Make your health an act of rebellion and join the community here.
Please Subscribe and Review: Apple Podcasts | RSS
This episode is sponsored by Elemental Labs and their electrolyte drink mix LMNT Recharge.
Download a copy of the transcript here (PDF)
Watch the podcast video here
Show Notes:
News topic du jour
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/schools-in-meat-loving-rural-brazil-went-vegan-the-community-revolted/2019/11/03/0ab77928-ec56-11e9-9306-47cb0324fd44_story.html
Schools in meat-loving rural Brazil went vegan. The community revolted.
1. Calcium [14:05]
Erica says
Hi Robb!
I first want to say thank you so much for the wealth of knowledge you share. Your book,The Paleo Solution, helped me get off Enbrel which I was taking for 13 years for Rheumatoid Arthritis. I’ve been medication and symptom free for a year just by following a Paleo/keto diet and I don’t ever plan on going back to my old life of processed foods, joint pain, and weekly injections of Enbrel. However, I am concerned about my calcium intake. Dairy and beans flare up my arthritis symptoms and I don’t digest leafy greens well at all. I know sardines are a good source of calcium, but I just can’t stomach them. 🤢 (Seriously, my husband is not even allowed to kiss me after he has eaten sardines )Do you have any suggestions of ways I can get calcium in my diet? I’ve heard bone meal is a good source but I don’t know exactly how to add that to my diet in an appealing way and I’m not finding much on the internet. Thank you so much for your time!
2. Coconut/Avocado Oil Potato Chips [17:18]
Gordon says:
You have mentioned Potato chips made with avocado/coconut oil but never really gave a thumbs up or down as too if these chips are ok to have ( for me everyday, i have a hard time with anything besides meat and rice). Am i plowing too many calories/carbs down? Any thoughts?
56 yr old male….workout 2/3 times a week …physical job but recently put on weight in my midsection …i eat about 4/5 bags a week…
All around good guy and overworked father
3. Booze, Keto and Gut Health [20:21]
Matt says:
Any chance you can devote some time on the show to discuss alcohol? I am amazed at how little information is available as to it’s effect on keto, weight loss, and muscle gain.
Here’s an example. My wife and I split a bottle of wine every night, start it with dinner and finish it off in the next few hours. The effect of this on sleep is a whole different topic 🙂 …. what is the wine doing to my ketogenic state and ability to lose weight? Is the outcome different if it’s two shots of tequila? The wine we drink is always dry (no residual sugar present)
Last question. I’m a wine-maker and have always wondered about the effect of the preservative that I use in wine. Sulfur Dioxide (SO2) is added to wine immediately after fermentation is complete. I continually maintain a ratio of 100-150ppm (legal limit is 350ppm) until bottling to prevent bad stuff from growing. I was trained that “the SO2 doesn’t kill the yeast and microbes, just prevents them from growing”. What effect does the SO2 have on my gut bacteria?
n=1; I haven’t noticed any difference in my gut/intestines/stool when drinking wine or abstaining.
Also, hard alcohol doesn’t have preservatives in it, because almost nothing grows in that much alcohol.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4880594/ (cardio/mito toxicant….but in VITRO)
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/12/171218090930.htm (food preservative in general…microbiome changed…then went back!)
Thanks for everything… your teaching’s have had a positive impact on me that is life-changing!
Also…. +1 vote to bring back The Controversial Truth
4. Pumpkin Seed Oil [26:54]
Bill says:
On a recent hiking trip to Slovenia, beautiful, beautiful country – btw, we were introduced to pumpkin seed oil. It is big in the region and also in Austria, It is sometimes toasted, sometimes not and has a wonderful “nutty” flavor. We used it on green salads. Our usual salad dressing is 1/3 MCT oil mixed with 2/3 rds high quality EVOO. We avoid ALL commercial salad dressings because of their crap seed oils, soy, canola etc. Pumpkin seeds are a regular for us along with healthy tree nuts.
Any reason from a Paleo or Keto standpoint to use or NOT use pumpkin seed oil along side of our usual?
Many thanks for all you do. Best, Bill
5. Gluten and Thyroiditis [28:29]
Sue says:
I am very confused. I have been following a gluten free diet since 2006 when a practitioner told me I had Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis. I’ve been told, “Not even a little bit.”
