A Special Interview with Dr. Paul Jaminet By Dr. Mercola

DM: Dr. Joseph Mercola

DJ: Dr. Paul Jaminet

Introduction: DM: Welcome, everyone. This is Dr. Mercola. Today I’m joined by Dr. Paul Jaminet,

who is a leader in the practical application of sort of a refined Paleolithic approach to optimizing your health for health challenges. I’m going to let him describe his journey.

It’s quite interesting. He’s been trained at several elite astrophysicist communities. He is an astrophysicist by training and really shifted more towards the health approach when he had some personal health challenges. His wife is actually on the staff of Harvard

Medical School. They make a great team. They work collaboratively together to really refine and continue the journey that we all want an understanding what is an optimal health diet.

He put together all these – not all of this, but a good portion of this information in his recent book, which is called The Perfect Health Diet. I did have the opportunity to listen

to him speak in person. We both were speakers at the 2011 November Weston Price Wise Traditions event. I was really intrigued with his information, and that’s why we have him on here today. We published one or two of his articles in the past. This time,

we’ll have an opportunity to engage with him in a live one-on-one discussion. Thank you for joining us.

DJ: Thank you, Joe. It’s great to be with you. DM: Why don’t you share with our listeners your journey and how you came to focus

your efforts and energies on helping understand what a better diet is? DJ: I was led into it by personal health problems. My wife also had personal health

problems. We found that medical doctors weren’t able to help us at all, even though our problems are fairly common. My condition is somewhat similar to multiple sclerosis. I had some cognitive neuropathic issues and some other symptoms like Rosacea and

some physical things. My wife had endometriosis, fibroids, hypothyroidism, and other problems.

We were both very career-focused, very busy. We worked very long hours. She’s a biomedical scientist at Harvard. I was an astrophysicist at MIT Berkeley and Harvard. Then I switched careers to become a software entrepreneur during the internet boom. I

was always working like 60-hour weeks. I would eat just whatever was available. I ate a lot of soft drinks and bread and cheese. Things like that.

DM: The typical IT geek diet.

DJ: Yeah. I had a terrible diet. I’m sure that’s why I started developing health problems at a young age. In some ways that was fortunate, because a lot of the symptoms I had were very common in the elderly, very similar to dementia, memory loss, mood

impairment, neuropathy. That’s why elderly people are more likely to fall. If it had happened 20 years later, I would have just assumed it was aging, and I wouldn’t

have tried to do anything about it. But I knew that something was wrong. I kept going to the doctors and not getting help, so I just kept getting slowly worse over a period of about 15 years. The symptoms first started around 1992 when I had a long course of

antibiotics. I could actually trace them back to probably when I was born because I had persistent

ear infections in my first four year. I was in and out of the hospital for surgeries. I had tympanotomies and had my adenoids removed. I think I had chronic infections from birth, but when I took these antibiotics it sort of spread and I started developing new

symptoms. And then it just gradually got worse. DM: Can I interrupt you here because my guess is that it’s likely that your parents like

mine were really well intentioned but not too educated about diet. They put you on what was considered a standard American diet back then, which was really full of processed foods and lots of desserts, of course after every meal, and lots of sugar – with no

awareness or knowledge that they were harming you, but that sort of set it up. Dr. Natasha is fond of this belief that the ecological flora of the mother during the

pregnancy is so crucial for setting the flora of the child when it’s born. Do you think that was an issue going on with you?

DJ: In my case, I don’t blame my parents. My mother had cancer. She was diagnosed while she was pregnant with me. She died when I was 10.

DM: Sorry to hear that. DJ: I’m not quite sure where things went wrong. My father was busy working, so we

sort of fended for ourselves. Our diet wasn’t good growing up either. I certainly wouldn’t blame my parents for that.

DM: It’s not so much to blame; it’s just it was one of the contributing factors. Obviously, one has to take personal responsibility, because that’s the only thing that we can change. We can’t change anyone else’s actions on us, but it is an issue. It was certainly

an issue for me growing up. I had literally two dozen mercury fillings by the time I was in high school. As a child, you’re not responsible for putting the food on your table – that’s really your parent’s responsibility.

DJ: Yeah. I think my wife’s case is a great illustration. Her father died of a stroke when she was 12. Everybody told her this conventional wisdom is the problem is eating fat

and you shouldn’t eat fat. So she became a vegetarian. She ate a lot of soy. I’m sure all that soy was a big contributor in causing her reproductive health problems. That was just the conventional wisdom. It was all the standard government recommendations –

eat lots of grains, avoid fat, and eat soy, polyunsaturated fats. I think there are so many people who have developed health problems because of the

bad advice they have gotten from government authorities and the medical establishment. Fortunately, things are changing now. I think people are realizing that advice didn’t work, and it didn’t have evidence behind it really. People are learning that

there are much better ways to eat out there. Hopefully, it will start turning the tide on these chronic disease epidemics that we’re experiencing.

DM: It sounds like your first effort to employ your own research and findings since your own personal applications was when you found the Paleo approach. Was that the progress you made?

DJ: Before that – in early 2005 – we tried Chinese medicine, and that had an impact. It was sort of the first thing I tried, the first medicine I tried that had an impact. Some of it

are good, some of it are bad. But because of the drugs and medicines I had tried that had no effect at all, that gave me something to think about and a direction to pursue. So, I started thinking about the things you ingest probably matter the most.

DM: Would you say that they had no effect at all maybe not fair and that they probably had negative effects?

DJ: The drugs generally do have negative effects. Many drugs target the natural functions of your body and alter them. In general, our body was designed to make us

healthy and not sick. When you alter how it functions you’ll tend do some damage. DM: Did you notice any side effects from the drugs that you were prescribed, or just no

benefits? DJ: As I mentioned, my health problems really started when I took a year long course

of antibiotics. But in general, I wasn’t aggressive about drugs. The big problem was I couldn’t get a diagnosis. It was always mysterious what was going on. I had a lot of symptoms, but they didn’t add up to a single condition.

I think a lot of chronic diseases are like that. You’ll have 80 percent overlap with some standard diagnosis, but there is always usually more than one thing going on. Chronic

diseases can be pretty confusing. DM: So then you tried your route with Chinese medicine, noticed some good and bad

things, and then you made the progression to Paleo?

DJ: Yeah. I also do work in economics. One of the pioneers in Paleo dieting was a fellow named Art De Vany, who was an economist. I came across him through an

economics website that led me to the Paleo diet, and the evolutionary arguments for Paleo eating seem persuasive to me. I had already started thinking that diet must be the avenue that I should explore.

I decided I would try the Paleo diet and that had big effects similar to the Chinese medicine. But this time I had more confidence in it, so I was willing to stick with it

through some negative effects during the first month. And then I had some more negative effects emerged over the next year. I realized that the Paleo diet – as I was implementing it then – was flawed. But it had enough strengths that what I really needed

to do was just refine it and figure out what, where the weaknesses of Paleo are as I was implementing it and how to fix those.

