“The Truth About Ozempic”, These 3 Foods Are Leading To Cancer: Dr Mindy Pelz (Transcript)

There’s no empowerment in that at all.

Now, if the pill doesn’t work, then what ends up happening is you go back to the doctor and you’re like, hey, pill didn’t work. And the doctor says, okay, well, let’s try a different pill. And then you try a different pill. And you do that like three or four times. And if it still doesn’t work, then what happens is now you go to a different doctor. You’re like, I gotta go to a different doctor. This one’s not working. And we keep outsourcing our power, looking for answers. Somebody show me, somebody show me.

The Power of Metabolic Switching

But with fasting, what happened is we showed this idea of metabolic switching, where there’s a time to eat and there’s a time not to eat. And the longer you spend not eating, the more your body heals itself. And that concept, I think women had never really, had grabbed before. And it was a tool that was so available. They could listen to the podcast we did and apply it like an hour later. And all of a sudden, again, the only person to give credit to is yourself. And so I don’t, I mean, maybe exercise. Exercise would be that tool. What other tools do we have that make you feel that powerful that quickly?

STEVEN BARTLETT: If someone has never come across the concept of fasting before, which I think is probably quite implausible now, but can you give me the, sort of evolutionary basis for fasting? Why does it help? And where were we told a lie? Where did we take a wrong turn in the last thousand years, which made us, I don’t know, just become really gluttonous and have five meals a day and so on?

DR MINDY PELZ: Well, let’s start with what fasting is and then I’ll dive into the lie. I have a lot of thoughts on the lie. If we go back to hunter-gatherer days, you know, one thing that blows me away is that the human body we’re living in is literally the same. It’s the same as the hunter-gatherers, but what we’re sitting in, what we’re exposed to, the physical, emotional, chemical stressors that are handed to us every single day is completely like opposite what the hunter and gatherers were doing.

The Evolution of Fasting and Metabolic Switching

So if I go back to the hunter and gatherers, they came out of the cave, they didn’t have door dash, they didn’t have a refrigerator, they didn’t know how to get food, they had to go find food. Now, if blood sugar is going down and they’ve got to go find food and they pass out, you know, a hundred yards from the cave, then we wouldn’t be sitting here right now. But that didn’t happen.

What happened is they went out to go hunt and the longer they were away trying to find food, the more they metabolically switched into this other fuel source called the ketogenic energy system. I like to call it the fat burning system because what their body did, we were like a hybrid car. The body was like, okay, blood sugar’s going down. Okay, time to switch over to our other fuel source. We’re going to pop in and start burning fat and make a ketone.

And then that ketone went up into their brain, sharpened their focus, and made them even stronger to go find food. Today, we don’t do that. We don’t ever lean into this other system that our hunter and gatherer ancestors had to lean into. We don’t have, there’s so much oversaturation of food and ideas and stimulation coming at us that we never had, there are like biological processes in our bodies that we’re not even accessing anymore, but they exist.

The Thrifty Gene Hypothesis

I think you and I talked about this last time. In the book, I talk about something called the thrifty gene hypothesis. Now it’s a hypothesis, and the idea was the humans that came out of that hunter-gatherer time had a gene that allowed them to switch over into the fat burning system and make a ketone in the absence of food. And so all of the people that survived that time period, they morphed into what we’re looking at as each other right now, because the ones that didn’t have that genetic profile didn’t live.

So they’re no longer with us. So now we’re sitting with this thrifty gene inside of us, eating all day, and what they believe is happening is that because we’re not accessing that gene, that the people that are suffering now is on the opposite, are the ones that are not tapping in to the fat burning system. The ones that are not accessing that are actually killing themselves because they’re not in alignment with their own biology.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I kind of have a lot of empathy for them in some respects because it’s difficult, isn’t it, when we’re surrounded by this much free, cheap, glucose, sugar, carbohydrates to fight back against the environment you live in. Kind of what we’re asking people to do is fight their natural urges. Presumably the brain also has a gene which says, listen, if you see sugar, you better grab it and put it in your mouth.

DR MINDY PELZ: Yep, and there’s some microbes doing that too.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, really?

DR MINDY PELZ: Yeah, yeah. There can be fungus in your gut that tells your taste buds, hey, I need more sugar because I gotta stay alive. Our taste buds have been completely hijacked by all the chemicals poured onto our food. But we get so much dopamine now from food that sometimes all we have to do is walk into a grocery store and look at our favorite food and see it in the aisle. We haven’t even picked it up, put it in the basket. We’re like, ooh, that potato chip. I love that potato chip. And that’s creating a dopamine response in our brain because our brain knows when I eat that, I get dopamine.

The Lie About Food Safety

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what is the lie then? We talked about the lie that’s been told to people about the food environment, about five meals a day, et cetera. What is that lie and why were we told the lie?

DR MINDY PELZ: The biggest lie is that all food is safe. Not all food is safe. And a part of that lie is I can walk into my grocery store and it’s already been vetted for my health. Now I can tell you in America, that’s not the case. We have a category of food called GRAS, generally recognized as safe in our country. And basically what the FDA can do is the FDA can put chemicals under this category when it hasn’t been scientifically proven to be safe. They can repackage them and put them in this category of generally recognized as safe.

The idea is that we have a innocent until proven guilty philosophy around food. And it’s even gone even further where within their own administration in the FDA, people are saying that the F is silent. They don’t care about the food. And then if you go even further and you think about it, how do we have food and drug together in the same administration? If we really cared about food, we would actually pull it out separate and we would have a bigger, better analysis of food.

So the lie is that all food is safe. That’s not true at all. There are foods that are medicine and there are foods that will build disease. And just because we call them both food doesn’t mean they’re safe. You have to know the difference.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How do we know the difference?

DR MINDY PELZ: Well, the first thing is learn to read an ingredient label. So which then, do you know how to read an ingredient label?

STEVEN BARTLETT: I would say no.

Reading Food Labels

DR MINDY PELZ: So the first thing I do on anything that’s packaged is I go straight to the ingredients. And this is so easy. All you’ve got to do is look at those ingredients and ask yourself, do I recognize, do I know every single one of those ingredients? And if you don’t, entertain yourself and go look them up.

I actually did this with my nephew years ago. He brought me some frozen waffles and he’s like, hey, what do you think? Are these safe? And I said, read them out loud to me. And he started to read them out loud. He was like 14 years old at the time. He started to read and he couldn’t get through like the third ingredient in was a chemical.

And he’s like, I don’t know how to pronounce this. I said, go look it up. I want you to Google it and look it up and tell me what it is. And he came back and he’s like, wait a second. What I just found is that’s a cancer causing chemical. I said, yeah, you’re right, it is. That’s what’s happening is that these chemicals are allowed in our food that promote disease.

Navigating the Grocery Store

And so then once you have that idea and you know the ingredients are the most important and you follow, is it a chemical? Is it a real food? Then the next thing you can do is really stay away from anything with an ingredient label. Like when you go into a grocery store, walk around the outside, don’t go into those middle aisles, go to the refrigerated sections, go to the fresh food.

If it doesn’t have a label, it means it’s authentic self. So they didn’t denature it. They didn’t change it. It came from the earth or it came from an animal, whatever your ethos is around there. But it wasn’t put into an altered state because what they do is they put these things into altered state so that they taste better and they hijack your taste buds so you’ll come back for more. Or they put it into an altered state so that it can last longer on the shelf. And if it lasts longer on the shelf, then that chemical’s lasting longer than you.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The lie around frequency of eating. Because when I grew up, breakfast, lunch, you might have something like a couple of snacks and then have dinner, and then you wake up the next day and go through the same routine of just basically eating every waking hour of the day that you can and snacking in between. Who told us this lie and is it a lie? Because it kind of seems to be the antithesis of fasting.

The Breakfast Myth

DR MINDY PELZ: Yep, well, from what I can find, and I’m sure there’s lots of ways we’ve perpetuated this lie, but “breakfast is the most important meal of the day” was an ad slogan for Kellogg’s corn flakes back in the 70s. So back in 1970, they had a hot new cereal and the ad was, eat it, breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Here we are in 2024 and people are still perpetuating that ad slogan.

So I’ve actually looked into the research on like, if I eat more, will it speed up my metabolism? From what I can tell from the research, I can’t find that. Now, let’s say we just leave the research out of it. I would like to meet a human that has eaten six meals a day and found that that was a metabolism stimulator. Like, I don’t know very many people that say that. It’s like a cultural lie that just got sort of passed down.

And what happened when the fasting research came out now, people like Valter Longo, people like Satchin Panda, big fasting researchers, what they figured out was, oh, wait, if we compress our eating into a certain time period like our ancestors did and we left longer for fasting, there’s something magical going on here. And those were the giants that started to show us that actually time-restricted eating is the most important thing that we can be doing when it comes to food.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about calorie-restricted eating? And how does, is that the same thing?

Time-Restricted Eating vs. Calorie Restriction

DR MINDY PELZ: No, thank you for asking that. So let’s talk about both of them in an everyday kind of scenario. So in time restriction, you are saying, I have a certain time in my 24 hours where I eat, I compress my eating window, and then I have a time where I’m fasting. So I have an eating window and I have a fasting window. Okay, and I get to decide how long, how compressed that eating window is and how long that fasting window is.

The longer you go in the fasting window, what you’re doing is you’re turning on these different healing mechanisms. And that is independent of calories coming in or not coming in. That is dependent on nutrients not coming in. That is dependent on glucose going down and switching over to burning fat so you make a ketone. That has nothing to do with calories.

When you come over to calorie restriction, you’re saying, I’m gonna have X amount of calories a day, I’m gonna output X amount of calories, and I’m gonna do that all day long. So very different philosophies to me. Like you’re creating an internal mechanism with time restriction that is going to stimulate a healing process and it’s nutrient deficiency along with glucose drop. It doesn’t have to do with calories.

The Rise of Ozempic

STEVEN BARTLETT: As it relates to fasting, since we had the conversation, something really massive happened in culture, which was this word Ozempic became really popular and the drug Ozempic became really popular. I know there’s various types of it, would go be or something else. There’s lots of different versions of it, but fasting as a tool is now quite established, but Ozempic has a tool for achieving the same outcomes. What’s your thoughts on that?

DR MINDY PELZ: Yeah, so now first I’m just gonna say I’m not an Ozempic expert, so I can’t tell you the mechanisms behind that. What I will tell you is that again, I’m a supporter of the everyday person. And the first challenge we have with Ozempic is the cost. So is everybody gonna be able to afford that, to be able to improve their metabolic health? I’m a supporter of the single mom who’s working two jobs and is trying to just put food on the table and Ozempic at $800,000, US dollars, she’s not going there.

STEVEN BARTLETT: A month, is it a month?

DR MINDY PELZ: A month. So the first thing is it’s unattainable for so many people. Second thing is that we’ve got a challenge with some of the side effects. Now there’s been a lot of debate about that and like the nausea and all that, like what is that? And some people have it, some people don’t. So you have to personally decide if that works for you or not.