I have recently changed primary care physicians. He sent me to an endocrinologist to straighten out my med dosage. I asked her about the relationship between gluten and thyroiditis and she said, “There is absolutely NO correlation between thyroid and gluten!”
So, I ate a cookie, okay three, yesterday and I did not feel awful. I’m just seriously confused.
Thank you for your kind time and attention.
~Sue
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=gluten+thyroid (PUBMED search for gluten+thyroid)
Transcript:
Robb: Hello folks, welcome to the show and thank you for joining the Healthy Rebellion. Hello, wife. How are you?
Nicki: Hubs, I’m good.
Robb: Nice. You’re looking dashing in your Elemental Labs hat.
Nicki: Yeah, I’m covering up my gray stripe along my root line.
Robb: Awesome. Awesome.
Nicki: You got to do what you got to do.
Robb: Definitely. So Texas is not a flaming inferno.
Nicki: Finally, getting somewhat of a fall, and it’s Wurstfest now, so we’re going to get to experience what all the glory that is Wurstfest here.
Robb: The best of the Wurst.
Nicki: Here in New Braunfels. It’s a two week thing. W-U-R-S-T.
Robb: Wurst.
Nicki: Wurst like bratwurst.
Robb: Yeah, but there’s other Wurst beside bratwurst.
Nicki: yeah. I think too, but yeah, we’re going to, we’re going to check that out with the kiddos and the cousins and see what that’s all about.
Robb: You have the downtown New Braunfels, a kind of German cultural influence is interesting because it’s the only place that I’ve been outside of Europe where at 9:00 AM people will be pulling back a gargantuan Stein of beer.
Nicki: And everybody dresses in Liederhosen. They get into-
Robb: Well, that’s the other thing too. But I mean, on any given weekend though, downtown in New Braunfels, there will be somebody drinking a Stein of beer at the …
Nicki: Yeah. Well, the farmer’s market is right outside of this restaurant called Krause’s, which is a huge beer garden area with phenomenal food, like really good quail and sausages and beef, and shrimp and…
Robb: But New Braunfels is terrible, you wouldn’t want to live here.
Nicki: Yeah, people do like their beer.
Robb: What’s our News picks for today?
Nicki: You had something pulled up about Brazil.
Robb: School? Yeah, This is a Washington post and we’ll have it in the show notes. Schools in meat loving rural Brazil went vegan. The community revolted. It’s a really interesting piece because when you dig into this thing, it looks like a woman who is from apparently from the Boston area because apparently she had some very hard Rs in her smack and all of that stuff. She went there and told these people that what they were doing was the wrong thing and they needed to go vegan and eat a bunch of soy and folks tried it and apparently the kids were choosing to not eat the food and just going home hungry. And oftentimes, these were scenarios in which the one meal that the kid got throughout the day was the school meal. They said it was tasteless and then there was a peasant uprising against this in that, why is this person from outside their community coming in and telling them what they need to do and what they’ve been traditionally doing is wrong?
Robb: And this is a perplexing topic to me on veganism in this age where we’re talking about cultural appropriation, gentrification, and I can’t think of something more culturally appropriative than-
Nicki: Like going into someone’s country and telling them how they should feed themselves.
Robb: … a wealthy white person going into someone’s country and telling them that, “Hey, you need to ditch all of your traditional food systems.” Now granted, a lot of the developing world is experiencing really catastrophic health problems because we are exporting shitty food. But this is an entirely different thing than going in and actually saying, “Hey, let’s look at some pictures of your culture a hundred years ago.” Nobody’s overweight, nobody’s obese, nobody has diabetes, and we have a zillion different local cultural cuisine approaches that fed and watered people in a spectacular way and did not lead to chronic degenerative disease. But the one goddamn solution that is offered is veganism. And all of this stuff was also scare mongered and couched within the climate change story and the fact that there were fires in the Amazon in Brazil, but there’s a whole other backstory to that which is that soy crops are arguably a much larger issue with that whole deforestation piece and everything, and this is again my Diana Rogers and I worked on the book a sacred cow, which is due out summer of next year.
Robb: It’s a really gnarly big topic and so chances are somebody can be triggered even before they’ve said, I’m trying to be more like, not blahzay but there’s just a lot of shit that needs to be unpacked with this stuff and sometimes they’re just going to be topics that maybe we have a deeply held conviction on. Like the topic of climate change is probably something that we should put some thought into and because we need to put some thoughts into it, we maybe shouldn’t have a hyper emotional response and assume that the 18 second elevator pitch story is the story. It’s like most of the people listening to this show and that listened to the Paleo Solution.
