Balanced Bites Podcast: Episode #13: Vegan Doctors Discussing Diet & Health with Liz, Legit Foods in Grocery Stores

Episode #13

Discussion Topics:

• Liz's plane ride sitting in front of two vegan doctors discussing diet and health (Yes, really. We can't make this stuff up!)
• Diane finds some legit food in a regular grocery store

Shout-outs:

• Kasandrinos Imports– AMAZING Extra Virgin Olive Oil from Greece available soon.

Topics: 
1. Diane & Liz's educational backgrounds
2. What is inflammation?!
3. Too much chicken and pork?
4. Eating only animal foods

LIZ WOLFE:Hey everybody, welcome to the Balanced Bites podcast number 13. Just a reminder: the materials and content contained in this podcast are for general health information only and are not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Ah, that was me, Liz.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: [laughs]

LIZ WOLFE:So what's up everybody? Diane, are you here?

DIANE SANFILIPPO: I can't even…I can't even listen to you do that with a straight face.

LIZ WOLFE:[laughs] Yeah, I know.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Your radio voice makes me laugh.

LIZ WOLFE:[laughs] What's going on with you?

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Oh, just hanging out. Waiting to record this podcast and then…

LIZ WOLFE:All right.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: go pick up some heavy stuff and put it back down.

LIZ WOLFE:[laughs]

DIANE SANFILIPPO: That's the plan. Just in writing, just working on an article for Paleo Magazine that will be out in January/February, I think, in that issue.

LIZ WOLFE:Rock.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: The article's going to be on starches, I think, so yeah. Fun to just kind of submerge myself in some different topics; usually, they're pretty hot topics, things that are commonly asked about, but sometimes they're not things that I would have necessarily gotten myself into. Just like completely, at the time…it's fun. It's fun to do a little extra research and digging and trying to make sense of it for people. And that's always kind of my perspective is just like, okay, what are they saying, like what's floating around out there and how do people kind of take that and make it practical in their own lives, and what do they do with it? So, I think there's a lot of like theorizing going on out there, and it's good to just get people some information about what they should do.

LIZ WOLFE:It's a very active job sometimes.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Yeah [laughs]

LIZ WOLFE:We're starting a little slow here, Diane.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Yeah, yeah. I'm like, I don't even know.

LIZ WOLFE:To be fair, though, I just got off a plane about half an hour ago, and I was sitting in front of two very emphatic vegan doctors that were discussing [laughs]. Well, one was a doctor, I don't know what the other one was, but they were discussing, you know, “You know, it's just so thoughtful,” and you know, I don't want to hate on the vegans. I don't because I think we had a little podcast review about maybe we shouldn't bash on other food ideologies so much, and I don't think I do. It's just kind of almost…

DIANE SANFILIPPO: I don't think we do. Yeah. I think that sometimes people are sensitive, and I'm like, mmm. Yeah.

LIZ WOLFE:And fair enough. I appreciate anybody's that's thoughtful about their food.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Mm-hmm.

LIZ WOLFE:I don't care what they're eating because in the end that's not my problem. But you know, if you're thoughtful about it…

DIANE SANFILIPPO: True.

LIZ WOLFE:you know, making informed choices, fine, you know, good on ya, but to hear, you know…it's just-it just blows my mind because I think a lot of us and probably most of the people listening to this podcast are pretty immersed. Like we're pretty Paleo-ed out, and it's just hard to believe that there are medical professionals that have so clearly not read any of the research that they are proposing exists. Because in my opinion, even a cursory review of some of these quote unquote studies that people are using as ammunition half the time do not yield the conclusions that people are making. I mean, it's straight up in China Study territory there, so it's just kind of blows my mind. So I've kind of been like you know, I already dislike flying enough as it is, but to sit in front of two people that are…oh my gosh. Like my brain was invaded. I tried plugging my ears. It got through. I couldn't-there was nothing I could do. Nothing. Nothing I could do. It's so awkward in that…

DIANE SANFILIPPO: What were they talking about?

LIZ WOLFE:They were talking about every nutrition myth that you could think of. Cholesterol being bad, animal products being bad, the girl asked about-they were talking about soy milk.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Are you sure you weren't on some kind of like hidden camera airplane show? Like how long will it take Liz Wolfe to freak out and like mash a stick of butter into one of these guy's faces? [laughs]

LIZ WOLFE:It was bad. I literally, and you know, I'm not sitting with friends or anything, you know, like, so I literally pulled-I started pulling my hair. I plugged my ears; it didn't work. I pulled my hair, like oh my gosh. I shook my head. I just-I don't know. I was thinking to myself WWDD-What Would Diane Do? Should I turn around, give them my business card? Or should I..? What should I do? But in the end, you know…

DIANE SANFILIPPO: I would have accidentally dropped some beef jerky in their, like, aisle.

LIZ WOLFE:I almost-I took out a PaleoKit and I was waving my beef jerky stick around just to try and get that smell over there.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: [laughs] Nice. Oh God.

LIZ WOLFE:But it was really something. And it was only about an hour and a half flight, but I swear, I mean, at least it was like the torture machine in the Princess Bride. I'm pretty sure they sucked about 50 years of my life away.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Awww,

LIZ WOLFE:I know.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: What's funny is that I've ended up like very serendipitously next to people on airplanes who've been very interested in what I'm teaching, and I don't even really mention kind of the realm of what I do. If they ask, I say I teach nutrition seminars, and I work with clients, you know, write on a blog, and so I tell them, but I don't really get into the details of it. And then they start asking more questions and they start revealing all these things about like their health or just how they've heard about something, about, you know, something related to what we're doing and I feel like I always have the opposite experience. People end up asking for my card and I'm just like, okay, awesome. Good luck, read something, you know, check it out. But I don't know.

LIZ WOLFE:Read something. Dear God. [laughs]

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Maybe what?

LIZ WOLFE:Dear God. Read something. I don't care what it is. Please. [laughs] Anyway.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Well, I don't envy you. That didn't sound like fun.

LIZ WOLFE:Not so much. If I had been sitting next to them, maybe I would have chimed in on the
conversation, but I was literally like chained to a middle seat one row ahead, just, you know, rocking back and forth, just you know.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: [laughs]

LIZ WOLFE:But I survived. I'm here. I made it.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: I'm picturing this.

LIZ WOLFE:Let's talk about real food.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: All right, yeah, just a couple of little things I wanted to bring up before we get into some questions. Let's see. Yeah, so maybe before I do some announcements, I'll just kind of talk to people a little bit about the stuff that I posted on Facebook maybe last week. I got into town and I moved, you know, here to New Jersey about a week and a half ago or so. Maybe it's almost been two weeks. And you know, I definitely need to kind of reestablish the lay of the land and where I'll be shopping and I have some really good meat sources for, you know, the primary-the primary source of my meats from farms I can use and that's kind of squared away, but in terms of just kind of everyday grocery shopping, I've been hitting the sort of regular grocery stores, just to see what's there. I think it's really-I think it's important, you know. Almost as much as it's sometimes important to turn on the TV, and just reacquaint ourselves with what's, you know, what people are being fed as truth about health and nutrition, as irritating as it is, or as much as it might like just really boil my blood, I think that it helps keep us, and by us, I mean all of us who are kind of eyeball-deep in Paleo research and just kind of talking to other people in our community about, you know, what we study. Just making sure we're still in touch with what people are learning and there's always new people just stepping into this…into this community.

