The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast Episode #316 - Eric Edmeades

TRANSCRIPT

 
Eric Edmeades
Evil isn't the right word because I don't think there's this one evil person in the food industry trying to give everybody diabetes, but the mechanism is definitely evil. So for endurance, obviously, it's a whole lot better to be primarily burning fat than sugar, because, you know, I'm not a sugar eventually, whereas fat, you have a much, much younger story.

I wouldn't say that symmetry is indicative of health. I would say that symmetry is indicative of genetic health.

Melanie Avalon
Welcome to the Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast, where we meet the world's top experts to explore the secrets of health, mindset, longevity, and so much more. Are you ready to take charge of your existence and biohack your life? This show is for you. Please keep in mind, we're not dispensing medical advice and are not responsible for any outcomes you may experience from implementing the tactics lying herein.

So friends, are you ready to join me? Let's do this! Welcome back to the Melanie Avalon biohacking podcast. Oh my goodness friends. I had so much fun in today's conversation. I truly enjoyed Eric Edmead's book post diabetics so much. I really feel like it brings something new to the world of metabolic health by distinguishing the difference between pre-diabetes versus post-diabetes and the how there often isn't an awareness about where a person's blood sugar levels are trending and then Eric's wild fit approach and his nine week plan, which involves switching around your macros to create a sort of seasonal eating is something that really aligns with me. So I thought we were going to primarily talk about that. I did not anticipate the incredible conversation we had about what he has experienced living with hunter gatherer tribes. Oh my goodness friends. You're going to hear what that is really like and what we can learn from them and the shocking role that our evolution plays in our cravings, our diet, our lifestyle, all the things I got to ask my really rabbit hole questions like, why don't we crave organ meats? And is it okay? The sort of weird habit I do to address my cravings while still indulging in my cravings, except not really, you'll see. And of course we touch on fun topics, like the sugar versus seed oil debate and so much more. And actually one of my other favorite parts was when we talked about the actual timing of a meal and our multi-course long dinners at a steakhouse actually natural, you're going to find out. And like we talk about, make sure to check out Eric's gap finder evaluation. We'll put a link to that in the show notes. It is an intensive quiz of incredible enlightening questions, which then provides you a personalized report showing how your current lifestyle aligns with evolutionary principles. I just took it. I got a 72%, although I think some of the fasting questions need to be tweaked. And in any case, my summary was that my current lifestyle demonstrates moderate alignment with evolutionary principles indicating I have many positive habits in place. However, targeted improvements in certain areas could significantly boost my overall satisfaction, energy, and vitality. The report is so cool. It gives you specific scores for all of these different categories, things like your physical health, your mental and spiritual health, your stress management, your optimism, your connection to nature, which I got a zero and that did not surprise me, your family and social bonds, your sense of adventure, your sense of purpose. I did get 100% there and so much more. All of those broader categories have tons of areas underneath them and it provides ideas for how you can raise your scores.

Melanie Avalon
It is so, so cool. These show notes for today's episode will be at Melanie Avalon.com slash post diabetic. Those show notes will have a full transcript as well as links to everything that we talked about. So definitely check that out.

I can't wait to hear what you guys think. Definitely let me know in my Facebook group, I have biohackers, intermittent fasting plus real foods plus life, comment something you learned or something that resonated with you on the pinned post to enter to win something that I love, and then check out my Instagram finally Friday announcement post. And again, comments there to enter to win something that I love. All right. I think that's all the things without further ado, please enjoy this fabulous conversation with Eric Edmeads. Hi friends. Welcome back to the show. I am so incredibly excited about the conversation I am about to have. It is a very long time coming. I, okay, friends, we talk a lot on this show about the role of blood sugar control, metabolic health, all the things people often hear the word diabetes. They often hear the word pre diabetes. And there is another word, which they probably don't hear, which is post diabetes. So when I saw the work of today's fabulous gas, I'm here with Eric Edmeads. He has a book called post diabetic and easy to follow nine week guide to reversing prediabetes and type two diabetes. I was clearly very excited by the title because it's a topic I'm fairly passionate about. And I was really interested if there was actually going to be a different spin with this whole word post diabetic. And oh my goodness, this book was absolutely mind blowing when it comes to learning the science of what's going on in our bodies. And Eric makes a very good case that there is a lot of confusion and misleadingness, I guess, when it comes to these labels and what they mean and how you can actually take control, take agency and change your health. And it definitely went into some topics that I haven't heard explored a lot, things like the circadian rhythm of insulin and glucagon. That was something that, you know, was completely new to me a lot on the medical system and how it's informed medications, you know, the history of insulin and how there were two figures with the same name, which kind of made things go crazy and something I'm really passionate about. And I can't wait to dive into, which is a cyclical type of eating where you actually change and adjust your macros and what you're doing based on these different seasons that Eric talks about. So I'm sure we'll talk about that. But in any case, the book was absolutely mind blowing, very motivating and inspirational. I have so many questions. So Eric, thank you so much for being here.

Eric Edmeades
You're welcome. Thanks for having me. I'm intrigued myself.

Melanie Avalon
I've really been looking forward to this, especially because you share personal stories and such in the book. And I was like, wow, this man's really interesting.

So like you, you did some fasted climbing, for example, I also host the intermittent fasting podcast. So fasting is a big topic around here.

Eric Edmeades
Yeah, I used to run these. I've done a lot of leadership training over the years.

And I used to run a leadership program. And you know, where some leadership programs use things like board breaking, and, you know, arrow bending, and the other uses metaphors, I wanted a metaphor that would be more intensive. And so I took people up Kilimanjaro as my metaphor. And so I've done that seven times. And on one of the climbs, I did it fasted. And wow, it was a completely different experience. It was the easiest summit I've ever done.

Melanie Avalon
So I have a major question about that because okay, and it's it's been a while since I read that part But I feel like you said it was like your Six time or so that you did it fast.

It wasn't your last time.

So my question is if it helped so much Why did you eat the next time you did it?

I'm so curious

Eric Edmeades
Science is kind of funny. You run an experiment and you get a result What you want to do is run the experiment again and confirm the results in a sense, right?

And and so I had climbed them out in a number of times and I did this one fasted summit and it was so Fantastic, but I didn't know for sure if it was about the fasting or if it was about something else I didn't know what it was. And so I thought you know what? I'm gonna do this again the way I've done it before and see if I get the same result and I did it again and it was it like I did it again as in with eating and I found the summit Unbelievably difficult and training and challenging again And so I I wouldn't say that I'm I've arrived at a full scientific conclusion on it But I I am tempted to do it one more time and go back and do it some it fasted again because When I say that it was easier, I don't mean I don't mean it was marginally easier I mean that I felt like a Superhuman going up the mountain and and one of the best ways to describe this is that if when you're climbing Kilimanjaro You don't even want to carry your own phone on that last summit day. It's too heavy. You don't want to carry it It's it's your your half oxygen wind ripping around you And so I had a guide carrying my large SLR camera with my big lens on it and they carry them for you And then if you want to take a picture he hands it to you and whatever We got about a third of the way up the summit, which you know, nobody talks It's unbelievably difficult. The altitude is climbing and I wanted to take a picture So he gave my camera and then I walked over here and then I walked over there then I walked up the mountain and shot down at everybody nobody has that picture because nobody does that and then I carried my Full-size SLR with the full lens on it to the summit. I didn't even notice I was doing it I was walking up walking back down and I it was mind-blowing So if I do it again, I will do it fasted the next time and then I'll have I'll have more data for you

Melanie Avalon
Oh my goodness. That is an incredible story.

One of the things about fasting, it's like the one thing that you can't do a, you know, a placebo controlled blind study because you can't really, although I came up with an idea where I think they should do some studies where they could give people a pill and then they would tell them the pill can't be taken with food and like you take it on an empty stomach in the morning and then don't eat for X amount of hours after. So then people would think they were testing the pill, but really they're testing like a fasting window. That's my, that's my idea that I'm putting out there.

Eric Edmeades
I think the other way that you could possibly do is with something like psyllium husk where people think they're eating and they are actually filling their stomach, but they're not. There's nothing.

There's no nutrition in there. And I think that could... That could be it.

Melanie Avalon
I'm really curious as well with the climbing. How many miles?

Eric Edmeades
just shy of 20,000 feet or close to 6,000 meters. It's a big climb. It's the tallest freestanding mountain in the world. I mean, we're not talking K2 and Everest here, but it's a significant climb.

Melanie Avalon
That's incredible. And we'll get into this later, and I teased it a little bit with the seasonal eating.

Does it matter or affect the dietary macros that you're doing around that when you do endurance type things like that?

Eric Edmeades
Yeah, yeah. So as you saw in post-diabetic, one of the core things that we stumbled upon long before we got involved in diabetes reversal and so on was we really just were helping people to improve their relationship with food and run through what we refer to as metabolic modes.

The idea being that humans evolved to survive the realities of the environment imposed upon them by mother nature. And so as the seasons changed, we evolved different energy management routines or different fuel sources. And those fuel sources, they affect our personalities, they affect our behavior and so on. And so depending on what type of sport you're doing, it might be optimal to be in one of those fuel sources versus another. And so for endurance, obviously, it's a whole lot better to be primarily burning fat than sugar because you run out of sugar eventually, whereas fat, you have a much, much longer storage of.

Melanie Avalon
So I am so fascinated and I haven't for a while with this idea that you're talking about with the different fuel sources at the different times of the year. Questions surrounding that, because I feel like the way I have approached it.

So there's this idea where I think people think about seasonal eating, which can seem very a little bit vague about like what you're actually would have done it evolutionarily. Like does it matter if it actually aligns with the season outside? So for example, you're talking about being in this fat burning state, which might correlate with like the winter season. But can you do that in the summer, like during the actual summer, if that's the metabolic state you want to be in?

Eric Edmeades
I have another book called The Evolution Gap, and The Evolution Gap basically explores what's called evolutionary mismatch theory. And it says that we evolved, our genetic, biological, psychological evolution took place for a particular environment, and then we moved ourselves out of that environment. And so I would put that most of the suffering pain difficulty that we have today is that mismatch.

So what that means is somebody talks about seasonal eating, like the whole macrobiotics thing came along and people like, oh, I should eat local and eat seasonal. Well, well, hold on. Let's just test out the logic of that. If you live in Minnetonka, Minnesota, and you wanna like eat local and eat seasonal, what you're gonna be doing is eating in an environment that your species has only been in for about five seconds. So it means you don't have a relationship with the local plants, and you don't have a relationship with the local seasonality. That's not what your metabolism evolved for. Your metabolism evolved for sub-Saharan Africa. And so you don't need to align your seasonal eating with the local seasonal realities of where you're living with.

Equally, I would say a good example of this would be something like sunlight. Like if you're from Nigeria or Eritrea and you move to Norway, you're gonna have a problem. There's not enough sun for you. You've got so much melanin in blocking out the sun that you're not gonna get enough sun. You're gonna have vitamin D problems. Your kids are gonna develop rickets. It's gonna be terrible. But equally, if we take that Norwegian from Bergen and take them to Eritrea for the week, they better be bloody careful about the sun. So it's not a matter of mimicking the seasons or the environment where you are.

It's a matter of mimicking the seasons and the environment of where you're from. And I know that we're all more recently from new places. If you've got blonde hair and blue eyes, you're probably from Northern Europe. And that doesn't change that 99% of our genetic history comes from sub-Saharan Africa. And that's where our metabolisms evolved. And that's when we talk about mimicking those seasons, that's what we're talking about.

Melanie Avalon
Oh, wow. So, and I think I would love your other book because I'm really obsessed with evolutionary theory behind why things happen the way they happen today.

We all do harken back still to the African upbringing. So, because I've always heard so much that you should go more on what you were saying earlier with the example of like the blonde hair and like being Norwegian, that that really prevails. But ultimately, it really is like the OG form that's informing us today.

