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FC2O Episode 1 - Mark Sisson
45 Plays6 years ago
In this episode we explore with Mark Sisson, a leader in the Paleo field, his journey into Paleo, his influences, people who he loves to learn from, how he's recovered from injury and illness applying his knowledge and where Paleo will lead us in the future. Mark shares his unique take on how Paleo provides deep and easily applied insights to help us from chaos to order.
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Transcript
Mark's Ambitious Goal to Impact Millions
00:00:00
Speaker
So Mark, you were saying that one of your goals is to hit 100 million people that you want to influence, you want to touch with your work. Is that something that you have always had that as a goal or is that something that has kind of evolved as you've developed your business?
00:00:16
Speaker
No, it's evolved for sure. I started out wanting to reach a million people on my blog. Within a year or two, I realized that that was going to be, I wouldn't say an easy goal, but that was going to come up pretty quickly. And so I shifted, I added a zero to that. And so for the longest time, my mission was to affect the lives of 10 million people through
00:00:35
Speaker
through my teachings. And the way I wanted to measure this was I wanted to allow people a means by which they could access better health and take themselves off the medical conveyor belt and off the insurance system that becomes such an abject failure in the US.
00:00:58
Speaker
And that meant learning how to eat right and how to move right and how to sleep and how to manifest excellent health without the requirement of a physician.
Achievements and Influences in Health and Fitness
00:01:38
Speaker
Hello and welcome to FC2.0 with me, Matt Walden, and my guest today, Mark Sisson. Now, I'm feeling very honored to have Mark joining us on FC2.0. Mark's the author of numerous books, including the Primal Blueprint, which was credited with turbocharging growth of the Primal Paleo movement back in 2009. In 2017, he became a New York Times bestselling author with the Keto Reset Diet, which reached the number one overall bestseller among all books on Amazon for two days. So that's quite an incredible achievement.
00:01:53
Speaker
To order FC to
00:02:05
Speaker
Mark's also written several other books, including the popular Primal themed cookbooks and lifestyle books. He's the publisher of Mark's Daily Apple.com, the number one ranked blog for over a decade in the health and fitness category. And he also started the very popular Primal Blueprint podcast, which I'm featuring on very soon. So look out for that. Now, Mark's the founder of Primal Kitchen and Primal Nutrition as well. And you can learn more about that at primalkitchen.com and primalblueprint.com.
00:02:29
Speaker
We also have a very generous offer for our FC2O listeners from Mark at the end of the podcast, so stay tuned for that. Show notes and imagery are available at MattWarden.com under the podcast tab. So here we go. Welcome to the From Chaos to Order podcast with myself, Matt Warden, and with Mark Sisson today. So, Mark, thank you very much for joining us. It's great to have you. It's great to be here, man. This is going to be fun today, I think.
00:02:57
Speaker
Yeah, I think it will. I think it will. Obviously, I've followed your work for a while. I think, you know, when we first were chatting a few months back, I was saying that, you know, in the early days when I first was looking up Paleo, there were very few people out there that were actually covering it, but you were one of those people. And so you've been in it right since the beginning. So I'm really interested to understand what it was that led you into the whole Paleo journey and, you know, your sort of background leading into becoming this kind of, you know, icon of primal living.
00:03:27
Speaker
Sure. You know, I was always interested in health and fitness from a very early age, and I was also interested in longevity, which made me a really weird, nerdy kid. From reading books on health and how to get stronger, how to get fitter, how to live longer from the ages of 12, 13, 14.
00:03:51
Speaker
Sort of tangentially, I found myself jogging to and from school just as a means of beating the bus, conserving time and being more time efficient with my own life. So between the jogging to and from school, which put in about three miles a day total
00:04:08
Speaker
of quote training and my interest in human performance and longevity and I started reading books on diet and how to maximize performance using diet. Of course the conventional wisdom in those days and this is now we're talking the late 1960s.
00:04:28
Speaker
The conventional wisdom was to consume a lot of carbohydrates, complex carbohydrates, grains, in order to fuel all of the miles that you were putting in. And then coincidentally, Ken Cooper came out with this book in 1968, I believe, called Aerobics, and sort of spawned this whole movement that in the US manifested itself as the distance running movement.
00:04:52
Speaker
So people started putting in lots of, they started jogging and started running marathons and started training with the understanding or at least the belief that doing so would confer some sort of longevity, some sort of benefit to their heart. And that made sense to me in the context of what I knew to be true. So I started running more and I started eating a lot of carbohydrates and I started entering races and performing actually quite well.
00:05:19
Speaker
And before you know it, I'm one of the top endurance athletes in the US by the end of the late 70s. And
Health Struggles Despite Athletic Success
00:05:28
Speaker
I looked pretty fit on the outside. I was on the cover of Runner's World magazine three times and I manifested this
00:05:35
Speaker
exterior that seemed to look like it was a strong fit body. But on the inside, I was really falling apart. I was starting to get osteoarthritis in my feet. I was getting tendonitis and tendinopathies throughout my body, primarily in the hips. I had irritable bowel syndrome, which was horrible and pretty much dictated hour to hour what I did throughout my day.
00:06:02
Speaker
I had upper respiratory tract infections six or eight times a year because my immune system was shot. I had gastroesophageal reflux disease. I had hemorrhoids. I mean, it was like a total wreck. And here I was, this kid who had started out with the intention of being healthy and living longer. And the next thing you know, I'm this performance beast
00:06:28
Speaker
who's turning out some pretty good running times and eventually some triathlon times but is literally falling apart on the inside. So I kind of had to take a step back and I mean I had to because I had to quit training at that high level. I just could not do it anymore with my osteoarthritis and my tendinopathy. So I just kind of rededicated my life in the
00:06:50
Speaker
in my late 20s and early 30s to figuring out how I could be.
Shift to Paleo and Evolutionary Biology
00:06:55
Speaker
All those things I said I wanted to be strong and lean and healthy at the same time without all that pain and suffering and sacrifice and all the stuff that I thought you had to do in order to achieve those.
