Zack Arnold

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Mark Sisson on the ‘Primal Lifestyle’

About Episode

Paleo and Primal are popular buzz words in the health and fitness industry right now, but I think it’s unfair to call them ‘fads’ as many people do, especially since these philosophies are designed based on millions of years of human evolution. My guest Mark Sisson is one of the godfathers of the paleo and primal diet and fitness movements, and we do a deep dive into living a ‘primal lifestyle,’ and we also dispel some of the myths and false atacks against this approach.

*PS. My apologies for the scratchy audio quality throughout this show.

Transcript

Zack Arnold: We’re just going to go ahead and jump right in today. I just want to say that it is a tremendous, tremendous pleasure to have you on this show. I am just a tremendous fan of your work, and it was actually-I don’t remember exactly when-it was probably five or six years ago now. That through through a random Google search, I found Mark’s DailyApple.com, and that was kind of the the very beginning, the very first small seed that was planted for me, going in the direction of eating in a more primal, natural paleo way. So I just wanted to thank you for all the the amazing resources that you’ve provided for me over the the last several years.

Mark Sisson: It’s my pleasure. In fact, most people who come to the site do so from having done an organic search, looking for information on a particular health issue, and that’s how they first come to Mark’s Daily Apple.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and you’re somebody that just is a tremendous resource for not only just general knowledge but really gritty, down and dirty scientific knowledge. And you understand the biology of the human body, and you understand the nutritional value of food. And you know, you’re not a licensed medical physician, but as I’ve told my audience several times in the world of nutrition that kind of doesn’t mean anything anymore. So it’s it’s really voices like yours that I tend to listen to more. So what I want to do for my audience today, because my audience, unlike yours or Ben Greenfield’s or Dave Aspreys or all the people in the health and fitness field, I have an audience that’s really starting from square one that knows very little about you know real food and has lived in the world of processed foods and the food pyramid and now my daily plate and all these other pieces of information that frankly are just not good information. So I want to really look at it from your perspective. So can we start with just kind of a one-on-one primer of what is the primal or paleo approach to diet and lifestyle.

Mark Sisson: Well, the primal approach is is one of recognizing that each of us has within us a recipe that wants to build a strong, lean, fit, happy, healthy, productive, loving human being. We have a genetic recipe that has certain expectations that are kind of built in over millions of years of evolution, the genes want to express themselves in a way that makes us healthy. But unfortunately, over the years and through partly through technology and partly through advances, if you want to call those in agriculture, we’ve given our genes the wrong inputs, and so we’ve created a version of ourselves that is not the best. It may be fatter than we wanted or less energetic than we wanted, or get sick more often than we wanted. So the purpose of the primal blueprint lifestyle is to identify many of these hidden genetic switches that we all possess, and uncover the ways in which we can literally reprogram our genes to build us stronger, and to have more energy, and to burn more fat, and to trend toward our ideal body composition, and to become less reliant on medicines to enjoy life. It’s basically a list of lifestyle choices. Certainly, a lot of that revolves around food choices. Certain foods have certain direct impacts on on hormonal expression and eventually on genetic expression, but also involves choices of exercise. You can choose certain types of exercise that will take you down one path of long, lean, sinewy muscles, and another path of exercise that’ll that’ll pack more muscle on and make you more of a speed athlete. It revolves around how much sun exposure you get, how much vitamin D you’re making based on your own genetic recipe, or how much sleep you are getting, and how much recovery that your body is undergoing as a result of those sleep choices. That’s not a very brief description, Zack, but it’s a description of what the Primal Blueprint is all about.

Zack Arnold: Well, I will say that I did not bring you on this podcast because I’m looking for somebody to be brief. That’s one thing that I really that I really appreciate about your show and about your articles is that if I want a quick paragraph and a tidbit or a bite about something, I go anywhere on Google or the internet. If I really want to dig in and learn the details and know that it’s going to be hard work, I’m going to go to Mark Sisson. So I don’t want you to be brief today. I know that you obviously have a life to go to, and so do I. But at the same time, I’m not looking for really nice succinct sound bites. I’m looking for that really good information, and that’s what I appreciate so much about your work.

Mark Sisson: Gotcha.

Zack Arnold: So one thing that I wanted to bring up before we go into some of the specifics is the idea that people are saying, “Oh, well, paleo is a fad diet, which to me, I think, is the funniest thing in the world. It’s like saying yoga is a fad. It’s like, well, these have actually been around for 1000s and 1000s of years, and somebody has now just found a way to kind of package this in a little bit neater way to understand. But talk about how, if you’re looking at diet and nutrition and exercise, the paleo approach is the farthest thing from the latest fad.

Mark Sisson: Yeah, it’s it’s really the crucible in which all of our genetic expectations, all of these switches were were forged. And so for two and a half million years of human evolution, and hundreds of millions of years of of evolution before that, there were certain limitations to what we ate. We didn’t eat industrial seed oils. We didn’t eat refined sugar or processed carbohydrates, what we would call a cellular carbohydrates. We ate, you know, natural wholesome food. When it was available, and when food was not available, luckily for us, we had developed this amazing skill to be able to store body fat for periods of famine, and then be able to live on that stored body fat quite effectively without eating sometimes for days, sometimes maybe for weeks, and to do so without losing our energy, without losing our motivation for for living or for moving on to the next, continuing to try to to eat more food. These are all skills that we have built innately as a result of a consistent diet. And yes, there are variations of this diet around the world in terms of macronutrient components, but the basic elements of what is not in the paleo or primal diet. Again, the the lack of industrial seed oils, the lack of refined sugar and processed carbohydrates. That’s really hardly a fad. That’s how we’ve been eating for two and a half million years. And all we’re doing now is, as you said, we’re sort of packaging it in a way that’s more palatable to the average consumer. To say, look, these are some of the foods that we evolved to thrive on, and some of the food groups and some of the food types, and these over here are some of the foods that are more recently introduced into our way of eating to which we have not yet adapted. Grains would be a good example of those. Most people have not fully adapted. Most humans have not adapted to being able to consume grains in a way that benefits the human body, and certainly not without problems across the board. So hardly a fad diet. It’s been going on for a long, long time, and all we’re doing is sort of reintroducing

Zack Arnold: It. Yeah, and you you have a an article that you wrote about why grains are bad, why gluten is bad, and this is another one of those where people are like, well, this gluten thing is just a fad, and I was on that train for a long time too, until I found this little thing called education and science, and realized that there really, really is a problem with these types of foods. So, what I’ll make sure to do is link to some of the the articles that I found of yours and have them right here in the podcast show notes so people can find them. But if I’m thinking, well, this all sounds kind of interesting, and I’m not really sure where to start, can you give me just like the elevator pitch for what does my diet look like if I decide that I want to go paleo?

