on fiber. They’re low on protein. They’re completely unsatisfying. They’re horribly aggressive. They’re not nutritious. They’re incredibly efficiently converted into fat by our body. The reason that they cause diabetes, is they trigger this abundance…

One; we eat a lot of them and they’re uniquely insulinogenic, meaning, they trigger a huge amount of insulin. We eat a lot of them, and even if we didn’t, we’d still trigger a lot of insulin, so, it’s like a one/two punch, like this giant flood of insulin on our body, and just like if we were to drink a lot of alcohol continuously, like we would eventually develop a tolerance. We would need to drink more and more alcohol to get the same effect, and eventually our liver would start to shut down, because it can’t process all of that alcohol…

Leslie: Right.

Jonathan: The same thing happens with insulin. We eat these foods, we produce more and more insulin because we develop a tolerance for insulin but then, our pancreas, which is what produces insulin, starts to break down, because it’s like, “I can’t keep producing all this insulin.” This isn’t technically true, but imagine that your pancreas can only produce a million units of insulin over the course of your life. Like, when it’s gone, you’re diabetic, and now you have to start shooting insulin into your body and that’s not a good scenario, and of course, that’s a gross oversimplification but you understand the point?

Leslie: I do understand the point. We really need to be watching breakfast food for our kids because what we’re doing, and I think with a combination of a lack of sleep and, we’re going to talk about sleep in just a moment, a lack of sleep, and then leading to insulin resistance and pre-diabetic states according to Science Daily, and then also the starch and the sugars combined, doing the same thing. We really are, men and women, pretty hormonally imbalanced, from the get go.

Jonathan: We absolutely are and again, think about starch… Most people get sugar is bad for you. They don’t necessarily understand how bad it is for us, like they think it’s empty calories. It’s much more than that. It’s not just empty calories, it is actively causing hormonal chaos in your body, so doubly bad.

Starch is a tough one for people because we think to ourselves like, “Starch is in the bible.” Starch is such a core part of our culture and that’s fine. To be clear, smoking is a core part of many European cultures, and was a core part of our culture, too. That doesn’t necessarily mean we wouldn’t be healthier if we didn’t smoke and it’s also been around for a really long time, it doesn’t mean it’s good for us. It’s also the case that even when we say it’s been around for a long time, that’s technically, not true.

Starch was first introduced into the human diet, about twelve, ten thousand years ago, which seems like a long time ago, but human evolution has been taking place over three to five million years, so that’s actually the most recent .2% of the evolution of our metabolic and hormonal systems. That kind of explains why so many people, for example, have gluten intolerance, because they simply, this isn’t recognized as food to their bodies, whereas cultures that have eaten starch for longer periods of time can tolerate it. They’re not gluten intolerant, but it’s still not the optimal food for them.

Leslie: Let’s go back to sleep, then. Is sleep insomnia, is that also a hormone imbalance affected by all of this?

Jonathan: Oh absolutely. Melatonin, serotonin, all of these things, the reason we’re not sleeping. If you want to keep someone awake, shoot them up with adrenaline. They’re not going to go to sleep no matter how tired they are. There’s very little in our body that hormones and enzymes, and that’s just what our body does. If it’s happening in your body, why do kids grow? Because of hormones. Why do…, just name something, unless it’s a virus or bacteria, the cause has to do with hormones.

Leslie: The hormone imbalance is classified into so many diseases. Diabetes, for one, correct? Alopecia, hair loss, balding, I think, is also a hormone imbalance issue, and of course the rest are anxiety, and panic attacks, all possible hormone imbalance.

Jonathan: Hormone imbalance, as well as, certainly genetic factors, so hair loss would be a good one, where there is, if your father and grandfather on both sides have no hair, chances are, there is very little you can do with your hormones to prevent your hair from falling out either but hormones and genetics play a role together.

Leslie: We’re really just beginning to understand the importance of hormones in our body and their role, their function and really, they are the foundation of our health and well-being?

Jonathan: Absolutely, and yeah. I would say the more we learn, the more we realize we don’t know yet. Obviously, we know more than we ever have, but we also start to learn about co-factors and other complicated things. We’re just really scratching the surface here exactly.

Leslie: Well, Holy Hormones, Honey Andy. What do you think?

Andy: Well, I think a lot, actually. It comes down to, affordability is a huge issue to have this sustaining diet, and eat naturally. It’s not cheap to do these things.

Leslie: It’s not cheap, but it’s very expensive to get sick and you’re more miserable sick than you are…

Andy: Very true as well to, but the availability of quality fruits and vegetables and seasons, there’s a lot of things to consider but if you can do it, you can do it.

Jonathan: Yeah Andy, let me add one thing…

Leslie: We just have yet a couple of minutes.

Jonathan: This will be really quick. For example, if the message was, you can only eat organically grown, local, pesticide free, SANE, that is impossible for most people. Is that ideal? Yes, however, is eating conventional SANE better than eating starches and sweets? Yes. I would encourage us to do the best that we can with that which is available to us, rather than just throwing our hands in the air and saying, “Well I can’t be perfect, so forget about it.”

Leslie: Well I think we’re going to have to leave it on that note and Jonathan, thank you for a perfect interview.

Jonathan: My pleasure.

Leslie: Got you there. Jonathan Bailor, The Smarter Science of Slim. We’ll have you back another time. Thank you so much.

Jonathan: Thank you. Bye bye.

Leslie: Alright. That’s going to wrap it up here at Holy Hormones, Honey. All those hormones, I can’t believe I’m sitting at the right place at the right time. Hormones. What if? Anyway, why are men so angry? That’s what we’re going to be talking about next Monday night. Men Alive focuses.

Andy: Because…

Leslie: Yea, that’s a loaded question. Jedd Diamond, actually I got ahead of myself. Jedd Diamond, PHD, NCHW, is going to be my guest. He is the auther of Men Alive. He also has a website by the same thing and he’s got a new book out. Men Alive: Stop Killer Stress With Simple Energy Healthy Tools, Bringing Together Wisdom Accumateled in 40 Years of Helping More Than 20,000 Men, Women, and Children. That is coming up next week on Holy Hormones Honey, the greatest story never told. And of course you’re listening to KRFC, Fort Collins, we’ll be back next week. See you then. Take care and blessings.

Jonathan: Wait, wait! Don’t stop listening yet.

Carrie: You can get fabulous free SANE recipes over at CarrieBrown.com.

Jonathan: And don’t forget, your 100% free ‘Eating and Exercise Quick Start Program’ as well as free, fun daily tips delivered right into your inbox at BailorGroup.com.

Welcome to another “bonus” episode of The Smarter Science of Slim podcast. A lot of readers and listeners have noticed that there’s quite a bit of Smarter Science of Slim activity going around the world and web, and have emailed asking for one place they could get all things Smarter Science of Slim…at least from an audio perspective.

So here we go!

Between “standard” SSoS podcast episodes I’ll share SSoS interviews etc. from all around the world and web. I hope these are helpful…and heck, if they’re not, or if they become repetitive (interviewers tend to ask me similar questions), feel free to skip them 🙂

For this week, here’s the second interview I did with Leslie.