00:07:11
Speaker
And what happened was I started reading, you know, as the research in health kind of shifted a little bit and it kind of started to open up a little bit more broadly. I'd been very interested in evolution in college. I was a pre-med candidate in college, so I thought I wanted to be a doctor at some point. But
00:07:34
Speaker
I started to understand that evolution had a strong bias in achieving good health. And so I started to go down this path of evolutionary biology and looking at ways in which we evolved
00:07:52
Speaker
and how maybe that the genes that we were using to express ourselves on a minute by minute basis every day, maybe they were expecting some different inputs from what I was giving them. So that's really kind of what got me headed down that paleo path.
00:08:11
Speaker
Right. Right. Yeah. And so what was actually your event? Did you have a specific event that you trained for? Or was it a range? Yeah, so I was training for the Olympic marathon trials, the US Olympic trials in 1980 was sort of the
00:08:28
Speaker
the ultimate goal that I had in mind. And I qualified for US trials. However, I was just, by the time the trials event rolled around, two things happened. Number one, the president Jimmy Carter at the time decided we weren't gonna go to the Olympics. And so that was sort of a shallow victory for whoever won it. And then I just, I was so, again, so beat up. I went from running 120 miles a week
00:08:55
Speaker
uh in my prime training years to um only being able to run about 40 miles a week because of the of the pain and I just said look this is just as ridiculous and I'm so I had to I had to sort of quit but the marathon was eventually my you know became became the my main event although from there I still could not get it out of my mind that I needed to do something in the in the field of endurance and even with my injuries
00:09:20
Speaker
I was able to shift over to triathlon. I did Ironman triathlon a couple of times because I could ride a bike without the pounding on the joints. I would say I could swim, but I was a horrible swimmer. Excellent. Did you see this as a pattern? Obviously, you must have been mixing with a whole raft of athletes in a similar training regime and nutritional focus issue. Was that something you saw as a pattern amongst your colleagues and competitors?
00:09:50
Speaker
Well, I certainly saw way too many injuries. And most of them were, they were connective tissue injuries, which is going to, you know, which we will use to segue into the papers that we just produced. But the connective tissue injuries were, in my case, the osteoarthritis, but a lot of my friends would have these tendinopathies, whether it was plantar fasciitis, Achilles tendons.
00:10:16
Speaker
Condra Malaysia was the you know the sort of need alignment that may or may not have been an artifact of the new shoe design that was entering the world in those days as Nike was coming out with these really thick cushion shoes that would sort of bias your foot toward the
00:10:36
Speaker
pronating. But the other thing that I did notice, a lot of people who would get sick a lot, like upper respiratory infections, it was almost this sort of self
00:10:51
Speaker
directing self-limiting situation where if you trained too hard, the body just said, hey man, I'm gonna make you take four days off. I'm gonna trash your immune system. You're gonna get some sniffles and a cough and a scratchy throat and you're gonna have to take four days and not run. Because in those days, it was like you had to run it, you ran every day. Maybe there was a day off once in a while, but a day off might've been an easy 10K.
00:11:20
Speaker
right? At 630 miles, you know, instead of 15 or 20 miles. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like what the naturopaths call a healing crisis, where the body literally, you know, throws you into this crisis and try and recover a little bit, right?
00:11:36
Speaker
Well, OK. Well, the theme of the podcast, as we've discussed, is from chaos to order.
Simplifying Health with Paleo Principles
00:11:42
Speaker
And one of the things I've found with the paleo understanding of things is that it does create some level of order and understanding from the chaos and the kind of complexity that's out there. And I'm wondering, obviously, having been on this path for a long time yourself, I imagine there's a number of things that you've picked out on your journey where you think, well, actually, there's all this kind of complexity around a given topic.
00:12:05
Speaker
And actually the answer is often quite simple if you follow paleo principles. So have you got any examples or experience with that? All comes razor, baby. It's no, I've got a lot of examples. I think the more time I sort of sit back and take a 30,000 foot view of life these days, the more I realize that we have huge amounts of chaos throughout civilization right now, and most of it is unnecessary.
00:12:32
Speaker
The primary example I can think of would be just medicine in general. The fact that perhaps 80 to 90% of all medical issues, certainly people who present themselves at a hospital or at a doctor's office or an emergency room,
00:12:50
Speaker
at least in the US, do so as a result of choices they've made, lifestyle choices. They've either become overweight from inappropriate dietary choices, they're stressed out from just an inability to handle stress or layering on way too much stress in their lives.
00:13:09
Speaker
they might be osteopenic, they might have bone density issues, they might have increased risk markers for heart disease as a result of inflammation. And if you go through the litany of all the ailments that insurance covers in the US, most of them have some
00:13:33
Speaker
lifestyle etiology. In fact, most of them have some dietary etiology, but even more, even a larger sphere would have just some dietary etiology, even if it's like not getting enough sleep. So as we look at the chaos of our lives today and we say, well, first of all, chaotically, there's way too much access to food and most of it's processed food.
00:13:55
Speaker
If the real, the fix there is so simple and it's to go back to a paleolithic diast. And I don't want to, you know, invoke the caveman, you know, iconic, you know, kind of hunter-gatherer and suggest that we should all emulate that, but to look at what our genes expect of us in the way of real food, unprocessed food.
00:14:16
Speaker
A study just came out the other day that I didn't look at the study, but I saw the headlines in the New York Times. So take that with a grain of salt. But it suggested that processed food, the study actually looked at processed food as a primary diet in some people's lives. And it was adding a few pounds every month to their lives. And so this is just the fact that the food has been
00:14:45
Speaker
you know, hyper become hyper palatable. The nutrients, the macro nutrients break down much more easily and therefore simulated much more easily and therefore stored as fat much more easily. So if we if we look at diet, we can go back to, you know, a paleolithic prescription, if you will, that would suggest that if we eat real food, we avoid processed food, we avoid processed industrial seed oils, we avoid added sugars and things like that.
00:15:12
Speaker
A lot of the things that are causing pain and suffering would go away.
