Coffee Bad For Liver

dave: hey, it's dave asprey with bulletproofexecutive radio. today's cool fact of the day is actually a trivia question. it was1831. in front of his distinguished colleagues at the french academy of medicine, professortouery drank a lethal dose of poison and lived to tell the tale. he combined his deadly poisonwith an antidote that's now commonly used in emergency rooms for acute poisoning. doyou know the name of the antidote? before we get going, the podcast videos recentlygot added to the itunes video channel, so if you're enjoying this in your car or onyour iphone or something, check out the video, and if you'd do me the favor of leaving areview, it will help more people find it. on today's show, you're going to notice thatthere's actually three people on. there's

me, and there's two guests. those guests wouldbe richard nikolay and tim steele. we're going to be talking about poop. guys welcome tothe show. richard: (laughs) thanks. great intro, dave.(laughing) dave: let me give you guys a better introthan that. richard, you and i have known each other for, i think, four or five years now.first met over some only slightly-off oysters, and you're an interesting guy. you've beena navy officer. you've been an entrepreneur, and you write freetheanimal.com, which iskind of a paleo-ish sort of blog. you're paleo, but you keep eating starch and doing weirdstuff like that. richard: yeah. foundation, yeah. some riceand potatoes and even some ... i made the

best pot of beans ever yesterday.dave: beans? oh, my god. richard: [crosstalk 00:01:46].dave: oh, man. all right, but anyhow, i'm actually a fan of your blog. i appreciateyour writing and your research and your entire lack of caution when experimenting with yourself,something that i share. our other guest today is tim steele. he is better known, actually,as tater tot, and he's from the same general quadrant of the world as me. he's from alaska.i'm from up here in british columbia, where we can almost see alaska, just like the alaskanscan almost see the russians. tim writes guest posts on free the animal and on dr. graceliu's dr. bg animal pharm blog, and you've heard dr. grace liu on this podcast, sortof. our audio quality was bad, so we put that

just on youtube, and i'm going to get thetranscript of dr. liu's interviews. it was really amazing, but you just couldn't heareverything she said. you could say tim is the main stay behindthe rediscovery of starch and not just any starch, but specific starches that feed gutbacteria and don't raise your blood sugar, things that don't cause the problems thatnormal starch causes. at least they don't cause those problems in some people.today, we're going to talk resistant starch, which has been kind of taking the paleo communityby storm. i've talked with mark sisson about this recently, and he mentioned on the podcastthat he wished he'd known more about this earlier on or paid more attention to it, becausehe'd seen the research. i'm really pleased

to have two of the leaders in bringing outonly a couple hundred studies of bringing these to light. i don't know which one ofyou wants to take this, but let's define resistant starch for people who are listening and maybedon't quite know much about resistant starch. richard: tim.tim: yeah, sure. i could talk about this forever. resistant starch is a starch granule that'sfound in a lot of different plants; potatoes, bananas, nuts, grains. anything that's starchykind of has a characteristic of resistant starch in there. when the plant is not cooked,when it's in its raw state, the starch granules are intact when you eat them, and they resistdigestion by your stomach acid and your small intestine, and they end up in your large intestine,where they serve as food for your gut bacteria.

there's four different types of resistantstarch. resistant starch one is found in nuts andgrains, and it's preserved in a shell like in a nut. then there's resistant starch twonestled in bananas and potatoes mostly. these are just the starch granules that are in theplant. then resistant starch three, if you cook those starch, like resistant starch two,if you cook them, they expand, and they turn into readily digestible starch. when you coolthem down, they form a crystal structure, and they once again become resistant to digestion.that's called resistant starch three. then there's another resistant starch four, andthese are man-made. if you've ever looked on a food label, you'll see something likepolydextrins or modified starches and things

like that, and those are resistant starchfours. these are man-made. there mostly a trick by the food industry just to get morefiber in your food. it has some other properties that they like, so it's added in in a lotof manufactured processed foods that we try to stay away from.richard: let me add one thing there on the rs2, which is in things like the green bananasor the potato starch, and just to distinguish between potato starch and potato flour, thepotato starch is the granules in a raw potato. you can do it yourself by grating and workingwater. then all those granules will fall out of there. potato flour is basically a cookedpotato that's ground, cooked and desiccated and then ground up into flour.one way to understand the difference between

the rs2 granules of starch and rapidly-digestingstarch is popcorn. what makes popcorn pop is there's a little bit of moisture insidethat granule, and when it gets to a certain temperature, the thing just goes "poof", andthat's exactly what resistant starch like potato starch granules are. when you get toabout 140 degrees, they will pop just like popcorn. one thing you can do is take a roundedteaspoon, stir it up in some water, and you'll see it sinks to the bottom like a non-newtoniumfluid. it's like clay. you stir it up, pop it in the microwave for a minute. it comesout, and you basically have hair gel. those things have all popped at that point,and that's why it makes a good thickener for sauces. you do a little slurry and dump itin there when it's boiling, and that's what

happens. those little things pop, but thathair gel kind of thing is all dispersed, and so you get a thickening for sauce. it's oneof the better sauce thickeners, actually. it works better than corn starch.dave: this is which one? rs2? richard: i'm talking specifically of potatostarch, but that's basically why you can't cook rs2 and retain ... well, some of thefoods do retain a small portion, but then once it's cooked, as tim said, and you coolit down, these things re-crystallize. it's not the same granule. it's more of a tightcrystal structure that has the same affect. it resists digestion. there's actually, ibelieve, tim, there's actually different bacteria that like the rs3, so it's a good thing toget both the rs2 and the rs3 integrated.