But that said, I was able to pick up a couple of really good finds at my local ShopRite grocery store that I just wanted to tell people about. Not, you know, pasture-raised, wild caught, most amazing forms of anything, but I think kind of, you know, the perspective I take is do the very best that you can. And I typically like to teach people that are avoiding what Chris Kresser calls “food toxins,” things like gluten, seed oils, and you know, maybe fructose or high fructose corn syrup and any refined sweeteners like that. I usually tell people that avoiding those kinds of things will go really far in just looking for whole food thereafter. So I found a couple of things-well, people might think they're a little bit questionable, but for me, they're kind of working. So one is a Spanish chorizo. It's imported from Spain, which I kind of like stuff that's imported. Not for many reasons other than I tend to think that food from like Spain might just somehow have better standards than some of the food we have in this country. I can be totally wrong on that. I have not researched it at all. I just typically think that unless you know, we know the farmer around here, we kind of can pretty safely assume if you've seen like Food, Inc., or you just have any idea about feedlots, you know how meat is raised around this country. So anyway, Spanish chorizo-it has like 3 or 4 ingredients, like pork, paprika, garlic, and salt, and that's it. And I was psyched to find that. I'm a pretty big fan of chorizo. It's like this probably like a 24 inch sausage that's kind of been in and it's dried, and you can kind of cut little pieces off, just add it in to different recipes, and I really liked that. Very, very tasty. If you go into it saying you don't know what to cook or what to make that's interesting, just chopping up a little bit of that and cooking it with some ground beef and then throwing it into something, delicious.

And the other thing I found, which this is definitely something that kind of goes back to my German roots-my mom's side of the family. We always had kind of a traditional delicatessen spread, bagels and schmear, and all that kind of thing, back when I was a kid. Liverwurst and all of that, which obviously I don't eat bagels anymore, but we used to eat a pretty large amount of smoked and pickled fish. Again, I had a really good taste for it when I was a kid, and just got away from it probably in my adolescent years. But I found some pickled herring, and I found that in the kosher section. So again in terms of like food standards and quality, that's another thing. We don't really talk about it too much and again, I don't know all of the details on it, but it's pretty standard that kosher practices, in terms of how meat is raised or processed, tend to be at least a step above anything conventional, in this country, so anyway, I don't think you can get certified kosher fish. I'm not really sure what the deal is with the fish, I mean, I guess they can certify it somehow.

But I'm totally getting on a tangent. But pickled herring is what I found, and just like a little quick note on it. It has sugar in it. It's herring, onions, some vinegar, and its distilled vinegar, I made sure it was a gluten free form of vinegar, and it does have some sugar in it, which is just really standard pickling kind of brine or recipe. So again, anyone who cooks, you kind of know that that stuff is standard. It's around 4 grams of sugar in a serving, which is about a quarter of cup, so it'd be like 4 little pieces that I take out of this jar, but in that serving, I'm probably getting about 415 milligrams of omega-3 fats. I've been having a really hard time personally getting in some fish, some coldwater fish with omega-3. I have a lot of trouble taking a supplement, and you know, I know it's stuff that we recommend to people for different reasons or purposes, but I'm-I-self-proclaimed, I stink at taking supplements. I have to literally set a reminder on my phone to take my adrenal protocol, which it actually just went off at the beginning of the podcast, so I'll have to remember to take it at the end. But I just found that you know what, even if there's a little bit of sugar, for the amount of activity that I do and the amount of other sugar that I don't eat, if it's going to help me get the omega-3s in, and it's going to help me eat some coldwater fish, I'll take it. That's a tradeoff I'm willing to make, so everyone has to do something different. Whatever works for you, but I find that that's kind of a nice little way I can get it in. It's something that I'll pick at and just have a snack of, pretty much almost every day, so…I was kind of excited about that, so I found some good little-good little foods at my ShopRite, so maybe some people can keep an eye out, you know, for specialty foods that they can find.

LIZ WOLFE:Nice.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: So that's me.

LIZ WOLFE:You know, I like real- I really lean kind of towards the traditional food stuff these days, and just kind of respecting stuff like fermenting and pickling and stuff like that that people used to do, just kind of necessity in a lot of ways, and I believe the reason that you use sugar in pickling is to inhibit bacterial growth. I'm not 100% sure on that, but it's kind of one those things where you know, respect the traditional method, you know? Just go for it. I don't- I just don't balk it.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Yeah.

LIZ WOLFE:Balk at that sugar content. It really just does not bother me.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Yeah.

LIZ WOLFE:against the backdrop of, you know, a good diet. I think it's fine.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Yeah, and I just usually, you know, when I always tell people too, like I-just the other announcement that I want to make after this, that I kind of run, pretty much every month a group of people who do what I call the 21 Day Sugar Detox, and you know, my kind of message with it is just read the ingredients because you have to know what's in it, and if you know, and you can make the choice in like, sort of the context of your own life, if you know, as I do, that 4 grams of that, you know 4 grams of carbohydrate that's even in there at all. There could be a gram contributed from the fish itself, who even knows, but…it's just not really that much, and I think awareness is totally the key, like what you were saying about being mindful about food, and just, you know, knowing about it. And of course at some point, maybe I'll make it myself and use less sugar than they would, you know, in the pre-packaged container, but yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, so I did want to make an announcement. I don't think I've really talked about it much on the podcast, but I do have a 21 Day Sugar Detox program that I run. It's currently…it's an e-book guide that you can download and I'll put a link to it-21DaySugarDetox.com, spelled out just how it sounds with the number. And what it does is just helps people who are pretty much like, oh my God, I can't make it through a day without feeling like I'm dying for sugar or carbs. People who just really need to kind of back away from anything that's going to slide them into a, you know, slippery slope of more and more sugar, and just really get those cravings to kind of subside, and you know, there's no secret to what it is. It's a real food-based approach, and you're essentially removing certain foods for that 21 days.

And I do have 3 different levels and now they're all kind of broken out when I send the next update of the guides. It will all be broken out separately, but it's 3 different levels that people can follow, so if you're kind of new to it, new to real whole foods, just getting rid of refined foods, the first level might be the best place to start. Then the next level. Then the next. And it's not some, you know, if you are totally new, that it'll freak you out. People think that it's kind of crazy that I would at all sort of you know, quote unquote allow people to eat grains. While the first level of this program actually does allow whole grains, and I think we kind of all know that it's not something that I promote as a healthy form of food, but to somebody who's coming from eating bread, pasta, cereal, bagels, cookies all the time, that's actually a really good first step.

