new connection where you can tune in and grow i'm your host and you may be familiar with new connection magazine for conscious living which has been enjoyed by readers in the pacific northwest for more than twenty years now we are excited to bring a new connection to life in your home on new connection we welcome authors practitioners and visionaries to share new ideas for alternative health spirituality and personal growth today  to care a lot of and it's not necessarily an entirely simple answer but we've had roughly three million years close to it of human to human evolution and we have a couple of in what people think of as i stage but whatever we we as humans during that long history of evolution would have certainly impacted our physiological requirements you and nutritional requirements so it's a starting place to look at how humans have have lived for the duration of our evolutionary history through the vast majority of which is fundamentally a hunter gatherer have we changed by has arm physiological makeup really changed that much from that time and how we know we're not in nine point nine nine percent exactly the same as we were before the dawn of agriculture and you know the last ten thousand years or so have just been a blink in an eye of our own evolutionary history so we're actually rather ill adapted to a diet that is agriculturally based in other words based in diet do you carbs help or hurt us well again it depends on what you're talking about when you talk about carbohydrates what i'm referring to when i talk about the deleterious effect of carbohydrates or sugars and starches but carbohydrates also include substances like protein and fat to us in a physiological level mean mean survival so we're we're cutely dependent on those foods for for our nutritional needs and i think that part of our physiological history which are pesticides and and pollutants and all kinds of things that that we're dealing with now is a rather a natural slot in modern life so in your your the natural fats or rancid fats either the artificially created trans fats which are also known as hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oils and we also want to avoid things that are overly processed as in a lot of the vegetable oils and things like that which are really new addition to the human diet or fats that have become rancid either through frying or just sitting around too long  definitely do not do good things for us but anything that is a natural fat that would appear otherwise to nature it's you know has a role to play in human health this includes saturated fats which are also overly generalized there are many different varieties of saturated fat some are short medium chain that we actually burn preferentially for energy that have a role to play in supporting our immune function even some  which have other roles to play actually the most accurate in fact there is which is called eighteen carbon steering casts it is actually the preferred fuel for the heart for the human heart as well it's you know liver and kidneys and that sort of thing so what food are we chain the longer the chains the more difficult they are to break down and use as energy that may be used for a whole variety of things though supporting our memory and supporting the structural integrity of our cell a membrane which cholesterol plays a role in as well  half the amount of fat in the human brain is saturated one of the reasons that the primary form of storage fat in the human body is saturated it's that guess what we're not refrigerated and with all the talk about  little consideration seems to be given to the fact that saturated fats by their very nature are resistant oxidation so they don't break down and get become rancid is easily they also help to support the utilization of the polyunsaturated fats we think of this good we don't want that to be based on polyunsaturated heaven forbid trans fats so there are a variety of fats and most of the longer chain fats are actually there even absorbed into the bloodstream there absorbed through th system and they play both short and long and fats play complex roles with respect to our immune function our cognitive functioning our nervous system is eighty percent fat and you cannot have a healthy functioning nervous system without sufficient dietary fat and this is one of the big problems that comes along when they talk about low fat diets they do local astro diets they do not support healthy cognitive mental emotional functioning at all so very lucky to get natural fats so what you're talking about are natural fats not the manmade right trans fats in our diet what sort of foods would we want to get natural fat well naturally occurring fats of course are going to occur in meats and fish and eggs and things of that nature we also see them in nuts and seeds and and there are some traditional oils like you know coconut oil and olive oil and it's like that that have been used for quite some time that we know to have you know to be reasonably beneficial actually with all of oil it's not that all of oil is so great for you it's kind of how bad it's not all of oil sort of neutral in the equation but but it's fine and in fact the when you look at a piece of meat so you have a piece of steak on your plate more than half of the in that steak people think well that's all saturated fat more than half of it is actually unset traded fat is model and saturated just like all of the oil it's just that