00:06:07 · Justin Mares, Daisy Wolf
[00:06:07] S1: Yeah. So I think that the average American gets way too much of their caloric intake in the form of what's called polyunsaturated fatty acids, PUFAs. So pupas are the primary fatty acid found in a lot of seed oils. They're very high in nuts. They're like in everything, basically. And what's key is they actually... These pupas will... They make up a lot of the meat concentration in chickens specifically. So chickens have... They're monogastric. They have one stomach. So it means when they eat what they eat, it goes directly into their meat tissue, whereas cows have two, and so they basically can actually eat things like grass. They have a rumen, they process it, and it gets integrated in their muscle tissue differently. And so, in The US, most chickens are fed corn and soy almost exclusively. And so you have these chickens basically that have the muscle and fat profile of something resembling a seed oil. And so I think that, like, chickens basically, I think, used to be much healthier. I think that if you're trying to cut down on PUFAs, which I think is broadly just a very good idea, especially if you live in The US, eating chicken every single day, changing that is probably a very easy way to lower your PUFA intake and which I think has a whole host of benefits from an inflammation and other kinds of standpoint. But, yeah, I'd avoid it. Avoid it. [00:07:22] S2: Oils, like, universally universally bad. Can you give us a few thoughts on that?
00:07:28 · Justin Mares
[00:07:28] S1: Yeah. So this is a... What I would say is a contested area. I think that the evidence is fairly clear personally. I think at the very least, even the people that are most pro see will say things that will agree that these are among the most highly processed things that you can put in your body. They're basically... If you think about what is a seed oil, it's extracting very, very small amounts of oil from a soybean or a sunflower or the canola plant. Think about soybean. Where is the oil in a soybean? You never eat a soybean. You're like, oh, wow, this is such an oily thing the way that you experience an olive or an avocado or something like that. And that's because there's barely any oil in that. Same with corn. There's not a lot of oil in these sorts of things. And so it takes something like the equivalent, I think, of ninety eight years years of corn to get five tablespoon of corn seed oil. And so what that means is because there's so little oil, they have to go through a very chemically intensive process to extract those small amounts of oil at very high heat to turn them into what we call a seed oil. There is this multi crazy step process to take something from corn or soybeans and turn it into the seed oil. Like, if you think about how you make olives, you pull them, press them, that's olive oil. That is not at all the process that we go through to make seed oil. And so I think that the evidence is quite clear that this process, in this process, these oils oxidize. They have a fatty acid and linoleic acid composition that I think is very unfriendly to human health. There have been a lot of studies where they've basically taken rats or other mammals, and they've swapped out sunflower oil for coca oil, and seen metabolic diseases basically go up inflammation, fatty liver disease, all these sorts of things massively go up. And if you think about, like, the average in I think it was 1970, soybean oil made up almost to 0% of the average American's caloric intake. We said we had much lower rates of obesity, inflammation, chronic disease, things like that. Today, the average American gets 20%, almost 20% of their total caloric intake in the form of soybean oil. And we have this record chronic disease crisis. And so I think in a best case scenario, you could say these are highly processed things that are maybe okay to not.
00:09:42 · Justin Mares, Daisy Wolf
That's not where I land. But I think that's like a best case scenario. In the worst case, I think you could make a very compelling argument that seed oils are among the chief reasons for the massive and rampant chronic disease crisis that we see today. So yeah, I think they're like very, very smart to avoid. But I really, really do think that like for so many of these things, the lens that the average person does not have and think about the food system is the quality lens. And like, we say, is gluten with bread good or bad? Or is sugar good or bad? Is chicken good or bad? I really think that the thing that people are not thinking about is the quality of this stuff matters a tremendous degree. Freshly milled, well sourced, like all this sort of... Like, bread like that is a totally different product than buying Wonder Bread from the center of the grocery store. Yet we call them both bread and say, like, categorically, you should avoid Wonder, which I think is kind of a mistake. [00:10:38] S2: What's the most indulgent thing or thing that's, like, bad for your health that you do with some regularity? [00:10:44] S1: Oh, man. I think... So, again, on the quality thing, like, I've recently been totally into this. It's called Alecs, a l e c s, a two. They have this, like, regenerative ice cream that is insanely good. And so my wife and I have been having, like, having that a couple days a week recently, and it's, you know, phenomenal. Like, incredibly well sourced, incredibly high quality, but definitely an indulgence. [00:11:09] S2: I forgot to ask you about protein.
00:11:09 · Daisy Wolf, Justin Mares
[00:11:09] S2: I forgot to ask you about protein. [00:11:12] S1: Yeah. [00:11:13] S2: Do we all need a 100 grams a day of protein? How many grams of protein do you get on an average I
00:11:19 · Justin Mares
[00:11:19] S1: I think that this is one of those things that is really person dependent. Like, probab... Like, a a man's needs are different from a protein standpoint than a woman's need. A pregnant woman's needs for protein are different than, like, you know, someone who's not pregnant. And so and also, like, it varies often by activity level. And so if you are, like, active, weight training, trying to get some movement in, all these sorts of things, I think that you should, you know, improve... Increase your protein requirements in in line with that. Like, I probably have... I don't track it super, super tightly, although I probably should. But I probably get somewhere in the neighborhood of, like, a 120 to a 150 grams of proteins a day. Like, I will have, most days some sort of protein powder shake, and then every day I'll have like one to two cups of bone broth. And so that's like 50 grams right there, and that's not very calorie dense. And so that's outside of like eating any other food. The other thing that I think is very important from a protein standpoint is everyone is eating the same types of protein. And so when you're thinking about eating protein, you're like almost always getting your protein from cuts of muscle meat. So like ground beef, steak, chicken, know, salmon, whatever. What I think that most people miss, and if you look at like hunter gatherer diets or ancestral diet, they would sort of get a full spectrum of amino acids and many different types of protein in their diet, and get a lot more collagen, a lot more gelatin, a lot more glycine, lot more of these other sorts of proteins and amino acids that are so key in building a very healthy gut, skin, joints, the like. That is almost entirely missing in the average person's diet today. And so I think that something that people get a lot of... Like a very high ROI thing to introduce into your diet is some sort of like glycine gelatin and collagen supplementation, either in the form of whole foods, which would be like, honestly, like bone broth and stuff like that. Or you can get very, very high quality gelatin and collagen supplement.
00:13:20 · Daisy Wolf, Justin Mares
[00:13:20] S2: Talk to us about supplementation. [00:13:23] S1: Yeah. [00:13:23] S2: What do you take every day? When do you take it? Why do you take it?