dave: in the course of creating the bulletproofdiet, which admittedly, now, i think paleo and some of my recommendations are comingcloser and closer together, when you get guys like chris kresser coming out, saying youhave to modify this and you can add this, and i love the direction that thinking isgoing, but the learning that i got out of this is that all proteins don't affect thebody the same way. there's a difference between soy protein, egg protein, and collagen protein.they're just different substances, just the fact they're all proteins ... so is spidervenom, but okay. then you look at sugars. there's differentsugars. fructose behaves differently in the liver than, say, sucrose or glucose, and samething for fats; butyric acid, mct, saturated

fat and corn oil are just different animals.the fact that they're all fats doesn't really matter, because they do different things.i've been, for a long time, since i lost 100 pounds, relatively suspicious on the starchside of things. i'm fine with some white rice and all, but i know that people tend to getfat. admittedly, i have a terrible history from a digestive perspective, because i wason antibiotics just about every month for 15 years, because i had chronic sinusitisthat just wouldn't go away, so they kept putting me on antibiotics over and over and over asa kid and strep throat as well. my gut biome is probably as bad as it gets.at least, it was. i managed to, after $50,000' worth of probiotics, i was actually on oneof the ones we're going to talk about today

for two, two-and-a-half years in the late2000s without a lot of results, and i played with some starches, but i always did terribleon starches, because i didn't understand these different types, not only of starches butof resistant starches, so i think you guys are bringing something that's worth understandingto light, and in the new "bulletproof diet" book that comes out december 2nd, i'm actuallygiving you credit for, "hey, these guys have talked about all the science that everyoneignored," so i appreciate you've done it. richard: there's ... what was the last i heard?there's roughly, i think, about 50 different kinds of starch structures, and rs1, rs2,rs3 are the three types that are resistant to digestion in humans. as far as how eachof those other 47 or so that are digested

by us, how they actually play in that digestion,how fast they're digested, or whatever, is something i don't know. i would speculatethat there's, just like with different proteins and with different fatty acids, there's gotto be perhaps different things that go on there. sugars as well.dave: it's fascinating, because it used to be very difficult to get a good view of what'sgoing on in the gut. there's a company called ubiome. i had them at the first biohackingconference about a year-and-a-half ago. they were promising to sequence the human gut biome,and i haven't got my results but i sure have been waiting for a while. there's the americangut project, which i believe both of you have done, right? looking at the species [inaudible00:11:09] diet. richard, have you?

richard: i have not, no.dave: okay. it's on my to-do list, but i haven't done that one either, because i kept expectingmy ubiome results, and i've done some other analytics work, the doctor's data, comprehensivestool analysis kind of thing, where you poop in a tray for three days and all that. i workedon fixing my gut a long time ago, and when i got the bulletproof diet thing down, i stoppedfarting. i stopped having all of these problems that really were significant for me, and it'sbeen working for a very long time, but i'm always intrigued. i read your blog, richard.tim, i saw all your crazy comments on there. i went out and got my plantain flour, my potatostarch ... this is kind of embarrassing to admit, but okay, i know that i'm one of thepeople that doesn't do well on potatoes. they

tend to cause joint pain, and i don't respondwell to nightshades, so one of the comments said, "well, you can just use it rectally,"and my plantain flour hadn't arrived yet, so i actually used some potato start in through,we'll say through the exit entrance there, and it did seem to have some effects on stoolconsistency and whatever, like positive effects, but i don't really have big problems there,anywhere, so i'm like, "okay, there's more bulk than there was before," and i startedusing the plantain flour, and i started getting pretty foul gas. i just don't have gas anymoreon the bulletproof diet, so i'm like, "this isn't a good sign, but it could be an adjustmentperiod." i was taking raw kefir that i make myselffrom grass-fed cows on the island where i

life, super properly done, and i started gettinghives from this stuff, and so i quit the resistant starch, and my hives went away, which [inaudible02:12:57], "all right. it doesn't mean it's bad." i've taken pig whipworm and mixed itinto all kinds of stuff, but it definitely made me think, "all right. there's somethinggoing on here, and how do i know what i'm feeding."my first question for you guys is, tim, you live as an alaskan mountain man. you carrychicken manure. you're at one with the earth and all that. richard, you're a silicon valleydweller, and you certainly don't get that ... even if you're taking a few capsules ofprobiotics, certainly, i've been doing that for 20 years now, how do you know what's goingto grow? it's like, you pour fertilizer on

tumbleweeds, you just get bigger tumbleweeds,so how does resistant starch affect what's in the gut biome?tim: yeah, it is difficult. one thing we found is potato starch is almost like a litmus testfor what's in your guy. potato starch is just a food. it's a fraction of a food that everyhuman should be able to eat without major repercussions. what we're finding is probablyhalf of the people that try potato starch probably have an issue with it of some sort,even if it's just really bad gas right away, but the kind that goes away. other peopleget, like you said, the hives and joint pain. some people it helps their sleep. some people,it makes their sleep worse, but everybody should be able to eat potato starch. it'sone of the ... not potato starch, but just

starch in general, but it's one of the foodsthat we grew up with from the time of a million years ago, when we were eating raw yams onthe african plains, and you should be able to eat potato starch. if you can't, then youhave something going on in your gut. a lot of the time, what it seems like, theiryeast overgrows. we had one lady on the phone named nancy. she tried potato starch, andit gave her a really bad reaction. i don't remember what ... the instant diarrhea thatlasted for three days and stuff like that. she got a gut test, and she had a major overgrowthof a pathogen called morganella. dave: oh, that's bad stuff.tim: twenty-five percent of her entire gut flora was made up of morganella. to me, ididn't even think that was possible to have

that much of a pathogen in your stomach, andshe'd been using low-carb and different dietary interventions for years, and all of her problemsstarted after a bunch of rounds of antibiotics, so she's been nursing this morganella alongfor years. when she tried the potato starch and had instant bad reaction to it and gother gut results back, it's like you can see right off what happened. then she startedon with the probiotics. i think she used the prescript assist and some others. there weredays when her diarrhea was clearing up. the last i heard, she's still doing [inaudible00:15:50] from some botanicals and some charcoal, things like that, trying to get rid of thismorganii before she restarts the potato starch, but yeah, people have all kinds of thingsin their guts.

