Transcript
WEBVTT
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Welcome to Eat Well, Think Well, Live Well; the podcast for women who want to lose weight, but are tired of counting and calculating all the food.
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I'm your host, Lisa Salsbury.
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I'm a certified health and weight loss coach and life coach, and most importantly a recovered chronic dieter.
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I'll teach you to figure out why you are eating when you aren't hungry, instead of worrying so much about what you are eating.
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Welcome everyone.
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I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving.
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I had my two college adult boys here for the weekend.
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So everyone was home.
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We had a lot of yummy food.
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We went to a football game.
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If you saw my stories, we went to the BYU Stanford game down at Stanford university on Saturday.
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So we spent some time in the city before that.
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So that was really fun, especially because I got to see firsthand my children being excited to get their siblings Christmas presents.
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I think every one of them bought something for someone else while we were in the city, which.
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I just love to see.
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That's really fun.
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So.
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If you want to get to know me a little, you can always follow me on Instagram.
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I share lots of personal and family stuff in my stories.
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In addition to Free content and things related to all of this weight loss and getting healthy.
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So I'm on Instagram at well underscore with underscore Lisa.
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And of course that link is in the show notes.
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Also one more piece of housekeeping before we jump into today's episode.
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And that is, I am starting a waitlist.
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For group coaching coming in 2023.
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So if you aren't on my email list, be sure to grab my go-to meals, free ebook That will put you on the list and you can see how then to get on the waitlist for group coaching, which I'm really excited about because I have that program.
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Designed and ready to go for you.
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Now I'm super excited about today's interview.
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I have for you.
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I first heard Erin talk on another podcast and I messaged her immediately.
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And said, can you come talk about all that stuff with my audience as well?
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She is a registered dietician and super knowledgeable about the ins and outs of healthy diets.
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One thing my clients tell me is that they aren't really sure what to eat.
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And you'll hear me talk in the episode about the fact that we start with working on stopping the overeating patterns and then move into improving the quality of the diet.
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And although I didn't hear Erin say this here in our interview.
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I've heard her say before That you don't need.
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Perfect quality nutrition, most omnivore type eating patterns.
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Outperform anything without meat so that's going to be one of your big takeaways here is to get adequate protein and specifically adequate proteins from animal sources.
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But I just don't want you to be overwhelmed and be like, oh, I have to eat all all this way perfectly now because just, just starting with protein.
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is going to really help and you'll see how that really translates into this work of healthy eating.
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we start our conversation with some talk about the blue zones as it is one of Erin's specialties.
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And you'll see how that really translates into this work.
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And I think you might be surprised also by what you learn about the blue zones.
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So I'm excited for you to hear this chat with Erin Skinner.
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Ok.
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So I have Erin Skinner on the podcast today.
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I'm super excited to meet her.
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I actually stalked her on Instagram and I was like, I love what you're doing.
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So would you come and share that with my listener?
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So let's start with an introduction from her and how she came to the work that she.
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Hi, thanks for having me on.
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My name's Erin Skinner.
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I'm a integrative and functional nutrition practitioner and a dietician.
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My private practice is called Empowered Nutrition.
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We offer insurance based functional medicine by utilizing the skills of, nutrition professionals rather than relying primarily on like physicians.
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but then my other big passion is ancestral nutrition.
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And so I spend a lot of time, working in that space.
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And then the top three things that I work with are people who want help with their digestive health, their metabolic health, and their hormone.
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Perfect.
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Fascinating.
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I love all of that stuff.
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Same like-minded it.
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So, yeah, Although I'm not a registered dietician, I'm like in another life that's what I would've done.
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So when I went back to school, I, I chose health coaching because it was honestly just a little quicker being in my forties already.
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But it's, you know, something I've been interested in my whole life.
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And when I heard you first, you were talking about the Blue Zones, which is kind of where we're gonna start with our conversation today.
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So tell us what Blue Zones are and I know you did quite a research project about that, so tell us all about that.
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I'm just gonna let you talk for a while,
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sure.
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Yeah, I'll just go for it and stop me.
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But, when I, if I talk too much, but long story short, most people I think have heard of the Blue Zones.
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Probably, yeah.
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I remember when I was a child learning about this and thinking it was like the coolest thing in the world that, Oh, they figured.
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these regions on the planet where people are much more likely to live, to be a centenarian, which is to live to be a hundred years old.
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And so let's back engineer, reverse engineer that, see what their lifestyles are like, see what their diets are like, and then just have people, you know, encourage people to follow that pattern.
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And then you'll also have longevity, like these people in these blue zones.
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So like that's a really
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feels like magic
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Idea that I think is really attractive to people of like, Oh, the secret to long life is like in these long living populations.