Impact of Modern Lifestyle on Health
00:15:19
Speaker
We can look at sleep. Sleep, you know, we have a chaotic lifestyle in terms of
00:15:25
Speaker
access to events like so much going on in our lives so much entertainment so much so many things to do artificial light that keeps us up at night allows us to stay awake allows us to you know then we have this this recent thing we call FOMO you know fear of missing out if I go to bed at 10 o'clock I'm gonna miss out on the party or I'm gonna miss out on binge watching another TV show so sleep has become compromised horribly through this chaotic lifestyle
00:15:54
Speaker
And a hunter-gatherer analysis or a hunter-gatherer method of looking at sleep would say, go to sleep when the sun goes down and get a rise when the sun comes up. Set your sleep environment to a dark room, relatively cool, a cool sleeping surface covered with a skin, no artificial light sound that is appropriate, whether it's white noise or no noise.
00:16:24
Speaker
And yet people don't do that. And so this is another, if you just look at the hunter-gatherer experience of sleep, you would see that our bodies expect us to get a lot more sleep than we do. And in fact, you know, a lot of the people in the paleo world now have been bragging about how much sleep they get, you know, on a regular basis. And I'm one of those. I mean, if I don't get eight and a half, I feel like I've short changed myself. But sleep would be,
00:16:52
Speaker
be that and then i just you know we go on and on and on about how many different areas of our lives can be impacted by this current. Civilization but i think that the interconnectedness the internet of the cell phones the personal devices are so enthralling and so engaging on one level but they take us out of.
00:17:14
Speaker
the human experience and connection, eye contact and actual conversations between two people that don't involve texts on a phone and shortcuts with communication. So I think if we look again, the hunter-gatherer experience, which was to spend meal times around a campfire or around something and enjoying the food and appreciating the food and having discussions
00:17:42
Speaker
you know, telling stories. I mean, part of the human experience is telling stories. And again, not in some LOL, you know, OMFG sort of experience, but really to describe experiences and to use this tool that we have in our brain to create pictures.
00:18:05
Speaker
that other people can relate to through human connection, not through internet connection. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does, absolutely. And I guess one of the things that I was angling at a little bit with the chaos and order side of things is that
00:18:22
Speaker
I imagine as an opinion leader and using the mediums that you have done, certainly as far as I'm concerned, you're one of the first bloggers that I used to follow. So blogging obviously is a new thing, but you have thousands, probably millions of people now that have engaged on your blog. I don't know if I'm overshooting it there, but I imagine you're getting a lot of people
00:18:46
Speaker
with very complex medical conditions saying, oh, what should I do about this with some kind of polysyllabic condition? And quite often the answer is the same. They need to sleep more and move more and eat better and so on. Is that what you find? Yeah. 100%. No, 100%. I mean, we know, you know, there's some 75 autoimmune disorders and some of them have really complex names.
00:19:09
Speaker
And so many of them have some dietary etiology. So many of them go back to, look, some choices you made were probably inappropriate for your condition. And if you were to remove some of these offending foods from your diet, you would get, if not complete resolution, certainly some measurable amount of relief.
00:19:29
Speaker
through this. And again, it's, you know, the human body is a complex, but very wet machine. You know, we, we are still, you know, if you look at the development and civilization, geez, man, we're two and a half million years old as a species. And we only, we only have to go back 500 years, we were digging in the dirt with
00:19:52
Speaker
pointed sticks and barely starting to build things. So the amount of complexity that we've laid on our lives just in the last 500 years, let alone the last 10,000 since agriculture has not allowed us a lot of time to evolve and change and adapt to this new environment and this new way of living that we've forced upon ourselves. So when in doubt, go back to
00:20:22
Speaker
the genetic model, which basically says, how did we get here in terms of evolution? What our genes expect of us? And then, and I know you know this to be true, every scientific biological study that comes down the path these days looks at gene expression. What happened in light of gene expression when we introduced these variables and we did this controlled study? So that's just a commonality in the last
00:20:51
Speaker
probably 15 years that not all studies looked at 20, 30, 40 years ago. Now they all look at gene expression because they all know that that's really the level at which whatever is happening in the body is manifesting itself through the turning on or turning off of certain genes.
00:21:09
Speaker
Yeah, so this whole sort of epigenetic phenomenon that has become sort of popularized by, I think Bruce Lipton was one of the first people to talk about it, wasn't he? Absolutely, man. I mean, and no, I mean, it's, yeah, exactly. Speaking of which, yeah, like, you know, there are a number of people that I have followed over my years and Lipton is certainly one of them.
00:21:31
Speaker
I was going to ask who some sort of key inspirations for you, because in those early days, I don't know when you when did you start your blog? What year was that? 2006. We've seen so long ago now, but it's not really. Yeah, yeah. Were there people, sorry, were there people, you know, that you really sort of looked to like like Bruce Lipton or others more specifically in the in the paleo field or evolutionary biology that you were inspired by?
00:21:59
Speaker
Well, yeah, the term paleo didn't even really emerge until I think they're early, maybe late 1990s, early 2000s. I mean, certainly Richard Dawkins, you know, The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, those were very influential books for me as someone who had had a fascination early on with evolution. Robert Sapolsky.
00:22:24
Speaker
Yeah. I wrote a book called Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. And it was amazing. It just sort of opened up a whole realm of exploration for me. Art Devaney was one of the first bloggers who I followed in this evolutionary pathway who sort of he had a unique set of skills, which was he was a mathematician.
00:22:51
Speaker
who was also very interested in gene expression. And he applied a lot of math to, you know, fractal patterns to eating and to movement and to power laws and things like that, that no one had really sort of made the connection that it's all math, right? At some point. So in fact, my first,
00:23:18
Speaker
two blog posts were guest posts on Art Devaney's site. So before I ever started Mark's Daily Apple, I'd written two articles, one of which was on high-level athletics and stress, that he posted and got such good response from his audience that I, at that point, decided I would start my own blog.
00:23:42
Speaker
So that was for sure my early inspirations. Yeah, yeah. Okay. And then I guess, as you say, it's been about 14 years, I'd say 15 years since the Paleo movement started to blossom a little bit and obviously got a lot of traction, I imagine, by about 2010, 2011. Is that the time it's so to
Influential Figures in Paleo Movement
00:24:01
Speaker
explode for you? Yeah, yeah.
