Jay
Welcome to episode 13 of the Energy Balance Podcast. I'm Jay Feldman and joining me again today is my good friend, Mike Fave. Today's episode is going to be a Q &A. We're gonna be talking about cholesterol and how we can lower our blood cholesterol levels if they're too high and whether we actually want to lower our blood cholesterol levels and whether cholesterol is really the culprit that it's made out to be in heart disease and stroke and other health concerns. And we'll also be talking about the role of carbohydrates in ancestral and tribal diets and the role that they may have played in our evolution and whether this means that we should or shouldn't be eating carbohydrates to improve our health. To check out the show notes for today's episode, head over to Jfeldmanwellness.com/podcast, where I'll be linking to any relevant articles or studies or anything else that we reference throughout today's episode.

And if you have any questions that you'd like us to go over on the next Q &A episode, send an email over to j.jfeldmanwellness.com. That's jay at jayfeldmanwellness.com. And we'll see if we can get to it on the next episode. And if you are struggling with any low energy symptoms, whether that is heart disease related, whether it is high cholesterol or any other sorts of fatigue or weight gain or gut inflammation, any other low energy related symptoms, head over to JFeldmanWellness.com/energy and sign up for a free mini course where I'll walk you through the main things that you'll want to do to support energy production and the main things that you'll want to avoid that inhibit energy production. And this will allow you to increase your cellular energy availability, which will then lead to relief from all of these different symptoms and conditions. And as I talked about through today's episode, these sorts of changes can result in pretty dramatic decreases in cholesterol levels. Just using myself as an example, my cholesterol dropped over a hundred points from implementing changes like this. So head over to Jfeldmanmoleness.com/energy to sign up for that energy balance mini course. And with that, let's get started. 

All right. So Debbie says I have high cholesterol and don't want to go on medications because I hear that cholesterol lowering drugs are not good for you. What is the best option for me? okay. So we sort of talked about

Jay
what can cause high cholesterol before. Some of those things were bacterial infection or any type of infection in general, the cholesterol is elevated as a protective response and that can cause a high triglycerides and things like that as well. The entire lipid based system of the blood gets elevated as a detoxification process against bacterial and viral and other sort of infective microbes and things like that.

Then the other thing we have is hypothyroidism. The cholesterol is basically is converted into steroid hormones by the mitochondria. So when you don't have that process going on, you can have an elevation in cholesterol. So basically like hypothyroidism or a hypometabolic state. And then besides that, like general inflammatory processes can elevate cholesterol as well. I think it's important here to note that it's not necessarily diet that causes an increase in cholesterol because the liver makes the most amount of cholesterol that is present within the bloodstream and it can adjust its creation and creation of cholesterol in general by in relation to how much is coming in from the diet. So cholesterol from the diet I don't think is like necessarily the biggest problem to worry about with that. So the implications from those things are number one, check and see if you have some type of infection going on and then address that. The next thing is to check your thyroid status and with, if your thyroid status is not doing well, then I would either use some type of supplement personally or, so yeah, would stick with like a thyroid supplement and then like addressing factors that could be causing your thyroid to become lower. Such as those, some of those things can include exposure to goitrogenic foods and compounds and drugs. Some of those are like cruciferous vegetables. Some of them are things like, I don't know, fluoride or things, different things like that. And then the last option is making sure that you're eating enough of the right foods and components to make sure that your thyroid function is working well. And I'm not sure, what was the third one I said? You're talking about inflammation, I think. inflammation in general.

Jay
So it would be avoiding inflammatory compounds that could elevate cholesterol. So some of those things could be polyunsaturated fats. Some of the other things can be heavy metals or different foods specifically that can cause inflammation like some of the not properly prepared grains, drinking a lot of alcohol, different things like that. So those are the basic three. So any type of inflammatory process, any type of infection going on.

And then anything like having a low thyroid function, which can come from the other two previous factors, or it can come from different foods in your diet or lack of foods or nutrients in your diet and things like that. So yeah, I don't know if you want to add anything to that. Yeah. Yeah. There's a few other things I want to add. So as far as thyroid function goes, what you were saying was that thyroid activity and metabolism is required to convert to convert the cholesterol to those protective steroid hormones, progesterone, prognanolone, DHEA, testosterone. And when your thyroid activity is low, then you don't have as much conversion from cholesterol to those hormones. So that can lead to, either a buildup of cholesterol, or it can also lead to basically this kind of feedback systems to increase cholesterol levels to kind of drive that conversion even further because you have lower thyroid activity. So yeah, that that's important. The other thing too, you mentioned, that diet doesn't affect it. And yeah, you were referring to dietary cholesterol not affecting cholesterol levels, which is, I would say is true. But diet of course does affect cholesterol levels considerably. So for example, for me, when I was on a low carb diet, my cholesterol was, I think around 270 to 280, it was like 275 or so and dropped about a hundred points when I basically shifted my diet, increased carbs a lot and shifted towards what we're doing now.