even back in the early studies with potatostarch and prebiotics in general, even just healthy screened people that were doing thesestudies, they found about 25% of the people couldn't handle the prebiotics, no matterwhat it was ... [inaudible 00:16:17], potato starch, and that was twenty-some years ago,so now it's probably even worse. dave: it's a pretty big supposition that,"okay, everyone should be able to handle these types of starches. in my experience, a lotof people don't, so the question is is the problem with the starch or the type of starch,or is the problem with the people, or is the problem with the gut biome? if people didmodify their gut biome in order to effortlessly digest starch as well as the fats, which arekind of the foundation of how i perform at

my best, how do we know what other effectsthat's going to have on the body. are you going to die 20 years sooner? are you goingto get yeast? are you going to get brain fog? are you going to get problems with histamine-forminglactobacilli, stuff like that? richard: there's always the counter-argumentto all of this stuff that we knew, that people live, on the average, longer than ever, soof course we know that living longer is ... you want to live well as long as you possiblycan, and we've gotten to the point where we can prolong someone's life 20 years. in alot of cases, it's not much of a life, kind of like a brain in a vat sort of a thing insome cases. if everybody gets this healthy gut, does it mean that we kick out at 50 insteadof ... (laughing)

all i can go by is what i've seen in myselfand what i've seen in others. i've had sinus allergies all of my life. i was one of theseones, the first with the potato starch, and i was doing the potato starch, buying greenplantain flour, green banana flour, even a little tapioca starch, some [fos sinula 00:18:12]and that sort of thing, so i had ... basically, the only negative that i had was the gas,which could just be so hilarious sometimes. it was beyond ... it's like, "this is justtoo funny." what happened was a lot of people, they get in this mode of like, "okay, i haveto take it every day," but what i've always done is, number one, i varied the dose. inever take the same ... i may take one teaspoon one day and five tablespoons the next, andthen one day i'll take nothing. then every

once in a while, i'll go three days without... nothing, more modeling like a food kind of thing instead of just pounding it. thegas resolved. i had the great dreams. i felt good, all of these positive benefits.then once i finally broke down and decided to take the three soil-base probiotics thatdr. grace had recommended, the primal defense ultra, the aor probiotic-3 and the prescriptassist. dave: those are the same three i've been usingfor ten years. richard: once i did that along with the resistantstarch in the various forms, i couldn't believe it, that all within three days ... i've alwayshad to carry around a paper towel to blow my nose. i still do, but it's literally 80-90%less, and when i sleep at night, i can breathe

through my nose. i always ... i'd wake upin the middle of the night with dry mouth because my nose is clogged. that is reducedby so much. my point is that i think people need to just play around with this thing.i said to someone this morning in a comment on my blog, i said from my perspective, about80% of the people that don't have any problems with potato starch or resistant starch ingeneral and they see some benefits, farting aside, because that typically resolves formost people in time. then there's 20% where it either doesn't appearto do anything for them, or they get some sort of adverse thing. then you add in theprobiotics in combination with it. i think 20%, you get more like half to maybe a fewmore of those, and even with the 80%, like

myself, can see more improvement than theywere getting by adding the probiotics. then you're going to have that five to ten percent,who it's not going to work, and you're probably looking fecal transplant or something likethat with some people that their guts are just so jacked that there's no coming back.i think in some years, we're going to see fecal transplant tourism. these people willstart going to tanzania to get a fecal transplant from a [inaudible 00:21:20], who's never beenexposed to antibiotics, any pesticides or toxins or anything like that.dave: it's funny. natren makes a probiotic that was cultured from the vagina of a womanin 1972, who had never taken antibiotics, and so i tried making sauerkraut with that,and that sauerkraut must have been the highest

histamine sauerkraut i've ever had. i atea cup of that stuff, and i was just completely ... i felt like crap after i'd eat it forthree days of brain fog. it was really bad. it's kind of funny. i've also thought foryears, knowing that i've been on antibiotics for a good portion of my life that, "yeah,fecal transplant is a great idea," so i thought about posting on craig's list for that. (laughs)how do you find someone ... "hey, let's ... can i have some of your poop?" it's such an awkwardthing. plus, you don't know what you're getting, right, so you might also pick up a parasite.you can get all sorts of weird stuff. i am not certain what the future of that's goingto look like, but i hope it's a little more quantified.the other question for you guys ... part of

that is we evolved, and this is going backto the ancestral health side of things ... we evolved eating certain substances on a regularbasis. what's in the world around you? that's what you eat. now i have pizza hut, taco bell,chinese food, and we're eating stuff from peru one day and somewhere else another day,and it seems like our gut biome would not change on a day-to-day basis, so you needto be eating at that thai restaurant every day for a month for your gut bacteria to adjustthemselves. what's the answer going to look like for people? not just resistant starchbut for the gut biome in general, given our diet isn't conducive to feeding the bacteriathe same way on a regular basis? is there an answer, or do we need to mix poop from20 different places and take it as a capsule?