That’s where I had a big advantage that my wife works at Harvard. We have access to all the medical journals. I have access to her expertise. She also brings a sort of wider perspective about diet coming from Asia, and that Asian diets are generally healthy. The

more I learned about diet, the more we learn that traditional Asian diets are actually extremely healthy. That kind of gave us confidence that we were on the right track. It’s not just Asian diets – lots of traditional cuisines are very healthy.

So, the strategy was more or less to go through the medical literature and try and understand all of our body’s nutrient needs and all of the toxins that maybe present in

food and figure out how to create a diet that gives you all of the nutrients that you need to optimally nourish your body but minimize the toxins that you’re taking in. That was our strategy. We were working from sort of an evolutionary foundation. We had a

starting point that was pretty good. And then we were just refining it with small refinements to try to get to as close to perfection as we could.

DM: In a previous discussion you had shared a perspective that I thought was very interesting in that there is so much medical literature out there that it would take dozens – if not hundreds and perhaps thousands – of lifetimes to even get a glimpse of the full

breadth of the information out there. Really, the only way that you can approach this is to sort of…

Like you had in astronomy, as an astrophysicist, it was appropriate, you have this powerful telescope, you need a really weak microscope to see what it feels you’re going to get into and then narrow it down. Could you describe that process? You explained it

more articulately, but I thought it was really very profound in a brilliant application of how do you approach this.

DJ: It’s the old problem of the eight blind men and the elephant. When you have an elephant and you’re a specialist, you’re looking at just part of the elephant; it’s very easy to get a misunderstanding of what an elephant is. Biologists and people thinking about

diet have that same problem.

The medical literature PubMed ,the database of journal articles, has over 22 million articles right now, and there is more than a million being added every year. If you think

about how much a person can read, I read at most two papers a day. I can read more abstracts. I might read 500 papers a year. So with a million coming out and being only able to read 500 or maybe 1000, you can see only a tiny fraction of the literature. It’s

very easy to have a kind of selection bias to get a small view of the literature and have that lead you the wrong way.

Biology is complex. These journal articles are hard to interpret. There is usually many different ways to interpret any single paper. So, you really need a big, overarching view that’s very close to the truth, and then you know how to interpret each paper. When I

first started reading these papers, I found things were very confusing. It was very hard to go from on any given idea. You could find seemingly contradictory papers some on each of the question. It was very hard to figure out where the truth lay.

What I found was when I started from an evolutionary perspective that led me very close to the truth. We actually have five different sources of evolutionary evidence, and

they all point in the same direction about what the optimal human diet is. And then when you start from that perspective and interpret the papers in that light, it gets much easier to see a way to reconcile all of the different papers.

I really started to have this since I was seeing the whole elephant. Now when I look at how other people interpret the literature, I usually see they’re very strongly influenced by

their own field, their own specialty, and they usually don’t take into account evidence from other specialties very much.

Our current medical community – scientific community – has very much encouraged a specialization. You know, people specialize in one type of ailment or one type of procedure for gathering evidence. Look at an expert like Walter Willett, who is head of

the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health – in schools of public health, they do epidemiology ,and most of the evidence he cites is from epidemiology. Experts, they really are experts, they know a lot. But they also have a limited

perspective and that can easily mislead them about diet. One thing that most of the government and academic authorities are missing is that big

picture of perspective. I think that’s what an evolutionary evidence provides us with: a really solid starting point. Once you’re close to the truth, then it’s easy to go into that giant literature, search on things, and figure out how to refine it to make it even closer to

the optimum. DM: Thank you for expanding on that, because it is obvious to me that most people

don’t really have an appreciation of what you just said. And to hear it and explained from that perspective I think will help people have a deeper appreciation of what the real challenge is in getting to the truth, because it is a serious challenge.

I’m really grateful for people like you who are especially gifted and skilled and have a mind that works so well and really can understand these complex articles. Even with

someone with your training you can only do two articles a day. The average person couldn’t probably do two articles in a year because of the lack of training. They have to look up every word.

But even at your rate of consuming the literature if you’re dedicated, at the end of one year, you would be a thousand years behind. So, we need lots of people like you to help

us uncover the truth. That’s why I so deeply appreciate it that you really joined the effort to help broaden the scope.

I’m wondering now if you can expand a bit on the evolutionary hints that suggested you go on this direction and then describe how you came about to understand what your views of the flaws in the Paleo at least from your particular illness perspective.

DJ: Evolutionary evidence, most Paleo authors start with what did our ancestors eat during the Paleolithic. So, back before we had supermarkets, when they had to go out

and hunt and gather their food. That’s a very good starting point. There are some uncertainties about what their diets were, and there were some variability. They would eat what was available in the climate they were in.

Eskimos (Inuit) would eat almost a pure animal food diet from seals and things like that. People in the tropics would tend to eat more carbohydrates. But typically, the amount of

carbohydrates eaten would range up to maybe 30 percent of calories and would typically be about 15 percent to 20 percent. We know that especially from hunter-gatherer tribes that were contacted in the 1800s and so on. We have some recently

good data from that period on what hunter-gatherer diets looked like. Another really valuable source of evidence is the composition of human breast milk. We

know that breast milk must be the optimal nourishing diet for human infants. Infants differ from adults, but we know how they differ so we can estimate how their nutrient needs differ from those of adults. We can see how the diet should be adjusted.

One thing we see in infants they have very large brains relative to their body size. So they use a lot of glucose. Roughly 50 percent of the calories that they use are glucose.

Breast milk is about 40 percent carbs. So, the amount of carbs in the diet is just slightly below the amount that the infant will actually use. If you translate that to adults, adults use about 30 percent of their calories as glucose. We would predict based on the

composition of breast milk that maybe the optimal amount of carbs for an adult would be just below 30 percent, so maybe 20 percent to 30 percent. That’s another example.

Then we look at the diets of animals, of mammals, that gives a lot of insight. It’s the same type of thing. With infants they bracket the optimal human diet, because animals are sort of biologically similar to us but have smaller brains. So, just like infants are like

us – but they have bigger brains, animals have smaller brains. And most animals when

you look at the nutrition going to their body, it’s very low carb, often 5 percent or 10 percent carb.

People think animals eat all these very different diets, because there are herbivores, carnivores, omnivores. They do eat very different food, but the food gets transformed in

their guts in their liver. The thing that changes evolutionarily in different animals is not the body and its nutrient needs – it’s the nature of the gut and the liver. So, herbivores will often have poor gut organs, like ruminants, that transform carbohydrates into fats

and volatile acids. Actually, a cow for instance gets almost no carbs in its diet. All the carbs are eaten by

bacteria, and the bacteria release short-chained fats that the cow consumes. When you look at these animals, that gives us more evidence about what the optimal diet should look like. That, again, leads us when we correct for brain size towards more of a 20

percent carb diet for adult humans. And then there are other sources of evolutionary evidence. For instance, people opt to

be able to survive a long fast or famine. In our evolutionary ancestral environment, there were no supermarkets. You couldn’t guarantee that food would always be around. You would have to be able to hunt effectively even if you hadn’t eaten for awhile. So, your

body has to be able to cannibalize itself. You have to live on a composition of the human body effectively. The optimal human diet can’t be that far away from the nutrient composition of the human body by itself.