Yeah, mean, carbohydrates, because of how they affect our thyroid status or metabolism, kind of synonymous, our thyroid status is basically just representative of where our metabolism is at. So yeah, I mean, because carbs increase that so much and reducing polyunsaturated fats helps and all of these other things that we've talked about, eating a lot of food or eating enough food, as you mentioned, those are all going to increase our metabolism, increase thyroid and drop cholesterol down. that would the, for like, just to simplify it and basically, because I think between the both of us, we were like, we get, I know I get ahead of myself, but, and then for you just to basically clarify it perfectly, cholesterol from the foods in your diet don't necessarily directly affect blood cholesterol levels. However, dietary factors such as polyunsaturated fats or not having enough carbs in your diet to provide for adequate thyroid function.

Can cause raises in cholesterol levels overall by affecting either conversion of that cholesterol into protective steroid hormones at the cellular level or by having affecting processes at the liver to increase cholesterol production overall. the, and with that said, the main regulator to a large extent of the amount of cholesterol that's produced is the liver. And then the main regulator of the amount of cholesterol that is converted
into steroid hormones is that's at the cellular level at the mitochondria. So you have a few like you have a chain of factors that can affect that process where you have the liver produces the cholesterol and at the cells the cholesterol is converted into steroid hormones and there's other functions of cholesterol besides just conversion to steroid hormones and but those that's like the general pathway so you see a streaming of the cholesterol being produced from the liver to going to the cells to be turned into steroid hormones and having other functions in the cell as well. Now diet affects this by affecting the, not necessarily by the total cholesterol in the diet or the cholesterol in the diet, but different factors of the diet affecting those processes. So diet does affect cholesterol, but it's not the dietary cholesterol that is affecting the cholesterol per se. Right. Yeah. there's some of the more like the larger well-known studies, like the Framingham study, for example, looked at that in huge numbers of people, thousands of people over 50 to 100 years. I think that study has been going on and is still going on for a while and has found that yeah, dietary cholesterol does not affect cholesterol levels, blood cholesterol levels. And that's because as you were saying.

Jay
Our liver produces a lot of cholesterol, so if you're not getting as much from your diet, your liver will produce it to make up for that fact because cholesterol is so important as a nutrient. And then what affects cholesterol in the blood has more to do with, again, those dynamics in the liver that either take up the cholesterol or keep it out in the blood, which is affected by metabolism and whether we have an infection because cholesterol is important as an immune, as a part of our immune system, so it's increased when we have an infection and things like that. So...

Yeah, addressing any infection, you know, looking at gut function, using antimicrobials or, making sure you're not eating things that are, you know, contributing to any sort of gut dysbiosis, eating the foods that will help to raise your metabolism, keeping inflammation down, keeping stress down. Those would be, I would say, the biggest things. The other thing that I want to point out that goes with this entire paradigm. So a lot of people worry about their high cholesterol in relationship to heart disease and stroke and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's not necessarily the cholesterol itself. Cause, a lot of people look at this. So, and I think we'll come to this at another point in some of these questions where you have an indicator like high LDL or high total cholesterol, something like that. And they're using that sort of as a proxy for, or a marker for some type of disease like heart disease or It's usually some degree of heart disease. So basically it's not necessarily your HDL or your LDL that is causing heart disease. And there are studies that basically look at this. The HDL and the LDL are protein carriers within the bloodstream that carry the cholesterol or lipids around the bloodstream. They're packaged with these carriers. And so what's more important isn't necessarily the total number of those carriers in relation to heart disease.

What are those carriers housing? So you can have people who have very low cholesterol using cholesterol blocking drugs like statins and they still develop heart disease. So the reason this can occur is number one is if the cholesterol is elevated for reasons such as hypothyroidism or inflammation or infection, the infectious components or the inflammatory components can lead to heart disease.

Jay
The other thing is if their cholesterol is saturated with polyunsaturated fats or damaged polyunsaturated fats, then it's not that the HDL and LDL is intrinsically toxic. It's that those carrier proteins are carrying around toxic lipids. And so these toxic lipids actually damage the vasculature themselves. they find in, and I think I'm remembering this correctly, but they find that in people with heart disease, they have a higher amount of linoleic acid in their LDL particles and it's oxidized. They call it oxidized cholesterol. linoleic acid is a polyunsaturated fat. is omega-6. It is one of the main polyunsaturated fats. And so what they find is that they have a high amount of, these people have a high amount of oxidized cholesterol, specifically LDL, with a high amount of linoleic acid, damaged linoleic acid within that carrier molecule.

That's partly what's causing the damage to the vasculature. So then the other thing that comes into play here is that there's a hypothesis put forward by Dr. Linus Pauling and then Dr. Mathias Rath. I think that's how you pronounce his first name at least. And basically what happens is in an absence of adequate vitamin C consumption, you basically find that the human body is unable to produce adequate amounts of collagen. so these, collagen that's the vitamin C is a cofactor for the enzymes that produce collagen. And it goes with different amino acids, proline, glycine, and I think it's lysine. I forget the third one. I'm pretty sure proline and glycine. And then there's another one. And then basically when you have vitamin C, these amino acids and copper and the specific enzyme, you're able to produce collagen. Now a lot of humans now have deficiencies in vitamin C and that deficiency in vitamin C makes it very difficult to repair damaged vasculature, damaged tissues that require collagen. So when you sort of develop this perfect storm where if you have an infection and even before having an infection, if you have a high amount of polyunsaturated fats in your diet, and you saturate the cholesterol with these polyunsaturated fats, which we already have talked about are very likely to oxidize. Then when they're floating around the bloodstream, they are causing damage. They are directly causing damage to the vasculature. And if you combine that with a deficiency of ascorbic acid, which is vitamin C, then you're unable to properly repair that damage. And so part of Dr. Linus Pauling and Matthias Rath's theory was that cholesterol served as sort of a It's almost like if you have a hole in your wall, you plaster that hole over. The cholesterol served as sort of like a plaster to repair that damage. So it gets deposited in the damaged areas of the vasculature. And so this is why their explanation for why most of the damage that you see in the vasculature is around the high pressure areas of the heart is because those areas take, they have the highest amount of pressure. are the most likely areas to break down.

