Nora Gedgaudas: Becoming a Primal Fat Burner

Content by: Nora Gedgaudas

Watch the full interview below or listen to the full episode on your iPhone HERE.

Guy:  This week welcome to the show Nora Gedgaudas. She is a widely recognized expert on what is popularly referred to as the “Paleo diet”. She is the author of the international best-selling book, Primal Body, Primal Mind: Beyond the Paleo Diet for Total Health and A Longer Life. She is also the author of the best selling ebook: Rethinking Fatigue: What Your Adrenals Are Really Telling You and What You Can Do About It.

Nora is an experienced nutritional consultant, speaker and educator, widely interviewed on national and international radio, popular podcasts, online summits, television and film. Her own popular podcasts are widely listened to on iTunes and are available for free download. She maintains a private practice in Portland, Oregon as both a Board-Certified nutritional consultant and a Board-Certified clinical Neurofeedback Specialist. Her latest book Primal Fat Burner was released in January 2017 by Simon & Schuster (Atria).


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Questions we ask in this episode:

  • How important is the role of fat in our diet?
  • Is a high-fat low-carb diet for everyone?
  • Can ‘Primal Fat Burning’ help prevent and alleviate disease?
  • Are there any particular types of people that this way of eating doesn’t suit?
  • What about athletic performance; does a high-fat diet suit these demands?
  • And much much more..

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Full Transcript

Guy

[00:00:30] Hey everybody. This is Guy Lawrence, of course, of 180 Nutrition and welcome to another stellar episode of the Health Sessions where we are connecting with leading global health and wellness experts to show the best and the latest in science and thinking and empowering people, ourselves, to turn our health and lives around, and this week we’re doing it with the awesome Nora Gedgaudes. We welcome back Nora to the show. This episode’s a special one to us because Nora was one of the very first guests we had on our podcast all those years ago, and at the time she’d released the book Primal Body, Primal Mind. It was at its peak of popularity, and she still had time for us and being a new podcast as well, she came on, and she was awesome. That book’s been a pivotal staple for myself and Stu over the years, and I highly recommend it if you haven’t checked it out.

[00:01:30] If you’re not familiar with Nora, she’s a wild, excuse me, a wildly recognized expert on what is popularly referred to as the paleo diet. She the author of international best-selling book Primal Body, Primal Mind. Nora’s also an experienced nutritional consultant, speaker, and educator. She’s widely interviewed on national and international radio, popular podcasts … I’d like to think that this is one of them … and online summits, television, and film as well. And she’s here to talk about her brand new book today called Primal Fat Burner, which I have right here, and I’ve been pulling it apart, and it’s another nugget of a book. Get it. I highly recommend it, and we delve into everything.

[00:02:00] Nora talks about what she learned over the past, you know, whatever many years ago since we last had her on. I’m watching this new book. And it’s one of those podcasts that we warn you, you’ll probably have to listen to it a couple of times. Nora is a wealth of information, and she certainly gets deep on some of the topics, but I think it’s so important that she does as well because we need to have a solid understand why we do the things we do with our nutrition and the impact it has on our longevity and health long term.

[00:02:30] So we cover all them things, and Nora did mention at the end of the podcast as well after we finished, that she’s actually coming to Australia towards the end of 2017, so keep an eye out for that as well. So that’s it, I guess. I will ask, guys, as always, if you can leave us a review on iTunes, five-star us, and please subscribe. If you haven’t done those things, please do them because they really help us getting this podcast out there. We’re getting great traction. We’re reaching more people. This message is getting out to more and more people. And just share it with a friend that you think might appreciate these episodes as well as we keep delivering them to you. Anyway, let’s go over to Nora Gedgaudes. Enjoy. Hi. This is Guy Lawrence. I’m joined by Stuart Cook. Good morning, Stu.

Stu

Hi, Guy.

Guy

And our lovely guest today is Nora Gedgaudes. Nora, welcome back to the show.

Nora

Oh, thanks, Guy and Stu. Thank you so much. It’s great to be back here with you guys again. It’s been a while.

Stu

Yes, it has.

Guy

Yeah, it’s been a while. I was looking this morning, and it’s been four years. Can you believe it? That’s how quickly-

Stu

My word.

Nora

You know, I think I made my first sort of splash in Australia back in either 2009 or 2010, so it’s been a while since the release of my last book, and everything that’s transpired. So yeah, it’s time.

Guy

Yeah. Life is brilliant, and I have to say, that last book of yours, Primal Body, Primal Mind, I mean that was pivotal in changing the way we thought as well all them years ago. Did you expect it to go on and be so successful as it is when you wrote it?

Nora

[00:04:00] Oh, no. God, no. I wrote that book just because I had all this stuff I had to get out of me, and I thought I would just put it all in one place in a way I could feel good about. And I initially self-published because I wanted … I had ideas about that. It wasn’t a bad thing to do, but I had horrible editorial problems, and there were a lot of problems with the self-published version. And then I had a bigger publisher come along and say, “No, we love this. It’s amazing. We would love to publish it.” But it took on a life of its own. I really had no idea it was going to do what it did. I think I would have planned my life very differently had I known.

[00:05:00] And suddenly, I was seeing clients eight to 10 hours a day, and then on evenings and weekends, I had to spend answering the 100 or more emails that were coming in every day about that book and doing interviews. And then I was asked to do a radio show, so I did that. All these things started happening. Yeah, it made my life really, really … Well, actually, my life is still pretty crazy as a result of all this. But it was something … It wasn’t by design. Let’s just say I didn’t write Primal Body, Primal Mind with marketing in mind at all. Had I done that, had I intended to, I went about it in a really stupid fashion because what I did was I wrote 15 books in one is essentially what I did with that one.

Stu

Yes.

Nora

[00:05:30] I don’t think in terms of marketing. I think in terms of what I’m passionate about, and research, and information that people are unlikely to get any other way. So I’m very passionate about research, and I’m very passionate about communicating, and that’s all I think about at the end of the day. I don’t think about new ways of getting my face on the side of a city bus, you know? So I’ve never really treated what I do with all of this as a business per se. It’s always just … I’m just going to do what I know how to do and try to reach the biggest audience possible, and at the end of the day, hopefully I can make a living at it.

Guy

[00:06:00] Passion trumps everything, doesn’t it? And it just shows the quality of the book. For something to become that successful when you just wrote it and put it out to the world, I think speaks volumes, you know?

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Nora

It’s [inaudible 00:06:02].

Stu

Definitely. Definitely. I actually use that book as a little bit of a nutritional reset every 12 months, so I just pull it off the bookshelf and then just read it from cover to cover again and great, just pulls me back online and just reconfirms everything we’ve kind of discovered over the last five years.

Nora

Well, I’m deeply flattered. That’s wonderful to hear. Thank you.