Mark Sisson: Well, out of the blocks, you’re going to want to give up all of the desserts and sweetened beverages and candies, candy bars, and all of those sort of things that you know everybody knows intuitively you should not be be chowing down on a regular basis-that’s the easiest part to to start with-is to give up the the sugary stuff. From there, you want to cut back on processed carbohydrates. That would be refined flours that are found in breads and pastas and cereals and cookies and crackers and things like that. And you go, well, what does that leave? Well, that leaves meat, fish, fowl, eggs, nuts, seeds, lots of vegetables, some fruit. It allows you the opportunity to put extra virgin olive oil on whatever you want, as much as you want, with reckless abandon. To use butter, ghee, lard, some of the healthy cooking fats. Coconut oil is a favorite. So on the one hand, it’s really mostly about what you’re going to decide to eliminate from your diet, and then on the other hand, it’s going to be recognizing all of these wonderful foods that you might have thought were unhealthy in the past that you’re now reintroducing to your diet. But the the elimination part is probably the the most difficult and yet most important, and it’s sort of the part that all of these other diets that you might think are are really diametrically opposed to each other, because you know a vegan diet or a blue zone diet or a typical low fat sort of diet, they still have in common with a paleo diet the elimination of these sugary things and these refined processed foods.

Zack Arnold: So then, let me ask this question as a follow-up. I hear a lot of people saying now, “Oh, well, you know, it’s really easy. All you just need to do is eat real food. That’s it. Just go out and eat real food, guys. It’s not hard. Explain to me how that doesn’t quite apply to the world we live in anymore, and how you have to kind of refine that to make sure that you’re eating the right real food and apply it to the paleo approach.

Mark Sisson: There are degrees of participation here, and I think I just sort of described the first degree, first level of participation, which is the elimination of some of those nasty things. But then you say, okay, well, what what can I eat? What am I going to eat? Ideally, you would eat grass-fed meats or or pastured, you know, eggs from pastured hens, cage-free, hormone and antibiotic-free, because those are the best sources of protein. You don’t want to be necessarily on the, you know, bandwagon that the the concentrated animal feedlot operation, like what we call the CAFO beef, where you’re eating animals that that in turn are not eating what they were evolved to eat, so there’s a a bit of an education that’s required there when you identify what real food is. The fact that it doesn’t have a label with lots of unpronounceable chemicals on it is a good start, but it doesn’t necessarily put you in the clear just yet. So people might. Well, milk is real food, and you know, based on my history of of low fat, I’m going to go get some 2% milk or some skim milk or you know, homogenize, pasteurized. As much as we are big fans of certain types of dairy in the primal blueprint movement, I would have you aggressively avoid 2% pasteurized, homogenized stuff. It’s crap. It’s been adulterated, and even though it you might call it real food, and you might look at the label and say, “Well, gee, there’s no chemicals added to it, it’s still been processed to the point that it’s not it’s not positively impact you, and may in fact be negatively impacting you. So we look at there is an element of education here. There is that’s what I what I do. That’s why I’ve got 4000 articles, and probably by now you know seven and a half, 8 million words on Mark’s Daily Apple because I’ve been looking at this a long time. And it’s not back to my opening statement here about degrees of participation. The first level of participation is what you’re eliminating. The several second level of participation is kind of understanding what it is that you can eat, and then how you can prepare it in ways that are healthful, and ways that. And by the way, let’s be clear: everything that I suggest you do here has almost by definition it has to taste good. If it doesn’t taste good, I don’t like eating it. So, the fact that kale is the most healthy food on the planet doesn’t necessarily mean you have to put kale in your diet, you know, unless it’s been prepared in a way that has great flavor on every mouthful.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that that’s something that was really, really key to me is that I spent years. I’ve I’ve been on this this decade of trying to figure out how to survive in my industry for over over a decade, and I really was doing the whole low fat approach. Like I would wake up for breakfast in the morning. I would have orange juice and Special K and low fat yogurt and maybe a piece of toast. And I thought that I was doing it right. You know, I was having my heart healthy grains and my cereals, and I just felt like garbage. I’ve never really had a weight problem. If anything, I was skinny when I was at the worst of my health. I was probably 40 pounds lighter than I am now, and I’m I’m not heavy now, so I was kind of the opposite of somebody that starts at you know being obese and being type two diabetic. But I still had horrible health problems. And what I realized when I started this approach is that not only is this better for me, but dear Lord, this food tastes so much better. And and I think that kale is a perfect example because I literally used to have bags of Doritos for dinner. Like people think, oh, I’m this health freak and all this. I’m like, no, I was not this way my whole life. I literally had bags of Doritos for dinner. But once you kind of detoxify your system and you identify something like kale, if you have like a nice baked kale with a little bit of olive oil and sea salt on it, I would take that any day over a bag of Doritos because it tastes so much better, but my body responds positively because I’m getting nutrients, and it’s actually something that I now crave. So it’s a much different mindset.