any thoughts? i don't expect you know theanswer. i just want to hear your thinking about it.tim: the gut microbiome is pretty amazing, and i think it actually is changing on a by-mealbasis. it doesn't require weeks and weeks of different meals to adapt to different platesof food, but there's only certain things that really get down to the large intestine thatserve as food for all these different microbes that are down there. just using the standardamerican diet, you know, go into mcdonald's twice a week, burger king and fast-food whateverand eating a lot of pizza and drinking beer, you're probably giving your large intestinemaybe three to five grams of resistant starch at the most, and most of that is coming frompotato chips and the burnt ends of french

fries and little things, but your guy microbesare also getting other things. they're getting bio-acids. they're getting sloughed off skinfrom your stomach and small intestine and kind of recycling the mucous layer of thelarge intestine. there's also some indigestible portions ofproteins ... [licoproteins 00:24:35], i guess, they call them down there. there's all kindsof things. as long as you're forming a turd, your gut microbes are [inaudible 00:24:44].if you have constant diarrhea, that means you don't have the gut microbes to form aturd. it sounds crude, but that's the reality of it. that's like the lady with the morganellaovergrowth. she was just chronic diarrhea from it, so all her gut microbes weren't thetype that form [inaudible 00:25:06] stool,

number four stools on there. when you startadding resistant starch to your meal on a regular basis, you start eating the [inaudible00:25:16] rice, [inaudible 00:25:20] potatoes and even [inaudible 00:25:21] beans like welike. it's like you start getting more resistant starch. what that does is require severaldifferent microbes to eat the resistant starch. there's what they call keystones and co-feeders.there's a big diversity of gut microbes in there, and these things are all engaged toproduce [inaudible 00:25:40] and producing other chemicals. some of them produce chemicalsthat other ones eat, and the microbial populations, they come up to meet this new food source.by just starting to eat in a better way, your gut microbes are going to be a better profile.dave: what about ketosis. if we're on a zero-starch

diet, which for a lot of people it createsincredible mental clarity. you get that ketosis, and then of course you add starch in. my recommendationsare every three to seven days you have a day where you're eating a substantial amount ofcarbohydrate, both for the gut biome and also just because you don't want to stay in ketosisforever. at least i don't think that's advisable. what's the timing look like on this stuff?richard: i think that's good advice, because i think one reason for the mental claritywith ketosis is the same way you can have mental clarity if you chop off your finger.you'll have extreme mental clarity, but do you want to chop off your finger? no. in otherwords, ketosis is an evolutionary adaptation to starvation. the thing is, a lot of peopledon't understand that yes, you can go into

mild ketosis by restricting carbohydrate,very little, but you can go into ketosis on a pure sugar diet if your calories are lowenough, right? dave: yes. very low calories, but yeah.richard: well, we had people, when back before this whole resistant starch thing, there wasthis thing going around called the potato hack, which that's where tater tot tim gothis name, where people were doing basically that chris boyd deal where you eat almostnothing but potatoes, maybe a little ketchup on it or little spices or whatever, but alittle bit of olive oil or something, and you drop weight precipitously. well, cometo find out that people who were doing this ... some of them were measuring their ketonesand finding that eating their fill of just

potatoes every day, they would still be inketosis, because the most they could get to was about 1300-1500 calories a day, becausethe potato was so filling, and that was a good 500, maybe 800, 1000 deficit calories,and they were in ketosis. ketosis ... i like to look at ketosis as asurvival adaptation when you have no food or not enough food. maybe that's where themental clarity comes from, a survival of the fittest kind of deal. it's something i don'tthink is good in a chronic state, and so i support your idea that every few days, loadup on carbs, however you do it, whether you eat fruit or drink some fruit juice or getsome starches or whatever. i think that's a great idea. one other thing i wanted tobriefly mention ... when you were talking

about all the different foods and what youhave around you, pizza hut and everything like that, too, well, i think there's probablysome hormetic benefit from every once in a while engaging in those toxins.to give you an example, yesterday i posted this woman basically used, and she's a medicalpractitioner, she had a salmonella infection for six months from eating some bad chicken.as a medical practitioner, she was banned from work. she has to have two consecutivestool samples that don't have the salmonella in it. she couldn't, da-da-da-da-da, so shegoes on the potato starch and those three probiotics for, i think, ten weeks or somethinglike that. boom. got rid of the salmonella. dave: the three, just so people listening... prescript assist, which is the sbo i recommend

as well, and i think a lot of people are onan sbo. the other one was advanced orthomolecular research probiotic-3, which is a super-coolone made by a guy who is just a gem of a human being, and the other one, the primal defenseultra, is jordan rubin, who has actually been on the bulletproof podcast, who kind of savedhis own life. these are the three time-tested good-quality ones. everyone listening is goingto want to know those three. go ahead. richard: she got rid of her salmonella fromit. she brought her fasting blood glucose from 130 down to the 70s, where it stays everyday now, and she lost her gluten sensitivity. for five years, she was paleo. she couldn'teat the slightest bit of gluten, or she said she'd be a swollen itchy mess, and now she'snot. i guess i could say that my point is

that there's two ways to approach the bulletproofidea; one is you can just eliminate, eliminate, eliminate everything that you're sensitiveto, or another approach might be to figure out a way that you can tolerate some ... tolerateit to the extent, not that you're eating it all the time, but that when you get it, itdoesn't send you into crazy things because you're so pure that you can't tolerate anyamounts of it anymore. i hope you get my point on that.dave: i do get your point on that. there's a reason that i've dropped so much money onso many different kinds of probiotics and other things. i've done colon hydrotherapyand coffee enemas. pretty much, if it's been written about and it affects the gut biome,at some point in the last 15 or so years,

i've probably tried it with the exceptionof a fecal transplant, and that wasn't because i wouldn't do it. it's because i don't knowwhere to get good poop. otherwise, i'd do that, too.if you're watching, tim just raised his hand, which is only slightly disturbing, but fedexme a nice one, would you? (laughs) richard: people were joking in my blog commentsfor a while that mark sisson needs to add another product to his health line ... hisown stool. dave: he brings good stuff. i can see it.(laughing) on the are-you-so-pure-you-don't-handle-stuff, it's a rough thing, because a lot of timesyou do want to go out to a restaurant, and people get used to feeling like the laserfocus. they're kind of like, "i guess i could