Guy

Oh, that’s brilliant, Nora.

Stu

No problem.

Guy

Just for the viewers, I’ve got your new book here.

Nora

Yes.

Guy

Primal Fat Burner. I was so pleased to see that you’d released another book. I was like, “Oh, my God,” because I think it’s been seven years … Is that correct? … since the last one.

Nora

It’s been quite a while.

Guy

Yeah.

Nora

Right.

Guy

Yeah.

Nora

Right.

Guy

So the question is, why a new book, Primal Fat Burner?

Nora

[00:07:30] I was actually reluctant to write another book because the first one had added so much craziness to my life, and it wasn’t necessarily … Let’s just say fame and fortune don’t necessarily go hand in hand, right? So the deal that I made for that book, it was kind of a boilerplate deal, and it brings me about 50 cents a copy, so it’s not like I have gotten rich selling that. But what it has done is made me insanely busy. And I don’t know. Why do I need more of this, right? Because I’m going to fall over and drop dead. And it’s a very difficult process writing a book. For one thing, I had … When Primal Body, Primal Mind got published, it’s not like my learning stopped just there. It’s not like, “Well, I don’t have anything else to add.” I’ve continued to learn an enormous amount of new information that I am always eager to share.

[00:09:00] But I couldn’t quite … Well, one of the things that started percolating sort of to the fore, I mean, I always knew fat was important, right? But the more research I did, and the more I came across, something just kept kind of trickling up into my face from time to time, was not just how important fat was, but really how central it was to human health, was something that became evident to me in a way that didn’t seem to be evident to anyone else. There were a lot of people out there talking about all the conspiracies that vilified fat in the first place and all that kind of a thing, lots of books on eat fat to burn fat, or fat isn’t as bad as we once thought, or fat’s okay, just as long as it’s olive oil, right? Or maybe an avocado or two, and if you really want to be naughty, some coconut oil from time to time. But animal fat was still kind of not necessarily seen as something particularly important. And I began to realize that not only is dietary fat central to human health, including, in fact especially dietary animal fat from the right sources, but it became apparent to me that it is quote literally central to what made us human in the first place.

Stu

Yeah.

Nora

[00:09:30] It’s our ignorance of that, I think, that has led, in part, to so many of the health-related issues that we have. We’ve become a fat-phobic society. We assume that eating fat makes us fat. I mean, that’s been well debunked, but these old myths kind of die hard. It takes I think for people to kind of let go of that and feel okay about restoring quality dietary fat to-

Guy

Do you think the fat phobia has moved since the last book, or do you think there’s still a fear around it?

Nora

Yes. Yeah, I mean, within certain circles, I think it’s moved quite a bit. The problem is the mainstream public. So mainstream health authorities are still kind of maintaining a similar bottom line. They’re getting a little bit more quiet about it. It’s like, “Well, dietary cholesterol is okay, now.” It’s like, “What? What was that you said?” You know? The American Heart Association here is already saying that, “Well, dietary cholesterol and serum cholesterol really don’t have anything to do with each other, so it’s okay to eat eggs now.” Yeah, it was bad before, but it’s good now, right? I believe that you guys, your dietetic association is still a bit behind the curve on that.

[00:11:30] What a lot of people don’t realize is that the whole reason that dietary fat ever became vilified in the first place … And there was a huge expose in the New York Times about this … is that … And forgive me. Oh yeah. Well, anyway. What they discovered was it was basically the sugar industry in the 1960s that literally paid off Harvard researchers. They paid off people to basically cover up the research that was being published at the time showing the direct connection between the increased consumption of dietary sugar and the then skyrocketing rates of obesity and heart disease, and instead downplay that, suppress that research and instead, basically, turn the table and point the finger at dietary fat, and particularly dietary animal fat.

[00:12:00] We also know that the vegetable oil industry played a role in all of this, in the popularization of margarines and things. I mean, these people were advertising in the Journal of the American Medical Association. There were things for margarine and whatever else in these medical journals. So there was kind of an unholy alliance early on. And it is basically … What the New York Times uncovered is the fact that the whole thing was a scam from the outset. And what angers me, and what should anger every one of your viewers is that tens of millions of people have died as a result of that scam.

Stu

Yeah.

Nora

[00:13:00] You know? Including people close to me, and I’m sure people close to you, too. I know that my father, who was, in a matter of speaking, medical royalty, he wrote the textbook on cardiovascular radiology. He was poster child for what the AMA said you should do. You know, avoid fats, except for vegetable oils and margarine, and eat those whole grains, and try to avoid red meat and all that kind of a thing. And my father walked every day. He was never particularly overweight or anything like that, and he was quite proud of his low cholesterol, and he died of a massive heart attack back in 2006, and you know, [inaudible 00:13:05] at the time, convinced that he was doing everything right for his heart health.

[00:14:00] My mother, who was herself a prima ballerina, and anybody who knows anybody like that knows just how almost obsessively disciplined these people can be. Ballet dancers are just obsessed. And so for her to stay slender and healthy and whatever, that was her core value. She exercised every single day. She swam about a mile a day, and early in life, anyway, she was preparing … Well, mostly when I lived at home, mostly the food that was put on the table was food that at least looked like food. There was some stuff added in in the occasional night where there were TV dinners, but for the most part … You know, she took butter out of the house when I was quite young and replaced everything with margarine and sunflower oil and later canola oil and whatever else.

[00:14:30] Now she has had cancer twice. She has multiple autoimmune diseases. She has suffered from a variety of health-related issues along the way. Right now she’s dying of Alzheimer’s disease. And so, I have an older sibling that is a medical doctor that was struggling with her own issues and finally came to me and said, “Okay, talk to me about what you do.” And I’m like, “Really? You want to talk about this?” Because I [inaudible 00:14:42] to keep those discussions away from my very, very mainstream family who [inaudible 00:14:48] a hard time kind of taking in my point of view about all these things.

[00:15:30] And so I just, I’m not invested in selling this to anybody who’s not inclined to listen. I’m not proselytizing. So I talked to her about it, and she said, “Okay. I’m going to do it.” I’m like, “Really?” She said, “Yeah.” And she completely turned her health around, literally to where she hands my books to her own doctors, who are like, “How did you do this?” You know, passing and to her friends and to whatever else. And so I’ve really earned … I’m actually shocked at how onboard she is with all this. She texts me every other day with, you know, “What do I do now with this?” and, “Is this thing okay for me?” and all that kind of stuff. I’m like, “What? Okay, well, that’s cool.”

Guy

[00:16:00] Sorry, Stu. Just to get clarity around … Because you mentioned about chronic illnesses and diseases there as well, and I wonder how much people think about this, but in your research and your view and everything that you’ve done over the years, how much of a role is the diet that we’ve been told for all these years actually playing a part in chronic disease? Because there’s still a perception of, I feel, that people will say, “Oh, look. It’s hereditary. It’s bad luck.” And then they’ll go to the doctor, and they’ll take a prescription, and they’re not actually looking at anything else externally.

