Dr. Sears: Well, actually mu ch of it comes from my ...sanesolution.com/CalMythSummitTranscripts/The... · Dr. Sears: Well, because the people in the, let's say, the new Atkins regimen

entheos.com The Calorie Myth 1

Jonathan: Hey, everyone. Jonathan Bailor back with, brace yourself, we

have got one of my personal heroes and one of the pioneers in

the field of let's call it modern nutrition and exercise science or

thinking beyond just oversimplified calories in, calories out. The

inventor of the Zone diet, the amazing researcher, Dr. Barry

Sears. Welcome, brother!

Dr. Sears: Thank you very much.

Jonathan: Dr. Sears, there's so much we can cover today. I was hoping

we're focusing on the beautiful complexity, but it's still simple

when it comes to actually using food and exercise to heal

ourselves, and you really broke through, in terms of thinking

about food and exercise as a control system for your hormones

a few decades ago.

I wanted to cover that. You've since made dramatic

advancements, but I want to start the viewers on your initial

breakthrough that predicated the Zone diet, which is food and

exercise is a control system for hormones a bit more than it is

about counting calories.

http://www.entheos.com/

http://www.entheos.com/The-Calorie-Myth


Dr. Sears: Well, actually much of it comes from my background, which is

not nutrition, but really intercalary systems for cancer drugs.

When you deal with cancer drugs, if you give too much of the

drug to the patient, they die. You give them too little of the drug,

they basically die of cancer. You try to keep that drug in a zone, a

zone that's not too high, but not too low.

So it became apparent to me about 35 years ago you could apply

the same principles to both diet and exercise to keep the

hormones juried by both of them within a zone, a zone that's not

too low, where it has no benefits, but not too high, where it has

basically adverse consequences. That was the thinking that led to

the development of the Zone diet, treating food as if it were a

drug.

Jonathan: There are two—just to unpack that a bit. It seems like there are

two really important points for our listeners to understand—or

viewers in this case. One is the focus on hormones and why that

matters and then also the focus of balance and how keeping our

body in balance—a lot of people think they need to balance

calories, but it seems like the body may have an innate drive for

balance if we just facilitate that. We talk about hormones and the

body's desire to balance itself.

Dr. Sears: Yeah, it is. This really was called medically homeostasis. The body

strives for basically consistency. The more you work with the

body, the better you two are going to coexist. The more you work

against the body, bad things are going to happen.

Jonathan: When you say working with the body versus working against the

body, I've always perceived starving yourself. If you feel hungry

and tired and terrible, that seems like the body might be saying,

"Hey, you're working against me." Is that a fair assessment?

Dr. Sears: That's a very fair assessment. The brain upstairs is basically

desperate. That's why you're tired. That's why you're hungry. It's

running out of fuel. What you basically had not done was either

make the right combination. Let me use an example like a car,




which is a very good analogy. You can't run a car on gas and you

can't run a car on air. You need some combination. The better

the combination, the better the mileage. That's what you're

trying to do with diet, to get the right balance of protein,

carbohydrate and fat to get the best hormonal mileage out of

each meal.

How do you know? You have a very simple metric. Your watch.

Five hours after you've eaten the meal, if you're not hungry, you

have peak mental acuity and you're not tired, your last meal was

hormonally correct for your body. Your goal is to find which

meals give that five-hour window of peak balance and try to

maintain that as your guide for the rest of your life.

Jonathan: All throughout this, Dr. Sears, you've been talking about

hormones, the correct hormonal fuel, the correct hormonal fuel.

I would assume then I might eat something that has 500 calories

and five hours later not feel great, and I could eat something that

has 500 calories and five hours later feel great. What hormonally

is different about those two experiences?

Dr. Sears: Well, there are a number of hormones that take place. Again,

let's look at the three primary hormonal systems that are

controlled by diet. One is the hormone insulin. If you eat too

many carbohydrates, the hormonal levels of insulin go up. That's

the hormone that makes you fat and keeps you fat. Now, so you

need some insulin, but not too much.

The hormone glucagon, which is stimulated by the amount of

protein at that meal of you also basically need that because that

releases stored energy. You have a tremendous amount of

stored energy, but you have to release it and that's what gives

you the five hours of appetite suppression, and that's controlled

by the amount of protein you eat at your previous meal.