Long-Term Effectiveness of Ozempic

The third issue is that, and this is a really interesting recent stat, is that within two years, people, 70% of those Ozempic users are off of Ozempic. I don’t know if it’s cost, I don’t know if it’s discomfort, I don’t know what it is, but long-term that’s not a phenomenal solution.

So with that in mind, let’s unpack what’s happening from a symptomatology point of view with Ozempic. And the biggest thing is you are not hungry. Okay? So I can tell you thousands and thousands and thousands of comments. Those two women you started this podcast off with, when people learn how to do a fasting lifestyle, their hunger goes away.

It is very, and I’ve never taken Ozempic, I can’t tell you like per se that if it would be the same experience, but when you learn to metabolically switch, your hunger goes down. Because without food, you go into this ketogenic energy system, you get a ketone, it turns off hunger. So the biggest, one of the biggest consequences we’ve seen in the millions of people we’ve seen build these fasting lifestyles, is they go, I just am not hungry anymore.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I can relate. When I did a ketogenic diet for a while, my hunger levels seemed to drop as well. Is that a similar thing?

DR MINDY PELZ: Yeah, so because your blood sugar is stable.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so you’re not getting the spikes and drops.

DR MINDY PELZ: Yeah, you got it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And is that much of the reason why you end up losing weight? Because you just end up eating a little bit less as well as you’re staying away from glucose and stuff.

The Mechanism of Ketosis and Weight Loss

DR MINDY PELZ: Yeah, it’s true, it’s that. And then in order to make a ketone, you have to burn fat. Think about it, let’s put it in Ozempic terms. It would be like going to the pharmacy and in order to pay your Ozempic bill, you had to give them a little piece of fat. And then of your fat. And then you came home with the shot, you plug it in and now you’re not hungry.

Okay, that’s what fasting is doing. Is fasting is using your own fat to make this byproduct called a ketone. So you’re losing weight in the process of making the ketone. And then the ketone goes up into the brain and actually shuts off the hunger hormone. And now you’re not hungry.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Can’t you see a world? Because I think with, again, this is my very limited knowledge of medicine and the biotech and pharmaceutical industry. I think what happens with patents, like medical patents, is eventually they expire. I think they expire after about 10 years or something like that. So eventually the Ozempic patent is going to expire, which means that other people can produce that drug.

I think the cost will eventually therefore go down, especially as other people start producing other iterations of the drug that becomes this price war. And you’ll have all these different versions of Ozempic, but at lower cost. Can you foresee, because I think I can, a world where most people in the Western world are taking some form of Ozempic to suppress hunger. And it’s casual.

The Future of Ozempic and Weight Loss Drugs

DR MINDY PELZ: I don’t know if I want to see that. I mean, the first thing I’d like to see is some long-term studies on this. I’d like to see, let’s give this a little bit of time to see how it unfolds in the culture and how people react to it. And then we have to ask, are we studying this on women? I’m going to be the fierce advocate for making sure that this gets researched on women.

So if we look at that world, I would say, okay, I’d only be willing to entertain that thought if we have some real clear data showing us long-term, 20, 30, 40 years that it’s going to be safe. Second thing though, that I want to say on that, and this, I go back to what you started this with. Do you feel empowered?

I mean, I know people are happy. They’re like, oh my God, I finally lose weight. They feel really good in their body. Like, I don’t want to dismiss that. And I’m not here to take that joy or excitement away from somebody who’s losing weight with Ozempic. I think a fasting lifestyle is a phenomenal pair to Ozempic if that’s you.

The Empowerment of Fasting vs. Medication

But what I hear when people lose that amount of weight is that when you look at them, you’re like, oh my God, you lost so much weight. They’re like, yeah, I’m on Ozempic. The ones that are like, I’m going to own it. Okay, so Ozempic got the power. When I see somebody who lost weight from a fasting lifestyle, what they say is, yeah, I started to learn how to fast. And there is an internal power that I did this for myself.

So again, we rob them of that internal experience. If every cure, including weight loss, is going to be found in a pill, how are we going to believe in our own bodies?

STEVEN BARTLETT: The most interesting take I’ve heard on why Ozempic might be a really negative thing for society is actually the point you just made about discipline and about, we talked at the start of this conversation about the comfort crisis and how everything’s getting easier. We can date and eat and whatever else from the comfort of our own home.

And now with AI coming into the world, where we’re going to have AI agents, where we can tell our devices to go do things for us, you play it forward a couple of years. You’re looking at a world where we really don’t have to do anything, that we don’t have to move. We’ve really optimized this comfort difficulty challenge out of our lives.

The Comfort Crisis and Ozempic

And now Ozempic offers another solution in that regard. I know, I know that it saves lives. And I think that’s a really amazing thing. And if I was in such a situation, I would take it. If my friends, family, children, I’d be the first to make sure that they were taking it to save their lives.

But if we look back through history, we’ve made this trade off and regretted it repeatedly. We’ve kind of chosen comfort and convenience at the expense of something else, which we only find out 10 or 20 years later, where we go, oh my God, Jesus, maybe having these devices or being able to order food like this or whatever else was a bad idea. But we won’t find out for 20, 30 years.

And it’s really interesting also to see this almost counter movement in culture, where people are now, this sort of counter movement of people that are choosing difficulty, the ice bar, the hydro marathon where they’re running across, you know what I mean? And that feels like the counter movement to this sort of comfort crisis.

But Ozempic I actually categorized as part of the comfort crisis, because of the comment I read at the start from the lady who said, it bolstered my confidence and I can now do hard things.

DR MINDY PELZ: Yeah, and do people say that with Ozempic? I mean, it’s a really interesting point. And my general ethos on health is that we should be looking within and what we’re capable of doing to heal. I am not a fan of outsourcing our health.

And this can even go down to the idea of ketones. There’s a lot of exogenous ketones out there. And people ask me all the time, which I take exogenous ketones. And my feeling is let’s get you learning how to metabolically switch so you can make your own ketone first. And if we have to go into an exogenous ketone, we will, but that’s another outsource. Like we just keep outsourcing and outsourcing and outsourcing until we do not feel powerful in our own bodies. And 20, 30 years of that is going to be a serious human crisis.

The Principle of Discomfort

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think the principle that if we don’t do anything uncomfortable today, we kind of just defer the discomfort into the future is a really wonderful principle to live by. You know what I mean?

DR MINDY PELZ: Right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m not saying that in the future, you’re going to necessarily have a health, a physical health issue or metabolic health issue if you’re choosing comfort in terms of your metabolic choices today. But you might have a relationship issue because you didn’t learn to deal with discomfort, have uncomfortable conversations. It’s interesting. It’s just the principles for life.

And one of them also is that I just think a really wonderful principle that I live by is that everything has a cost. And whenever someone presents you with the idea that there’s a miracle drug or a miracle cure, it’s because we haven’t figured out the cost yet. And the uncertainty of not knowing the cost for me is terrifying.

I’d rather someone said, listen, this drug isn’t perfect and it has all these issues with it and you’re going to suffer in this way, but is the trade-off worth it for you? Then present it as a miracle drug. And I kind of think Ozempic right now is viewed as a bit of a miracle drug, which scares the hell out of me.

DR MINDY PELZ: Right. Yeah. And again, we need more time with the long-term studies. And I think what’s confusing about Ozempic is it does have some amazing upsides. And so we can’t just totally villainize it. It’s like, oh, there’s some interesting things to learn here. And people who are in a massive metabolic crisis, it can be a lifeline to get them out.

But again, a line that I will continue to hold is lifestyle, lifestyle, lifestyle. There is no free pass when it comes to your health. I mean, we can hack in from many different directions. We have some pretty fast paths to health, like learning how to metabolically switch. But in the end, you are going to have to make health your responsibility and you’re going to have to work for it, especially as you age.

The Invisible Consequences of Diet

STEVEN BARTLETT: And diet is one of those things that the consequences of a bad diet, making bad dietary choices is kind of invisible today. You might not feel great or you might get a little bit of a stomach ache or whatever, or feel a bit bloated, but it’s almost like sowing seeds for your 100-year-old self that you don’t yet see the consequence of. And this is why I think diet has to become a bit of a religion to some degree. But you don’t see the internal damage. You don’t see the shifting of your gut microbiome on a daily basis.

DR MINDY PELZ: Oh, I used to say this all the time to my patients. I would say everything you’re doing with your lifestyle now is preventing you from diseases you never knew you were going to get because you’ll never get them. So you didn’t even know that the 5 a.m. workout that you chose to get up and go do is going to actually save you from Alzheimer’s 20 years from now.

You have no idea the fasting lifestyle that you committed to is actually going to save you from some kind of hormonal cancer. The list goes on and on because you’re doing it today tomorrow you don’t eat. And so there’s no reward on that front because prevention doesn’t come with a ribbon.

Ketones and the Ketogenic Diet

STEVEN BARTLETT: You used the word ketones and you used it in the context of fasting. Does that mean that you’re an advocate of the ketogenic diet because the word is the same?

DR MINDY PELZ: Yeah, thank you for asking this because this gets confusing a lot. I’m an advocate of pulsing in ketones and my way of encouraging people to do that is through fasting.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why not the ketogenic diet?

DR MINDY PELZ: So the ketogenic diet has some upsides, just like Ozempic has some upsides and it has some downsides. So moving processed carbs out of your diet is always a good idea. Bringing your carb level down so your blood sugar comes down, always a good idea. But when the ketogenic diet came out, what ended up happening is people were just eating meat or eating fat and they weren’t eating any fruits and vegetables.

Okay, for women, fruits and vegetables are really important. You gotta have that fiber to feed a set of bacteria in your gut that break estrogen down. So that’s why when I talk about keto, I always say it’s ketobiotic because I brought the carb level back up. I was like, yeah, stay off of processed carbs. But if you want a ketone, you’re gonna get that ketone by attaching a fasting window to every single day and learning to metabolically switch. So you get over here and you make a ketone from fasting, not from manipulating your food over and over and over again which has a long-term challenge.

The Duration of Fasting for Metabolic Switching

STEVEN BARTLETT: How long do I have to fast for in order to metabolically switch?

DR MINDY PELZ: Yeah, so eight hours is usually what they say where the system starts to move from sugar burner to fat burner. It usually takes about four hours to get over there. So we always say 12-

STEVEN BARTLETT: For additional hours, okay.

DR MINDY PELZ: Well, yeah, thank you for pointing that out. So 12 hours. And now you’re pretty much over into this fasting window. Your intelligent body, what it’s doing is it’s saying it’s been 12 hours. Glucose hasn’t gone up and we haven’t had any nutrients. Well, we’re gonna switch into our other fuel source and we’re gonna burn fat to make a ketone.

So everybody’s a little different because some people don’t switch as easy. Some people take a little longer to make a ketone. I mean, we saw some incredible hurdles that people hit trying to get into the fasted state that were because what I call their metabolic switch was sluggish. They had never really practiced this before. And so when they were going 12 hours, all of a sudden they weren’t making a ketone and they were just hungry.