Nora

[00:16:30] You know, I’ll tell you, the medical industry is really in love with the whole DNA thing, with the whole genetic thing because in their minds, it’s sort of like your own terrorist sleeper cell in you that’s going to leap out and, at some point, betray you by triggering a disease that you didn’t deserve and all that kind of thing. And so medical treatments designed to affect DNA expression, whatever, are really the answer and all of that. Look. We have control of better than 90% of everything that goes on with our genetics. Genes are basically controlled by regulatory genes. Regulatory genes are controlled by epigenetic factors.

[00:17:30] In other words, a gene will not express itself unless the environment is favorable to the expression of that gene. We all have genes for all kinds of things good and bad. Whether or not a gene decides to express itself really depends on how friendly an environment we’ve created for the expression of that gene. So we have genes for cancer. We all have genes for whatever, and there may be hereditary tendencies with respect to autoimmune disease. I mean, my whole family … I’m the only member of my family that does not have an autoimmune disease.

Guy

Wow.

Nora

[00:18:00] The only one. And I work really, really hard at that one. And every time, I get regular testing. I’m always checking because all kinds of thing can trigger those. But I say 70% of the equation with respect to chronic and debilitating disease we can thank mainstream dietary, basically, recommendation. As a matter of fact, it’s quite interesting. A couple of years ago, there was a study published that evaluated … And I talk about this in my new book, so if somebody wants to look up a citation and examine this in more detail, it’s all there, the citations. And I footnote this book quite … In fact, nowhere near as heavily as I initially did, but I’ll tell you more about that later, but anyway.

[00:19:00] And what they wanted to do was take a look at the dietary guideline data between 1965 and 2011, take a look at what the dietary guidelines were, but also … Because we had been kind of led to believe that all these well-meaning health authorities had created these really beneficial dietary guidelines for us to follow, and of course, as our health declines, and obesity explodes, whatever, what we’re told is that, well, we’re just too fat, stupid, and lazy to follow the rules, you know? If we would all just listen to our dietary authorities and our medical authorities and eat the way we’re supposed to eat, we’d all be doing so much better than we are. Well, that’s not what the study uncovered. What they did was they looked at what had been the dietary recommendations, and how has that affected … How closely has the American public been following these suggestions? And by the way, these suggestions are pretty well in lockstep with what you guys are being told to do.

[00:20:00] But most importantly, what has the impact been on the health of the American public? And it turns out that not only have we been following the rules, not only have we been doing what the dietary authorities have been telling us to, I mean, almost to the letter, but the more closely we have followed the rules, the more obedient we have been in the process of following these dietary guidelines, the sicker and more obese we’ve become as a society. And it’s there in back and white, and it’s glaring. We’re led to believe it’s our own fat, stupid fault that we’re just … And we’re not exercising enough, which has very little to do with obesity. I’m not saying exercise isn’t important, but it is a comparatively small part of the equation compared to what it is we choose as a foundational dietary approach.

Guy

Questions keep coming up. Sorry, Nora. Do you think they actually know, or do you think there’s still a certain amount of ignorance there? The [crosstalk 00:20:22].

Nora

I think that there are those that know and would either rather not think about it or who have too many vested interests in pursuing things the way they’ve been happening because frankly, it’s been quite profitable.

Stu

Yeah.

Nora

[00:21:00] There are hundreds of billions of dollars to be made on the diseases of modern Western civilization. The problem that we have … And I don’t care who’s paying for it. If it’s a government paying for it, if it’s an individual insurance policy paying for it, it’s a corrupt and broken system. Medical authorities are not being paid for the quality of care. They’re being paid for the volume of care.

Guy

Yeah.

Stu

Yes.

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Nora

[00:22:00] There’s something wrong with that [inaudible 00:21:04]. It’s not a healthcare system. It is a disease management system. And the only people not benefiting from it are those of us that are kind of sucked into that black vortex. So it’s up to us, really, because if we want to be genuinely healthy, we have to realize that there’s not a lot of impetus from the top, so to speak, to make these changes and to see positive healthcare whatever, positive changes in the health of society. Look. Health is not a medical condition that can be treated with pharmaceuticals, right? There’s no profit to be made. And that’s not conspiracy theory. That’s fact. And when you consider just how profitable pharmaceutical interests have become and how powerful they have become, there’s this really … And it’s not just them.

[00:23:00] One of the things I point out in the book, I can think of not one single multinational corporate interest on planet Earth, including big oil, by the way, that would not be heavily invested in every man, woman, and child on this planet eating a carbohydrate-based diet because it’s extremely easy to produce. It’s extremely profitable. And basically, it keeps the … As a matter of fact, you can’t make a 5,000% profit on a grass-fed steak like you can a box of cereal. So it’s very cheap to produce, and it keeps those that eat a diet in that way more or less perpetually hungry. So what’s not for Monsanto and Kellogg’s to love about that?

Guy

Yeah.

Nora

[00:23:30] And who’s benefiting from this? Well, again, you know I mentioned big oil, but their number one customer is big agribusiness, so you know big agribusiness is benefiting from this. Who’s establishing the United States dietary guidelines? The United States Department of Agriculture. No conflict of interest there, right? The dietary pyramid that tells us that grains and legumes and all these so-called complex carbs, basically metabolic kindling, is supposed to be the foundation of the human dietary approach … No human people group in the history of the human species has ever eaten a diet remotely resembling what that dietary pyramid suggests is optimal. And yet, we’re told that that’s what we need to do, and that fat is the thing we need to minimize at all costs.

[00:24:30] Again, there are individuals within the medical field. There are individuals within the nutritional and dietetic field that get this very well, but when you consider that it’s multinational corporate interests like the food industry, for instance, that is responsible for establishing a lot of the curriculum being taught in these mainstream institutions, right? When you have Coca-Cola and Nabisco coming in, or whatever, to teach classes for aspiring nutritionists and dieticians, there’s a conflict of interest there. And so a lot depends on how willing individuals graduating from these programs are to look at the weight of the actual data out there, or whether they’re just regurgitating what they’ve been spoonfed.

[00:25:00] In our educational systems, respectively, we’re not taught how to think critically or creatively. We’re taught how to basically regurgitate what we’ve been spoonfed. Again, if we want changes to happen with healthcare, we have to really take an attitude of self-empowerment. None of it is every going to happen from the top down. It’s going to be grassroots. It’s going to be people gradually waking up left and right, and this is happening, and learning to take control of their own health, understanding that prevention is the best medicine, and that right now, here in the States, the number one cause of bankruptcy is a bad diagnosis.