Mark Sisson: Absolutely, and and that also sort of reminds me to remind your audience that this is a lifestyle that’s an a intended to be sustainable. It’s intended to be something you could do for the rest of your life, and and almost most importantly, it’s intended to be to improve every aspect of your life. So I want you to have more energy. I want you to trend toward your ideal body composition. I want you to be in a better mood all the time. I don’t want you to get sick as often as you as you used to get. I want you to get off the meds. All of these things are integral in enjoying an awesome life, and and that’s our new theme at the Primal Blueprint is live awesome. It’s not just about dialing in your diet, although that’s an important part. It’s about how can I get the most enjoyment out of every minute of every day that that I’m awake.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that’s what’s so important to me about this is it’s not a paleo diet. When people say the words paleo diet, I understand that from the fad perspective, there are a lot of people that are trying to capitalize on this idea and are doing it wrong. But to me, it’s the paleo lifestyle, and it’s just understanding that we’re trying to get back to our roots as human beings and trying to get away from everything that you’ve already talked about. So I’m not going to go into all of that. But speaking of the word paleo diet, I want to talk a little bit about a report that came out earlier this year, and I’ll put a link to it in the show notes. But this is a report from U.S. News and World Report for the best diets of 2015, and they reviewed 34 or 35 of all the various diets, and the paleo was dead last. So, can you talk to me about how something like that happens because when I look at it, Weight Watchers and the Biggest Loser diet are near the top, and to me that’s absurd. So can you just talk about this report?

Mark Sisson: Yeah, it sort of throws the credibility of of these reporting agencies into serious question. Now, you know when you do an evaluation like this, and it’s a U.S. News and World Report or or any any magazine. You assemble a board of so-called experts. Well, in this case, the experts are M.D.s, physicians who had maybe six hours of training in their entire seven-year training cycle as a as a physician, never really focused on on. On nutrition in any way, shape, or form. Then you have registered dietitians who who learned how to prescribe for hospital settings, people coming out of out of surgery or out of cancer surgery, and then sitting down to a meal of Jello, mashed potatoes, skim milk, and orange juice. It’s it’s unbelievable that that so a board of this sort of of dogmatic people who are who are sort of sponsored by industry adhere to a certain principle that was that was taught first 50 years ago and hasn’t changed since, and now they’re using the same criteria that they learned that is really old technology and bad science. They’re using the same criteria to evaluate these eating strategies. So the fact that Weight Watchers and its point system and its dramatically lowered calorie intake would would score highly, or that heaven forbid that that the biggest loser, which is probably the most unhealthy eating strategy on the planet, and and then when combined with the inhumane exercise strategies that they employ, is the antithesis of health, and certainly the antithesis of sustainability. I mean, seriously, most of the people who have gone on The Biggest Loser have gained gained back all the weight. It’s the it’s you know it’s I don’t even think it’s a secret anymore. So you’ve got a once again you’ve got a board of of advisors here who are going through criteria that are way outdated and haven’t been updated for for decades, using that criteria to quote objectively evaluate different programs. I mean, the fact that so much research and science has exonerated saturated fat as a proximate cause of heart disease, and yet it’s one of the one of the things that this board will call out as something wrong with the paleo diet and cause it to get a negative rating because it contains higher levels of saturated fat than the other diets. Well, that’s the whole premise of the paleo diet is to cut back on carbohydrates and improve healthy fats. And as you go down, I mean, we just have realized, and just in the last five years, that dietary cholesterol is not bad for you. It doesn’t really impact your your blood cholesterol, and yet that’s a criteria that was used to cast an aspersions, further aspersions on the paleo diet in the overall scheme of all the diets on the planet. So I just I look at this and I go. I just kind of roll my eyes and go, okay. If you guys who are who are in the trenches advising people on how to eat, if you registered dietitians and you board of advisor physicians who are on this board doing this evaluation, if this is how you’re recommending people eat, no wonder we have such catastrophic failure in the obesity program in this country.

Zack Arnold: Well, and I kind of feel like too that I mean, granted, this may not be the scientific approach, and this is you know correlation and not causation. But all you have to do is kind of go anywhere, and you look around, you say, well, if the mainstream is being prescribed a specific diet and a specific protocol, and two thirds of the entire country is literally morbidly obese, and you know, type two diabetes is skyrocketing. Well, maybe all of this isn’t working.

Mark Sisson: There’s your experiment right there. Yeah, exactly. Yeah,

Zack Arnold: But since you brought up the whole idea of saturated fat and cholesterol, that’s actually a terrific segue to my next point, which is yet again kind of another opposing viewpoint, as I’m sure you know all about and have read the whole study and know way more about it than I do. There was a meta study or meta analysis that came out sometime last year, and this is kind of what started this whole movement and resurgence towards fat is back and butter is back, and we see the picture of butter on Time magazine. So talk to me a little bit about this study, and then we’re going to go into some of the people that are still looking at this and saying, no, no, no, no, no, this is all BS. So let’s talk a little bit about this study and how it’s starting to change things.

Mark Sisson: Well, the basic element of these studies is just going back and reviewing these. Sometimes meta-analyses go back and look at other studies and and compile all the data and and pull out some of the stuff that was either lost the first time around or was inappropriately assembled or acquired in terms of data, and the end result is that there is no correlation with saturated fat intake and heart disease. And it’s been there’s voices in the wilderness have been shouting this for the last 50 years, but the overwhelming, you know, the political influences and the and the industrial influences have been have been out shouting them and shouting them down. The bottom line is saturated fat has never been shown to be approximate cause of heart disease. So we’ve got a meta-analysis association of dietary circulating and supplement fatty acids with coronary risk. A systematic review and meta-analysis in the Annals of Internal Medicine, 2014, basically proving saturated fat is not the is not the issue here. And the more that we that we cling to the idea that it is, the more we get rid of saturated fat and in our diet and replace it with sugars, which we know to be problematic in excess.

Zack Arnold: Yeah. Now the in response to this. This meta analysis. There’s an article that I found through a podcast, and it’s from Dr. McDougall’s Health and Medical Center. And again, I’ll put all the links to these articles we talk about in the show notes. But some of his basic rebuttals, and this is a long rebuttal, but I’m just going to read off a couple of the the key bullet points that really stuck out to me. It’s not okay to eat animals, eggs, saturated fats, excess starch and carbohydrates do not turn into body fat. Poly, and this next one is the one that just almost literally made my head explode. Polyunsaturated fats, like fish oil, do not prevent heart disease and most likely promote cancer. This is coming from a guy with “doctor” in front of his name.