It's why you don't see a lot of plaques present in veins. It's mostly in arteries, which are higher pressure structures, and they're mostly closer to the heart. And so basically what happens is the cholesterol gets deposited as sort of a plaster for those damaged areas, but it only gets worse if that cholesterol is saturated with polyunsaturated fats, because now you have further damage. So if you add an infection to this process, or basically large amounts of influx of endotoxin into the bloodstream, then you're also going to have an elevated cholesterol because the cholesterol is elevating to detoxify that endotoxin. So you have this sort of perfect storm of polyunsaturated fat, loaded cholesterol, a deficiency in an ability to heal the vasculature. And then you have an element like endotoxin, which causes damage in and of itself, but also elevates cholesterol to high levels as a detoxifying measure. And then all of sudden you have massive amounts of heart disease.

With a lot of this said, the importance from what we talked about is, yes, you want to have your thyroid function optimal. And then the other thing to talk about is that, again, yes, your thyroid levels aren't great, but what is causing those thyroid levels to basically not do well? Do you have something inhibiting your functioning in your diet? Like I told you, talks about goitrogen, like cruciferous vegetables, where they inhibit the ability of the body to fix iodine into the thyroid hormones. They inhibit iodine uptake and things like that.

Jay
Or are you not providing adequate carbohydrate so your body isn't producing thyroid hormone because that's like the thyroid hormones function is in amplifying or producing or signaling oxidative metabolism and without enough carbohydrate that sort of takes a backseat to the beta oxidation or the burning of fatty acids. So you have to look at a lot of these underlying factors and then or do you have an infection going on and that's causing your cholesterol to be elevated.

So you have that. So it's not just like a one piece of the picture, okay, your cholesterol is elevated, take your statin, we'll lower it, and then your risk will be decreased. That's not necessarily what happens. That's not even necessarily what happens. That doesn't happen. That's not what happens. I see people all the time in the hospital that are on statins and their cholesterol is on the lower side and they still have problems. And then when you look in the literature, when you lower cholesterol to the extent that they want you to lower it, It actually increases mortality. actually increases cancer. It actually increases risk of infection. It doesn't do well for these patients that are having heart disease, that are having diabetes, that are having kidney failure and things like that. It doesn't help them. The cholesterol has a protective effect. And especially if it's not saturated with polyunsaturated fats, it's very protective. So there's a few pieces to the picture here that are important to address and to fix.

And that's to make sure that you're not taking in polyunsaturated fats. That's to make sure that your diet's in place. It's to look at your thyroid hormone function from your thyroid and see, okay, well, what's going on and what could be causing it to be decreased. It's to look and make sure that you don't have any type of infection going on. It's to make sure that you don't have any massive inflammatory processes going on. And part of that is making sure you limit the polyunsaturated fatty acids. So there's a whole picture here.

Just looking at, your cholesterol is elevated, okay, have heart disease, okay, take a statin, and then you'll be fine. No, that's not how it works, and it's obviously not how it works because the heart disease numbers aren't dropping, they're only increasing. And the cancer in the country is only increasing. So when you start looking at this type of stuff, there's a huge process in place. But the thing is, it doesn't need such a complex structure. It's what's the right way to eat? How do you take care of yourself? It all comes basically down to that.

Jay
And I mean, so those are some of the ways that I would rectify the situation. It's not necessarily, it's definitely not medical advice, just opinion. And those are some of the theories behind, you know, what's, what's going on in the vasculature, what's causing the elevated cholesterol, what's causing heart disease, things like that. A couple of things to clarify. One is, is you had mentioned the polyunsaturated fat saturate, the, cholesterol that is loaded with polyunsaturated fats and referring to the cholesterol carriers there. So LDL that has high amounts of polyunsaturated fats, for example, it's not the cholesterol itself. Just to clarify. the polyunsaturated fat can oxidize the cholesterol because there is cholesterol bound within the LDL carrier. Right. Yeah. Can oxidize the cholesterol. So even if you had a properly formed functioning cholesterol molecule, if it's surrounded by linoleic acid, it will oxidize that cholesterol.

Right, which is definitely a problem and the, you know, when looking at plaque and heart disease, people talk about the LDL cholesterol being there and that that's why it's the problem. But what's actually there is LDL, but it's LDL that contains the oxidized polyunsaturated fats, which suggests that it's not the cholesterol itself that's a problem, it's not the LDL itself. It's the oxidized polyunsaturated fats in the LDL that causes it to be an issue as opposed to an effective repair mechanism. Yeah.