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And, but then what I learned as an adult is, unfortunately, like many things, stories I heard as a child is actually a fairytale
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So sad.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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I also think I'm gonna be Prince Charming, although my husband's great.
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You know, there's no like pumpkin turning into a carriage going on.
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But, yeah.
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So basically, the functional medicine space got recruited to work at this clinic in California.
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that was basically this owned by this company called Adventist Health is a healthcare company that has multiple hospitals in California and they got excited about the idea of functional medicine and so they wanted to have a functional medicine clinic.
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In their corporate headquarters and have it be insurance billed.
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And so they hired, you know, me and this other functional medicine team, like the doctor, the nurse, the pharmacist, the physical therapist, all that.
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so go ahead and figure out how to make this work with insurance.
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And so, that was like the assignment.
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But then while I was there, it turns out that Blue Zones is not just an idea, it's a company.
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because once it, once it became an idea, then they created books and a whole like trademark around it.
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Yes.
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Yeah, exactly.
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And they do a lot of like consulting where they have, they get hired to implement.
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The Blue Zones like environment in a place.
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So like a town might hire them to have their town be more Blue Zones, ask and like to, to help the citizens follow more of a Blue Zones lifestyle or company might help with like a corporate Blue Zones environment with them getting it.
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So anyway, I was working at this company, Adventist Health.
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They purchased the Blue Zones company
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Okay.
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then it became all about like, okay, we're totally into the Blue Zones now.
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We're gonna be promoting the whole Blue Zones model.
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We're gonna be teaching that, We're gonna be trying to get all these employees to start doing that.
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and so of course I'm the only nutrition professional in the building, so of course it's like, yeah, I should, you know, look at what this nutrition plan is,
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Because that's a big piece of, of the whole Blue Zone concept is what they're eating.
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Huge.
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Yeah, huge.
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Yeah.
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I think a lot of people don't realize that there are other pieces,
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There's a, a lot to it with like connection with other individuals and their, their lifestyle, their movement, all of that.
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But the diet is where things get focus.
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exactly.
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Yeah.
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So, so I pulled it up.
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There's like basically a description of the diet and it's.
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Immediately concerning to me because it's basically like one step removed from a vegan diet.
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So it's something on the order of like maybe one ounce a day of some animal protein on average, even fish was discouraged.
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eggs are discouraged, DA is discouraged.
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It's, it's essentially a vegan diet but not labeled as such.
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and so.
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That's to me an unsafe diet, especially to be recommending on a population level.
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This isn't like, Hey, talk to a healthcare professional about this and, and ask them if this is appropriate for you.
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There's no discussion of supplements or any way that you're gonna round out the.
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Inadequacies of this diet with like supplementing or anything.
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It just, everybody should start eating this way and like, everybody's gonna love to be a hundred.
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Woo.
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It's gonna be great.
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and it's like
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Yeah.
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So, but, data first, right?
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So what I did was I, they actually, part of the, what you can get with Blue Zones is you can pay to get access to their meal planner.
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mm-hmm.
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And so I was like, Okay, great.
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I paid, I was like, I'll buy a subscription.
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I'll have it generate an individualized meal plan for me.
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I went and followed that and tracked all my nutrition with my, nutrition as software for three days.
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and it turned out that I was inadequate on almost all of the vitamins and minerals, and very inadequate on protein, on the, on the diet.
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So, To me that was like immediately concerning.
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Cause it's inadequate for me, let alone somebody who's compromised, like a pregnant woman or a child or an elderly person, or someone with an injury or chronic illness.
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an athlete, like every, all those people have increased needs.
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but it was even inadequate for pouring on me with normal needs.
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So, so, basically.
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that was the main research project I did, and then I just kind of put that together with, I'm actually in a doctorate program, so I write a lot of like, papers that summarize like a topic, like let's summarize all the peer reviewed literature on a topic.
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And so I kind of put together a paper that summarize, like, okay, here's all the, the problematic things about vegan diets.
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Cuz by the way, the meal plan that it gave me was vegan.
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even though they allow a little bit, but they say it's discouraged when you put it into the meal plan, they don't actually plan you
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Yeah, it's like this weird little bait and switch thing where like, surprise, you are given this vegan diet without them us telling you that's gonna happen.
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In the end, it that didn't even matter.
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Cuz what I did is I said, Okay, well this is like completely inadequate, quite, but what if I went ahead and did put in the one ounce a day?
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Animal protein that this diet allows.
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and like, I think there's like a small allowance of like some dairy.
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it didn't change the numbers at all.
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It was
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Oh.
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Cause it wasn't enough.
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It was, yeah, it was like a drop in the bucket.