00:24:03
Speaker
Since then, of course, many different names have come onto the scene. Is there anyone that you particularly look to at the moment and say, oh, this guy is really on it, or, you know, information you've found really helpful for your own understanding? No, for sure. I mean, Rob Wolf is a good friend of mine, and we are very simpatico and hang out at events. We don't hang out as much as I'd like for us to socially, but we've, I think, sort of maintained very similar
00:24:36
Speaker
trajectories in terms of how we view the world and the adjustments that we might make in our own way of thinking based on recent science. And he's, you know, again, he's a really adept, high-level thinker. He does not accept as dogmatic everything that gets put up on the internet. Yeah, yeah, good.
00:24:59
Speaker
You know, Chris Kresser is another one. Chris is more in the medical field and Chris has some great insights and ideas on how the body works and really as a clinician, he really digs deeply and wants to get into the details. So he really wants to figure out what it is specifically for each individual or each organism that is causing
00:25:25
Speaker
you know, whatever the problem happens to be. So he would be one who starts, you know, at a high level with a template, but then really drills down and is, I think, a very astute investigator in that regard.
00:25:39
Speaker
Beyond that, there are a number of people who I see at the expos and shows who are speaking, who have helped popularize what we do. The latest movement now, even beyond keto, is the carnivore diet. A lot of people are really speaking highly of the carnivore diet.
00:26:05
Speaker
Still, I'm holding my analysis for more data, but Paul Saldino is an MD who's talking a lot about the carnivore diet, and he was a vegan for a while, and that didn't work for him. It wasn't because he had some philosophical bent. He just wanted to improve his health, and he was open to these different things. He went from vegan to carnivore.
00:26:27
Speaker
And it's and it's had such great results. He's now doing that with his with his with his patients and clients, right? You know, there are a lot of people I mean, I would like to think that that that With Mark's daily Apple coming out in 2006 and the primal blueprint coming out in 2009 my book It opened the door for a lot of people to start
00:26:48
Speaker
their blogs and start offering their own hypotheses and doing their own experiments. Yeah, for sure. For sure. Have you, across the last 10 years or so, have you seen different ideas sort of come and go within the paleo
Critique of Paleo Dogma
00:27:05
Speaker
order? Have there been any mistakes made, do you think, where people have kind of gone down a certain rabbit hole and really been pushing it and then realized, actually, maybe that was a little too enthusiastic.
00:27:18
Speaker
Yeah, that's an interesting question. You know, I think the biggest broad mistake is this, again, this notion that
00:27:31
Speaker
there is one dogmatic right way that people should adhere to this one way. And I think some people are looking for the answer to be, well, there's only one way. And so the biggest mistake for the longest time was adhering to this paleo dogma, part of which said, for instance, early on that saturated fats are not good for you.
00:27:54
Speaker
And then it came back that, well, maybe saturated fats are fine and they're allowable. And so then, you know, people started eating way too much saturated fat. So now the pendulum has sort of swung back and forth as
00:28:10
Speaker
you know, as we refine the, at least the advice that's based around the template. And I've seen that in keto where people are, you know, people are like, okay, when on keto I can eat whatever I want, and as much as I want.
00:28:29
Speaker
And so they're sort of missing, you know, the concept of keto, which is literally, in my estimation anyway, is to allow you to get by on far fewer calories more efficiently and without compromise to your health.
00:28:41
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, right, right. I was at the Ancestral Health Symposium, the first one they did, I think it was 2012, and you were there. And I remember Lauren Cordain was standing up, and it was exactly that discussion about saturated fats. And someone said, because he was one of the early proponents of minimizing saturated fats, and talking about various world, you know, world game and so on, having very low saturated fats.
00:29:06
Speaker
and obviously trying to make that fit with the sort of heart hypothesis that was prevalent at the time and someone asked him you know where are you at with that now and he said well look as a scientist I sort of reserved the right to change my mind based on the evidence and it was a big round of applause and I thought it was fantastic actually it was really really good to see that but I kind of saw a similar thing in
00:29:29
Speaker
in running with the whole barefoot thing and how people that because of this whole discussion about persistence hunting and people doing, you know, long, long distance running to, to, you know, take down an antelope or whatever, that, you know, of course, the endurance runners love that. And like, oh, so this is this is, you know, the way we evolved to work. And also, I think, you know, the notion that because
00:29:56
Speaker
particularly Lieberman, Dan Lieberman from Harvard, which was the key guy, wasn't he, that was promoting, and still is promoting this. And I think the assumption, therefore, is that everyone's an endurance runner. But you can see from the build of some people that we're really not at that stage now. I mean, maybe our ancestors were endurance runners, but clearly not everyone's an endurance runner now. So is that something you've seen as well, sort of fitness trends? No, it's a great example, because when McDougall came out with Born to Run,
00:30:26
Speaker
uh it was about the same time that that vibram was introducing your your five-finger shoes um you know a classic example enough runners said wow this looks like this is a great idea uh it explains a lot um i'm going to go out and buy some minimalist shoes and i'm going to run seven miles the first day
00:30:44
Speaker
And lo and behold, they ruined their plantar fascia, their Achilles, or something happened because they weren't adapted to that form of movement yet. So a great example of how mistakes are made because we glom on to some new notion that sounds great and sounds like it might have some basis in fact or in science or in evolution.
00:31:11
Speaker
But the reality is we are far removed, not just genetically in terms of familial genetics and regional genetics. Like you say, you take a stocking northern European family that goes back many generations. You're right. They're probably not great endurance
00:31:34
Speaker
material, but they might be, you know, awesome for covering, you know, craggy, rocky ground with their herds for, you know, all day long, moving around at a low level of activity.
00:31:49
Speaker
And of course, as we know, manifesting that varied range of motion in stronger ligaments and connective tissue, then say a modern genetically gifted runner in the United States who just runs on paved roads all day long in a straight line, never altering the gate, never moving side to side, creating a
00:32:16
Speaker
an adaptive machine that can run a 210 marathon but that couldn't play tennis or ski or snowboard without getting a massive injury. I just went off on a tangent there but that's the sort of thing that when you hear that something
00:32:39
Speaker
Some new, you know, paleo intervention is the be all and the end all, you know, be somewhat wary of. One of the things I used to explain because I was involved with the Vibram Five Fingers here in the UK was that I had a slide which was kind of showing someone on a tightrope.