Finally, there's a hormone called eicosanoids. They're the

hormones that control not only inflammation, but really they're

the hormones that control all other hormones of your body.

They're dictated by the balance of Omega-6 to Omega-3 fatty




acids. You're trying to keep those three hormonal systems in that

zone for the next five hours. Once you find out what is the right

balance of protein, carbohydrate and fat that you can live with

for a lifetime, you're well on your way to at least be having a

longer and better life.

Jonathan: I don't know if it's intentional that we've been using the window

of five hours, but it makes me smile a bit because we hear so

much about five hour energy and the five-hour energy drink. It

seems like if we're eating a hormonally balanced meal that keeps

us in the zone, there would be no need for a five-hour energy

drink. We will just have five hour energy.

Dr. Sears: You took the words right out of my mouth. It's not me talking

about this. This is actually data from Harvard Medical School. The

hormonal changes caused by any meal will last about five hours.

That's both good news and bad news. The good news is that no

matter how bad your last meal was, five hours later you can

rectify all the hormonal damage. The bad news is you have to

basically, every five hours for the rest of your life, make another

decision of what I'm going to eat and how that's going to dictate

how I will feel for the next five hours.

Jonathan: You've been helping people to find that balance for many

decades now, Dr. Sears. What are some of the concrete

guidelines you've found? Obviously, this needs to be customized

per person. I would imagine a 65-year-old, postmenopausal

woman will need to do different things to stay in the zone than a

15-year-old male football player in high school. But what are

some of the common denominators and then what are some of

the differences?

Dr. Sears: Well, one, there aren't that many differences.

Jonathan: Okay.

Dr. Sears: It turns out that whether you're an elite athlete or basically

someone just hanging on by their fingertips that the hormonal




rules haven't changed in 40 million years, and they probably

won't change tomorrow.

Now, the young athlete is putting a greater stress on their body

so they have to take that into account. But the hormonals for the

Olympic athletes that I've worked with and for the overweight,

type 2 diabetics are basically the same.

Here are all the rules you need to know because you only need

three things. Your hand. There's one hand. One eye and one

watch. At each meal, divide your plate into three equal sections.

On one-third of the plate, you put some low-fat protein. That can

be chicken or fish or if you're a vegetarian, it could be tofu or

soybean imitation meat products. I don't care where the protein

comes from, but that's no bigger or thicker than the palm of your

hand. That's about three ounces for an average female and

about four ounces for the average male.

Now what about the other two-thirds of the plate? You fill it until

it's overflowing with colorful carbohydrates. What are those?

Primarily vegetables and fruits. Finally, you add a dash. A dash of

what? Fat. What's a dash? A small amount. Just make sure the

dash of fat is low in saturated fats and low in Omega-6 fats. What

fats fall in that category? It could be slivered almonds. It could be

extra virgin olive oil or it could be guacamole.

Now, if you do that, how do you know it's working? That's why

you need the watch. If you hit the right balance, for the next five

hours, you'll have no hunger and complete mental acuity. All you

want to do is take the meals you like to eat, keep adjusting them

until those meals that you like to eat give you that five-hour

window of peak mental acuity without hunger. Now what you

have is a hormonal winning cookbook you can follow for the rest

of your life.

Jonathan: Dr. Sears, I love that you started this conversation talking about

how when you first approached this problem, as you continue to

approach the problem, you looked at it from a seeing food as

almost pharmacology and how you can then predictably use




food to manipulate the body in standard ways, just like you

would—like penicillin does this. It's not controversial. We don't

need to argue about it. We know it works this way. You have that

goal and you have that framework.

You mentioned in your overview just now, for example, you said

Omega-6 fats, not something you want to overdo, as well as

saturated fats. A very popular movement nowadays is this lower

carbohydrate, higher fat movement, which celebrates saturated

fats. Of course, that has different goals than what you're talking

about, but why did you say what you said about saturated fats?