Robb: If we were to throw out there the notion that, Hey, the process of cardiovascular disease is a really complex thing. It’s not just cholesterol, it’s a multifactorial thing. And so if we start talking about how we’re going to feed a global population and do that in a way that’s sustainable over hundreds or thousands of years, we might need to have some back and forth about all the details of that. And I would throw out there also that the solutions that are going to work in Brazil are not going to be the solutions that work in Saskatchewan and we need to have some respect for the local cultural differences.
Nicki: You mean there is not one size fits all solutions to-
Robb: Funny enough, maybe not. And this is one of the things that just gives me an absolute red ass about this stuff because it’s so interesting because like the… I always get it. Was it the Warren commission or the McGovern commission?
Robb: One of them was like the JFK assassination and the other one was the food investigation like Ancel Keys and-
Nicki: McGovern I believe.
Robb: … McGovern I’m pretty sure. But when McGovern was interviewing scientists and they were like, The science is inconclusive and we don’t think the science supports what you guys are saying. He quipped that senators don’t have the luxury of waiting for all the science being we need to act. Well, the way that they acted created the junk food industry and arguably kind of launched the modern diabesity epidemic and there’s overly simplistic stories around that too. But God, this seems similar where it’s like we need to act. Okay, well let’s be really clear about what it is that we’re doing. But any way we will have a link to this. It’s a Washington post piece and I think it’s just really interesting because-
Nicki: So how it netting out? Are they staying strong and pushing forward? I know there was a statement in there that they wanted to have all the schools be plant-based by a certain year or did the revolt of the parents and the people, are they kicking this legislation out or what?
Robb: It’s back and forth-
Nicki: So it’s still in process?
Robb: It’s a mixed bag. Yeah, it’s a mixed processing and God, if you look at the comments on this thing, it’s like we have a lot of work ahead of us, but it’s-
Nicki: It’s funny how in one of your Wired to Eat talks a couple of years ago you talked about how people think it’s orthorexia like disordered eating to cut out a whole food group like grains. That’s one of the biggest criticisms of paleo, right? Cutting out grains and dairy, but here they are wanting to cut out an entire food group of meat.
Robb: This is a fascinating thing. And whenever I find somebody in the health and wellness space that says that low carb diets or paleo diets are problematic because you’re cutting out a whole food group, inevitably you can look that person up and search whatever their name is and vegan or vegetarian and these people will advocate for a vegan or vegetarian diet. And that is in fact also cutting out whole food groups. Yes, so good points on that. But yeah, so anyway, it is an interesting news piece and I don’t know if I’m patting myself on the back or beating myself over the head with a bat, but I’ve been saying for years that stuff like this was coming and abs are sexy and skinny jeans sell shit and there’s all kinds of jokers on the internet. We definitely cater more to our aesthetic vices than we do these big squishy hard to get our arms around topics.
Robb: But this thing’s a pretty big deal. And don’t just take our word for it, definitely be critical of what we’re saying. Diana posted a paper today from the proceedings of the national Academy of sciences and it basically… Maybe we’ll pull this one up next week and we’ll dig into that one. But it makes the case that if you completely did away with all animal husbandry in the United States, it would reduce total greenhouse gas emissions by the United States by about 2% and then there’s the whole knock on piece to that, that most of that is within this thing called the nitrogen and carbon cycle. So it’s arguably a natural process in which carbon is both liberated and sequestered back and forth, and it’s ignoring the fact that if we went something like the White Oak Pasture process, we might actually sequester carbon.
Robb: So, there’s a whole deal with that. And then in this P&AS piece, it said it would undoubtedly damage people nutritionally. There would be nutritional deficiencies. People would overeat because they tend to eat beyond their normal caloric intake due to caloric deficiencies. It’s an outstanding paper and holy smokes, the way that people lost their minds on that. One person was like, “So Rob, how much are you getting from big meat?” And I was like, “No man, I’m big on sweet potato.” Like, “Did you miss the note on that?” Because the low carb jihadis still think that I’m getting money from big sweet potato. Because even though I love ketogenic diets, I don’t think they’re the right thing for everybody. So of course I’m, “Dude, we’re just flushed with cash.” “We’re getting money from like big sweet potato and big meat and-”
Nicki: Who’s next big farmer?