00:32:58
Speaker
And on one side they're holding like a balanced bar. And one side they had phylogeny, evolution of species. And on the other side they had ontogeny, which is the evolution of the individual. And so I was always sort of making the point that you may be very highly adapted to run around barefoot from a phylogeny perspective, from an evolutionary perspective.
00:33:17
Speaker
But in terms of what you've done and how you've grown up, you know, wearing cushion shoes your whole life, you're way behind on that side. So, you know, you can't think you can just jump into barefoot running or minimalist running and instantly adapt because that's the evolutionary story. There's more to it than that. You've got to think of your own evolution, your own sort of heritage. Absolutely. And, you know, most people who have this awakening have this awakening in their 30s or 40s or 50s after they've done
00:33:44
Speaker
decades of, I wouldn't call it necessarily damage, but let's just, well, maybe I would call it damage, you know, whether it was metabolic damage or, you know, physiological damage, the way they moved. And then to think that they can, because of their phylogeny, they can undo that, you know, like quickly. It doesn't always happen that way.
00:34:09
Speaker
Yeah, right, right, yeah, for sure.
Business Growth and Strategic Goals
00:34:11
Speaker
So tell us about the sort of business side of being involved in Paleo, because I know obviously you have many books, you've got a range of supplements and foods as well. You've got various training courses, and obviously the blog and the podcasts. I mean, you've got a lot going on. How many people are in your organization?
00:34:32
Speaker
Probably 80 now. The food company I just sold to Kraft Heinz in January this year, so I don't own that. I still work for the company and all my foreign employees still run that company. It's just owned by Kraft Heinz.
00:34:53
Speaker
And that's been a very rewarding experience to create products that I had written about and wish existed in the marketplace but did not exist. So I had to create to myself, and the response, you know the consumer response those has been overwhelming and made it one of the most successful.
00:35:12
Speaker
food launches in the US in a long time. I continue to write books. I don't publish myself anymore. I have a great relationship with Harmony Books in New York. My most recent book was
00:35:30
Speaker
with the keto reset diet and I've done a couple of keto cookbooks and then I have one coming out the end of this year on keto longevity using the keto strategy for increasing your lifespan and your health span.
00:35:45
Speaker
And then I have a health coaching business which has really taken off for the past few years, Primal Health Coach and the Primal Health Coach Institute. And so we certify people to become life coaches, health coaches through this organization. My intention there was always to take what I know in my brain and be able to leverage it with other people because I feel like this technology, if you will call it that, this intellectual property, this strategy of living,
00:36:13
Speaker
is so powerful and available to anyone, but it does require quite often a close one-to-one relationship with a teacher or a coach or an instructor who can go into your house and help you clean out your refrigerator, clean out your pantry and go shopping with you and show you how to shop for the right kinds of foods and go to the gym with you and show you some appropriate movements.
00:36:35
Speaker
restaurant with you and show you how to order off of any menu in a way that does not sabotage your reading strategies. So we've had over 3,000 people have gone through the course now and it's really gratifying to see not just
00:36:52
Speaker
You know, that number of people who, who believe in the, the system and believe in the concept of primal living, but have also had phenomenal and major impacts on, on people around them, whether it's their clients or their family or their friends or themselves. So we have, I think we have like eight people working for that organization now.
00:37:12
Speaker
So yeah, I've just, look, my goal from day one was to change the way the world views health. I wanted to affect the lives of 100 million people in terms of accessing better health and getting themselves off that grid, off that health and insurance-based, I wanna talk treadmill, but it's basically a conveyor belt in the US and take back control of their own health from,
00:37:41
Speaker
from with some very simple lifestyle strategies. That was basically all I ever wanted to do. And so I've just chosen to do it through the blog, through seminars, through books, through coaching, and now through creating food products that most of my customers are people
00:37:59
Speaker
Most of my food customers are people who never heard of me, but have been looking for a clean sauce or condiment or dressing to put on their food. And finally pick up the bottle and go, wow, this is exactly what I've been looking for. And then that gets them into understanding more about
00:38:17
Speaker
other things they can do to achieve good health through eating choices. Fantastic. Fantastic. That's great. And so how many of these health coaches are outside of the US? Are you expanding quite widely? I would say 30% of our coaches are outside the US. It's an online learning experience. It's a very robust course. I mean, we have 100
00:38:41
Speaker
150,000 words of text. We've got 40, 50, 60 hours of video. And it's a very, again, it takes about 15 weeks to get through the course. It's got an exam that you have to pass at the end of every modules, 15 modules. We go into business building techniques. We go into a lot of other strategies, advanced coaching strategies and things like that will be on the science.
00:39:11
Speaker
We had doctors take it, MDs, chiropractors, physical therapists, nurse assistants, physician assistants, things like that. Everybody who's taken it thinks it's like one of the more robust courses they've taken. Mark, you were saying that one of your goals is to hit 100 million people that you want to influence, you want to touch with your work. Yes. Is that something that you have always had that as a goal or is that something that has evolved as you've developed your business?
00:39:41
Speaker
No, it's evolved for sure. I started out wanting to reach a million people on my blog. Within a year or two, I realized that that was going to be, I wouldn't say an easy goal, but that was going to come up pretty quickly. And so I shifted, I added a zero to that. And so for the longest time, my mission was to affect the lives of 10 million people through
00:40:00
Speaker
through my teachings and the way I wanted to measure this was I wanted to allow people a means by which they could access better health and take themselves off the medical conveyor belt and off the insurance system that becomes such an abject failure in the US.
00:40:24
Speaker
And that meant learning how to eat right and how to move right and how to sleep and how to manifest excellent health without the requirement of a physician or the medical system. And then of course, not of course, but a few years ago, I just said, wait a minute, I'm coming up at 10 million already with my books and my seminars and my
00:40:46
Speaker
and my, you know, millions of monthly visitors to Mark's Daily Apple. So let me add another zero. So then I punched it up to 100 million and that became that now that's, you know, these are not just sort of ephemeral like, oh, I'll just put a big goal out there and it doesn't matter if I hit it or not. I really want to hit that number.