Eric Edmeades
Yeah, I mean to understand evolution by natural selection is to have a new understanding or appreciation of time I don't know how to put this except to say that it's very difficult for us to appreciate time on the large scale that it Exists on you know humans. Let's say in some form of in development for say six or seven million years And and so now you have these people are talking about our behaviors in the last 20 or 30 000 years I mean, that's a blip.

That's a that's an incredibly small blip of time and and and so Really what we want to do is pay more attention to where the majority of that evolution took place in my opinion So yeah, there are some more Immediate modern genetic mutations that have taken place for example skin color as I mentioned. I mean, that's a more recent thing people who Evolved and lived, you know very equatorily have the darkest darkest skin possible people who moved north or south away from the equator They started developing lighter and lighter skin to allow more sunlight in But when it comes to our our nutrition and our metabolism We have not changed so dramatically that somebody from norway has a different say they they require the same vitamins the same minerals And they have the basic same metabolic function. There are slight differences Like apparently there are some genetic differences in the the most northern The the inuit people from say northern canada or northern russia apparently they do have some genetic markers coming from eating Predominantly meat based diet, but those are very recent changes and most of us don't have them

Melanie Avalon
Okay, this is, yeah, so interesting. Do you think, and I feel like things are changing a little bit now, just with awareness surrounding processed food and the problems with it.

And I mean, we could, this is a rabbit hole, but people are losing weight with these, you know, GLP1 agonists, just a hypothetical question. If we keep being on the train we're on and eating all the processed food and everything. Do you think the body would eventually, like, would we evolve to deal with that or would we just, would the species go extinct?

Eric Edmeades
People often ask me that, like, are we going to evolve to adjust to this new situation we're in? We basically left the natural selection game a long time ago. For the vast majority of history, we had, say, something like 80% infant mortality. So that meant that only 2 out of 10 children would make it past their fifth birthday, right? It was very rare. And what that is, is selective pressure. It means that the environment was so difficult and so tough that only a few people made it through. And generally speaking, the ones that made it through had genetic advantages. They were smarter, they were faster, they were more ingenious, they were better at the breeding game. And as a result, you start selecting for those better genes. Now, we have fixed a lot of those problems. We no longer have significant death from starvation. And we no longer have significant selective pressure. Today, if you have 10 children, the odds are they all make it to breeding age. That's the way it is, which means that there is no selective pressure, which means that there's nothing choosing advantageous genes.

So let's say, for example, we could evolve an advantageous gene that made us thrive on McDonald's food. Let's just say we could do that, right? Well, the problem is, is that you would then have to have a selective pressure that was therefore killing off or deselecting the people that weren't eating McDonald's food. And then that gene, that new McDonald's gene could move forward proudly into the creation of a new sapien, right? Or a new version of Homo sapiens. But as everybody gets to breed today, we don't have that. And by the way, not only do we not have that, but now we have this other version where, you know, I mean, let's say, for example, puffy lips are a selective, desirable trait among men. They like puffy lips, let's say. Well, in a normal world, what would happen is you would see a woman with puffy lips and you would have a, say, a predilection, a desire to mate with her. And maybe the puffy lip girls are the ones that end up having more babies. And so there are more puffy lip girls being bred all the time. Only now the lips are not puffy for genetic reasons. They're puffy for some other reason. So that's no longer a selecting criteria. We've tricked it all. So, you know, as people use cosmetic surgery to change the way they look, we're no longer selecting genetic traits. We're selecting mimetic traits. We're selecting choices people have made. So, no, we're not going to evolve to become capable of thriving on processed food, in my opinion.

Melanie Avalon
Actually, last week I was interviewing Ben Greenfield and we were talking about symmetry and physical beauty and how it affects evolution of the species, but also health and how symmetry correlates to health. And I was wondering, with plastic surgery, for example, how much of it is causation correlation that with the longevity benefits associated with symmetry?

So basically, does that mean getting plastic surgery actually increases longevity or no?

Eric Edmeades
I'm not saying there aren't certain, look, you could say somebody feels bad about themselves and that's going to create a certain chemical reality in their life and so then they go and have a little adjustment and they feel better about themselves. Yeah, that could have a positive impact on their longevity. I have a very good friend. She's just one of the most alive, most amazing people in the world and as she's approaching 80, she's saying, you know what, I've laughed and smiled so much in my life, the wrinkles are a bit deep, I'm going to go have a lift. So she does it and you know what, she's happier. She is. She's vivacious. Her confidence is back. So I'm not here to judge any of that. I'm not here to say whether people should or shouldn't do it. When I say that it's not going to help longevity, what I mean is, yeah, maybe in some ways it can, but you know, the idea that I wouldn't say that symmetry is indicative of health. I would say that symmetry is indicative of genetic health. If you are highly symmetrical, it likely speaks to stronger genes. If somebody has an eye drifting off in asymmetry from the other eye, there may have been let's say some close family breeding involved somewhere along the line and that hasn't been good for the dynamic. So we see symmetry instinctually, we see symmetry as a recognition of things that are good genetically. But then we see asymmetry is unattractive. And so in a natural normal world, you might say, oh, this is asymmetrical. This person is asymmetrical. I don't want to breed with them. And that asymmetry would end up being selected out. But in our world today, we can go and fix that and go, oh, look, we can fix the symmetry or this person's teeth are not symmetrical. We can fix that. And so as a consequence of that, which is and it's great that we can do that. But what it really means is that to your question, is that going are we going to evolve? Well, no, we're not because we're outside the natural selection game.

Melanie Avalon
Wow, I love it so much. And can you tell listeners a little bit about your background? So when did you first get interested in this whole world?

Eric Edmeades
I kind of have my closeted background and my public background. My public background is entrepreneurship. I started my first company when I was in my mid-20s and we did logistics management systems, barcode scanning, technology and stuff. I sold that business and then I got involved in, I bought a film studio in Northern California where we did practical special effects. We worked on Avatar and Pirates of the Caribbean and some really cool stuff.

That parlayed us into military research and high-fidelity medical simulation for the U.S. Army and stuff. So I've had this business background, but my closeted background underneath it all starts when I'm about 12 and my great-grandfather had found the oldest Homo sapiens skull in history.

Melanie Avalon
He found it.

Eric Edmeades
Yeah, the florist bed skull, they've now found one that's slightly older, so it's no longer the oldest one.

Melanie Avalon
Oh my goodness, okay.

Eric Edmeades
Okay. That's cool. Well, and then on top of that, I was born in South Africa and spent a huge amount of my time in places like the Kruger National Park and just in sub-Saharan Africa. So I had a really deep fascination with human evolution.

I explored all these caves in South Africa and it was a big part of my life. When I went through a big health renaissance, I was very, very sick in my early 20s. And when I changed that with food, I married my two passions. My passion for, say, evolutionary biology and human history with my new passion for nutrition and that's 1991. That's when that journey began. And so underneath everything, no matter what other business projects I've been involved with, the underlying fascination I've always had is with evolutionary biology, why we behave the way we do, why we're suffering the way we're suffering and what we can do about it.

Melanie Avalon
Oh my goodness, this is so fascinating. Did you go on archeological digs when you were a kid?

Eric Edmeades
I didn't. My great-grandfather died before I was born, so I didn't get to meet him or get to know him.

But I studied archaeology briefly at the University of Bristol because I was so fascinated and I found the pace of learning to be so... I mean, look, the University of Bristol was great. To study archaeology meant I had to go and study Ancient Greek archaeology. I was like, no, no, no. I only want to learn about archaeology as it relates to Sub-Saharan Africa, like my human history. And I couldn't find that as a discipline. And so I just took it on myself and I started doing all the reading and visiting sites on my own and visiting caves that my great-grandfather had excavated in Southern Africa and going to visiting them myself and that sort of thing. And then I had... Where archaeology and anthropology intersect is I got this incredible invitation 15 years ago to go and visit with the Hadzabe people in East Africa. And they're one of the last proper nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes on Earth and that has just been... I've now been visiting them for 15 years and that's just been one of the greatest honours of my life.

Melanie Avalon
Oh wow. So with that, because I think when people hear this about, you know, visiting these tribes, it's just so hard to viscerally or actually imagine what that is like.

Are there any misconceptions about these tribes? Like, what do you want to set the record straight on?

Eric Edmeades
There's so much of that, but I'll give you a really good example. I mean, more recently, the Hazabe people have been kind of popularized. A few people that have gone and done like a four hour visit with them managed to get themselves on Joe Rogan to talk about it. And CNN went to go visit them. And you know, I've been visiting with them for 15 years. I've done embedded stays of weeks at a time. Like I've really spent a lot of time with them. In fact, last November, they we were there and they invited my family and me and we had some guests with us and they invited us back to the fire one night and they had this huge ceremony. We never seen them be like this. They're usually really irreverent and playful, but this was very solemn and the big fire and then the chief called me over to the fire and he started giving this huge speech. And again, I've never seen him be so formal ever. And then he put this like jewelry on my neck. And of course, what was going on is he was inducting me as an honorary member of the tribe. It was mind blowing to me.

And then he brought my now fiance, he brought Kirstie up and he did a ceremony for her. And then we had one of our daughters with us who is 16 at the time. I mean, if you can just imagine having this experience of 16 anyway. So I say all that to say that, yes, there are definitely some misconceptions. Here's the biggest one. They're called the bird hunters. OK, strictly speaking, Melanie, they do hunt birds. It is true that they hunt birds, but they're not the bird hunters at all. And what I mean by that is the only reason people think that the bird hunters is that they go there and they meet them for an afternoon and then they ask if they can be taken on a little tourist jaunt and they take it and then a couple of the more gregarious hunters will take them out for a little Instagram journey. And of course, on an Instagram journey, they're not going to do any real hunting because they've got novice, you know, city people with them who don't know how to hunt. And so they hunt birds. And so CNN calls them the bird hunters. I can tell you, I have hunted with them and we've hunted big game. We've hunted baboons. We've hunted hyenas like they are game hunters. They only hunt birds when they're easy and convenient and when they have tourists to entertain.

Melanie Avalon
Oh my goodness. And are there translators or how does that work?

Eric Edmeades
Yeah, they they now speak, you know, a very basic version of Swahili and they have their own language, which is a super cool, percussive language with, you know, all these beautiful clicky noises and, and, and I have two guides that I work with who speak some Hadzabe and then between their Hadzabe and the Hadzabe people speaking some Swahili, we're able to get through it all.

Melanie Avalon
Wow, beyond incredible. And I have Vegas at Tribe, how many people?

Eric Edmeades
You know, I've met two different families in the tribe, one family, and they're obviously distantly related. The family that I spent the majority of the time over the last 15 years with, I've seen them at times where their camp balloons out to as many as say 40 or 50 people, and I've seen them when there's as few as 12 or 15 people in the camp.

There are apparently about 800 Hadzabe people left, about 400 of whom have been integrated into society, which is to say they're dying at the bottom of a bottle and they're smoking cigarettes in a gut or somewhere. It's really terrible. Like it's a really misguided thing to try to jump them into civilization. And so there's about 400 or so that are still living, say, quote, wild, and yeah, it's fascinating.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, so to that point, do they, the ones who have not been, you know, forced integrated into society, do they tend to struggle with any health conditions or what's their longevity like?

Eric Edmeades
You know, it's hard to say because they don't have birth records. And so, you know, you don't really know how old anybody is.