And so, that's about as much as I'll tell you about, you know, where kind of that first step comes
in, but it's a big deal, and I think people like often forget the context of like, again, you know, we're so immersed in this community that we forget that there's so many people out there who are still eating highly, highly refined foods that we need to get them to start changing their habits. And if it means that they're going to start cooking rice instead of eating a piece of bread, then cool. I'm psyched that they just made that change, and it's going to take them a long way to making even more, you know, positive changes, so anyway.

They pretty much kick off around the first of every month. It just depends on you know, where the day of the week is. I'm kicking it off December 1st, so that it can end, definitely in time for Christmas, just to give people that little bit of leeway, and yeah, well, obviously we'll have kind of another big kickoff for one in January. There's a Facebook page. People can come and share any questions or concerns or, you know, talk to each other about what they're experiencing and you know, people seem to really kind of enjoy doing it. It's a nice little challenge and experience some really interesting positive side effects from it. I know recently one woman said she used to get migraines all the time and found that her migraines had stopped, so some really cool-some really cool effects of that.

What else? Announcements? More announcements? Should we talk about-just a quick, as I don't have too many details yet? This event called PaleoFX.

LIZ WOLFE:Oh yeah.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: It is-yeah, it's taking place in Austin. I'm going to be in Austin so much in the beginning of next year. It's taking place March 14th to 17th at the Start Center at the University of Texas. It's called PaleoFX 12 for 2012, and a whole bunch of speakers and the focus of it..it's also supported by the Ancestral Health Society who also runs the Ancestral Health Symposium, but it's a totally different focus. The focus at the Ancestral Health Symposium is a little bit more science to theory, and the focus of this event is theory to practice, which I think is actually going to be really cool and a lot of fun for folks like us, for that's really what we do. We really take a lot of that theory and put it into practice every day with our clients.

LIZ WOLFE:Right.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: in our interactions and our blog, and yeah, I'm really excited about that. I'll be speaking. I'm not sure all of the details of it yet, but people can check out the website PaleoFX.com and again, we'll link to that. That should be fun.

LIZ WOLFE:Let's talk about olive oil. Because I know we both…

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Did you get that olive oil? Cool. Well, I just wanted to do a little shoutout to my buddies. I think he's your buddy too, actually. Last time I spoke to him he said to say Hola for him.

LIZ WOLFE:Wassup?

DIANE SANFILIPPO: What's up, Tony?

LIZ WOLFE:[laughs]

DIANE SANFILIPPO: So my friend, Anthony, Tony Kasandrinos. I've probably even talked about him before on the podcast. At least I know on Facebook. He-his family's from Greece, and they have olive farms or whatever they're called…olive farms? I don't know.

LIZ WOLFE:Vineyard? Olive groves? I think they're groves.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: I don't even know. Large plantation? I don't know. Anyway, they grow olives and they make amazing, amazing olive oil, so he's starting up actually a full on website, Facebook page, Kasandrinos' Imports, and he's going to put a bunch of information up on the website as soon as it gets up about it, and you'll be able to order it, and it's the only olive oil I've been using these days because it just tastes amazing, and again, those imported foods, you know? The guidelines of the way they grow their food are pretty, pretty stringent, so yeah, I'll put a link up to that, and you guys can check out the olive oil that I'm always talking about…amazing, all the time. Not to cook with. [laughs]

LIZ WOLFE:Drink it. Just drink it, really.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Basically. No, it's like I'll finish making something, and I'm like that needs more fat. What am I going to do? I'm like, oh yes, it's like liquid gold. [laughs]

LIZ WOLFE:[laughs] All right cool. Well, what about our new segment? Do you want to introduce our new segment?

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Yeah, so we seem to be doing this anyway because things just come up and you and I just like to chat, so I think we're going to start to do, you know, maybe every week, if we have it. We definitely still have tons of questions, but I think, you know, people find it interesting to hear us talk about lots of different things, not just questions, so I think we're going to start just kind of like Paleo in the News-ish section, just trying to dig something up each week that has kind of been going around and you know, it can be specifically Paleo nutrition-oriented or just kind of something that's swirling around our community that you may or may not have seen maybe again through Twitter, Facebook, what have you, but just so we can kind of give our two cents on.

LIZ WOLFE:Yeah.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: So this week, [laughs] did you see this? Did you see this clip?

LIZ WOLFE:I did. Can I commentate?

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Yeah, why don't you go for it first since I've been yapping for awhile.

LIZ WOLFE:So one of my horrible addictions that I overcame as I was introduced to Paleo was my obsession with The Biggest Loser, which I loved…

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Mmm. Still love it.

LIZ WOLFE: I mean, it made me so happy. People exercising 9 hours a day and eating nothing but refined, you know, wheat products because I thought to myself, I want to do that.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Yeah. [laughs]

LIZ WOLFE:I want to go to the gym and plod away for the next 24 hours and lose a million pounds and whatever. You know, who cares? But so anyway, I guess Bob and Jillian, or Jillian has a new show, or she was on The Doctors or something like that. I saw the segment online.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: [laughs] She was on The Doctors. I don't know how she's on that show, but okay.

LIZ WOLFE:This is a tough one. Now, okay, Jillian's not-I mean, she's not a bad person. She's cultivated a cool, you know, personality that works, that draws viewers and stuff like that, but Bob put her through a little miniature kind of CrossFit chipper, and you know, like good on her, like that was cool to see her struggle through that, like it's kind of a fun little, you know, kind of re-emphasizing of what a tough, you know, thing that a lot of us are doing on a very frequent basis.

Like it is very cool. And you know, we all gave-we kind of gave her a little s-h-I-t. You know, made fun of her a little, had a little struggle there, but what I loved about it is like, yeah, what we do is not easy, you know. It's not-it's no joke. Like we're working hard, and I loved that little kind of opportunity to kind of put out there what a challenge all of us are kind of willingly placing on our own plates every day. You know, not to…

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Yeah.

LIZ WOLFE:degrade Jillian or anything that she's doing, but we all should be pretty damn proud of ourselves because CrossFit ain't easy and it's a commitment.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Yeah.

LIZ WOLFE:Full of sweat and tears and I think it's awesome that it's getting some mainstream, you know, recognition, and we can all kind of pat ourselves on the back a little bit for not being satisfied with just plodding away, you know, killing ourselves on a treadmill for an hour every day.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Yeah.

LIZ WOLFE:So that made me happy.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Yeah. So like one of the things…and you know, which I think is really funny, too. I think something about Facebook, like whoever the first person is that you see share a story, their take on it, I think tends to like begin to taint your take on it, one way or another. Maybe that just happens to me sometimes, but when I first saw this. The person who shared it was like totally had Jillian on blast and I kind of saw the perspective of you know, I agree with you. I think what she does is great for the most part. I think what's interesting about her is that I think she knows more than she really says about how a lot of stuff works, though I did listen to her podcast once or twice, just to get an idea for what she's doing. And some of the things she said weren't super sharp. But I think, like she gets it about endocrinology and hormones, like she knows that it's not just about calories, and she knows that garbage food is garbage food. I'm not sure she fully understands what all might be included in garbage food, but I don't know that her personal take on that is always what's reflected in The Biggest Loser, for example.