do it," and that's one of the reasons thati do the upgraded coconut charcoal, because if you're going to eat stuff, there's a question.are you getting toxins from the food. certainly, some foods you do get toxins directly fromthe food and they do affect your brain. even if you have a good gut biome, they still affectyour brain. if you combine some of the toxins, preferentially using an absorbent agent, okay,that makes good sense. by the way, that's the answer to the trivia question at the beginning,was activated charcoal. that's one thing, and then eating adequatefat changes your blood sugar response if you're eating a lot of sugar. there's various hackslike that. at the end of the day, i haven't seen something that makes me believe msg ... "oh,i should have a dose of msg once a month so

i'll be more resilient to msg," like i thinkthose just don't have a place. it's very fine-grained, but there is a great argument that says, "don'tbe in too steady of a state. you should wobble," which is why i'm like have a re-feed day,but i do know that the people i work with and in my own experience, that my re-feedday is carl's jr. and coke and cheesecake or whatever. i'm going to take at least fourdays before i get the laser focus and the brain that's always on and the effortlessstate that i'm used to living in. what i'd love to see, from the research youguys are doing and certainly my own self experiments with it right now, is if i can increase myresilience, i can make it easier to be in that state that i'm seeking on a daily basis.that would be an amazing gift, and i'd love

to have more people feel that way more ofthe time, not just me. is that your experience. what's your energy like when you're on a highrs diet versus on a clean diet where you feel great on a clean diet, or did you never havethat? i don't know. tim: yeah. i don't know. i'm doing great withthe high rs diet, and i've been doing it now for well over a year. i'm kind of like youwith the biohacking stuff. i like to get medical labs as much as i can. i work in a hospital,so it's really easy for me to go to the lab and get blood drawn.dave: oh, fun. tim: i have [insurances 00:34:05] so i canuse one in one quarter and another on a another quarter, or they like to do it twice a year,so i kind of got them all separated out, where

if i went, i could get labs every three monthsand track my cholesterol and track a few other markers that i like to see, but yeah, my energylevel's great. my cholesterol's great. all my ... all the standard labs that they'vetracked have been perfect. my a1c dropped from ... i think at one point it was up around6.0, which is almost diabetic, prediabetic. now it's like 4.7, which is right at the verybottom of the normal range, so everything is working out perfect as far as the labs.dave: you've lost a ton of weight, tim, right? tim: yeah. what happened ... my story is similarto yours. i was in the military, and i spent a lot of time over in a desert back in 2004right after 9-11. at that time, they thought there was a big anthrax problem, so what they'ddo to make us bulletproof soldiers is they

shot us full of cipro.dave: lovely. tim: [inaudible 00:35:21] five points we wentin. i think we got a cipro booster, five months, and during that time, i went from pretty healthy,but my digestion just tanked. i was having heartburn and gerd. you couldn't even getpepto-bismol at the little store they had there at the post we were at. when your familywould ask what you want, they're expecting you to say cookies and ... told them to sendtums and pepto-bismol. we just thought it was from the crappy food we were eating inthe little dining facilities, but people ... we weren't sleeping. people were kind of goingcrazy and getting sent home. now there's all these post-traumatic stress disorder, andi know that all that's linked to what they

did with the cipro. that's going to be thenew agent orange. wait and see. when i got back from there, that was in 2004.that's the last antibiotics i've had. from 2004 to about 2008, i gained about 70 pounds.i went full-fledge metabolic syndrome. my a1c and fasting blood glucose shot up. i gainedall this weight. i was on cholesterol medicine, blood pressure medicine, all that. long storyshort, i was doing everything the doctors were saying, eating whole grains, lean meat.then i developed gout, so i couldn't exercise anymore, just one thing after another, soi started looking around on the internet, found mark sisson and primal blueprint. ifound you. i had your food pictograph up on my refrigerator at one point. i was doingall the stuff. i was doing the bulletproof

coffee with the stick blender. i was doingeverything that was against what the doctors were telling me to do and it worked out great.within six months, i was off all my medicine. i lost ...dave: love it. tim: ... 40 pounds in that first six months.my gout completely disappeared, and it was great, just like you guys with the bulletproofand the primal and all that, and everything was just great. then things started eveningout. i lost about 100 pounds. then i started getting the low carbs. i wanted to lose another10 pounds, so to do that, i'll cut out all the carbs. i'll go to zero carbs. i did allthat, and it was dry eyes, cold hands. dave: it wrecked my house. i had to stop afterthree months. it's bad news.

tim: it was the same here, and i think i wason your site, where i came across that it was like every couple days eating some starches,and that was just about the time of the safe starch debates. i adopted that pretty heartily.that was a couple years ago. i started eating rice and potatoes, and then i started readingabout resistant starch. about a year and almost a year and a half ago, i came across potatostarch as a form of resistant starch, so i started doing that, and i talked richard intodoing it. richard started it. then we started blogging about it, but yeah, i would say myenergy levels have been great. my brain energy has been great. my labs have all been great.i guess i'm talking a little too much. dave: no. not at all. i think people afterfascinated to hear this stuff, tim, because

you started monitoring. you looked at whatworks. you got somewhere. part of the whole philosophy that i'm really setting out inthe bulletproof diet book here is that there's a bunch of suspect foods that are probablynot serving you well. you might want to see how it feels to be clean for a little whileand then start adding stuff back in and see what it does and maybe measure the results.there's even an app that looks at your heart rate. if you add something in that messesyou up, your heart rate's going to tell you before you feel it, really. there's all kindsof cool hacks that we can do. i would love to be able to say, "yeah, i taketwo spoonfuls of starch. i maintain my mental things. my kids don't laugh at me becausei fart all the time," stuff like that. i can't

say i'm there yet, but my first experimentwith resistant starch didn't go well at all. this current one i'm in right now, i've beentaking arabinogalactan, which speeds a specific species in the gut that allegedly makes youmore resilient to aflatoxin, which is an interesting bulletproof skill to have. that stuff, man,like i don't even want to be in the room with myself, much less anyone else, but after threeor four days, it started calming down, so i'm eager to do another study. i've been usingthe corn-based resistant starch, the high-amylose starch, because the potato starch still ... itake some potato, i get rashes from it. i don't believe there's a lot of lectin in it.i also, i haven't actually published this, but i ran ... one of the concerns with potatoesthat i have is there's about 20 different

