Metabolic Uncle on Challenges with Ray Peat’s Bioenergetics
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Well, today we have another guest with us, someone who goes by the name Metabolic Uncle on X. Some say he is cyborg. Some say he is AI. Some say he's from another planet. But he joins us now live in the flesh as much as we can do online. How are you doing? Hi, everybody. Hi, David. Thanks for having me. I'm fine. I hope you do.

Yeah, I'm doing great. Now you've got a shirt on. What's your shirt say? Is it readable? Yeah. Woke zero, huh? Exactly. Now, I saw your post and I thought, you know, you've got a lot of interesting ideas and, you know, you've articulated it pretty well and you've really got some folks wanting to know more about you. So I thought maybe you just start off with a little bit of introduction to you. Obviously,

For those who followed you, you do enjoy a lot of the principles of Ray Peet and his philosophy, but you don't subscribe to it in any ideological way. You've come to it from your own journey of health, and you have kind of a remarkable story. So tell us a little bit about your journey in health. My journey in health started essentially 12 years ago. Before that, it was constant decline.

I grew heavier and heavier for all my life, essentially. And at the age of 47, then somehow the reality hit me pretty hard. I saw myself in a video and that my son had made of me. And I was honestly shocked because I didn't realize when I looked into the mirror how I had already grown my body.

So it's a little bit, I cannot explain it. I think it's the same mechanism that you see in people who are starving themselves to death. They don't perceive themselves when they look into a mirror as almost dying or being just bones and skin. And I think the opposite thing is also a little bit happening when you have a huge body mass, you tend to mask it out, I guess,

I never was aware of it, but then I saw that video of me and suddenly I realized, okay, dude, you can't continue like that. My son was back then. Yeah. He wasn't even a teenager. And, and, and I didn't want to, I was pretty sure. Okay. If I continue like that, I could die any minute of a heart attack or something like that. What were you doing in that video that woke you up? Were you doing a cannonball into a pool or something? No, no. We were on vacation and we were returning, um,

Back home, and my son was moving around with his GoPro. And later when I screened the material that he made, I saw, I was sitting in the car. So essentially, I have a transformation video where I cut this scene in. And I was sitting in the car and this made me even, he was pretty close. Perhaps this was the image. So I got an incredible distorted image of a huge body mass,

sitting there. And then I realized, okay, I don't want to continue like that. Like anyone who ever had weight issues in his life, it's usually it's a long path. And it's not a constant path. It's not that I did not try to lose weight. I started essentially, I think my first diet was with 15 or so. As a teenager, I remember very well that I don't know, I think it was

Somehow after the first Rocky movie or something like that, it took a while. I was literally for several weeks waking up before school, jogging, walking, jogging through the city as a teenager. And I really lost weight. So I have two school class photographs from back then, from one year to the next. And you couldn't compare the two persons that you saw in these two images. You wouldn't identify it's the same person. But again,

It didn't last long. So essentially, my whole life was the same story. Like the weight development was like a stock price. It goes up and then it corrects a little bit and then it goes up even higher, always reaching a new high until the age of 47. So 11, 11 and a half years ago.

Well, this incident happened with a video. And then back then was my peak at around 147 kg. Sorry if I think it's around. It's a little bit more than 300 pounds. And yeah, that's essentially that was the highest I ever weighed. And that was also the last time that I was actually overweight. So since then, I didn't put the weight back on.

um of course there are always fluctuations so so the the lowest body fat that I had was um three or four years ago I went essentially down to slightly below 10 so you can see this in videos and in images but this was not something that I felt very very uh well on it so sleep started to

getting a little bit worse. So I definitely didn't want to stay that low. And now I'm hovering around between 12 and 14% or something like that, depending if it's winter or summer. So we all put, I think it might be even a hormonal issue. Others say, okay, it's the sunlight, it's wintertime, it's summertime. You know, we have new theories coming up.

about seasonal eating. I do kind of follow such an approach instinctively. I just feel better when I eat during winter a little bit more fat and during summer a little bit more carbs. But I don't think that you can locate yourself if you didn't grow up

where your ancestors grew up, I don't think that you can draw these straight lines and say, okay, now I'm living in Norway. Now I have to eat like a Scandinavian. And my ancestors are Greek. So coming from the, you don't even know if your ancestors two or three generations ago are actually coming from Greece or not far in the east or somewhere. So it's difficult to try to adjust your nutrition

based on the climate where you're living. If you don't have a very long history for several generations there, I don't think that you can optimize so easily like that. It's very confusing when you have different genetic mixtures and different, you know, it's hard to know where the epigenetic triggers are, you know? Do you count it back to your ancient lineage or do you count it back to the last three generations? You know, it's very

You would have to know. I mean, most of you in America, for example, or many of the Caucasians in the U.S.,

are essentially all coming from Europe and in Europe you also can't say a few generations earlier where did these people come from. So it's I don't think that this is so easy to define some genetical makeup and say okay this is now my nutrition. You might try the genetic analysis or something like that but I don't know. I think the most important indicator that you have is essentially

your own feeling. It's your health status, your energy status. So your body will usually tell you if you're doing well, if you're feeding it right, if you feel well, if you have energy. I mean, I know people who are pretty overweight, who feel great, have good blood markers. So you have these cases. Overweight is not always a sign of metabolic dysfunction. In many, many or the most cases, it will be like that.