Mark Sisson: Well, first of all, I mean, I I’ve been battling it out in the trenches with McDougal for a long time, over a decade. I attended one of his events. Gosh, again, over a decade. I wrote about it in a long blog post on Mark’s Daily Apple called “Escape from Vegan Island. It was a it was a week long retreat. My in laws were followers of McDougal, and just on a whim, I decided to join them on a family vacation to do a one-week retreat, and it was it was eye-opening to see the number of unhealthy people that were just waddling up to the to the to the buffet line every night and filling their plates full of pasta and potatoes and sweetened beverages and quote unquote healthy desserts, and you know none of them looked healthy, and none of them looked like they were going to lose any weight. And so my experience of Dr. McDougall, I know he’s trying to do the right thing, but my experience of it was not was not impressive. And to just make a blank a blanket statement that that I mean, if if you don’t if he doesn’t back it up with research that fat, that carbohydrates and and excess starches get stored as as as fat. I mean, we know that they raise insulin level. We know that insulin is a fat storage hormone. We know that out of hundreds of 1000s of user experiences on Mark’s Daily Apple, where people go in and start eating this way, and the weight literally falls off because they’ve cut back on these on these carbs, and they’ve improved the types of fats in their diet. It’s just an inappropriate statement to make from a from an MD. Now, the idea that you know the concept of polyunsaturated fatty acids-that’s an interesting concept-and I’m I’m not going to 100% disagree with him because the polyunsaturated fatty acid content of some of these industrial seed oils is such that you might find a link to increased risk for cancer if you took in the inappropriate polyunsaturated fatty acids or rancidified polyunsaturated fatty acids. But you know, fresh fresh salmon and the omega-3 fats, which are which are in fact a a version of polyunsaturated fatty acids, can I can guarantee you those are not causing cancer, so it’s it’s a very nuanced area where he’s making a blanket statement that says you know that that the paleo diet is wrong, and then and for him to just say it’s wrong to eat animals and eggs. I mean, you know that’s there’s a bit of a ethical thing that’s leaking into that, and in my way of hearing it, I don’t know when this debate is going to finally be over because people are attached to their way of eating probably more aggressively than they are attached to defending their religion in some cases. Well, and

Zack Arnold: Food is religion to a lot of people. Like they really do stick to it that much, where it’s it’s not just about oh I want to lose some weight. It’s like this is the way that I live, and this is the way that you have to live, and it works for me. Therefore, it has to work for you, right? And for me, the paleo approach is something that really, really works for me. That completely changed my life around, changed the way that I function on a daily basis, changed the way that I think, the amount of energy that I have. But that doesn’t make mean that it’s going to work for everybody. So it’s about finding something that works for you. And it’s what I keep trying to stress to people over and over: is don’t look for a diet. Your goal cannot be here’s where I want to get in 90 days. Like yes, you need to make short term goals, and I make goals literally every single day. But I always have an end goal, and for me, I’m playing the long game. Like I, I play chess with life. I don’t play checkers, and a lot of these diets are just a you know silly game of checkers where you say, “Oh, I’m going to do this for 90 days and be miserable, and then I’m going to reach my goal, and then a year later I’m going to be even you know in poorer health and have gained more of the weight back than I had originally. So for me, the paleo approach is playing the long game and looking at the way that my body was designed over hundreds of 1000s, if not millions, of years of evolution, so rather than looking at it from “Oh, what’s the best diet? by U.S. News and World Report for weight loss, can you talk to me a little bit about playing the long game with paleo and the kind of long-term health effects that it will have to switch your diet in this direction?

Mark Sisson: Sure. So the first thing that we notice is a reduction in inflammation almost across the board. So a lot of people are walking around with with little issues that they may or may not complain of: joint pain, mood issues. Maybe they retain water. Maybe they have sinus problems. Maybe they have gastrointestinal discomfort on a regular basis. And those are the sorts of things that start to start to resolve in a very short period of time. Sometimes days, sometimes just a few weeks. We will see people who report back that well, my digestion is better, or I’m more more regular, or I’ve lost a couple pounds. I didn’t even count calories. I didn’t feel the need to count calories because I never got hungry and never felt that I stuffed myself. So over time, what you see is a trend toward your ideal body composition. So you’ll arrive at a point when you become good at burning off your own stored body fat, which is one of the sort of sub goals of of the primal blueprint. It’s becoming good at burning stored body fat. Then you you lose that excess weight that’s probably increasing your risk for a lot of other problems. Your joints feel better because you’re carrying around less weight. You have more energy on a regular and consistent basis because you become so good at burning off your own stored body fat. Now the 500 calories that it takes you to get from lunch to dinner, your body doesn’t care whether it came from a plate of food or off your thighs, because you’re so good at accessing that fat. Either way, body doesn’t care, and it and it’s not concerned, and it doesn’t go into any kind of a starvation mode. The way that happens with a lot of people who have become so dependent on carbohydrate at every meal that once you withhold carbohydrate for a long period of time, the body kind of goes into an emergency situation. Not so with with the primal blueprint.

Zack Arnold: Well, for those that are listening that are in my industry, and I’m assuming the vast majority of my audience is, we’re all people in post production. We work in dark rooms all day long. It’s not a healthy environment. The food in our environment is horrible. A practical application of what he’s talking about, as far as the being dependent on carbohydrates and needing to eat every two or three hours, I’m sure everybody can relate to this story, and this is I can relate to it as well because I live this way most of my life. If you have an edit session that comes up at the last minute and it happens at around 1230 and your lunch that was takeout that you ordered from some restaurant down the street was supposed to be there at one. You’re thinking, “Oh my God! Like I have to start working with somebody at 1230 I’m not going to be able to eat. And then you’re in the room with them all afternoon, and you are the quote unquote grumpy editor. Everybody knows the grumpy editor. When you start to change your diet and you realize that you may miss a meal or you’re going to have to wait an extra hour or two, it doesn’t matter. And I literally get these weird looks where something will come up last minute, and I can’t eat lunch or whatever it is, or a director will come in and say, “Oh my God, you haven’t had lunch. I’m like, “No, it’s it’s really fine. Like, it’s not a big deal. And I’ll miss lunch, or I’ll go an extra two or three hours. I don’t crash. I don’t get jittery. I don’t get anxious, and I don’t get moody because I’ve transitioned to being more of a fat burner, and I’m not strictly a fat burner because I’m I’m still working on it and still trying to build better habits. But I’m primarily a fat burner, and I really don’t touch carbs until the afternoon. And when I do, it’s usually like an apple or you know a healthier version of a carbohydrate. But just the the level at which your cognitive function changes and your energy is leveled off, and you don’t have those swings. That was to me one of the most profound experiences I’ve ever had.

