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Transcript
- 02:07 About Jonny Bowden
- 11:22 The Great Cholesterol Myth
- 16:17 “Smart Fat”
- 30:27 The 10-5-5 Program
- 34:56 The Truth about Fat Loss Summit
- 38:30 The Most Pressing Health Issue in the World Today
- 43:01 Where to Find Jonny Bowden
Wendy Myers: Hello! My name is Wendy Myers. Welcome to the Live to 110 Podcast. You can find me at myersdetox.com. You can find this video podcast on the corresponding blog post on my website or on my YouTube channel, WendyMyers.
Today, we’re talking to Jonny Bowden, PhD. He was such an interesting interview. He has so much energy and enthusiasm. I loved interviewing him. He’s really an interesting character. He has a new book out called Smart Fat. And we’re going to be talking today on the podcast about fat and how a lot of things you know about fat may not be quite right. We’re going to definitely go over all those low fat foods and why they’re not good for you, why eating a low fat diet is not healthy for you, why you need to eat fat to in fact lose weight. So, very, very interesting podcast.
We’re going to be talking about what exactly “smart fat” is, his Smart Fat program. And he’s also hosting a Truth about Fat Loss Summit. You can get a link to that in the blog post below. Very interesting summit with three experts on fat. It’s going to be really, really interesting with top health celebrities, top authorities on fat and busting all those myths about fat. I only said fat about a thousand times.
But first, we have to do the disclaimer. Please keep in mind that this program is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or health condition and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. The Live to 110 Podcast is solely informational in nature. Please consult your healthcare practitioner before engaging in anything that we suggest today on the show.
Our guest, Jonny Bowden, PhD, CNS, also known as the Nutrition Myth-Buster is a nationally known expert on weight loss, nutrition and health. He is a board certified nutritionist with a master’s degree in psychology and the author of 14 books on health, healing, food and longevity, including three bestsellers, The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth—which I’ve bought before, a long, long time ago—Living Low Carb and The Great Cholesterol Myth, co-authored by Stephen Sinatra, a well-known cardiologist.
He also has earned six national certifications in personal training and exercise. He’s board certified by the American College of Nutrition, a member of the prestigious American Society for Nutrition and is a much in-demand speaker at conferences and events across the country.
Wendy Myers: Can you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and your background?
Jonny Bowden: Sure! Well, I came to this field, it’s a second career for me. I was a professional pianist and conductor and musician. I was as out of shape and unhealthy as you might imagine as somebody who came up in the sex, drugs and rock n’ roll era of Woodstock would be. I thought a healthy breakfast was coffee and an aspirin and around 11 o’clock in the morning. So, I was pretty much of a hot mess in terms of my health.
And with not much of an interest in health or nutrition or any of this stuff, I was a smoker. I’m addicted. Everybody knows this already. It’s pretty common. I’ve been addicted to every drug in the PDR (Physician’s Desk Reference). If it’s something bad for you, I’ve probably done it. And that has served me very well in my work (which we’ll get to in a second).
So, in the late ‘80s, I’m traveling around the country, conducting shows, doing off-Broadway and Broadway, touring companies. You get really bored. The actors, it’s their job to stay in shape. So these guys, men and women, they knew what to do in the gym. They knew what to do with weights. And one day, out of total boredom, I just said to one of the actors, “Mike, teach me how to lift these weights things. Maybe I’ll try to lose some of these belly.” If you look back at pictures of me, I look probably 20 years older than I look now.
So, I began lifting weights. And I, like many people who came to a career in health and fitness as a second calling, got really bitten by the bug and became something of a zealot. I just started to see the changes that went on in my own body. I saw the weight come off. My energy improved.
And I was not, Wendy, one of these people who had an epiphany and changed their life. I was the guy that would go to the gym, do a couple of sets in the bench press and go out and smoke a cigarette in between sets. So, it was a long process to change all these different things—give up drugs, cigarettes and alcohol.