And so what we started to do is teach them things like, okay, this is a large reason why the new book is around is because I needed to create a food manual to help them clean up their food system so they could switch over into the fasted system much easier.

Drinks During Fasting

STEVEN BARTLETT: If I’m drinking coffee or water, all these kinds of things, is that gonna interrupt the process of metabolic switching?

DR MINDY PELZ: You should be fine with water. Now I have definitely seen some really extreme cases where people even have a blood sugar spike from water, but very extreme. Coffee, most people will do okay with coffee. It’s what you put in your coffee. That’s a problem.

STEVEN BARTLETT: If it’s just black coffee.

DR MINDY PELZ: Black coffee should be fine. Now make sure it’s chemical free. Don’t, you know, make sure it’s organic. Like there’s a, like make it clean. So those two are pretty good. Teas can be fine to drink in the fasting window.

Common Mistakes in Intermittent Fasting

STEVEN BARTLETT: What are the common mistakes people make when they’re into intermittent fasting? Or, you know, the common myths around the process that someone who thinks they know it’s intermittent fasting could well be making?

DR MINDY PELZ: So if we stay in the fasting window idea, I’ll tell you a couple of that I’ve seen, like people drinking a diet drink that has chemicals in it. And so, or a synthetic sweetener that actually stimulates hunger. So, you know, some of the diet drinks that are out there, there’s a whole bunch of them.

So people think I can just drink, if we go with the mistake, people just think I can drink whatever I want then. It’s just not eating. I’ve even had questions of, can I do fruit juice? I’m like, no, it’s not eating. You’re trying to get your blood sugar down so you switch over into this ketogenic energy system.

So I would say the fasting window, people can trip over themselves a little bit. Then I would say, you know, of course, women specifically fasting all the time. That’s why I did Fast Like A Girl was women needed to know how to fast to their cycles. The other mistake that people make is they think, well, they don’t have to clean up their food. And that’s your, you know, that’s your prerogative. But if you clean up food, your food system, you’re gonna make fasting a lot easier.

So I think those are some of the biggies. I would say other ones that might be helpful for people listening and I’m thinking about the conversation with your girlfriend is thinking that there’s a one size fits all for fasting. Some people like to skip dinner. Other people like to skip breakfast. I have plenty of people in our community that do lunch to lunch fasting.

You get to decide where your eating window goes. And you know, there’s a lot of theories. Like I’m a big fan of eat in the light, don’t eat in the dark. When you eat in the dark, melatonin’s in and melatonin makes you more insulin resistant. So eat in the light and just make that your fasting window. Look at what the light patterns are.

So there’s some really good evidence there, but it’s all customizable to you and your lifestyle. Oh, I have patients and friends who are like sitting down at the table for dinner with my family is the most important moment of my day. And that happens at eight o’clock at night. And so I’m like, great, eat then, enjoy that experience and build that, maybe your fasting window is two to nine or 10.

Overcoming Hunger Cravings

STEVEN BARTLETT: You must have so many people that listen to your work, read your books, and then they still can’t do it. They still can’t fast. They still get beaten by the hunger craving that comes at 11 p.m. And then the next day at eight a.m. It just wins, it just keeps winning. And they’re listening to you over and over again, but the hunger cravings, the sugar cravings just keep winning and they just keep failing at this idea of fasting.

DR MINDY PELZ: You know, it’s funny because maybe I just don’t see it as much, I mean, we get hundreds of thousands of comments across our socials every week. And I try to keep a pulse on them. But so I may not see all the, maybe the people who can’t fast, maybe they don’t leave comments even.

So, but there was a really interesting study called the Every Other Day Diet. And the Every Other Day Diet years ago was a researcher who took a group of people who were in a metabolic crisis. And like their cholesterol was high, their hemoglobin A1c was high, their liver enzymes were off, blood pressure, I mean, everything was bad. And they were eating the Western standard diet.

And she said, you can eat whatever you want, but you’re gonna do it every other day. So one day eat, go to town, one day you’re not eating at all, you’re fasting all day. And then the next day, go to town, eat whatever you want, and then you’re fasting. And you’re gonna do this for a year. And so they ended up doing it for a year.

Now I wanna point out, there was like a third of the people that dropped out. So we have to like point that out. But everybody that stayed in it, at the end of the year, all their metabolic markers improved, they lost weight. But the thing that shocked the researchers the most is that their taste buds changed. What they craved changed.

So when they hung in there and they did it over a period of time, all of a sudden they went from craving a hamburger and fries to craving a salad with some protein on it. And that was very unconscious. And I’ve thought a lot about that study and like why did that happen? And I believe it happened because of the microbiome changes.

Our taste buds are not always a brain decision. Sometimes they’re a micro decision. And if I have a set of bad bacteria because I’ve been feeding bad bacteria, you know, these toxic foods, then yeah, I’m gonna keep craving it. And yeah, this gets difficult. But if I stick with it long enough, if I keep fasting and trying it and experimenting with it, and I make enough progress that I can change my microbiome, then there’s a door in because now my food cravings can start to change.

Fasting and Gut Microbiome

STEVEN BARTLETT: How does fasting change your gut microbiome in that situation?

DR MINDY PELZ: This is a great question. So biggest criticism, one of the biggest criticisms of fasting is it destroys your gut. So I wanna unpack this one. So here’s what the science is showing. When you are in a fasted state, the longer you’re there, the most famous study was out of MIT 24 hour fast, you started to get these stem cells into the gut that repaired the gut. But when you are in a fasted state, these bad bacteria get starved out. And when they get starved out, there’s an opportunity.

Now, here’s what I wanna say because the criticism is that fasting destroys your gut microbes. So first, yes, it destroys the ones you no longer want. Now, second thing is that first meal matters, that first door into your food matters. And if you bring in probiotic, prebiotic, polyphenol foods, my favorite thing to break a fast with for years was an avocado with sauerkraut and hemp seeds on top of it. If you bring all of that in, now you’re actually feeding those good bacteria and you’re helping them grow.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But do the good bacteria die as well when I starve them?

DR MINDY PELZ: Some of them can, for sure. There can be an overall depletion, for sure.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But what you’re saying is you’re killing a lot of bacteria in the gut potentially, but then you’re feeding the good ones.

DR MINDY PELZ: That’s right. Okay. That’s right. So this is, again, why Eat Like a Girl came about because of these kind of questions was what happened was that so many people were just doing six meals a day, calorie counting, trying to manipulate their food. And then when they discovered, wait a second, I need to think about the timing of my food, not necessarily the quality of what I’m eating, and they switched over, all of a sudden they started to drop weight.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But the thing you broke your fast with, the sauerkraut, et cetera, if I just started eating that, wouldn’t the bad bacteria die anyway?

DR MINDY PELZ: So you would change the balance, hopefully where good bacteria would grow and bad bacteria would be outnumbered at that point. It’s possible, yeah. I think that’s the slower way. I’m gonna be really honest.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I guess the counterpoint would be then that it’s hard to do that because I’d still be getting the cravings from the bad bacteria. Those bad bacteria would still be sending me signals through my gut microbiome to eat the hamburgers.

DR MINDY PELZ: We see microbiomes change within weeks. Food cravings change within weeks if you just stick with this and then you look at that first meal matters and you make sure you’re getting those sauerkrauts, you’re getting, hemp seeds was another one I put on that avocado all the time, great prebiotic.

So if you make that first meal really good quality and you feed those microbes, then this is a much faster way. Every other day diet, I wanna say it was about six months that they started to see food changes happening because it wasn’t until the full year was completed that they started to actually see the food changes that happened.

Personal Experience with Diet Changes

STEVEN BARTLETT: Anecdotally in my life, when I changed my diet, so when I tried the keto diet for a while and when I’ve done other things, I lose the cravings for bad foods, the sort of like the hamburger or whatever, or the cookie fairly quickly. They usually take, for me, it usually takes about a week.

If I don’t have the bad foods for about a week, I lose my cravings for them. And I’ve always wondered why that is and if there’s a way to get to that point quicker. But it’s fascinating because once I’m in that stage where I’ve lost those cravings, the next three, four months, my diet is impeccable. But then something might happen, someone offers me a brownie or something, I don’t know, whatever. And then I’m back in that struggle again of fighting the craving.

DR MINDY PELZ: Yeah, and the microbes have a piece of that. Your glucose system, insulin system has a piece of that too. Do you know what your hemoglobin A1c is?

STEVEN BARTLETT: I don’t.

DR MINDY PELZ: You should know that number.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Really? Bloody hell, that’s fantastic.

DR MINDY PELZ: That tells you what your metabolic system is doing over 90 days. So you can see the patterns of glucose and insulin and you want it to be around five.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Hemoglobin A1c.

DR MINDY PELZ: Hemoglobin A1c.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What if it’s, I want it to be around five.

DR MINDY PELZ: You want it to be around five. And what does that mean? So that tells you that you are insulin sensitive, that your metabolic system is actually working efficiently. Meaning you can eat even, if somebody has got a hemoglobin A1c around five, they go eat a brownie. And we’ve seen this on continuous glucose monitors. People like this will go eat a brownie, it’ll spike up crazy high. But then boom, within 60 to 90 minutes, it returns back to normal.

Somebody with a hemoglobin A1c of 5.5, 5.7, 5.8, that same brownie, what will happen, because those cells aren’t as insulin sensitive, is that you’ll get this spike and then two, three hours later, it takes that long for the glucose to come down because that insulin system is not working at its best. So I personally love that as a target.

Understanding Hemoglobin A1c

What is hemoglobin A1c? The other piece about hemoglobin A1c that’s really important for people to understand is that the higher that number is, there is a process called glycation going on in the body, where the red blood cells that deliver oxygen to tissue are gummed up with the extra glucose the body doesn’t know how to get into the cells. So now the red blood cell can’t carry oxygen, because that’s a big part of what it does, to tissues to oxygenate those tissues.

Lesser Known Benefits of Fasting

STEVEN BARTLETT: To close off on this point of fasting, then what are some of the lesser known benefits of fasting that people don’t typically think about? Because if you think about weight loss, I think that’s probably the number one reason why people start fasting, because they want to burn belly fat. Is that accurate from what you’ve seen?

DR MINDY PELZ: Yeah, well, I mean, the research is really interesting that 36 hours into a fast, the body goes and starts to burn specifically belly fat. Now, that research was done on, just so we’re clear, is 36 hours, followed by 12 hours of eating, and then 36 hours of fasting, followed by 12 for 30 days, and they started to see waist circumference go down. I’m not telling people to fast that way, but I think it is surprising when you go into these longer fasts how you can unstick weight.

But to answer your question, I’m gonna say the biggest, biggest thing is mental health. Biggest, like, aha. Mental clarity, happiness, and I believe that’s because ketones do several things. They can start to, when a ketone comes on, inflammation is coming down, hunger is coming down, and it supercharges the brain, so now there’s this intense brain clarity that’s like kicking in, because the ketone, let’s go back to our hunter-gatherers.