[00:26:00] So I mean, I don’t care even if you’re an Aussie, if you’re a Fortune 500 executive, or you are slinging burgers at McDonald’s, nobody can afford a bad diagnosis. And when you [inaudible 00:25:39], by the time you get sucked into the system, that your risk of complication and morbidity and mortality, just simply due to the treatments you receive, is disturbingly high, more people from properly prescribed medications just here in the United States alone than died in all the years in Vietnam combined, every single year.

Guy

And you’ve really got to be proactive, and prevention is the only way, really, isn’t it?

Nora

Right. But you know, the water’s [inaudible 00:26:13] muddied because … And forgive me for talking over you. I’ve gotten worked up, so …

Guy

That’s okay.

Nora

[00:27:00] But the water’s been muddied by all of the conflicting information, by all of the confusion about what actually does or doesn’t constitute a healthy diet. And people get cynical. They throw their arms up in the air and they say, “Well, one day, you hear this is good, and the next day, you hear this is bad. I’m just going to eat what I want, right? And if I drop dead [inaudible 00:26:37] dead.” Well, the people that talk that way, they’re not thinking it through, for one. People rarely are lucky enough, like my father was, I guess, in a manner of speaking, to just drop dead. What if you don’t drop dead? What if you get a cancer diagnosis, and you get to watch your family become bankrupt and die a slow death along with you watching you go through that? Or if you have a stroke, and then you spend the rest of your life having people around you change your diapers? Or you have some other debilitating condition that lands you in a wheelchair, or suddenly you have to walk around with an oxygen tank? It’s not about living forever. It’s about quality of life.

Guy

Of course.

Nora

[00:28:00]
And we have control over the vast majority of that. We certainly have an environment in which there’re many things over which we have very little control, although I would submit that we should try to be exerting more control. We have air, water, soil pollution. We have depleted soils. We have all kinds of radiation contamination now, especially here in the Northern Hemisphere, that we’re contending with. There’s EMF pollution. There’s GMOs. There are all of these things going on. There is rocket fuel and glyphosate in 70% of the water supplies everywhere. You know? So in the face of all of the things that we seemingly have no control over, it’s incumbent upon us to take control of what we can.

[00:28:30] And it turns out there’s quite a bit we still have control over, and it’s incumbent upon us to exert that control and not just sort of have … You know, I think it’s easy to have a laissez-faire attitude toward things because in modern times, we live so comfortably. We live in climate-controlled environments. Even in Minnesota in February, where it can be 40 below zero Fahrenheit, you’re not having to put up with … The winter doesn’t come for you anymore. You’re living in 72 degrees, sitting on the couch watching Netflix, you know? You don’t even have to get off your round behind to go to the fridge. If your front door’s unlocked, somebody can deliver a pizza and put it right in your lap, you know?

Guy

Yeah.

Nora

We have this, today, this unnatural access to this unnatural abundance of food, and unfortunately, food-like substances, and we don’t usually have to take more than two steps in any direction to grab a handful of something and stick it in our faces. And we still have a wild psychology. We’re still, in effect, wild. We’re genetically 100% virtually hunter-gatherers still in terms of what our physiological makeup is. What our basic nutritional requirements are haven’t changed much in the last 200,000 years, and feast or famine is part of the equation in any wild mindset. When food is there, you eat it. And we’re tempted to overeat. So things are quite comfortable for us. We’re [inaudible 00:29:50].

Stu

The premise of the book is high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet, and all the amazing health benefits that come from that. So I just wanted to talk a little bit about that because when you mention high fat, low carb, and even in the mainstream media now, like high fat, low carb, there’s paleo, Mediterranean zone. There’s so many terms and types of diet. People get confused. So couple of questions, and I’m going to throw a few at you, and I’ll let you answer them in your own way. Firstly, is it for everyone? Because some people may say, “Well, look. I eat quite a lot of carbohydrates, but they might be organic vegetables, for instance, so I don’t touch processed food.”

Nora: I’m with them. I probably eat more organic vegetables than most vegetarians do.

Stu

Right.

Nora

[00:31:00] In fact, if you were to look at my dinner plate, you’d probably see more vegetables than anything else, but that’s not where my prime calorie intake is coming from or where the majority, necessarily, of the nutrient-dense value of my food is coming from, but I do think that fibrous vegetables and greens are probably more important to us now than they ever used to be.

Stu

Right. Okay, so confusion about the amount of carbohydrates … Is this diet for everybody? People say, “Well, look. I hear about tribes living in India, and they exist on solely carbohydrate, and they seem to be doing okay.”

Nora

[00:32:00] That’s so … And the Indians, the Southern Indians that are basically consuming vegetarian diets or vegan diets, it’s the lowest life expectancy of any people group on Earth. You know? And really, I don’t know any human people group that’s ever really adopted vegetarianism by choice. You just sort of go with what’s available and what … And so here’s the deal. Even though humans have been seen to thrive on a variety of diets throughout our evolutionary history, one thing to keep in mind is that, as human beings, we are all much more alike than unalike.

[00:33:00] What defines us are not our differences but the things that we have in common. Right now, the big buzz words out there … And everybody nods as if some great wisdom were being spoken. Everybody’s different, right? The whole biochemical individuality. Well, you know, maybe that’s fine and good for you, but a vegetarian diet’s better for me. There is no such thing. We all have the same basic physiological makeup. We have the same organs and tissues. We have more or less the same brains. Some work better than others, and we all have a blood PH between 7.35 and 7.45 or else, right? By the way, we, unlike our … So for instance, when you look at the animals that are actually designed to consume a plant-based diet, where they eat nothing but plants, the animals that are actually designed by nature to do that, you look at them very closely and you see … You have to ask, “What are they doing all day long?” Well, their face are in the grass. They’re in the bushes. They’re in the trees. They have to eat constantly in order to be able to meet their basic nutritional requirements.

[00:34:00] But what a lot of people don’t realize, interesting factoid, is that even a cow is designed to get at least 70% of its caloric intake from short-chain saturated fatty acids, from fat, basically from the bacterial fermentation of all that fiber. See a cow basically has, and all herbivores basically have a fermentative-based digestive system that are designed to take all that plant and plant fiber in and then run it through these enormous bacterial vats, where the bacteria then convert all of that stuff and unlock all of the nutrients available in those plant foods.

[00:34:30] I mean, broccoli contains a lot of great stuff. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s automatically available to us if we consume it. We don’t have the same digestive tract as an herbivore does. In fact, ours is not a fermentative-based digestive system. It’s a hydrochloric acid-based digestive system, so we’re actually designed to get our primary nutrients from animals that have done a lot of the hard work for us, have consumed and converted and generated a lot of these nutrients, have generated this complement of fatty acids in their tissues that they’re much better equipped to make conversions with than we are. And then we’re designed to get them directly from those animals that have done that [inaudible 00:34:44] for us.