And as I began to do this, I began to see as an experiment to myself what was possible by changing one’s diet and lifestyle choices, gradually, very gradually—and I point out this was a couple of year process—I really just became a zealot.
And being a kind of middle class Jewish New Yorker, academically-oriented, over-achieving, the first thing I thought of was, “I wonder if I could get a degree in this stuff” because you immediately want to find some kind of credential that makes what you’re learning authentic or respected. I was an education junkie. Anywhere, I had a master’s degree in psychology, a bachelor’s in music. And so I started collecting certifications as a personal trainer.
So, when I got one, I said, “This is phenomenal. I love this stuff. I can go on another one.” And I ultimately collected six of them.
This is still stuff that I’m still doing as a hobby. I’m thinking to myself, “Boy! Getting certified in personal training and aerobics, that would look really good on a Broadway [inaudible 00:05:56]. That’s really sexy like, ‘In addition to being a conductor, he’s also a well-known…’”
And so I kind of did it for those reasons. I was still able to balance my music career with my newfound interest in nutrition and fitness.
And as it turned out, it was 1990, and there was this new gym that was opening in New York City. Nobody had ever heard of it. It looked really sexy and classy and had beautiful signs. It was called Equinox. I walk into this tiny, little office on Amsterdam Avenue in New York City where they’re putting it together and hiring—it says “hiring trainers”—I walk in with not one day of experience in my life, but six certifications, I go, “I’m a personal trainer. I’d like to work here,” and for whatever reason, God only knows, they hired me.
I started at Equinox, the very first club they ever opened. It was a small family business at the time. Everybody listening to this probably knows it’s one of the biggest and most prestigious chains in America. The small family sold that for about $250 million in the late ‘90s. I was a floor trainer at Equinox, I rose to become the dean of the Equinox Fitness Training Institute which is kind of the model for how we train trainers in America these days in almost every gym. And I just love this stuff.
Slowly, I kind of realized I’m a lot better at this than I am—I was successful as a musician. I made my living. I wasn’t aspiring. But there were a lot of people a lot better at that than me. And I was pretty good at this.
And because I was a little older when I started and because I had a background in writing—I had been a writer all my life, and an educator—I kind of rose in the ranks pretty quickly. Equinox started using me as a communicator, as a spokesperson. I started writing. One of my clients was the editor-in-chief of Fitness Magazine and she brought me on as a contributing editor. I started writing for iVillage. I got my first book deal in 2000 and wrote a book that nobody ever read except my girlfriend and my mother because it came out the day after 9/11.
Wendy Myers: Oh, no!
Jonny Bowden: It’s just one of those things.
But I kind of changed careers and became a personal trainer. And everything I knew about nutrition, Wendy, I learned from the God-awful American Dietetic Association which was pretty much responsible for teaching nutrition to personal trainers. They gave us the same, old “low fat, high carb” crap, all the message that we’ve been given for the last 40 years. And I, and everyone else knew, swallowed it—hook, line and sinker.
And I was one of those guys—just to tell you where I came from—who would order an egg white omelet. And if there was even a little bit of yolk, I’d send it back because I just knew if I ate that yolk, I was going to get heart disease. It’s going to increase my cholesterol.
So, I was a true believer.
Early ‘90s, Equinox hosts a lecture from an unknown biochemist who had just published a book and he decided to come and do a speaking tour to the people, professionals in the health field. We were hosting this talk from a man named Dr. Barry Sears.
Now, Barry Sears is the author of—he created the Zone Empire. The book was called The Zone. It was his first of a beautiful series of books, The Zone Diet. There’s a hundred of them—Anti-Aging Zone, The Omega Zone.
Barry spoke and he had a relatively revolutionary concept. He said, “This is not all about calories. This is not all about exercise. Food is information. Food has a hormonal effect. We need to look at not just calories, but the effect those calories have on our hormones which really are what run the show when it comes to weight loss, fat-burning, all the things that you guys all care about. It’s not being driven by calories. It’s certainly not being driven by a high carb/low fat diet. It is, in fact, being driven by hormones. And we need to adjust our diet in order to have a beneficial hormonal environment where fat loss is actually possible.”