And then a fifth source of evidence is the food reward system of the human brain. We like certain kinds of foods. We like to get a certain amount of protein each day. We like

to get a certain amount of salt each day. Certain things taste good, certain things taste very bad. Those taste preferences and food preferences evolved in order to guide us to eating a healthy diet. We can infer from the nature of the brain also what a healthy diet

is. Those five sources of evidence are pretty much what we used to try to get a first

thought of what the optimal diet is. And then once we had that starting point, then we went for the literature to look for evidence and drilled down to the level of individual nutrients and toxins to try and figure out how to implement that in terms of food and how

to really optimize everything. DM: That’s another interesting view that you have that certainly some professionals

focus on (but not many), and that is the element of the toxins. You’re taking it from not only the nutrients and the nutrient composition perspective, but also from the toxins in the food. Can you expand on that and perhaps provide us with the understanding of

how you came to that appreciation? DJ: I think food toxins are a very important subject. I think they have a huge impact on

health. I think toxins in soy had a big effect on my wife’s health. Actually, one of the strengths of the Paleo diet is that the Paleo diet is very low in toxicity. That happens for

several reasons. One is that the foods it generally recommends are low in toxicity. In general, mass-produced agricultural foods are high in toxins. I’ll explain why in a

moment. The other reason the Paleo diet is low in toxicity is it’s much more varied. In actual

Paleolithic diets, a typical Paleolithic villager apparently ate on the order of 300 different plant species. Most Americans now eat at most 30. We have a limited number of types of plant foods. In toxicology, the dose makes the poison, so the more you eat – if you

eat a small amount of any toxin, your body will be able to eliminate it without any health effects. But if you eat a large amount, then it can become quite dangerous. So, the Paleo style of eating is very healthy.

In terms of toxicity of foods, that’s really an underrated and under-investigated source of health problems. A professor at Berkeley, Bruce Aames, and his collaborator, Lois Gold,

have estimated that the average person gets like 1.5 grams per day of natural food toxins. Those constitute over 99.9 percent of all the toxins that people ingest.

Plants make all kinds of toxins. They make pesticides to prevent insects from eating them. They make antifungal compounds to prevent mold from growing on them – antibacterial compounds. Most of those we can tolerate fairly well as long as the dose is

low, but some plants have very high levels of toxins that we don’t tolerate so well. Those are generally the plants that are eaten by mammals.

Mammals are very similar to us. A toxin that is targeted against mammals will be very effective against us. Things that are eaten by herbivorous mammals like cows have a lot of toxins that act against humans. Of course, the things that herbivores eat – they live

on grassland. They eat grasses and they eat the seeds of grasses, which are cereal grains like wheat, corn – those types of things – and also some legumes, beans especially. Things like wheat, soy and so on, they tend to have a lot of toxins, which

works specifically against mammals. The purpose of these toxins is to try to prevent the seeds from getting digested.

One of my favorite papers was a finding that if you eat one gram of wheat bran, then the weight of your feces will go up by over 5 grams. What that is telling us is that there are bioactive proteins in wheat that are pretty good at sabotaging our digestive function. So,

they not only prevent the wheat bran from getting digested, but also other things that you eat along with it. That’s why the feces rate goes up so much. The trouble is if they can disrupt a bodily function like digestion, they can also disrupt other functions. These

toxins can actually have a pretty large health impact. There is growing evidence that the impact is very substantial.

There is a really interesting study that just came out of Japan this summer. Children in Japan who eat wheat every day, have bread for breakfast, are almost four IQ points lower than children who eat rice. The nice thing about rice (it’s the only grain that we

recommend in our diet) is that the toxins are destroyed in cooking. Cooked white rice is very low in toxins. That gives us a measure of how much wheat may be impacting

health. That’s interesting, because the IQ difference between Asians and Americans is about four points. It could be just the difference between eating wheat and rice.

There is a lot we don’t know about the health effects of these toxin-containing plants. I think that’s really an area where scientists need to put a lot more effort in

understanding. DM: What typical carbohydrate is in rice? Is it a mixture of, like, typical disaccharides

where there is equal amounts of dextrose and fructose, or is it mostly dextrose? DJ: It’s a starch, so that’s long chains of glucose. It has almost no fructose, which is

another thing we like about it. We recommend having very low levels of fructose in the diet. Get your fructose only from fruits, berries, and vegetables. There are some sugary vegetables that are good, like squashes and things like that, carrots, onions, beets. In

general, fruits and berries are good. Those will give you some fructose, but they don’t have huge amounts of fructose.

What you shouldn’t do is eat things with added table sugar or high-fructose corn syrup – things like soda – because fructose is a toxin. It’s not a nutrient the way glucose is.

DM: What were the specific challenges that you found with the Paleo approach? You already said it was low in toxins, but I suspect it wasn’t the toxin approach. What was its downfall with respect to your individual challenge?

DJ: In my case, the biggest problem was that the way I implemented it was extremely low carb. I tried to get my carbs just from vegetables. I ate a lot of vegetables. I ate

probably two or three pounds a day of vegetables. But what I didn’t realize was vegetables are not a very good source of glucose. Your body does need some glucose.

A typical vegetable has maybe 80 calories per pound of carbs. They are half-glucose, half-fructose. Your digestive tract will consume maybe 40 calories of glucose per pound digesting it. You’ll absorb maybe 40 calories of glucose from the vegetables. But then,

however, the succeeding hours as you digest the plant matter you’ll be consuming those, and so you won’t get any net glucose contribution to your body.

The fructose can be converted to glucose, but often we don’t absorb fructose very well. It can be intercepted by gut bacteria and they use it. That makes them more active, and our immune system have to use some glucose to fight them. So really, vegetables make

a very limited contribution to the body’s glucose balance. If you’re short of glucose that could affect the immune activity, because the immune

system needs glucose in order to kill pathogens. It affects some other things. It give me dry eyes. That’s because mucus, tears, and saliva all need sugars. The key components in mucus are made of glucose bonded to protein. They are about 80

percent glucose, 20 percent protein. If you don’t have enough glucose, you won’t make

a lot of mucus and you’ll get dry eyes. That makes you vulnerable to infections. Also not having much glucose for the immune system makes you vulnerable to infections.

