Please Subscribe and Review: Apple Podcasts | RSS
Submit your questions for the podcast here
News Topic:
Lab-Grown Meat’s Carbon Footprint Potentially Worse Than Retail Beef
Show Notes:
How to LOWER LDL on Keto. No meds!
Migraine Prevention through Ketogenic Diet: More than Body Mass Composition Changes
Questions:
Linoleic Acid
Gerry writes:
Rob and Nickie..
Fellow Montanans here.. from the Kalispell area snd have seen you both around town! Hope you are enjoying Bozo town, you will definitely get more sunshine there..
My wife and I have been avoiding seed oils for several years now.
Recently, I heard Dr.Mercola speak about the dangers of linoleic acid. He urged everyone to avoid bacon and eggs from conventionally fed chickens and pigs. He stated that the soy and corn fed to these animals contains seed oils and is stored in muscle and fat.. When we eat bacon or eggs we are loading up on toxic fats!
I have not heard others warn of this danger, even high profile carnivore advocates..
I have been carnivore for over a year and noticed much less joint pain and substantial weight loss .,
Bacon and eggs are a major part of my diet! It’s is disheartening to think of avoiding them.
What do you two think about this??
Saturated Fat for Type 1
Will writes
I’m a 51 y/o type 1 diabetic. I’m 5’10” and 170 lbs. I’m also very lean and carry a healthy amount of muscle mass. Since I’m wholly reliant on exogenous insulin, I’m hyper aware of my own insulin sensitivity, or lack thereof. Every time I eat a large bolus of saturated fat, especially beef, my insulin sensitivity drops dramatically and I end up taking 2 – 3 times the amount of insulin for a known food than normal. The worst food offenders are saturated fat + starch combinations like steak and potato or coconut curry and rice. Even if I restrict the carbs completely, large doses of saturated fat leave me chasing blood sugars and often injecting large doses of insulin to counteract the high glucose levels. Aside from limiting intake of beef, lamb, and other meats containing lots of saturated fat, what proteins would you rely on for health and body composition?
Migraine with Aura
Renea writes:
My daughter has suffered from monthly migraines since the age of 2. She vomits every-time. Around the age of 8 she began getting migraines with aura and the vomiting went from one occurrence to 6-15 hours long. She is now 12, almost out of puberty and still suffers from auras. We have tried a lot of functional medicine but can’t seem to find many answers. Her neurologist wants to put her on anti seizure meds but we have put it off due to the side effects of that class of drug. Preventative drugs are not favored either due to the side effects.
I too suffer from auras but only get them when I workout at 100% (CrossFit causes many of my auras and have since stopped CF) I try to workout at 80% to prevent them. Any advice how to prevent auras with migraine?
Sponsor:
The Healthy Rebellion Radio is sponsored by our electrolyte company, LMNT.
Proper hydration is more than just drinking water. You need electrolytes too! Check out The Healthy Rebellion Radio sponsor LMNT for grab-and-go electrolyte packets to keep you at your peak! They give you all the electrolytes want, none of the stuff you don’t. Click here to get your LMNT electrolytes
Transcript:
Nicki: It’s time to make your health an act of rebellion. We’re tackling personalized nutrition, metabolic flexibility, resilient aging, and answering your diet and lifestyle questions. This is the only show with the bold aim to help 1 million people liberate themselves from the sick care system. You’re listening to The Healthy Rebellion Radio.
The contents of this show are for entertainment and educational purposes only. Nothing in this podcast should be considered medical advice. Please consult your licensed and credentialed functional medicine practitioner before embarking on any health, dietary or fitness change. Warning, when Robb gets passionate, he’s been known to use the occasional expletive. If foul language is not your thing, if it gets your britches in a bunch, well there’s always Disney Plus.
Robb: Welcome back everybody.
Nicki: Hello, this is episode 181 of The Healthy Rebellion Radio. Good morning, Hubs.
Robb: Good morning.
Nicki: How’s it going?
Robb: Good.
Nicki: Got another… All the snow in our neighborhood was almost completely melted, and then this morning we had another little, I don’t know, inch.
Robb: A wee dusting of snow.