00:41:02
Speaker
how I want to hit that number is through the coaching program. I want to leverage, as I said, I want to leverage my expertise with my thousands of coaches who then go out in the world and teach that. But another way was with the food company. With food, if somebody who has never heard of paleo or primal or keto or anything like that, but is still looking to get the best possible
00:41:25
Speaker
Uh, sauces, dressings and condiments and topics to put on their food. If they pick up one of my food products and then read a little bit about what they're, what they're consuming, that might pique their curiosity enough to understand, uh, or to learn more about, you know, other types of food. And, and that's sort of a backdoor way of getting them.
00:41:44
Speaker
into paleo primal, keto, low carb, real food eating, whatever it might be. So yeah, so the number is now 100 million. Excellent. That's fantastic. Part of the reason I asked is that in our paper, in one of our papers, we referenced another paper which was talking about allostatic load, which of course is the kind of overall stress on the body. And it was saying that purpose in life predicts allostatic load 10 years down the line.
00:42:10
Speaker
And so, of course, if you've got purpose, then what it's showing is it actually decreases the stress on the on the body. So obviously, it's a key part of sort of healthy living and realizing your potential. So fantastically, you've got that 100 million as the next goal, as it were.
00:42:27
Speaker
No, and you know, it's interesting to me that people, you know, some people today don't have a purpose, don't have a sense of what they want in life. I know, you know, there's this whole biohacking community, and one of their goals, stated goals is some of them say, well, I want to live forever. Wouldn't that be awesome to live forever? And I'm like, wait a minute, if you don't have a purpose to get up in the morning, why would you want to live forever? What is there about, you know, about living forever, that implies immediately some sort of quality
00:42:55
Speaker
of life. You know, living to me, I just I want every day that I do live to be full of, you know, joy, fulfillment, contentment, happiness, whatever. And I think you have to have a purpose in order to, you know, just to be able to measure that. Yeah, it also strikes me it's not very paleo to live forever, is it?
00:43:15
Speaker
Exactly. Exactly. Well, you know, the irony there is, you know, the whole concept of evolution is that, you know, we're just a bizarre manifestation of two strands of RNA, the primordial ooze that had a tendency to want to replicate. So humans today, we're still just these, you know, wet machines that are doing whatever they can to pass the genetic material along to another generation. Full stop. Yeah, yeah, that's it. That's it.
00:43:42
Speaker
Okay, so look, one of the things that we had a conversation about early on when we were talking about writing these papers together was an Achilles injury that you'd had.
Healing Through Nutritional Science
00:43:51
Speaker
And can you tell me a bit more about how that came on and what you did to resolve it?
00:43:57
Speaker
Sure. So I don't run distance anymore, but I do do sprints. I do beach sprints. I go to the track sometimes and run sprints. I play a game called Ultimate Frisbee. And Ultimate is one of the greatest games ever invented. It's very fast paced. It's played on a
00:44:15
Speaker
basically on a soccer pitch. It's lots of stop and go, lots of changing direction, lots of jumping, lots of sprinting, sometimes for two hours. It's the best workout I do all week. It's the most fun I have all week. Don't tell my wife that. And yet, over the years, as I play this game with 20-somethings and 30-somethings, and I'm 60-something now, I notice that my Achilles were starting to get
00:44:43
Speaker
tender, painful, and thickened. And I was developing a tendinopathy called Achilles tendinosis. And it got to the point where I couldn't play anymore because I couldn't sprint without tremendous pain and stiffness. I had this sort of haunting feeling that if I jumped more than a foot off the ground that I would snap both Achilles.
00:45:06
Speaker
So I went to see some of the best orthopedic surgeons in the world in Los Angeles. Of course, the diagnosis there was you have this severe tendinopathy and the only cure for it is for you to slit open the back severe heels and scrape down the Achilles and wrap you up in a cast for three months and then you'll do nine months of rehab and maybe you'll get back to 80 or 85% of where you were. Well, that did not sit well with me at all. I went back to the drawing board. I realized that
00:45:37
Speaker
much of what we do in life has to do with how we offer the raw materials for our body to rebuild, renew, regenerate, recreate, repair itself on a day to day basis based on stresses and based on the access to these raw materials. And I realized I had not had access to
00:45:58
Speaker
collagen building, collagen repairing raw materials, even though as paleo, I was not eating the parts of an animal that would supply the collagen peptides, the glycine, the proline, the hydroxyproline, these unique amino acids that are, that I would say unique. They're prevalent in skin, hair, nails, tendons, ligaments, cartilage, fascia, and all this connective tissue.
00:46:28
Speaker
Without these raw materials, the body has to go to plan B. Plan B, in terms of my Achilles, was basically my body saying, look, if we don't have the building blocks to go repair your Achilles and make them even stronger as a result of the stresses, then we're going to have to make do with what we have. We can build some scar tissue there. We can thicken your Achilles.
00:46:49
Speaker
and we can prevent or at least protect you from immediate trauma, but it's gonna be less pliable, it might snap, but that's plan B. And I'm like, well, can you hear me talking to my body now? It's just, I didn't mean to put it in that context, but so the button. Yeah, so anyway, I said, well, look, I've got a,
00:47:08
Speaker
I have to have access to collagen. It's why bone broth has become so popular in the last few years bone broth is a great source of collagen. For most of human history we have lots of access to lots of collagen and gelatin.