Robb: I’m just hoping it’s big cocaine. So we’ll really go big on that. So yeah, I’ll unpack that one maybe on the next show because it’s a cool one.
Nicki: Yeah, let’s make a note to that, that sounds like a good one. All righty. Let’s see. So this is episode four and we want to read one of our favorite reviews from the first couple of episodes.
Robb: And hopefully… Thank you guys for listening. Please subscribe. Please leave a review. It really makes or breaks shows. And so if you like the show, please give a review.
Nicki: Absolutely. So anyway, this review was from Quito Tony, and he says, “Spot on dude and his better half.” “This guy, Rob, has been down more rabbit holes for us than Alice.” “He’s cutting edge and old school common sense both at the same time.” “Follow Robb and his charming wife Nicki as they patiently answer the same questions over and over and over again.” “No, really they are the best thing that’s happened to health radio since George and Gracie.” “I’m all in.” Tony has an awesome review. Thank you so much.
Robb: Pretty cool. Are you letting folks know what’s happening?
Nicki: I am. So, Quito Tony, if you’re listening to this, thank you again for your review. Shoot us an email to [email protected]. Let us know your shipping address and your T-shirt size. You are going to get one of our very first healthy rebellion radio T-shirts.
Robb: And there’ll be awesome.
Nicki: And they will be awesome. So, Yeah. So, All righty. Let’s see. Today’s show is sponsored by Elemental Labs, maker of the electrolyte drink mix element or recharge. Robb, I don’t know if you noticed, but this morning in the healthy rebellion community, Alison, one of our members posted a recipe. She shared a recipe where she makes a salted caramel vanilla coffee using the element raw, unflavored mix. So she says she adds-
Robb: Are you going to tell people what it is? You just can’t leave them [inaudible 00:12:20].
Nicki: No, I’m going to give the recipe. So to her coffee, she adds one scoop of vanilla collagen powder, a splash of organic heavy cream and one packet of raw, unflavored element recharge. And in her words, it’s all of the fun. None of the guilt. So grab your stash of element [email protected]. That’s drink L-M-N-T.com.
Robb: Alison also had an element, Jell-O shot recipe.
Nicki: Yeah, the day after Halloween when most people are bringing bags of candy into their office and their work. She’s like, “They can have their candy.” And she had heard her little Jell- O. It was not spiked. But it was Jell-O shots, but without-
Robb: No, no, no, you kidding. You need to do a chemical analysis on that. That would be a crafty way to sneak in there.
Nicki: You’ll never know that would be a crafty way. How about have a good post Halloween day of work with your …
Robb: it’s like, Wow, they were very quiet today. Not particularly productive, but, yeah.
Nicki: All righty. Let’s go on to our questions for this week’s episode. We have a question from Erica on calcium. She says, “Hi Robb, I first want to thank you so much for the wealth of knowledge you share.” “Your book the Paleo Solution helped me get off Embrel, which I was taking for 13 years for rheumatoid arthritis.” “I’ve been medication and symptom free for a year just by following a paleo keto diet and I don’t ever plan on going back to my old life of processed foods, joint pain and weekly injections of Embrel.”
Nicki: “However, I am concerned about my calcium intake.” “Dairy and beans flare up my arthritis symptoms and I don’t digest leafy greens well at all.” “I know sardines are a good source of calcium, but I just can’t stomach them.” “Seriously, my husband is not even allowed to kiss me after he has eaten sardines.” “Do you have any suggestions of ways I can get calcium in my diet?” “I’ve heard bone meal is a good source, but I don’t know exactly how to add that to my diet in an appealing way and I’m not finding much on the internet.” “Thank you so much.”
Robb: Yeah, this is a great question. And within paleo, keto land, bone broth is a reasonably good option. The sounds may be a little gnarly, but if you have anything like chicken or ribs, anything that’s got some boney articular pieces to it, if you just cook it really well, like good Texas barbecue or something like that. The cartilage will be very amenable for chewing. Even some of the bones will be amenable for chewing. If we have the time to really do a good job on our ribs when I cook them, if the bone should be that big when I’m done with it’s like that big.