Nicki: Wee dusting of snow. Yep. So winter is clearly not done with us yet. And frequently here, apparently winter’s not done with you until June.
Robb: Or later.
Nicki: So we’ll see. We had a nice trip to Washington DC with my cousin and her family. Saw many a site, walked a ton, which one of the nice things about going with my cousin and her four kids was that the walking piece, which I think normally we would’ve had a lot of complaining kids about the… We walked an average of, I don’t know, five miles.
Robb: The big day was 10.
Nicki: Nine miles. Yeah, we walked a ton but didn’t have a lot of complaining kids because they had each other. So that was pretty cool. What else? What… highlights-
Robb: Do you want to mention your highlight?
Nicki: My highlight. Well, there were lots of highlights. It was really cool. We got to see Mount Vernon, which is George Washington’s Estate, which is a beautiful… The Botanic Gardens, the National Archives where the Constitution Declaration of Independence Bill of Rights are. And I think one of the most striking buildings that we went in was the Library of Congress, just the ceiling and the architecture. It really reminded me of being in Italy. I don’t know. I haven’t seen a lot of the buildings in America that remind me of that kind of style where people poured their life’s energy building something amazing and beautiful. That stands the test of time. So that was pretty cool to see.
Robb: Well, and it was kind of an interesting little dust up on X or Twitter or whatever it is these days. Brett Weinstein mentioned-
Nicki: No, it was Tucker-
Robb: Or was it, Tucker?
Nicki: … was saying about Russia how all the architecture-
Robb: Oh, that’s right. That’s right.
Nicki: … in Russia is so beautiful.
Robb: It’s not post-modern. It’s-
Nicki: And it’s not just these square boxes that get slapped up quickly. And then-
Robb: Which ironically was the coin of the realm for Eastern Germany. That was communist architecture, just soulless, utilitarian. And now postmodernism. That’s what it is.
Nicki: Again, yeah.
Robb: This like soulless, ugly. Yeah, just interesting.
Nicki: Versus Renaissance architecture in Florence or… So anyway, that was really fun. And then I think the highlight that you’re referring to was we went to this taco shop in the Capitol Hill area, mall area.
Robb: The chef was a protege of Anthony Bourdain.
Nicki: And so on the menu they had these had grasshopper tacos. And so my cousin’s youngest is six, and he is just a little… Has a sweet spot in my heart. And so I was like, “Cooper, we should have a grasshopper taco.” And he’s like, “Oh yeah.” So I ordered three tacos, one of which was a grasshopper taco thinking that it’s going to taste-
Robb: Probably pretty good.
Nicki: … pretty good. I’m fairly adventurous with my palate. And anyway, long story short, these tacos were so… It was so terrible. It was like the grasshoppers were steeped in some sort of ancho chili. The only flavor was this overbearing chili flavor. And it was you take one grasshopper out and we all had one. And okay, it’s not so bad that you try to take a whole bite of taco, which had 15 grasshoppers in that mouth bite. And oh, goodness.
Robb: The funny thing is one certainly got far more protein in the grasshopper tacos than you did any of the other taco options.
Nicki: But the other ones were phenomenal.
Robb: They were tasty.
Nicki: The other ones were phenomenal. I was a little disappointed in the grasshoppers. Let’s see. I think that’s all for up front. What do you have for us for our news topic?
Robb: I think I may have mentioned this before, but it popped up Chris Kresser actually forwarded it to me. Ucdavis.edu lab-grown meat, carbon footprint worse than beef. We’ve talked about this a lot. Diana Rogers and I mentioned this both in the book and the film, Sacred Cow.
Nicki: And now there’s finally some studies to-
Robb: I will admit-
Nicki: … clearly demonstrate that you were early.
Robb: We were early and ours was largely back of the envelope napkin math on this stuff ’cause there was not yet all that much there. But what’s interesting is the one news piece said that this fake meat could be up to 25 times worse-
Nicki: For climate change.
Robb: … for climate change. Which I don’t know whether to just give up or to just double down and be a complete raging asshole about this stuff. Because there’s so many things ranging from the climate change topic to mostly peaceful protests and a host of other things where people are just absolutely fucking certain about their position on it. And then you do a little bit of poking and a little bit of pressure testing and things like, “No, this is absolute bullshit.” And this is another one of those things. It’s just bullshit.