Well, this flew in the face of everything we had heard—everything. And I remember going up to him afterwards and saying, “Dr. Sears,” I said, “My God! If what you’re saying is true, then everybody else is wrong.” And I don’t know if you know Barry Sears, but he’s not lacking in confidence. He looked at me smilingly and benevolently and he said, “That’s exactly right. Everybody else is wrong.” And that started a lifelong friendship that I still have with Barry to this day. I just interviewed him recently for my summit. He wrote the introduction to my first book. And that was the beginning of the opening of my eyes and my “emperor’s new clothes” moment when I realized what we have been taught by the American Dietetic Association was nonsense, and I began investigating this on my own.
Now, that led me to actually realize I didn’t know as much about nutrition as I thought, and I went back to school. First, I became a CN, a certified nutritionist. Ultimately, I went back and got a PhD in nutrition and got certified by the American College of Nutrition. I stopped teaching bench presses and started doing nutrition. The first book led to another. And now, here we are, 15 books later, and I have devoted probably most of my career to just busting the myths that we’ve been told by all of these establishments, what we call the diet-dictocrats who have all the answers, except they were all wrong.
Wendy Myers: Yes. The typical thing you hear in the media is to eat less fat. All the foods in the grocery store say “less fat,” “2% fat,” et cetera, et cetera. Why do we actually need to eat more fat?
Jonny Bowden: Well, that’s the subject of my follow-up book to The Great Cholesterol Myth which is called Smart Fat. When we took fat out of our diets—it’s around the mid-80s when that became the accepted policy. We talk about this, by the way, in The Great Cholesterol Myth because fat and cholesterol are the Bonnie & Clyde of dietary villains as far as most of America is concerned. It’s impossible to talk about one without the other.
I mean, we’re warned off of fat because it supposedly raises cholesterol—that’s a whole other subject—and cholesterol supposedly causes heart diseases. So, one of the reasons that we’re so afraid of fat is the connection to cholesterol and heart disease.
If that connection is not so—and that’s exactly the subject of The Great Cholesterol Myth, it is not so—then the dietary guidelines of the past 40 years crumble like a house of cards.
So, we’ve been warned off fat because of its supposed relationship to cholesterol and cholesterol’s supposed relationship to heart disease, number one, and also, because of this kind of notion that we humans are kind of pre-wired to think like “You eat the heart of a lion, you get brave like a lion… you eat that, what happens? You get that.” So, we’ve got these twin myths that eating fat makes you fat—absolutely untrue—and eating fat will give you heart disease—also absolutely untrue. And those are the two main reasons that we got started on this crazy low-fat thing in the first place.
Then what happens is these things take on a life of its own. Now, you’ve got billions of dollars put into low fat foods, into lowering cholesteron and to statin drugs. And it becomes a whole big oceanliner that’s very difficult to turn around. But that’s the kind of progress that we’re making. And it’s certainly not just me. It’s all the people who have called BS on cholesterol and fat and saturated fat and all the demons in the diet and we’re trying—the mission is to try to refocus our health capital on the things that really cause obesity, diabetes and heart disease. And they ain’t fat.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, it’s about money. All the big food companies, big agra and big pharma, they’re all in collusion to make us think cholesterol is bad. We’ve got to do everything we can to lower it. Take drugs. Fat is bad. Eat all these processed foods with reduced fat. It’s just all about money.
Jonny Bowden: Well, I try to not sound like a conspiracy theorist. I don’t necessarily think all these are bad people, that every doctor who puts you in a statin drug is necessarily a bad guy. They are marketed to very effectively by the pharmaceutical companies. They are harassed. They don’t have a lot of time to spend with patients. They get six to seven minutes. Most of their time is spent doing paperwork. They don’t have the easiest job either. And they’ve got these perky, little pharm reps who come to their office with samples and graphs and statistics. It becomes pretty hard to resist this information as it’s passed on.