You're also talking about how lowering cholesterol isn't all that helpful. yeah, again, the long-term studies have found that about half of the heart attacks that occur happen to people without high cholesterol. So again, just the kind of idea that high cholesterol is directly what leads to these heart attacks just doesn't seem to be playing out. So the other thing, there's other things in the studies that they show that basically when you take statins, lower your they'll lower your, your like the events that happen from your cardiovascular events, but your total mortality doesn't decrease. So yeah, you don't have a heart attack or a stroke, but you maybe you'll get cancer. Maybe, I don't know, maybe you'll get an infection that'll kill you. It's not solving the problem. It's just adjusting what's going to happen. And then they also have, there's also studies showing that people with familial hypercholesterolemia, which means that like you genetically are
your family has high cholesterol or you have a predisposition, a genetic predisposition to having a high amount of cholesterol in the bloodstream, those people don't necessarily have more cardiovascular events. It doesn't make them sicker. They just have higher cholesterol in general in the bloodstream. So when you start looking at stuff like that, it starts to basically degrade this theory, which I mean, it's already been debunked in the research. It's just mainstream and clinical practice is not caught up to that.

Because there's interest behind prescribing statins. There's interest behind the entire heart disease dynamic. It is an industry. Yeah. And we've talked about that again, like high cholesterol. This doesn't mean that high cholesterol is an ideal state. You know, as we were talking about the things that raise cholesterol are typically indicative of less than ideal function. So we're not saying like, just because the cholesterol itself isn't the problem that high cholesterol is good. And again, the levels of high cholesterol are
I don't want to lump them all into one category, but that's kind what I'm saying is that if you have very high cholesterol levels, you do want to make sure that you're doing the things that will bring them down to more of a normal level. Low cholesterol is also a problem. So lower is definitely not better. So I don't want that to be misconstrued. There's a range. There's a Goldilocks range and they find it in, they look at it in research. It's definitely not below 200, especially for older people.

I mean, for younger people, it could be below 200, that should be fine. But for like 50, 60s and above, the below 200 has not been shown to be good. like 200 to 240 is typically the range that has the lowest mortality. Somewhere somewhere in the mid 200s, from what I've read is where it's I think it's even higher than 200. I think it's like 220 to 260s from what I've seen is where it's like people have had the better health outcomes.

So yeah, so it's not that we're saying that having high cholesterol is ideal. We're just saying that it's not necessarily the cholesterol that's the problem and you want to look at the, it's literally a warning sign that high cholesterol is a symptom. It's okay, you have something going on, what's going on. Now in the case, the genetic predisposition for having super high cholesterol, that is a very rare, rare case.

Jay
That is a very small percentage of people that actually have that. So it's not incredibly high cholesterol levels. Yeah. And it's not just like, I'm 300. It's like, no, you're really high. Like they have like 400, 500. I'm pretty sure. so, and they're, that's, that's a completely different story. That's not the same as somebody who's had a, I don't know, one 60 throughout their life. And then all of a sudden they go on their zero carb carnivore diet and their cholesterol levels are sitting at 300.

And it's like, cholesterol is protective, bro. And it's like, yes, it's protective, but having it at 300 means that you have something going on. And most likely, since you're on zero carb, you probably have very poor thyroid function right now. So you're not converting your cholesterol into steroid hormones. And that's a problem. That's definitely a problem. yeah, there's nuances to it. It's not just simple high cholesterol stat and you're solved. Wash my hands of the situation.

That's not necessarily how it works. I mean, it's it's presented, but it's different story than that.

So speaking of Katie asks about evidence that native cultures or ancestral people ate a diet that included plenty of carbs since that's one of the main keto or low carb arguments. So she's just referring to the fact that people will say that carbs were not very widely available in the history of humans. So that must mean that they aren't ideal. And that really isn't necessarily accurate.

There's actually very, very few cultures that didn't have a decent amount of carbohydrates in their diets. The main one that people would look to would be the Inuits way up north. And yeah, they didn't have very much carbs. They did actually have some from the glycogen in the meat that they were eating. But other than that, pretty much every culture had some form of carbohydrates. And along with this too is, and I'll, you know, we'll kind of dive into that in a little more detail.

Jay
But another kind of argument that you'll hear a lot too is that even if something like fruit was available back in the day, it wasn't like the fruit that we have now. was nowhere near as sweet and it was much less carbohydrate dense. And there's a really good article by Denise Minjer, which looks into that idea and basically finds that that's really not the case. And the idea that all of these wild ancient fruits were, you know, very low in carbohydrates and sugar densities is not at all the case.

So yeah, those arguments kind of don't really hold true. yeah, there's also lot of, so there's a lot of evidence that these high carbohydrate components are really important for us as humans and have also kind of been an important part of our evolutionary lineage where if you look at, again, that evolution through apes, basically you have the association between intelligence and sugar consumption where the apes that eat more fruit typically have greater intelligence and that again can be attributed to that which is basically higher brain needs which our brain typically runs mostly on carbohydrates, typically runs entirely on carbohydrates. having those available is necessary for having that high level of intelligence, having that higher brain function. And another component that's been really important for that is honey, which has been shown to also be a really important part of a lot of different
tribal cultures and also different apes as well.