And what often like I've been in the I've been a champion of the ancestral health idea since before the paleo diet was written, like I've been in it that long. And, and I know that the biggest criticism that that, you know, people come along and they want to shoot down your, your sort of ancestral diet ideas like, well, yeah, but those people don't live very long, you know, their average age is only about 35. Well, first of all, how the hell do you think you know that since they don't have birth certificates? But secondly, let's say that it's true. Let's say that they do live to an average of 35. I mean, that's short, right? That's very short. But I would also put to you a couple of other things, the average age of a person in Tanzania, irrespective of where they live is about 35. The whole country has a low, low life expectancy relative, and that's quite consistent in that part of Africa. But then let's look at it another way. And this is the thing is statistics don't lie, but you can lie with statistics. And this is how you lie with statistics. With an infant mortality rate of 80%, or let's say 80% of children don't make it past the age of five, because guess what hyenas and, and infections and injuries, and it's a really tough life out there. And so, you know, what happens at that is that if you lose, say 80% of people before the age of five, then how old did the remaining two need to get to to have an average age of 35?

Melanie Avalon
Like the math, yeah, exactly. They have to, yeah, it's not looking, not looking in their favor.

Eric Edmeades
Yeah, and I've definitely I mean when I've been with them I've definitely seen I've seen members of the tribe that I would assume were in their we're in their 60s I would assume I mean again, they don't even know so how am I supposed to know? But but again, you know, let's remember they don't they don't have they can't call 911 when they have an accident They don't have that kind of thing.

They they fall out of trees. They they have very different Ultimate causes of death than we do they don't die from cancer and heart disease and so on and I'm not saying that they couldn't ever They die from infections. They die from hunting accidents and and and snake bites and so on it's it's just a very different lifestyle

Melanie Avalon
And to that point, I guess it's hard to know if we look back evolutionarily because we do live so much longer today because of modern medicine, we develop things like Alzheimer's and dementia and they say that everybody, like, you know, all these different things that quote, everybody dies with just, you know, at a different state. So like men and prostate cancer, just all the different things.

So when we look back at these shorter lifespans evolutionarily, I guess we always assume they wouldn't have developed those, but maybe they would have, you know, like, maybe. Like Alzheimer's or cognitive decline.

Eric Edmeades
It's obviously difficult to have a, you know, a firm answer on those things, but I think we can connect some dots. I would put to you that cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's and so forth are all actually just, um, symptom or results of some form of diabetes. Like the, you know, I don't think of diabetes as a disease, by the way, I think of it as a repetitive stress disorder. And so once your blood sugar management's off, you are on the path to heart disease. You're on the path to erectile dysfunction. You are on the path to cancer and all those other kinds of things.

Now the odds of the Hadzabe person ever developing diabetes is incredibly low. I mean, how exactly are they going to do that? You know, we can get into the sugar do it or the seed oil do it debate, which is obviously a big raging debate out there at the moment. And we can certainly touch on that, but let's say that that is the debate. Let's say those are the causes or at least the two of them together have an influence. Well, they don't have access to those things. They don't have access to refined sugar until misguided missionaries deliver it to them. They don't have access to seed oils until the misguided missionaries deliver it to them. So without those things, they would never have developed diabetes without diabetes, the vast majority of the longer tail age related diseases that we think of just, I just, I don't, I just don't see them developing.

Melanie Avalon
Actually, in speaking of diabetes and this concept of time, I think about this a lot and that's one reason I really liked the word post-diabetic is, first of all, I'll tell you what I'm thinking. You can tell me your thoughts.

So if somebody has pre-diabetes, okay, you could have two people and one person has quote pre-diabetes or doesn't have, actually, one person, let's say it doesn't have diabetes, they have normal metabolic health. And then we have another person who had diabetes in the past and is now quote post-diabetic but is on the other side of it and has the same blood sugar levels as the person who never had diabetes. Are those two people at the same possibility of getting diabetes? And what I mean by that is the person who never had diabetes, it's like, oh, you know, you might become pre-diabetic or you might get diabetes and then the person who had diabetes but no longer has diabetes, we say now that they're in remission from diabetes and that they're always going to be in remission, like even though they could technically have the same blood sugar level and be at the same state as the person who never had diabetes. So I guess my question is this idea of remission and is there any difference being before you get the diabetes versus after the diabetes if you have the same sugar?

Eric Edmeades
I think where you're going, so let's break it down like this. First of all, we talk about type 2 diabetes being, hey, your A1c is above this level, and there's other indicators. So now you're properly a type 2 diabetic.

So in order to understand this, we then have to take a look at what is pre-diabetes and how did it come to be. And I'm a little jaded about pharmaceuticals at times. And by the way, like hospitals and pharmaceuticals have saved my life. I'm not against them. I'm just saying sometimes I feel there could be, you know, there could be some conflict of interest going on occasionally. And so imagine that you're a pharmaceutical company and you're making a ton of your money selling insulin or metformin or any number of things to support diabetics. But you suddenly realize, well, geez, we've now gotten to everybody. We've got them all. How can we grow our business? We have to satisfy our shareholders. And they're like, well, there are a bunch of undiagnosed type 2s out there. So we could put kiosks in the malls and we could go find the undiagnosed type 2s. And then we'd be able to prescribe medication to them. So they do that. Now they've got everybody. And now, like, geez, we got everybody. Now what do we do? We could like move the definition. We could move the A1C line down and expand the range of type 2 diabetes because there's a ton more people that are just one point off that and then we could, no, no, no, that would be too obvious. We can't do that. You know what we'll do? We'll create a new category called prediabetes. And then once they're in that prediabetes range, what that means is they will become, you know, they'll become prescribable because if they don't have any condition, they're not prescribable. And so now you're prediabetic. Now the doctor can say, well, you could make some lifestyle changes or I could give you metformin. And so you have the birth of prediabetes.

Now what is post-diabetes and remission? And this is really very, very important. The reason that we refer to it as post-diabetic is that if you take somebody and they, like, if you take somebody and they get off, they reverse the condition, they're no longer type 2 diabetic, right? There's going to be a window of time where they are in the same blood sugar range as a prediabetic person, right? Like, but what's the difference? Well, I would say the difference is that a doctor talking to a prediabetic who is trending toward type 2 diabetes should be providing very different medical advice than to a person who is, quote, prediabetic, but trending in the other direction. This is a very important distinction.

And so if that person is not, if they're prediabetic but they're trending away from diabetes, they're not prediabetic at all, they're post-diabetic. And so that, their medical advice therefore should be different. Then when they've continued to be on this remission path and they've now returned to normalize blood sugar, we argue that they remain post-diabetic, not non-diabetic, not cured from diabetes, not, we say that they're post-diabetic.

Eric Edmeades
And the reason is, is that they have demonstrated a propensity for the development of the condition. And so they need to be aware, more so, say, than the average person who never developed it in the first place of their lifestyle because they've demonstrated maybe through a combination of social conditioning and lifestyle and possibly genetics that they have an inclination.

And so that person remains post-diabetic for that reason and one other. And that is the longer somebody's type 2 diabetes, the more permanent damage they're doing. And so if somebody hits type 2 diabetes in their late 30s and they turn it around, they probably haven't done any major lasting damage. But if they turn it around in their mid-60s, the odds are they do have potentially permanent damage or uncirculation, that kind of stuff. And so again, referring to this post-diabetic acknowledges the condition that they were living with before, acknowledges that they've turned that around, but also acknowledges that they need to be careful.

Melanie Avalon
That differing advice that the doctor would give, depending on which way the person is trending, presumably there are things you can do that support metabolic health regardless. So is it just the level of severity of the advice or how is that advice different based on which way you're trending?

Eric Edmeades
Well, I would say let's just look at drugs for an example. Let's say that we've got this person who's trending in the wrong direction and the doctor really wants to help them and they've got an emergent situation here and they're like, okay, this drug can help you. We all know that that drug is going to come with potential side effects and other costs and so forth, right? But at that point, the doctor is weighing up the reality of the current symptomology against the balance of the risk of side effects and saying, actually, you're better off with medication. Fair enough.

But if the person is trending in the other direction, they're in recovery, their A1C has improved. They were at 12 and now they're at 7 and they're heading towards 6. It's all getting better every step of the way. There's no need for medication at that point. And so why put them in that situation? Why prescribe a medication to them that is going to come along with a bunch of side effects? There's no need to.

And so do no harm, right? Well, medication does harm, unfortunately.

The idea of do no harm is kind of interesting because I think a lot of times what doctors are really choosing between is the present harm and the harm that this medicine is going to create and I now need to balance out between those two harms. Well, if this person is in recovery and they're headed in a different direction, then why introduce them to the potential harm of the medication?

Melanie Avalon
people probably are going to want to know where you, we don't have to go on like a hardcore tangent on it, but where you land on the sugar versus seed oil debate.

Eric Edmeades
I'm happy to dive into that i think i saw that you had sean baker on your podcast i have you had also do you know.

Melanie Avalon
Yes, he's been on a few times. Actually, crazy story. He was like my third guest, I think on this show, like before he had a podcast or anything. I just heard him on a few shows and I was like, I got to interview this guy.

Yeah. So yeah, I love the carnivore people.

Eric Edmeades
Yeah. I've been on both of their two podcasts and I've actually spent quite a lot of time with Paul in Africa, funny enough, and I'll come to that because Paul and I had a number of debates and I would say that I influenced him on the one and he influenced me on the other. And so I'll explain. I've never been a fan of seed oils or vegetable oils, but I've never been as against them as I, he really pushed me much further than even further against them. And it was largely based on the conversations around the influence around that seed oils have relative to cell function and diabetes development and so forth. So he's definitely influenced my thinking about that.

Conversely, I feel I influenced his thinking on the carnivore diet because when he and I first met it, we were funny enough. We were at a party at Gerard Butler's house here in LA. Gerard Butler's singing happy birthday to my girlfriend in one corner and Paul and I are having a heated debate about ancestral diet routines and stuff on the other side. And Paul at this point was still a hardcore carnivore, meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, meat. And I was saying, well, I don't know. Look, I'm a purist. I'm an evolutionary biology purist and humans grew up eating more than just meat and blah, blah, blah, and seasonal fruits and blah, blah, blah. So anyway, I ended up taking Paul to go visit with the Hazabi people. So we go off to Africa, him and me and Anthony Gerstein, I founded Perfect Keto and one of the co-founders of Zumba. It was a really cool eclectic group. And of course, around that time, I'm assuming I had a bit of a role in it, but Paul started talking about honey and fruit and that kind of stuff. And so that's why I say I think I pushed him a little in one direction. He pushed me in another.

That said, I've seen a bunch of people debating this on podcasts like, are seed oils causing diabetes or is sugar causing diabetes? And this is one of the problems we have in the food science world is everybody wants things to be black and white. They want it to be cut and dry. And what I would ask you as a thought experiment is, let's imagine that you and I go up to Mendocino County, Northern California. There are bears that live up there. And one day, I was staying with a friend of mine, a friend of mine, John Gray, who wrote the Mars Venus book. So staying up at his ranch, we used to have a men's retreat up there with him. He and I were in a men's group in Marin County. And so we'd go up and have our little men's gets away. And one morning we woke up and I walked out in the drive and there was fresh bear shit right there on the ground, steaming, steaming like we're talking fresh. And I'm looking at it and it's got broken branches and some unchewed berries and so on. And I'm thinking about that. Now what's going on is it's the fall and these bears are stocking up on berries like crazy. And what that's doing is it's slowing down their metabolism. It's increasing their carbohydrate cravings and it's making them slightly aggressive because they need to fight for their share of the berries.

Eric Edmeades
And it's causing them to fatten up. It's causing low grade insulin sensitivity and it's pushing them into hibernation. It's all perfect because of course winter's coming and they need to get ready for that.

But Melanie, what do you think happens if we take that bear and we trap them in Mendocino Forest fall for four or five years? Right, it probably changes. Well yeah, but if we just leave the bear in that same forest but we trap them so that it's only fall, which means their food supply doesn't change. They never go into winter.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, they're gonna get, I mean, really, really, really fat. They're gonna become like us.

Eric Edmeades
And then they're going to get fat shamed, and it's going to be horrible. And likely, they're going to even develop low-grade diabetes.