The ketone, when it shows up, you’re finding food, and you better go find food immediately, so your focus has to completely sharpen so you can be the best hunter possible. So now when we’re doing that in a day-to-day kind of life, that ketone, we’re not hunting, but we might be working, we might be in an interview, and so that sharpened focus is so amazing.

And then the other piece I really like about the ketone is with it, it brings GABA, and so GABA calms you.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s GABA?

DR MINDY PELZ: So GABA’s a neurotransmitter, and when ketones go up, GABA follows. So again, let’s go back to our hunter-gatherer friends. When GABA, when ketones are up, I’m focused, I have clarity, I’m hunting for food, and I better stay calm, because I need to go find food.

Women and Fasting

STEVEN BARTLETT: On the point of women and fasting, I think you said to me last time that women shouldn’t be fasting when they’re on their periods.

DR MINDY PELZ: The week before their period.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The week before their period, okay. Yeah. So in the lead-up to their period, they should be avoiding fasting. Why is that again?

DR MINDY PELZ: So let’s go through the hormones, because I think this is one. You asked me what has surprised me on the book coming out. I’ll tell you the other thing that surprised me. How many women don’t understand their hormones? You’re controlled by it, your behaviors, your sleep, your interactions with humans, and we don’t have a system that’s teaching women hormones. This is appalling.

So when we look at the three sex hormones, when it comes through the lens of fasting, estrogen, which comes in the front half of a woman’s cycle, does really well with fasting, because she likes you to be insulin sensitive. A great example of this is the growing number of cases of polycystic ovarian syndrome, where we are seeing insulin resistance leading to infertility, because of an imbalance in the estrogen system, and we’re seeing an increase in testosterone because of this insulin system being off.

So we need, when estrogen comes in, a tool to help women to be insulin sensitive. Progesterone’s her twin sister. They look the same, we call them the same, but she acts exactly opposite. She wants glucose to be higher. She doesn’t do well with cortisol. Cortisol comes in, she’s gone away. I always say when progesterone goes high, cortisol is shy.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And cortisol is the stress hormone?

DR MINDY PELZ: Yeah. So in a woman’s 30 day period, you have moments where estrogen is making her peak, and you have moments where progesterone is making her peak. So if she’s on the keto diet, if she is in calorie restriction, if she is fasting all the time, she’s not honoring the rhythms of these two hormones. And that is a major problem.

So we say don’t fast the week before your period because you need glucose to be higher and you don’t want cortisol to be high. And just like exercise increases cortisol, so does fasting.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So what’s gonna happen if you fast the week before your period, what’s the consequence?

DR MINDY PELZ: Yeah, so what we have typically seen is women lose their cycles.

Women’s Hormonal Cycles and Fasting

DR MINDY PELZ: You need progesterone. So let’s put it through the lens of a woman’s brain. Around day 20, like progesterone’s building, building, building, building, she has to peak. And then when she hits the peak, the uterine lining sheds and you have a period. Okay, if you are fasting during that time and you didn’t bring your glucose up high enough, progesterone may not peak, and then you don’t have that shed of blood.

When you shed every single month that menstrual blood that comes out, there are four major chemicals in them. There are phthalates, there are parabens, there are forever chemicals, and there are plastics. They can actually measure that in a woman’s menstrual blood. So if she’s not bleeding, then she’s not detoxing.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because those four chemicals are toxic.

DR MINDY PELZ: They’re toxic, yes.

Dealing with Irregular Menstrual Cycles

STEVEN BARTLETT: What do you say to those people and that don’t have menstrual cycles and they’re, because, listen, obviously, I’ve never been through that myself, but I have a partner who’s been very open. I think she did a post last week on her Instagram describing the journey that she went on to try and get her menstrual cycle back. And she successfully has now.

She’s 31, she’s as big as me now. And she had many years where she had an inconsistent or non-existent menstrual cycle. And I got to observe firsthand how frustrating, how fattening, confusing that is and how you feel like you’re broken in some way if you’re not having a menstrual cycle as a woman. So what do we offer those women?

DR MINDY PELZ: Well, I applaud your girlfriend for doing that. I first wanna say that. Getting your cycle back, not only just for pregnancy, but for general health, it’s brilliant. So smart to do that. I think a lot of women think it’s great they don’t have a menstrual cycle. That’s a little bit in the culture right now. So to those women who feel like this is a blessing they don’t have a cycle, I’d ask them to rethink that. Even if they don’t wanna have kids, let’s rethink it because your body needs to shed every single month.

So there’s that. For the other women that are struggling to get their periods, the first thing that, and I’d be curious if your girlfriend discovered this, is that we have to realize that a woman’s body is rhythmic. It has times where we can be outgoing and we can conquer the world, and there’s times we’re gonna sit on the couch and do nothing. And there’s times that we’re really happy and there’s times don’t look at us that way because our hormonal system is agitated. So we are constantly in a state of rhythm. And when you’re not shedding, you’re missing a major part of your rhythm that makes you a woman.

Accommodating Women’s Cycles in the Workplace

STEVEN BARTLETT: We talked about this last time, and it was the first time as a employer, I started to reconsider how we run our business because if women do need certain accommodations based on their cycle, what might be an optimal way for an employer to set up a working schedule for a woman which would be accommodating of her cycle?

DR MINDY PELZ: So this is what I came up with is I, we talked about this idea of like three days off every single month. What if every employee had three days off every single month, no questions asked, you take it when you wanna take it? And then there’s an educational process for the women that we recommend you take it the week before your period because that’s going to absolutely help you in supporting your hormonal health.

And what we know is if you take it off the week before your period, that when you come back, you’re going to be an even better version of yourself. So it’s again, not a weakness. So I would think you would take some chunk of time and you let your employees use their prerogative because you can’t tell them when to take time, when to use it with their period. I think that’s the most fair because then the men can do it too.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, yeah, maybe we’re doing that already then because we do offer what we call unlimited holiday. I guess it’s more like a responsible holiday policy where people can take as much time as they like. So someone like Jack in the team, it also applies for me, can decide to take as much holidays he wants when he wants. And I have no idea, perhaps I hear now how much holiday Jack has taken this year, for example, or why he’s taken it and when he’s taken it. I guess, therefore, with that in place, people can decide to do that without having to broadcast why they’re off to the company.

DR MINDY PELZ: Exactly, and to the women in the company, what they need to know is that that day that everything is crashing down on you and your stress is coming from all different angles and you have to get up and push through on that day and it’s day 25 of your menstrual cycle. If it is appropriate on that day for you to stay home and you work in a company like this that has no questions asked, then stay home and nurture yourself.

And be aware that every moment a woman is pushing through that week before her period, she is destroying her hormonal system. Now there are little pushes through and there are big pushes through. So I’m talking about the big pushes through. I’m not talking about the moment you wake up and you’re like, yeah, it’s gonna be a boring day or there’s some difficult conversations I have to have today. I’m talking about the moment when your energy’s down, your brain fogged, you might be having some cramps, you might be really irritable and you’re like, I can’t take one more thing. How about I have this really cool company I work for, what if I just nurture myself today and take care of myself so I can show up tomorrow a better person?

Apple Cider Vinegar and Blood Sugar

STEVEN BARTLETT: One of the other things that I wanted to talk to you about, because I had noticed it popped into my fridge after our conversation, and I know my partner listened to the conversation. As I said to her, it was translated into a bunch of languages, so her family got to listen to it in Spanish as well, was this apple cider vinegar thing.

In the drawer of my fridge there’s apple cider vinegar and I wasn’t sure what it was the other day, so I drank a bit and it was disgusting, but I thought it looked kind of like apple juice or something and I tried it and it was really disgusting, but apple cider vinegar is currently in the door of my fridge. My partner, she’s so smart, she’s ahead of me on all of these things. Why is it in the door of my fridge?

DR MINDY PELZ: Have you tried it?

STEVEN BARTLETT: I tried it, it was disgusting.

DR MINDY PELZ: It’s totally disgusting.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s a little bit too strong, but I tried it straight from the bottle and then I put it back on.

DR MINDY PELZ: Well, so I’ll give you the reason why I’m here in a second, but I have the same experience. I do not like apple cider vinegar, although they’ve come out with some really good modifications and drinks with it, which is amazing.

And we’re always trying to look at how we can support people on our YouTube channel. And one of our consultants was like, oh, you need to do a video on apple cider vinegar. And I was like, really? Because I don’t really like apple cider vinegar. It’s hard to advocate something I don’t like. And so I finally did one and it went viral. Like everybody wanted to know about apple cider vinegar.

So here’s why it works, is it stabilizes blood sugar. So let’s unpack this. So this is really interesting. So apple cider vinegar can be taken before a meal or after a meal to have a different glucose response, a less of a glucose response. So that’s why people use it. I don’t know when she’s drinking it, but typically people would do it before a meal or after a meal to make sure that the glucose spike wasn’t high.

So the second question then to ask yourself is why does that work? So apple cider vinegar is incredibly nurturing to the gut microbes. And your gut microbes actually control your blood sugar levels. They send a bacterial signal to the liver because the liver is a major fat-burning organ. It’s a major participant in balancing blood sugar. And the two of them coordinate a blood sugar response of a meal.

So let’s use a woman on birth control for decades. There’s new studies showing that that actually upregulates some bad bacteria. That bad bacteria, when food hits it, has a heyday and has this really exaggerated glucose response. Okay, she takes some apple cider vinegar and now we’ve got her glucose, her bacteria, savoring a better glucose response.

Meal Frequency and Fasting

STEVEN BARTLETT: And how many times a day do you think men and women should be eating? Because there’s this one meal a day thing that some people subscribe to where you just have one meal every single day. But I’m unsure whether that’s healthy for both men and women at all stages in their cycle.

DR MINDY PELZ: If we bring both men and women into that conversation, I like to look at, feast famine cycling is what is best. Let’s go back to our hunter and gatherer people. Sometimes they would make a big kill and they would feast for days. They didn’t fast. They were like, we have food, we don’t have refrigeration. They would feast for days. And then they would all of a sudden go into a famine state and now they’re in a famine state and now they got to go out and they’re fasting for days.

So this is how our human body was created. So now when we’re doing one meal a day, we’re not really mimicking that. We’re mimicking pieces of that. When we’re eating all day, we’re only mimicking the kill. We’re not mimicking the hunt. So I think variation is really great and it gives freedom and flexibility. Like it allows you to have one meal one day and three the next and two the next. And it gives you that ability to just be in flow with food and not be so rigid.

So I’m not a one meal a day fan. I’m definitely not a one meal a day fan for women.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why?

DR MINDY PELZ: This is how this whole concept started was all the one meal a day women were doing it for 90 days or longer, never cycling it, showed up on my YouTube channel and they had lost their periods. Their hair was falling out. They were agitated because they weren’t minding this week before their cycle. So one meal a day maybe for the first 10 days of your cycle. Okay, that would work. But then let’s switch out when we go into ovulation.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And eat more meals a day.

DR MINDY PELZ: Yeah, yep.