But there are also cases where this is not the case. So some of us have, for example, the kind of obesity that I had or the kind that I was obese was essentially not the one that is triggering easily chronic disease. It would have triggered it perhaps down the road, 10, 15, right now, 10,

approaching 60, probably it might have made me sick. But back then, you could not see my blood markers that I was essentially diabetic or something like that. You have this different genetical setups. So I have this type. I put much more weight on my back and on my glutes and all over the body, subcutaneous. So I think this saves me a little bit from adding too much

visceral fat, which is when problems really start to arise. You see, for example, the phenomenon in India right now, they have 10 or 12% type 2 diabetics. That's a lot. And they are not the heavy or large types that we see in Europe or in other parts of the world. And they definitely have a much smaller

tolerance for body fat, they also they don't edit all over their body like I do or like, like, I don't know, you perhaps do. So they are adding it essentially the legs are not growing that much. The glutes are not growing that much. They are putting all of it in the visceral area and organs and in the stomach and the front side of the body. And these people usually develop pretty

much faster insulin resistance, severe cases, or type 2 diabetes. So you lost your weight. I don't know how much you said you lost, but did you do the Ray-Pete principles to do it or something else? No, no, no, no, no. I think we can talk about that later in this podcast. I don't think that the Ray-Pete approach is...

The way it is commonly perceived, let's put it that way. I don't want to say that Ray said this or that. The way that is usually perceived is definitely not the way to go when you want to lose weight. And Ray also never said this. But we are going to get to these details later.

Back then, for me, it was a pretty long road. And I tortured myself in the beginning. So I mixed everything up. And the beginning was essentially I glided softly and I started in the vacation right away with walking. I swam more. I walked more every day. And I increased my physical activity, but low-intensity activity. I brought this back with me from vacation, basically.

And I continue with a daily continued with a daily walks. This went on for several months. So I went every day for longer and longer and longer walks, but I did not start doing some muscle resistance training or anything like that. Then I bought a mountain bike and I started biking. So I increased a little bit, my aerobic endurance that I had, but this,

I dropped around 30 kg or something like that, but I still looked

far away from acceptable or something that I like. Because when you start to lose weight and you do this for a year or something like that, you want to see results. And then soon you see, okay, it's not that easy. And I started changing things. I started reading into the literature, started to look into, yeah, the science, studies, discussions on Facebook in specific groups. So I really...

started diving into the topic relatively deep and then I understood, okay, how the metabolism works, carbs, fats, protein, macronutrients, why, what, when is important, how to deal with caloric restrictions. And I kind of mixed everything into

a new approach and I was in this state essentially for more than two years. So it took me quite the time because I was not that hard in the beginning regarding physical exercise and also the caloric restriction. I understood after starting to read into the subject that I don't want to be one of those biggest losers because I knew that effect from my earlier diets during my life. I knew that the

The stricter or the harder, the quicker the weight loss was, the sooner the weight bounced back again. So this famous yo-yo dieting was always something that I had several times in my life. And it was always because I forced the weight from my body. So caloric restriction, physical activity, like going for a run every morning before school and things like that.

and you can't fool your body forever. So essentially you're building up. It's like it would memorize a deep hunger by regulating different hormones. And then when you, while also experiencing this adaptive thermogenesis, that it reduces your metabolic revenue, your metabolic rate. And

When you then start to increase your food intake again, you have essentially the worst kind of situation or the worst combination. You have a reduced metabolic rate and you have this deep, deep hunger when your body wants to compensate. And then these two things together shoot you usually, I think it's 90% or so or 90 even. Yeah, I think it's more than 90% of all the people dieting

who put on the weight again. You really see this relatively rarely, sustained weight loss that people keep their weight down. Yeah. Yeah. And when you talk through all that, you know, I came, you know, one of the reasons why, you know, I found Ray Peet stuff was a lot of the similar reason that motivated Ray himself, which is he saw...