there's a higher percentage of saturates in there both you know short medium long chain and also if you happen to get that piece of meat from an animal that was fed a diet that was natural to that animal in other words a grass fed animal will have actually a good amount of omega three use in fact if you have a grass fed state in front of you you may have more omega three s program than you would in a piece of wild caught salmon for instance so our ancestors got their omega three s mainly by eating wild game and in the form of omega three s found in animal sourced foods like like either wild game or grass fed meat or wild caught cold water fish but also make a three as are the ones that we make the best use of now the stuff that you find in flax seed oil and walnuts and that kind of thing there that's what's called the parent form of omega three in theory we should be able to go through a conversion process and make use of that eventually  but in reality humans are actually not very well designed to make ideal use of those fats we're lucky to actually have a conversion of maybe three to five percent of that what's called alpha  be of northern european celtic descent native descent you will probably lack the internal the enzymes necessary internally in order to make that conversion at all so there are certain people that because  that are something we don't naturally process well well our ancient ancestors never really had an emergency need to lower blood sugar you know what i mean when you consider that we're really creatures of the ice n they all except yes this is this is accepted you know under understanding we really only spent a minute amount of that time period in temperate during a revolution during temperate periods where plant life would have flourished over most of the planet on the average we've spent about ninety percent of that really in during much colder the planet was much colder and yes there was equitorial region where people may have congregated but humans were all over the planet if we were designed somehow to be dependent on carbohydrates as our primary source to fuel as the food pyramid would suggest we never would have survived to this point if we're really designed to make use of fat it's our primary source of fuel that's why we're able to store enough fat for instance the average person could probably they wouldn't be happy doing this and i don't suggest it but we could probably survive a good month or so without any food and just living on our fat stores alone as a primary source of energy whereas if we had to depend on sugar is our primary source of fuel we can't store more something to eat and i think that you know we need that super charge but you don't necessarily need rocket fuel to get around in life and do your day to day things sugar which is basically we're talking about simply not true it's only conditionally true if we have adapted ourselves to depending upon sugar is our primary source of fuel then we are enslaved to that need but that's not the only option or actually better design to make use of something called ketones as  primary source of fuel ketones are the energy units fat and ketones are very long burning they're very even burning we have a you know tremendous supply always at our disposal and the only tissues in the human body that actually have to have new coast in order to fuel themselves in order in order to to go on blood cells they they feed and the sugar is an anaerobic fuel in order to preserve their precious cargo which is oxygen but everything else and human body that you know can burn in an ox is can be sustained in an oxygen based atmosphere and happily depend upon ketones for its primary source of fuel ketones and free fatty acids are what are made for and it makes sense if you look upon these macronutrients like like sugars and fats strictly from the standpoint of carbohydrates and fats strictly from the standpoint of the energy that they provide as again you can look upon carbohydrate sugar and starch as being basically a form of kindling so you're brown rice in your beans and things like that you could sort of look upon as twigs on the metabolic fire so to speak and and you can look upon things like white rice potatoes bread cereal it's like throwing paper on the fire alcohol would be like throwing gasoline on the fire lighter fluid on the fire and i don't know if you've ever heated your home with stove i have i have one from minnesota so these analogies work well for making it and if i had to heat my house with nothing but kindling why i could do it but i would be having to manage that only way i would have no life i would be a slave to keeping that fire alive i'd be throwing temples at tweets that have to be huge volume of space to store it in and i would be preoccupied with that all day long and heaven forbid i should you know take a little too much time away too i don't take a bathroom break or go do something and suddenly like oh my gosh the fire is going out i thought it lighter fluid you know whatever it takes or paper to get it going again to keep feeding that fire this is what the majority of people are doing this is what a grain based diet does to us it gives us in unnecessary preoccupation with where our next meal is coming from and it forces us to have to manage blood sugar but what if you were able to take blood sugar completely out of the mood and cognitive energy equation and instead now you have a big log to put on fire which