[00:35:00] Even chimps. So our great ape ancestors, for instance, we have a much smaller digestive tract than our great ape ancestors, all of which, by the way, eat some meat, with the exception of gorillas. But they have a brain about a third of the size that would be expected for a primate of their size. We have a digestive tract that’s much smaller and that has a colon that only makes up about 20% of that digestive tract. That’s the fermentative part of our digestive system is our colon, where a chimp basically has a colon that makes up more than 52% of its digestive system.

[00:36:00] So you see chimps. They look like they’ve been drinking beer all day. You see these great … They have big, barrel guts, right? Because it [inaudible 00:35:29] big fermentation vat. And even though they’re designed to eat a little meat here and there, they’re mostly noshing on the plant foods, but even chimps get at least 60% of their calories not from carbohydrates. Very little of their caloric intake comes from carbohydrates. Most of it comes from, actually, saturated fat but the saturated short-chain fatty acids from the bacterial fermentation of all the fiber they consume. We can’t generate more than 5% of our caloric and energy and nutrient needs through that bacterial fermentation process. It’s not that it’s not consequential to us. We know that our gut bacteria are hugely influential in terms of many aspects of our health. But again, it is not the basis of our digestive system. It’s just one aspect of it.

[00:37:00] And we are truly designed, all of us, to get our primary nutrient intake from animal-source foods. And this has been bourne out by all the stabilized topic data. The Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, has been now, for decades, doing stabilized isotopic research of human bone collagen data obtained from human remains from all periods of our evolutionary history. They have yet to uncover any evidence that we got any significant portion at all of our protein intake from plant foods of any kind, including grains and legumes or anything else. As a matter of fact, not only has the evidence shown in a way that surprised even me that we’re designed to be carnivores, but actually higher level carnivores even than bears, wolf, foxes, saber-toothed cats, or other predators of the times that we evolved in. And I think it’s because the entire evolutionary period up until about 10,000 years ago, we had a preference for hunting these enormous herbivores, megafauna, very, very fatty animals.

[00:38:00] And so that played an enormous role in our diet up until the end of the last ice age. It still was a centerpiece of our diet in terms of its importance, but it became harder to procure. So when you ask the question, “Is this for everybody?” we’re all designed in the same fundamental way. There are certain genetic polymorphisms and certain issues that we have that might be different from the next person, but there’s no one for whom a plant-based diet is foundational. There is no evidence anywhere in the fossil record, anywhere in the stable isotopic data, really anywhere as evidenced by our physiological makeup or the size of our brains to suggest that plant foods should be foundational to our diet in that way, calorically.

Guy

I have a question for you, Nora, then. Another confusion we see along with that is actually the amount of fat that we should eat. We quite often talk to different people, and they go, “Right. I’m going to cut out the processed foods and the sugars,” and they start pulling these things away. But then there’s still a confusion around fat itself. I think there’s still a subconscious phobia there. And so my question to you, how much should the general person be eating every day? What would your typical day look like, and …?

Stu

Can I just add to that as well, Guy?

Guy

Yeah.

Stu

Nora, the confusion behind being very heavily fat adapted but not operating in ketosis, versus being in ketosis all the time.

Nora

[00:39:30] Right. Well, okay. So that’s two different questions. The first thing I’ll point out, and something that I talk about in an uncompromising fashion in my new book Primal Fat Burner, is that the biggest emphasis has to be upon food quality. That means that, you know, the health … We all hear meat’s bad for us. Fat’s bad for us. Look. The health of the meat or the fat that we consume directly correlates to the health of the animal that meat or fat came from. We should all be only supporting those farmers and ranchers that are raising their animals 100%, from beginning to end, on fresh pasture, fresh forage, right?

[00:40:00] Nobody should be spending their money on feedlot or factory-farmed meat. It’s a completely different fatty acid profile. When I talk about what bad fats are, I consider those to be, essentially, bad fats. And it’s the difference between something bad for you and something that can literally save your life going to the meat of an animal and the fat of an animal that has been allowed to live out in fresh air and sunshine and eat what’s natural for it to eat and have a healthy life.

Stu

Yeah.

Nora

[00:41:00]
So that’s really, really important. There aren’t any hard, fast rules about how many grams a day of fat. The idea is, if you’re consuming your animal-source foods from these kinds of sources, and you’re eating nose to tail, you’re consuming not just steak every night, not just like a piece of chicken every night or whatever, but you’re including some organ meats … And there are ways of doing it that you won’t even notice it’s there, right? You can grind heart and kidney and liver and things like that into ground beef, and it just tastes like a burger and that kind of thing. There are ways of mixing it in there that you can kind of conceal it a little bit. Best to develop a taste for it, but in any case, if you’re eating the right foods, the amounts of fat, the balance of fats, for starters, should just kind of take of themselves.

[00:42:30] But I also advocate for moderating of protein intake, so not over-consuming meat, not over-consuming fish and eggs and things like that and making, really, fat the caloric centerpiece. And it’s confusing because, again, if you were to look at my dinner plate, at first glance, you might wonder if I was a vegetarian. “It’s all those great vegetables and greens and, look, a few sprouts on the side. Oh, some cultured veggies. Wow. She must be a … Oh, wait. I think I see some meat in there.” You know? A couple pieces, maybe, of meat or liver or whatever might be in there, and then what I’ve done is I add things like … I mean, I will cook the meat, for instance, in a really high-quality fat, whether it’s … whatever fat of choice that there is. I happen to really love duck fat. That’s something I have a weakness for, and I’m able to get really good sources of that, so I like cooking with it. But there are a lot of great fats to cook with.

[00:43:00] Animal fats are inherently a lot more stable to cook with than vegetable fats are. Coconut oil is fine and great. I mean, go for it. The only issue I have with coconut oil is that there aren’t any … It doesn’t really contain any … It certainly contains fats that can fuel and energize your brain, but it doesn’t really contain any structural fats for your brain. The two fats that are most responsible for human cognition are 20 and 22 carbon fats, arachidonic acid, docosahexaenoic acid. That’s what makes our cognition uniquely human. And by the way, those fats are only present in our diets within animal-source foods. They cannot be gotten any other way, and if DHA isn’t in your diet, it’s not in your brain, either.

Stu

Yeah.

Nora

[00:44:30] And so when you’re eating grass-fed meat, you automatically get those things, or wild-caught game, if you have the ability to go out and get it, whatever. These things are automatically present in a balanced form. But adding extra fat to cook the meat in, choosing fattier cuts of meat as opposed to the really lean cuts … If it’s a grass-fed thing, then go for the fattiest cut you can get. You can eat a bigger portion and still keep your protein intake moderate, and it’s very satiating. It’s not like your plate has to be swimming in fat. I mean, I’ll drizzle extra olive oil or macadamia nut oil or avocado oil over my vegetables, or I may have sliced avocado on the side and that kind of a thing. Really, you’re not going to walk away hungry if you eat that way. Doesn’t mean your plate is swimming in fat. It’s not more fat is better. Sufficient fat is what you’re shooting for. You need as much as you need to satisfy your appetite and meet your complex nutritional requirements. And we, as humans, require a greater variety of fats than most animals do.