being able to improve the metabolism of the masses as a political agenda for himself. You know, he thought that if he could raise the, you know, the mental energy and the physical energy of the masses, of the populace, that he could actually affect revolutionary change against the sadistic, you know, what he called eugenicists that he thought, you know, were in charge of the

globalist system. And so, you know, I kind of have a similar approach in my agenda, which is whatever we discover, you know, scientifically or anecdotally or whatever, to be truly the most effective path for metabolic healing. It is my hope and desire that it is something easily scalable to the common man. And unfortunately, even though Ray developed a lot of

staples that are ostensibly affordable to the common man, like an egg a day, a carrot a day, white button mushrooms, you know, a Coca-Cola is a universal drink that the common man can afford. It's not a fancy kombucha or something like other diets or something, you know, having, having staples like, you know,

uh gelatinous cuts of meat and soups and uh milk and orange juice those are all very at least in america very common americana staples and unfortunately unfortunately they're being priced out because like artificial shortages that the government is doing with the killing of all these chickens and ducks for the bird but

But besides that point, my point is that unfortunately it seems so complex the way to lose weight healthily that sometimes I kind of despair the thought that at least as it is understood now, this is not something that's scalable to the masses.

Like, the masses could understand a low carb, you cut the carbs, you find out what a carb is that was a hard thing for the public to do. But they some of them figured it out what a carbohydrate is. And then they start figuring out okay if I just kind of avoid those things like the plague, or count them at a very small amount.

then the weight will come off, and keto works like that. But then, of course, keto runs into problems over long term, and so it becomes unsustainable, and therefore it doesn't solve the problem for a lot of people's metabolic dysfunction. So then you think, okay, let's try the no PUFA approach to repeat and low-fat, higher carbohydrate, but it seems like that's even a harder jigsaw puzzle or something to figure out.

For the average person. The problem with a no PUFA approach is that you essentially are loading a lifetime of PUFA into your body fat stores. And even if you are healing your metabolism and if you are eating only healthy fats,

Your body will try to get rid of that, PUFA, and it will take several years until it will not be a burden anymore on your system, until it is essentially recycled and eliminated. So this is something that people often forget, that when you lose weight and you go into your body fat stores, you're essentially melting all this out, and together with that also toxins. That's why a diet where you lose your weight fast,

can also have additionally metabolism suppressing effects, but also literally make you sick or feel unwell. And to come back to Ray, if his message would even work for everything you said and would even allow for a healthier type of obesity, if you don't have all the PUFAs, if you don't have these hormonal disruptions,

I'm pretty convinced about it that having excess body fat, if you are the type that can actually add subcutaneous fat that doesn't harm you in your liver or in your organs, then it becomes just a cosmetic thing.

but not something that is crucial for your health. So essentially, if the people would do what Ray said, they would have a chance to not develop that much of chronic disease, although they would be obese. But the problem is, I would not even say that it's a complex diet to follow.

It has a few staples. Yeah, I'm not saying it's complex to follow. The problem are the people, that they are not the masses. They are not consequential. So essentially, they say, oh, that's great. I will try that. I will drink Coke and I will eat my ice cream and I will eat sugar. But then they are not consequential. They still continue to eat processed foods. They are still not that poof-aware like most of the nerds.

You and I know or seen podcasts or seen in repeat groups. So the question is, how meticulously are they actually following this approach? And I can tell you out of my personal experience, the PUFA thing is really the worst of all.

I could not believe the effect that it has until I literally experienced it after having cleansed my body. I cleansed it for several years, pufa-free essentially, never eating anything. I will not even...

take vitamin E to be able to eat in some shitty restaurant, some fries or something like that. No, I don't touch that stuff anymore. And a year ago, a little bit more over a year ago, I was on a business trip in India. Don't ask me why. Why I forgot this. I don't know, jet lag, whatever. We went out for a dinner and all of them were vegetarian in that Indian company.

And they went into a really great Burmese restaurant and everything was vegan. And the food was so yummy. I did not even, I don't know, this thought didn't even touch remotely my thinking that I'm loading up on Puffa like crazy because everything was fried and there was plant oils and seed oils and everything. It was literally, I don't know, it was a Puffa shock, that meal.

And I can tell you, it did not take even an hour after that meal that

My energy tanked. I was feeling so horrible and it was nothing. I didn't have a stomach back or something like that. But I was three or four times in India, never had some issues with my digestion because I was always also cautious. It was nothing. It was not a flu. It was not the throat. Nothing at the nose. No achy feeling in the stomach or something like that.

It was just like somebody had unplugged me. All my energy was gone. I was from one moment to the other from this high energy state that I'm always in. I was completely drained. And the problem was next day, it was even worse. And it persisted for quite a while. And it took me, I came back from India and I still didn't gain back my old energy levels. It literally took me three or four months

To come back to the fitness level that I had, because I'm essentially, I know what I'm doing. I know how fast I can run. I know the weights that I can lift. I know the intensity workouts that I do, what my limits are. It really took me three or four months to feel like my old self without one single symptom of a cold or something like that. It was the poofa.