So all that being said, I just thought it was really kind of funny that the image that she puts out about who she is and what she does, which, maybe it's just the image that I'm picking up, that she's super strong and capable, because that's how she looks and how she presents herself, and she's putting out workout videos for other people to do, that you know, she really was kind of struggling and looked kind of weak in the workout. And I didn't think that really much that she was doing, like the sumo deadlift highpull she did, you know, somebody commented somewhere that it's like a ridiculous exercise for anyone to do or a ridiculous move, and I'm like yeah, it totally is. Nobody looks efficient doing it, but I just was kind of surprised that you know what, I'm sure she was debriefed on what she was going to be doing. There's no way you get on TV to that kind of a show and you don't know what move you're about to do. For her to at least have some cueing of how to pull that weight off the floor with her hips and not with her shoulders, and again, this is not what I expect of the everyday person. You know, my mom started CrossFit this week, and I'll tell you a little bit about that, but like you know, she presents a different image and I'm with you. It's like, it's a hard thing. This stuff is not…these moves are not…CrossFit is not anything about like specific moves. Like they pulled things from all different arenas together, and that's what makes it unique, but then even a shoulder press or a push press that she was doing. I was just really surprised to see that she did not seem to be that strong and I don't ever think that people need to be a certain, you know, level of strength or whatever. It's just that she presents one image, and that example of just a few minutes really kind of surprised me and maybe that's why I reacted the way that I did. I was like, I guess I thought somehow that she would be stronger than that. Like she just seemed like she would be. So you know, maybe I was just taken aback by it. You know? Or maybe I forget how hard some of this stuff is for…

LIZ WOLFE:Whatever. Jillian…

DIANE SANFILIPPO: are strong at other things. Hmm?

LIZ WOLFE:I think it's kind of fun. A little bit of good-natured ribbing for Jillian. I mean, she dishes it out. She can take it a little bit. It's all good, you know. We're not…

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Yeah.

LIZ WOLFE:Everybody's just kind of sitting around waiting to be offended or angry about something. Like, I don't know. I got a kick out of it, I thought it was cool. It reaffirmed the fact that you know, you don't have to call it CrossFit. Whatever you want to call it. High intensity functional type movements. Moving some weights.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Totally,

LIZ WOLFE:Not being on the elliptical machine. Not the abductor/adductor you know, party of two. it's just like, it was cool. It was fun.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Yeah. And that's good, too. Like I think we also like…I wouldn't even have a problem with somebody who did want to get on the elliptical machine if it meant they were not going to be on their couch. Like I don't even care what people do. Like I don't have any…like some of the comments on the blog-there was a blog post that went up that was kind of like, a rebuttal to seeing a lot of negative commentary on Facebook about it. You know, just saying kind of something about the CrossFit elitist attitude, and I'm like, that's not even what it is. It's just more of this one person who presents herself one way and then it was like wow, you kind of ended up with this result, and yeah, I definitely think CrossFit is hard stuff and I think whatever anyone's going to do. If we have an elitist attitude about it, it's very off-putting, it's very exclusive, and not inclusive, and you know, for the last week and a half I've been having conversations with my mom because she started at CrossFit. And she does yoga very regularly. She's been doing yoga for nine years. She swims pretty regularly, but she needs something with weight-bearing exercise to do because she hasn't been doing anything other than those things and it doesn't mean it needs to be the same intensity that, you know, the 20 and 30 somethings do it with. But you know, something different for her and it's a new community of people to reach out to. But I think, you know, I think that's what the kind of cool thing is, is that there's always something out there for people to kind of check in on and see what they're going to do and try, you know, try something new and you know, just because we rib somebody who's kind of out there and puts this one image out doesn't mean that, you know, it's a totally elitist thing. I would never say that to my mom.

LIZ WOLFE:Whatever. I like the word “elite.” I'm good with it. I think that trying really hard and working really hard is super elite and I think “elite” doesn't have to mean “exclusive” and I want everybody to try super hard; therefore, I want everybody to be super elite, and I want all of us to be a big super elite, hard trying band of Paleo Awesome. So there you go.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: [laughs] Okay. Great.

LIZ WOLFE:I just put it down.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Okay. Liz lays it down.

LIZ WOLFE:[laughs]

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Should we have a new section? Liz Lays It Down.

LIZ WOLFE:Yeah, that's the new section, but really I mean, like trying super hard is awesome. I don't care who you are, I don't care if you're Jillian or if you're me, in my, you know, prime time TV addicted butt, like try super hard, be elite, be awesome. Let's all get in on it together.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Yeah. Woohoo!

LIZ WOLFE:That made no sense. How about we ask a question? Do you want to move on to a question? [laughs]

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Yeah, definitely. We can move on. I'm sure people are like, what is…is this the podcast now? We're just going to listen to these two yap the whole time?

LIZ WOLFE:Yeah, exactly. And I'll do it…

DIANE SANFILIPPO: hopefully…I know. Apparently, after you know, after last week, I was like, I don't know how much time we can fill. Apparently, you and I can really fill a lot of time, but anyway, yeah, let's jump into a-into that first one.

LIZ WOLFE:All right. Quick one from Chelsea: “You mentioned your educational backgrounds in this podcast… just curious what degree and/or program did each of you complete? Great podcast! Thanks!”

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Cool, so before I studied nutrition, I went to Syracuse University and got a Bachelor's degree, so that forever and a year ago. No, it was awhile ago. And then I actually first studied with the CHEK Institute. I did the Holistic Lifestyle Coaching program, which the level one of that program was what I did, and it's mostly focused on improving your own health, but it does leave with you with tools to use to do health assessments on some other people, and to coach them as well. But I would say the main bulk of my education was through Bauman College, which…they're headquartered in…I can't remember actually…the campus I went to is in Berkeley, California. They have several campuses around the West Coast and Colorado, but they do also have a distance learning program, which is very popular. A lot of people complete that. And the nutrition consultant program that I completed is pretty-it's pretty intense. There's a lot of work, lot of reading, lot of studying, lot of homework assignments, case studies, client case studies. It's not really-it's not something you can just do flippantly. You really need to have time to focus and study if you are doing a distance learning program. You get to sort of work a little bit more on your own timeline, so it's nice because you can kind of take more time if you need it or move faster if you can. The classroom setting, you, obviously, move at the pace with the entire class.

So I would definitely recommend it. I would definitely recommend checking out the curriculum if you're interested in learning more. But yeah, that's my background. Also a bunch of other continuing education seminars and lectures I'm constantly attending, so you can check more about that on my About page on BalancedBites.com. And Liz…?

LIZ WOLFE:Well, I was first educated…well, first I went to clown college and then…

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Of course.