Dr. Sears: Well, because the people in the, let's say, the new Atkins regimen

say saturated fats are good. Unfortunately, they're well-meaning

people, but they don't have a good background in the genetic

aspects of how fats affect what are called—there is sensory on all

of our cells. They're called toll-like receptors. Fats, saturated fats

basically are mimics of certain bacterial fragments that can

activate these toll-like receptors that send inflammatory signals.

It says, "Okay." Yes, Omega-6 fats are the worst you want to

remove. They're ubiquitous because they give rise to

inflammatory hormones. But make an effort of removing the

saturated fats and replacing them with monounsaturated fats.

Now it's been shown that if you do that, you get superior results,

but it's a lot easier to fall back saying, "Saturated fats are good."

They're not as bad as people are led to believe, but they're not

great. It depends on how much effort you're willing to expend

and how much the goal you want to achieve is worth.

I think that, again, a little science goes a long way, but in the area

of diet, science is usually the first casualty of war.

Jonathan: It seems like you classified fats maybe into three categories. Tell

me if you think this is fair, Dr. Sears. You have therapeutic fats.

Omega-3s it seems like would be classified as a therapeutic fat.

Monounsaturated fats seem like they're closer to that

therapeutic end. Maybe saturated are sitting somewhere in the




middle, and then the trans fats are on the far other end, and

then Omega-6 starts to fall more in that realm. Is that fair?

Dr. Sears: That's a very correct assessment. You're looking to say, "I'm

trying to get basically as much of the therapeutic fats in my diet

and minimize the amount of, let's say, deleterious fats. Once you

know what to basically say, "Okay, I've got good fats and bad fats.

Okay, I eat more good fats. I eat less bad fats."

Now, it's just not that simple because you still have a balance of

protein and carbohydrate to really control the flow of the fats

you do eat into the right hormonal pathways and say, "Oh, my

God. It's getting so complex." I say, "It's not that hard." But once

you understand yes, it's like a three-dimensional checker game.

You say, "Once I get the idea I've got to work in three dimensions,

it's not that hard." Eventually, it becomes second nature.

Jonathan: If I'm just—let's say I'm an individual who is with those colorful

carbohydrates. Let's say I do more vegetable-based and less

fruit-based so I'm not going to get many calories from that

source of my plate, and I'm sticking with the lean protein like a

fish or a chicken so I'm not getting many calories there. If I just

need to eat more calories so that I have energy, obviously we

would then go to the monounsaturated, but if I needed to do a

cocoa or a coconut or a grass-fed beef more as a source of

calories rather than a source of therapeutic nutrition, what

would be your thoughts on that approach?

Dr. Sears: Well, again, I'll speak with my work with the 25 gold medal

winners of the last five Olympics I've worked with. Again, the

difference between their diet and that of a type 2 diabetic is not

that great, except they need more calories. Therefore, they eat

more fat, more monounsaturated fat.

We've mentioned a couple sources of monounsaturated fat

which people like. Guacamole, slivered almonds, olive oil, but

here's a real easy one, probably the best source, macadamia

nuts. They're portable. They're little balls of fat and they're big

time energy.




I tell my world-class athletes. I say, "Just balance the protein and

carbohydrate. You really don't need that much more protein.

You have to basically make sure you don't overconsume the

carbohydrates, so eat lots of vegetables." It's hard to

overconsume vegetables.

If you need more calories, how do you know? You take your shirt

off. If you can see your abdominal muscles, you probably need a

little more energy, so eat macadamia nuts. Now if you eat too

many macadamia nuts, all of a sudden, you're not going to see

your abdominal muscles. You've eaten too much. Cut back.

Jonathan: I love it! No, that's just the new strategy now. You're on the

beach. I'm just going to go to the beach with a five-pound bag of

macadamia nuts and based on how people look I'm either going

to give them macadamia nuts or not based on their abdominals.

Dr. Sears: The reason why this is important is because fat is high octane

fuel. It really basically allows the elite athlete to perform at a

longer level because he has now basically—it's not how much

calories I eat. It's how many molecules of ATP I can make. You

can make a lot more ATP from fat than you can from

carbohydrates.

This is why you need a certain level of fat. Can you be too thin?

Of course, you can. But again, you're looking at the abdominal

muscles like the watch. It gives you a very, very good indicator if

you have adequate reserves to basically perform at high levels of

physical output.