Nothing else could explain what I experienced because it was directly an energy thing. Energy was really, it was completely lost. And I can only recommend to anyone who has cleansed his body from PUFA, never again touch this stuff, even remotely. And normies, let's call them normies, so people who are not aware about PUFAs, they might not experience it as harshly because your body develops a tolerance to every toxin.

So you're essentially getting small or bigger doses of it, and you don't feel it that way, but you never feel the energy potential that you could actually have if you get rid of this stuff. And I experienced from one moment to the other how it is if you are PUFA-free and then load up a really big amount of PUFAs at once. It was a horrible experience.

My sympathy goes out to everyone who is really struggling with mitochondrial disease in any way, shape or form or feeling having this drained feeling all the time. It's a horrible state to be in. And I never again want to feel that because my normal life is always I'm always energetic. I never have issues waking up. I can work for hours and hours and hours. I'm doing my workouts every day.

I'm literally never tired. So it was a completely new experience. Now, when you say you avoid PUFA, do you avoid the natural forms of it, like nuts and seeds and fish, stuff like that? Definitely. I don't eat any more salmon or stuff like that. Earlier, I definitely was eating also...

Sardines, for example, I preferred sardines over salmon because I already knew the smaller the fatty fish are that you eat, the lower they are in the food chain. And when they are lower in the food chain, they are essentially, they don't have that much time to accumulate as many toxins like mercury as bigger fish. So essentially, the worst thing that you can do is eat a big fatty fish.

That is on the top of the food chain because it has a longer lifespan and has much more time to accumulate toxins that you then eat. But I stopped eating stuff like that. So the only proof that I get, I mean, we need a bit and kids need even a little bit more as long as they have their brains still growing physically.

They definitely need a little bit more. You see it also in the breast milk fatty acid composition, that you will have more PUFA there than you would now eat as an adult. But as adults, I mean, if you get to three or four grams for omega-6 and omega-3, you will be definitely fine. I mean, literally since five years or so, except the India trip, which was intoxicated with omega-6,

I never ate any fish or something like that. No fish oil. I used to take fish oil earlier. And I remember back then when I was so in the last two or three years of my obesity, I tried all kinds of things. I was even vegan for a moment. I was eating all this garbage and also fish oils and stuff like that. Never touched sugar. And I was also calorie sensitive, but it didn't move my weight.

So you definitely get enough if you eat animal foods, you will get enough omega-3 and omega-6. Essentially, you might even get a little bit more than you want when you eat, for example, eggs and you don't know how well were the eggs fed. So the amount of PUFAs that you eat with normal animal foods will always be dependent on the food that the animal said that you are eating.

So you don't have the control. Nuts was a big issue for me because I loved nuts and I loved peanuts, especially, and I ate a lot of nuts before becoming a Peter. But now still I have one nut that I can eat, and that's macadamia nuts, but that's essentially the only nut that I'm eating.

Oils, I also don't consume that much olive oil because if you really want to reduce the PUFA intake, you definitely have to also be aware about olive oil. It will have between 8% and 14% depending on the quality PUFA. And if you eat two or three, if you do add two or three tablespoons into your salad, you will end up with quite the amount of omega-6. Yeah, so essentially that's definitely actively

I'm also tracking all the foods that I'm eating since many years, it has become a habit. It's not that I would need that now because I was essentially don't vary my diet much.

When something works for me and I feel good, I tend to stay on it for quite a while. So I'm a Spartan when it comes to food. I had my time back, yeah, 15, 20, even 30 years. I love cooking.

There's got to be a way to scale this for the masses, you know, because that's the thing that I'm always thinking about. Simplifying rules and making clear that you cannot eat ice cream and you cannot drink Coca-Cola and you cannot eat a high sugar diet as long as you are not meticulously really taking care of not eating any PUFAs.

and also not eating too much fat with that. If your body composition is of concern for you, then you definitely, it won't work. And this is something that in this Ray Peet's field often is not communicated that clearly. And this is something that I think the community is doing wrong because Ray was aware of that. And he mentioned that also. He didn't talk all the time about that, but

You can hear him in some podcasts saying that if you want to lose weight, you have to eat less or drink skimmed milk instead of fat milk and things like that. So Ray, new calories are a thing. You cannot magically...

add tons of fuel no matter how well your body is using energy i mean there are artificial things of course you can load up with hormones or um there are even pharmaceuticals that will there was a time when they had fat burners that are now forbidden that bodybuilders took they literally could jazz up their metabolic rate to a degree that some of them even died