Guy

Yeah, so just to clarify, it’d be fair to say, then, that if we confuse ourselves, “Should I be in ketosis? Should I be Mediterranean? Should I just like concentrate on the quality of food sources first?”

Nora

That really has to be the first thing. Stu, you were asking me about, “Well, is the state of ketosis for everyone?” If you are not in a state of ketosis … We have one of two sources of fuel that we can burn as a primary source of energy. If you’re relying on carbohydrates as your primary source of fuel, for starters, there’s … You know, this is a very new exercise for us. This is something that humans have only been attempting in the last 10,000 years or so. This is not what is most natural a metabolism for humankind. It wouldn’t make sense. Of the three major macronutrients, proteins, fats, and carbohydrates, the only one for which there is no scientifically established human dietary requirement, not in any medical textbook anywhere, not in any textbook of human physiology, is carbohydrates. We can manufacture all the glucose we need from a combination of protein and fat, and it’s better to manufacture glucose as we need it rather than attempting to just stuff ourselves full of it and then try to let our bodies sort that out.

[00:46:30] We know from human longevity research, which is part of what I base all this on, it’s not all ancestral nutrition. How do we optimize these ancestral principles in way that is in alignment with what we’ve learned about what helps us live the longest? Well, we do know from longevity research, loud and clear, that the less of a demand for hormone we place upon ourselves in the course of our lives, the longer we’re going to live, and the healthier we’re going to be by far. And I covered that exhaustively in Primal Body, Primal Mind. I talk about it in the new book as well because it’s still true.

[00:47:00] Also, it does turn out, however, that even though our ancestors ate a lot of meat, doesn’t mean that we have to eat a lot of meat in order to be optimally healthy. As a matter of fact, it’s better if we don’t. It’s much better if we work at meeting our complete protein requirements, and animal-source foods are the best way for us to do that. That’s what stimulates the process, stimulates hydrochloric acid, and stimulates our north-to-south process of digestive signaling that our digestive system is based upon. But by keeping it to just what we need and not exceeding that has a variety of benefits.

 

[00:47:30] Number one, if we consume protein in excess of what we need, some amount of that is going to be converted to sugar and used the same way. But the other part to the equation, and even more importantly, we know that protein consumed in excess triggers certain reproductive metabolic pathways. Now if you’re trying to become pregnant or you’re pregnant, or you’re an infant, a child, or a teen that’s growing and needs to be making new cells, then a little extra protein is probably a helpful thing for you. I make space for that in this book. I talk about that.

[00:48:30] But if you’re not trying to reproduce right now, or you’re past that sort of useful reproductive age, and you over-consume protein, you’re still triggering those same reproductive pathways, but what it’s stimulating is essentially a state of cellular proliferation. And that is a potential, especially in this day and age with all the toxins and all of the mutagenic substances we’re being exposed to, it’s a potential impetus for cancer. So we need to keep that protein intake to just what we need and try not to exceed it. So it’s about .8 gram per kilogram of body weight and maybe even as low as .5 gram per kilogram of body weight in people particularly susceptible to cancer or that sort of a thing. It’s really careful that we don’t over-consume protein.

[00:49:00] But what’s really cool, that when we don’t trigger that threshold … You know, the metabolic pathway is called mTOR, mammalian target of rapamycin. I talk about it in both books. But when we don’t trigger that metabolic pathway, what’s really cool is that it’s like this loophole in mother nature’s design, where you can kind of put it in modern-day economic terms by saying, “Oh, gee.” Your body’s saying, “It looks like it’s too expensive to build a new house right now, so let’s fix up the one we’ve got.” And instead, your body flips over into repair and regeneration mode because it assumes that there isn’t enough to eat, and therefore, your body has to work at keeping you going in the best way possible so that you can live to reproduce another day. In other words, it’s literally anti-aging.

[00:50:00] There is no more powerful approach for supporting the health of your mitochondria, your body’s fundamental energy-burning factories … Everything boils down to mitochondria. There’s no approach that can do more to fuel you all day long, even in the absence of regular meals, than a fat-based metabolism. If you’re talking about being fat adapted, you’re talking about ketogenic. There’s no other way to put it. You’re either a sugar burner, or you’re a fat burner. You don’t get good at burning fat by burning sugar all day long any more than you get good at tennis by playing golf. You know? You get good at burning fat by burning fat, by showing your body that this is the fuel. This is what we’re about burning. Don’t go after the other stuff. It’s not incoming. We will always have a reserve of glucose. Your body will always make sure that there’s enough of a reserve of glucose that it can draw upon it in case of an emergency.

[00:51:00] But carbohydrates are fundamentally metabolic kindling. It’s rocket fuel. It’s designed to fuel us in case of an emergency, in case we need to exert ourselves, but even the most complex carbohydrates are little more than twigs on our metabolic fire, and then the refined carbohydrates are like crumpled up paper, and then alcohol and your beer and your alcoholic beverages and juices and sodas and things like that are like throwing gasoline or lighter fluid on that metabolic fire. And if all you’re trying to run that fire with all day long is kindling … Well, this is what we’re being conditioned to do in society. We’re being told that glucose, of necessity, is the primary fuel for the human brain, and therefore we have to keep eating every two hours and whatever. Think about who’s benefiting from that. Certainly not you.

[00:52:30] But what’s the alternative? What if you were to take a nice, big fat log and throw that on the fire instead? Suddenly, now, you’re free. You can go about your business, and you have a source of fuel that is long lasting and even burning that can fuel your brain all day long. Your brain can run on almost nothing but pure ketones all day long, even in the absence of regular meals. I’ve actually done some, you know, they called it biohacking, these personal experiments that we do, these [inaudible 00:51:51] experiments. Well, I’ve gone for days and even weeks without eating anything. I did that once this year and went for three solid weeks, actually, on nothing but water and a little bit of tea in the morning, you know, whatever, in other words, calorically negligible. At no point was I craving. At no point was I feeling physically fatigued or mentally irritable or brain fogged or … Mind you, it was a real bummer not to eat because so much of our culture is all about … And our social interactions are all about eating and whatever, so I was really bummed out that I couldn’t eat.