Drinks for Weight Loss and Repair

STEVEN BARTLETT: Interesting, okay. Are there any drinks that you would recommend for specifically for weight loss and repair?

DR MINDY PELZ: Well, we started with apple cider vinegar. So I think we’ve addressed that. You could drink that in your fasting window, especially with people who have really high blood sugar and they can’t seem to get it down. Try drinking that in your fasting window. I think that’s a really interesting insight.

The second one in the morning is coffee. There are signs that coffee and studies showing that it can speed up our metabolism. Now, if you don’t drink coffee, I’m not telling you to go drink it, but there is some really interesting indications that people who drink coffee have a faster metabolism. So you could do that.

Capsicum, something spicy. So cayenne pepper, which is a spice, has a heat to it. And that heat has actually been proven to speed up metabolism.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Honey.

DR MINDY PELZ: Honey. What do I think of honey?

STEVEN BARTLETT: What do you think of honey?

DR MINDY PELZ: Raw would be best because anytime we get anything raw, it’s got the enzymes in them. Anytime we pasteurize it, now we’ve killed it because we had to heat it up. So I like honey. I think it’s a great sweetener. It’s a little higher on the glycemic index than things like stevia that people seem to love. I hate the taste of stevia, so I would plant towards honey. But I don’t have a problem with honey. I think we got a little crazy on sweeteners. Like, let’s go back to real food, people. And honey is a real food.

Cancer-Feeding Foods

STEVEN BARTLETT: Are there foods that you consider to be cancer-feeding?

DR MINDY PELZ: Yeah. Well, sugar.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Sugar, okay.

DR MINDY PELZ: Yeah, sugar’s a biggie.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But are there certain foods that we all assume are healthy? Like, what are the foods that your kid, I, anybody that’s not spending a lot of time doing the research, think they are consuming, that are beneficial to them, that are, in fact, cancer-feeding?

DR MINDY PELZ: Okay, so one of them that was years ago was the processed meats.

Cancer-Feeding Foods

And hot dogs specifically. I don’t know if you remember this study, but it showed kids that ate processed meats a couple of times, and I don’t know the exact, so I don’t want to misquote the study, but the general theme was when you had processed meats consistently throughout a week, you had a higher case of leukemia. That’s the correlation they were looking for. So processed meats have chemicals in them. So that would definitely be one.

I mean, the sugar cereals are packed with chemicals. The toxic oils in like donuts, like horrific for children. Juice boxes, the Go-Gurts. Oh my gosh, my kids would like-

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s that?

DR MINDY PELZ: It’s like yogurt that has been packed with sugar and artificial colorings that make it blue and then put into a tube. I hope they’ve changed this. Put into a plastic tube and kids would just like slurp it out of this plastic tube. And there, every single ingredient in there was toxic. And it was in a toxic container.

Obesogens and Their Impact

And to continue this thought, I know you’ve had guests on here about obesogens. So let’s go back to the Go-Gurt. All those things I just mentioned are obesogens. And what are obesogens doing to children? And they’re doing this to pregnant women. They are turning their stem cells into fat cells. They’re reprogramming their stem cells, specifically the stem cells that make bone cells. And they’re telling those stem cells to make fat cells.

And one of the things we’re seeing right now is the height of children is less than it’s ever been. And the weight of children is greater than it’s ever been. When we have a world of obese children, we have a chronic health problem coming down the line. And those are the kinds of things where I just get irate with the food industry. We have to change that because well-intending parents don’t know this. And so they go in and they’re like, oh, my kid’s so happy with the Go-Gurt. I just want to make him happy. And it says all natural, which is a buzzword that has no regulations on it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is an obesogen?

DR MINDY PELZ: So obesogens are chemicals that are allowed in our food that turn, well, they do two things, but the big thing that I’m really focused on right now is they turn our stem cells into fat cells.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what is a stem cell?

DR MINDY PELZ: Great question. So a stem cell is a cell that can go anywhere in the body and it can repair anything. It can make anything. So it’s like a universal cell. It can do anything. It can make an eyeball. It can make an ankle. And you have a ton of them when you’re little and you lose them after about 30. You don’t lose them completely, but you start to get less of them.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And they’re a good thing. Production of stem cells is a good thing.

DR MINDY PELZ: Yeah. Yeah, a stem cell is a great thing. So one of my favorite is a tough word to say. One of the most interesting reviews that I’ve seen on obesogens was put out by Science for Public Interest, Citizen Science for Public Interest. It’s a beautiful PDF. And basically it has list after list and study after study of these obesogens and all the ways that they are altering our stem cells and turning them into, reprogramming them into these fat cells.

And all the different ways that the obesity crisis we are seeing right now in our children comes from these chemicals that are allowed in our food. And then it lists, list after list after list of everything that we are putting into food, that we are lathering our body, that is in our chemical environment and how these massive influx of chemicals is contributing to obesity and specifically in a younger generation.

The Obesity Crisis

Now, let’s zoom out. Let’s zoom out big picture. What’s happening in our culture right now? Our culture is like, obesity is a problem. It, you know, we went from an immune system problem to really understand we have an obesity problem and this is across many countries. And it’s not just in adults, it’s in kids. Does that mean that every single person that is obese right now is undisciplined? I argue, no. It’s because what we are eating is reprogramming ourselves to make fat cells.

And now we’ve come up with a drug to be able to solve that problem. That’s a huge B for me. That’s, at the core of that, that is wrong. We haven’t gotten to the root cause. Let’s fix the food system. We have to fix the food system. If we don’t fix the food system, we are going to have problems beyond obesity. We’re going to have cancer problems. We’re going to have anxiety problems. We’re going to have, you know, all the brain challenges that come with that.

They’re excitotoxins that rev up the nervous system. And just ask any parent who’s ever gave their child a go-gurt. What was their mood? They might’ve been happy eating it, but how were they within the next couple hours afterwards? Bouncing off the walls is an excitotoxin.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s an interesting point that, okay, we might be skinny, but we might still be suffering with the cancers and the, I don’t know, the ADHDs and stuff like that, things that are linked to our diets. So we might be skinny, but we might appear to be healthy on the surface and we might not have the type two diabetes or whatever, but it doesn’t mean we’re going to be any better.

DR MINDY PELZ: 73% of Americans right now are over-rated or over-beast. So the skinny population is going away very quickly. I did a research for England here recently because I’m speaking at a conference this weekend. It’s like 64% of people in England are either overweight or obese. We’ve got 30% of our children, not teenagers, like children that are under 13 and under are obese, and we have 50% of teenagers that are obese.

We have a chemical problem. We have an obesogen problem that needs to be addressed. So my biggest piece is that we came up with Ozempic. Okay, phenomenal temporary solution. Can we please get to the root cause? And that’s what’s not being addressed. And the media, the way the information gets put out there is we don’t understand why. Yes, we do. We understand why. We just don’t want to address the why.

There’s too much money in the food industry to change that. And that is criminal. And as a parent, I am not okay with that. Even though my kids are beyond that point, but it is something that every parent should be irate about. And the only way we’re going to change that is we vote with our dollars and we start to buy our kids natural, healthy, real food that doesn’t have these obesogens in them.

Reimagining the Food System

STEVEN BARTLETT: What does that world look like? If I gave you a magic wand and I said, okay, you’re going to be the president of the entire world and you can implement any rule as it relates to food that you want, what do you do day one?

DR MINDY PELZ: Day one, we implement an education system, a body and a food education system. So we empower the individual and we teach them metabolic switching. Now for kids, we can put that one aside because I’m not advocating for kids to fast, but I am advocating for kids to understand their blood sugar.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why not kids fasting?

DR MINDY PELZ: Well, we have the tricky part of eating disorders. So I’m a fan of a child who’s under 13 teaching them their own natural rhythm with food. So what happens is we say kitchen closes at seven, breakfast is the most important meal. You only have a lunch break from 12 to one at school, so you gotta eat that then. So we take that intuitive sense that kids should get around when I’m hungry and when I’m not hungry and we completely like make that go away.

So I would start to bring in a more intuitive sense and allow, help educate. I mean, kids were, if we’re talking about kids right now, help to educate them on what it means to be hungry when and find their own internal guidance system there. With adults, here’s what I would do day one. I would put continuous glucose monitors on every person on the planet. And I would say, okay, eat. Just eat. And let’s see what your response is. That would change every single person’s relationship to food.

Eat your favorite foods, eat the foods you don’t like, eat them all and look at the glucose response. And now you have, you see the logical consequence of that. That would be so powerful if we could do that. And then the next thing I would do is I would outlaw chemicals in our food, completely outlawed. No more. Let’s go back to real food.

STEVEN BARTLETT: All chemicals.

DR MINDY PELZ: All chemicals.

STEVEN BARTLETT: If I go into a supermarket, what do I see?

DR MINDY PELZ: Oh, you see fruits and vegetables. And when you look at them, they’re not shiny. They’re not all the same size. They’re all different sizes. Some are a little bit less ripe. They’re not all unripe. Some of them are more ripe. They look like something that came out of your backyard garden.

Ugly. Like very different. I would have, for people who want to eat meat, and I’m a fan of people eating meat, I would have healthy meat that hasn’t been pumped with antibiotics, hasn’t been pumped with growth hormone. Healthy meat. I would have eggs from not just chickens, but ducks that we get a variety of eggs in there. If we could have breads, I’m not opposed to breads. Maybe they’re sourdough breads and fermented foods, but this grocery store that we would create in the future, all of these foods would actually spoil within a week.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Not great for business.

DR MINDY PELZ: Not great for business.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Which is why we don’t see it.

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Fasting and Stem Cell Production

STEVEN BARTLETT: We talked about stem cell production. Does stem cell production increase if I fast?

DR MINDY PELZ: The longer, in the longer fast, yeah. Three days is, the research was 24 hours for gut repair. So you get intestinal stem cells, but for systemic stem cells, three days, 72 hours.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And the systemic stem cells can do what for me?

DR MINDY PELZ: They can go anywhere in your body and repair anything.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So if I have a toe injury, I had a toe injury recently, I played this football match called soccer aid. I was thinking in the lead up to it, I really need to make sure that my toe is healed because it has some like inflammation. I think I’d like almost dislocated it. I was thinking, it did cross my mind. I just did cross my mind. Maybe I should fast for a couple of days to help accelerate the repair so that I can play in this big football match, which was in London, almost 50,000 people there on this particular day, which was about two weeks away. So would fasting help me in that situation?

DR MINDY PELZ: The story I always use is that I had an Achilles tendon injury and I tried everything and it was like not healing. I couldn’t work out. It was really bumming me out. And so my last resort, I was like, okay, let me throw a three-day water fast at it.

Fasting and Injury Healing

DR MINDY PELZ: On the third day, I just started to notice the pain was a little less. And a lot of that is just because the inflammation’s coming down, the stem cells were starting to kick in. By the end of the third day, I’m like, I think the pain’s like 50% gone. So I thought, let me stick with this. And how long can I go until the pain’s completely gone?