Nicki: You should take a picture of how well you eat ribs babe. It’s no joke like-
Robb: It looks like-
Nicki: I’ll eat a rib. The kids eat their ribs and then Robb is like the family dog that takes the rib, the Eaten ribs off of everybody else’s plates and then makes them look like they’ve been baked out in the sun, in the Sahara for two years. And there’s not even a stitch of anything edible left to them.
Robb: Barely even the rib left. So, those things are great options. Just saving your bones and making homemade bone broth, getting something like kettle and fire bone broth. All those things are good options and so long as you’re generally eating a well balanced whole food based diet and getting adequate sodium and magnesium, your calcium needs are actually moderated.
Robb: Your body will do a pretty good job of regulating things and then making sure that you’re getting some vitamin D and K in the mix. Also follow Chris Masterjohn for all the deep insights on that. But adequate ADK levels will also ensure that just about whatever calcium you’re bringing in, you will retain the appropriate amount and not just retain it but put it in the right spot. This is one of the problems with overly elevated vitamin D levels relative to vitamin K levels. The D helps you retain it, the vitamin K tells your body where to put it. You don’t necessarily want to stick that stuff in your vascular endothelium. So, bone broth eat the cartilage off of your fleshy meaty things and then just make sure you’re doing a good job on sodium and magnesium in the rest of your diet.
Nicki: Okay. Let’s see. Our next question is from Gordon on coconut and avocado oil, potato chips. You’ve mentioned potato chips with an avocado, coconut oil, but never really gave a thumbs up or down as to if these chips are okay to have. For me everyday I have a hard time with anything besides meat and rice. Am I plowing too many calories and carbs down. Any thoughts? I’m a 56 year old male. I work out two to three times a week. I have a physical job, but recently put on weight in my midsection. I eat about four to five of bags of chips a week all around. Good guy and overworked father. Sounds like much of the population.
Robb: Everybody. Gordon, this is a great question. What do they call this stuff and the consumer product, good space. The better thans. So, like…
Nicki: Like see a day chips.
Robb: See a day chips.
Nicki: Jackson’s honest.
Robb: Yeah, Jackson’s honest, which Jackson’s honest would probably be similar to this where it would be potatoes or sweet potatoes and the plantain and they’re cooked in coconut oil. We’re definitely going to avoid the problems with oxidized polyunsaturated fats, which even things like canola oil can be problematic with that. The downside is that you can eat four to five bags of them per week and there’s just like another probably thousand calories that you just drop on top of things. And so, if you’re going to kick your heels up, I think it’s probably worthwhile to find something like this, but at the same time.
Nicki: Four to five bags a week… If you were lean and you were happy with your physique, then I think that’s probably not the end of the world, but the fact that you’re wanting to be leaner around the midsection, that would be a pretty good spot to start it.
Robb: Yeah. And so we were big fans of both mammoth and rebel ice cream. Stuff’s great. And while the weather was high, we would do dinner and then I’m like, “Man, rebel ice cream would sure be good.” And we’ve been stressed out. Sleep’s been okay, not great, but not terrible. Exercise has been hit and miss. Definitely not as much as what we would like. And then I would finish off the evenings with a big bowl of keto friendly ice cream-
Nicki: It still has a lot of calories.
Robb: …and lo and behold, I got chubby. It’s like I didn’t spike my insulin, but I managed to get chubby, go figure. And so, I guess in this case again, super over the top insulin hypothesis folks was like, “Well, those potatoes are insulin producing.” Okay, yeah. Might be a problem. The bag of chips for me would be a worse decision than like the Keto ice cream because I don’t respond well to carbs, but at the end of the day it is the caloric load and the fact that both of these things are hyper palatable foods is where you get yourself in trouble. Yeah.
Nicki: Yeah, all right Gordon, so cut it down to one bag a week and report back.
Robb: Yeah, and do a workout first or take a walk.
Nicki: Take a walk afterwards. Yes. Okay. We have a question from Matt on booze, Keto, and gut health. Matt says, “Any chance you can devote some time on the show to discuss alcohol?” “I’m amazed at how little information is available as to its effect on Keto weight loss and muscle gain.” “Here’s an example, my wife and I split a bottle of wine every night and we start with dinner and finish it off in the next few hours.” “The effect of this on sleep is a whole different topic.”” But what is the wine doing to my ketogenic state and ability to lose weight?” “Is the outcome different?’ “If it’s two shots of Tequila?” “The wine we drink is always dry with no residual sugar present.”