[00:53:00] I was like, “Oh, geez.” I woke up, you know, like, “Can’t have [inaudible 00:52:39] make my breakfast today, or my lunch, or whatever. Can’t go out to dinner.” But honest to God, my health never suffered. My energy never suffered because my body was so well adapted to relying on fat as a primary source of fuel that I wasn’t adding fat because just [inaudible 00:53:00] . It’s sort of like … I’m not suggesting people try this at home, by the way. I’m not suggesting people need to go out and do this. I don’t recommend it, actually, but it was something that I knew that I could do and get away with and whatever else. It was interesting. At one point, I had blood sugar as low as 54, and I felt clear as a bell, and I had energy to burn, literally.

Guy

Wow.

Stu

Fascinating.

Nora

[00:54:30]

[crosstalk 00:53:27]. So you know, is this for everyone? In effect, yes. We’re actually designed, first and foremost, to be relying on fat as a primary source of fuel. We’re literally born in a state of ketosis. Ketones are actually … When a baby is born, its brain is relying on the ketones as the primary fuel for brain development. We have, as humans, a brain that makes up maybe 2-5% of our total body weight, but it uses at least 20, 25% of our total caloric energy demands. But if you’re an infant, that number shoots up to 85%. If you’re a child, it’s 45 or 50%, and so that’s very metabolically expensive tissue up here. Fat provides more than twice the calories per gram that carbohydrates or protein do for fuel, but guess what. If you are metabolically adapted to relying on fat as a primary source of fuel, in other words, you’re ketogenically well adapted, it actually has a potential to generate four times the energy, even though it’s twice the calories. It will produce four times the energy. That is [inaudible 00:54:40].

Guy

[00:55:00] Just to touch on that as well, Nora, I know there’ll be a lot of athletes listening to this podcast, and there’s always a debate, especially within the CrossFit community and more the high-intensity, short-interval things, and some of these guys are pushing themselves to the extremes. With the varied nutrition that you talked about, especially for regular health, is there a line, or does that equal across the board to even a high-end athlete as well?

Nora

[00:56:00] Yes, but again, I always have to throw a caveat on it and say it depends. I mean, there are people involved in elite sports that our ancestors would have looked at and said, “Are they nuts?” They would not … They couldn’t be able to fathom the reasoning behind doing something so metabolically expensive for so little return on any … So what we’re in effect doing is something that’s quite unnatural to us. I will concede that, particularly in high-intensity anaerobic sports … Although you can come pretty close to matching the best of what Olympic athletes can do on a really, really carefully designed, well-adapted ketogenic approach if you do it right. Peter Attia has done a lot with this and shows that very, very high-intensity cycling and whatever else … Man, you are almost entirely there.

[00:57:00] In fact, in some ways, your performance is better in some respects. But I would be willing to concede that … I know a number of elite athletes that actually do … They’re big fans of my work, and they base a lot of what they do on my work, and they are at the top of their game and winning the contests, including a woman, Maureen Quinn, who’s like one of the top strongwomen in the United States, is basically … It’s a diet based on my material. Most of her calories come from fat. Ben Greenfield has done a lot with a high-fat, ketogenic approach, and he’ll do like a shot of MCT oil, eat a stick of butter, and drink a cup of coffee before his events. You know, it’s like … He doesn’t do carb loading.

[00:57:30] But some of these people will use things. I mean, I know that Ben has used these things. I know some other … Particularly the anaerobic sports, where they use these super starches, which are these high-tech gels that don’t influence hormone but provide an energy substrate during the course of the event that can provide that little extra rocket fuel [inaudible 00:57:30] . Sometimes people have to take a slightly unnatural approach to do something that’s fundamentally unnatural. I would say for endurance sports, nothing beats fat for endurance. Nothing.

Guy

Yeah.

Nora

[00:58:00] You know, we’re talking [inaudible 00:57:43]. So picture, if you will, an 18-wheel super tanker carrying gasoline down the freeway. We periodically see them pull into truck stops to fill up their tiny little gas tanks, and they’re carrying hundreds of gallons of gasoline in the back, but yet, because they are only tapped into this tiny little gas tank, they have to stop every so often, pretty frequently, to refill their tank so that they can keep going. But gosh, what if they were tapped into the bigger tank of fuel? Well, they could drive clear across country and back again a few times over without ever having to stop at all.

[00:59:00] Metaphorically, if you see an obese person sitting on a bench, it’s kind of the same story. They’ve got this supertanker full of fuel, and yet they’re tapped into the wrong fuel. They’re burning sugar all day. They don’t know how to burn fat because they’re sugar burners, right? If you can tap into that supertanker, even the thinnest, most athletic person watching this probably has a good 100 to 150,000 kilocalories of fat on their bodies, even if they don’t look like they’ve got it, that they could be tapped into as a constant source of fuel, even in the absence of regular meals, where they wouldn’t have to be slugging juice every, whatever, down their thing.

Guy

How long does that adaptation take, normally with individuals, Nora?

Nora

[00:59:30] Well, I’ve generally found, for the average person, is like three to six weeks is all it generally takes for people. And there’re exceptions to that. Some people have real hypoglycemic problems, or they have addictive issues with … Their brains are more prone than somebody else’s might be to having opiate addiction, which sugars trigger opiate centers in the brain. Grains and dairy trigger opiate centers in the brain. Some people have a really difficult time giving up those foods. So with some people, they need a little extra hand holding to get past those hurdles.

[01:00:30] People that have depressed cortisol issues, they may have a hard time because cortisol is what our body generally uses to nudge up glucose when we actually do need it, and when cortisol isn’t working right, there may be problems accessing sufficient glucose, and therefore the cravings for sugar kind of keep at them. Or Hashimoto’s disease, for instance, which is an autoimmune thyroid condition … I’ve never met a Hashimoto’s sufferer that didn’t have blood sugar issues. And it becomes even more important for those people to adopt a fat-based metabolism so that their mood, cognitive, and energy equation aren’t enslaved to a sugar-based metabolism.

Guy

Can they expect a world of pain? If somebody was like, “Oh, my God, I’m a sugar burner. I’m a carbohydrate eater. I’m going to flick the switch tomorrow. I’m going for it …”

Nora

[01:01:00] Well, there is this thing that’s been popularized called the ketogenic flu, right? Because when you think about it, you’re switching over from rocket fuel to diesel, or whatever, and so there has to be changes made to your engine, so to speak, to adapt to that. And in the meantime, you’re kind of in a state of metabolic purgatory. Now some people just blow right through that, and it’s very, very easy. It was for me. It was very easy. But for some folks, it’s more of challenge, so for a few days, they might feel low energy, or they might be struggling more, then they have more cravings or headaches or whatever comes along, flu-like symptoms.

[01:02:00] There’re ways of getting around that. There’re supplements and things that can help kind of take up the slack and help you transition a little bit more painlessly to that fat-based metabolism. You can either tough it out, or you can use supplements, and I talk about ways of doing that. I will say, for athletes, it takes a little longer for them to fully reclaim their levels of performance that they expect of themselves. Because they’re pushing their metabolism harder than the average person, it may take them a couple of months before they’re feeling like, “Okay.” So this is not the kind of thing you do when you’re in the middle of a competitive-

Guy

[crosstalk 01:02:04] I was going to say, yeah.