Jonathan: Dr. Sears, some people perceive the Zone diet or the Zone way of

eating or even a SANE lifestyle like I advocate as a high-protein

diet because you're consuming more than the 50 gram

recommended daily allowance. Some people have even gone so

far as to say that eating a high-protein diet like this causes

cancer. Now I've publicly stated my opinion on this many times,

but I want to hear your thoughts.




Dr. Sears: Your thoughts and mine are one in the same. First of all, it's not

really a high-protein diet. Every nutritionist in the world will say,

"Never consume any more protein at a meal than you can fit on

the palm of your hand." Well, that's the Zone diet. Then if that's

too much protein, then every nutritionist in the world is wrong.

We need adequate levels of protein because without that we

cannot maintain our immune function. We cannot maintain

muscle mass or strength. Can you take in too much protein? Of

course, you can. Again, we follow that zone.

Now an elite athlete, because of their higher levels of exercise

and muscle mass will need more than the sedentary type 2

diabetic, but not that much more. In all of the Olympic athletes

I've worked with, none of them have ever consumed more than

2,500 calories per day because that's all they need to make the

ATP perform at high levels.

So again, saying it's a high-protein diet in terms of percentage of

the calories, yes. In terms of the absolute number of grams, no.

What is different is why the percentages of carbohydrates are

lower. You're eating a lot of vegetables. Any fool can eat pasta.

Any fool can eat bread, but eating two pounds of vegetables,

that's hard work. But that gives you basically adequate levels of

carbohydrates for brain function, but without overconsuming it.

You have a built in governor that says, "It's just hard to eat the

two pounds of vegetables per day."

Jonathan: Dr. Sears, we've all met people who eat and eat and eat and

don't gain weight. The people who get the most attention and

the people most common in this country are individuals who are

metabolically dysfunctioning. If they even smell a cupcake, they

gain two pounds. How is it—what is happening hormonally in the

gut, in the brain, wherever that causes the difference between

the individual who can literally drink weight gainer shakes and

not gain weight and the other individual who, if they eat one too

many macadamia nuts, ends up losing their six pack?




Dr. Sears: It's called genetics. Some of us are lucky and some of us are not.

I happen to fall in the category that's not very lucky. I have to

work very, very hard, because again, let's say what appears to be

a genetic defect in some ways, let's say 10,000 years ago, was a

genetic attribute. Those who could basically store incoming

calories more successfully as fat had a better likelihood of

surviving famine.

Today, basically the idea of famine is basically more than two

hours between meals. Again, our genes are working against us.

You have to base work and say, "It's not how much I weigh or

how I look in a swimsuit, but how well I am." My definition of

wellness is really how well are you controlling inflammation. That

becomes now the guideline. I don't care what you eat as long as

you're controlling inflammation. Inflammation is the reason we

get sick. It's the reason we age at a faster rate.

The Zone diet is really an anti-inflammatory diet. It's basically

looking at food from the perspective of endocrinology and

saying, "How can we now orchestrate these incoming nutrients

to have the greatest impact of reducing chronic inflammation in

our body?" That becomes really the telling card saying, "Is a diet

successful or not?"

By the blood samples that we and others have taken, Americans

are not very successful at controlling their levels of inflammation.

That's why our healthcare system is careening out of control. We

are basically more inflamed than any country on the face of the

earth and that's why our healthcare costs are really double the

cost. Unless we reverse this inflammation epidemic, our country

will be bankrupt in a few years. Make no mistake about it.

It's really basically saying, "Not what is the best diet for weight

loss." It's really, "What is the best diet for inflammation control?"

That will be a lifelong struggle. If you don't have the right

genetics to basically look great in a swimsuit, that's okay as long

as you're basically constantly monitoring your levels of

inflammation in your body. If you are and they're under control,




then you're going to live a good, long, and healthy life. That's

basically what nutrition is all about.

Jonathan: Dr. Sears, you mentioned really the focus is on inflammation not

so much on this conscious control of calories in, calories out as

we were led to believe over the past 40 years and the Zone diet,

as we've talked about here and as folks who have read your

obviously bestselling books know is about the manipulation of

the quality of food you're eating. We've been talking about the

quality of carbohydrates, the quality of fats, the quality of

protein. You have not once said, "I want you to count the number

of calories you are taking in."