So you definitely can manipulate your metabolic rate, but it doesn't make any physiological sense for an organism to increase its metabolic rate more and more in a physiological natural way, more and more and more, not just to compensate. We are not talking about these people are not claiming I can eat more and don't eat weight. Some of them are claiming

I'm eating a ton of sugar and I'm losing weight. This will work.

in a narrow range. Let's say you have, for example, stress in your body, you have water weight, you have things like that. And then you increase your sugar intake, you reduce your stress hormones. There might be effects that you have the water composition or the body composition changes. You get a little bit tighter, you feel a little bit slimmer. You might also lose actually water weight, but there is no way that your body will say, oh, okay,

Normally, I would just burn 3,500 calories, yeah, approximately. But now this guy is ingesting 7,000 calories. So let me jazz up my metabolic rate to 8,000 calories so that he can lose weight. It just doesn't make sense for an organism. So we have to make really a clear distinction between being able to compensate for some overfeeding

by increasing body temperature, by making you move more. This is also something not many people are talking about, but just as a caloric restriction will make you move less,

a caloric oversupply and a humming metabolism that can burn it will make you essentially move more and you won't even be able to recognize it so fidgeting and stuff like that you will stand up more often you will walk around you will have more energy and therefore your body will instinctively try to spend and so all these effects are not priced in in these oh

I'm adding 2000 calories in my coffee with butter and sugar and I'm losing weight. It doesn't work that way. Imagine physiologically, it just doesn't make sense for an organism to say,

I will lose weight, I will lose body mass, and with that I don't mean manipulating water in your body, which you can get rid of pretty fast, or you can also add it. I mean, you see MMR fighters when they are preparing for their fights, or any fighter or boxer or whatever, they can lose really up to two-digit kg numbers.

with all the manipulations they are doing. So water weight is not the issue, but nobody can tell me that you can literally lose body fat significant amounts while overeating, no matter what you are overeating. Even the

rice diet experiments that I showed and that I posted recently, it's definitely clear that the people who had this huge weight loss on the high sugar diet, they were on a caloric restriction. They did not restrict to 800 calories or something like that, but they were not in the group. So the other people with chronic disease that they had, they

I think the average was around 2,400 calories, but some of the people who were not overweight, they actually started losing weight on this 96% carbohydrate diet.

And then they added calories so they would not lose too much body mass. So there's definitely something like the body is compensating, increasing the metabolic rate. I think Ray also cited several studies often about animal studies where this happened. But imagine now in real life when somebody hears this.

And doesn't have all the pieces to that and then thinks, okay, all I have to do is drink Coca-Cola and eat ice cream and my body will reduce stress hormones and I feel better and I will lose all my weight. That's what many people are thinking about the repeat diet, which was never a diet and which was never a very close framework, so to say. I mean, you see this bastardization, let's call it that,

That you see today. I mean, you have it also now in the other direction. So I think things like this, for example, the honey diet right now, this is not something that Ray promoted. Ray would always tell you, eat balanced meals, eat fat with your carbs to not have a bigger insulin spike that then will trigger diabetes.

Again, a rising cortisol. So all these things are not... Many things fly under the radar and are perceived. Everything that is somehow high carb is somehow peaty. But this is not what Ray Peet taught when he spoke of these things. He also, near the end of his life, kind of became more anti-high protein. I remember him...

I remember him recommending like 80 grams of protein a day sometimes for people. Yeah, but this is something I'm not sure if I would trust that. I would be very cautious with that. I mean, when you have, you know, you have now younger people in this community or in other communities who

are saying, hey, okay, I don't need that much of a protein, that much of protein, but they also have a much higher muscle protein synthesis rate and less catabolism. So when, but somebody, let's say a normie who is not well-trained or is not successfully on a repeat diet like I am since many years in my age group without resistance training and then even reducing protein intake, definitely muscle loss is a thing.

after the age of 35 or something like that, it starts really becoming a very, um,

significant subject. And I don't think that this is the best thing that you can do. You can mitigate this definitely when you are resistance training. So the muscle protein synthesis trigger or signaling that you're getting from resistance training is even stronger than from protein intake. That's why you can preserve muscle mass during fasting or during a hypocaloric diet. So it's the most important thing that

But most people don't want to move. Most people are not doing this and then recommending them, okay, now decrease your protein intake. I'm not so sure about that. If the rest is not perfect, I mean...

Of course, you can now we don't have epidemiological studies that consider a repeat diet in a low protein context over 20 years to actually be able to say, okay, this works. So essentially, you have to be a gambler and say, oh, I believe in this physiological theory. And I will try that. Personally, I would not do that. What I might or would try without fear would be to say, hey, okay,

Why not trying for a few weeks 100% carbs or reducing protein? I believe, for example, generally in a cyclical approach. So even if I'm still eating mixed meals and not doing something like a honey diet, I will eat less protein and less fat together with the carbs in my early day.

and then load more protein and more fat in the evening. And then before going to bed, I might add a significant amount of carbs. I'm literally the guy who, I should not say this publicly because again, somebody could understand, oh, all I have to do is eat a bunch of marshmallows. But I really, sometimes I end up with 600 grams of carbs or something like that on a day.