Well, think it's important to point out that the amount of carbohydrate you're going to have in your diet to some extent depends on how far north you go. When you look at the Inuits, the summer years for the Inuit population, they don't really have a lot of summer months for a lot of vegetation to grow to produce a lot of carbohydrates. When you look at the diets that a lot of them were eating, you see that.

Well, there's a few things to point out here. The Inuit populations, when they killed their meat, they did have meat that they would ferment. I think it was called muktuk, which was like fermented seal or something like that. But a lot of the meat that they killed and ate was fresh. They would eat it fresh right there, and so the glycogen was still intact. So there was still a degree of carbohydrate in the diet. And then I think I remember reading at one point that the Inuit populations, at least some of them, would actually
spend a decent amount of time sourcing mussels and different shellfish because the mussels and different shellfish were actually a rich source of different carbohydrates. So they would go out of their way to actually get these foods. They were eating a lot of fresh meat, which did contain glycogen, not the aged stuff that sits on the shelf for extended periods of time that we have now. Just to clarify there, as you age the meat, the glycogen breaks down. And so the fresher the meat is, the more
glycogen is already in, know, our muscles all store glycogen as a fuel source. So the fresher the meat, the less aged it is or the farther away, you know, the longer it sits there, the less glycogen is available. breaks down over time. Yeah, exactly. And then in the summer months, they did seek out different plant foods. there was a, and so then besides that, the second point was I'm pretty sure there's been shown to be different adaptations within the Inuit populations to be able to convert protein into carbohydrate in the liver better than some of us can. And that's probably because of the lack of the carbohydrate, I think that in general in the diet up north. But I think that this also shows the importance of carbohydrate in the diet, such that the body is increasing its ability to handle gluconeogenesis, which is the process of converting protein into carbohydrate by the liver. So the carbohydrate aspect is, I think, very important. And then the other thing, before I get into some of the other populations, but a lot of the anti-carbohydrate stuff coming out of the paleosphere and the carnivore sphere and the stuff that I see from that seems to talk about the carbohydrates as the cause of disease.

And so when you have that premise, then you start, okay, well, this population didn't eat carbs and they were fine and they didn't have this disease and they didn't have that disease. The Inuit populations were shown to actually age relatively rapidly. And it's been mentioned in some of the texts that they had a very aged appearance and that you can put that down to lack of carbohydrate in the diet to some extent. You could put that down to a bunch of different factors. Specifically, you know, they don't have a lot of access to light in the winter months and different things like that. So there's that there.

Jay
But then the other thing is, is we don't really have any evidence conclusively showing that carbohydrate in and of itself is the cause of disease. Not at all. Yeah. So there's, there's again, when we come back to the idea of markers, they have markers. Okay. You have elevated blood sugars and that you see that in diabetes, you have elevated insulin levels and things like that. And well sugar happens to cause an insulin spike. And it's, mean, I, there's not really any evidence that, that high blood sugar is what's causing diabetes. I don't think that there's any evidence. There's just an association. There's not really, and yes, just go ahead. I was just going to say like it's simply a symptom of diabetes, the high blood sugar. It's the same thing as high cholesterol. Exactly. Yeah. And, and we talked about like the whole idea that carbs are like this whole idea that carbs are the problem. We've dissected that quite a bit in the last few episodes or in some of the previous episodes.

I'll link to those and some articles as well so that we can focus more on the tribal cultures and that whole idea. So, okay. So just based on that, you have this idea that these things are causing diseases when I don't think that there's, at least from what I've read and from what I've seen, I don't see evidence of that being the case. The other thing is you have cultures around the world from different areas. You have different cultures like from Catawba or the island of Tokelu or I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right.

But different Pacific Islands, different African populations, different South American populations, different Native American populations, and different Indian populations, Asian populations, all eating varying ranges of carbohydrates. And some of from starchy sources, some of them from sugar sources, some of them lower in carbs, some of them higher. And there's a vast range of carbohydrate intake in these different groups.

And then some of the ones that have been studied specifically like Kitaba, the majority of their diet is sweet potatoes. Sweet potatoes and bananas and fruits. And I think they have like something like 20 % fat and then I think it was like 10 to 15 % protein and the rest being almost entirely carbohydrate. So that's a very high carbohydrate diet, at least by what the researchers consider. And they weren't shown to have any type of heart disease or cancer or anything like that. And they're notorious.

Jay
For being like rampant smokers. And we've dug into why we think the certain carbs or different associated foods that have carbs are associated with disease, but there's a huge range of different populations that have different intakes of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. And they seem to be thriving and doing pretty well. There's also a group of Native Americans in South America I think it's called the Yamamoto or something like that. I can't pronounce the names, they're tribe of Indians and a study came out about them and they basically have an extremely low fat diet with a lower protein diet, somewhere I think between 10 and 20 % of their calories and then the rest being carbohydrate from plantains and fruit and different roots like cassava and things like that. And they don't have any incidences of a heart disease or high blood pressure or things like that.