So I ended up going five full days in a fasted state. On the fifth day, the pain was completely gone. And to this date, it has never come back. What happened? That has to be stem cells being active in my body, going in there and repairing that Achilles tendon. I didn’t do anything that week. I didn’t take supplements. I didn’t do any fancy treatments. I literally went into a five-day water fast and my body figured out how to get the stem cells to where they needed to go.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is there any scientific support for this idea that fasting can accelerate repair and heal injury?

DR MINDY PELZ: Musculoskeletal-wise, I have not seen that correlation. Stem cell-wise, we have several studies. Valter Longo was the researcher who showed that the whole immune system gets rebooted with when a three-day water fast. He went on to try different types of fasting. One of them is the fast-mimicking diet. He created, which is like a calorie restriction.

So there’s a little bit lower calorie restriction diet. And he did it with people who were type 1 diabetics. And he had five days, once a month for three months. He had them do this extreme calorie restriction and he had some requirements around protein. He wanted to keep them in a state of autophagy. So he kept protein under 20 grams. And what he found after three months is that the pancreatic cells were actually starting to regrow themselves from that style of fasting, called fast-mimicking diet.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Which is just calorie restriction.

DR MINDY PELZ: Just calorie, less than 800. 800 calories, less than 20 grams of protein.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It must be pretty easy to test this because you could theoretically bring in a group of 100 people and, I don’t know, give them a little cut or a little pinprick or something and then put them on different diets and see how quickly they healed from that cut or whatever.

DR MINDY PELZ: You would think, yeah. I think you could probably do it and really look at it that way. Yeah, I mean, I’m sure. And I haven’t done a specific PubMed search just on musculoskeletal repair and fasting. You have me thinking, so I’m going to put my researchers on it and then I’ll send you what I find.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Great, because I’d love to know. I was throwing everything at my bloody toe. I was like icing it and putting it up in the air to try and get the, people told me that helped inflammation. And I was, and eventually in the lead up to the game, I took ibuprofen and some anti-inflammatories, which I absolutely never take. I never take any medication because I was just trying to throw everything at it. So it would have been good to know in the future that if I have some kind of injury that fasting might be, that long-stage fasting might be useful.

DR MINDY PELZ: I mean, we see people, we get so many comments of people like joints move better when they’re like a couple of days into a fast. So you have to remember the whole inflammatory system starts to come down. And so there’s a body that just is in more ease, but I’d be curious for you to try it.

Protein Cycling and Intake

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about, you mentioned protein there. There’s this time I saw, which was protein cycling. And I don’t really know what that means, but I was hoping maybe you could enlighten me.

DR MINDY PELZ: Where did you see that?

STEVEN BARTLETT: I saw that protein cycling is a useful part of your weight loss regime. I’m reading an article about it.

DR MINDY PELZ: So let’s talk about protein in general. Definitely protein is the hero macronutrient of the day. Like there’s no doubt, protein, we need more protein. And I really liked this idea of, and the research supports it, there’s experts out there that are talking about it that I think is phenomenal. And I like this idea of making sure you have at least 30 grams of protein, especially at your first meal. It opens up a amino acid sensor system that now makes your muscles very grabby and receptive to all other protein that you eat the rest of the day.

So I really liked that. I also think it’s very interesting to figure out how to get one gram of protein for, or one and a half grams of protein for every kilogram of body weight, or one to two grams of protein for every pound of body weight you want to be. So your ideal weight. Okay, let’s say you’re 130 pounds. So you would need 130 grams of protein. So how are you going to get that in in a day?

Now, some people are like, I’ll just eat a big steak and I’ll get it in all in one go. But what I have seen is that for some people, when they eat a lot of protein, their body can’t take the influx in one meal. And so it turns to excess glucose, which then turns to extra fat. So I’m a fan of dosing it in. You do 30 grams here, 50 grams there, 70 grams there. There was old research. This has now been updated, but there was old research showing that the pulsing in, they call it protein cycling, actually was the best way to get protein into your system that way.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How do you dose it in just facing?

DR MINDY PELZ: Well, let’s put it in applicable terms. So you have a smoothie, maybe it’s got 30 grams. And then a couple of hours later, I’m going to go with the meat world. Like you have a bunch of hard boiled eggs. Maybe you have like a scrambled eggs. Maybe then two hours later, you have a chicken breast on top of some bed of lettuce.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I heard that, I don’t know, this was years ago I heard this, that we can only like process 20 grams of protein a day anyway. So we’re all like having too much protein anyway in our diets.

DR MINDY PELZ: I think that’s changed. I’m not up to speed on like 2024, what we’re saying, but I can tell you from the protein experts that are out there, there’s a huge push right now to eat more protein because, and it’s not 20 grams a day.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I remember someone telling me, cause I was back in the day when I was having a lot of protein shakes, they’re telling me, it doesn’t really matter if you drink more protein because your body can only process like 20 grams a day. So it’s just going to poop it out or convert it to glucose

DR MINDY PELZ: Again, I’m going to go back to what I’ve seen clinically that some people eat protein and they all of a sudden, this is women. Again, I should probably be more, women is really my specialty. So when I look at women eating more protein, a lot of them, especially the younger women, all of a sudden, like their workouts are better, they grow muscle better. Like they really love that extra protein.

I’ve also seen women who are going through the perimenopausal years that are really metabolically unhealthy and they jump on this protein idea and they start eating too much protein and they minimize carbs and they just start gaining weight. And so it’s because there’s just too much glucose in the system and that they’re not insulin sensitive yet. And so that’s just turning, that extra protein is just turning back into more glucose. And when you have extra glucose, the body stores it as fat.

So I think we’re back at this personalized idea. There’s some concepts that are really great. Now you experiment with them and see what works best for you.

The Importance of the Liver

STEVEN BARTLETT: How important is our liver in all of this?

DR MINDY PELZ: Oh, it’s the most important. Yeah, outside the brain. Brain, gut, liver, keep those healthy. Like keep those really healthy. So liver breaks down hormones. So you need it to break down hormones like thyroid hormone. Let’s use thyroid, for example. The brain sends a signal to the thyroid to make TSH, goes to thyroid, tells the thyroid to make T4.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s that?

DR MINDY PELZ: So T4 is a thyroid version of a thyroid hormone. The four stands for how many iodine sites it has. T4 is unusable to the cell. So what T4 has to do is have to go on to the liver and the gut where those two organs conjugate it, convert it, change it into something called T3. T3 is now usable to your cells and T3 goes into the cell and activates the metabolism and everything the thyroid’s supposed to do.

If I have poor thyroid health, if my gut is off because I’ve been on too many antibiotics or birth control, what may end up happening is my thyroid’s working fine, my brain’s working fine, but it’s not converting into a usable format for my cells. So there’s an example of where a stagnant liver, a liver that’s struggling, not healthy, can actually affect how a hormone manifests in your body.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So how do I know if my liver’s healthy? Is there any symptoms of an unhealthy or toxic liver?

DR MINDY PELZ: Well, let’s go through possibilities. I call them checklists, okay? And the reason I call them checklists is because they may not apply to everybody. The first question to ask if your liver’s healthy is when you go without food, do you make a ketone? Okay. If you don’t make a ketone and you’re like, we’ve had people that are like 20 hours in, 36 hours in, 48 hours in, they’re like, I’m still not making a ketone.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How do they know?

DR MINDY PELZ: Because we have them testing. So little ketone, the continuous glucose monitors, they’ll help the blood sugar, but you need a ketone reader to help ketones, you prick your finger. Have you ever used one?

STEVEN BARTLETT: No, that’s so interesting. I didn’t know there was even a thing.

DR MINDY PELZ: Oh yeah, you should get one. So you get a little monitor and you prick your finger and then you put your blood on this little strip and you put the strip into this little monitor and it tells you how many ketones you have.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so more ketones the better, right?

DR MINDY PELZ: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, interesting.

Signs of Liver Health

DR MINDY PELZ: So if you can’t make ketones or you’re starving would be another, or after a long period, you’re not feeling the benefits of fasting, that could be because of your liver. So we now have, okay, that’s liver issue number one.

Okay, then we can go to things like how do you process alcohol? Like, you know how there’s certain people who like you go out to drink with them and after a couple of drinks, they’re dancing on the table and then there’s other people that like can drink the whole bar and they seem like they’re completely normal compared to when they walked in.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

DR MINDY PELZ: That’s liver function. How quickly is that liver metabolizing that alcohol?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Which one is healthy, sorry.

DR MINDY PELZ: Well, I actually think metabolizing it quickly is better than the stagnant person.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So the person that’s hammered is going to be.

DR MINDY PELZ: Yeah. So, I mean, there’s a lot of nuance in that comment. So just so we don’t get the whole world coming after you or I on that. So it’s how quickly are you able to metabolize a toxin in your system and get it out of you? So that would be another one.

Then we have some really, really good ones, really like applicable ones. Like this is based off some old ancient strategies like corner of your eye. If the inside of your eye is yellow, according to iridology, which is the study of the eye as it relates to health, when the corner of the eye is yellow, that can be a sign of liver stagnation. Okay, another one.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The inside corner?

DR MINDY PELZ: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The next to your nose?

DR MINDY PELZ: Okay. Another one, you can look at the bottom of your feet. So bottom of your feet, when they’re dry and cracking is showing that you’re not getting proper circulation down to your feet. And so it can be a possibility that the liver is not doing a good job of detoxing and getting toxins out. So your circulatory system has more sledge in it. So the circulation isn’t freely getting down to the bottom of your feet.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Have you ever asked someone to show you their feet?

DR MINDY PELZ: Oh yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Really?

DR MINDY PELZ: Yeah. Feet, eyes, I want to know everything because it tells you. Feet, eyes, I want to know what your menstrual blood. I don’t need to see it, but I want to know, is it clumpy? How quickly does the flow come out? These kinds of things are so important. How quickly your hair grows, how quickly your nails grow. What’s on your nails? Are nails on ridges on your nails? Because that could be minerals. Our body gives us a full analysis of what’s going on. So I have looked at a lot of feet.

Daily Health Checks

STEVEN BARTLETT: And if I look at my feet now, I just want to take a quick look because I can’t remember you looking at but on my face. What is the sign that my liver is not healthy looking at the bottom of the feet?

DR MINDY PELZ: It’s a real dry crack.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Mine is soft like a baby’s bottom.

DR MINDY PELZ: So here’s a couple, let’s give people a daily routine of what to look at to be able to see like how your body’s functioning. So when I get up in the morning, that’s one thing I do. I’m periodically throughout the day looking in the corner of my eyes. Is there a yellow tinge in there? So I look at that.

I also look at my tongue every morning when I wake up. Do you look at your tongue?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Not really.

DR MINDY PELZ: Okay, so when you look at your tongue, does it have a white coat on it? Does a white coat on it? That can be a sign of candida, of too much yeast in your system and your body’s detoxing. You can also look at your tongue when you fast. Sometimes it’ll go black and that’s like candida coming out. That’s yeast coming out. So make sure you’re looking at your tongue. Every morning I look at my tongue. So, because at night you’re going to see what’s detoxing out of you.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So if it’s white, what do I do? If it’s black, what do I do?