And some of that is I might sit there and eat 300 grams of a whole bag of marshmallows in the evening just before going to bed. So I'm also not that type of guy who says I really sometimes have to laugh

I used to also get in arguments with other, I don't consider myself an influencer, I don't have an Instagram or something like that. I'm just using the term influencer now, discussing with influencers in their feeds. Usually I'm saying, guys, I'm living in the city, on the fourth floor.

in a very tightly, yeah, I have all kinds of antennas around me. If I check my VLAN, I will probably find 20 routers around me and a 5G antenna somewhere around me. But I believe that a high energy state is protecting me from any detrimental effects that it has been. If you want to measure detrimental effects with sleep quality,

I can stuff myself with a huge meal. I'm sitting in such an environment. When I go to bed, I need two or three minutes and I'm asleep. And I will sleep until I wake up. No interruptions since many years. So I really think so. I think all these biohacks that you see, oh, I need...

I have to be aware with blue light and I have to, I don't know, need a grounding mat in my bed and I need to optimize this and that. I think the more low energy state you are, the more you suppress your metabolic rate, the more of these gadgets you might need to actually get healthy sleep. I don't know. It's a theory. I didn't study that. Do you generally recommend people just have a pretty mixed macro spread or no?

Right now, I would say it depends on what your goal is. If you want to lose weight, you will have an easier time losing weight when you focus on one side of things.

of the balance essentially. So you definitely have to reduce something. So very high fat works and high carb works because you take out. So all these magic effects that you see in this diets have often to do with an automatic caloric restriction or reduction

Same with intermittent fasting. So people think these are all magic bullets, but I don't believe in these magic bullets. I definitely think you are essentially adjusting your caloric intake slightly. So it's easier to...

It's easier to control for calories without controlling for calories by focusing on either carbs or fat and not eating both of the fuel macros, macronutrients together at the same time. I thought you said that Ray says to eat fat with carbs to...

Reduce the insulin. I know. And I'm not saying that you should reduce it to zero, but I think it's perfectly fine to eat only 10 grams or 15 grams at max in a meal of fat instead of 30 or 40. Yeah. It makes a big difference. So it could just be, hey, okay, I eat less fat, but I'm drinking then whole milk. So even drinking skimped milk

will generate a higher insulin response compared to whole milk. This is something that nobody talks about, that you actually protein sources, the leaner they are, the stronger is the insulin response that they have. So lean red meat, for example, will have a, that's why many low carbs or carnivores, for example, will experience a drop in their blood glucose when they're eating a steak.

So they're usually, their bodies are accustomed to or used to, when they are doing this for many years, they will have a relatively high fasting blood glucose. Especially carnivores or especially on a high protein diet, they will have a higher blood glucose. And when they are eating, their blood glucose will fall.

instead of increasing if they are eating only meals. So protein definitely has this effect. That's why Ray always also said that you should essentially eat it together or even eat first carbs and then your protein source.

to mitigate this effect. And what the fat helps essentially, the saturated good fat helps essentially, it has different effects. When you eat potatoes or starches or something like that, you can essentially stop them from getting into your described cases or studies where these molecules, starch molecules,

would even show up in your bloodstream and might cause some autoimmune effects and things like that. So that's one reason why to eat them with fat. But the simple mechanical physiological reason is essentially that it slows down the absorption and therefore you get less of an insulin spike. But

less, I mean, it's essentially just shaping the curve differently. So the area under the curve, if you imagine our blood glucose graph on insulin graph, you can have a spike and then a sudden fallback, or you can have a lower increase, but it will go for longer because your body digests it longer. And the essentially, so you don't get a spike, but you're working longer on it. So the net increase

amount of insulin won't be that different, but it will definitely have an influence on your appetite and your hunger. So if you eat it with fat, you won't get hungry as fast as you will get again when you eat it with low fat or no fat, because then you will have the faster reaction. And when it comes down again, you again need to eat. It can be a strategy to eat only carbs and

And then really every, I don't know, 90 minutes, eat some dried fruit or something like that. Stay purely on carb and try like that to avoid these up and downs of your blood sugar. And this is something that fat helps.