There is a net energy input that’s necessary to make the modern meat and dairy system work. But the reality is that the basic engine is sunlight, grass and cows. Period. Whereas these other stories, you have sunlight, you have plants, but those plants have to then get processed in a whole host of ways to end up put into this lab grown meat system. And it’s shockingly inefficient. If one were on a spaceship traveling between stars, that would be a good option because that’s what you’ve got in play.
Nicki: You don’t have sunlight.
Robb: Well-
Nicki: … to the degree that we-
Robb: You don’t have vast tracts of land that convert free energy, sunlight into food. And arguably we are on a spaceship called Earth, but we’ve got better options still. And again, I guess my main takeaway with this is just the fucking certitude that government, media, social media shills, vegans,…
And there’s still people within this ancestral health community that will go on and on about the pending climate crisis and whatnot. And this is again, a piece that… Well, we have challenges, yes. But if we do stupid shit like converting our food production over to lab grown meat, which is owned by people like Bill Gates and it basically turns food into IP and we make it illegal or difficult or impossible to grow food in traditional ways, then yeah, we’re going to have a hell of a problem.
Nicki: Or like our last news topic, spring something in our atmosphere to block the sunlight to prevent global warming.
Robb: Might have more problems than what is attempting to be solved.
Nicki: So we’ll link to this in the show notes. All right. The Healthy Rebellion Radio is sponsored by our Salty AF electrolyte company LMNT. It’s late afternoon and you’re dragging. You want something to carry you over the finish line of your long work day, but you don’t want more coffee. So what do you go for? Most people grab an energy drink, whack a caffeine, and a non-trivial amount of sugar.
But you’re not like most people, you know that a bolus of afternoon sugar isn’t doing you any favors energy-wise or with regards to your health and fitness goals. You know that you don’t need more caffeine. Your body needs electrolytes, particularly sodium. You grab Element and you feel the difference. Order yours today at drinklmnt.com/robb. That’s drinklmnt.com.robb.
Reminder, the last day to order chocolate medley is March 27th. And this year’s chocolate medley contains 10 sticks, each of chocolate raspberry, chocolate chai and chocolate mint, all of them incredible in hot water. That deadline again to order is March 27th at drinklmnt.com.robb. Okay.
Robb: Nicely done.
Nicki: Three questions. First one on linoleic acid. This one’s from Jerry. “Hi, Rob and Nicki. Fellow Montanans here from the Kalispell area, and I’ve seen you both around town. Hope you are enjoying Bozo town. You’ll definitely get more sunshine there.” And we are.
Robb: Absolutely.
Nicki: Yep. My wife and I have been avoiding seed oils for several years now. Recently I heard Dr. Mercola speak about the dangers of linoleic acid. He urged everyone to avoid bacon and eggs from conventionally fed chickens and pigs. He stated that the soy and corn fed to these animals contain seed oils and is stored in muscle and fat. When we eat bacon or eggs, we are loading up on toxic facts. I’ve not heard others want of this danger. Even high profile carnivore advocates. I’ve been carnivore for over a year and notice much less joint pain and substantial weight loss. Bacon and eggs are a major part of my diet. It’s disheartening to think of avoiding them. What do you two think about this?
Robb: The seed oil topic has been making me a little crazy of late. I’m definitely… I have no doubt that oxidized fats are a problem. I have no doubt that a incestrally inappropriate Omega-three, Omega-six balance from dietary sources are a concern.
Nicki: And some people are legitimately sensitive to seed oils like they…
Robb: Yeah, but it’s still… Nine-tenths of this, I’m still left wondering, is it the seed oils or is it the fact that you were eating a donut and five donuts? There are people who push back on this and that’s fine. We will motor forward. I just happen to be one of the people that is kind of underwhelmed by this stuff. And part of this is eating nuts and seeds, which contain usually significant amounts of linoleic acid, a short chain omega-six fat. You will find Paul Saladino pretty down on chicken and pork because of the potential of higher omega-six fat content. Which actually can be a arachidonic acid because the animals will elongate this stuff to some degree.