Mark Sisson: Yeah, and it’s something that you assume otherwise. You you know you think well for the rest of my life I you know eat multiple small meals throughout the day because that’s how I’m going to have to get through life. And I you know for the longest time I think in the 70s and 80s we we heard that if we skipped a meal that our bodies would go into cannibal mode and start tearing apart our muscle tissue and stuff like that, and at least that was the mantra in the in the sports and athletic community. Not even close. And when you become good at burning fat, you become you preserve muscle, and that’s that has its own benefits. But but sort of following from that, one of the things that happens as a result of transitioning this way is your appetite starts to regulate, and you find that you don’t, you’re not ravenous for food ever. You might be hungry if you don’t eat for a while, but you’re not ravenous, and you also find that you tend to develop a skill that allows you to walk away from food once you’ve had enough to eat, once you’re no longer hungry for the next bite. So as opposed to filling up because that’s what you’re on your plate, and like I’m sure when you lived on the Doritos, you know you’d have bags and bags. If there, you’d never leave a half a bag of Doritos because it’s, you know, it’s like a bag of Doritos is a serving size. So, well, now you have created this ability to to go long periods of time without eating and to and then to not overeat when you do get a chance to eat. And it’s again very empowering, very freeing kind of thing that that appetite no longer runs your life, and but you know there that’s one of many many benefits. I mean, people sleep better as a result of this. I back to some of the other side benefits. I was suffering from arthritis up until the age of about 40-seven. I was had this oncoming arthritis I’d had at my feet for years, but it was starting to get into my into my fingers, and so I would be, you know, wary of anybody who came up and shook my hand. I thought, I, I, in the back of my mind, I’d wonder, oh God, I hope they don’t clamp down too hard because it hurt. I couldn’t hold a golf club the way I wanted to, and I yet that this was at a time when I was still defending my right to eat grains. Because I’d been eating them my whole life. Well, when I gave up grains on an experiment, a 30-day experiment, the arthritis went away. As did my irritable bowel syndrome. As did my my heartburn and a few other things. So I was quite clear that all these little life issues that I assumed I was going to have to live with for the rest of my life resolved. They cleared up. They went away when I cleaned my act up when I got rid of, in my case, when I got rid of the grains and replaced them with just more vegetables and some lamb chops and some you know meatballs and marinara sauce and and omelets and a whole bunch of other great tasty substitutions.

Zack Arnold: Well, and I think that the the key word here is inflammation, and this was the big light bulb that went off above my head is that for most of my life, and I think for everybody in the modern world, they’re making their food choices. If they’re trying to make a healthy choice, it’s based on: am I going to gain or am I going to lose weight? It’s all about the short term. And now, when I look at food, having the knowledge that I do and having done the research I have on your sites and other sites, is this food going to make me inflamed? And people say, “Well, what does that even mean? And it’s about, well, if I’m going to be inflamed, yes, there’s the long-term issues of arthritis and all these other health problems, and we can go into that. But even on a short-term basis, once you start to remove inflammation from your diet and then you reintroduce it with bad food, the first thing that hits me is just massive brain fog. So, can we talk a little bit about inflammation, both from a short term and a long term perspective? Looking at you know heart disease down the road, and how inflammation is such an important component that nobody thinks about when they make their food choices.

Mark Sisson: Sure. Well, what we realize now about a lot of the diseases of civilization, and whether that’s arthritis, heart disease, even cancer, certainly the propensity to get to get upper respiratory tract infections. These are all effects of your immune system being turned on or off based on signals it gets from the environment. Now, in the case of a lot of people who are eating a standard American diet, the inflammation is deriving from stuff that’s getting into their bloodstream that is causing the immune system to respond by setting up an immune response. Which means, I mean, if you look at what happens when you twist an ankle, an immune response sets in. There’s been some damage done. There are you know swelling occurs locally to assist in not only stabilizing the the area, but providing more blood flow, and all of these things are sort of an acute response to a traumatic event. Well, when you don’t eat appropriately, and you start to take in foods that are inflammatory or pro-inflammatory in nature, you get what we call the systemic inflammation. Your entire body starts to take on this immune response and starts to set itself up as if it were being attacked or as if it had been injured. And how that manifests itself in a lot of people is, again, joint pain could be brain fog. In many cases, it’s it’s a propensity to gain weight in the form of just retaining water. Your whole body swells up just like your ankle would swell up when you twisted it. And one of the ways to to fix this is to recognize, well, gee, there’s how is stuff getting into my gut? Well, you may be suffering from a leaky gut. You may have literally holes in the lining of your gut that are caused by some of the foods you’re eating, and they’re they’re not eroding it, but they’re just and they’re not destroying it per se, but they’re opening up the gaps between some of the cells and allowing large undigested food particles to get into your bloodstream and and set up the systemic inflammation. So that’s one of the first things that we notice with a lot of people who have had these sorts of issues is that that systemic inflammation subsides. Now, what happens if you allow that inflammation to go on over time is because inflammation and oxidation are forms of free radical damage that can lead to say plaque formation, and that may be increasing your risk for heart disease. So, a highly inflammatory diet is one that increases your risk for heart disease because inflammation, the the plaque that form on the arterial walls, are a result of this inflammatory process, and it’s just your body responding to the signals. It’s your genes responding to the signals and trying to put out the fire, or in some cases start the fire, because of the signals that you’ve chosen to give the genes. and And my job at the Primal Blueprint is to identify these hidden genetic switches and provide lifestyle choices that are probably more inclined to decrease inflammation and to get you to your goal more easily than maybe another choice.