LIZ WOLFE:I went to the school of hard knocks, which those are both jokes. Bad jokes. But basically I went to the University of Kansas, which is the best school in the history of the planet and all space and time. Rock Chalk Jayhawk! So my education there is actually in English. I did a little study abroad. I did a second…a minor in American Studies; I was really interested in sociology and actually the politics of food at the time. And then I went on and just finished fairly recently my Nutrition Therapy certification, so I guess you could say that my nutrition education is through…board certification is through the Nutrition Therapy Association. And if anybody wants more info on that, just hop over to my Facebook page for Cave Girl Eats or you can send me a message through my business website, which is AncestralWellness.com, and I'm glad to always, you know, talk about the education program because I really just found it phenomenal, so..That's where I'm at.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Cool.

LIZ WOLFE:All right.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Hit the next one.

LIZ WOLFE:Next question. I think this is Elyse. Elyse asks: “For two plus years I’ve been eating a good, clean Paleo diet, have followed many blogs and podcasts and experienced many health improvements. Science has never been my strong suit but I’m slowly beginning to understand all of the biochemistry gobble-dy-gook and hope to get to the point where I might actually be able to talk intelligently about this stuff. Your podcast is certainly helping in the arena–thanks so much for your good work!!” Diane, I think we may have regressed a little bit in the talking intelligently in the first 30 minutes of this podcast.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: [laughs] I know.

LIZ WOLFE:We'll do our best to bring it back.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Yeah.

LIZ WOLFE:Elyse's question. She says, “It's a basic one but it has always perplexed me… What exactly is inflammation? I know it’s bad, caused by too many omega -6’s and can lead to many diseases. But what are the symptoms of inflammation? How is it detected or measured?

I eat a very clean Paleo diet with my biggest cheat being vegetable oils from restaurant food (gluten free) probably less than once a month. At night I will feel a burning sensation in my upper back which I think may be inflammation. I also get this feeling when I eat nuts or coconut flour which I’ve cut out completely. What do you think–am I on track here? Thanks for enlightening me on this and nutrition in general!” Diane, I think you've probably got a good answer for this one, I believe.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Cool. Yeah, I have a few notes. So she's-like her basic question is really what is inflammation and she's identifying something that she's experiencing and asking if, you know, if that is an example of inflammation. Her experience of a burning sensation in her upper back, which definitely would be inflammation. But so if we just want to define inflammation, it's a biological response of vascular tissues to pathogens, damaged cells or other irritants. It's how our body heals infections. It can be acute or chronic, so it can be, you know, quick, short, short bursts of pain, heat, inflammation…pain, sorry, inflammation, I can't use the word inflammation to define the word. Pain, heat, redness, swelling, loss of function. Those are all signs of inflammation. And they're all what we would call mediators of inflammation, so they're just something that's telling you there's a problem. So a mediator, you might hear about, you know, you might hear that term sometimes. It just means, like what language is inflammation coming to you in, so if you were to get, you know, rub your arm in some poison ivy and you get some red bumps and then it becomes swollen and potentially itchy, you know, the red bumps, swelling, and itchiness, those are your mediators of inflammation. That's the message. That's the way that you're hearing there's some kind of problem, some kind of pathogen, damaged cells or other irritating experience happening in your body.

So it's always about balance when it comes to inflammation. What she's asking about the omega-3/omega-6, which I think you have some more stuff to kind of give us on that, but when people get kind of confused about omega-3/omega-6, it's not one's good and one's bad. It's that they need to be in a certain kind of balance and that will help our body to produce inflammatory responses which we need. We need inflammatory responses to heal problems, so you know, you do a workout and you feel pain in your muscles, that's inflammation going to the site of tears in your muscles to repair what's happened there and hopefully within a couple days that heals, and that inflammation and pain that you're feeling as the mediator goes away. But if you, you know, you have way too many inflammatory foods or food toxin type things in your diet, so you know, things like gluten, seed oils, too much sugar, refined foods in general, and I don't think her once a month vegetable oils from restaurant food is really the biggest issue there. I think regular hits of vegetable oil from restaurants could be a problem, you know, daily, but I think, you know, infrequently it's probably not the biggest deal. The awareness is probably way more important than even just eating it that once a month. You know the fact that you know that that's what you're getting.

But you know, why food matters in this case is that she had an interesting. She's very very in tune. She gets the feeling when she eats nuts or coconut flour. Why food matters so much is that 70% of your immune system is in your gut. So what people may not realize is that between when you eat food and you know, the metabolic end result of that food getting broken down through your digestive system starts to enter your body. It's happening at the lining of your small intestine, and how successfully that happens, you know, it really depends. It depends on your digestive function. It depends on, you know, what your immune system might be doing at the time. But between your lining of your small intestine and where food is in your body, there's a whole immune layer. I don't want to get like too science-y, but Peyer's Patches are what sort of line in this immune layer and essentially before your food becomes-before your food enters the bloodstream as broken down into amino acids and sugars and fatty acids, it needs to pass through there.

And so if you're eating foods that are causing inflammation for you. If you're eating foods that you don't process well for reasons that we've talked about a million times with regards to leaky gut, so…and you know, poor digestive function. If you don't have enough digestive enzymes, if the food's getting in there and you know, you have an intolerance to that food and you really can't break it down completely, and your food's trying to get through this immune layer, and your immune system is responding to it, it's that 70% of your immune system, if that's happening at your gut lining, and it's constantly responding to irritating food, then the amount of inflammation or inflammatory response that your body can commit to other processes, is only going to be that much lower because so much of it is concentrated on focusing on digestion. Your body has to work on your digestive process for you to survive. It does not need to work on your back pain. It doesn't need to work on your foot pain. Your skin. Any of these other responses in order to survive. So it's going to put inflammation first to your gut, and then secondarily to other places, so this is why sometimes when you eat a food that's irritating, you actually don't experience digestive distress because it maybe mediated in a different way for you.

So she may feel this as a result of these other foods because her mediators are different from somebody else's. This is the same reason why sometimes when people are sort of detoxing, they stop eating irritating foods, and inflammation sort of stops paying attention to the gut lining because it's not as irritated anymore and it goes somewhere else. And some other kind of pain or irritating flares. Sometimes people experience more issues with acne sometimes after they stop eating irritating foods, which I think can be that inflammatory process moving. Sometimes it's a hormone issue or a rebalancing of how much sugar they're taking in, but that's you know, that's kind of the essential information to what is inflammation. Why food matters.

The other piece of this puzzle is also that in terms of food and stress…so you've got…you've got your immune system sitting in your gut in what we're calling Peyer's Patches. You also have this substance called Secretory IgA, which is an immunoglobulin. It's an immune…it's an immune functioning substance that's sitting in the mucosal surfaces of your GI tract; it's also present in your mouth. So when you are stressed, secretory IgA is depressed. So this is just a normal response. If your stress levels are chronically high, then your ability to respond with your immune system to different invaders, different pathogens, everything that I was saying can contribute to inflammation will be diminished or lowered. So any kind of systemic stressor can do that, so it's basically kind of reminding us, all this stuff we talked about with digestion and stress, it all matters to be able to heal any problems that might be happening in your body. That lowering stress, you know, stress that you can think about intellectually and also that systemic stress that could be caused by anything: poor food choices, lifestyle choices, you know, the wrong exercise, not enough recovery, mental, emotional, physical, etc., etc.