Is the chain of events that happens here in the Zone diet model

and the physiological, endocrinological model you've established

something like this? Individuals eat the wrong quality of food.

That causes inflammation and inflammation causes the body to

become dysregulated, which makes us then overconsume and

under expend energy because the body is broken down, for lack

of better terms, which then results in obesity and disease. Is

that—because right now we just hear we just eat too much and

we get fat and diabetic. That seems like that's not fitting within

the model you're describing.

Dr. Sears: No, you're quite right. It basically is about the inflammation and

your ability to control it, because the inflammation, if you

consume too many calories, it basically causes disruption in our

signaling systems. We have really three primary signaling

systems that have to work in concert. One is in the blood. That is

the hormones in the blood. Another one is the brain and how it

innervates those incoming messages, and the third is in our gut.

In terms of the gut, in terms of basically releasing hormonal

signals, but our other hundred trillion friends called bacteria,

who are a major part of our GI system.

This is why we understand why gastric bypass surgery works

now. When you talk to the gastric bypass surgery patient when

they wake up out of surgery, the first thing they say is they say,

"My God! I'm free. I'm free at last!" You say, "Oh, free of what?"




"Free of hunger." Because they're no longer hungry because the

re-routing of the intestine has now dropped the limited amount

of protein in the deeper part of the intestine to release

hormones that go directly to the brain that say, "Stop eating."

We have these intricate hormonal control systems that tell us

when we're hungry and when we're not hungry. What we find is

changes in our diet that basically cause those control systems, as

elegant as they are, to become discombuberated. As a

consequence, we have lost the ability to control satiety. Satiety is

simply the lack of hunger, but it has a very, very precise

hormonal and endocrinology description of what has to have

happen.

I think that the more we understand really the intricacy of

basically hunger, why we gain weight, all these old aspects, eat

less, exercise more fall by the wayside. Don't you think that the

overweight diabetic says, "Wow! I never thought about this, 'If I

eat less and exercise more and I'd lose weight.'" Well, what

happens when people tend to eat less and exercise more? They

get tired and they become hungry. How long do you want to go

through life being tired and hungry? Not very long.

What you're looking for is a diet that you're never tired and

you're never hungry. You'd say, "Well, that's a diet I can live with."

It's like, "Exactly!" That's a root word of diet. It comes from the

ancient Greek, which means "way of life." You're looking for a

way of life that basically you make some adjustments as you go

through life, as you age, yes, you'll have some adjustments there,

but that you go through life never being hungry, never being

tired.

Jonathan: Dr. Sears, when an individual looks at the primary research,

when they look at the work of people such as yourself, this

makes not only so much common sense, but it is so backed up in

the research and also if you just understand you can study this

pharmacology. It's not controversial. When you eat sugar, insulin

does this. There's no need to debate. It can be demonstrated

and proven.




This idea that the body seeks out health and seeks out balance,

again, that seems to be understood. If you look on Wikipedia and

you look up blood sugar, it uses the word homeostasis. It says if

the body's blood sugar rises, the body tries to bring it down, and

if it goes down, the body tries to bring it up. Why do we just

continue to hear the message of gluttony and sloth rather than

the breakdown of the body's ability to balance energy

automatically, just like it balances blood sugar, blood pressure,

everything else?

Dr. Sears: Because we want to ignore the facts. There are three things in

life which are very visceral. Religion, politics, and nutrition. Once

you believe, you say, "Don't confuse me with the facts because in

my heart I know I'm right." What we've had in the last 40 years

has been a political discussion and basically the science has been

the casualty of that political discussion.

Let's even look at the aspect of carbohydrates make you fat. Not

necessarily if you have a good regulatory system. Now

carbohydrates will make you fat if you have them combined with

insulin resistance caused by inflammation, which maintains high

levels of insulin all the time. That's going to make you fat.

Jonathan: Yep.

Dr. Sears: That's why I say this elite athlete, he eats eight pounds of pasta a

day. He's not fat. Well, because he's basically counterbalancing

that with the exercise, but the day he stops exercising, those

eight pounds of pasta will make him fat because he'll start

basically adding more Omega-6 to his pasta and so it's not as

simple that carbohydrates make you fat. It's inflammation that

causes insulin resistance that makes you fat.