I had certain chronic infections clear up while I was on very low-carb Paleo. I didn’t want to believe that we needed carbs, but gradually I learned that we did. And I found that

when I added more carbs in my health, it would get better; when I took them out, it would get worse. Some of the symptoms were very clear, like the dry eyes. I gradually started to understand the reasons for that – how glucose works, the many things it’s

used for in the body, and how much we needed. Once my wife and I calculated how much we need and we started thinking through

more of that evolutionary perspective of what’s the evolutionary evidence for how many carbs we need, it became clear that I was just eating too few carbohydrates. That was the single biggest…

DM: It’s interesting. We’ve had two previous articles that really highlight the debate that was going on in the Internet between and Dr. Rosedale. Dr. Rosedale – for those not

familiar with him – is really one of my mentors in helping me understand and fully appreciate the importance of insulin, which had a radical and profound massive influence on the improvements I was able to see when I was counseling patients with

their diet. I have enormous respect for him. It’s interesting to see the dialog between the two of you, which I think collectively was

well over a hundred pages of written information and Word documents. It was literally a book. You both have very compelling approaches. I think you slowly won me over from your perspective, because I personally have had some of these challenges, too. I’d like

you to at least go into some depth of what appears to be a paradoxical reaction to too low carbs.

Dr. Rosedale’s approach is that you can’t have too little glucose, because it’s always going to cause some bad side effect. It’s just a matter of relative amount. Your approach at which you have personal experience with – and I have some – that if you go too low,

you have challenges because you need a certain threshold. I love the fact that one of your main evolutionary supports for this was looking at breast milk. What could be a more perfect human food than breast milk? I think it’s up to 40 percent carbohydrate.

But the infants, of course, have different requirements than adult humans. What I noticed when I went too low on carbs (and, just like you, had restricted basically

all my carbohydrates to vegetables, no grains at all and no starchy carbs), it paradoxically would raise my triglycerides. I would notice extreme fatigue when I was working out. It just caused a lot of problems. It actually worsened my kidney function,

too. I proved it for myself that you can go too low on glucose. Largely because of the

evidence that you presented and your review and your experience and the information

you shared, it kind of hit me pretty hard that this is true. I wonder if you can expand on that a little more.

DJ: People need to realize that glucose has a lot of functions in the body. People think of macronutrients as things you burn for energy, but really that’s not their primary

function. If you would recall what I said where we’re meant to survive famines by cannibalizing our own bodies. Really, what your food should do is nourish and build up your body. And then as your cells need energy, they can cannibalize themselves.

For instance, when a cell burns fat, it may pull the fatty acid off of its cell membrane and carry that into the mitochondria to burn. And then at some other time the cell membrane

shrinks, and then when food is available it takes fats from the blood and it rebuilds the cell membrane to the size that it wants to have.

People should think of our bodies as modular elements that our food should be used to build up our bodies, construct our bodies, and then our body should cannibalize itself in order to get energy. Food shouldn’t be considered a source of energy. It should be

considered a source of building up our body. Fat, calorie-wise, fat is almost half of the macronutrients of most cells by weight, but it’s

more than them in calories because it’s calorie-dense. That’s why it’s good to eat a high-fat diet. You get the majority of calories from fat and less from carbs. But carbs are still an important structural element of the body. Over half the proteins in the body need

to be bonded with sugars in order to function. Almost all of the proteins that are in the membranes of cells are glycosylated. They are bonded with carbohydrate.

DM: This isn’t necessarily something detrimental. This is something that is required and highly functional. If you don’t have any, you’re going to have problems.

DJ: That is right. This is essential. If the proteins get joined to these sugars in these parts of the cell near the nucleus called the endoplasmic reticulum and golgi bodies. If they are not properly bonded, the glucose, they’ll be tagged for destruction and

destroyed. So really, our proteins are protein-carbohydrate compounds. They are not pure protein.

DM: Just to interrupt you here for a moment, because that’s an important concept. I didn’t realize that the percentage was so high. I think most physicians in their training were not taught that, but then additionally we’re taught to believe that any glycosylation

of proteins is bad and harmful, because the parameter that we use clinically is the glycosylated hemoglobin to monitor diabetes. The lower, the better – typically. The higher you are, the worst your control. There is this age related proteins. There is this

general perception that glycosylation of proteins is harmful. DJ: You can extrapolate from diabetes, which is a disease where people have too

much glucose and they are being poisoned by it back to normal physiological ranges. The point you raised about glycated hemoglobin, there is actually a mortally minimum

around hemoglobin A1c level of about 5.0. So if you go below that – if you’re hypoglycemic – then mortality rises fairly rapidly.

Like a lot of things in health, there is an optimum, and you can have too little or too much. So, if diabetics have too much – and it’s very good for them to lower their blood

glucose preferably by natural dietary methods not drugs – it’s also possible to get too low. Some of the health problems that diabetics have also can arise from hypoglycemia.

People have trouble regulating their blood glucose, and often getting the hypoglycemic episodes can really damage their health, because they’re not providing enough glucose to the cells when their blood sugar gets very low. You sort of need a balance.

If your health is really good, you may be able to tolerate a very low-carbohydrate diet, particularly if you’re eating a lot of protein. You can manufacture glucose from protein.

There are some people who do tolerate zero carb diets well. The biggest problem is it’s not a robust diet. If you get infections (which will raise your body’s glucose needs), then you can really get into trouble on a zero carb diet. In general, it’s a stressful thing for

your body. If you nourish yourself very close to your body’s nutrient needs, it’s a very low-stress

diet for the body. Your body has very little transformation of the food, so your body can rest a lot. The farther you go away from that, the more your body has to transform what you eat into something different. In order to do that, it has to release a lot of hormones,

whether it’s insulin, to get rid of an excess of glucose, or something like cortisol. Thyroid hormones get adjusted. When you’re low in carbs or protein, the thyroid hormone levels go down.

All kinds of hormonal changes happen when you’re not eating in accordance with your body’s nutritional needs. That has the potential to cause trouble, and it makes you

vulnerable to various pathologies which may disrupt your ability to make all those hormones and respond to them. It’s a riskier way to eat the more you vary from what your body really needs.

DM: Can you comment also on what appears to be a paradoxical response of normally when you lower the amount of carbs and raise the amount of fat, you will optimize your

cholesterol balance and lipoprotein ratios? But when you go too low, you veer from this Goldilocks window that you will actually have sort of the reverse paradoxical effect , and your lipoprotein profiles will start to deteriorate.

DJ: There is a lot of mysteries there that scientists really haven’t explored low-carb diets all that much. Behavior on low-carb diets is different from behavior on high-carb

diets. In physics, we often have these different regimes – like there is a regime where classical physics holds – but then when you go to very small sizes, you need quantum physics. It’s something like that with the low-carb diet. When your carb intake is more

than 30 percent of calories (which is about whatever your body needs), then you got an

excess of carbs you have to get rid of. The biology is totally different than when you’re on a low-carb diet eating less than 30 percent carbs and you need to make extra carbs.