Zack Arnold: Well, and what I want to do, given what you’re talking about with the primal blueprint and with diet and everything else, I’m going to give you a massive free plug right now, which I will just completely say you did not ask me to do. I’m not an affiliate of yours. I really hope to be sometime in the very near future, but currently I have no. Reason to do this other than to help you. You’ve started your own kind of primal nutrition line where you’re offering supplements and powders, and like your your most recent release is your mayonnaise, which frankly I have to say is freaking amazing. And if I had it and I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t have mentioned it because mayonnaise is something that I completely cut out of my diet because it’s so highly inflammatory because it’s made with soybean oil and canola oil and all these horrible oils that we thought were heart healthy that are not. But you make it with avocado oil, and now mayonnaise is back. So talk a little bit about that, but also just about kind of the the line of of products that you offer and why they can be really beneficial for people.

Mark Sisson: Well, yeah. So the mayonnaise was-that’s like the holy grail of the paleo diet. It’s like everybody wants to eat mayonnaise because it’s a-it’s a fat and it tastes good and it helps to impart added flavor to foods. But it’s historically been so bad that you’ve been cautioned to use it sparingly because of these oils and these and these other things in it. Well, we created the world’s first healthy mayonnaise, and I’ll-you know-it’s-it’s unbelievable. My, it tastes great. The more you put on food, I think the better your food becomes in terms of a health from a health profile, because this avocado oil is really at the peak of all the healthy fats, in my estimation. We released it a few days ago. We’ve sold 10s of 1000s of bottles already. I’m just thrilled that people are responding to it because they’ve been waiting for something like this for a long time, but that’s what I do with with all of my products. I mean, I make a probiotic product because I think gut health is is huge, and our ancestors ate dirt every day. That’s how they populated their gut with trillions of healthy bacteria. Well, we don’t eat dirt anymore, and it’s probably not appropriate that we do under most circumstances, so I create a probiotic capsule that contains some of these soil-based organisms that have been shown to be beneficial, both in the short term and the long term, and that’s the kind of product that I create. I create products that fit within the still fit within the the paradigm of of what our genetic recipes, our DNA recipes within us expect to get on a daily basis from us that we’re not currently giving them.

Zack Arnold: And talk to me a little bit about primal fuel because this is something I actually haven’t even used yet. But I’m trying to help people in my industry find an easy door to open into the world of nutrition because to just tell them that they need to go in their fridge and throw away all their food and stop eating sugar and eat salads and fruits and vegetables. It just kind of doesn’t happen because there’s just not enough time to be able to do that properly and do the all-or-nothing approach. So I’m trying to find the best kind of simple, easy meal replacements. And one of them that I’m a fan of is Shakeology. And I know that I don’t know if you had anything to do with the creation of that itself, but I know that you worked with Beachbody for a long time, and you’re a close friend of Tony Horton. But I feel like Primal Fuel is something that definitely belongs at the top of that list as well. So talk a little bit about that and how it can be incorporated into just the the daily grind of somebody that doesn’t have time to make this gorgeous, beautiful, colorful salad every day.

Mark Sisson: Yeah, well, there you go. I mean, I prefer everybody eat real food when you can, but I recognize that you can’t always have access to real food. So what’s the next best alternative? So I created Primal Fuel for people who want to be good at burning fat. So it’s a low carb, moderate fat, high protein meal replacement. It’s 195 calories. It’s 21 grams of protein. It’s five grams net of carbohydrate slash sugars. It tastes phenomenal. Mixes well with water. So now, when that editor walks in at 1230 or excuse me, when that when that director walks in at at 1230 and says, “Hey, we’re going to be you know we’re going to do a marathon 12 hour editing session here. I hope you had lunch. You can go no, but give me two minutes. I’m going to make make a primal fuel shake, and that’ll that’ll buy me eight hours at least worth of fat burning, and you know no no more appetite. And it was it’s it’s a tool. It’s it’s part of a strategy to lose weight. It’s not and to maintain energy and to be healthy. It’s not intended to be something you live on, but it’s certainly intended to be something that’s available when real food is not.

Zack Arnold: So I want to switch gears a little bit, and I want to stay within the primal philosophy, and I now want to talk a little bit about fitness because there is so much information out there about fitness, so many fad programs, so many fad exercise routines and contraptions, and it’s I don’t even know where to start to be able to to help people as far as which program to choose or which thing to do here or there, and then I found your approach, which is again the primal approach. And for example, I’m here right now with a 20 kilogram kettlebell, and I just have it with me, and I’m kind of moving it around and carrying it and lifting it and doing squats as we’re talking. And some people would say, “Well, that’s not a workout. You’re not sweating, and you’re not doing 60 minutes a day. So, talk to me a little bit about your approach to fitness and lifestyle, the same way that you approach diet.

Mark Sisson: Yeah. So, the first premise of the fitness aspect is that our bodies are designed to move and to move through different planes and and arcs and motions. And ranges throughout the day. So this isn’t about burning calories, as it’s just about movement. The more ways you can find a move, the better. 80% of your body composition happens as a result of how you eat. So you’re not going to. There’s no way you can effectively exercise away a bad diet. You have to get the diet dialed in, but once you get the diet dialed in and you become a good fat burner, then you don’t have to train hard that much to maximize your strength, your cardiovascular system, and and so on and so forth. It’s really quite a elegant little program here, so that when you, again, when you become good at burning fat, then I say, okay, now find ways to move around through space throughout the day. So I have, for instance, at my office, each of my employees has a treadmill at their desk. You can buy them. They don’t have rails. They just they’re they’re mounted underneath the desk. And if they want to walk six or eight miles in a day while they’re doing work, they can. If they don’t want to, they don’t have to. I don’t make them. Everybody at my office has a stand-up desk. I’m a big fan of stand-up desks, but I don’t. They don’t stand all day. They can raise or lower their desks, so they change positions throughout the day. I encourage people to take breaks, take a walk, go over across in my again at my company, go across the hall to the shipping department, and you know bring a whatever, bring a note in or or pick up a return or something. You know, find ways to move about space throughout the day. If you can, at lunch, go for a walk. At lunch, you’ll walk down to the corner deli for lunch instead of sitting at the desk and and and eating lunch there. Now that’s that covers the low level movement. And then to fill in and and get the actual training twice a week, I want you to do what we call lift-heavy things. That’s the kettlebell. That’s the push-ups, pull-ups, dips, squats, lunges. That’s the sort of high-intensity stuff that really can take as little as 12 minutes and doesn’t need to take an hour. I mean, I I might spend 35 minutes total time doing my one of my two full-body routines per week. So I do two of these high intensity strength training routines, and then once a week I sprint. Now sprinting doesn’t have to be at the track. Running could be sprints on the bike. It could be sprints on the even on the elliptical if you want on the rowing machine. I have a Versa climber, which is a piece of equipment that’s that is highly aerobic in nature, and I can do sprints on that. So I do I do sprints once a week. So the total amount of time I do sprints is maybe 25 minutes from the warm up to the cool down. The total amount of time I’m lifting is maybe 12 to 30 minutes twice a week, and then the rest of the time I don’t even call it exercise. I just call it movement. I’m I’m I’m moving through space. I might go for a hike if I have the time, and and I count that. The rest of the time for my movement is I try to fill with some form of play. So I get out. I try to get out on my paddle board and do stand up paddling once a week. I try to take a hike once a week. I try to find ways in which to play. I play ultimate frisbee on the weekends, and so the more I can incorporate play into my workout strategy. I don’t even call it working out; I call it play, but it is movement, and it does count, and it all adds up to strong, lean, fit, happy, healthy body.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I I could not agree more. And anybody that’s listening knows that I’m a huge proponent of the adjustable stand up desk and the treadmill. And I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but my top two sponsors are Geek Desk and Lifespan because they provide those things for winners of my challenge groups.