And they've never had seed oils. So what I'm kind of suggesting is that the debate shouldn't be which is doing it. I think the debate should be what are the compounding influences on the development. And so I would suggest that our changes to the sugar supply were the first part of stretching the elastic band, like stretching our body's metabolism's capacity for adjustment. This starts early with agriculture. The minute you can start to grow stuff and influence when it's in season, like we get to a place. Look, when I was a little boy, you go to the grocery store, there were no mangoes there half the year. They were only there when they were in season. Now you go to Whole Foods, and there's mangoes there every single day. It wasn't like that. So we messed with agriculture, and we made sugar in its best form, even, available all the time. Then we Frankenstein sugar. We developed all these different types of sugar and processed sugars and syrups and all this stuff. So then we created nuclear sugar. And all of those changes to our sugar supply and our lack of seasonality, I believe, contributed to the first wave of diabetes.

I don't think there should be any doubt about that. But then seed oils came along and accelerated the process dramatically. One way to look at this is that type 2 diabetes is a fairly new thing in human evolutionary terms. The Greeks knew about diabetes. They would line soldiers up, and they would make them pee on the sand. Whoever attracted the most ants, they knew had diabetes. They knew about it. But that was largely type 1 diabetes, and type 2 came along as a lifestyle disease after the fact. And so by the time the 1970s rolled along, you pretty much had to be 40 to get type 2 diabetes. It was a requirement. It was very rare that somebody under 40 would have type 2 diabetes. But now you've got kids, kids that are on the pre-diabetic spectrum that are developing. And so I don't think that we should be debating is it sugar or is it seed oils.

I think we should be saying it's modernity, and it's the A, the total lack of seasonality around carbohydrate foods. Then it's the upgrade of the intensity of availability and the intensity of the types of our carbohydrate foods. And then it's this disastrous introduction of these terrible oils that mess with our cell function. And yeah, we're damaging ourselves with all of those things, so I don't think it should be an either or debate. It should be a stop at all.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, people really love the debates. It reminds me a lot.

Do you know Rick Johnson? He wrote Why Nature Made Us Fat, but he's one who really popularized that fructose is like the thing behind everything, and that it creates a state of starvation in the cell, and that leads to this overeating situation. But when you're talking about the bears, it really reminded me of his book. Quick, funny story about Paul. So when he came on, like I said, like long time ago, like episode three, we had a debate about what you're talking about. And I love like looking back at the transcript, because literally I asked him, I'm like, but wouldn't you know, like a meat diet with like fruit and honey sort of be, you know, things that, like a similar argument can be made for eating them compared to meat. And he's like, no, it's, you know, fruit is nature's poison. And then later, yeah, he adopted the, the honey and fruit.

Eric Edmeades
Well, I can tell you anecdotally, I hope he and Anthony, I hope I'm not talking to out of school for them, but we introduced them to our Hadza friends and we had a great time with them. In fact, it's a bit of a side story, but at one point, we had killed a baboon and they'd asked us to sit with it while they went and got some more, went to get more food. And I ended up getting lost. And so I left Paul and Anthony and my fiancé and everybody behind and they didn't know where I was and I was lost in the forest with the Bushmen.

It was a very, it was a super interesting situation and it led to the book, The Evolution Gap. But after that trip, we, a bunch of us went on to go to Zanzibar, but Paul and Anthony stayed on for another day or so. And if I remember the story correctly, you're going to have to bring Paul back and ask him the truth of it. I don't want to get it too wrong. But if I remember correctly, they got so, there were these berries that were in season while we were there and they ate so many of them, I'm pretty sure the two of them gave themselves the shits for a few days, like they went too far. But the point of it is, is that when we were there, he really saw the way the Hadza responds to fruit and the way they respond to honey. But these guys, again, there's this baby bathwater. Anybody who wants to say that fruit is nature's poison or that nature wants us to be fat, these are baby bathwater statements. They're like, they're all or nothing black and white statements. The fact is that our, and we have to be careful about facts and opinions when we're talking archaeology and the internet history, but I think it's fair to say that it's a fact that our ancestors had a brief and seasonal relationship with fruit when it was available. And it would show up and we would love it. And it advertised itself brightly because by the way, fruit wants you to eat it. I mean, it wants you to. It wants you to eat it, but it does not want you to digest or break the seed, right? It wants you to transport the seed. So it advertises brightly and says, come eat me, I'm yummy and I'm full of maybe polyphenols and I'm full of antioxidants and I've got some benefit for you even. Come and get it. And then you get it. But then a week later, they're gone. And so you binge out and your blood sugar spikes and you have all of that stuff going on. You trigger low grade insulin sensitivity. You store a bunch of fat and thank God because winter is coming. But then the fruit is gone. The trouble today is the fruit is never gone and it's no longer fruit.

Melanie Avalon
I was reading a study yesterday about the thrifty genetic metabolism versus the spin thrift and this idea that some people, when they have that binge they were talking about or overeat, their metabolism actually increases more than somebody else's, and the same people who don't have that metabolic response, they don't really increase their metabolism after overeating. They also, when they're fasting, they get colder because their metabolism is being more conservative.

So that genetic tendency, what role does that play and where is that coming from?

Eric Edmeades
Well, I think that we have to draw a line between genetic and epigenetic, and that's a very important line to draw. So, genetic, let's say, is like, say, Lego pieces that you inherited from your parents and they make you what you are. And, you know, so your genetics predetermined your hair color and your eye color. And your genetics predetermined your height range, that if you ate optimally and lived optimally there was a maximum height you were going to achieve, and you inherited that from your parents and so forth.

And so those are the building blocks. But then epigenetics is like saying, what if some of those Lego pieces have a switch on them? And so they can express somewhat differently. They can express in a slightly different way. And so, you know, in fact, we can even see that with hair color where a child can be born with blonde hair and then later in their life it'll switch over and it'll get darker. They're expressing that gene differently at a different point in their life.

So the question is, what affects those switches? And so metabolism, I think, is heavily influenced by epigenetics, maybe more so than by genetics directly. And what I mean by that is that epigenetics can be switched by your behavior, by your environmental conditions, but also by the behavior of your parents. And so if you start eating lots of carbohydrate foods, you activate winter is coming in your body. That's what you activate. You activate winter is coming. And so what does winter is coming? It's an app. You've activated this app. One easy way for people to think about this is women. Women have all these apps in them. Men do too, but it's easier to think of it with women. Women have all these apps that lie dormant until they get pregnant. And the minute they get pregnant, they activate a bunch of apps. And as they proceed through their pregnancy, different apps activate. So for example, there's the lactation app. It just suddenly fires up. Women didn't know how to make milk three months ago. Now she knows how to make milk. So that her behavior activated a genetic expression.

And so in this metabolism sense, you're eating a bunch of carbohydrate foods, and you activate the winter is coming. And what does the winter is coming app do? It slows your metabolism down a little. You might lean toward developing a bit of insulin resistance. You might have a bit of a personality shift. The more carbs you're eating, the more aggressive you might become a little bit. And you might have more mood swings. These are all winter is coming app side effects. But it's not just what you're eating that can affect that. It's also how your parents, or particularly how your mother was eating, even before you were born, that can kind of make your... This is very metaphorical, but in a sense, it could make your epigenetic switch have a default mode based on the environmental conditions that you are bred in. So some people, and you can even have this two different siblings from the same mother.

Eric Edmeades
One is quite good at storing fat, and the other one isn't. I would say that that might have to do with the way the mother was living when each child was gestating.

I have two stepdaughters. One of them has a super powerful craving for sugar and carbs. The other one just doesn't have that. Talk to mom. Mom will tell you. With the first child, she barely ate sugar or carbs at all. With the second one, she totally binged out. Now, this is unbelievably anecdotal and unscientific, but the point being that I'm really trying to make is that it's not just hardcore genetics.

I don't like when people do that when they get too focused on the genetics because that's very deterministic. Oh, you've got that genetic... You've got that gene that means you're going to get all the women cancers, then now you have to take out all your... No. No. It means you need to be more careful about the way you turn those genes on and off.

Melanie Avalon
And actually to that point, so what they theorized, and one of the studies I was reading about that spin-thrift versus thrifty phenotype was that it correlated to the fetal birth weight and nutrition status of the baby. So basically, if they were lower birth weight or didn't have as much nutrition in the womb, that set them up to have this more thrifty phenotype.

So that would be an epigenetic effect on genetics.

Eric Edmeades
Yeah, but I would say that it could even go further back, though, to the conditions that the parents themselves were living in. You know, if the parents were living through a really difficult time, you know, say significant drought and, you know, difficulty with water and all that kind of stuff, but they were healthy enough to breed, and you're born out of that environment, you're going to be born set up to survive the hard times that they just survived, even before you've eaten your first food.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, I actually, it was a while ago, but I had Wim Hof on the show and we talked about that and because he talks about how his work can, you know, address the trauma of your ancestors, which gets passed down, you know, genetically, like seven generations or something. Yeah, this is so, so interesting.

It's funny with the cravings, were you a sugar craver? Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, I crave protein and I don't know, I don't know if that's more like epigenetic, like I just eat so much of it and I've like adapted to that. But the umami tastes to me is what really, really does it. But I wonder if everybody ate more protein, if they would start craving it more.

Eric Edmeades
Okay, yeah, you're on to something that's really, really important. One of the things that we do is we teach our clients how to mimic ozimpic so that they don't have to take it. And it's super easy to do.

So let's go to this issue of cravings, taste, and what have you. Let's say your grandparents lived through an incredible famine. So now what's going to happen is that your parents and you are going to be affected, epigenetically, by the famine they survived. There was a study done around this, like a big famine in 1944, 1945 in Holland. And the children that were born to the women during that famine were way more prone to obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. There was a similar study in Sweden, and the same thing, that the grandparents surviving those things would have a direct impact on the way it expressed in their children. So what I want to say is you've got this idea of genetic predetermination, which I don't like very much when it relates to disease. I get it when it comes to things like height and bone dense, or say bone size and that kind of stuff, but not the next version when it comes to the development of lifestyle disease. I don't see that as genetically predetermined.

I see it as epigenetically determined. But now what if you're saying, well, yeah, but if my great-grandparents had that, am I screwed? Am I in trouble because my great-grandparents were in a famine, and so now I'm really craving sugar all the time? Okay, yeah, that's true. But I think a better way to think of it is, imagine you have a switch. And the switch is, do I crave protein or do I crave sugar? And that switch could be in either position. If your grandparents suffered a famine, that switch is going to have a default position of craving carbs and sugar in order to help you survive and fatten up. So it doesn't mean that it has to be there. It just means that's its default position.

So now if you want to take that person and put them into keto, you're going to really have to work at it. They're going to have to be really strict. If they even smell a mango, the switch is going to flip back again, right? But once the switch flips back over to the protein side, their craving for carbs will diminish and maybe even fade away completely. But the minute they give in to temptation and eat a Cinnabon, the switch is going to flip straight back again. So it's not a deterministic view.

It's a recognition of strengths and weaknesses view. So somebody like me, I have a propensity for craving sweet things and so forth. I can certainly trace back lineage and kind of point to where that might come from. But when I go into what we call hunter spring or spring in a wild fit sense, when I go into that season, which is, say, a very clean keto model, within three days of that, I no longer crave anything sweet. The switch is flipped.

Melanie Avalon
This is an awareness I have about myself. It's like the people who, and again, this is making either or broad categories, which clearly the message here is, you know, we don't want to be doing that.

And still, there are people who seem to be, you know, extremists or people who can be moderators. And for me, so I don't, I don't eat processed foods. I haven't in years. And if I'm, if I'm with somebody and they're having something I used to really love, like a dessert or just whatever it may be, it is not, it's that switched feeling that you're talking about. It's literally not worth it for me to have one bite because then it just all comes flooding back. I'm really fascinated by how just not having it, I can be completely fine. But if I have one bite, I just, I can't. And I'm like, is that a weakness?