What people have studied generally are people in high-carb diets. Most of the data in the literature is about how lipoproteins – what causes high lipoproteins on high carb

diets. In general, when you’re eating a high-carb diet and you lower your carbs, then your blood cholesterol profile is going to get healthier. People are generally seeing their triglyceride levels go down sharply.

But then as you start going below 25 percent carbs or so, then your body has to adapt to a scarcity of glucose. It does that with some hormonal changes that can also impact

blood lipids. So, for instance, when you’re eating very low-carb, one thing your body does to conserve glucose and protein is it lowers the level of T3 and thyroid hormones. So, that reduces glucose utilization by cells. That’s good. It’s conserving the glucose so

that it can be used for the most important functions, but you have lower thyroid hormone levels.

Thyroid hormone also activates the fat metabolism. It activates LDL receptors, some other things. It’s possible if you’re eating too low-carb to get elevations of blood lipids. I have to say this is sort of an issue we’re still exploring. We did a lot of work on my blog

this year trying to track down why some low-carb diets have high blood lipids. Usually it’s either the thyroid hormone response to too little glucose in the diet, or various micronutrient deficiencies can cause it. Copper deficiency is a common one – selenium,

magnesium can affect it. It’s important to be well-nourished. If people eat very low carb and they let themselves

get malnourished, then they are very likely to have some kind of problems with their lipid profile.

DM: Thank you for explaining that. As you sought to refine your application of the Paleo principles by recognizing that there was this Goldilocks window that you had exceeded and gone below this magical 30 percent to 25 percent of carbs, so you were glucose-

deficient essentially. Was that when you started noticing pretty dramatic improvements? Were there any other revisions that you applied?

DJ: In my case, I found that I really needed to get at least 10 percent of calories from an easily digestible glucose source like a starch like rice or potatoes. I think, in general, a lot of people have had that experience around 200 calories (or 10 percent of calories

is carbs), a lot of the glucose deficiency symptoms go away. But it’s still kind of marginal, and that’s why I recommend 20 percent to 30 percent carbs.

Other factors, it’s really important to be low in omega-6 fats. When you’re eating low-carb, you’re necessarily eating a high-fat diet, and the quality of your fats becomes very important. It’s very important to keep down the level of omega-6 fats, because the

polyunsaturated fats in general become toxic if you get too much. That’s where you really have to avoid all these vegetable oils, because they can be very high in omega-6.

Things like corn oil, safflower oil, soy bean oil – even canola oil – just have too much polyunsaturated fats.

The really good fat sources are either tropical plants like palm oil and coconut oil. Olive oil is pretty good, avocado oil. Tree nut butters are generally good. Macadamia nuts are

great, cashews, almonds or animal fats. In general, just about all animal fats are healthy, but the healthiest ones are the ones that are the lowest in omega-6 ones that come from seafood or from red meat like beef or lamb.

A very good way to get cooking fat is get some beef fat and render it, so that you take out all of the meat and other impurities used to have pure fat. That will be a very

nutritious fat, extremely low in omega-6, especially if it’s a grass-fed animal. And it has some nutrients, so the natural fats will have some phospholipids that are very nutritious like choline and inositol.

In general, animal fats are quite healthy. We tend to use beef fat or clarified butter as cooking oils, or coconut oil, They are the ones we use most in our house.

DM: When I had interviewed Dr. Natasha who advocates pretty similar approaches, she has an introductory GAPS diet, which is really low-carb for awhile. She made a

distinction between fats with respect to plant-based fats and animal-based fats. The plant-based fats she classified mostly as detoxifying, whereas the animal fats were nourishing. I’m wondering if you share similar views or if you have a disagreement with

that position. DJ: I’m not sure I see a difference in – I don’t think I would characterize things that way.

I characterize them more by the nutrients that they digest to – the fatty acid composition and the phospholipid composition. I would say fats that come from organ meats like liver are especially nourishing, because they are very high in phospholipids.

I think animal fats are very low-toxicity, because their biology is very similar to us. Anything that would poison us would poison the animals so that they don’t have toxins

in general. They try to avoid putting toxins in their fat. DM: This would be true for factory animals that are exposed to foods that were largely

contaminated with pesticides? DJ: Yeah. Of course, any animal can be a poison. If you have an unhealthy animal

because it’s been poisoned, some of that poison will be in their body. You do want to eat fat from healthy animals. It’s better to get your food if you can from naturally raised animals. Animals are trying to detoxify themselves.

As long as what they’re fed is reasonably healthy, then we’re sort of through detoxification efforts removed from the toxins, so that the animal itself is trying to

detoxify everything it eats. And then when we eat the animal meat, any toxins that

remain we try to detoxify so our liver tries to clear any toxins. Having it gone through those two filters – the animal liver and our liver – makes it relatively safe.

Plants, they’re an interesting thing. Plants have a kind of toxins themselves. So, they have all these polyphenolic compounds and other things which do have an impact on

our… They go to the liver and they impact the detoxification process there. Plants can have probably hormetic effect, where if you get small doses of these plant toxins then they’ll make your detoxification mechanisms work better. There is some evidence for

that. I’m not sure that I make that a big factor in deciding how much plant food to eat,

because those plant toxins can work both ways. The evidence is really hard to tell. Do the hormetic benefits outweigh the toxic effects? That’s kind of an unsettled question, I would say so. I would eat plants for the nutrition, for the taste. I wouldn’t put too much

emphasis on the detoxification pathways. DM: Another point that Dr. Natasha brings up is the importance of optimizing the gut

ecology. I believe is one of the reasons why yours and the Paleo approach works is because that’s what you’re doing: you’re optimizing this bacterial population though cells as you, of course, know outnumber us 10 to one. Her supposition is that the

bacterial population actually is the most potent detoxification mechanism known to man, and that these toxins that we’re exposed to can be rapidly eliminated through the body by binding to these bacterial cells and then eliminate it in our stool. Obviously, there’s

the need for fermented foods in large quantities as an adjunct to detoxify it. I’m wondering if you could comment on that from your perspective.

DJ: That’s exactly right. Bacteria are very good at detoxifying things. Like I said, plants have a lot of toxins, but the toxin levels are significantly decreased in fermented foods. The bacteria bear the brunt of the toxins and they help digest the toxins while it’s

fermenting. In general, fermented plant foods are more nourishing and less toxic than unfermented plant foods.

We do recommend homemade fermentation of vegetables. It’s something we have started doing this year. It really tastes great, and it’s very good for you. It’s very simple. You put a bunch of vegetables with some water and salt in a closed jar. Leave it in a

cool dark place for a week and then open it up and eat it. It tastes great. It’s definitely the case that having a very healthy population of gut bacteria is really good

for you. There is evolutionary evidence for that, too. If you do something that reduces your gut population – like taking antibiotics – then your immune system relaxes. About 80 percent of our immune cells are located in the gut. They lie in the gut and they try to

maintain a healthy ecology of gut bacteria. One of the ways they do that is they release antimicrobial peptides, which kill bacteria

into the gut. They control how much they release based on the population of bacteria

and the nature of the bacteria you have. The less bacteria you have, the less they release antimicrobial peptides, because they want to let the population grow.