But these are more complicated arguments that the American

public wants sound bites. They want to basically live and die by

Dr. Oz. Therefore, if they know better, tend to basically dumb

down their arguments so they lose the scientific validity. Or they

have no idea what the arguments are in the first place so they




can't dumb them down. They find something that basically is

really kind of out there that they can stake their hat on.

There's nothing more complex in existence, not only for humans,

but for every species than basically the diet. It basically is the

reason why we exist and we always are seeking for the optimal

aspects to maximize our resources. I think the time will come

hopefully—hopefully in my lifetime when we bring back the role

of diet in terms of logical, scientific aspect. It doesn't have to be

complicated to you. I said if you've got one hand, one eye, and

one watch you can do it.

Now what's happening in your body is incredibly complex. To

ignore that is to basically give more rise to greater confusion of

Americans and they're totally confused right now as what to eat.

Jonathan: Dr. Sears, I admire your persistence because you've been beating

this hormonal drum. It's a fact of life that we're going to continue

to live in a world of sound bites. I mean I feel like the Internet,

things like that are helping because we now see people that

know more, well more about nutrition and hormones and gut

health than their physicians because they have the Internet now,

but you've been beating this hormonal drum for many decades.

It does seem, if we need a simple answer, right now that simple

answer is calories. Just calories in, calories out, count them, eat

100-calorie snack packs, weigh your food, yada, yada, yada. But

what you say and what so many other people say and what the

research says is think of food and exercise as a control system

for your hormones. That seems as simple. Instead of calories,

think about hormones. How can we continue to make that shift

in our culture?

Dr. Sears: Well, unfortunately the answer is education. Right now, we don't

have education nutrition. We have screaming matches. Until we

get back to where we try to address this like civilized humans,

we're going to have this constant shouting match from one side

to the other.




But for the average person, say, "Yeah, basically use your body as

a data point of one." Make some experiments. Try balancing your

plate better. Do you feel better? How long does it take? Harvard

has told us. It takes one meal. One meal, you're going to find out.

Just keep adjusting until you say, "I've got it."

Then basically here's the hardest part. It's called execution. Then

you say, "I've got it scientifically, but now I've got to execute it."

That's the hard part. The science part, I get it. But it takes usually

a year, if not longer, to change habits.

Jonathan: Gotcha.

Dr. Sears: That's the hardest part. People basically say, "I want an

instantaneous format." Not going to happen, but you have the

rest of your life to be working on it and give yourself a year so

you can find out within the first day something is different.

Jonathan: And you can have the confidence of knowing maybe on two

fronts, one, it's not as if what we've been doing is working, so

you're not risking very much, right? The path we're on seems to

be going pretty poorly and the pot of gold at the end of this

pursuit, as you've said, it's not a diet. Maybe it's better

characterized as nutritional serenity when you just eat and you

don't have to think about how much you're eating or when

you're eating, you just do it and you've got your hand, your

watch, and your eyeball and you're healthy and you're happy.

That's a pretty awesome state that very few of us are

experiencing right now.

Dr. Sears: Well, yes. I'll go back to emphasize that. Yeah, healthy and happy.

It's a rarity in America. You're looking at a little experimentation,

but here's a good rule of thumb. If something doesn't make

commonsense, then it's probably nutritional nonsense. When

you start this, you're looking for these wild explanations. Stand

back and say, "That's nonsense."

Now it does take work. There's no question about it, but the

question is is your future worth it? I think it is. Call me crazy.




Jonathan: Dr. Sears, it's such an empowering message, though, because

right now what I hear you saying is it's simple. It might not be

easy to execute, but it is simple. That makes sense to me

because no one knew what a calorie was. We didn't understand

all of this science even 100 years ago, and people were still

slimmer and healthier back then. I don't think we've all gotten

lazier and dumber, so it must just be that if we get back to that

simplicity that we had, which was just eat things you find in

nature and that's one actual followup question, Dr. Sears, is we

talked about the colorful carbohydrates, the high-quality protein.