The other thing that a lot of people talk about, well, these populations don't live to old age. And when you looked at the data that they talked about this population, yeah, there wasn't quite as many who lived to old age, but it wasn't because they were necessarily dying of heart disease or anything earlier, or they were dying of accidents. They were dying of infections. And so yes, that does take down the population. And maybe if they got older, they would have had developed they would have developed these diseases. But the thing is, is the people who are older within those groups, they didn't develop the diseases. And a decent portion, I think it was something like once you made it to 35 or you had like an 80 or 90 % chance of making it to 50, but once you're at 50, you had a very high chance. I think it was if once you were at 50 years old, you had a very high chance of making it to 70, 80 and without any sort of disease.

You're seeing these populations thriving on different levels of intakes of carb, protein, and fat intakes across the world. And they're not necessarily showing up with these chronic diseases if they do make it to old age and when they do make it to old age. So, I mean, even beyond that, when you start looking at some of the other populations like the Okinawans or...
or different populations like that, they, again, they're living on a high amount of carbs. Their diet currently, and they do have fat in their diet and they do have protein. That is definitely true. I don't think that the diet is as low in fat and protein as some of the outlets like to make it out to be, but they are eating a decent amount of carbs. So there's a vast intake of these different foods and there's not necessarily chronic disease with all the areas where these foods are present. So now the other thing to talk about is when you do look at current industrial civilization and you start to look at disease curves, specifically chronic disease curves, and then you start to look at dietary intake, it doesn't really track with carbohydrate intake. It tracks more with polyunsaturated fat intake. So when you start to see things like that, then you like, and then you don't see any real valid evidence or valid theories proving that carbs or anything like that is causing the disease, then you start to say, okay, well.

Well, what is, and you start looking at polyunsaturated fats, say, well, the population in Kitaba, they don't eat vegetable oil. Their main fat source is coconut oil. In Okinawa, I'm pretty sure the main fat source there was lard. the pigs in the island weren't fed corn and soy per se. They were fed, I think, sweet potatoes and different foliage and things that they grew on the island.

A lot of that stuff is brand new to the corn oil and soy oil and things like that. Those are introductions. Those things weren't necessarily always present there. So then when you start to put the picture together, I don't think you see a valid picture for carbohydrate causing the issue. And then even beyond that, you have groups currently in the United States that are eating high amounts of carbs.

And even some of the populations that the carnivores and keto don't like, the plant-based vegans or like fruitarian populations, there's a portion of them, particularly fruitarians, that you don't see them getting obese eating all that fruit. I mean, most of them are deathly skinny. That can be from a different situation, but I wouldn't say that, like, I don't think that that is showing a picture of carbs per se causing the issue. I think there's, if you want to rely on the cultural narrative and the different population narrative when you start to put the picture together You don't really see a narrative for okay carbs are the problem or okay fat is the problem or okay protein is the problem I started I think you started to see that there's actually more nuances to that Yeah Yeah, and as you kind of alluded to throughout is the carb sources are definitely different from what the major card sources have been for the last You know 50 to 100 years here in the Western society, which was non-properly processed grains, which no traditional cultures ate those. If they were eating grains or any other starchy foods or any other vegetation, they were processing them through really extensive soaking and sprouting or fermenting or breaking it down in all sorts of different ways in order to make it digestible and healthy. But a lot of them went to great lengths to get their carbohydrates from those places. And that's because of how important these carbs are. And

Another population you didn't mention, which I don't remember if I mentioned earlier, the Hadza in Africa, honey is one of their main dietary components and then they also eat some fruit and some starchy tubers as well. Although I don't think they actually eat the starch components. I think they just chew them and kind of like. Yeah, part of the population. Some of the cultures do do that. Even some of the apes do that. They'll chew some of the foliage that they eat and suck the juices and then spit everything else out. Right. And yeah, and and so another thing like kind of a different perspective on this whole looking at these other tribal populations as ideal, I think there's some fallacy there as well. So obviously a lot of them are without the chronic health conditions or any of the health issues that we have in our modern society, which is already saying a lot. And then But of course, there's a lot of differences. It died is not the only one. But the other thing to consider as well is that they're all working with whatever is available in their region based on, as you were talking about, how hot or cold it is or north, you know, how, you know, what latitude they're at. Yeah, obviously the Inuits are not growing bananas. There's not banana trees up there. So there's this fallacy or this assumption that because they were doing it, that that's ideal.

Jay
And that that means that we should all be following those things when in reality those are products of circumstance. So these cultures are taking what's available and creating or choosing the best options for health, which has taken many, years to figure out. But they're still all limited by what was available. And that doesn't say anything about the state that allowed us as humans to evolve and progress and develop larger, more complex brains, which is really you know, that increased complexity is really what we're going for. I that's kind of the greatest sign of, of increased energy availability. And again, this goes back to this, this view of evolution, which is a two way street between the environment and our genetics, if you want to think of it that way. And so the, the environment obviously has this, this enormous influence and the assumption, basically we're, we're operating on these assumptions without considering the possibilities that the circumstances that allowed us as humans to have this increased intelligence, this increased brain size and complexity may have involved environments that were much warmer and potentially had higher CO2 and also therefore have had much greater fruit availability. And just because we can survive without that doesn't mean that that's ideal or that that continues us on that same progression.