Eric Edmeades
No, it's human. It's a survival. This is evolutionary mismatch right there. This is a perfect example of evolutionary mismatch.

If you did not have that trait, your great-grandparents wouldn't have made it. That was a hardcore, hard-won survival thing. Can you imagine the odds of people walking through the bush and there's suddenly this tree full of berries and like, no, I'm on a diet. Well, the next season is drought. If I don't put on one or two pounds of fat right now, I'm not going to make it through that drought. So it's very important, not only that I start eating this stuff, but that I eat as much of it as I can.

Binging is a normal human behavior. There's nothing, you know, one of the big things we work with when people have, like, say disorders or, you know, binging disorders and stuff, we're like, let go of the guilt about that. It is normal to binge. The trouble is that Mother Nature used to control what you binged on and for how long.

And now that Mother Nature isn't doing that, you're going to have to bring consciousness to it. So sure, if you want to binge out on a bunch of mangoes, do it, but don't do it every day. You've got to find a seasonal pattern for that.

Melanie Avalon
So this is why I, one reason I like practicing intermittent fasting, and I do a one-mill-a-day approach, but it's because it lets me engage in this feasting, I mean, I guess, binging, but feasting behavior daily, and then have the metabolic health benefits.

I like that swing saw. I'd much rather do that than moderate constantly, which is miserable for me.

Eric Edmeades
Yeah, exactly. And you know, what we should what we do with our clients is we basically, we're, we're, we're trying to give them something that we call food freedom and food freedom is the ability to eat what you want when you want as much as you want without any guilt or remorse and equally the ability to avoid that which you should not eat without feeling like you're missing out. That that's the big promise. That's what we're trying to give to people.

And it's a tough promise because the food industry, evil isn't the right word, because I don't think there's this one evil person in the food industry trying to give everybody diabetes, but the mechanism is definitely evil. And so we now need to bring our consciousness to bear to try to figure out how to, you know, how to navigate all that. And so when we when we are intermittent fasting, as an example, I I've not been such a big fan of it in the in the in the sort of willpower controlled mechanism of, of intermittent fasting, but we talk about something called ancestral food rhythms. So ancestral food rhythms basically can be broken into three categories. First category is macro rhythms, that is to say, what season are you in? If you are in a season where carbohydrates are available, you're going to have carbohydrates cravings, you're going to you're going to you're probably going to overeat, you're going to you're going to come to the end of a pate of plastic pasta and wish there was more because carbohydrates trigger hunger. That's what that season is for. It's a season of accumulation. Then, ancestrally, the season would have ended and you would have moved into winter. And now there'd be incredible food scarcity. And so your metabolism would switch gears, you might burn a little fat for a while, you would definitely long term switch into protein burning if you were starving enough. And, and then all of a sudden, the spring would come along. And there'd be prolific hunting and lots of greens. And you would switch to say, a fat burning in keto model. That's ancestral rhythms at the highest level, then you have ancestral rhythms. On the daily level. And here's a great question. I'll ask you and see what your thought is. What do you think the Hadzabe people eat for breakfast when they wake up?

Melanie Avalon
Do they not?

Eric Edmeades
eat breakfast? Well, yeah, they eat body fat. That's what they eat for breakfast because they don't have a fridge. They don't have a pantry. They don't have Instacart. They don't have Uber Eats, right? So that means they wake up in the morning and they get their blood pumping and they move around and then they head out hunting and or gathering. And after having done a bunch of exercise, probably two or three hours worth, they start eating, which we call breakfast, right?

So so if we follow and then same thing with nighttime, I mean, when do you think they stop eating? Well, they probably stop eating around the time that it's no longer light enough to be looking for food. And so they stop eating. Now we call this intermittent fasting today, I call it it's a basic ancestral food rhythm. That's why they slept on an empty stomach and produce good human growth hormone and did their repairs overnight. And so that's ancestral food rhythms on a daily basis.

But now you also have ancestral food rhythms relative to the way you eat food. So as an example, should we slow down and slow the meal down? No, not necessarily. No, I mean, do you think our ancestors did they kill the buffalo and you think they they snacked at it? Hell no, they ate as much of it as they could fit into their stomach.

Now, before the lions came, like we're you know, we want to get it when we you know, we're going to eat as much as we can. Now, when they stumbled upon fruit, did they nibble at it? And did they use a bunch of appetite control and will? No, they ate as much of it as they could. The stomach is expandable for a reason. Your stomach is normally the size of your fist, but it can stretch to an enormous size to cope with this binging. But now let's take a look at something like nuts. Would our ancestors have done that with nuts? No, they couldn't. Just think of the time it takes to go get them to break them open. The nut frequency would be like maximally one nut every three or four minutes by the time you gathered it and broke the shell open. I mean, watch chimpanzee on Disney. Watch the chimpanzees break open nut shells like it's not fast. And so now we have people that sit down with a plate of pistachios and just carve through them and they eat more nuts in 10 minutes than your ancestors could have eaten in a day.

And then they wonder why they have, you know, stomach pains and so on. So I like to look at all of those rhythms and try to duplicate them as best I can.

Melanie Avalon
I don't use Instacart. I mean, I use Amazon, I order stuff all the time, but food, I can't, there's something about me, I have to go, I know I'm not a hunter-gatherer, but I have to go to the grocery store every day, like I have to, non-negotiable, and I have to get my food and bring it home.

And then I have to prepare it individually, like myself. I don't, yeah, and I feel like it's something from, it's craving that practice that we had, evolutionarily. Makes me really happy, actually.

Eric Edmeades
Yeah, and the next time you go to Whole Foods or wherever to get fish, what you do is you say to the guy behind the counter, you go, could you throw that to me? And he's going to what? You go that way. I can go home and tell my kids.

I caught it.

Melanie Avalon
Oh, I'm going to use that line. That's amazing.

I had another question about this whole, what was it, the pattern? Oh, oh, yeah, just really quickly, the movement of this tribe, because you're mentioning the exercise that they do and stuff. And I know you referenced in the book, I think it was the Hadza and how they actually move. Is it true that these populations are not as active as we think they are? Like I've heard that they actually don't move that much more than we do.

Eric Edmeades
I don't know where that would have come from. They are extremes, you know, they really are living with extremes. The men, like, okay, I'll tell you, I arrived for my first ever embedded stay. So at this point, I visited a number of times. I've done a couple of overnights here and there, but now I'm doing an embedded stay. This is many years ago, and I'm going to stay with them for a full week. I took no food. I took water because, you know, I'm not stupid, but I didn't take any food, and I'm going to be living with them embedded.

All right, cool. So first morning I wake up and Nona, the chief, or it's probably pronounced more like Onna, but he says, hey, we're going hunting. So, you know, get our stuff together and we go. And I look around at the hunters and none of them are carrying water. So I don't bother. I don't want to carry water. Water's a bad thing to carry when you're hunting if you don't have a bladder because it makes noise, right? If you have a, if you can't squeeze the air out. So I didn't want, if they're not bringing water, I didn't want to bring water. So off we go. But I carry my phone with me. Now there's no signal out there, but I can still use it for the pedometer to see how many steps we're taking. We did 27 miles, 27 miles. And these are not like, I ran the London marathon and I was warned about how tough the cobblestone streets were going to be. I'm like, screw cobble. This is 27 of the hardest miles you could imagine, cliffs, edges, ducking under thorn trees that are ripping you to shreds. I mean, it's, this is the toughest 27 miles of my life. And we go out and we do our 27 miles and we don't get much that day. Just some small things, like a couple of small, like squirrel type animals, a few birds, not enough food to justify 27 miles of effort.

And the next morning, I mean, by the way, you can imagine how well I slept that night. The next morning we wake up with the sunrise and Nona comes up and he goes, come on, let's go. And again, today we didn't get anything yesterday. And off we go. We did 17 more miles before we killed the bush pig. 17 more miles back to back days. This is quite normal for them, you know, and, and, and by the way, when they've, I haven't done this study, but I've read about it. They, they geotagged them. And when they geotagged them, they were trying to figure out like, do the men and the women move, you know, differently and so on. And the men and women move very differently, but they basically do about the same number of steps every day. The difference is that if you look at it from, say, a satellite view, if you look at the men's walking patterns, it looks like a big star, like the men walk north and then they came back and then they walked east and then they came back. So there's these big, long stretches out. If you look at the women, it looks like a big spider web. They never went more than 200 meters out of the camp, but they walked everywhere, you know, collecting information and collecting routes and doing all their stuff.

Eric Edmeades
Right. But they move all the time. But they also are lazy all the time. They're unbelievably good energy conservationists.

We sit around the fire for hours at a time doing absolutely nothing. So they have basically two modes, intense activity and intense rest.

Melanie Avalon
Fascinating. Do they use the bladders from animals to hold water?

Eric Edmeades
No, no, I just meaning like, you know, real hunters will know you carry your water in a water bottle where it's soft, so you can squeeze the water out of it and they sometimes call them bladders. And I didn't have one, so I didn't want water that would be like sloshing around while we were going.

Melanie Avalon
Oh, I was like, I was like, Oh, I didn't know they use splatters from animals to carry water.

Eric Edmeades
I think that's where the expression comes from, because I think those...

Melanie Avalon
Maybe. Oh my goodness. Do they wear shoes? I actually just did an episode this week on the barefoot movement.

Eric Edmeades
That's fascinating. So, yeah, they do now wear sandals. When I first was visiting, and some of them were barefoot, but nowadays, they pretty much all have sandals that are made by the Dutoga people or Masai people. They're made from bits of tires that have exploded on the side of the highway. So it's just like pieces of rubber on the bottom of their feet.

And it's super helpful because they have thorns there that are, you know, three, four inches long that will poke right through to the bone. So it's very inconvenient when you step on one. I mean, I've been there in like proper sold hiking shoes and had the thorns go through that. And that's really painful. But funny enough, you mentioned about the barefoot running. Now, this is really cool. And my very first visit with them changed my life in a bunch of ways.

But one of the ways it changed my life was that I arrived there. And this is, again, over 15 years ago. And the chief handed me a bow and four arrows. And it turned out we were going to have a little archery competition. I'm like, well, I'm not any kind of an archer. So and anyway, we had this little archery competition. And by sheer luck, I managed to get two of my arrows into this piece of baobab wood that they'd set up as a target. And so then they said, well, you know, do you want to do you want to come out on a hunt? And I was like, Yeah, that'd be great. Let's go. But what I hadn't really taken account of is that I had given up running years before because my my one of my knees had gone. I ran the London Marathon, and I really damaged my knee in the process. And and so I had to give up running, I just couldn't do it anymore.

And which was sad, you know, because I'm in my 30s, like, it seems a bit young to give up running, right? So anyway, I head out on this hunt with these guys. And I realized this is going to go very badly for them, because I'm making so much noise, like, I'm just, you know, thundering through the bush compared to them just. And I thought, well, and I thought about this from like, well, you know, Tony Robins, he says, if somebody else is getting the result you want, what do you do model them? So what are they doing? I'm going to model them. And so I start looking at the way they're running. And I start running the way they're running. So they're running on their toes more than anything else. And they're, they're more bouncy that way. And it lets them pick their spots better. And so on. So I start running like that. And it suddenly occurs to me that we've been running for about three hours. And I'm having no pain in my knee. Like nothing.

And I'm blown away by this. So of course, after that, I went home, I was living in London, England at the time, and I went to a running shoe shop, where they sold those stupid, ugly five foot running shoes. I was so embarrassed. I like waited for people to leave the shop before I tried them on. I'd say, and I put them on and they and now I only run in barefoot running shoes. It's changed my life completely. I'm now my mid 50s. I run with no difficulty.

Melanie Avalon
Wow, amazing. Yeah, I really, I've had two recent I interviewed Palluva and Viva Barefoot and I'm just blown away by everything I've learned about how much it affects everything like the shoes, the shoe thing.