When you take antibiotics, they are releasing very few antimicrobial peptides in the gut, so you’re vulnerable to getting an infection. Any bacteria in your food can enter your

body relatively easily. If you eat too much fiber, then you may have too many bacteria, and your immune system will release a lot of antimicrobial peptides. You’ll have kind of an excess level of inflammation and a warfare going on between bacteria and the

immune system. There is kind of a Goldilocks level of fiber intake which I would say is probably what you

get if you eat maybe a pound of vegetables a day, plus maybe a pound of starches and fruits and berries. So, you kind of want to have a healthy gut. You want to avoid antibiotics if you can. You want to eat healthy plant foods. A lot of the plant foods in

traditional diets, they have a lot of antimicrobial compounds that are good at killing pathogens but that probiotic bacteria don’t mind. A lot of those compounds can help shape the gut flora in a positive way.

For instance, nearly all vegetables have antifungal compounds. If you eat a lot of vegetables, if you eat salads, you’re very unlikely to have say a Candida overgrowth in

the gut or some kind of fungal infection in the gut. But if you never ate vegetables, then you’ll be at risk for that. So, there is a lot of ways that the food we eat shapes our gut ecology. The nature of our gut flora can have a big impact on our health.

DM: Would you subscribe to the notion that there are certain individuals who have a highly imbalanced gut flora dysbiosis, so to speak, and they have many pathogenic

bacteria running around there? When you give them any type of fiber which tends to be more of a non-specific promoter of colonic bacteria – if it’s overwhelmingly pathogenic – you’re going to make your symptoms worse. Actually, fiber could be worse for these

individuals until they optimize their gut flora. DJ: Yeah. That’s exactly right. In fact, I’m going to do a blog post soon on a case study

of this woman who has bipolar disorder, but as long as she doesn’t need any plant foods at all (and that includes vegetables) then she has no symptoms. If she really starves her gut bacteria, then her bipolar disorder basically disappears. There is a lot of

evidence that many of these diseases that are so difficult to treat may be attributable to bad gut bacteria – effectively an infection of the digestive tract.

Actually, I think one of the emerging therapies of this century is probably going to be a method for doing fecal transplants from people that have good gut bacteria into people that have this disturbed flora. They might fast and clear the gut, take antibiotics, and

take something that induces diarrhea to try to clear the gut, and then receive a transplant of somebody else’s feces so that they can pick up all the good gut bacteria from that other person and basically replace their gut flora. That may be a much more

effective treatment for all kinds of mental health issues, digestive tract issues, other kinds of diseases than the treatments that we have right now.

DM: It’s fascinating. Of course the individual would have to commit to a healthy

lifestyle, although they’ll shift their bacteria right back to where it was initially. That seems to hold a lot of promise, and it’s certainly a lot more invasive than any of the traditional transplants that we do. I actually was involved with kidney and corneal

transplants prior to going to medical school and have some familiarity with that. It’s usually not so much corneal but any other organ transplants. They are put in these very potent autoimmune-suppressing drugs, which most experts believe was one of the

major risk factors for shortening Steve Jobs’ life. It’s the drugs – not so much the transplant – that does it.

So, if you can maybe outline some of the other elements of your perfect health approach that have been helpful, because you really put together quite a phenomenal set of recommendations that I think many people would widely benefit from.

DJ: In terms of macronutrients, we talked about carbs. Protein, almost everyone eats pretty close to the optimum, which is around 15 percent of calories may be a bit lower in

some cases or 10 percent. Fats, they should be rich in saturated and monounsaturated fats. The polyunsaturated fat should be balanced between omega-6 and omega-3. It’s good to eat maybe a pound of oily fish per week – like salmon, sardines, and herring –

in order to get omega-3s. We talked about fiber. It’s good to make a lot of the traditional sauces that you’ll find in

old-fashioned cookbooks. It’s good to combine fats with acids like lemon juice or vinegar.

DM: Or from fermented veggies. DJ: That’s right, the fermented vegetables. You’ll start with water and salt, but after a

while the water grows acidic, because you get all these lactic acid-producing bacteria. That lactic acid is very good for you.

And then another very good thing to do is to make bone broth and have soups. We try to get bones every week or two from grass-fed cows usually. We make a bone broth, and then we just flavor it a little differently every day. Have a little different soup. You

can use the broth as a beverage. DM: Is that as your primary meal occasionally?

DJ: Yeah.

DM: How do you balance out the ratios with the bone broth? DJ: I think most people will find that pretty natural. In general, people shouldn’t drink

any calorie-containing beverages like you shouldn’t drink fruit juice or soda or anything

like that. Good beverages would include water, tea, and coffee. We do recommend moderate amounts of wine or so on.

I think for beverages you should also include things like broths, soups, and fermented vegetable grind. You can actually have a lot of liquids in your meal. One of the good

things about making things like stews and soups is that in cooking, often a lot of nutrients will leak out into the cooking water or the cooking oil. If you don’t eat those, then you’re missing out on some of the nutrients, whereas if you’ll be cooking a broth

you have a soup or a stew. One of the things that we make fairly often is Vietnamese broth (Pho), which is sort of a

noodle soup. You can put all kinds of different ingredients in it. You can use a bone broth as a base for that.

The good thing about a bone broth it gives you two kinds of nutrients that you may not easily get in other places. It gives you minerals from the bone. When you cook the bones in water – especially with some acidic water – then you’ll see the bone soften. As

the broth gets thicker, the bone gets softer and lighter. The other thing besides minerals that is being pulled out of the bones are the collagen

matrix that the bone is made of. That’s very important. Collagen makes up about 30 percent of all the proteins in your body. It’s about 15 percent of the dry weight of your body. It’s a big component of your body. It’s constantly getting broken down and then

rebuilt especially in disease. There is a lot of pathogens that have developed ways to break down your extracellular matrix. You constantly need to rebuild it, and you need a very healthy extracellular matrix in order to be healthy and function optimally.

One of the best ways you can promote that is by eating these broths. I would say things like bone broths, fermented vegetables, seaweeds, and seafood. Those are some of the

most underrepresented but very important foods in typical modern diets. DM: I agree, but I’m seeking to understand the practical application of the bone broth.

Is this something you use with other items in your meal, or would this be the primary food at your meal?

DJ: Typically, it would be a side dish. We’ll have a bowl of soup. We have cooked the broth just with the bones and water, and then we might add a few things like, say, tomatoes and maybe a little meat maybe an egg yolk and some flavorings and have a

little soup and maybe a different flavor of soup every day. It might just be seaweed like a miso soup. This is very common in Asia. Basically, these kinds of soups are the beverage with the meal in most Asian meals. That’s actually a very healthy way to

obtain water and other nutrients. DM: Thanks for the clarification. There are some health experts who subscribe to the

notion that you shouldn’t have any fluids with your meals, because that dilutes the digestive juices and your enzyme concentration and your ability to digest the food.