Certainly some things you find in nature, like a potato for

example, is not a colorful carbohydrate. It is found directly in

nature. It was part of the diet of humanity for many thousands of

years. How does that fit within this model?

Dr. Sears: Well, I go back to saying if it's not white, don't eat it. It's as simple

as that. We have to, again, treat this like a political campaign. You

make it simple for people to say, "The more white you put on

your plate, the more inflammation you're going to create." It's

saying, "Do you feel lucky? Do you feel lucky eating that potato or

that piece of white bread or that piece of white pasta or that

serving of white rice?"

You might be. Who knows? But I know most people are not. But

it's been around saying, "Well, strychnine has been around for a

long time. That doesn't make it healthy." It's saying you use your

eye to put the least amount of white on your plate and the most

color, try to balance it the best you can, and look at your watch

and say it's a game. Treat it as a game, not as some type of

arduous task. This is not like Hercules washing out the stables,

but it's a game. What's the end response? A longer and better

life. Once you learn how to master the game, then the goal

remains in sight.

Now the trouble is you're not going to really find out how that

happens until you're really about age 60. Up to age 60, you can

eat virtually everything and probably get away with it, but as you




get toward the last quarter of your life, things start catching up.

You say, "That's my long-term retirement goal is to basically live a

healthy and happy life."

This is why, again, I go back to the happiness. There's a very, very

strong connection between our diet and our ability to be happy,

because basically we're looking for—happiness can be defined

many ways as the levels of dopamine in your brain. The more

dopamine you can produce, the happier you are. That's why we

run around doing things sometimes really dumb that increase

dopamine levels. "I'm going to take this drug, drink this alcohol,

do this." But it turns out diet is a very powerful way of

maintaining constant levels of dopamine in the brain. If the

dopamine in the brain is constant, you're happy all the time.

Jonathan: That's very promising because often we hear that, "Well, if I can't

eat these refined carbohydrates or processed fats, that's what

gives me enjoyment in life." It sounds like what you're saying is

we can prove clinically that if you can quantify enjoyment, it's the

level of dopamine in your brain and having proper nutrition, the

area under the how much dopamine you have curve will be

higher than if you had these teeny tiny little spikes from

processed garbage.

Dr. Sears: Unfortunately, the teeny tiny spikes give rise to a very rapid

depression. You get, "Yes, I feel great eating my Dunkin Donut,"

then about an hour later it's like, "I don't feel so good." Basically

now the area under the curve is zero. The good spike has been

knocked out by saying, "I feel miserable."

You want to basically say, "If that's a goal," say, "I've now got a

biochemical measure. It's not how good I look in a swimsuit." It's

like, "How much can I maintain happiness using my food as my

ultimate drug?" You can talk about this because you can look at

diseases like depression and other diseases like, let's say,

attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Both of these are

characterized by decreases in dopamine, along with serotonin.

The only agent known to man that can increase both serotonin

and dopamine is called fish oils.




The more fish oil you can put in your diet, the happier you're

going to be. The happier you're going to be, the more likely

you're going to make the right choices and like that frontal cortex

say, "Hey, that's a dumb idea. Don't do it." But if you don't have

basically a good-functioning brain, basically that limiting system

is going to take hold and you're in trouble. It's like saying,

"Dopamine made me do it."

Jonathan: I love it. What do you feel is—just to wrap up here, Dr. Sears? I

mean there's been so much advancement over the past 40 years,

right? We started in 1977 down this path where the Senate Select

Committee said, "Just eat less, exercise more." We are where we

are today where we're talking about inflammation and we're

talking about homeostasis and we're talking about hormones.

What do you see as the next big field to be explored in the

modern science of nutrition and exercise?

Dr. Sears: Well, I think it'll be building a bridge between these two ruling

factors which are pushing against each other. One: We're

running out of time. I don't have time to make the right choices

even if I knew what they were. Two: I have a better idea what the

right choices are, but basically life gets in the way.

I think that I really feel we're coming to another age of what I call

processed foods 2.0. Processed foods 1.0 have been the foods

that have gotten us into trouble. They're convenient. They're

tasty. They activate the dopamine receptors, but they're not very

good for us.