So, I don’t think that all the doctors and scientists got together like the Dick Cheney Energy Committee in secret and said, “Let’s screw up the American public. Let’s all tell them to stay away from fat. And let’s all put them on cholesterol meds.” I don’t think it happens like that.
But what I think happens is information, maybe even with the best of intention, gets into the zeitgeist. It becomes kind of conventional wisdom. People start to adapt it. All of a sudden, it becomes [ratified] in recommendations. The American Diabetes Association, The American Heart Association. And it becomes evidence-based medicine and everybody is afraid to deviate from it.
And I don’t necessarily think it’s because of bad faith or conspiracy. It’s kind of the way ideas get a hold.
And like I said on Dr. Oz, he asked me, “Well, why do you think such smart people still believe this stuff?” and I said, “Dr. Oz, if you went back a couple of thousand years, you would have the smartest scientist and the smartest people on earth all convinced that the earth is fat. I don’t know how these ideas stay around and what changes them. But our human history is filled with this stuff. The sun actually rotates around the earth. Revolution when we found out that wasn’t true. High carb diets are healthy. Wrong! This is the revolution in that.”
We’re finding out cholesterol doesn’t cause heart disease. Fat doesn’t make you fat. And the dietary direction that we have been pointed for the past 40 years is dietary death. And you’re seeing the result of it. Don’t take my word for it. As I’ve said, we live in California, I just say, “Go to Disneyland and look around.” This is not the template that people were designed to be in. This is not being 100 lbs. overweight walking around with a Diet Coke in one hand and some terrible junk food hotdog in the other. This is not the energy level we were meant to have. This is not our birth right. We have been misled. And it is time to set the record straight about fat, cholesterol and diet.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. And so you’re referring to people who are overweight. Can eating more fat help you to, in fact, lose weight?
Jonny Bowden: Yeah. The sad part about the whole overweight mythology is that it’s very victimizing. And people who are overweight are, really, one of the last victims in which—you know, it’s still okay for comedians to make fat jokes. It’s still okay for people who would never dream doing a racial epithet or an ethnic epithet will make jokes about fat people, “Well, they’re slovenly. They’re greedy. They don’t have any self-control,” when, in fact, we now know that what makes people fat is a complex interaction of hormones and metabolism and the microbiome and hormone disruptors in the environment and in the food supply. There are so many other factors.
And this notion that people are just not following the advice, “What’s the matter with them? They’re so greedy. They can’t control themselves” is not only disempowering, but it is so sad. We will look back on it 50 years from now when we’ve sorted all these out and go, “Oh, my God! What were they thinking?”
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: And so, your book is called Smart Fat. What exactly do you mean by “smart fat?”
Jonny Bowden: Well, these are fats that in good human trials have been shown to have distinctive health benefits—the most obvious would be fish oil, olive oil. These are fats that we know are associated with good health outcomes from many, many studies ranging back over the years. So, smart fats are the ones we want you to specifically include in your diet.
But there’s another category called ‘neutral fats’ which actually do no harm. They may not yet be shown to have a specific health benefit, but they certainly don’t harm you. And these are some of the fats that we’ve demonized—the saturated fats that comes from grass-fed beef, for example, which is very, very different than the fat that comes from factory-farmed beef. That’s a perfectly neutral, wonderful fat. I believe that in a short time, we will have enough evidence to say that’s actually a smart fat and it does a lot of good things. There are people in the space right now like Dr. Perlmutter who will tell you that right now.
But we’re willing to say, “Okay, let’s at least admit that this stuff doesn’t harm you in one drop.” We do not want to say that it’s a smart fat, that you should make an effort to get more of them in your diet. Okay, I’m okay with that. But for God’s sake, let’s not demonize it.