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And so it ended up being that, yeah, it didn't matter either way, but Yeah, I kind of put that all together of like, Hey, here's a summary, summary of the literature on, vegan diets and like problematic things about that.
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Here's the data that I found, and then I compared that to like, Okay, let me put in three days of like my typical diet.
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But no, I was like, meaning almost everything on my normal diet.
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So it's like, yeah, no, it's not like the software is crazy.
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It.
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This meal, this meal plan is crazy.
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so that,
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like, what kinds of specific things, I mean, the protein alone is obviously super concerning, but what, what kinds of other things do you feel like it was missing?
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well, I mean, like most of the B vitamins, it came in low and then, Very little calcium.
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it came in low on there.
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There's essentially no choline in it.
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Um, zinc was inadequate on it.
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Selenium, lium, I think magnesium might have been okay.
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There's essentially no vitamin D in it.
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There's no pre-form vitamin A by definition.
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Like you can only get that from animal sources.
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mm-hmm.
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No EPA and dha, at all.
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because they don't allow that.
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So it is just like,
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And yet no recommendation of supplementation on that stuff, even though it's shown to be protective.
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Yeah.
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Well the B12 was zero.
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Like you can't get that from plants.
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And so, and like I personally had clients with B12 deficiencies, you can get like irreversible neurological damage.
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From a B12 deficiency.
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No warning of that.
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None.
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So that's crazy.
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What, why is it that the Blue Zone company has decided that the vegan diet is what Blue Zone folks ate?
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What happened there?
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Like where's the disconnect between these, these regions where we did have centenarians and this diet that is actually like, it can't be what they were eating.
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Like what happened?
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Yeah, that's a good question.
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What I found that, like really kind of blew my mind when I started to look more into that question was basically, there's some really concerning things about these data sets.
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there's basically like publish studies where they've gone in and they've looked at it and they found that like, Oh, okay, here's where.
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You can almost predict that there's gonna be a blue zone.
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It's gonna be an area where there is, a federal pension paid based out on age to a population that has a low income.
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And there's poor vital records keeping.
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So you're poor, you don't have money, but if you, if you can prove that you're.
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A certain age you can start getting money from the government and it's easy to prove cuz you can fake a birth certificate when you have those three things happening at the same time, you have a blue zone, so,
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not actually centenarians as what studies are showing?
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Is that what you're
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Yeah.
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And what's even more obvious about it now is like they're going back and like, and like those people that like back in the, like 20 years ago, and this all became a big thing.
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Some of these like amazing centenarians that were interviewed, like they'll go now and they're like still alive.
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So it would make'em be like 120 years old,
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Yeah.
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Which would be like record break.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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So Blue Zones are like, the whole thing is not true, is basically what your research is finding.
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Yeah.
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Okay.
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That's so disappointing on so many levels.
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I know.
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I know it really is.
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Yeah.
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Age fraud is like known to be a huge issue with, with like longevity research.
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And so, I did try to give them the benefit of the doubt and like look for like, okay, where's their, like peer reviewed studies where they've shown that this.
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Is like valid and like they have good evidence for it, and there's really none.
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I mean, they've really gotten away with not having any peer reviewed research or like sharing any data.
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They, like, they all say, they just say they have the data and they don't share it.
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So it's not reproducible and, and really the blue zones was, the whole beginning situation was a correlation.
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It wasn't really a study.
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They just went in and said, We think this maybe correlates.
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Right, and within real research, that's not how that works.
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To your point is like you start with some of this like epidemiological type data, which is like the weakest tier of data of like, okay, well we think we're seeing this correlation between this blue zones lifestyle and longevity.
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The next step is that an interventional study where you go and take two groups and put one group on the Blue Zones lifestyle and another group on a different lifestyle, or you compare it to the.
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American lifestyle is controls.
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And then you actually see what happens over time.
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You know?
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Hmm, but that was never
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No, no, definitely not.
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No.
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and what, what else is crazy about it?
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The whole thing is like, in these areas that are like the blue zones, they've actually found that, like if you are, Like in those populations, in those areas where they're saying where people are more likely to live to 100 years old, those people are also less likely to live to be 65, which doesn't match any like reality in terms of how human life works.
00:16:20.508 --> 00:16:29.168
But what it does match is like poverty because again, these are poor areas and we know that people with poverty have lower longevity.
00:16:30.038 --> 00:16:34.879
Poor health outcomes and less likely to, to live, to retirement age.
00:16:34.879 --> 00:16:42.192
And so, in that environment, you also have more of these people who have, of course, like falsified their age in order to get to this age where they get this pension.
00:16:42.192 --> 00:16:44.799
But, that just underscores how messed up it all is.