things during harvesting and storage thatmake the potatoes go wrong, so they make a lot more self-defense anti-nutrients. theyhave fungal problems. these are well documented in potato farmers. the rest of us, like, "ah,i just ate a potato. sometimes i felt good, sometimes i didn't," but the variable wasthe potato, itself. i'm like drying potatoes [inaudible 00:40:45]. there's got to be mycotoxinsin there, so i sent them off to my labs, and we ran them through a medium sensitivity test.i don't want to say the brand, because i did one sample, so i don't want to imply thatthe brand ... it's a major national brand of potato starch. it came through with flyingcolors, like as low as it gets. i don't think there's a mycotoxin issue in it, but i cantell you i still get rashes from it, so maybe

it's a lectin issue or maybe it's a gut biomeissue. for people who are listening to this, if you're going to experiment with this, checkout the stuff that you guys have written on free the animal for sure. there's what, 900comments in that, richard? richard: there's now roughly 100 differentposts that are tagged resistant starch, and it covers the board from stuff where we, wheretim and i have dug up research, everything, every topic you can think of. most of thoseposts have at least a couple hundred comments. one post has 1000 comments. it's safe to sayif you started reading the bible today and started reading all those posts and the comments,you'd probably finish the bible first. it's huge at this point. it's huge at this point.one thing that's good about reading the comments

is that you have ... it's mostly positiveanecdotes, but there's plenty of negative anecdotes there, too.then there's also, if you're able to look at it through time, you can come and say,"wait, so this person says this," and then later one way down the thread, or maybe evenon another thread, they're like, "hey, i did this, and this helped," and so i'm on my way.that's one of the things that got me convinced that most people need to get on probiotics,sbos as well, because one woman was having ... the potato starch was giving her headaches,like migraines, like serious headaches. she took the ... i think it was the prescriptassist was the only one she took, and it was like, boom, headache's gone. it's so complex,what you're dealing with. you're dealing with

up to a thousand different species with agenome that's 100 times our genome. our genome is one percent of everything thatthere is about us. when you say, "is there a genetic component to obesity?" yeah, butit may be the 99% of the genes that is the big component to it, right?dave: tim, do you mind if i talk about what's in your gut specifically? i saw your labs.grace shared them with permission, but can i talk about it on the air.tim: yeah, yeah. dave: i looked at all your different species.quite impressive, but the one that stood out that made me want to high-five myself, althoughi actually don't do that when no one's watching, is that your lactobacilli count was relativelylow compared to all of the other species you

had. did you notice that or have any thoughtsabout it? tim: yeah, and i did think that was strange.prior to that test, i had been, actually, taking several probiotics with lactobacillusin them, because in my american gut, i think lactobacillus was nonexistent. i don't evenknow if it was 0.01 or less. i don't even know if it even showed up on there. i thoughtthat was really strange, because i eat a lot of fermented foods, a lot of sauerkraut, andi'm around the farm and stuff like this, so i should be full of the stuff, but i havea feeling that a lot of people ... the lactobacillus just doesn't stick around or it's kind ofin a biofilm or isn't in your feces, so it doesn't show up on the reports. yeah, i wasn'tworried about it at all, because i think that

everything that's going on in my gut is reallyhealthy compared to what's in a healthy gut. dave: it actually supported a hypothesis thati've had for a while. i wrote a really popular post called, "why yogurt makes you fat andfoggy." some of the species of lactobacilli are histamine formers and their peroxynitriteformers. they'll take nitrates and make them toxic. i'm sorry ... those are nitrosamines,not peroxynitrite, so they're nitrosamine formers. even the big, a while back, red meatraises tmao and causes ... that's also a gut bacteria-mediated thing, but those are mostlylactobacilli species. some of the species that you can take cause negative changes inthe gut and their alleged probiotics. i know when i take those species, i get brain fog,and i can grow a muffin top like no one else,

and it's lactobacilli mediated. i also knowwhen i drink bulletproof coffee, the phenols in the coffee or when you eat blueberriesor any of the brightly-colored vegetables, you're feeding the bacteroidetes rather thanfeeding the firmicutes. thin people have lots of bacteroidetes. youdo, by the way. when we looked at yours, you have lots of those, and they have less firmicutes,which includes lactobacillus. i think some species of lactobacilli are fat people bacteria,and they make you slow and they make you foggy, and they make you more susceptible to things.there's probably some great species in there, too, but when you clump all of them together,it's just like saying all starch is good or all starch is bad or all protein is god orbad. lactobacilli are fat people bacteria.

not all of them, but enough of them that i'mscared of them. tim: yeah. i agree with you on that. did youever read up about lactobacillus plantarum? dave: yeah, i was looking at what grace wassaying about that, and i certainly ... in the years of research, i've taken a few plantarumonce. that's ... primal defense ultra contains plantarum, right?tim: yeah, yeah. i was reading up on that, and one place where it's really heavily concentratedis decomposing feathers, so like chickens ... if you raise chickens and stuff, theyhave a lot of it on there. they even ... the add composted feathers to cow food, and thatmakes the lactobacillus plantarum grow in the foods. you get the microbes in there [inaudible00:46:56]. remember, everybody used to use

old feather pillows. it seems like at night,you're sleeping on this feather pillow, your slobbering on it.dave: (laughs) a fermented feather pillow. sounds like another product maybe you canget. maybe you can get mark sisson to sell it along with his poop. (laughs)tim: the bulletproof product for you. i want some royalties on that one. any of your googleor any search engine, type in lactobacillis plantarum and bdnf, and i know you know whatthat is. dave: oh, absolutely.tim: there's a strong connection between the l. plantarum and bdnf, which is brain-derivedneurotrophic factor. dave: neurotrophic factor, yeah.tim: the l. plantarum actually increases the