Nicki: Last question. “I’m a winemaker and I’ve always wondered about the effect of the preservative that I use in wine, Sulfur dioxide. It’s added to wine immediately after fermentation is complete. I continually maintain a ratio of 100 to 150 parts per million, legal limit is 350 parts per million until bottling to prevent bad stuff from growing. I was trained that the So2, Sulfur dioxide doesn’t kill the yeast and microbes, it just prevents them from growing. What effect does that have on my gut bacteria and equals one. I haven’t noticed any difference in my gut, intestines and stool when drinking wine or abstaining. Also hard alcohol doesn’t have preservatives in it because not almost nothing grows in that much alcohol.” And then he has a couple of links.
Robb: Those links are mine.
Nicki: Oh, you put those links in there?
Robb: Yeah.
Nicki: Okay, those are your notes.
Robb: And he said, thanks for everything. Teaching has had a positive impact on his life. That’s awesome. Oh, bring back the controversial truth. Yeah. We had to hide the controversial truth for a while. Maybe someday we’ll tell a story about that. So Matt, where do we begin unpacking?
Nicki: Okay, so does it affect weight loss, muscle gain, your state of ketosis?
Robb: Yeah, what’s the problem was doing a half a bottle of wine a night.
Nicki: The sleep piece is the big.
Robb: The calories.
Nicki: The calories and the sleep.
Robb: Yeah. And again, if we want to make it damnable hard, bordering on impossible to lean somebody out, just disorder their sleep. We’ve seen this in police, military, fire, new parents. When sleep is bad, then it’s really hard to lean people out. And if somebody starting from very overweight, then we can usually make some progress. But you hit a plateau rather quickly. Just all the metabolic issues around the sleep. So man, just spinning out on this like booze is going to be problematic for sleep so…
Nicki: Does it kick you? It doesn’t kick you out.I mean-
Robb: The ketosis or not ketosis is a non issue. It still is down to what the caloric load is. I will say in general, I noticed that something like tequila or vodka disorders my sleep less badly than wine and there are wines out there that I think are generally better than other wines, but still any type of wine generally will be more disturbing to my sleep than tequila or, or vodka. And again, it’s handy if I can drink earlier in the day. The further away from bedtime I can drink, then the less of an impact it has of all other things being equal. So on the sulfur dioxide, I dug into this and it’s interesting. Sulfur dioxide as a food additive is a cardiac and a mitochondrial toxicant. But this is only in Detroit. In vivo, you don’t really see this effect and this is so many of the problems when they’re like nitrates and nitrites are terrible.
Robb: When you look at them in vitro in a Petri dish, then these things end up being problematic and then almost inevitably when you look at them through the perspective of actually consuming them the way that you would normally not being cut open in a giant Petri dish and chemicals dumped on you. Oddly enough, the response is different. And so another piece that we have in here, which we will have in the show notes is that in general, whatever food preservatives you want to look at, there’s a huge list of them. If they expose people to a food preservative, then their gut microbiome changes initially and then over the course of time it tends to go back. And this kind of reflects what he reported, which was he hasn’t really noticed a difference one way or the other. And then within that, even with the… It changed the gut microbiome.
Robb: When you sneeze, your gut microbiome changes. When you pee. It’s like if you watch a scary movie, it changes. And so this is one of the things that makes me crazy about the state of our understanding, the gut microbiome. We need to be able to… This is like watching, taking a picture within the two and a half hour movie of fight club and knowing anything about what the movie is relative to seeing the two and a half hour deal. We are so infantile in our understanding, we know that gut health is important. We know the gut microbiome is important and that’s about the extent of our knowledge on it in my opinion. Like there are some people out there that claimed some really deep knowledge on this stuff. I think it’s bullshit, maybe on I’m wrong, but we have different things that we can do to try to clinically affect the outcome of our gut health.
Robb: And again, I think that’s just kind of like, well let’s try it and see what sticks to the wall. It’s not like we have a really deep understanding of what’s going on. Fiber helps some people at Rex, other people, same deal with probiotics and prebiotics. And so, in this story around the food preservatives, the fact that it changes the gut microbiota and then the gut microbiota tends to shift back to where it was before. It’s a shrug. I’m not sure what to say on that, but I could make the case that if he’s not getting, if he’s not looking, feeling and performing the way that he wants to, that he probably needs to dial into those bathroom.