helps regulating and making it a bit smoother. If you are very insulin sensitive and you are getting insulin sensitive on a high carb diet, you might even get something like reactive hypoglycemia or something like that. So essentially you can literally eat carbs or drink a bigger amount of orange juice or something like that. You can even have this with protein and then you will become cold from one moment to the other. You literally have your blood

glucose drop and you feel essentially like being hypoglycemic. Can happen. Therefore, the mix is always the best, but how you mix it, in the end, it will still be kind of a caloric game. So it's difficult. I mean, I can imagine there are ways to formulate a repeat approach where you are a little bit more, yeah,

you try to add some vegetables that are not harmful, that are well cooked, because they will also keep you longer satiated. So if you really have a significant amount to lose weight, there is no way around the fact that you will have to fuel your body with less fuel than it actually needs. There's no way around that. And the successful ways to...

to get this thing going and also keep the weight loss is to do it constantly and to do it with a relatively small to medium caloric deficit and to do it without torturing and forcing yourself without having the constant appetite. You see this, for example, with bodybuilders.

Bodybuilders are really torturing themselves usually. They are on five to seven high protein meals with very lean protein. They eat rice, starches, starchy foods to get the maximum insulin and the maximum muscle protein synthesis during all their meals. But then they are also keeping a caloric restriction

And that's essentially the worst place you can be. So you're eating all the time. You're having these ups and downs because you're not eating fat. You have to save somewhere calories and you have to be hypocaloric. And it gets worse and worse and more and more difficult the leaner you get. So this is really the worst way. What you must try to achieve is essentially achieve a caloric deficit.

I don't like this word. Yeah, because I'm a little bit, I think a little bit more nuanced about this subject than a normal psycho proponent would. But still, if you don't have, you have to achieve this caloric deficit without feeling the hunger. That's why intermittent fasting or keto works for so many people, at least for a while.

Because both of these approaches bring you in a state where your body essentially takes over and brings you in this other state, produces ketones, and it kills your appetite. When I tried keto for the first time and carnivore, both these protocols, I ate...

a form of low carb for a while when I lost the most weight that I lost was essentially on something that I called back then smart carb. It was a little bit more than, than low carb. And it turns out with the stuff that I know today that I was essentially well in a safe zone regarding my carbs to not produce, to do not have this effect that I have to ramp up gluconeogenesis because I was eating 120 grams,

grams of carbs, 150 grams of carbs. I had a special formula to select the carb sources that I ate. The foods are not that ideal because today I would also say, okay, phytic acid, anti-nutrients. So I ate, for example, legumes back then. But what I did was essentially really eating a medium, let's say medium to low carb approach.

and keeping fat relatively low to stay in a caloric deficit. And I ate a lot of vegetables to finish that point. And this kept me

And I combined that with intermittent fasting, which has a funny effect. My body became very metabolically flexible because I was also working out in a fasted state. So I never was hungry. I could stay for 16, 17, 18 hours and I would not get hungry during the day. So that's why these protocols are working. And in keto, you have the effect that you essentially, your body kills your appetite.

I wonder if physiologically, since most Americans are fat burners because they're eating PUFA and high carb and high fat or whatever, and they are familiar with low carb, I wonder if that model you just said of a moderate carb approach is probably maybe that would be effective for a lot of the masses to be able to gradually lose

transition into a bioenergetic state is if they don't go straight, you know, 500, 600 carbs a day, but they kind of go into it smoothly, 120, 150, 100, you know, trying to stave off the stressors of gluconeogenesis and at the same time kind of get their body transitioning more comfortably with carbohydrates while lowering their fat.

might be the safest, one of the safest, perhaps, and sustainable transitions to a bio-international paradigm for Americans, especially here. Yeah. But one thing that you said, PUFA eating doesn't make you a fat burner. So essentially, these fatty acids will...

sabotage your energy metabolism and your body also might even prefer to put them into storage because it's such an inferior form of, it's not just an inferior form of energy, but it's literally slowing down your metabolism. So I would not say because you're eating many PUFAs, you are an ideal fat burner. That definitely I would not say. But the other point is absolutely spot on.

I take it the fat burner concept from Brad Marshall's point about torpor and the idea that the mammalian response to eating acorns and so forth like that sends a signaling molecule to store fat for hibernation. So I take it that when you're eating a lot of PUFA, you're signaling to your body to store fat and then...

because we eat a high-fat, high-carb, high-grain diet in America, you're typically going to be having a lot of free-floating fatty acids in the blood because your body is kind of in a mixed state of torpor all the time. Would you believe me if I tell you that not just the Americans but everyone on this planet could have essentially a natural form of Ozempic integrated into his daily meals very easily?