Mark Sisson: Cool, very cool.

Zack Arnold: And if, as you may notice right now, I’m actually a little short of breath because what I’ve been doing as he’s been talking about getting daily activity is doing swings with my 45 pound kettlebell. And you’re thinking, well, why in the world would you do that? It’s because I’m probably going to work a 14-hour day today in front of a computer. I’m not going to find 60 minutes to exercise, but my heart rate is going. I’m literally, I’m, I’m, I’m not playing. This is actually me losing my breath because I was doing these swings while he was talking. So talk to me about the difference from more of a scientific standpoint between doing a 30-minute all-out high-intensity workout and then sitting at your computer for 12 hours versus doing exactly what you said and what that does long term.

Mark Sisson: Doing a 30-minute all-out workout is is is fine. It’s great once in a while, and I highly encourage it. I don’t encourage sitting at your desk for long periods of time all day. So somewhere in the middle, we find a nice balance where we are maximizing the our health. We’re optimizing our fitness. Now we’re not maximizing our fitness because unless we’re training for you know an event to compete, I really want to just I want to be as fit as I can with the least amount of pain, suffering, sacrifice, and discipline possible. Let’s be clear on that, and and so I’m looking for these short-term solutions. And one of many of the research articles in the past decade have proven that short bouts of high-intensity activity will provide as good or better gains than these 45-minute to. An hour and a half sessions of, you know, what we would what I call chronic cardio. That is keeping your heart rate at a metronomic 70-5% of your max for long periods of time. All that does is tire you out, makes you hungry. You know, has a lot of potential for joint pain over the years if you continue to do repetitive motion like that. I see people at the you know at the gym on the treadmill, day in and day out, and they’re struggling. You know they’re putting their 45 minutes in every day on the treadmill, and you know they still have the same 25 pounds to lose that they’ve had for three or four years, and now they’re just a little bit more jiggly, and you know and they’re looking like they’re depressed because they they they’re they’re doing the work and they think they’re doing the right thing, but they’re not losing the weight, and they’ve just they haven’t tapped into the secret, which is to become a good fat burner. Don’t worry about burning calories. Just do a couple of short bouts of high intensity activity once or twice a week, and you’ll get those benefits and even more. I mean, I people have plateaued on the Primal Blueprint weight loss program. First question I’ll ask: Are you sprinting? And if the answer is no, I say, well, you got to sprint because that’s the next level of getting your body to prepare to burn fat more efficiently, more effectively, and and burn off your stored body fat, which is what you want.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I can’t emphasize enough what a big change that was for me because my recreational activity is doing Spartan races. I love doing obstacle course racing partly because going back to what you said earlier, I get to eat some dirt, and that’s obviously good for my gut flora. A lot of dirt eating in those events, but the other reason is because it it’s it’s kind of forced me to start doing this more high intensity activity. When I used to train for things, it was do some sort of exercise routine and then just run, run, run, run! I just log the miles. But then, when you recommended the sprinting thing, what I realized is not only is the sprinting helping me with doing that high burst of intense activity, but it’s also helping me burn a lot more calories post workout. So, just talk a little bit about the idea that if you’re on the treadmill for 45 minutes and the little machine says you just burned 375 calories, you may do 10 sets of wind sprints for 15 minutes and burn less calories in that tiny little window. But talk more about the effects afterwards and how they’re different.