But ironically, when you really dig into all of that story, we need a arachidonic acid to get the first phase of the inflammatory response. It’s critical for mTOR complex one to be activated, which is part of muscle growth and immune system response. So you want a balance of this stuff.
And what I linked to is a piece from Nate Norowitz who’s a brilliant young guy who’s already has a PhD, I believe he’s in Harvard Medical School as well. And he’s really kind of rocketed onto the keto low-carb scene. Because one, his background, two, he’s very, very smart. And then three, he has healed inflammatory bowel issues with a ketogenic diet. He has this piece YouTube how to lower LDL on keto no meds. And one of the things that he talks about is consuming seed oil sources. And he talks about things like tahini and he acknowledges that these denuded seed oils that maybe have been oxidized or have some other issues with them could be a problem.
But he points out that he dietarily… He’s ketogenic and he eats low-carb, ketogenic, all that stuff. He points out that even though at the dietary level he has a strong skewing of omega-six in preference to omega-three when he gets his blood work done. And you look at a red blood cell membrane composition of omega-three and omega-six is the body tends to sort that stuff out. And something that is oftentimes missed is that polyunsaturated fats are preferentially combusted or preferentially oxidized, particularly in a ketogenic state.
And people are usually familiar that MCT oil is ketogenic because you can’t really do anything else with it. But what’s interesting is in a ketogenic state, in a state in which we are limited in oxaloacetate, and so we’re going to be driving down that ketogenic kind of road, you could make the argument that polyunsaturated fats or even a mix of polyunsaturated fats are more ketogenic than MCT oil. So Nick points out that he will use good quality sesame oil and he will find that his ketones get up as high as six nanomolar, which is what you would get with a really extended fast kind of state. It’s remarkably high, possibly too high for a lot of people, or it might be just right in the strike zone for people that have a serious neurological issue or if they’re under cancer therapeutics or things like that.
So I’m not in the camp that thinks that bacon and eggs… Would it be great if these things were fed more flax and less soybean and so the omega ratio was better? Yeah, that would probably be great. But at the end of the day, I really feel like this is majoring in the minors and there’s… I’ll probably have more about this. I’ve had some discussions with some email lists about this stuff. People have mentioned things like toxicants, like hexane in canola oil, which is a thing. But the thing about that is that the accepted limits… Because the manufacturers that actually use hexane to chemically extract these lipids, they want that hexane back because they want to use it in the next round.
And they also legitimately don’t want to poison people. So if you have a kilogram of canola oil that’s been chemically extracted, you can expect to have about 0.8 milligrams per kilogram of the oil. 2.2 pounds, thousand grams. Sounds like a lot. People would say, “Well, I don’t want to eat hexane.” It’s like, “Okay, that’s great.”
If you work in any type of an industrial setting, like you’re around gasoline or diesel or you do any type of farm work, if you work in a lab like I used to, the OSHA accepted limits per day are 50 to 500 milligrams. So you would need to eat 50 kilograms of canola oil to get the daily limit of the average worker who works in an environment where hexane is a factor.
And people will go on and on about… Oh god, what’s the other one? Glyphosate. Well, the rapeseed canola is raised with glyphosate. It’s the thing is though, is that glyphosate, you need to be a way better chemist than I am to make glyphosate dissolvable in lipids, it’s mainly water-soluble. It’s got a polar nitrogenous center, it’s got a phosphate, it’s got a carboxylic acid, which makes it really nicely soluble in water. Reasonably soluble in alcohol, which is also in between polar and nonpolar solvent. And then when you get completely nonpolar solvents like canola oil, you can’t fucking dissolve it in it.
And so there’s a bunch of this stuff that people will just fire off. They’re like, “Glyphosate, hexane.” And they have absolutely no context for this stuff at all. And if you don’t want to eat that stuff, fine, don’t eat it. But even if you’re out and you’re on a ketogenic diet and you’re one of the crazy people that still eats vegetables because they don’t give you gut issues, which I would love to be that person. I eat a little bit, I would love to eat more. I actually like vegetables. I like salads. But if you’re out and you mainly eat non-seed oil containing items at home and you’re out and you ask the folks, “What type of salad dressing do you have?” And it’s like, “Oh, it’s a mix of olive oil-
Nicki: Even if you order-
Robb: … and canola oil.