So that's kind of in a nutshell what I want to tell people about inflammation. And it really is…it's really important to understand that it's not always something super tangible, you can put your finger on. like, oh well, you know, people say, you know, this word, oh, it's inflammation all the time. Inflammation, you know, really just means there's a problem somewhere and your body's trying to fix it, which in a sense is like good. If you have inflammation, then at least your body is trying to work on it. It means that's something's at least working in a proper way, but what happens so often, you know, with the Standard American Diet or people who are really trying to shift away from poor food choices that their body has been dealing with poor food choices for so, so long that it's like, we need to really try and get the inflammation in their system, that irritating that their gut lining essentially or just the overload of sugar in refined foods needs to calm the system down. So I mean, there's just so many different ways that you can identify inflammation, but it's essentially, I mean…I think what most people out there are kind of identifying pretty much all diseases, all problems that kind of happen with our, you know, skin or our organs are all problems of inflammation. But that's what it is. It just means, you know, a problem at a certain site that the message is sent to us in different ways, so does that kind of make sense? It's a very…overarching, sweeping term.

LIZ WOLFE:I like it.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: But it just means, you know, there's a problem with something. Yeah.

LIZ WOLFE:Yeah, I kind of want to add to…kind of broad sweeping stroke to all of this. Like I think that a lot of us got started talking about like inflammation and omega-3 vs. omega-6 through an introduction to the Zone diet, which I have kind of abandoned. I think 40-30-30 is a good starting point for some people when it comes to good food and just learning to kind of eyeball what good food looks like. But I think it was really Barry Sears who kind of instilled this kind of fear of omega-6, specifically arachidonic acid. And I've had some athletes kind of ask me about arachidonic acid, which is really concentrated like in egg yolks and in chicken skin, for example, It was funny because at the Weston A. Price conference, I was able to hear more extraordinary genius from Chris Masterjohn who spoke a little bit about specifically arachidonic acid and actually poked a little bit of fun at Barry Sears for this. This crazy, you know, all consuming feat of arachidonic acid-he was-Dr. Sears, I guess, was talking about injecting rabbits with arachidonic acid and how they died within like three minutes, and ooooh! Chris just goes “Think of the implications for bioterrorism!” You know, like arachidonic acid, dangerous dangerous. But that's just not the case at all. And it was really funny to see just Chris wax humorous about it because there really is, even with those people that we respect-a lot of CrossFitters are also Zoners. There is still a lot of misinformation out there.

And arachidonic acid actually is really important to anti-inflammation, just as much as it is to inflammation. It helps promotes and to resolve inflammation, and ultimately, that's what we want is kind of the balance between inflammatory and anti-inflammatory processes. Between jumpstarting healing and completing healing, so you know, I think there are many aspects to these prostaglandin pathways, which is really what we're talking about when we talk about you know, omega-3/omega-6 fatty acids and that type of stuff.

I think in some ways, they're poorly understood, and so as Chris said, I think when we don't necessarily fully understand something, we should really default to the wisdom of traditional people. So you look at, you know, traditional healthy cultures, did they eat arachidonic acid? Yes. Did they eat, you know, coldwater fish? Yes. Absolutely. They ate all of these things. They ate real foo Diane Sanfilippo: egg yolks, chicken skin, chicken broth, fish, fish roe, all sorts of good stuff. And omega-6 is a natural part of the diet. It's just not when you're eating a diet full of industrial seed oils and processed foods and things like that. So I kind of default to Dr. Harris's thing about eliminate those industrial agents of disease: the omega-6 seed oils, and you're pretty much good to go.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Yeah, I think this is kind of an interesting topic too because beyond even we talk about it a lot, eliminating seed oils, which as people are confused about what we mean by seed oils. My post-it's called “Fats: Which to Eat and Which to Ditch,” you can get a lot more information on like what we're talking about there with seed oils, mostly canola, corn, soybean oil are like the biggest ones. Grapeseed is better, but it kind of goes on.

Besides those oils just not being ideal to eat at all, I think the biggest problem, you know, when people do get hung up and start to nitpick over whole foods is that most people who are consuming those oils, they're not putting it over a salad cold, they're heating them or eating them fried, even if it's not in their house for the most part, it's restaurant food that's being deep fried in these oils, and it's not just the oil, it's the fact that it's already damaged. So it's like, you know, people get their heads so deep into the skein that they forget to pull it out and pick their head up and look around, and like wait, what was I even talking about here? You know, it's like, the whole point was stop eating processed, refined foods that are fried in seed oils that are so damaged that now, you know, those are promoting inflammation in our body and it's not even the natural form of a pro-inflammatory that might be okay to eat, you know? It was like something that Mother Nature never intended. You know, it came through a factory and was so highly processed before it was put in our hand in this bottle and then we're deep frying garbage in it. You know, so it's like people get so far removed and they start to demonize like you said, chicken skin. And it's like, okay, calm down. You know?

I just think it's kind of funny that that happens, but I also actually think when we do look at what we keep thinking you know are ideal levels of omega-3 to 6 for us to consume, I do think people need to calm down a little bit trying to reach that one to ten ratio, of one unit of-oh, sorry-one to one or one to two ratio. One unit of omega-3 to one of omega-6, or even one of 3 to two of 6, I think it's really hard to hit that, even modern diet. If we entered either of our diets, I'm sure they would still come up much higher than that, even if you eat any avocado, if you eat any olive oil, if you eat any poultry, if you eat any pork at all, those levels will get pushed around. So I just don't personally sweat it too much, but I think people get really kind of spun out on that. And enter your day's worth of meals into NutritionData.com and you know, see what happens and then calm down. You know, like, you're going to be okay. We're eating whole food and that's really the point. I think that's-I love that about Chris Masterjohn, too. He's like, hold on everybody, you know, like…

LIZ WOLFE:Right.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: All that freaking out about, you know, isolating a nutrient. And whenever we do that, we forget that it acts differently in food, too, than it does injected in the body. So it's a totally different ballgame.

LIZ WOLFE:[laughs]

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Right? Well, I think..so I think…so the next question is totally related, which is why we put it in here because, you know, we obviously have just spoken a lot about omega-3 and omega-6, specifically inflammation and kind of all that, but let's kind of answer that next question and just get into it more from the food perspective, too.

LIZ WOLFE:Yeah, let's do it. Okay, Kim says: “Hiya Diane and Liz! First of all, I must give a big congratulations and thank you on the podcast!” Awww, that's so nice. “I love throwing it into my routine. Listening to all these Paleo pods helps me stay motivated and on track. I also appreciate your down to earth and ‘layman’s' answers. I love listen to Robb, but sometimes it goes over my head.” I mean, Robb is just so damn smart, it goes over my head, too.