bdnf in everybody, every animal that theystudied it in. there's a connection there with anxiety, depression, alzheimer's, thingsfrom aging, so old people. give them a feather pillow. tell them to slobber on it.dave: (laughs) tim: i'm thinking that there's something tothat, because that's another thing that's disappearing from our life is feathers. everybodyused to use feather pillows, feather mattresses and that and they brought them into the house.these things are a natural [sink 00:48:22] for l. plantarum. there's another one calledbacillus licheniformis. that's another feather degrader. l. plantarum is an antihistamine,right, so it's histamine-degrading. the bacillis licheniformis is histamine-producing, butthe licheniformis only grows on white feathers.

the people who know this is the people whoraise birds, like parrots and stuff like that. that's where you learn all this stuff, soyou have this histamine-producing growing on white feathers. you have the antihistaminegrowing on all the feathers, the decomposing feathers. if you think about now, chickenfactories, where they're raising chickens. what are all of those chickens? they're white,so we've bred this super-histamine-producing feathers.dave: ... so it's not enough to pay attention to a1 and a2 casein. you have to know thecolor of the feathers of the chicken that made your eggs, or it's really not as bulletproofas it could be. tim: it's just a nasty [inaudible 00:49:33],because we get these chickens, we pump them

full of antibiotics, and they're raised sothey have white feathers, and the reason they have white feathers is because when you pluckthem, it leaves a nice clean carcass. if you pluck a black chicken, there's little blackdots all over it. it doesn't look very appealing in the store, so you genetically breed allthese chickens to be white. they're all producing histamines, so it's like the yin and yangthing is gone with the chicken farm. then we pump them full of antibiotics, we eat theeggs, we eat the meat, and we've got all the crappy microbes from it. you get back to theheirloom breeds of chickens, like i raised ones called black jerseys.dave: nice. tim: they're pure chickens. the old featherpillows, i remember when i was a kid, we had

some feather mattresses out in this barn,and we'd play with them, throw the feathers around, and they were just nasty old duckfeathers in there. they weren't white feathers. i bet if you buy a feather pillow today, it'sprobably full of white feathers that are sterilized and won't grow anything. yeah, so you needto start selling those, good black feather pillows.dave: fermented feather pillows. i think there might be a few regulatory lines between hereand there, but it's really ... tim: [crosstalk 00:50:52] amazing on that,though. dave: raising bdnf is like a core biohackexercise does. it's certain kinds of movement, like yoga, blueberries, intermittent fasting.there's so many things you can do, and even

going in and out of ketosis, you're changingthe state. anything that's causing hormetic change tends to raise bdnf, because it helpsus adapt to new environments, high-intensity interval training. i did not know that aboutplantarum. i'm certainly familiar with it. tim: l. plantarum bdnf. you'll find [inaudible00:51:26] the whole thing. dave: we'll put a link in the show to thatgoogle query. i'll use, "let me google that for you. if you don't know that service, it'sthe best one ever." richard: i love it when someone asks me aquestion. dave: this has been an amazing conversation.i'm really glad that both you guys were able to come on here. i'm hoping you're planningto do some kind of a book on resistant starch

coming up, right?richard: it's well in the works. grace and tim and i, and it's basically a package rightnow, but because this is such a moving target, we've found in a lot of instances of havingto go back and really adjust and re-write stuff, because there's new stuff coming outall the time. at a point, you got to say you cut, cut, and that's kind of where we're atright now. i think grace and tim are currently working on a re-write of a chapter about probiotics,i believe. i'm a chapter or two behind them and word-by-word-by-word edit, because itis quite long at this point. i don't know, tim, 400, 450 pages, i think.dave: that's a long book. richard: that's long, and so i'm going through,and i'm trying to say everything that we can

possibly say in as few words as possible.dave: don't do the gary taubes mistake. "good calories, bad calories" was a seminal amazingbook. i couldn't put it down, but there aren't that many readers like the three of us thatcouldn't put it down, which is why he came out with, "why we get fat and what to do aboutit". keep it accessible, because i'm struggling with the same thing with "the bulletproofdiet". i want to write [inaudible 00:53:13] but i'm not.richard: you can ask tim what i go through, and he was looking at revisions yesterday.i'm trying to write it that it's like a narrative story about all these bugs in your gut. thatwas my original idea. someone needs to tell their story, right, but then it's got tonsand tons and tons and tons and tons of references.

i don't know. we've got thousands of references.a lot of people don't even look at the references. part of that word count is thousands of references.i don't really know how it's going to shake out in the end with the length, but hopefullywe'll know very soon, because we've got to wrap this up.dave: do you have a publisher, or how's that all going to work?richard: well, mark sisson kind of let the cat out of the bag. remember when he was onyour show? that was the first time he said it publicly that we'd been back and forthon this. dave: okay, so that's official? we can talkabout it? richard: mark's attitude, and i agree withhim, is that because i write about resistant

starch and tim does and grace does and everything,within that community, it's cool to say we're working on a book and da-da-da-da-da, butit doesn't really serve mark's interest if it turns out he officially publishes the bookto make a big hey about it now. it's something you want to do a couple months before it comesout. that's when we'll hear mark talking about it.dave: when the time comes for your book launch, let me know a little in advance. we'll getyou back on this show so people can hear the latest about the book. i like to support myfriends' launches as best as possible. the bulletproof podcast is growing pretty well.number one ranks most the time. if we can push more readers towards your book, i thinkit's going to be an important seminal work