Nicki: Even if you order olive oil, the chances are it’s going to be adulterated-
Robb: It’s going to be adulterated.
Nicki: … and cut with some other oils because-
Robb: Yeah. That’s not the end of the world, in my opinion. There are people, I know Paul Saladino, he’s had videos where he will go into a restaurant and he refuses to eat at the restaurant because the restaurant sprays canola oil on the grill. And Paul can do whatever the fuck he wants to do. That’s fine. But to me that is showmanship and just kind of bullshit. It’s like how flexible are you? How adaptable are you that you can’t go into a restaurant and just be like, well… And maybe do some education there. Well, maybe in the future you guys could endeavor to have a higher quality of oil or something. Or you put on this three ring circus of-
Nicki: I don’t know. I feel like Karen is very sensitive to seed oils. Pennegras.
Robb: She used to be and she got a-
Nicki: There are people that-
Robb: Well, and it wasn’t-
Nicki: … feel that-
Robb: It wasn’t seed oils, it was any type of meat that was fed something other than grass.
Nicki: Okay.
Robb: And she was legitimately reactive to that.
Nicki: So I just want to… Because I feel like there are people who definitely feel awful after consuming, and it’s probably not everybody. And I agree to some extent with your showmanship point, but-
Robb: Well, I appreciate the pushback. My thing is that I feel like I am as far out on the compromise scale as most people get. And maybe this is just one of those things that I don’t significantly react to. And so maybe I don’t take it as seriously at all.
Nicki: Maybe it’s sort of like when you said, “Ah, people who have back pain, they’re just faking it,” until you had a back injury.
Robb: Could be similar, could be similar, could be similar. But I still in the grand scheme of things where it’s like we got people off of donuts, we got people off of Cheetos, that’s a win. That’s a huge win. And then, it gets-
Nicki: And then to tell them to skip the eggs and bacon when… Is sort of…
Robb: Yeah. And for me, so I’m pretty active and on a busy day. Like an active jujitsu day, I might burn 1200 calories doing jujitsu and I just can’t eat 3,600 calories of beef. I can’t do it. I’ve tried, I just can’t do it. And maybe that’s just my own individual problem. But I… A lot of the people that I see hand wringing over this stuff, they’re still… They’ve not even gotten in and weighed and measured their food once. And there’s a bunch of other… And they’re not lifting weights, they’re not doing some zone two cardio. They’re not endeavoring to either get real or analogous sunlight on their skin on a daily basis.
I just feel like there’s all this other stuff that is guaranteed benefit, low-hanging fruit versus this. I know that the seed oil thing is super sexy right now, and there are people… When I brought this stuff up and I was kind of pushing back on it, one of the people who was pretty prominent in this space, and I won’t mention his name right now. But when he was kind of dressing me down, he mentioned, “Well, Robb used to be quite popular, but his popularity is really waned over time.”
And I replied to him, “I’m like, what the fuck does that have-
Nicki: Yeah. What does that have-
Robb: … to do with anything?” So this is someone that I would kind of consider a colleague within this space. And this topic is so incendiary that just the fact that I’m pushing back on it a little bit then creates this scenario in which we get character-
Nicki: Has to discredit you in some way.
Robb: … assassination. Which if you want me to crawl up your ass sideways, do that to me. Which is part of the reason why I’m in this state.
Nicki: You’re pretty pretty fired up right now.
Robb: I’ve been on multiple email threads about this with the low-carb network practitioners, and this is where people are very knowledgeable. They mentioned hexane and glyphosate, and I was like, “No, the hexane is a…” If you want to get wrapped around the axle of that, cool, but here’s the toxicology on it. You will get more under… All these other circumstances and the amount you would need to eat to even be at the level that a typical auto worker gets in a day, you would need eat 50 kilograms of it. It’s like there’s just no… And then the glyphosate thing. Does glyphosate suck? Yeah, it completely sucks and you’re not going to get it from a lipid-based source.