00:47:24
Speaker
We ate nose to tail, but we don't anymore. We eat the choice cuts of meat and that's it. Without access to the glycine, the proline, the hydroxyproline, we get large amounts of methionine. Methionine in muscle meat
00:47:43
Speaker
helps us build muscle and does a number of wonderful things but also interferes and uses and takes up the glycine from the collagen parts of our body as part of this metabolism and so historically we ate the whole part of the animal where there was a lot of glycine a lot of these other amino acids in the collagen historically even when we didn't eat the whole animal we still were we were eating jello you know jello was a dessert for in the u.s for
00:48:10
Speaker
50 years that kids had and mothers made, you know, Aspic and all sorts of like, not just desserts, but dishes out of. Or many women in this country took Nox gelatin. It was available and they took it theoretically for their skin, hair and nails because it made a wonderful lustrous hair and
00:48:32
Speaker
um lustrous skin and long nails but it was also benefiting um fascia and ligaments and tendons and other connective tissue. Well those have disappeared in the last couple of decades and so now we
00:48:45
Speaker
We've come to a point where we see it in sports a lot, where there are a lot of connective tissue injuries. There are a lot of tendinopathies or ruptured tendons. There are a lot of ACLs, MCLs. There are a lot of things that are happening in orthopedics that I think are a result of this dearth, this lack of this raw material that you can use to rebuild connective tissue. So in my case,
00:49:11
Speaker
I realized this and I started taking 30 to 40 grams of a collagen peptide, collagen hydrolysate, every day. And in four months, I effectively cured my Achilles tendons. They went back to normal. It's been five and a half or six years now. I'm sprinting well, knock wood. I think my Achilles are probably the strongest
00:49:35
Speaker
part of my body now. And so I became a huge believer in this notion that you consume like for like. If you want to build muscle, you eat muscle meat. If you want to build collagen and connective tissue, you eat collagen and connective tissue, or at least the amino acids that are prevalent in those. If you want to build bone, you eat eggshells and bone meal as a source of calcium. I mean, it's not
00:50:04
Speaker
some airy-fairy-woo-woo kind of concept that it's based in science. This is access to these raw materials. It's one of the reasons that, for instance, pea protein is not a great source of protein if you're a bodybuilder and you want to be a vegan bodybuilder. So anyway, yeah.
00:50:27
Speaker
Well, we referenced some of those kinds of papers about collagen absorption and so on in our own paper. So yeah, you know, it's like you say, the science is there. It's not just you're trying it out and it's seeming to work. It's your research is there to back it, right? Yeah, good stuff. Good stuff. So
00:50:44
Speaker
I guess, you know, it's a really interesting example of how something that is almost too simple to believe for someone who's done an entire medical degree and become, like you say, a top surgeon, some of the best surgeons in the world, and they're saying, let's cut you open.
00:51:01
Speaker
when something as simple as actually eating what the tendons are made out of was enough to fix you. Yeah, it's incredible, isn't it? Well, it's not just incredible, it's scary. It's scary that that happens millions of times a day in the world.
00:51:17
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, for sure. For sure. Okay, well, so we obviously wrote these, we wrote these two papers together for the Journal of Body Work and Movement Therapies.
Paleo's Place in Alternative Therapy
00:51:25
Speaker
And part of the reason I had approached you was that, you know, of course, you know, you've got a fantastic reputation in the paleosphere. But what I what I found was that, in my experience, I wasn't seeing as many of my colleagues in the field of osteopathy and physiotherapy and chiropractic
00:51:42
Speaker
really sort of taking to the paleo, I guess, information that's out there and applying it with their clients, it still almost seems a little bit left of field for them. Whereas the people that I know that are much more training oriented and strength conditioning coaches, they seem to have embraced it far more. Has that been your experience in terms of what you've seen? Pretty much.
00:52:06
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think people who are hands on working in the field for, you know, an hour at a time with clients who have the time to not just, you know, manipulate and, and, and, and guide the patient or the client through, you know, whatever activities you're doing, but have the time to talk, talk about diet, talk about sleep, talk about sun exposure. And it just,
00:52:32
Speaker
To me, it seems like people who are in sort of these alternative therapies have a mindset that opens them up to alternative therapies and other alternative therapies.
00:52:40
Speaker
versus a traditional medical setting where a doctor might get your results of your test back and go, well, your blood work is back and your cholesterol is a little high and your iron's a little low. So I would say you need to eat better and maybe exercise a little bit more. Well, what does a patient do with that? They don't do anything. So I think...
00:53:02
Speaker
That's the typical medical experience. Now, what I'm seeing, and it's very gratifying, I'm seeing a lot of MDs now who have embraced paleo and have embraced this new movement, which suggests that there's a lot more that we could do besides surgery and radiation.
00:53:21
Speaker
And drugs that we can actually intervene with diet in a way that that manifests outcomes that are not Possible through even drug, you know drug interventions So I think I'm seeing a whole kind of fringe group of MDs. There's a company
00:53:43
Speaker
called SteadyMD. You can access an online physician who is like-minded with your philosophy, who is simpatico, so you can find a paleo physician. Then when you bring them your blood work and your total cholesterol is 230, but your HDL is 85, they don't go off the deep end crazy and say, we're going to put you on status.
00:54:04
Speaker
They basically go, oh, that's great. Look at you, man. And your triglycerides are 45. You're killing it, right? So I'm seeing some of these doctors, and I think it's going to trend more and more in that direction. So that's kind of the good news.
00:54:21
Speaker
Right now, it's frustrating to see people who have real medical issues and then go see a traditional doctor and then get sort of put on that conveyor belt that has medicine.
00:54:37
Speaker
I like the classic is, you know, you have type 2 diabetes, and your doctor says, well, I don't really, if you want to keep eating your dessert, you can, as long as you take your meds. Yeah, that's terrible, isn't it? Oh, yeah, yeah. It's interesting that you mentioned, you know, the sort of duration that people spend with their clients, because one of the papers that I actually wrote previously for the Journal of Body Work was called, But You're Infinitely More Complex Than A Car. And, you know, it's a bizarre title, in a way, but
00:55:04
Speaker
where I led the readers was that the sort of standard, let's say five, 10 minutes you spend with your doctor or even maybe like 30 minutes with a chiropractor or someone, your body is infinitely more complex than a car. And yet you would never leave your car with someone for a full service for 30 minutes or for five minutes. So it's just crazy that we devalue our bodies to that degree, that we think that something as complex as a human body can be fixed.
00:55:33
Speaker
in five or 10 minutes, where really, you know, if you can have spend the time coaching people, and this really seems to be the key thing, isn't it is coaching them to empower them to greater health rather than giving them the pill or the surgery or whatever it is.