Just by eating vegetables as their first plate, because it will definitely manipulate the same hormones, reduce your appetite, reduce the insulin reaction that you get. It's essentially the easiest way. That's why I'm saying if somebody would ask me, what should I do to lose weight? And this is something that in the Ray Peek community might not be such an, I don't know, welcomed point.

because of veggies are essentially the simplification of these topics is really making me mad sometimes when people are saying ray did not say stay away from vegetables he said a they have these and that problems but you can cook them well so you can even eat spinach yeah if you cook it very well and be aware of all the anti-nutrients but i'm not even telling you to eat spinach

But if you would eat vegetables, you would have them, you would be much easier satiated. So if you want to have the ideal metabolic profile or insulin and satiation profile, you would eat first, you would eat some veggies.

then you would eat your protein sauce and then you would add some carbs. And I guarantee you, you would eat much less and you would not be hungry in one or two hours again. That would be the easiest dietary fix that a nation could apply to naturally having the same effect that Ozempic has with so many side effects, negative side effects. Yeah.

It's really that easy. Yeah, I appreciate your time. And I think we'll call it a wrap here. Any last thoughts you want to leave off with or anything you want to give us as a concluding thought? I totally agree with you. We need to get the message out, but we need to make the message of Ray Peet a little bit more mass compatible. We have to simplify it in some form.

we have to make it easier to digest and to understand, and we might even have to break it down to very simple rules that are easier to accept. And still, the failure potential will be very high because people tend to do things that are not good for them. Well, hopefully we can get back to an era, you know, the men especially of the

1950s and 40s and 30s and 20s, they were not obsessing over every calorie in their diet. And I hope that we can get back to a time where we don't have to have

people counting every calorie to survive. You know, that's insane. Really? You should never human flirt. Now, if you like it because it's a personal science nerd thing for you, then that's not insane. But the average person doesn't want to, you know, be chained to a computer every day, measuring everything they ever absorbed. That wasn't what the human species was designed to do primarily. And I think that hopefully, uh,

You know, there could be some breakthroughs here to simplify this so that the average person can go about their life, you know, having fun or skydiving or doing whatever they want to do without being obsessed about everything that's going in their body. It's just you can't scale that obsession healthily. It's okay for the frontiers, the frontiersmen and the pioneers and the science nerds to do it, but they can't scale that.

passion to other people because most people just want to get on with their life you know let's hope that maha will have some effect yeah and we'll clean out the food supply but i mean what what can you do in four years yeah what what would you tell what would you advise bobby kennedy if you had a chance to sit down with him processed foods

have to be regulated. There's much more than a few dyes that have to get out of that. And then essentially the seed oils and the PUFA, this whole industry, I think this is one of the

Pillars of chronic disease are really the seed holes. And I know that he's well aware of that. But this will be a very difficult holy cow to slaughter. Because this industry is making money with trash, with garbage. And is doing that since many decades. And Brooke Rollins, the pick for USDA secretary, she's already announced...

Her chief of staff is a former top seed oil lobbyist. So that's a big statement she's making. So we'll have to fight it. It's a tough place to be in because, you know, I want to be supportive of the things that Trump is doing right. But I have to call him out on the things that are disastrously wrong. The mountain of designed evidence over the last few decades is so high to climb.

I mean, academia in general, let's be honest, it's essentially

Who's financing it? Yeah, pay to play. Who's financing the journals and everything? So this whole thing is so messed up. It's so messed up from every angle that you look into it. And you cannot come now as one administration or one Barbara Kennedy would have a difficult time to say, because everybody will say, look, this is the evidence. Nobody will actually be able to take the time to dismantle all of that evidence and say, hey, this and that stuff.

You know, one citation that I heard recently or saw in a video, John Ioannidis, I think he's the most cited scientist in scientific studies. It's a Greek guy in an American university. And he said once 95% of scientific studies are essentially, somehow he said it like that, that they are not even worth a paper they are written on. Yeah.

because there are so many co-founders, you can influence the study outcome. It's really a mess and yet we are essentially basing everything on that. And that's not even accounting for epidemiological studies, so studies that are not clinical double-blind studies with placebo groups, for example, to actually have measurable effects, because in this realm you can't do that. You can't really do that.

Kempner did this with his rice diet. I mean, he had the people in a hospital that was like...

Yeah, like a prison. And he controlled them and he actually got the data that he wanted. But you cannot do this today with human beings. So it's not even with a bad intent manipulating studies. It's just using epidemiological studies with a lot of cofactors where you cannot simply say, is this a sugar or was this all the other crap that they ate?

in that time. So it's really a big mess. I don't want to be, yeah, I don't want to program people negative when it comes to that. There's always some hope. There has to be some hope. But it's really, it's more than an uphill battle that these people have to fight on. And yeah, let's hope for the best. Well, for more commentary from our guest today, follow him at Metabolic Uncle. Is that right? On X?

Only on X right now. I don't know if this will expand, but as already said, I'm not an influencer. I'm not perceiving myself as such. All right. Take care. Thank you for your time, sir. Thanks also for your time, David. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Bye.