And so what I’m seeing in this space is the same type of just take my brain out, be religious about this thing that I see among vegans. It’s like, what about the toxicology? What about the basic chemistry? What about the trade-offs? What other things am I trading off here to have this extreme perfection in this thing? And again, we’ve known people and I am one of those people that is quite sensitive to a host of things and if you need to tighten this up for it to work for you, great. But that’s not the standard to apply to everybody.
And the people that I see doing that are usually, they haven’t worked with large numbers of people. They’ve certainly never worked with people in a capacity that is the way that they earn their living. Because it’s like, “Well, you can have whatever fucking high-minded ideals you want, so long as nobody is responsible for getting success on the back end.” ‘Cause I can just set arbitrary standards and have these people fail again and again and never hear about it because I’m not responsible for them. And I know we-
Nicki: Jerry?
Robb: … have a busy day in, so I should shut the fuck up on this.
Nicki: Jerry, I hope that answered your question. I think your bacon and eggs-
Robb: Probably get plenty of inbound around this.
Nicki: I think your bacon and eggs are probably good to go.
Robb: I think, yes. The short answer is that’s fine.
Nicki: Okay, next question is from Will on saturated fat for type one diabetic. And Will writes, “I am 51 years old and a type one diabetic, five foot 10 and 170 pounds. I’m also very lean and carry a healthy amount of muscle mass. Since I’m wholly reliant on exogenous insulin, I’m hyper aware of my own insulin sensitivity or lack thereof. Every time I eat a large bolus of saturated fat, especially beef, my insulin sensitivity drops dramatically and I end up taking two to three times the amount of insulin for a known food than normal. The worst food offenders are saturated fat plus starch combinations like steak and potato or coconut curry and rice. Even if I restrict the carbs completely, large doses of saturated fat leave me chasing blood sugars and often injecting large doses of insulin to counteract the high glucose levels. Aside from limiting my intake of beef, lamb and other meats containing lots of saturated fat, what proteins would you rely on for health and body composition?”
Robb: So, Will, I really appreciate this question, particularly in the context of all these seed oils and stuff like that. Because there are a ton of folks out there that are, “Just eat saturated fat.” And they even view monounsaturated fats like linoleic acid from olive oil as suspect at this point, which I find it’s crazy. I am so appreciative of carnivore and keto and these low carb things. And it’s fine that people have different opinions on this, but I feel like folks are kind of going out of their way to ignore clinical manifestations exactly like this.
So we see this a lot within the Bernstein diabetes community because people… Dr. Bernstein talks about the law of small numbers. We want the insulin bolus to be small. We want the delta and blood glucose to be small. It’s kind of like you don’t want to over correct on an icy road.
So I think a place to go, there are leaner cuts of beef. When you look at tri-tip versus chuck steak or ribeye, the tri-tip is super lean and there are leaner cuts even than tri-tip. So I think can still use beef sources, but you just seek out the lower fat cuts for that type of meat. You would probably be well-served to use some nuts and seeds. Maybe you soak them and sprout them if you have some gut issues with them, lightly roast them so that they’re more digestible. But you haven’t damaged any of the fats in them. But this is one of the things that the vegans do kind of get right and that they, in some ways, rightfully harangue the low-carb scene, which is high saturated fat intake negatively impacts insulin response. Period. Full stop.
And people can get all butt hurt about this, but it just alters the membrane fluidity of cells. Things don’t move through the cells as well, and you need the insulin receptor to translocate through the cell for shit to work. It’s literally a physical property here. So there’s nothing controversial about this, there’s nothing weird about this. The thing that the vegans don’t really get about this, I think potentially, is if you have a functioning pancreas and you’re generally eating low-carb, I don’t know that clinically this matters that much, but maybe it does. I’ve talked to John Wellborn about this and although he and I have a mutual acquaintance, Dr. Tom, who I think is kind of crazy, but he’s crazy smart. And things that he has mentioned is that when he checks on people who are like super carnivore, super high saturated fat intake, they have shit insulin resistance. They also tend to have some high systemic inflammation.
Something that people forget about just saturated fats in general is that they preferentially translocate, LPS, lipopolysaccharide, the products that are on the outside of gram-negative bacteria. It facilitates the movement of that gram-negative bacteria material from outside the gut to inside the body, and that is disastrous for inflammatory processes. This is the thing that kills people when we end up in a septic shock scenario.