Nicki: It sounds like he’s been doing that. This is like their routine. They share this bottle of wine. So Matt, I’d be really curious if you’re game, if your wife is game. You don’t say how heavy you are and how much weight you’re trying to lose, but you probably have a sense of how much you’re losing per month doing what you’re doing. Maybe do a month of no wine and shifting to tequila and see if there’s a difference. See if it changes your sweet sleep quality. Maybe it has an impact there. Be kind of interesting. And then if you do that, tell us. Yeah.
Robb: Especially on the calling show. That would be a perfect time.
Nicki: Yeah, that would be a great time to call in. Okay. Let’s see. Question from bill on pumpkin seed oil. Let’s see. Bill says, “On a recent hiking trip to Slovenia, beautiful, beautiful country by the way, we were introduced to pumpkin seed oil. It is big in the region and also in Austria. It is sometimes toasted, sometimes not and has a wonderful nutty flavor. We used it on green salads. Our usual salad dressing is a third MCT oil mixed with two thirds high quality extra Virgin olive oil. We avoid all commercial salad dressings because of their crap seed oil, soy, canola, et cetera. Pumpkin seeds are regular for us along with healthy tree nuts. Any reason from a paleo or keto standpoint to not use pumpkin seed oil alongside our usual many things?”, Bill.
Robb: Pumpkin seed oil does have a modest amount of polyunsaturated fat so they can oxidize, so you might have some lipid peroxides to deal with. So, get a good quality, make sure it’s in a dark jar and it’s kept relatively cool. I suspect pumpkin seed oil is similar to olive oil. If you stick it in the fridge, it’s probably going to solidify because even the mono and saturated fats can solidify it. It had refrigerator temperatures, but otherwise I think-
Nicki: Once it’s open and try to use it reasonably. You don’t want to have a bottle that’s three years old.
Robb: Yeah, like vinegar that’s super old, usually is good, but oils, you don’t want them. They don’t get better with time. Yeah, they do not improve with age.
Nicki: Okay. Let’s see. Our last question for this week is from Sue on gluten and thyroiditis. Sue says, “I am very confused. I’ve been following a gluten free diet since 2006 when a practitioner told me I had Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. I’ve been told no gluten, not even a little bit. I recently changed my primary care physician and he sent me to an endocrinologist to straighten out my medical dosage. I asked her about the relationship between gluten and thyroiditis and she said, “There is absolutely no correlation between thyroid and gluten.” So I ate a cookie, okay three yesterday and I did not feel awful. I’m just seriously confused. Thank you for your kind time and attention.”
Robb: Yeah, what I did is I went to pub med and I put in the search term and we have this in the show notes, gluten and thyroid and there’s a lot of returns. Now, a lot of it is not germane. It deals with a bunch of… It’s just kind of random stuff, but when you poke around in there, there is a ton of literature with connections between thyroid dysregulation and gluten cross-reactivity. So the fact that your endocrinologist said there is no correlation means that this person has not researched the topic at all. Now the deal though is that there are… I was just listening to an amazing, a nourish balance thrive podcast. They interviewed Malcolm Kendrick who is a physician who is very well steeped on cardiovascular disease propagation and again and again when he was talking about different things. He says that is a cause of cardiovascular disease, not the cause of cardiovascular disease and this is something that we need to get in our lexicon.
Robb: Gluten can be a cause of autoimmune disease. It is not the cause. But there are multiple factors that can come into this. Now, it is interesting that when you really dig into that story, it’s usually some issue with tissue trans glue Tammany’s which is a ubiquitous enzyme in all of ourselves. In the tissue transglutaminase is the thing that in Ciliac and other gluten autoimmune conditions, that is the protein that is getting cross reacted to. So there’s something there and it’s really deep, but there are other molecular mimics in nature and in our diets that can produce this even just endotoxins from certain bacteria. I think the last podcast or maybe it wasn’t the podcast, maybe it was me talking about unpacking my gut health stuff. I talked about the [indie B Killen 00:00:30:32] antibodies in the cyto lethal toxin B that comes out of bacteria.