would be dietary fat and also the fat that we have stored in our bodies you put a fat on the fat you put a log on the fire and now you have a life you can go off and you can do other things you can even you know sleep and the fire will burn and as the fire starts to go down  look and say oh time to add another log you know you add another log and you can still go on with your life and it's even bernie it's not this chronic up and down sort of emergency state which is how most people seem to conduct their because our dreams are actually designed to increase blood sugar when it gets too low when it plummets you eat a meal you have like a bagel and a cup of coffee first thing in the morning and some orange juice your blood sugar shoots up insulin which only is able to sort of generally manage blood sugar that's not its real main biological role but it can take over this sort of in a crude way and insulin will take it and and take blood sugar out of your bloodstream because it's an emergency when there's too much sugar in there sugar is very damaging to the system creates a lot of free radical activity and now your blood sugar plummets down because insulin has been released and if it plummets too quickly feel anxious making us feel irritable making us maybe feel a little hyperactive or jittery or whatever else people feel and on the way down people might feel fatigued or brain fog you know i can be on a more of a diet depending on fat as a primary source of fuel you know i could have a say a duck and cook something you know it's six o'clock in the morning and if i haven't eaten anything by one in the afternoon i'll probably be a little hungry which is normal hunger is a normal signal but it's not a state where i'm extremely fatigue else people get when they are having that blood sugar moment and i can eat a meal and i'm not hungry anymore but i'm not more energized or you're getting around lunch so for part of the distant plan to work is it basically having a little bit of natural added every meal what are the guidelines are there any rice is there any is there any carbohydrate  ancestors would have if they were omnivores they would have eaten anything they weren't necessarily selecting food with the idea of living the obvious and longest possible life they were concerned with survival and they were on a feast or famine in a feast or famine sort of psychological state in all times as all wild things are and it makes sense that you don't know where the next meal is coming from so of course you're going to eat all you can now you know i don't know that we always had the ability to eat so absent slabs of meat the way some paleo pundits would you know would promote because any time we killed anything we had to divide amongst our family members of the tribal group or whatever and we may not have gotten very much in a meal but it would have always you know certainly sought out that's more nutrient dense foods there's no question if you've ever been spent any time in hiking in the wild or whatever  ails you understand fairly quickly that you just you can't sustain yourself munching on leaves and berries for very long you really do need these extremely nutrient dense foods and that's what we would have pursued but then again we would  yeah what the what i ought to do with my book was also look at modern human longevity research and see how we can take those basic concepts as basic principles and apply them in a way that is in  alignment with what they're finding now with modern longevity research and it turns out that the single most notable factor in individuals who are the longest lived and this is everything from yeast to primate including us is low insulin levels ok and so anything that stimulates insulin secretion is probably something we want to avoid as much as possible we want to minimize our need for insulin maybe in a reached for the occasional starchy router to something like that when they could cook well because a lot of these foods are also really rather talks in the wild really only relatively recently have we had a dop to adapt the use of fire to cooking methods to really be able to make the best use of plant foods but what i did present in my book is a way of optimizing these nutrient ratios to maximize your health and longevity so the here's the basic formula minimizing to the extent possible or eliminating sugar and starch from the diet the occasional half full of berry is and whatever else i see there is a lot of you know nutrients  and berries and things that i think are quite beneficial and so a little of that is ok but we really want to limit limit consumption even of fruit and moderate our protein intake it turns out that there are metabolic pathways that we activate if we over consume protein that are aren't necessarily in our best interest to do by not activating those metabolic pathways and already eating just enough protein your metabolic needs to meet the needs of restructure rebuilding your body to be a supply and whatever you need for all of that we don't need more than maybe six or seven ounces a meter fish or eggs or whatever a day to meet that requirement and so by limiting it to that and by not by limiting it to that what we're maximizing is our longevity and lifespan because what  is our body's own repair mechanisms kick in in a way to help regenerate and preserve us when it's wonderful to do for us so yes i really appreciate all you've shown absolutely primal diet and learning