DJ: First of all, these soups are relatively thick compared to drinking water. I think if you

have a well-functioning digestive system, that doesn’t matter. If you’re having difficulty generating sufficient stomach acid, then that could be a factor. If you’re taking some of these drugs that suppress stomach acid production or if you have an H. pylori infection

that suppresses stomach acid (or if you don’t eat enough salt and you can’t make stomach acid because you have a chlorine deficiency or some other kind of dysfunction), then that could be an issue.

But in general, stomachs are pretty good at making enough acid that digest their food. So, the body senses the pH in the stomach and tries to make enough acid to make

things digest properly. If somebody is having that problem, I would rather recommend trying to fix the underlying cause of stomach acid deficiency rather than just avoiding water with meals.

DM: I would agree. It seems to be the solution, at least for my experience: to optimize their gut flora (if they have their gut floras optimized, then it probably is not going to be

much of an issue) and to really apply the typical universal recommendation to an optimal healthy diet, which is to listen to your body. If you’re thirsty at a meal, then drink some water. That makes perfect sense.

I also want to in a previous discussion you had mentioned the fact that 50 percent of Americans’ diet is carbohydrate. For some strange reason, I had never heard that

before. Or if I had heard it, I totally forgot. It’s a profound simple statement, but it has enormous impact. I had epiphanies, and the lights went off when you said that, because I came to appreciate that we still are suffering in most part from the fallout from the low-

fat myth in the 50s with Ancel Keys and the commonly held belief that animal fats are unhealthy.

If you take fat out of the diet, you have to replace it with something. So, the only thing you could really replace it with is carbohydrate, because for whatever reason people don’t have much more than the 15 percent to 20 percent of protein. It’s not natural, but

some people do. Maybe you can talk about that, too – what happens like if you’re a weight trainer and you start going 40 percent to 50 percent protein – because I think there are some problems with that. Maybe you can talk about that now, and we’ll go

about the fat component. What are the challenges with having too much protein? Because you can do it, you can do anything pretty much if you have a strong will and discipline.

DJ: It tends not to taste very good. That’s one thing: your brain has a very strong food reward element to it. It really wants you to eat very close to 15 percent of calories as

protein. Lean meat will be very distasteful to people once they have enough protein. But you can force yourself to do it. A lot of bodybuilders do under the mistaken impression of more dietary protein means more muscle. It does, but only up to a certain point – only

up to maybe 600 protein calories a day, which is at most 30 percent of calories for a typical person.

The trouble with large amounts of protein, there is really two problems. The main one is

that amino acids come with nitrogen. We can’t burn the nitrogen. In order to metabolize protein, it’s usually converted to glucose, and that releases nitrogen which starts out as ammonia. Ammonia is quite toxic. People are familiar with ammonia cleaning products

and they wouldn’t want to drink any of those. If you’re consuming a lot of protein in order to get rid of it, it has to be metabolized, and

it releases a lot of ammonia in the body. The ammonia can be converted to urea and uric acid and disposed off that way. The ability to make urea, which is the safe way to dispose of it, is limited. The liver has only limited capacity. It can dispose of that most in

the 800 calories a day in urea. When you’re eating more than maybe 600 calories of protein, you’re starting to get a buildup of ammonia in your body, and it has toxic effects.

There are some other potential problems with high protein. The amino acid glutamine can be digested by gut bacteria, and that can create a gut dysbiosis if you eat way too much protein for too long. There is also some potential for metabolic problems,

especially in young children. You don’t want to feed very young children too much protein. Breast milk is only 7 percent protein. That’s a pretty good clue. If you feed very young children too much protein, then they’ll tend to have health problems later on.

They are more likely to become obese or have some other issues. During pregnancy, you don’t want too much protein either.

There are various problems that can develop. In general for adults, a safe protein range is between about 200 calories to 600 calories a day. Most people will eat 300 to 400, and that’s a very healthy range.

DM: Sort of just by listening to your body, we’ll arrive at the right percentage of protein. The real challenge is to figure out the percentage of carbs versus fat. As you mentioned

previously, 50 percent of most Americans are consuming carbohydrates. From your research and review of the literature, you believe that it should be closer to 30 percent – maybe 25 percent, maybe as low as 20 percent – but certainly not lower than 20

percent. So then, the challenge becomes: as you’re removing those carbohydrates, what do you replace it with?

It appears to me it’s a pretty simple solution: you just have to replace it with healthy fats. That’s the big issue. Cut out the bad carbs, take out the ones with the toxins, and make sure you have enough of the good carbs – the vegetables and the appropriate starchy

carbs – and replace with healthy fats (which is not an excess of the omega-6 plant oils, which can cause a disruption of the omega-6 to omega-3 ratios), and get these healthy animal fats and saturated fats. If you do that, your body has the building blocks and the

fundamental tools it needs to spontaneously just revert to health and pretty much resolve most nearly any disease you can think of.

DJ: That’s right. It’s amazing what your body can do when you give it the right tools to rebuild itself. One thing I think it’s good to emphasize is people wonder what the right

ratio of fat to carbs or protein is. What you’ll find as the best ratio is usually one that tastes the best. A good rule of thumb is that when you’re eating protein, if it should taste

kind of moist. Good rule of thumb is aim for close to two-thirds of calories from fat, one-third of calories from carb or protein. That’s pretty much if you look at any fatty meats that taste kind of moist.

The composition of an egg is 68 percent fat, 32 percent protein. The composition of like a rib eye steak reasonably fatty is in that vicinity. If you put butter or sour cream on a big

potato, you’ll probably get about two-thirds fat, one-third carbs. If you just aim to mix fat with your carbs and fat with your protein – if they taste good to you – then you’ll have a very good macronutrient ratio in your whole diet. Whereas if you’re too low in fat, like

you’re eating lean meats like chicken breast, then it will kind of taste dry and less appetizing.

It’s fairly simple to actually optimize your macronutrient ratios. You just make good-tasting food, like classic French cooking you find in a Julia Child cookbook. It’s usually just about perfect.

DM: It seems one of the key principles here is to cut down those carbs and replace it with healthy fat. But the practical way you just referenced is to combine the fat with your

protein and your carbs. I found personally that having a source of raw, organic grass-fed butter is profoundly useful. I go through probably a pound of butter a week; I apply it pretty most of my meals. I just melt it over a very low temperature until it just makes the

transition to a liquid and pour it over. It’s just phenomenal, the taste of the food. It’s an easy way to get animal fat, but you could also get it… It’s more of a challenge

when you start to do this, because you have to go to the butcher and you’ve a little more work with it. You get the fat that lines the inside of the belly, the lamb, either beef or pork – you can melt that and create this lard and do the same thing, especially with your

soups and your vegetables, and roast them with those. DJ: Those are tremendous. Butter is tremendous. It’s very healthy. If you enjoy butter,

that’s a great one to stick with that will serve you well. DM: Those listening who may not have access to that (and certainly in their grocery

store, unless you’re in California): Weston Price has a number of chapters. You can go to their website, and you can contact one of their chapters. They’re pretty much all over the country. They typically have access and have networked with the farmers, the local

farmers who are growing these and producing it, and can hook you up with that and do it in a legal way.