I think that this is part of the mechanism of why we see elevated lipoproteins in cholesterol with increases in saturated fat because the body is getting exposed to more lipopolysaccharide and lipoproteins remove LPS. They have binding proteins on it that help remove and detoxify it. It’s pointed out that people with high cholesterol tend to survive sepsis better than people with low cholesterol. But there might be a trade-off with that with regard to cardiovascular disease.
And I’ve completely driven off the cliff away from this type one diabetes question. But, I think look at fat content within, say beef and lamb-
Nicki: Different cuts.
Robb: Different cuts, go for leaner cuts. You could certainly look at fish. You’re generally going to get more poly and monounsaturated fats with that nuts and seeds. If you tolerate those things, I think that’s fine. Again, Nick Norowitz, the link that I had on the last question… The mono and poly unsaturated fats, particularly if you are on the low-carb side of things, will improve insulin sensitivity. And I think that will be of benefit for the type one diabetic.
The type one diabetic is not that you don’t really want to be in ketosis per se because that blunts insulin sensitivity. This is why Bernstein is a high protein, moderate fat, low-carb diet. The goal isn’t ketosis. The goal is a super metered glucose release from the liver so that we can control that as carefully as we can with exogenous insulin. And, I think that improving insulin sensitivity with a variety of fats, not just purely saturated fat is going to be a good move.
And like you see it in spades… The type one diabetic I think is so interesting as a metabolic experiment because you see what sleep deprivation does. You see what changes in lipid composition accomplishes with regards to how much insulin, any given bolus of food is necessary. And it really… You don’t need to cater everybody’s life as if they were a type one diabetic, but you could do way worse than emulating what the type one diabetic needs to do to be able to manage blood sugars properly.
Nicki: Got it. Okay.
Final question. This week is from Renee on migraines with an aura. She writes, “My daughter has suffered from monthly migraines since the age of two. She vomits every time. Around the age of eight, she began getting migraines with aura, and the vomiting went from one occurrence to six to 15 hours long. She’s now 12, almost out of puberty and still suffers from auras. We’ve tried a lot of functional medicine but can’t seem to find many answers. Her neurologist wants to put her on anti-seizure meds, but we have put it off due to the side effects of that class of drug. Preventative drugs are not favored either due to the side effects. I, too, suffer from auras but only get them when I work out at 100%. CrossFit causes many of my auras and I have since stopped Crossfit. I try to work out at 80% to prevent them. Do you have any advice on how to prevent auras with a migraine?”
Robb: I have had some experience with this. I don’t know if you’ve tried feverfew in the past, but there is some pretty legit literature supporting feverfew. It modifies vascular dynamics. So like vasoconstriction, vasodilation. I have a link to some kind of studies and definitely more on the anecdotal stage, but super safe. Given the severity of what you have going on that may not be something that’s going to work. But I think it’s kind of low-hanging fruit that could be plugged in and maybe it takes 5% off of the thing, 20% off.
Generally elimination diets have been shown to be favorable for migraine and other types of kind of vascular-related headaches. And I have a link to that one. But really the ultimate elimination diet is a ketogenic diet and I have a link migraine prevention through ketogenic diet more than body mass composition changes and it’s really robust. It reduced the frequency of the migraines by like 80%. It reduced the severity on a self-perceived score by like 50 to 60%.
And this is still… You never really know what type of adherence folks had on these protocols. I didn’t notice that they were tracking blood ketones and stuff like that. It was just they’re doing this diet. What’s interesting is when we look at parallels between epilepsy and migraines, there’s a fair amount of overlap. It’s clearly something vascular going on, something going on with serotonin and dopamine and different neurotransmitters.
But what’s interesting in all of this is that generally cleaning up the diet, like a lower glycemic load diet has been shown for most epileptics to be as beneficial as a ketogenic diet. And then for more difficult cases than things like a modified Atkins, which is a higher protein, usually not as high of ketones because of the higher protein that works even better than the basic low glycemic load.