That can all still be regressing us, which is basically what we're seeing in the Western civilization is that you are seeing, like you see the health degenerate and what that is going to lead to is a regression in our species in a way that we can survive with okay health with less energy availability, which is going to have to come from things like our intelligence and our, among other things. Well, you're also, seeing that directly in some, some of this, like the, the observational studies or models that they're looking at where when you compare size and skeletal differences between some the Paleolithic people and now, on average, we seem shorter. On average, we seem to have smaller bones and things like that. Then the other thing you see is even currently, you're seeing smaller birth weights. You're seeing smaller head sizes with children and babies and things like that. All of those are direct implications, at least from my point of view, of a regression of sorts.

Jay
From changes in diet and things like that, diet and lifestyle and et cetera. So go ahead, go ahead. Yeah, well, and we've even seen that in more recent history. During the medieval periods, people were shorter and had smaller head size. What's that? Much shorter. Right. that- into any of the castles in Europe, the rooms are really small. Right, right. And I'm pretty sure that all came about as the result of a mini ice age as well, or like a cooling period.

And, you know, there's a lot of, I don't want to, we won't go into all the climatology and everything, but that played a huge role in, or may at the very least have played a huge role in our development as a species and our progression and regression since that time. So you take a period where food is not, know, agriculture is greatly diminished, not that agriculture is ideal, but our food availability is greatly diminished. And you see pretty immediately this decrease in stature and all of that, which
you know, yeah, it's just good evidence for this whole idea. Yeah. The other thing that you can see, and these are, these are sort of broad associations, but when you look at different populations and like Weston Price talked about this, Weston A. Price talked about this in his book, and this is not associated with necessarily Weston A. Price Foundation. This is coming directly from his text, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, but the populations that subsisted on or had like a decent diets as far as
like the the Messiah or the neors who had a high amount of like milk present and meat present and things like that they had a larger stature and they often picked on some of the smaller surrounding tribes that were that were largely vegetarian now this they they had carbohydrate in the diet there's like they there's evidence of them and i i think it was from the knee spinger or it's either i forget who it was from talking about the the Messiah actually trading for different foods like honey and tubers. So they had this stuff available. mean, the diet was based on animal products. This isn't to say that animal products aren't a valid part of the diet. It's not to say that. It's just to say that the fact that people try and print this picture where there wasn't any carbohydrate present in the ancestral diets or that there was limited carbohydrate present in ancestral diets, this isn't necessarily true.

Jay
I think that you see carbohydrate present in a lot of these diets. mean, if you're drinking, what is it? If you're drinking a gallon of milk a day, how many grams of carbs is that right there? There has to be a decent amount, no? So if you have these populations drinking large quantities of milk and things like that, then here, let's Milk. Also, while you're looking that up, would also add that stature does not inherently, like it is not necessarily directly related with increased complexity or intelligence or anything like that.

Especially on the individual basis, but a massive change in a short period of time that can be seen across the population can signify reduced energy availability. that's, yeah, I just want to make that clarification. Yeah. And so same thing with the Masai too, just because their stature was greater, they were much taller, doesn't mean that that was ideal either, but it's so important to consider. It's about 175 grams of carbs. And a gallon of milk. And a gallon of milk. And that's, I mean, that's kind of also just based on some standardized gallons which obviously it differs a lot between animal species that you're getting the milk from and what they're eating and all of that. Yeah. I think the overall point is that there's been carbohydrate consumption across different cultures. I think the important point to point out though is in a lot of like what that source of carbohydrates was. And I think when you start looking at what's the difference in the source of carbohydrates and also the sources of fats, you start to come to see that it's not really pinning it down to macronutrient.

And then again, the idea of one gram of protein or the idea of a protein or a fat or a carb, it's a categorization of an element of food, but there's much more to it than just like, there's a vast difference between starch and sugar. But then even within that, even within starches, there's a vast difference between getting your starch from sweet potatoes or potatoes than there is from getting your starch from corn or wheat or I don't know, Walmart cookies. Like there's, there's much more to the picture than just having these, these random macronutrients. So I think like putting things in terms of like trying to manipulate the language around something and putting it into a term of, okay, it's either fat or sugar. It only, creates this element where your mind only sees the two options as fat or sugar. And I think that the picture is way more nuanced than just fat or sugar. I think it, or, protein or things like that. When you look at all these things and yes, we use science and we have all these different qualifications or quantifications of things, but when you compare soy protein to beef, can you just purely compare them on protein? Not really. Not at all. There's a study that I saw in rats where they looked at giving them equivalent amounts of whey protein versus, I want to say it was soy protein, no, was whey protein versus gluten using gluten protein. And there was major differences in the effects in like how much of it was actually used in the muscle and how much of it was stored as fat, where obviously the whey protein was much better than the gluten protein. Yeah. mean, besides that you have the different proteins have different digestibility. They have different amino acids present.

When they're broken down, form different peptides and digestion, and they also have different nutrients coming along for the ride with them. And then you have different interactions with different people and their immune system with different proteins. Like there's a lot more going on than just, okay, protein or carbs or fat or sugar in general. I'm going to be hard pressed for somebody. this is why I think the, I'm just going to say it blatantly, that if it fits your macros movement is complete garbage. doesn't make any sense at all.