Robb: If you get an autoimmune response to the cyto lethal toxin B, then that can cross react with vinculin, and vinculin is a normal protein in our gut and then problems can ensue. So there can be multiple inputs here. Maybe gluten is not the input, the fact that she didn’t feel terrible from a cookie. Also, part of that is if you’re already in this Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, she probably is on medication. So it’s being managed. And so maybe you don’t experience a worsening, but I will mention this, when you poke around in the literature, if you have an autoimmune disease, the likelihood of developing other auto immune diseases is much greater. So this is where I would just not fuck around with this stuff at all. And do you want to share our weekend dining experience?
Nicki: Oh yeah. We went out to a restaurant here in new Braunfels, which we really like. And historically we’ve been there a couple times now and they have a lamb burger on the menu, which is amazing. We order it with no bun and we’ve had it two or three times. Three times. Yeah. And so we just went the other evening, we had some friends come into town and ordered it the same way. We always order it, no bun, and it shows up on a plate on a bun. So we begin to say, we need to send it back.
Robb: I’m typically reactive enough that if my food landed on a piece of bread, I can’t eat it. Like it’s typically going to crush me.
Nicki: Right. Even if there’s a salad with the bread on the side of the plate, you have to remake it cause it just the, just the tiny crumbs can make Rob really, really sick.
Robb: So, when I told the waitress what my situation was, she went back to the kitchen, then she came back and she said, ‘Hey, I don’t know if you know this, but they put bread crumbs in the land-
Nicki: In the Patty mixture.
Robb: And we’ve had this happen in the past where I’ve eaten something that seems like it should be fine. And then I get laid out sick for a couple of days.
Nicki: Well even the barbecue place that we go to, which was amazing when we first moved here and you kept getting sick after it and we realized that they’re putting flour in the coleslaw, like a rule in the coleslaw. So, once we ditched the coleslaw, you were fine. But anyway, you’ve eaten this lamb burger like three times, ordered it the other night, found out that it had breadcrumbs in it and you ended up ordering something different because you didn’t want pressure to touch it.
Robb: Yeah, the crazy circuitous story on that is my gut health is better now. If you guys remember I had some soup, we first moved to new Braunfels, my gut health got way better. And then I think I caught a gut bug. I did a ton of testing to unpack that and figure out what was going on. I do a full accounting of that in the healthy rebellion. So if you want to check that out. You can go on there. But the long and short of that is I’m better now. I’m not quite where I was when things were really good, but it’s better than… Other than that six week period when things were awesome. My gut health now is better than what it’s been in like 25 years. So it’s pretty darn good. And as far as I can tell, like I didn’t react to the gluten.
Robb: I had it at least two times, maybe three times. And the waitress said, well are you going to play around with that? And I was like, no I’m not because my mom died from celiac complications. And if I am just at a spot where I don’t get sick from cross-reactivity and I don’t need you as neurotic, that’s a huge win. But given what I know and given my family history and everything, it would seem to be silly to just tempt fate in that way.So, Sue. So this was my big circuitous thing to get back to that. You have a known autoimmune condition. The linkage between gluten and other molecular mimics like that are very well established. If it’s not an entirely own risk thing for you to do this, then I would recommend sticking with gluten free. And again, we’ll have a link to this pub med search, your doc needs to do less clinical time and a little bit of research time because he or she was very ill informed on that.
Nicki: So. All right, that was our last question for this week. Make sure you check out our show sponsor Elemental Labs and maybe make that salted caramel coffee goodness that Alison mentioned there with element recharge. And like Rob mentioned, he did a big unpacking of his blood work in the healthy rebellion community. So if you’re interested in joining our community and being a part of the conversations there, you can do [email protected] and finally, please subscribe and leave us a review on iTunes or wherever you go for your podcast experience. We will read the bestest pithiest reviews and you can win a healthy rebellion radio T-shirt if we pick yours and you reach back out to us. Everybody loves Piff. Yeah.
Robb: Okay.
Nicki: All right. Thanks guys.
Robb: Thank you, wife.
Nicki: Thanks, hub.
Robb: Okay, bye guys.
Nicki: Bye.
Where you can find us:
Submit questions for the podcast: https://robbwolf.com/contact/submit-a-question-for-the-podcast/
Don’t forget, Wired to Eat is now available!
Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, iBooks
Its very nice information for me………….thank you for sharing