I think the real challenge, because time will still be compressed,

even more so as time goes on. We're not going to go back to the

old days. We may have to be looking at, I think, thinking out of

the box approach, of thinking of processed foods 2.0, that have

to be convenient, they have to be tasty, but now they have to be

able to increase dopamine and stop hunger. If we achieve that,

we may be able to get our way out of this problem. Processed

foods got us into this problem and I think the processed foods

may have the opportunity to get us out of the problem because




most people the most precious commodity of time is being

compressed so much that the time to make foods, buy foods,

and eat foods is disappearing.

I think we have to basically start things from a really out-of-the-

box approaches because even though we have the best

intentions, life gets in the way.

Jonathan: You said out-of-the-box approaches. It sounds like one of those

out-of-the-box approaches might be finding a way to put things

into the box without making them toxic for us.

Dr. Sears: Exactly. It's a challenge, but I think basically science thrives on

challenges. If we want to basically take the next step and say,

"Okay, as we understand more, can we make now foods that

basically can be not as a replacement, but be as a partner? A

partner for the times you can eat the two pounds of vegetables."

It's hard work. I try to eat two pounds of vegetables a day. It's

hard work! Is it worth it? Yes, it is.

But again, we have to have basically adjuncts to basically bring it

to play because the bottom line, we are in a totally unsustainable

situation globally. The one disease that will destroy every

developed country in the world is type 2 diabetes. That's bad

enough, except that we know that type 2 diabetes, you're two to

four times more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease.

We've had an epidemic rise of type 2 diabetes worldwide, which

means 10 to 15 years from now we'll start to see another

epidemic rise of Alzheimer's. That's the end of healthcare as we

know it worldwide. We have a clock that's running out.

Until we basically focus our attention on some of these more, I

won't say esoteric, but taken out to say, it's not as simple as eat

less, exercise more. It's not so complex that you can't do it, but

we have to basically say—we have to have a commitment to say,

"You might need a hybrid system of both foods and processed

foods 2.0 so they can be working in concert to basically allow you

to retake control of your genetic future."




Jonathan: Dr. Sears, it's certainly also true that having a future where we're

all diabetic with dementia and obese, that's not easy either. We

say it might be a challenge or hard to eat this way, but it's also

pretty challenging to go through life sick and overweight. It's a bit

like we can pick which path we want to take. Sadly, nothing in life

is easy or free.

Dr. Sears: Agreed. That's why we go back to education. It's education,

education, education. Yet, we tend to basically—are becoming

less educated. That is we basically now are gravitating toward

political statements. As a consequence, we get further away from

our goal of saying, "What are we really doing to our bodies?" This

is just not a personal question because we now know through

epigenetics that there are trans generational effects and that the

sins of the mother and the father can be amplified and

transmitted to the next generations. Not just next generation,

but next generations.

We're in really, I think, in many ways, a fight for our genetic

future. It's being eroded before our very eyes. If we have an idea

for the future for the human species, we've got to get back on

target as quickly as possible, because as these epigenetic

changes induced by our diet become more constant, you run the

risk of having them become permanent. Then, at that point, it's

too late. I think we have a challenge, a very major challenge,

really we're not talking about losing weight, but we're really in

the survival mode for our species.

Jonathan: Listeners, as you take this incredibly powerful words to heart and

you hear this message of education, certainly Dr. Sears has been

a pioneer in educating us for decades now. If you haven't

checked out his work, I would highly recommend it. You've

certainly heard of the Zone diet. You can learn all about it at the

zonediet.com. It really is, to me, more of a framework. It will get

you to start seeing food as a control system for your hormones

rather than just a way to manipulate metabolic math, which

really doesn't add up anyway.



http://www.zonediet.com/


Dr. Sears, thank you for all that you've done for so long to help

educate on this lifesaving topic.

Dr. Sears: Thank you very much and hopefully opportunities like this will

basically hopefully get the message out.

Jonathan: Absolutely! Dr. Barry Sears, thank you so much!

Dr. Sears: Thank you.

Jonathan: Bye-bye.



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Dr. Sears: Well, actually mu ch of it comes from my ...sanesolution.com/CalMythSummitTranscripts/The... · Dr. Sears: Well, because the people in the, let's say, the new Atkins regimen