But when you like, it's going to be hard pressed for somebody to try and come up with some sort of explanation saying that refined granulated sucrose is exactly the same or has the same effects as drinking a glass of pineapple juice. I would, I, I don't think you, could do studies on it and you would show a different effect and they show different effects and studies of that. There are different effects of giving fruit juice versus giving sucrose and the effects on liver and stuff like that. There's studies showing protective effects of fruit juice against a variety of different issues. Some of them include fatty liver. I mean, the ones that I'm speaking of specifically, I think were in rats, but still, there's still, there is, I think, vast, different effect. I think getting caught up in these definitions and these categorizations and these ways of thinking that are abstractions from reality, I don't think help the situation. mean, when you break it down into its base elements, like the underlying pinnings behind a lot of the keto, low carb and this and that is based on this sort of weird, this sort of weird categorization and manipulation of the definitions of foods into macronutrient categories. I'm not saying that it's not helpful to have those categories because the quantifications of the different foods is helpful, especially when you're trying to construct diets or give people recommendations for different things.

It's very helpful but when you when you try and think of that as like causative elements you start to you start and you don't realize the abstractions that they are you start to get into issues same thing with calories so you have to really put the terms that people are using and the definitions of things into context because there's a wordplay that goes along with a lot of this stuff that it's now you're you're purely thinking in terms of the word and the concept that the word represents and you're not understanding the basis of where that's coming from and what its actual use is for. So I think it's really important that that is kept in mind when you start to look at low carb versus high carb and this and that there's way more like when you call somebody a vegan, they can be a vegan eating entire grain based diet or they can be a vegan eating an entire fruit based diet. I think you'll find very different effects on those two diets and that has nothing to do with the amount of carbs that they're eating per se.

Probably has a lot more to do with the different physiologic effects of the foods that they're ingesting. And so just breaking it down into these groups and categories and people fighting over them makes zero sense. then like holding on to an ideology about some sort of, the some sort of definitional term also doesn't make sense. I'm low carb. That can mean a million different things. Yeah, well, and not to mention like, yeah, there's a lot of problems that come when you associate yourself with any sort of group like that or identify with the way that you eat. It leads to a lack of objectivity, you could say, to be gentle. Yeah, I I think it's hard to follow your own guidance and what's going on with you yourself.

Jay
when you attach your ego or your identity to some sort of, some sort of like definitional term, like low carb, it's kind of hard to sit there and say, well, well, I'm low carb, but you know, when I drink juice, I feel great. It's like, well, those things then you have, it's more of like a psychological issue now because you have cognitive dissonance where it's like, well, I feel great on juice, but I'm low carb.

And that goes against my identity. So then you have to rectify your identity of low carb with what your actual experience is. And I think people will tend to just, we'll just say, rationalize that the juice is this or the juice is that. And then you find these weird, these weird ideas coming out where it's just like, I was feeling good. Cause juice is addicting and sugar is worse than cocaine and all this type of stuff. You start to get these ideas and these abstractions and rather than sort of relying to an extent on how you feel and what's going on for you and sort of questioning your situation. It's not, well, why do I like the juice? Like what's it doing for me? Why do I feel good when I drink it? The question is more, well, I'm low carb so I can't like it at all. So there has to be some reason why it's wrong or he has a frame behind it. Yeah. That sort of identity leads to kind of a closed mindedness in a way or, or you, I mean, you can only see things through, through that perspective. obviously that prevents progress. Yeah. And it's dangerous. Yeah. I would also add to as far as how, you know, you, we talked a little bit about, using how you feel as an indicator for, and using our experience as like a valuable input. And it is, we also have to consider that how you feel is not necessarily like it can be representative of different physiological states. You know, if you have very high stress hormones, you can feel like you have a lot of energy and you can also feel like you have a lot of energy with very low stress hormones.

So it's important to use your experience in conjunction with continuing to try to understand the physiology and what's going on in order to come up with the best, in order to best guide your experimentation. That's going to wrap up today's episode. If you did enjoy it, please leave a review or a like or a comment wherever you're listening. It really does a lot to help support the podcast. And if you have any questions that you'd like us to answer on the next Q &A episode, send an email over to j at jfeldmanwellness.com. That's jay at jayfeldmanwellness.com. To check out the show notes for today's episode, head over to jfeldmanwellness.com slash podcast where you can take a look at any of the links to articles or studies or anything else that we referenced throughout today's episode. And if you're dealing with any low energy symptoms, we had talked a little bit about high cholesterol today, which is a pretty common symptom.

But if you're dealing with any other low energy symptoms, whether that's high blood pressure or high blood sugar or fatigue or weight gain or gut inflammation, head over to Jfeldmanwellness.com/energy and sign up for a free energy balance mini course where I'll walk you through the main things that you'll want to do to support energy production and the things that you want to avoid that inhibit that process. And I'll also explain why this is so important for reducing any of these symptoms and how energy relates to our health. So to sign up for that energy balance mini course, head over to jfeldmanwellness.com/energy, and I will see you in the next episode.