DR MINDY PELZ: So if it’s white and black, you have candida. That’s a sign of too much yeast in the system. So, I mean, fasting can help. Getting off sugar, alcohol, fruits can help. We just find people who fast, especially if you go into longer fasts, it’ll start to change. We’ve even done some interesting community fasts where we have people watch their fast and they decide to break their fast based off what their tongue is doing.

So if it’s white and it’s black and it’s getting worse, keep going, if you can keep going until it starts to turn pink. And then the outside of the tongue will actually start to turn pink. And then we know, okay, the yeast is starting to die off. Go ahead and break your fast. So that’s one way that you can look at the tongue.

We already talked about the bottom of the feet, periodically looking at that, your hair and your nails. So do you ever look at like the ridges of your nails?

STEVEN BARTLETT: No.

DR MINDY PELZ: Okay, so when there’s a lot of ridges in your nails or how quickly your nails are growing, that can be a sign of mineral deficiency.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So on the nails then, what am I looking for? There’s no ridges in my nails.

DR MINDY PELZ: Perfect. So you probably have a good mineral love. But if you ever look down and you see those ridges, it can be a sign that you have too many low minerals.

Minerals and Soil Health

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what kind of minerals would you then supplement with or focus on?

DR MINDY PELZ: Yeah, I’m a huge fan right now of organic minerals that come from the earth, like fulvic and humic acid type minerals that are coming from like volcanic ash, because they’re very, very rich in minerals that we’re not getting in your typical mineral supplement or your food. You know the whole thing about conventional farming and how it’s depleting the minerals in our soil, right?

I feel like this is going to get really depressing really quick. You always do?

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’d rather know the truth.

DR MINDY PELZ: Okay, so the soils that are being mono-cropped or they’re being tilled over and over again, not from regenerative farms, what we know now is that they are deficient in minerals. So the way that it’s being expressed to people is the broccoli you have now has less vitamin and mineral content than the broccoli you had 10, 20, 30 years ago because of how the farmers are taking care of the soil.

Now you go to a regenerative farm where there’s bugs, there’s weeds, they don’t spray. When a crop grows, they let it die, they don’t till, that has more minerals. So when you are actually eating food from regenerative farms you’re getting the minerals that you need into your system.

So when like you people look at — their nail’s not growing, they look at the ridges, a good question if you don’t want to take a mineral supplement is ask yourself, am I eating food from a regenerative farm? Am I eating fruits and vegetables from the farmer, do I know the farmer even?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Sounds expensive.

DR MINDY PELZ: Right, yeah. Can you see why I like fasting?

STEVEN BARTLETT: But if I fast, I’m still not getting the mineral.

DR MINDY PELZ: Right, I know. But all of these problems that we’re addressing in order to eat healthy is expensive.

Fasting and Mineral Supplementation

DR MINDY PELZ: So I’ll come back to that comment in a second because that’s a good one to address. Let’s use the typical person. They’re eating, everything we’ve talked about, they’re eating all the obesogens, they’re gaining weight, their toxic load is high, they’re not getting enough vitamins, they’re not getting enough minerals, their hair is falling out, a woman’s menstrual cycle is off, their skin is changing, weird stuff is showing up.

For that person, if all I do is say, hey, I want you to eat your fruits and vegetables from a regenerative farm. Now, okay, we’re adding some minerals back in. So we’re starting to get some of the nutrients that person was supposed to be getting, but was actually getting, all those toxins were depleting that person’s system.

So we start to get them eating fruits and vegetables from a regenerative farm. Now they’re getting the nutrients they need that are being depleted by these chemicals. Okay, so that’s why in that context, just eating good healthy fruits and vegetables is important.

But what if we put them in a fasted state? Let’s take that person one step further. They’re metabolically challenged. They’re full of toxins. Let’s put that each day, let’s start to tack on a fasting window. In that fasting window, we’re starting to see glucose come down. We’re starting to see the body repair and heal itself.

Okay, now when they open up their eating window, we can have them add in minerals. So we can have them added in, or they can still eat more fruits and vegetables from regenerative farms, but they have to prioritize minerals. In our community, we actually will have people add in minerals in the fasted window. Take a mineral supplement, take an electrolyte supplement, put it in your fasting window so you’re adding that support in.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And when you say minerals, what exactly are you referring to?

DR MINDY PELZ: Well, there’s a lot of different ones, right? So magnesium, zinc, selenium, those are the biggies.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, and it’s expensive, so can I just supplement it?

DR MINDY PELZ: Right, so the reason I like the fasting window is because we’re changing the metabolic system, and now we go into eating window. Let’s just at least start with fruits and vegetables coming from regenerative farms if you don’t want to spend money on supplements. If you have the resources to spend money on supplements, go ahead and do that.

Other Health Markers

STEVEN BARTLETT: And is there anything else that I should be looking for as a sort of marker or a signal of my overall health? You said the eyes, you said the feet, we said the nails, the hair, the skin.

DR MINDY PELZ: The hair, how quickly your hair grows, the quality of your hair. Is it always have the same moisture and texture?

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s your view on alcohol?

DR MINDY PELZ: Ooh, this is a good one. There’s never a moment where alcohol is a health food. Let’s just be clear on that. So I think the research on alcohol and brain health needs to be honored.

Alcohol and Health

DR MINDY PELZ: Dr. Amen, I know he’s been on your podcast and he has been very clear on that stance. A lot of people have, not great for brain health, not great for liver health because when there’s alcohol in your liver, then you’re now shutting down your liver’s ability to burn fat and to detox and do all the other things. All it’s doing is taking care of the alcohol toxin. So not great for both of those.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Hormones?

DR MINDY PELZ: Not great for hormones because you need your liver to break down estrogen and all the other ones. But specifically, so hot flashes, very common to see hot flashes go up when women have a glass of wine or not. So that’s the downside.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s the upside?

DR MINDY PELZ: Well, I’m going to throw it out as, and I’m going to be careful I say this because I know people are going to take my words and try to make them absolutes. When you’re drinking a lower alcohol, that is clean alcohol, like a wine that hasn’t been sprayed with pesticides, that doesn’t have a lot of toxins, it doesn’t have a ton of added sugars in it, then you are now putting somebody into a temporary, temporary lower cortisol state.

So you’re bringing down their glucose, you’re bringing down, you’re calming them down if they’ve been wound up from the day. So they’re a little more in a relaxed state and they might be a little more social. Every once in a while, I’m not talking every day, every once in a while you splash a glass of wine into your life, you have a connection, a glass, I’m not talking a lot, you have a deeper connection because you’re more relaxed. What happens when we’re connecting with others?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oxytocin.

DR MINDY PELZ: That’s right, you’re bringing oxytocin up. Now, I really want people to hear me through on this one because I know my words will get very twisted on this one, I want to be really clear. In this scenario, you’ve taken somebody who might’ve been very stressed out, had a really horrible day, they were not looking to connect with their spouse, they couldn’t connect because their brain is like looping, you give them a glass of wine on that one part of the day, at the end of the day, and all of a sudden they’re in a little more relaxed state and they’re more in a place where they want to connect and so oxytocin now goes up.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And then the problem, I guess, is the next day they go to work, they have another shit day, they come home, they drink the wine again. The problem is that.

DR MINDY PELZ: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: If you could isolate it and not cause the same addiction cycle, then in isolation, it could, yeah.

DR MINDY PELZ: I mean, I really, the nuance on that is so important because people will literally come after me and say, I said alcohol is a health suit, I’m not saying that. In the example that I just gave, where do we leave room for human connection? How do we get out of this drive, drive, drive, overproduction, stressed out, so stressed out I can’t connect with people? Where is health in that?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Breath work?

DR MINDY PELZ: Yeah, there’s a lot of other things. You’re right, there’s a lot of other things. So I want to, but let’s put it in this context cause it needs to live in a scenario that we do. You go out with friends, you eat good food, you have a glass of wine, you’re enjoying each other, you’re enjoying life. Is that dangerous?

Alternatives to Alcohol for Connection

STEVEN BARTLETT: Would the world be a better place if alcohol didn’t exist?

DR MINDY PELZ: Well, I think a lot of people would say yes. I mean, people who have dealt with alcoholics would definitely say yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I feel like we would have just found a different way to connect. And this idea that alcohol helps us to connect is probably because of the way we’ve designed the world. Like bars, restaurants, pubs, all those kinds of things. And I feel like if we’d never discovered the invention, we would have just found another way.

You go to other parts of the world where they don’t really drink, they do kind of have another way. I was in Bali and they do these like ecstatic dances where it’s like, have you ever seen one of these things? It’s daytime, they have the music blaring and everyone is just going absolutely crazy. They’re like dancing as if they’re all absolutely hammered and they’re doing it in daytime.

I mean, ecstatic dancing is a thing over here. In fact, it happens upstairs in the studio.

DR MINDY PELZ: That’s oxytocin. So maybe we should frame all of this under what’s going to give you oxytocin. We need to do more oxytocin rich activities so that we can make sure we keep human connection up because human connection is so incredibly important. And so if ecstatic dance is your thing, great. You know, again, to your point, like the glass of wine, every once in a while might put you in that mood to be able to connect in all of these ways. So that might be a tool, but not every day.

The Importance of Oxytocin

So, but we have to bring back this idea. Oxytocin is the most powerful hormone on the planet. So when we’re sitting at home and we’re isolating ourselves and we are in disconnection and we’re pointing fingers and we’re yelling at each other, like we’re raising cortisol, we’re not raising oxytocin. But if you bring oxytocin up, as soon as oxytocin comes in, cortisol goes down.

One of my recommendations to menopausal women that aren’t sleeping is start petting your dog. Like just pet your dog before you go to bed because that’s going to give you oxytocin. It’s going to bring the cortisol down from the day and it’s going to put you in a more relaxed state so you can get yourself into bed. If you don’t have a dog, you know, hug somebody.

But if we have to look at oxytocin as a healing hormone and what we’re talking about is this end of the day. And what I think happens is we go produce, produce, produce, and then, okay, no, now I’m done. And then we go and maybe pop on social media and then we’re like, oh my God, that person doesn’t think like I think or this person’s saying something wrong and we just keep amping up our cortisol.

If we go back to you asked me about my daily routine, I feel like the morning should be oxytocin filled. You can let your day be cortisol filled if that feels right to you. And then when you end the day, bring oxytocin back in. How are you going to do that is personal to you.

Oxytocin and Diet

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is there a link between oxytocin and diet? If I’m in an oxytocin state, am I more likely to choose a certain food? I was thinking here about like, you know, oxytocin rises when I hug my partner, for example. So I was also thinking, does that mean that people that don’t have a dog don’t have a partner, don’t have friends, people that are lonely have less oxytocin, maybe more cortisol and are therefore more likely to eat poorly? I don’t know.

DR MINDY PELZ: Oh yeah, because cortisol is high. Cortisol is going to spike appetite and going to make you, it’s going to make you want to eat more. So yeah, but for that person, so, you know, there’s a thing called havening where you just like rub your own arms.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And that releases oxytocin?