Then you have the full on three to one, four to one ketogenic diet, which I think still offers a lot of benefit for very, very difficult to treat cases. And then I didn’t put it in here, but there are things like Kinetic, which is, K-I-N-E-T-
Nicki: I-C.
Robb: I-C, Which is an exogenous ketone option. Talking about a twelve-year-old girl here, so the ability to get her to do a ketogenic diet may be challenging. Kinetic is, in my opinion, it tastes really good. It gets super high blood ketone levels and it’s something that she could just have on her person and carry around throughout the day. And this is stuff that you would play with, do you just do it all the time? Do you do it right at the beginning of an aura? Because these interventions with some of the drugs right at the beginning of an aura, some of these vascular modifiers can prevent the full transition to a migraine.
Nicki: Well, you’ve talked a little bit about how for some folks just cutting out some of the carbs and then adding MCT can kind of be that bridge. And so for a twelve-year-old, it sounds like maybe if she’s not game yet or not quite willing to go full on ketogenic, she could clean stuff up a bit, focus on protein, some good fats. But then have either MCT or this Kinetic option to kind of supplement and goose things in the direction.
Robb: Things that folks… And this is maybe something that we put together, a little guide on this or something like that. You mix up some mayonnaise and you make it fifty-fifty like mayonnaise, MCT. And when they do sandwiches or they’re dipping french fries-
Nicki: Chicken salad or tuna salad.
Robb: … in something. Yeah. Then that way you’re really flying that MCT kind of under the radar. It’s not like, “Come on honey, come drink your-
Nicki: Tablespoon. Yeah.
Robb: … tablespoon shot down. So there’s things like that and then maybe you supplement that with the Kinetic.
Nicki: Can you mix it in heavy cream for-
Robb: Absolutely.
Nicki: … the mousse thing that you make, right?
Robb: Yeah.
Nicki: You often will do a heavy cream based…
Robb: And then I just put… I take half a cup of cream, a tablespoon of cocoa powder, and then I will whip that, make whipped cream out of it, and it ends up being this whipped mousse dessert.
Nicki: You add stevia.
Robb: And I add stevia. I will say that the addition of one tablespoon of MCT-
Nicki: MCT.
Robb: … in that half cup, it makes the whipped cream not as whippy. It’s harder to get it-
Nicki: What about the flavor?
Robb: The flavor’s great.
Nicki: The flavor’s there. So it might not be-
Robb: You won’t taste it at all.
Nicki: Okay.
Robb: It doesn’t-
Nicki: So, there’s ways to sneak it in for somebody who is either new to this or half on board, half off to make it fly.
Robb: And I got to say this. This whipped cream plus cocoa powder plus stevia, you could have somebody who is used to eating the most sugary diet imaginable, and I think that they would be like, “Yeah, that’s pretty good.”
Nicki: The caveat there is the calorie… You do it for the calories after you’ve been training.
Robb: Correct.
Nicki: So if somebody is trying to-
Robb: This is a 12-year-old girl though, she’s growing and so it’s probably not a big deal. It is just caloric dense.
Nicki: Our broad audience, like somebody who is working on body composition goals, you’re probably not going to want to add that in. If you’re trying to maintain-
Robb: Unless your body composition goal is-
Nicki: … certain calorie level.
Robb: … Sumo, then it may be super helpful
Nicki: Or you’re really, really active and have a hard time-
Robb: Getting enough. Yeah.
Nicki: Getting enough in. Yeah.
Robb: Cool.
Nicki: All righty. Awesome folks. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of The Healthy Rebellion Radio. Remember to check out our show sponsor LMNT for all your electrolyte needs. And also if you want to get any more of this year’s chocolate medley, the last day to order that is March 27th. You can order that at drinklmnt.com/robb. And I’m so excited for what’s coming with LMNT here in just about, gosh, six weeks. So we’ll have more teaser stuff coming up.
Robb: I would let Nicki tell you, but then I would have to kill her.
Nicki: Yes. Well, lots of people would kill me if I told you right now, so anyway…
Robb: But it is awesome.
Nicki: It is awesome. All right, thanks folks. We will see you next week. Take care.
Robb: Take care everybody.
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
Join the Discussion