It's crazy.

Eric Edmeades
Yeah, I mean, one thought exercise about that is that if you were to walk out of any building and try to run down the sidewalk barefoot, there's zero chance you would heel strike. Right? And the only reason we heel strike is because our shoes let us. And then that forces our skeletal system to absorb the shock.

I'm a complete convert. I'm a huge fan. I wear Palluva now, you know, Mark Sisson's shoes. And jeez, I've taken them deep into Africa. They've done incredible hunts with me. I love them.

Melanie Avalon
Oh, that's amazing, amazing. Yeah, we had Mark on recently for Paluba and his book, Born to Walk, just blew my mind about everything with the feet.

Quick question about the eating timing, just because I think you're the first guest, because a lot of guests will talk about seasonal eating timing, daily eating timing, but this is the first time I'm having a conversation about the speed of eating actual in the moment. So like these long dinners we have, if we go out for dinner and it's like all these multiple courses and all the things, so is that very antithetical to evolutionarily how we would have eaten?

Eric Edmeades
I think it is, and if you think about it, that never happens at a steakhouse.

Melanie Avalon
like a multi-course dinner.

Eric Edmeades
If you go to a steakhouse, maybe you have a shrimp starter and a ribeye. If you don't have any bread and you don't have any potatoes, you're done and you definitely don't order dessert. The reason is that when you eat the high-fat, high-protein, good-quality food, you produce your own GLP ones. You basically tell your body that you're satiated. You're done.

The only way to have a multi-course fiasco meal like that, which, by the way, I'll do it. I'll go to Italy and do it every now and again. I'm not saying we can't have fun, but the only way to do it, you have to start with bread. You have to start with something that's going to stimulate your blood sugar and get your hunger going and get your appetite going, and you're going to have to eat something that causes you to produce endorphins so that you don't feel a pain in your stomach right away, and then you're going to eat a monstrosity amount of food. It's a constructed reality.

It's not something that you could really easily duplicate in nature until the berries came in season, and then you would. You would sit there and eat and eat and eat and eat. Endorphins are fascinating, by the way. Have you ever eaten so much fruit that your stomach hurt? What's interesting is why the hell did your stomach not start hurting a little earlier? Couldn't you have told me a little earlier that I was overdoing it?

No, I didn't want to tell you earlier that you're overdoing it because freaking winter is coming, and so I needed you to eat as much of this as you possibly could. In fact, the way I did that was, hey, you're eating some of these berries, your blood sugar is spiking, now you're producing insulin, which is causing your blood sugar to crash, which means you're going to walk back to the bush and keep eating more. You're going to keep eating more. You're going to keep eating more. Then equally, what's going to happen when you do that is you're going to produce all the serotonin and dopamine, which is going to totally feel like a reward, which is going to help you to remember where this bush is so you can find it again next year. In the meantime, you're going to start producing endorphins, which are natural painkillers, so you cannot feel the stretching of your stomach because I need you to stretch it maximally so that you can survive the winter. That's what a big eight-course meal is. A big eight-course meal is preparation for winter. The problem today is that we are using disastrous foods to have that eight-course meal.

Melanie Avalon
It's so funny. So I'm just, you're touching on things I have wondered, like, so I've literally sat there and pondered like the, because they say that, you know, the the fullness signal reaches your brain on this like time delay. And I've always been like, that seems like really inefficient.

Like, like, why, why do we not instantly just feel full?

Eric Edmeades
But haven't you noticed haven't you noticed if you're eating a steak you do?

Melanie Avalon
So this is why it's interesting because you're talking about the multiple courses. You'll have to see me at a restaurant.

So I do turn steakhouses into multiple courses. So basically for the appetizer, I'll get like carpaccio or tartare or shrimp cocktail. Then for the entree, I will get two entrees. I usually gain a steak and then a fish. And then for dessert, I get a savory dessert. So I'll reorder one of the appetizers or I'll get another entree. The kitchen hates me, but now I know to warn them ahead of time.

Eric Edmeades
Oh yeah, I do the same thing. But what I'm trying to get at is that if you were to compare the volume of food that you're eating to say that same experience in an Italian restaurant where you start with bread and then you move to pasta and the volume of food isn't the same, your body gets to a point where it says, I'm done now.

And when people do that with carbs, the I'm done now signal is a pain signal. It's a you've now put too much in this container. Whereas with meat, it's an internal like thalamus indicated I am now nutritionally satisfied I can stop.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah. And I'm just thinking it's mind blowing because it's been so long since I've had like bread and pasta and stuff, but it's kind of crazy, the difference in the actual volume of it.

I'll tell you my little hack, and I'm glad earlier that you mentioned the thing about people having guilt and shame around these eating behaviors and binging and things like that, because just evolutionarily, we were set up for it. I don't know if I should share this.

Eric Edmeades
Then you should.

Melanie Avalon
The hack I've come up with that allows me to, actually before I say that, so backstory, I'm also fascinated by, because you're talking about how we have these foods and then we release these neurotransmitters and we get these associations. I'm so fascinated that, because when I grew up, I ate all the things, like all the processed foods. I know what everything tastes like. You know, we ate fast food, we ate Pillsbury, all everything. A, it's really interesting to me that it's been decades and I can still remember how all that stuff tastes. I don't crave it, but if I see a picture of it, I'm like, oh, that looks really good. So A, I often reflect on my life and I'm like, these are like feel-good happy memories. Am I actually okay that I had this period of time where I ate all these foods that now I would never eat?

But in any case, so because I crave them and I appreciate them, well, so my first wondering is if I had never had them, would I never crave them? So if a child was raised and only was ever given whole foods, not the store, but whole unprocessed foods, would they not even crave anything? Do you have to taste it to crave it? Like the processed foods?

Eric Edmeades
Yeah, yes, yes is the short answer.

Melanie Avalon
And that was not my confession, but I got on a, yeah, that's a backstory.

Eric Edmeades
come back to your confession. Yes is the short answer. We do have these base cravings, right? We typically don't have specific cravings, and what I mean by that is that if somebody does have a specific craving, like they're craving cashews or they're craving a Snickers bar or Skittles, then that's an emotional thing. That's not the body.

Now, it might be the emotional thing plus the body. So, for example, if somebody's blood sugar is crashing and they're in a shitty mood and now they crave Skittles, in our Wildstate coaching practice, we talk about six core hungers that drive all your eating decisions. It's not generally one of them that takes over. It's when they gang up on you. One of them is low blood sugar. When you have low blood sugar, you become less rational about your food decisions because, well, you've got to save your life. Then if you are emotionally in a hole and your blood sugar is low, well, then it's really tough to make good decisions. There are some base cravings from core hunger, but those are generally for fat or salt or sweet, just like these larger macro cravings. In order for somebody to crave an oatmeal-raising cookie, they have to have tried it before. In order for somebody to crave a Cinnabon, they have to have had that before. We teach our clients and our coaching team teaches our clients different mechanisms for parenting depending on what age the children are at. For example, we would argue that there is no purpose in introducing your sub-four-year-old child to Coca-Cola. There's just no purpose in that. You shouldn't allow it. You shouldn't allow it into their sphere. There's no purpose in it.

Now, once they get to four and five years old and they're going to be going out to preschool, you're going to have to take a different approach. The different approach is they're going to get to this stuff anyway, so now you need to align with them so they're not rebelling against you. You're going to have to take a slightly different approach. The longer you can delay it, the more agency they will have about it. Children get to a point at, say, seven or eight years old or even from four and five years old where they don't like new stuff. Well, the trouble is, a lot of kids now, they've already had pancakes because we wanted to give them a treat. They've already had waffles because we wanted to give them a treat. Then when we try to get them to eat an apple or a steak or a liver and they're like, no, I don't want to try something new. If they grew up with that, then when somebody tried to get them to eat a waffle, they're like, no, I don't want to try something new. The longer you can delay the introduction of those things to children, the better, but that has a limit as well because I think you should delay it in the least until they're four. Then at five, you have to start now working with them on how to control it because it's going to enter their sphere of influence and there's nothing you can do about that.

Melanie Avalon
It's like you develop this language of these foods because basically once you know what cake tastes like, you can look at any cake, you know, you can kind of like envision what it takes.

Eric Edmeades
I was in Dubai a couple of weeks ago and somebody came up to me and they offered me this, you know, some rather dessert. Like I'm into freedom. I'll have some stuff here or there now and again that's not perfect. I'm not ideological about these things. I just do my best and I do really well.

But the guy comes along and says, this is the most incredible dessert ever. And I said, no, thank you. Why would I want that? Why would I want to taste that and then live the rest of my life without it? So my view is that if somebody comes along and says, this is a devastatingly good dessert, I'm like, well, then I won't be having it. I have the same feeling about heroin. I've heard that heroin is amazeballs. I've heard that it's fantastic. And that's precisely why I don't want to try it.

Melanie Avalon
I say this all the time about cocaine. I'm like, I just can't. I know how I am with dopamine. We're not going there.

That's funny. I do wonder why people, I think about this a lot, like why we don't crave organ meats, because it seems like... Because I had an experience where this was after I had adopted a whole foods diet. So I was down to eat natural food in its natural form. And I actually was severely anemic. I didn't realize. And then I found out I was. So I was like, you know what? I'm going to have some liver. And I hadn't actually had liver, just plain. I'd had it growing... I had liver verse growing up because my grandmother was German. But I was like, you know what? I'm anemic right now. I like eating whole foods. I haven't had processed foods in a long time. I'm going to go buy some liver. And I'm sure it's just going to amazing. And it tasted horrible. And I've thought about that for so long. I was like, I shouldn't like this. Why do I not like this? So organ meats and people seem to not like organs.

Eric Edmeades
I think I can help you with this. This is a really fascinating conversation.

Let's talk about how does a craving evolve, right? And so then we have to talk a little bit about taste predilection and how does our taste preference evolve. So I would argue that we only developed cravings for things that were imperative to our health and rare. So if it wasn't rare, you didn't need a craving for it because you were going to eat it anyway, right? So if it wasn't rare or required significant effort and motivation to get, why have a craving for it? And so as an example for that, most people don't have a craving for, I mean, look, some people can develop an emotional connection to salad and they go, I feel like I need a salad. But the truth is, there's no craving for spinach. It's just, you know, there's no craving for that in a typical sense. What we know that there is a craving for salt, we know there is a craving for fat, we know there's a craving for sweet. So in the case of fruit, for example, why do we crave fruit? Well, it was imperative to our survival. If we didn't get enough of it in the fall, we didn't make it through the winter. It's that simple. If we didn't eat enough fruit, fatten up and prepare for the winter, we died. So if you put it this way, say you have two villages. One village, they all have a really powerful craving for sweet. And the other one, they don't have that craving at all. And then the berries are everywhere. Well, the one village, they're like getting all the berries and they're fattening up for winter. The other village, they didn't make it through the winter. So therefore, the craving moves forward as a genetic trait. So why not with organ meats? And I would argue that not with organ meats because the craving for meat and fat was already strong enough that that drove the desire for hunting. Like that was straight up, like we're going to go hunt. Now what's really interesting is that when you go hunting, say with the Hadzabi people, the very first thing they do is eat the organ meats. And it's interesting because I've taken a variety of very interesting people to go visit the Hadzabi people over the years, as we already talked about. And what will happen is people like that will often say, oh, look, they're eating the organ meats first because they know they're nutritious. Really? How do they know that? Did they talk to Chachi TP? Like, how the hell do they know that? They do not know that. They do not have a certificate in nutrition. They didn't have a conversation with a doctor. They're eating the organ meats first because organ meats spoil quickly. And that's it. They're eating them first because they don't they spoil fast. The meat, the steak meat, that kind of meat can be dried. It doesn't spoil so bad. Like you can carry that back to camp. But if you try to carry the heart back to camp by the time you got back in the heat four hours later, it would be rancid. So they eat them because they spoil quickly. Now, the fact is that may have now put us in a situation where because we ate them fast, we developed a nutritional dependency upon them, which is why they're so nutritious for us.