DR MINDY PELZ: Yeah, and it calms you. It releases oxytocin. You’re literally loving on yourself and it upregulates the parasympathetic nervous system. It takes you out of the amygdala and you’re just, you’re just rubbing yourself and on your arms.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s a bit of a stretch, but this is how my brain works. So theoretically, hugging myself can help me lose weight. You know what I mean?

DR MINDY PELZ: Yeah, you can make the real on that one.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, but just what I’m saying, higher oxytocin, lower cortisol, I’m going to make better food choices. Therefore I’m going to be more likely to lose weight and make better dietary choices across the board.

The Hormonal Hierarchy

DR MINDY PELZ: So it’s something I call the hormonal hierarchy. So at the top, let’s start with the bottom. At the bottom of the hormonal hierarchy is sex hormones, progesterone, estrogen, and testosterone. Above that is insulin. So if you’re insulin resistant, you’re going to throw those sex hormones off. Okay, above insulin is cortisol. If you’re stressed out, this is another thing we saw in our community. If you’re so stressed out all the time, it’s going to be very difficult for you to get into these deep states of ketosis. It may be very difficult for you to lose weight. So we gotta handle something to help you handle stress.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And the behavioral point there, which is what I know so well, is the choices I make in that state are bad.

DR MINDY PELZ: That’s right. So, but what do you do? I’m going to go, what if you do if you’re 48 years old, you’re a perimenopausal woman, your hormones are all over the place, you’re just agitated and irritable, and you can’t get yourself out of that loop, and cortisol is surging, you go eat, because that feels that you’re like, give me some dopamine, is what you’re looking for there.

If we could just take that moment and get that woman to think about connection, can think about laughter, can think about gratitude, things like that, think about petting your dog, think about going for a walk out in nature, these kind of things start to raise oxytocin and they start to decrease cortisol. And it seems like we put toss that aside, we’re like, oh, that’s so frivolous. Like, no, actually it’s not.

Like, I had a guy on my podcast recently that was saying that they had just done a study on smokers, and they had found that smokers that had positive relationships in their life compared to smokers that were lonely and didn’t have as many positive relationships, the lonely smokers had a higher incidence of lung cancer than ones that had positive relationships in their life. That is the power of human connection, and that is oxytocin bringing down all the other hormones and regulating them.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And it kind of insulates us, doesn’t it, from the stresses of life, like insulation.

DR MINDY PELZ: That’s right.

The Health Toolbox

STEVEN BARTLETT: Human connection insulates us against disease, against I guess even poor dietary choices in that regard. Is that in part why I have a toolbox in the corner of the room? Because we talked about, there’s a toolbox over here.

So there’s a, oh, it’s a Diary of a CEO toolbox. This is cool. So I have this toolbox in the corner of the room. Sometimes my team, they do these little experiments. So they’ll bring something to the podcast from doing research on the guest I’m speaking to, and then they’ll put it there. And I have to be honest, I haven’t opened this toolbox. It’s a Diary of a CEO toolbox, which is quite cool. We will sell these online. That’s a good way to make a quick buck. But who should open this toolbox? Because I know you know what’s in this.

DR MINDY PELZ: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And I swear on everything that I haven’t opened it.

DR MINDY PELZ: Okay. You want me to open it?

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think you should open it. I’ll explain why you bought a toolbox.

DR MINDY PELZ: So the first thing that I want to say is, whenever you’re looking at your health, you need to think about what’s your toolbox. How many tools do you need in here? Which ones do you need? Which ones are appropriate to you?

So we talked about this in the beginning. If I was going to remodel a room, which I wouldn’t be doing, because I don’t know how to do that. But let’s say I wanted to change something, the construction of a room. I would bring my toolbox in. I wouldn’t pull out the hammer and the screwdriver, and be like, the hammer’s better than the screwdriver. Ah, I don’t need the screwdriver. The hammer’s better than the screwdriver. I would look around the room and I’d be like, okay, there’s going to be a moment I need the hammer. There’s going to be a moment I need the screwdriver. I might, and I don’t know what size screwdriver. I live in an old house. You know, sometimes you need a Phillips head. Sometimes you don’t. Like, I would have different tools.

This is how we should be looking at health. And what’s happening is we’re looking for the one-off. So I want everybody to create a toolbox. So here’s how we look at it. So, okay, some days I get up and I’m like, you know what, today there’s fun tools in here that I have been eating so bad and I haven’t been getting my minerals or my vitamins. So I better load up on my supplements. So today I just haven’t been eating well. I need to load up on my supplements. I’m going to use my supplements. Do you use supplements every day?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Not every day.

DR MINDY PELZ: How come?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because sometimes I don’t feel like I need them because I’ve had them through my, I feel like I’ve had those supplements through my diet. So for example, if I’ve been in my house in Cape town, I probably don’t need my vitamin D. But when I’ve been in a studio every day for days on end, I think probably my vitamin D is probably low.

STEVEN BARTLETT: That’s right.

DR MINDY PELZ: So you use this as it’s supposed to be used as a supplement to a lifestyle. So when your lifestyle all of a sudden now goes in a new direction, you don’t need that supplement. Okay? So it’s cool. Okay. Now I always tell people if you’re on the same supplement over and over and over again, like it may not be working for you anymore.

Various Health Tools

Okay. So there’s a supplement. Then some days, let’s say you’ve been working too much. This is heavy. And you’re going to go work out. This is heavy. And so today, like you’ve decided, you know what? I’ve been traveling a lot. I haven’t been prioritizing strength training. Today, my tool is strength training. So I’m going to make sure that I power up on weights today.

And we could have had a shoe in here. And then like on another day, I might decide that I need to do more cardio. What’s better, strength training or cardio?

STEVEN BARTLETT: This is a trick question.

DR MINDY PELZ: It is.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Neither.

DR MINDY PELZ: Right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Neither are better.

DR MINDY PELZ: That’s right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Context dependent.

DR MINDY PELZ: That’s right. Although we have a lot of discussions in the health world right now about which one’s better.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. People are fighting over which one’s more important.

DR MINDY PELZ: Okay. Yeah. Then what if I want to fast? Cause my empty plate. What if I decide, you know what? Today, I need to get to autophagy. I need to shed some of those cells that are dysfunctional. So I’m going to make sure that I fast longer today because I need to access that internal part of me. Okay. There’s my little clock. So today I’m just going to set my timer and I’m going to fast for 17 hours because I need autophagy.

Okay. One day I wake up and I don’t feel like fasting. Is fasting right or not fasting? Which tool is right? They’re both the same. When are you going to use them?

STEVEN BARTLETT: When you need to.

DR MINDY PELZ: Got it. Okay. Then all of a sudden I realize I haven’t really been prioritizing protein. I like eggs. They’ve got lots of choline in them. I better power up on eggs today so that I can, because we know choline helps with brain health. So eggs are phenomenal. Are they phenomenal every day?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Some days more than others.

DR MINDY PELZ: Right. I have a more brain power I need today. Maybe I’ll do, so we’ll go ahead and power up on an egg. But it doesn’t mean we have eggs every day. Okay. What about if my hunger has been off the chart? I can’t stabilize my blood sugar. I’m going to add more fats in. I’m going to have an avocado. So I pull out my avocado one day and now I eat it. And all of a sudden I’m like, wow, that’s so much better. Like I can fast longer the next day. I feel like my blood sugar is more stable. I’m more mentally clear. Is the avocado the hero?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Not always.

DR MINDY PELZ: Not always. It was just your body needed more fat that day. Okay. What about, you know, for my menopausal friends, all of a sudden I’m getting hot flashes and I realize I haven’t really been prioritizing fiber. I haven’t really been giving cruciferous vegetables to my liver. Maybe I’ve been drinking a little too much. So I’m going to need to power up on my cruciferous, fibrous vegetables to help support my liver.

STEVEN BARTLETT: For anyone just on audio, she’s pulled out some broccoli from the toolbox.

DR MINDY PELZ: Broccoli. Yeah. So now all of a sudden I eat more broccoli. I’m all of a sudden noticing that my hot flashes are going away. Did the broccoli, is the broccoli the reason my hot flashes went away?

STEVEN BARTLETT: That day it was, right?

DR MINDY PELZ: It’s that day it was because your liver needed more support and your gut needed more fiber to be able to break. Remember we have a whole set of bacteria in our gut called the Estrobolone to be able to break down estrogen so it’s usable for your cells. Same thing with the thyroid like we talked about. Maybe all of a sudden your metabolism speeds up because you gave your liver and gut better choices and so now your thyroid starts working better for you.

All of these go on and on and on. They’re all just tools. The last one is the one we’ve been talking about.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh wow, look at that. An amazing product.

DR MINDY PELZ: What if I haven’t prioritized oxytocin? I’ve been working too much. I haven’t been really, like my friends, I haven’t really been prioritizing friends or family. I know I gotta get together with them but they don’t really want to hear about my workload so let me figure out another way to connect to them. So I’m going to grab this really cool Diary of a CEO conversation cards and I’m going to take that over and I’m going to tell my friend I just want to hang out with them and we’re going to have a good conversation.

These are all tools. The goal of health is for us all to create a unique toolbox. One that works for us that becomes effortless over time. If we stick with rigidity, if we’re like animal protein is the best. No, plant protein is the best. Fasting is good. No, fasting’s not good. Oh, we should be strength training. No, we should be doing cardio. All of these things in isolation are not health. When we put them together and we customize them for our own specific needs, now we are on our own health path but we can’t isolate them anymore.

Closing Question

STEVEN BARTLETT: We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they’re leaving it for. And the question that’s been left for you is, dear guest, first person to ever say that, dear guest, are you in love with life and is life loving you back?

DR MINDY PELZ: I’m absolutely in love with life. I mean, I’ll tell you why. I love what I’m doing. I love how we started this. Like that one woman who now believes in herself and to have that over and over again, fuels me and gets me out of bed every morning and makes me show up in London and have conversations with you. And I have amazing friends and amazing family. Like I have connections. I love my life. And at 54, I love my life now more than I’ve ever loved it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And I have to say, of all the people that I meet, you’re one of the people that I’m convinced is loving life in it. I’m convinced it’s also loving you back on and off camera. You really are a wonderful human being.

DR MINDY PELZ: Thank you.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And you’re doing work that is so critical to so many. I recommend everybody goes and reads the book, Fast Like a Girl, even if you’re not a girl, I have to say, because I learned a ton about my partner, about my wife, about myself from reading this book, but also your book, Eat Like a Girl, is equally critical for anyone that’s looking for really practical ways to upgrade and think about their nutrition through the lens of everything we’ve discussed today. I’ll link both of those books below. And they’re must-reads. Thank you so much.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Thank you, Steven. It’s absolutely a pleasure to see you again.

DR MINDY PELZ: Yeah, and the feeling’s mutual. I just keep doing what you’re doing because it’s profound. So I feel honored to have been here twice. So thank you for everything you’re doing.

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