Mark Sisson: Well, you pretty much described it. But one of the things that happens when you’re on this chronic cardio regimen, you you wind up burning off a lot of of glycogen in your muscles, and not a lot of fat, because if you haven’t if you haven’t adapted to becoming a good fat burner, your body only knows to burn carbohydrate. Doesn’t burn fat very well. Well, now you burn off this this glycogen, which is a stored form of carbohydrate. Now you’re hungry, so now you go home, and even though the machine says you burn 375 calories, you go home and eat 500 calories because your brain is telling you, well, if we’re going to do this again tomorrow, you’ve depleted all the glycogen. We have to really work hard to refill those glycogen stores. So you haven’t become good at burning fat. You’ve just you’ve just postponed your ability to become good at burning fat, and now you’re on this literal and figurative treadmill of where you’re having to work out hard every day to burn off the calories, and then to go home and and replace the calories because your brain won’t let you go hungry, and all of that again goes away when you become a good good fat burner. Now, conversely, if you are doing high intensity stuff, short bursts of high intensity stuff, you have enough glycogen in your system to get through any sort of 20 minutes worth of high intensity activity. The end result or the effect of that over time is that you’re going to be burning fat throughout the day. You’re building muscle now. You’re creating a need, a demand for energy systems that had not existed until you put the demand there. The body doesn’t want to do what it doesn’t have to do. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And so the body doesn’t like to change unless you create a real need for change. And that’s where the high intensity comes in. Yeah, it’s gonna. I’m not even gonna say it’s gonna hurt a little bit, but for a couple of seconds here or there, you got to dig, dig, dig deep. But that’s giving the signal to your body: Hey, we gotta, you know, we gotta build some more enzyme systems to create the energy in case this fool wants to do this again sometime. And it’s a it’s a beautiful thing because it doesn’t take that much time to be very effective and efficient at improving strength, and and by the way, if you do the short stuff, then when you go back to the desk for another six-hour stint of editing, you’re not tired, you’re energized. It’s crazy how good this feels, and it’s crazy how well this works.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and it’s something that I do almost on a daily basis. Not the sprinting, because I know you don’t recommend sprinting every day. But what I’ll do around four or 430 every day, when most people’s energy reserves are pretty much at their lowest, I’ll just go outside for 10 minutes, and I go around the block, and it’s partly walking. But then I’ll do like not an all-out sprint, but probably a 70% fast jog at you know maybe a six or seven mile or six or seven minute mile pace, and I just do that for five or 10 minutes, and then I go back up the stairs and maybe do a sprint up a flight or two, and that’s it. I don’t even sweat. My heart rate is jacked up. My respiratory rate is jacked up, but then I’m good until like 10 or 11 o’clock at night. Yesterday was a perfect example. I. Even start my edit session until 7p.m and I was calm and I was focused and I had no problems working through all the way until 11 p.m. and I attribute that to both my diet choices and the fact that I got activity and to go back to something I said earlier. I wasn’t saying, oh well, you know, doing 30-minute exercises or 60-minute exercises are bad. Obviously, that’s great, and everybody should be doing that. But in our industry, sometimes it’s just not possible. So rather than saying to everybody in my industry, “Well, you just have to find the time, and you have to wake up earlier or stay up later, what I’ve been finding with this job that I’m currently on, that I’ve been on for like five or six months now, I’m just trapped. I’m trapped in a tiny room, and it’s just the reality that I’m in, and I refuse to let my health go. I’m not going to let it happen anymore. And what I’ve been doing are the things that you’re saying: just being more active, being on the treadmill, swinging a kettlebell, using resistance stretching bands, doing push-ups, doing lunges. And I don’t think I’ve done more than maybe three or four dedicated exercise sessions this year, this calendar year, but I feel great, and I’m actually losing weight and cutting body fat percentage just because I’m being active during the day. And anybody can do that. My office is 10 feet by 10 feet. I work in a tiny, tiny box. I don’t have this luxurious space, but I can I can make it work. And there are so many other people in this industry that can do the same thing. So that’s that’s kind of what I’m trying to do here.

Mark Sisson: I don’t know your industry that well, but I know that a lot there’s a lot of time waiting while the word rendering seems to be across the screen.

Zack Arnold: Yes, render is a big thing. So I always espouse render breaks. You know,

Mark Sisson: Render breaks. So so drop and do get as many push-ups as you can in that rendering sequence, and you know make it fun that way.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, exactly. That’s we actually do 30 day challenges where I say, you know, every day do plank or do lunges or push ups or burpees, whatever it is for the month to try and do it every day for 30 days. And I say everybody in our industry has to render. It’s just a part of our life. This stuff takes 30 to 90 seconds, right? So you just go in and you do it, and there you’ve got some activity. And as soon as you do it once, all of a sudden that switches on. You’re like, oh, wait a second. I feel a little bit better. I’m gonna try a little bit more, then a little bit more. And it’s it’s just as addicting as anything else. But it’s a good addiction when you know done in the the right proportions because you start to feel better and you realize it’s just not that hard,

Mark Sisson: Right?

Zack Arnold: You know. So I’m gonna let you go because I know you’re you’re an immensely busy guy. But I want to make sure that people know all the different ways to find you the way that I found you because you’ve had a tremendous impact on my health and the quality of my life. So if somebody’s listening to this and says, “I just I want to find this guy and learn more, what are the best ways to find you and everything you’re doing?

Mark Sisson: Well, Mark’s DailyApple.com is the website where most of the information resides. But if you want to find out about more of the products. You can go to primalblueprint.com. That’s my commerce site. That’s where all the books I’ve written. I don’t eight books and and published 15 others, and all of our products. So if you want the Primal Fuel or the mayonnaise, go to primalblueprint.com. Yeah, or if you just want to do a quick Amazon search for the Primal Blueprint. That’s my seminal work, the book that was the bestseller. The Primal Blueprint.

Zack Arnold: Right, and I’m assuming that Mark’s Daily Organic Pesticide Free Apple was probably taken, and that’s why you just went with Mark’s Daily Apple, right?

Mark Sisson: That’s pretty much it. Yeah,

Zack Arnold: Yeah, exactly. All right. Well, thank you so much for being on the show. I’ve been hoping to do this for like a year, and I wanted to just throw a thank you out to Mira and Jason Colton because they’re the ones that hooked me up with you, and I know that you’re the one that discovered the genius of rich food, poor food, and basically swooped in and said, “I have to publish this because it’s awesome, and I’m huge, huge fans of theirs. And they actually, I just published a podcast with them. If you, I saw that, yeah, yeah, yeah. I literally was just email stalking Mira for about four months straight, saying when can we do the show? When can we do the show? When can we do the show? And it was so worth the wait. It was just you know a two part fantastic show, and this is going to come right on the heels of it. And I think that it’s going to kind of be an unbeatable combination and really inspire people to say, you know what, this isn’t as hard or overwhelming as I thought. And then as soon as you take that first step, your life just kind of opens up. It’s just like taking the red pill in the Matrix. You just you can’t go back once you’re in the rabbit hole. You never come back out.

Mark Sisson: That’s right. That’s right.

Zack Arnold: So,

Mark Sisson: All right, Zack.

Zack Arnold: Thank you so much. I hope you have a wonderful day, and hopefully, we’ll have a chance sometime soon to actually meet in person.

Mark Sisson: Let’s do that. Okay.

Zack Arnold: Okay. Take it easy. Bye bye.

Zack Arnold

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Mark Sisson on the ‘Primal Lifestyle’

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