Eric Edmeades
It's a bit of a, you know, the relationship is a little opposite of the way most people think of it.

But then equally, because we did that, we didn't need to develop a craving for them.

We were already hunting.

We had the craving for fat.

We had the craving for that meat.

We went out and hunted.

And then we ate their organ meats as a matter of, well, I don't want to starve.

And they're going to spoil quickly.

I need to eat them.

Therefore, no need to crave them.

And then also, this is interesting.

I hate organ meats, frankly.

I eat them always.

I can't stand them.

The texture of liver, it's terrible.

Melanie Avalon
I didn't even like the taste of the liver, which I found interesting though. I was like, this should taste good.

Eric Edmeades
Yeah, well I'll tell you that on one of our recent trips we we uh, i've had liver now from a bunch of different animals and The weirdest ones have been baboon And hyena And I I I don't like admitting this and please don't tell my mom Well, she's not listening because my mom and i've been fighting about the liver thing for you. In fact when I was about Four or five years old I went to this daycare and in eastern canada Halifax and they serve liver every tuesday and I I hated it I hated it so much that I I went on a hunger strike I refused to eat and then I thought my hunger strike is not creating enough impact here So I started talking to the other students about how gross liver was and I got them to go on a hunger strike And i'm not kidding.

I got the school to stop serving liver So what i'm about to I'm hoping none of my teachers are listening I hope my mom's not listening. But the fact is the hyena liver wasn't so bad Neither was the i think that part of the issue that we have right now is that we are almost everything we eat is fairly heavily introduced It's very modern And so, you know, we're eating them in a different way and and You know the amount of say fat that's in the liver is different than it would have been in nature and all that kind of stuff So i've never tried deer liver, for example, i'd be curious But at the end of the day, I know I don't enjoy it a great deal, but I know my body does and so I do it anyway

Melanie Avalon
My theory, just because I have the experience of thinking, I'm just like, you know, it should at least taste neutral. It's very rare that I dislike a natural food, I guess.

So my theory was maybe it's protective against vitamin toxicity of fat-soluble vitamins.

Eric Edmeades
Yeah, there may be a bit of a don't over eat on this, don't overdo vitamin A, or you know, there may be that, but I think it's much more, you know, it's very hard to see a one dimensional being can't see the second dimension. It's very hard for you to imagine right now, you, like, I want you to imagine that for the vast majority of human history, we did not eat food because of flavor. Flavor wasn't a consideration. That was not our reason for eating, right?

Like, I was in Austin a couple years ago, and I and I recognize that they don't serve food in airports, they serve something closely approximating food, but they don't actually serve food in airports or on planes. But weirdly, in Austin, they do there's a they have, I think there's a salt lake there, they serve actual food. And then there's also this other farm to table place, at least it was there when I was there. And I went in and I said they had all these like, really great organic and grass fed meats and all this kind of stuff. And then they had all the different vegetables. And then they had an assortment of spices and sauces in 12 dishes by 12 dishes, like these little dishes. So that's 144 different flavors. And as I'm ordering my food and serving it up, I'm thinking myself, how freakin spoiled are we? We get to eat food because it tastes nice. That's new.

Not even our grandparents had that to the degree that we do. We literally like somebody can go, hey, do you want to go out and have that? No, I had that yesterday. You spoiled jerk, like what you you're you, you it's all about flavor. So for the vast majority of history, you ate because you were fucking hungry, excuse me. You know, you ate because you were hungry, right? Like that. If somebody handed you a piece of liver, you didn't go, oh, you know, I don't really know. I don't really like that. You ate it.

Melanie Avalon
I'm just so excited because these are literally the things I ponder. I'm really fascinated why people, me included, I love rare meat.

When I order my steaks, I order them blue and I try to get them as rare as possible, which that would also be a question. Chard meat. A lot of people love chard meat. When I was a server, fine dining, people would often order it. They want it as charred as possible. Why would we like and crave that when that is literally toxic material?

Eric Edmeades
There are so many factors involved. How much salt is involved? Was there barbecue sauce or glaze? Was there a marination involved and so on?

But then the other version of it is that we've been cooking meat on fires for a long time. There's a few different schools of thought about this, but I belong to the school of thought that says that humans have had control of fire for at least about two million years. I don't think that we started cooking meat because we suddenly thought one day, wow, it would be interesting to put this meat on the fire. I think what probably most likely happened is some very, very early hominid beings stumbled upon a rhino that was taken down in a brush fire and the smell was overwhelmingly pleasing because the fat had burned and so on. They're like, holy shit, this is yummy. They're like, you don't think we could do this ourselves, do you? Of course, they didn't have grills to put the meat on. I've been with the Hadza. They just throw the meat onto the coals. They just throw it onto the coals.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, how much should I cook it?

Eric Edmeades
How much?

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, like so like when I'm when I'm like contemplating if I'm being evolutionary or not with my rare steak.

Eric Edmeades
Not much at all. I would suggest that the best way to eat a good quality piece of meat that you trust is as raw as possible. I mean, I used to be a medium and then I became a medium rare and now I'm like, let's go a little more rare. My eldest daughter is basically blue rare.

We were at a steakhouse here in LA last night. Blue rare, please. She wants it to groan and she sticks the fork in, I think. But they do cook it though. And like with the organ meats, they'll take that heart, they'll take the heart and they'll just throw it into the red coals and they flip it around a few times and they eat it. It's charred on the outside, crunchy and it's satisfying. And then it's basically raw in the middle. The other meats, they'll either cook them a little bit more similar to the way we would like the ribs and that kind of stuff, or they dry them and eat them raw.

Melanie Avalon
Okay, I'm like your daughter. I just as rare as they will bring it is how I want it.

Eric Edmeades
Listen, carpaccio, that's it. It's funny how we feel about raw food. My dad took me fishing in Lac La Range in deep northern Saskatchewan when I was a kid, and he caught a big lake trout, which is basically a salmon. It's similar to a salmon. We got onto the beach, and my dad was a magician as a fisherman and with a fillet knife. He filleted this thing out, and he's carving out these beautiful strips of this beautiful pink trout meat. Then he started eating it, just like that. I was like, are you kidding? I was like, are you insane? I remember having a total meltdown.

He said, no, you should try it. There's no chance I was trying it. Of course, now I'm paying top dollar to eat sashimi. I had the same experience with meat. My fiancé, Kirsty, she's a wonderful human being and just a huge influence on my life. Then one day, we're out at this Russian restaurant in Estonia, and she orders beef carpaccio. I'm like, what? Raw beef? Are you insane? Then I started thinking about my dad. She goes, well, you should at least try it. I eat it all the time now.

Melanie Avalon
I had a moment one night, it was a good, you know, high quality grass-fed steak. And I was like, I want to make some carpaccio. So I was like slicing it really thin and eating it as carpaccio. And then I was like, and I just got lazy. And I was like, you know what, I'll just eat this without slicing it.

So I find societal norms really interesting. Because basically what I'm telling you is I ate a completely raw steak, like I didn't cook it at all. And that's really weird, but it's not weird if you slice it thin because then it's carpaccio. Like, what's the difference? You know? Yeah. Speaking of weird. So the little hack that I do now, because basically I eat my one meal a day every day and kind of like we're talking about these different macros mimicking different seasons and such. I don't do it on a, and just by a way as a plug for the book and for listeners, get post diabetic, get it now. And it has an entire program that brings you through, it's a nine weeks, right? A nine week program where you go through these different seasons that Eric is talking about. You adjust your macros and you change what you're eating, the types of food. And then there's a lot that goes along with it as far as how you engage with the food and what it does to your metabolism. And it's really amazing, like walks you through hand by hand, step by step.

Eric Edmeades
Actually, and to add a little plug, there's a QR code in there that'll actually let you go do one of our multimedia programs for free. It's a 13-week version of the 9-week version, but it's like me on video guiding through. It's normally like $800 or something, and we did it with the print run that's currently running with that book, so they get that for free.

So they can do it in the book, or they can get the online version.

Melanie Avalon
Oh, nice. Okay. We will put links to that in the show notes with the 13 week versus the nine weeks. Do you add phases or do you just expand in time some of the phases?

Eric Edmeades
We expand a little. I don't believe willpower-based eating regimes are very ineffective for 97% of people. They really struggle with them.

In our multimedia programs, we use a variety of neuro-linguistics and hypnotic language patterns and so on so that willpower doesn't have to be part of it. There's a lot of really powerful food psychology stuff in there. We do this. We teach people this concept called reward re-patterning, which completely changes the relationship with food. They don't end up having to use willpower-based eating. That's the key to the whole thing. We have an 85% completion rate on our video training program.

Melanie Avalon
Oh, wow. Okay. So actually, that's perfect, because it relates to my confession. I wonder if this habit that I do is supportive of reward reattering or going against me. So basically, I know, I know I have, okay, actually, going back to first, my one meal a day. So my one meal a day situation, which is over quite a few hours, might either eat in that window, it's always moderate, moderate, it's always high protein, I eat a lot of protein, and then it's either high carb, low fat. So basically, it's protein and fruit, or it's protein and like fat. I don't ever combine the fat and the fruit. So that's what works for me.

When I'm having the fruit, which is the majority of the time, usually it's like a fruit and protein night, I know I have these cravings from childhood for like cakes and candies and all the things that just light up my brain. And people, you know, there's like, they call it like food porn, people like looking at picture, you know, they watch baking shows and they look at like Instagram profiles of, you know, these different cakes and cookies and treats that you make. So my favorite thing every night is I, in the early part of my meal, I like I'm doing research and I read books and stuff for the show, which I know that's a whole topic about if you should do that while you're eating, but I do it. But in any case, when I, my fruit is like the last thing I eat, and I eat a lot of fruit, like a lot of fruit. And I love reading like food blogs and like looking at recipes. So basically I get to enjoy and satisfy my craving for these sweet processed foods from childhood and baking things. And I get to experience the sweet taste by eating the fruit, but I never actually eat the things that I miss from childhood and I don't feel deprived. So that's my hack for that craving.

Eric Edmeades
I think that's a useful hack. We all have to figure out how to escape from the bonds of the links that we created with food as children and with the food industry.

There are people who just can't navigate their way through Easter without chocolate. I often try to remind them that Jesus did.

Melanie Avalon
He had wine.

Eric Edmeades
Yeah, there you go. He had one but like chocolate chocolate has been sponsored into that holiday and now you feel like you have to have it so I'll describe for your reward re-patterning because there's some similarity to it But reward re-patterning is based on and everything that I do is based on, you know I suppose evolutionary mismatch, but If you imagine you and me and we're walking through You know sub-saharan african forest and and we're hunting and gathering and what have you and we we stumble upon A bush full of brightly colored berries. Of course, we're going to eat them right like, you know, we're eating them So they're sweet and they're sour. They're wonderful.

They're the ones i'm thinking of called sour plums. They're just amazing They're just they're truly amazing They're 90 seed and 10 flesh that you suck off the seed It's a sound so you have to eat a lot of them to get anywhere, right? But you do you eat them and the more of them you eat the more of them you want then you and I start walking Away from the bush. We like we've had enough But then our blood sugar crashes because we've been producing all this excessive insulin And then you or I turns to each other and go. Hey, do you want to go back and get some more? Right, like that's just human behavior So we go back and and we get some more now we're producing a bunch of serotonin. We're producing a bunch of dopamine. Why? Because emotion is the indexing system of memory That's all emotions are it's just indexing your memories You are going to produce all this neurotransmitter emotional response in order to remember two things where this bush is and What was my strategy for finding it in the first place?