“Okay, here is my question. I have dabbled in Paleo for over a year, but about 3 months ago, I made the commitment to make the lifestyle change. I am feeling great and have lost about 15lbs. But recently I am hearing to limit pork and chicken consumption. This makes me sad. Chicken…

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Awww.

LIZ WOLFE:I know. Awww. ” Chicken and recently pork have become a staple in my diet. One, because I cook up for the week on Sunday and it doesn’t dry out in the microwave; and two, I just love chicken. How much should I concern myself with this? What does it mean to limit and how many times per week? For example, last week I ate a 5lb chicken and a 2.5lb pork loin. Too much?” I don't think so.

“Keep on keeping on! I love the info. And Diane, the east coast is happy to have you back! You may regret this decision come winter. I lived in Santa Barbara (for college) and regret the move back every year during the first snow fall. Thank you!” Okay.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Okay.

LIZ WOLFE:Okay, yeah, do you want me to jump in?

DIANE SANFILIPPO: So, well…

LIZ WOLFE:Let me jump in and I'll read my thing.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Oh, yeah, I'll just give you a couple of notes that I have because we were just talking about this and you know, I just want to say, like okay, you know, we definitely…I think you and I have the same perspective on this, like let's not freak out about it, whatever. But I think we do get to a point where we've eliminated bad foods and we're trying to optimize good food, right? So we're like okay, we're not eating rancid seed oils, but now we're eating good quality meat. And so how do we kind of make the best of that, and so I think her question does have a good point, and I think the reason she had been hearing to limit poultry and pork was this omega-6 issue. So I don't think she brought that up but I think that's kind of the reason.

You know, that's what I think the recommendations are based. My point of view is also inclusive of the fact that I actually think pastured chicken or ideally raised chicken and pork is harder to find than grass-fed pastured beef, but that might not be the case for everyone. You know, you may live next to a chicken farm, I don't know where you live. Yeah, I don't know what you have around you. It may be really easy for you to find and that's local and sustainable and you want to do that, cool. I don't really think it's a big deal. I think…you know, I think that's kind of where the recommendations are coming from though, and I think also the idea of just larger ruminant animals being something that may have been, you know, more Paleo-friendly. We would not have had chickens. They're probably sort of quasi-agriculturally equivalent in terms of meat. You know, like we started to cultivate and grow chickens in larger quantities probably when we had a homestead and a farm and we kind of sat still for awhile until we started to grow crops.

So does that mean that chickens are unhealthy for us? No, I don't really think so, but I don't tend to rely on chicken or even pork, even though I eat bacon, you know, not daily, but fairly regularly. I don't rely on either of those personally for my main sources of protein, partially because I think I just got tired of chicken, you know, for 25 years it's probably almost all my mom made a couple of times a week other things, so that's part of it or me, but I do think, you know, that finding good sources of grass-fed ruminants is a good idea. Ruminants being like beef, bison, lamb, animals that eat grass and other sorts of shrubbery growing that can kind of break down that stuff and have probably a more favorable omega-3 to omega-6 ratio. And again, like the only reason we get a little nerdy about that is that we know we're getting tons of omega-6 elsewhere in our diet. We're just trying to optimize at that point.

As far as much food as you eat, I mean, I probably eat a pound of meat a day, so it doesn't sound like too much. [laughs] A five pound chicken? I'm sure I could crush a five pound chicken in a day if I wanted to, I mean, realistically, I can really eat, so that doesn't sound like much to me. Like really, not an issue. You know, if she is curious about the omega-6 content in different meats, I'll link her to a couple of things over on PaleoZone nutrition. It's Julianne…shoot, what's her last name? I forget her last name…She's a Paleo Zone nutritionist, but not super, I don't think she's super geeked out on Zone currently, but she has some nice posts on the omega-3 content, the omega-6 content in different foods, and EatWild.com has a lot of information on health benefits of, you know, grass-fed pastured, specifically beef I think in that post, but interesting to note. Also, you know, if you're not getting red meat, you may just want to look out for where you're getting your sources of iron. You can get iron from things like leafy greens, spinach, I think, specifically, but it's what called non-heme iron, so it's a plant source of iron, which is different from heme iron in a way that works in your body. You probably will feel, you know, some experience of I don't know, it's probably you may not feel as much energy if you're not getting enough iron. It just really depends on a lot of other factors, too. But anyway, that's another kind of road to go down, but…ahh, what else do you have for her on this whole chicken and pork overload potential?

LIZ WOLFE:Okay well, I wanted to go on like a tangent for sure. And get into..

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Oh, I like them.

LIZ WOLFE:teasing it over and over…what?

DIANE SANFILIPPO: I like tangents.

LIZ WOLFE:I love tangents. So we keep teasing this article in the Weston A. Price Foundation journal about pork preparation, and so really I think a good rule of thumb just overall when you're eating chicken or you're eating pork, is to focus on getting them from good sources, number one. Just because just from a humane standpoint, you know, just as much as beef, but especially with pork and chicken, like you want these things to be fed what they need to be fed. What is biologically appropriate and not just convenient for Tyson chicken. I would definitely say never ever buy Tyson chicken because I've gone on a float trip down the river near the Tyson chicken plant, and I grew several extra digits and my hair turned green, so just avoid that at all costs.
But so this article in the Weston A. Price journal, basically they did their own study where they looked at the effects on live blood and consuming these different types of pork. So they looked at cured salted cooked pork, which would be like bacon, ham, the traditional way of preparing pork, which we look at, you know, commonly as a bad thing. You know, bacon, ham, that type of stuff. We generally…

DIANE SANFILIPPO: “We” not inclusive of me. [laughs]

LIZ WOLFE:Yes. We not inclusive of me, who I probably eat about a pound of bacon a day and I'm good with that. And I'm happier than I've ever been, so, you know, if that's not elite, then I don't know what is.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: [laughs] Go ahead. Sorry.

LIZ WOLFE:So basically…so this kind of goes back to looking at the way traditional people kind of did things, and just kind of defaulting to this ancient wisdom, so overall, what they looked at was pastured pork, and they looked at pastured pork that had been cured and cooked, and pastured pork that had not been cured and cooked, and basically they looked at blood clotting, like the platelet aggregation after eating these different types of pork, and what they found was actually there were no changes in the blood that they could see with the marinated, cured, cooked pork. Like bacon, prosciutto, that type of thing. So basically as to summarize, like bacon and cured pork is probably the best way to go from a like choice by choice basis. Like it actually appear to not cause this effect of platelet aggregation that other types of pork do, and this kind of goes back to the idea that may be potentially be something about pork protein that is irritating to humans, I don't know. You know, I don't know a whole lot about the history of that, but there is some suggestion that that's the reason for certain religious kind of institutional bans on eating pork and stuff like that. But the idea is bacon is good for you. So there you go.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: [laughs] Awesome. Are we able to link people to that? Or do you have it as a kind of rights protected thing?