So, the smart fats are the ones that we know are beneficial. I personally—and I don’t know that my co-author would necessarily agree with this. He’s a little more conservative than I am. But I would include Malaysian palm oil as a smart fat. That’s that red, delicious oil that is so neglected because it’s a saturated fat. But actually, the reason it’s red is because it contains all these carotenoids and all these tocotrienols which are really great compounds.
The bad fats, interestingly enough—and this is the notion that was so hard to really attack in smart fat, to get people to understand this—there is good fat and bad fat. It just doesn’t divide along the metric that we all think it does.
We all think that bad fat—if you ask the average person, even an educated person who reads about nutrition, you say, “What’s bad fat?” they’re going to say, “Well, saturated fats… animal products… trans fats.” Well, they’re right about the trans fats, but they’re wrong about the animal products and saturated fats.
And if you ask them what are good fats, they’re going to say vegetable oils. Well, they’re wrong about that too, and here’s why.
What makes a fat good or bad is whether or not it’s toxic—pure and simple. That’s the only metric that matters. Is the fat toxic?
Now, here’s what we mean by that.
Every mammal on the planet—you, me, the monkeys, the dogs, the cats, anything, any mammal—stores toxins in their fat. If you take calves and you raise them in this horrific environment known as a feed lot farm, what they call CAFO’s, confined animal feeding operations—theese are vast multi-acre areas in which cows are raised in tiny, little stools. They’re force fed, number one, grain. And grain is not their natural diet. It makes their stomachs acid. Now, we need to give them more antibiotics. In addition to the antibiotics that fatten them up, they need antibiotics just not to get sick because of the conditions they live in and the food they’re forced to eat.
All of the pesticides of that crappy grain gets stored in their fat. The antibiotics get stored in their fat. The steroids that they are given to grow faster and get fatter, stored in their fat. The bovine growth hormone, stored in their fat. Well, that fat is a toxic waste dump but not because it’s saturated and not because it comes from an animal.
I’ll give you an example. Here in California where you and I live, we had an e. coli scare a couple of years ago. I don’t know if you remember that. It was traced to a crop of spinach. At one point, you couldn’t go into a Subway sandwich stop and get spinach. It had all been recalled.
Not one health professional went on the air and said, “Guys, spinach is bad for you.” Everybody intuitively understood that a crop had been contaminated. It’s a great vegetable. Are you kidding me? But what happened is this particular crop got contaminated and it wound up in all the supermarkets, and they had to recall it.
Well, that’s the way to think about the animal fat. It’s not the animals. You get grass-fed meat that was raised on pasture, never been fed an antibiotic or a steroid or a hormone or the pesticides in the grain that they don’t eat, then there’s no reason to avoid that at all.
When I buy grass-fed meat at the farmer’s market and they say, “They want the lean kind?” No! Bring on the fat. It makes it tastes better, and there’s nothing in it that’s bad. Untrue with factory-farmed meat. If factory-farmed meat was the only meat available to me, I’d become a vegetarian—and I am very far from being a vegetarian.
So, we need to understand the toxicity is what makes fat bad, not whether it comes from an animal or a vegetable.
Now, the other part of the myth of bad fat is that vegetable oils are good for us. Here’s the problem. We humans make both inflammatory and anti-inflammatory compounds in our body. Both are necessary. People always say to me, “Well, why do we need inflammatory compounds?” Well, think about the last time you got a splinter or you got an infection or you got a fever. What happens is inflammation is part of the body’s healing response. We need to be able to send these inflammatory cytokines to the area in which there’s been a puncture wound or an injury to prevent the microbe from getting a hold, from infection from getting started. So, we need the ability to make inflammatory compounds.
We also need, obviously, the ability to make anti-inflammatory compounds. And we make these compounds, both inflammatory and anti-inflammatory, out of fat.
The omega-6 fats which are found in vegetable oil, all the stuff we’ve been told to eat—corn or safflower or sunflower or canola—all of these stuff is high in omega-6. It’s pro-inflammatory. Omega-3’s are pro anti-inflammatory.