Nora

[01:02:30] You wait until the off-season, and then you go through the process of metabolic adaptation so that by the time you’re in the active season again, you’re blowing past your competition, but it takes a while to adapt. But once you’ve done it, you’re not really going to want to go back to another way of doing things. It’s the most liberating thing in the world to not have to rely on, to not have to be eating every two hours, to not be enslaved, if you will, to your metabolic wood stove and to the food industry that profits from it, right? So yeah.

Guy

Beautiful. Beautiful. Just aware of the time on the show, and we’re coming to the end Nora, and-

 

Nora

Okay. Good.

Guy

[01:03:00] … we ask a couple of questions to everyone on the show. The first question is what are your non-negotiables to be the best version of yourself daily? If you [crosstalk 01:03:05].

Nora

[01:03:30] Non-negotiable for me is food and water quality. I don’t compromise those things. I just don’t. And particularly with respect to what I know to be food sensitivities, for instance, you know, gluten, dairy, and things like that that I have had immunologic testing, reliable immunologic testing to show that those are problems. I will never eat those things again. And I don’t ever compromise. It’s not like, “Well, once in a while, I’ll eat a piece of chocolate cake.” No, I won’t. You’ll never see me do that. And so I consider those thing non-negotiables. I consider the alternative to be just not worth it.

Guy

Yeah.

Nora

[01:04:00] In a world, too, where we’re being compromised by so much, it’s so incumbent upon us to take control of what we can, so from that standpoint, yeah, no compromises there. Yeah.

Guy

Perfect. Perfect. And the last question, what’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?

Nora

[01:04:30] I think the thing that … What was sane to me at some level at some point because my life made a big turn-around the day I realized that I needed to stop shooting on myself, and the problem was that I need to pursue my passions in life and not worry about how I was going to make a living. At the time, I realized that, really, nutrition, the whole subject matter, was more important to me than anything else. And I just knew to pursue that. I really didn’t know where that was going. At the time I really wasn’t making any money at it, but when I made that decision to follow, really, my passion, everything changed. Everything changed.

Guy

Brilliant. Absolutely. And your new book, it’s out.

Nora

[inaudible 01:05:05] It is.

Guy

So …

Nora

I’ll tell you something … Yes, go ahead.

Guy

No, go for it. Tell … What was you going to say?

Nora

[01:06:00] I was going to say something else that’s out. I have a new online educational program. It’s called Primal Power 52, and it’s weekly. It’s every week of the year, and it’s a subscription thing. It’s just … The module I just recorded was close to an hour or so, but technically maybe 30, 40 minutes for the most part. It’s basically designed to help people get the most out of my material, to get details and whatever out of what I know and what I have learned and what I’m constantly learning that just can’t really be gotten any other way. One of the things that’s true of my book, for instance, that the initial manuscript that I attempted to turn in to the publisher was over 300,000 words and had over 3,000 peer-reviewed references. They looked at that and said, “Yeah. No, it can’t be more than lie 85,000 words,” and we compromised a little on that. They literally cut 9/10 of the peer-reviewed references, which was like cutting my heart out at the same time.

[01:07:00] So much of what I had written was designed to save lives, and it was just so much rich information, and they agreed it was brilliant and important and great, but they just couldn’t fit it into a book that was designed for mainstream trade publication. So it’s like, “Where do I put all that?” I’m not going to light a match to it or throw it in the shredder. So this program is going to allow me to provide people with information they’re not going to get any other way, and I have so much cutting-edge access to information, I know people who are doing the research out there that is changing lives that most practitioners aren’t even going to be onto for another decade or more and that you might not read about any place. I’ve got access to all this rich information, so it’s designed to … Starters help kind of set people’s foundations, establish people’s foundational areas and get people’s health going well foundationally and then provide all of the extra nuance and information that can allow them to really make the most of their lives and their health, [crosstalk 01:07:27] physical health.

Guy

Wow. Sounds amazing.

Nora

Yeah, it’s totally cool. You can go to primalpower52.com and learn more about it, and there’s a lot more coming with that, too, a lot of extra benefits and things, though. We’ll have a forum. We’ll have all kinds of great stuff, so-

Guy

Could you just repeat the URL? Sorry, Nora. I missed it.

Nora

Yeah, primalpower52.com, you know, 52 weeks per [inaudible 01:07:49], right?

Stu

Right.

Guy

Beautiful. Well, we’ll link to that in the show notes as well. That’s awesome. I’m definitely going to check that out. Yeah.

Nora

Excellent.

Guy

Brilliant. Brilliant. So thank you so much for coming on, Nora.

Nora

Oh, Guy. It was really great being on, speaking on here again. I’ve missed you guys.

Stu

We’ve missed you, Nora. And best place to send people, Nora, if they want to learn more about you and your books and your learnings?

Nora

[01:08:30] Well, my new book, primalfatburner.com. You can go there and also the good old primalbody-primalmind.com, and if you sign up for updates and things like that, you will not be spammed. I will never sell your information to anybody. My primary interest is in getting information that you can make the best use of for you. So you can be apprised of all the updates and things that are happening from there, and there’s a lot of new stuff happening. I’ll be starting my new mastermind series. It’s going to be starting again in just about a month. And yeah …

Stu

Fantastic.

Nora

Anyway.

Stu

Okay. Well, we will litter the show notes with links galore so people will know exactly where you are at any given time.

Nora

[inaudible 01:09:08].

Guy

Awesome.

Stu

Fantastic. Nora, thank you so much for sharing your time with us this morning. It’s been an honor again, and you continue to learn, and I will continue to read your books from cover to cover.

Nora

Marvelous.

Stu

Yeah. Every 12 months.

Nora

I’m honored and flattered. Thank you so much. It was really [crosstalk 01:09:25].

Stu

No problem.

Guy

Thanks guys.

Stu

Thank you. Bye-bye.

 

 

Nora Gedgaudas

This podcast features Nora Gedgaudas who is widely recognized expert on what is popularly referred to as the “Paleo diet”. She is the author of the international best-selling book, Primal Body, Primal Mind: Beyond the Paleo Diet for Total Health and A Longer Life. She is also the author of... Read More
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2 Replies to “Nora Gedgaudas: Becoming a Primal Fat Burner”
Heather Dicker says:

Brilliant and inspiring interview. Primal Body is my bible although my needy stepson has it at the moment. She really did help me change my life around for the better.

Guy Lawrence says:

Thanks for the kind words Heather! Yes, Nora is true health advocate and was great to have her back on the show 🙂

Comments are closed.