That’s a resource, because many times the devil is in the details. We can come up with these great generic philosophical recommendations, but people have to apply them. And that’s a useful tool that people can use – a very good resource.

DJ: That’s right. We have farmer’s markets around here frequently. We go to them. That’s how we get our beef bones and organ meats. There is also a lot of supermarkets

now stocking good organic dairy and other things. Around here we have Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods. Especially if you live in a city, I’m sure you can find things and stuff.

DM: One of the other elements that the perfect health diet addresses is the mineral deficiencies, that we have both macro and micronutrient mineral deficiencies. Because my guess is this: it is related to the rapidly decreasing quality of the soil nutrition, which

minimizes the transfer of these nutrients to the foods that we typically eat, both plant and animal. I’m wondering if you could comment on that now.

DJ: Like I said, the strategy of our book was we wanted to go through with every nutrient and figure out how to optimize the amount that you get of it. One of the things we found that was a little surprising to me when we did the research was that most

people actually get pretty good amounts of most vitamins. The exceptions are sort of vitamin D, because people don’t go out in the sun enough, and vitamin K, because they don’t eat enough animal fats.

DM: Would that be K1 or K2?

DJ: K2. The things people are really deficient in their minerals. Mineral deficiencies are just so widespread.

The single biggest reason is the treatment of water. Water treatment, it’s been a tremendous boon for public health. It’s gotten all these microbes out of our water. The water is much safer from that perspective, but the treatment does remove all the

minerals. And water was traditionally the leading source of a lot of minerals in the diet. DM: You have evidence in the literature to support to that? I have not really heard that

before, but you’re convinced of that. DJ: Absolutely, especially for magnesium, for instance. So, magnesium deficiency is

extremely widespread. It’s an extremely important nutrient. Water was traditionally the biggest source of magnesium in diets. That’s number one reason why people are deficient in minerals.

The other one you mentioned: repeated agriculture, especially with the same crops, tends to deplete the soil with minerals. If they are not restored through fertilizers, then

the plant foods are going to be deficient in minerals. Actually, that’s a big problem for a lot of farms. The crops live at sort of the edge of nutrient deficiencies. Certain minerals – the mineral content of our plant foods has diminished significantly.

There was a British study that found that in British plant foods, the levels of certain minerals have gone down by up to like 75 percent over the last century. That also

affects the mineral levels in the animal foods that are fed those agriculturally produced plants. It’s a major problem.

It’s one of the things that’s actually in some ways a bigger problem for organic farmers

than for others, because the organic rules don’t use fertilizer. So, it’s hard for them to keep the soils full up with minerals. It’s a serious problem for any agriculturally produced food.

We do need agriculture to feed a world of seven billion people. It’s a problem. I think, in general, it’s very difficult for people to get enough minerals without supplementing with

minerals. You should at least take a multi-mineral supplement daily. It can be as part of your multivitamin. But if you wanted to skip the vitamin part, just take the multi-mineral. You could do that, too; I also recommend specific supplementation of certain minerals

that are extremely important, like magnesium, selenium, iodine. Potentially, copper can be deficient. Copper needs to be in balance. So, it can be problem. It’s important to take good care of your mineral status.

DM: Can you mention some of the doses that you would recommend.

DJ: Magnesium (200 milligrams a day) supplementation is pretty good. Usually a 200 to 400 milligram supplementation will get people into the optimal range. You do get some in food. Calcium – it’s usually not necessary to supplement, but I happen to take a

multi-mineral that has like 200 milligrams. That’s pretty good. Selenium – about 200 micrograms a day – is good in a supplemental form. Iodine – it’s good to get some.

There is actually a very broad range that’s healthy. If you choose to go to higher doses, then you need to build up smaller. I think it’s actually good to do that, but you should take your time in getting up to higher doses. We talk in both the book and on the blog

about how to do that. Those are probably the most important ones. Some other ones are good, too. I think a little bit of chromium is good.

Basically, you just want to avoid deficiencies. If you eat seafood and seaweed, sea vegetables, and liver, those things (and if you eat bone broths), those things will help improve your mineral status, too.

DM: I think you have really provided us with a wealth of great knowledge and information. The really wonderful element of what you bring to the table and offer is that

you’re still relatively young. You’ve got an amazing mind. You’re going to be contributing to this area of knowledge in the future. You’ve got a resource out there now, your book, The Perfect Health Diet, and a website

and a blog. If people are interested in connecting with you or learning more about your work or continue to be updated, what are your recommendations for them?

DJ: Come visit our blog. It’s PerfectHealthDiet.com. We do a food post, a cooking recipe post, once a week. We do usually a survey of other interesting things on the web

once a week. We usually try to do one, sometimes two, science posts a week. Our book is most often looking into the diseases and how can we use diet and nutrition to help

heal the disease. That’s a big focus, because both my wife and I had chronic diseases, and diet and nutrition is really what helped us overcome them. We’re really trying to

prove that natural healing methods built around dieting, nutrition are extremely important for healing disease and help other people cure their own disease through the same kind of exploratory process that we use.

We’re really hoping to advance the science and the science of heal ing, of medicine, and sort of integrate dietary nutritional science with medical practice.

And then I do recommend our book. It’s really a systematic overview of the whole issue. On the blog, we tend to go into more details. In the blog, we’re trying to advance

knowledge, create sort of do science, create new knowledge. The book is kind of an overview of all the foundations; that’s a good thing to do. We’re working on a cookbook. If you don’t like science and you just want some practical guidance on how to cook and

what to eat, that should be a really good book. We’re working on that. Hopefully it will be out by the end of this coming year.

DM: Terrific. I greatly appreciate what you do. I personally subscribe to your blogs. For those who have not done that, many people have either an iPhone or an iPad, and you can use Flipboard, which is probably in my view one of the best apps in the entire iOS

operating system. You just use Flipboard, you can type in your name and your blog will appear, and then you could use Flipboard to read your blog in a regular basis. It makes it easy and convenient. I recommend doing that if you have an interest in this.

I want to also extend my deep appreciation for all you’ve done and all you will continue to do, specifically for helping me develop the appreciation that there is this minimum

glucose threshold, which if you go below you’re likely going to suffer some complication . I think that’s really an important concept that is not widely understood or appreciated . Really, you as one of the pioneers in helping people understand that through your own

experience. Thank you for doing that. Thank you for all you will do. DJ: Thank you very much.

DM: It’s been a great pleasure. We look forward to connecting with you in the future.

DJ: Great.