So, the omega-3’s are anti-inflammatory, the omega-6’s are inflammatory. We need a balance of about 1:1. We are currently consuming between 16:1 and 25:1 in favor of these stupid vegetable oils that are processed [inaudible 00:23:23]. They have nothing of value left in them and are very pro-inflammatory. And then, we wonder why inflammation is at the heart of every major disease and why we’re seeing such an epidemic of it. It’s partly because we’re following this idiotic advice to consume more vegetable oil and less saturated fat.
It’s not that vegetable oil is always bad. It’s that the amount that we’re consuming is so massive compared to the anti-inflammatory omega-3’s that were completely out of whack. We need an oil change. We need to go back to some good, healthy, neutral saturated fats—some good saturated fats like coconut oil, which is a smart fat, Malaysian palm oil, grass-fed butter, all of these great fats that we can use to balance all of these inflammatory omega-6 that has taken over our diet.
Wendy Myers: Yeah! And I read that the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 should be about 1:1 or 1:2. And now it’s 1:25.
Jonny Bowden: That’s what I’m saying. That’s exactly right.
Wendy Myers: It’s so out-of-whack witho your natural diet and that’s why we’re all sick.
Jonny Bowden: That’s exactly right.
Wendy Myers: So, let’s talk about heart disease. The status quo thinking is that saturated fats lead to heart disease. How do you dispel that myth in your book, Smart Fat ?
Jonny Bowden: Well, I didn’t dispel it actually. The research dispelled it. In the last five years, there had been at least—I think there’s really probably three or four, but there are two that I know of and can quote right away—two major meta-analysis that actually looked at exactly this question.
I think the best way to explain this is I have some great visuals that I use when I’m lecturing about this. I’m trying to put it in verbal terms. It’s very hard to study people for 30 years—to study their diet, to do a randomized controlled trial—and see how many people diet at the end of 30 years.
And when you’re looking at heart disease, that’s just what you really care about. Cholesterol is just a marker. And people believe that it’s a great marker for heart disease. We talk in the book about why it’s a terrible marker for heart disease. Half the people admitted to hospitals for cardiovascular disease of any kind have perfectly normal cholesterol. So, it’s a lousy marker, but we think it’s a great marker.
So, cholesterol has become kind of a stand-in for the effect of saturated fat. If we see that saturated fat raises cholesterol in a 6-month study, a 2-year study, we assume all those people are at a major greater risk for heart disease because it’s a stand-in. It’s an easier study to do.
One of the examples I use in this is I live in L.A., the heart of the movie industry. If you’re hiring Brad Pitt for a movie, and you got to light him, you use a stand-in. You’re not going to use a $20-million actor to stand there while they do hair and make-up. You use somebody who has the same coloring, the same height and they’re like that guy. That’s the stand-in. Well, cholesterol has been a stand-in for heart disease.
So, what these researchers did, they said, “Okay, we know that, under certain circumstances, saturated fat will raise cholesterol.” Now, there’s a whole discussion about whether that matters or not, but let’s just go with it for the moment, that it raises total cholesterol.
These researchers said, “What happens if we take out the middle man? What happens if we don’t use a stand-in, we look at the actual event we care about, which is, ‘Is this guy going to be around in 30 years to play with his grandkids?’ Do you really care what your blood level [inaudible 00:26:40]. Nobody knows. It has no symptoms. What we care about is what we think it tells us about our future.” So, they said, “Let’s see what the real future is. Forget the marker. Forget the stand-in.”
They looked at the meta-analysis—for people who don’t know, it’s not a study itself. It’s a study of studies. They look at all the research. They throw out anything that does not meet absolutely pristine research standards. If there’s any question about it, they don’t include it. They take the studies that absolutely are impeccably done. They pool all the data. And they wind up with something like—in one of these things, 350,000 patients, and the other one, it was over 500,000 patients. They look and they say, “Okay, these people eat a high saturated fat diet. Forget the cholesterol. Let’s look at the end result. Did that saturated fat in any manner, shape or form have an effect on heart disease?”