And so you're going to lock in a behavior the behavior was how did I find this tree and where is this tree? now that's a very powerful human trait and it's one of the most important things in consideration of of behavior modification because What your brain is doing at that point is it's going where is this tree? And how did I get here because I want to be able to find this tree and other trees like it in the future So the brain goes back and goes millen and eric were talking and they started getting restless and impatient And so they decided to go for a walk. Oh restless and impatient that moves us toward the fruit trees So that serotonin causes us to replay that information and lock those traits into our personality. It's powerful But now you and I have landed at chicago o'hare airport and we're a little dehydrated from the flight We're a little stressed out because we were flying with spirit and you know, so we're kind of like we we we And then we smell cinnabon We walk over to cinnabon and we eat a cinnabon and we produce all the same serotonin and dopamine First thing our body does is goes wow. Where is this place? I will remember this place forever and from now onwards we will spot every cinnabon cinnabon we can ever find And and and then equally though our body will say yeah, but what what led us here?

Eric Edmeades
Oh, you know what? We were a little irritable We were a little depressed coming off that flight And so our body learns that irritability and depression leads to calorie payoff if you reward Depression with chocolate your body will learn that depression is the path to the chocolate and then you'll wonder why you're depressed

Melanie Avalon
Yeah. So with the repatterning, can anybody train themselves to crave anything?

Eric Edmeades
Here's here's the deal repatterning works like this you understand that reward mechanism and now you have a new deal with yourself Before you try to give up cinnabon and I don't believe anybody should give up anything until they don't want it anymore If you still want a cinnabon what you should start with is a healthy relationship with cinnabon before you try to go cold turkey Off it. It's just that we know that diets don't work.

We know that doesn't work like that So what if the first step was to say? All right, I can have a cinnabon, but only when i've had the best day of my life So so a couple of years ago i'm i'm at home. I was at home I had my my fiance was there her daughter's my daughter my fiance sister and her daughter So it was the house of oxytocin and estrogen. It was just like the feminine most feminine christmas You could imagine i'm in this house and it was full of love and we just had the best time It was amazing and then one by one they all start leaving, right? The holidays are over and they all start leaving and i'm down to just me and my daughter on a friday But she's going to her mom's place. So I gotta tell you i'm looking forward to saturday. It's going to be man day All the girls are gone. It's man day. I'm gonna watch liam mason shoot people and rescue his daughter And you know, i'm gonna have the best day. It's gonna be man day only I wake up that morning and i'm feeling depressed I'm feeling alone. I'm feeling abandoned. I I don't know. I just feel dejected and I as i'm walking through the house I suddenly think to myself. Oh You have the ingredients to make grace And grace is a smoothie that comes from cafe gratitude here in la and it's almond butter and vanilla and and and uh Jeez, how is it sweetened out dates? That's right. And I think to myself. Oh, I could make myself a grace Well in the minute that I have that thought I start feeling better It's not food that makes us feel better. It's the permission so I start feeling better right away Then this voice pops in my head eric I'm like reward re-patterning You're feeling depressed. Do you really want to reward that? I'm like, shut up. I don't want to talk about it. And then the voice goes you can have grace But only if you have a great day, like shut up. I don't want to talk about it So then i'm not kidding you I like I decide to go out for a walk on the beach and I just like trying to rewire My brain. Why am I feeling like this and I do a bunch of you know, meditation reflection Then I sit down and I make some sand castles because I like making sand castles Then I get lost in making sand castle for like three hours And then two of my friends stumble upon I have to give them a tour of the castle Then they invite me to have lunch. We go and have lunch. We have the best afternoon We laugh our asses off and and and and as the sun is going down I start walking back to my house and as I walk into my house that voice goes Now you can have grace and you know, the crazy thing is I didn't want it anymore That's reward re-patterning.

Eric Edmeades
It's you you you only want to eat those disastrous, you know endorphin producing serotonin triggering foods in reward of greatness And and very often when you're in that state, you won't want them anyway

Melanie Avalon
super powerful okay oh my goodness i love this this has been such an incredible conversation i i have got to read your evolutionary

Eric Edmeades
Evolution Gap. But I'll tell you what you what you might want to do even before that or certainly after you've read the book is if you go to gapfinder.com there is a and it's about to get massively upgraded so you can do the one that's there now but you'll get emailed when the upgrade launches like in a week. So by the time anybody's listening to this I think it'll be live but at gap finder.com you can do a test which is a evolutionary mismatch about assessment. So basically you answer a ton of questions about your life and it will then produce a report that will show you where evolutionary mismatch is showing up in your life and it's environmental emotional social nutritional it's it's it's it's really it's I've been working on it for a few years and I'm and and no kidding as I've been on this with you the team sent me the draft so I so I can go and review it but it looks like it's gonna be live within a week or two but there is a test there now so you can go check it out and then you'll be notified when the new one comes.

Melanie Avalon
Yes, okay, that is right up my alley. Okay, we'll put that in the show notes and I will go straight there.

And I also see because when I was pulling up your book for the title on Amazon, do you have another book coming out The Wild Fit Way in September? I would love to have you back for that.

Eric Edmeades
Yeah, for sure. That'd be great fun.

Melanie Avalon
Oh my goodness, amazing. Okay, well this was so, so amazing, Eric. Thank you so much for everything that you do.

Listeners, friends, get post diabetic now. Also look for the WildFit way, which is coming out. We'll put everything in the show notes. Was there anything else you wanted to touch on before we go? I know we got through a lot.

Eric Edmeades
Melanie, I would just say this. First of all, I want to say I really appreciate you doing this work. You know, I came and took a look at your podcast before and I saw some of my good friends in here. I saw you had Emily Fletcher and Shawn Wells and just some, you know, great, great, great friends of mine. And I, I really, really admire people that are out there asking the questions and getting information out to people. And then I'd add this one thing, and that is that we are living right now in what are arguably the very, very best times ever to be alive from an individual perspective.

I'm not saying we don't have some political challenges and some environmental considerations, but the average person is living with a greater level of comfort and ease and certainty than has ever existed ever before. And yet we have more anxiety, depression, more psychiatric drug prescription, more addiction and more suicide than ever before. And that doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense that as life has gotten to this unbelievable safe and certain stage, people are opting out of the game and they can't handle it anymore. And what I want to suggest is that that really comes down to evolutionary mismatch or what you might even call nature deprivation syndrome. And so a podcast like yours, where you're exploring these sort of ancestral realities and, and helping people kind of close that gap. It's not, it's not simply good work. It's important work. So I just want to say thank you for, for, you know, putting this stuff out there and giving people like me and Shawn and all the rest of voice. It's, I appreciate it.

Melanie Avalon
No, thank you so much. And you know, just hearing you say that it's such a foundational work that I think is not as appreciate as much as it should be because, you know, we can argue and debate and talk about diet and fitness and lifestyle all day every day.

But so much of it, like we've talked about all through this episode, it all goes back to this, you know, evolutionary history for why we're doing what we're doing. And I love that you are not only empowering people to make changes that will actually work, but also providing this paradigm shift where people can understand because awareness is just so powerful. And knowing why you're doing what you're doing is so eye opening. And it absolves people up. I think so much guilt and shame. And like you said, like mental health issues. Absolutely amazing.

Eric Edmeades
Okay, now I have to give you one more. I know we're way past our scheduled time, but I'm going to give you one more just as a great example of this. It's very much to what you just said. Most people have a variety of whys for why they exercise. They want to look better. They want to feel better. They want longevity benefits. They want muscle density. They have all these different whys. And yet, there are some people who just can't make it happen.

They just can't get themselves to move enough to go to the gym to do the resistance work or what have you. So I want to give you a different why. I don't want to see how it lands for you. Evolutionary mismatch works like this, that you have a heart and you have a diaphragm because the need to pump oxygen and blood around your system is both important and urgent. So it's important, but it's also urgent. By minute by minute, you need these things to flow around your system. Lymphatic fluid, which is responsible for cleansing all the cells of your body, is important and not urgent. So we didn't evolve a pump for it. You don't have a lymph pump. You how is it that lymph moves around the system? Muscular use. Muscular contraction and relaxation. When you squeeze tightly and release your muscles, you are. You are your lymphatic pump. You are. And that used to be super functional because to satisfy your most basic water and nutritional needs and social needs on a daily basis, you walked 20 to 30,000 steps every day. You bent over. You dug things up. You climbed trees. You used your muscles and you flowed lymph around your body. Today, the average American sits in front of Netflix for three hours a day, not circulating lymph. There's your why for exercising. Forget about the fitness, the cardiovascular. Just move the lymph. And you know what's really fascinating? So many people told me once they learned that, that was the deal.

Melanie Avalon
That's what did it.

Eric Edmeades
That's what did it. Now that I know that the only way to cleanse my cells is to move my body, I'm going to move my body.

Melanie Avalon
I love that. See that's I love this so much. Okay, I'm just I'm so grateful for you.

And actually, this is perfect timing because the last question I promised that I asked on the show. And I asked every single guest and it's because I am just so passionate about the role of mindset and everything, which is what we're just talking about. So what is something that you're grateful for?

Eric Edmeades
You know, here's a great answer. I am grateful that I was taught about gratitude. I wake up every morning and do gratitude meditations. And the mornings I do them, most of the mornings when I don't feel like it.

When things are not going the way I would prefer they went, when my ego would like things to be different than they are, I begin counting my blessings and they start with things like hot and cold running water. You know, the fact that we have flush toilets and then they lead to the bigger gratitudes, like I have the most amazing partner in the world. I have the most just interesting fasting children. I inherited two step kids and I got them in their teens and I thought maybe it was too late to form a bonding parental relationship with them. And I was so wrong. They are two of the most rewarding relationships I have in my life.

So I don't have that one thing that I'm most grateful for except for the discovery of gratitude.

Melanie Avalon
I love it so much. Oh my goodness.

Well, thank you so much, Eric. How can people best get your book? I know you're saying like the QR codes and stuff they can scan. So do they need to get the print edition for that only? No, I think.

Eric Edmeades
in the Kindle version as well. They can find it on Amazon and bookstores. In Europe, it's only Amazon, but I think in North America, it's distributed in bookstores and so on. That's the post-diabetic book.

The evolution gap is actually only in pre-release. It's a longer story, but it's on Amazon, and it's a pre-release version. It was just title preservation. We heard somebody else was going to release a similar title book, so we released it.

Melanie Avalon
Oh, so it's not out yet?

Eric Edmeades
It is on Amazon, but it's not officially out. You can go get it, but it's a pre-release version, and it will come down, but it's there.

Basically, we found out that a sociologist from I think the University of Oxford or somewhere was going to release a book under the same title, and I've been working with that title for years, and I own the dot com, and I was like, you know what, get it out quickly, so we're first. And so that's the only reason it got out early.

Melanie Avalon
That's why I didn't come across that I guess when I was because it's not, it was not, it was not written prior. I mean, it was not like available for purchase prior to post.

Eric Edmeades
Let's try about it. I don't think so. I can't remember exactly when, but it is there now on Amazon now. And then, of course, the WildFit way is available for pre-order on Amazon now.

People can find me at I'm at www.erik.e or erikedneats.com. And then I manage my own Instagram. So I do my level best to answer people when they write to me. And I devote an hour every week to send voice notes back to people when they write to me and stuff. So people can always try me there as well.

Melanie Avalon
Awesome, awesome. Well, thank you so much, Eric.

This was such a treasure of a conversation and I'm so, so grateful for what you're doing and hopefully we can have you back for, yeah, the WildFit way.

Eric Edmeades
That sounds great. Thanks so much for having me.

Melanie Avalon
Thank you. Have a good rest of your day. Bye.

Thank you so much for listening to the Melanie Avalon biohacking podcast. For more information and resources, you can check out my book, What, When, Why, as well as my supplement line Avalon X. Please visit melanieavalon.com to learn more about today's guests and always feel free to contact me at contact at melanieavalon.com. And always remember, you got this.