00:55:47
Speaker
Well, this is where the one-on-one really becomes important because, you know, as a physical therapist, you watch people move. You watch their reaction to certain ranges of motion when they wince, you know, because, you know, their arm is back in a position where maybe the fascia is adhered to the deltoid. And that's the reason they're, you know, it's not that they have some
00:56:11
Speaker
uh you know torn labrum or some you know uh rotator cuff issue it's basically some simple thing that well not simple but something has happened the physician the normal physician might not even recognize and yet you see it in real time you see the wincing and then you say well maybe there's a you know there's a dysfunction here that we can fix
00:56:31
Speaker
and manipulate with stretching and with hypervolt or whatever modality we're using in the office here versus a surgeon who might say, well, geez, that's indicative of a torn labrum and a bursitis. We're going to have to go in there and cut.
00:56:50
Speaker
But that's because they haven't spent time and haven't seen this complex machine, as you describe it, go through its various iterations and machinations throughout the day. But you spend an hour with somebody in a physical therapy setting, you learn a lot about them, not just by the way, from their movement, but from their discussing about what's going on in their personal life and their diet. And you really do get to see the whole patient. Yeah, for sure, for sure. Great stuff.
00:57:18
Speaker
We've obviously talked about how the Paleo movement has unfolded over the last 10, 15 years.
Future of Paleo: Genetics and Epigenetics
00:57:25
Speaker
Where do you see it heading over the coming 10 or 15 years?
00:57:30
Speaker
Well, I think we set ourselves up for great success. I don't know that it's called paleo much longer. I think paleo is sort of a moniker that served us well. It gave us a visual of a hunter-gatherer paradigm and kind of allowed people to understand that our genes today
00:57:49
Speaker
have not really shifted much in the last 10,000 years. So that's good. And then I think what's happened is that modern genetic science has kind of taken over. And every, as I said, every, every study you see today refers to what happens at a level of gene expression. And that will kind of guide us into the next generation of
00:58:10
Speaker
of ways in which we can manifest a strong, lean, fit, happy, healthy, productive, loving human organism using epigenetics as the key driver of this. And so, you know, terms like epigenetics have kind of taken over from a paleo model. Real food has kind of taken over from the term paleo diet. As long as you're eating real food, I think you're well on your way to what you need.
00:58:40
Speaker
to do to get to 80% of what your optimal health is.
00:58:47
Speaker
But I feel pretty confident that we're headed in the right direction and I feel very confident that we're not headed backwards. As you have said on occasion, we're coming full circle. It's really interesting that we would use a tech platform to learn enough about our bodies to bring us back to an intuitive sense where we don't need the tech because we feel we're in tune with
00:59:12
Speaker
the needs of our bodies and what we need to do to optimize health. Yeah, fantastic. Fantastic. That's great. And so, well, thank you very much for today. Thank you for your time. And where will people learn more about your work and your products and so on? Sure. So marksdailyapple.com. That's the blog. Something new and exciting there every day for the last
00:59:34
Speaker
uh 13 years 14 years uh yeah lots of books that you can get on amazon the primal blueprint the primal connection primal endurance
00:59:44
Speaker
Are you detecting a theme here? The keto reset diet, a bunch of cookbooks, all good stuff. If you want to find out about our food products, go to primalkitchen.com. We have a lot of very tasty and good for you products there. And then ultimately, if you want to be a health coach, the Primal Health Coach Institute is where we teach people how to become certified primal health coaches, lots of information there, lots of
01:00:12
Speaker
webinars and things you can get for free and learn about the program, whether this is something you want to do. How long does that training take, Jeremy? Is there a specific time? Well, people can get through it in as little as four months now, but it's a very robust program. It's an online experience. There's no face-to-face. It's all done online. There's 150,000 words of text. There's probably 30 or 40 hours of videos.
01:00:37
Speaker
There's an exam that you take at the end of every module in order to move on to the next module. We've had doctors, we've had chiropractors, nurses, physicians assistants, trainers, lots of people go through the program and rave about it. So it's highly recommended. If you're in the health field and you want to get certified as a primal health coach, that's the place to go. Awesome. Fantastic. And one thing with regards to your food products, you have collagen in some of those products?
01:01:06
Speaker
We have several products from college and I was such a fan of college and we have bars that you can take that have collagen in them. We have several different drinks. We have a turmeric sort of coffee and tea additive. We've got vanilla flavored, you know, coffee creamer that has collagen in it, chocolate.
01:01:26
Speaker
regular collagen peptides. We have a lot of collagen. Can you tell I'm a big fan of collagen? Sounds tasty. Sounds tasty. Fantastic. All right. Well, thank you very much, Mark, for joining me on From Chaos to Order. It's been great to have you on today. And no doubt our paths will be crossing down the line. So thanks again for your time. My pleasure, man. Take care. See you soon.
01:01:50
Speaker
Thank you for listening to FC2O. If you enjoyed that and found it useful, please do feel free to share it with your friends, colleagues, and loved ones. Now, I mentioned that Mark has a really generous offer for FC2O listeners, and this is that you can lock in a $500 tuition discount if you register for Mark's Primal Health Coach program within a week at the podcast publish date, which means you've got through to July the 6th to do that. What you have to do is to cite MAT500, so that's MAT in caps, M-A-T-T, and then 500 in numerals.
01:02:20
Speaker
when enrolling into the program.
01:02:22
Speaker
Now to learn more, you can visit primalhealthcoach.com forward slash webinar. This gives you instant access to a free webinar that Mark held with master coach, Christine Hasler, in which they explain how you can turn your passion for health, wellness, of helping other people into a thriving business by becoming a health coach. It also details the steps to take to become trained, certified, and successful. You can also access the papers that Mark and I wrote for free until July the 4th at mattwalden.com under the podcast tab.
01:02:51
Speaker
I'll also be offering a free webinar on July the 12th where I touch on the content of the papers called Modern Disintegration Primal Connectivity. So take a look at that, that's all there on mattewaldon.com. Thank you for joining me and I look forward to seeing you next time.