on nutrition. i'm eager to read it, and ifi can read it early, please let me. i'll even say something nice if it's worth it.richard: i'll return the favor with you as well, dave, when you say yours is due ... [inaudible00:55:18] in december, you think? dave: my deadline is june 1st. rodale is publishingit, and it should come out december 2nd. richard: okay. yeah, that's a ... that's atough deadline. dave: you are the only podcast i'm recordingthis month, because this is such important stuff. i moved all the rest of them out untili hit this deadline. all i'm doing is the on-stage appearances where i promised someonei'd be there and writing, because there's so much i want to say.richard: tim and i just talked about that

the other day. this is probably the last thingwe're going to do until at least the book is off and into the publishing shoe. the thingis, when that happens, i'm going to be busy, too, because by that point, tim and gracewill be done, and it will be my job to go to the excruciating process with the actualeditors. that's going to be a nightmare. dave: i totally understand that. let me knowwhen it's time to have you back on. you guys are always welcome. before i let you go, iknow we're running up on the end of our deadline here, there's a question that i ask everyguest ... top three things for people who want to kick more ass. it doesn't have tobe resistant starch-based, just your whole-life most important three things. since i've gottwo of you, that means there's six. richard,

why don't you go first.richard: the top important three things is, number one, real food. everybody knows whatthat is. whatever your own particular dietary things are, whether you are more plant-basedor whether you're move animal-based, just try to make it good and real food. the secondthing is get outside and have fun, whether that's a walk or working out outside, whetherit's laying in the sun or whatever, and number three is to get good sleep, but i like tosay, it's kind of like what we were saying with dosage with resistant starch. i'm notone of these guys who say, "oh, i've got to get my seven hours or eight hours every night.i prefer to be the kind of guy who has four hours one night and ten hours another night.in other words, if my body wants to sleep

ten hours, i'm going to let it sleep ten hours,but if i wake up, and i've slept for four and i feel fine, rearing to go, then get upand get going, right? dave: that's what healthy people do.richard: get off the clock is what i'd say in terms of sleep. sleep when you're tired.get up when you're not. dave: love it.richard: that's my three. dave: tim, enlighten us with your tater totknowledge. tim: i guess what i've been telling everybodylately is read all that you can about the gut. there's so much coming out on it everyday. there's articles, there's blogs, everything. read every one of those gut articles and youtubevideos. watch those. learn as much as you

can about the gut. when you're reading it,listen to that. keep in the back of your mind resistant starch, prebiotics and probioticsand how that changes what you're hearing about it. a lot of things you read and hear aboutthe gut, it seems like it's really out of your control, but when you're feeding thegut and applying new microbes in there, things actually can be within your grasp, like changes,so read all you can about the gut. also, try to get in touch with the dirt, especiallythis summer. go out and grow a garden. dig in the dirt. plant some new trees. try tokeep your hands dirty in the summer and don't go crazy about sterilizing them. there areso many microbes in the dirt. most of the probiotics that we've talked about today arein the dirt. if you pick up a handful of dirt,

you're going to get l. plantarum on your hand.the stuff lives in the dirt. also, i tell people biohack yourself. biohacksomething. try some new things and see how you feel. don't just read the blog [inaudible00:59:20] four tablespoons of potato starch. if it doesn't work, you quit it and call ita bad experiment. biohack it. try to figure out what's not working. try to make it workfor you, just like you're doing. you didn't stop with potato starch. you moved on to otherthings and you're finding things that work for you. that's what i like to tell people.keep biohacking yourself, because you've got the rest of your life to get it right.dave: love it. guys, thanks for being on here. let's see. name some blogs real quick thatpeople can go to, and then i know you got

to run, richard, specifically. freetheanimal.com,and any other places we should send people? richard: oh, yeah. paul jaminet, "perfecthealth diet". dave: oh, yeah.richard: good resource. dave: great guy.richard: ... is one, and he's pretty, of course, supportive of starches and resistant starch.robb wolf has been talking about it, robbwolf.com. chris kresser has been talking about it andpromoting his ... and chris is in clinical practice and has had a lot of good resultswith his patients, which is important to understand. then, of course, our collaborator, grace liu,that's bganimalpharm.blogspot.com if i'm not mistaken. that's where a lot of this actionis on resistant starch. oh, and then mark

sisson.dave: of course. richard: "mark's daily apple". he finallycame out and did a definitive guide. when mark sisson does a definitive guide, thatmeans he has been convinced that there is something big and important about this. there'snot tons of definitive guides. it has to be something that he considers real worthy todo that. dave: lovely. thanks again, guys. i look forwardto hearing about your book when it comes out. richard: thank you, dave.dave: hey, if you haven't heard yet, we've got activated charcoal back in stock. featuredfree the animal

dr. grace liu’s animal pharm blogresources ubiomedoctors data comprehensive stool anaylsis human microbiome projectadvanced orthomolecular research probiotic 3paul jaminet’sâ perfect health diet chris kressermark sisson’s definitive guide to resistant starchlet me google that for you primal defense ultraarabinogalactan powder lactobacillus plantarum (l plantarum)prescript assist probiotic bulletproofis there such a thing as a bulletproof resistant

starch?why yogurt and probiotics make you fat and foggy#117 uncovering resistant starch with dr. grace liu - podcast#101 primal blueprint with mark sisson - podcast #47 biohacking cows, bulletproof dairy, andprobiotics with natural health expert jordan rubin - podcastbulletproof⮠coffee upgraded™ coconut charcoal quick guide to key points* how to raise bdnf: blueberries, intermittent fasting, exercise, yoga, going in and outof ketosis, and high intensity interval training * when the starch is not cooked they “resist”digestion and reach the large intestine. resistant

starch types: rs1 (nuts and grains preservedby a shell), rs2 (green bananas and potato starch), rs3 (when rs2 is cooked it expandsand when cooled will resist digestion), rs4 (man-made) bulletproof toolboxpodcast #124, richard nikoley and tim steele 30 â© the bulletproof executive 2013