LIZ WOLFE:I believe that eventually all of the articles from the Weston A. Price Foundation journal do appear on their website: westonaprice.org. But to join, it's like $40 and you get like 4 of these incredible journals with these really cool self-satisfying Bacon is Good For You type of stories, so…yeah, I would recommend just joining the foundation and you get them delivered right to your house, but you can look for them on their website, and Chris Masterjohn is-he actually started out as a Weston A. Price guy. He's kind of a Paleo darling right now as well, but he started out with the Weston A. Price Foundation, and he contributes regularly to their publication. So good stuff going on over there.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Cool. Awesome. Should we…

LIZ WOLFE:So bacon rocks.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Yeah, I know. I'm like, uh, yeah. I don't really have more. I already wrote my post on that.

LIZ WOLFE:Yeah, I don't [xxx 1:02:19-20] [laughs]

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Should we maybe hit one more question? I think it's a short one from Ben and then I think that will wrap us up.

LIZ WOLFE:Yeah, let's do it. Okay, Ben from Scottsdale asks: “Hey Diane, my MovNat buddy, and Liz! I’ve been curious about something. What do you think of eating mostly animal products? Do you think we can get all the nutritional requirements we need? I’m thinking about trying this experiment. I may have an occasional bowl of mixed berries with coconut milk or dark chocolate as a treat. But mainly sticking to animal products. Would I be missing something if I didn’t eat many veggies? Thanks!” And he kind of describes his meals basically: eggs, bacon, kraut, sometimes berries and coconut milk. Green salad with salmon, tuna, or sardines. Beef, veggies, good stuff. Coconut based treat, high intensity training. Good stuff. Fermented cod liver oil. Awesome.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Cool. So you know, I don't know. My kind of take on this is that I think we can probably get most of what we need from animal foods. I think it's really hard to assess the micronutrient status of every person. We kind of all have a different constitution and I'll kind of say that word and people don't really know what I'm talking about, you know. I think of your constitution as like how were fed and watered for your first, you know, five, ten, twenty years of your life even. If you think about the constitution of our grandparents and even older than them, you know, they had a really good foundation and so, you know, the last 30 years of really poor nutrition maybe has not affected them as deeply, whereas our constitution, I think, you know, again, a lot of us maybe weren't breastfed, were fed formula and maybe were and that was a lot, largely by choice, you know…our moms…that fell out of vogue to breastfeed for awhile and you know, even soy formula, so things like that. We just don't know what each of our sort of individual micronutrient status is. We don't know what our reserves are. I don't know, you know, where you're living and what your environment's like. How toxic your environment is, and so kind of at the end of the day, what I'm trying to say is, we don't know how much antioxidant content in your food would be useful to you, or not that necessary. Just for different sort of detoxification processes, just basic function of your system. I don't think you'll have any major problems for quite some time eating that way, I mean. Not to again bust on something vegetarian or vegan, but like a lot of people don't experience micronutrient deficiency problems for at least 5 if not 7 years.

LIZ WOLFE:Oh wow.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: So if you were to experience some kind of deficiency, you know, on an all-animal based diet, it would probably take awhile. That said, you know, there are probably a handful of nutrients that you can't get in high, high quantities from animal products. I don't know how ample vitamin C is in animal products. I'm just not sure.

LIZ WOLFE:You'd have to eat the adrenal glands to get vitamin C probably from most animal products.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Yeah, so that's kind of a good point, too, is that's like if you're going to do an all animal product type of thing, then going more nose-to-tail might be the way that you need to go with it. Where you're eating glands, thymus, adrenal glands, you're eating liver, you're eating potentially brain. I don't know whatever else, just to get that full spectrum of nutrition. Obviously, we know there are some hunter-gatherer populations that really subsisted primarily on animal products, so sure.

And what's your heritage, too? Does your lineage come from a more plant-based vs. animal-based, you know, evolution? I don't know. I think it could really vary, and I would certainly say, if you want to try it, if you find that interesting, I think that the test is probably not clean, if you're still eating berries and coconut milk and sauerkraut, but of course I think those are great things to eat, so you know, if you want to do it, just kind of 90%, I think you could probably get…you could probably get the rest of the way with, you know, like a 90% animal product based diet, 10% plant. I don't know. I think it sounds okay. What do you think, Liz?

LIZ WOLFE:Sounds fun to me. I think you nailed it. Like eat nose-to-tail. I think you should include some broth, like literally get that marrow. Get some glands going. Eat some liver. Eat some brain. Eat some tongue. Yeah, and I think maybe adding those fermented foods because those are traditional foods as well. Like you said, if you look at traditional people, they would ferment things.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Well, yeah, you…yeah, I think this is something I heard…I heard somebody ask Robb about this at one of his seminars where they were like, What about fermented foods and hunter-gatherers? And his response was something about like in the gut of large game animal would have been some fermented vegetation that.

LIZ WOLFE:Yes.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: maybe those hunter-gatherers would have eaten, so, you know, that raw kraut could be pretty legit there, you know?

LIZ WOLFE:Yeah, totally. I mean, If we're going to do it, let's contextualize it and take it all the way. I mean, I'd actually be interested to hear back from this guy, kind of how he implements it and if he does, and how he does with it.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Yeah, yeah, so Ben, I know from the MovNat trip last summer. Actually two of my fellow MovNat buddies got mentioned in this podcast. My friend Tony with the olive oil and Ben. Both of them were on the MovNat trip with me last year, which was a lot of fun, but yeah, I think more than anything, like eating that way is just kind of boring. You know, and I think it can be a little anti-social, and you know, I had a…

LIZ WOLFE:Yeah.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Seriously, this one girl..she follows my Facebook page. Her name's Caitlin and she eats pretty much…or she was eating like zero carb at the time, and I don't know, I just tried to encourage her to get more color in, because I don't know, I was looking at the pictures of what she was posting. And I was like, ah, this looks kind of boring. You know, everything's like red brown, and she had some white and yellow from eggs, but I encouraged it from, you know, a palatability of visual effect. You know, we eat with our eyes kind of thing and you know, if you're not in it for food reward at all, then maybe palatability and the visual effect aren't so critical for you. But I do think you can get also tons of micronutrients from herbs and spices. So even if he didn't want to add tons of other vegetation, if he just adds lots of spices in the mix. He could get a lot of micronutrient quality from that, and fresh herbs, so…

LIZ WOLFE:Definitely.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: Keep us posted if you do it, Ben. I think that's good. I got to get ready for a workout.

LIZ WOLFE:Yeah, I got to go chill out, man. I feel like I was wound up into a little ball this whole time. Sorry about that.

DIANE SANFILIPPO: That's all good. We caught you off a plane and threw you down and had you record this podcast right away, so cool. Well, I think that's…yeah, that's it for now. And keep the questions coming. We've got other stuff coming up and we'll check you next time.

LIZ WOLFE:See ya.

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Cheers!
Diane & Liz