In both meta-analyses done independently in different journals, the answer was a resounding no. It has no effect on dying, cardiovascular disease, heart disease or anything else.
Wendy Myers: So, have that steak!
Jonny Bowden: Well, no, wait a second. That’s the problem with sound bytes in Twitter. Have that steak if it is grass-fed because you don’t want the toxins that come with the fat when it’s not grass-fed. And bring down the contribution to your diet of all of these processed carbs.
Often, when we find something that’s really good like olive oil, Americans will often think, “Oh, that’s good. I’ll add it to my corn flakes.” No! The idea is to eat that instead of some of the stuff that’s making you fat, sick, tired, depressed and old. That’s the juggling act there.
So, it’s not just eat the steak, go into McDonald’s and order a steak, no, we don’t want you to eat that either because that will make you unhealthy for a dozen other reasons (all of which, we just talked about when we talked about toxins). But yes, there is nothing to fear from a grass-fed steak at all.
Wendy Myers: So you’ve established saturated fat does not cause heart disease. What actually is causing heart disease?
Jonny Bowden: In Smart Fat, we identified four factors. And believe me, we know there are many others. There are theories that viruses have a big effect on heart disease. There are many different things, genetic factors, susceptibility. But we identified four major factors we can actually do something about.
And interestingly enough, a few years ago, I wrote another book called The Most Effective Ways to Live Longer, and I read copious research about people who lived well into their 90s in good health—not in assisted living homes or in oxygen tanks, but people who are actually doing things. We looked at what are the things that age people.
And interesting enough, the four things that age people are the same four things that promote heart disease—and they are inflammation, oxidative damage, stress in your life and sugar in your diet. The same damn four things that make you old also give you heart disease.
This insane concentration on lowering cholesterol—which makes not a wit of different in terms of protecting people from dying—has been the sole focus of our efforts to reduce heart disease. And what we should be focusing on are the things that actually make a difference like inflammation, oxidative damage, lowering stress in our lives, lowering sugar in our diet. Those are the things we can actually do something about.
Triglycerides, easy to lower, big risk factor. Inflammatory measures like homocysteine, relatively easy to bring down. Those are the things we should be looking at. For God’s sake, let’s get off this crazy cholesterol kick.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I a hundred percent agree with you.
Wendy Myers: So, you have a program you talk about in your book, the 10-5-5 program. Can you explain what that is exactly?
Jonny Bowden: It’s really easy. The Smart Fat Program basically says, “Here’s what you need to do. You need to get five good servings of smart fat a day. You need to get five good servings of what we call ‘clean protein’—which is everything we’ve talked about, as long as it’s not factory-farmed or farmed salmon where it has PCB’s, just clean sources of protein, five of those a day—and 10 servings of fiber.”
Now, here’s the important thing about fiber. I’ve been an advocate for low carb diets probably since 2004 when I wrote Living Low Carb. At one point, I was a consultant for Atkin’s, some of the big believers in higher fat diets. There’s one bugaboo, one Achilles’ heel in those diets. They tend to have too little fiber. And that’s because protein doesn’t have any fiber. When people take out all the carbs, they misunderstand. They think they shouldn’t eat vegetables or beans or nuts or any of these things. They wind up with very low fiber diet.
Fiber is associated in every single epidemiological study ever done. Higher fiber diets are associated with better blood sugar control, less rates of diabetes, less obesity, general well-being, better digestive health. Everything goes with high fiber diets.
So, we created a high fat diet that also is high fiber. And the 10 in the 10-5-5 is 10 servings of fiber a day.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I love it. That’s been my biggest beef with the low carb diets. They account, “Artichokes have 17 grams of carbs. Oh, my God! So don’t eat that.”
Jonny Bowden: We don’t think that. We do not do that. We’re not big fans of grains. I’ll be honest with you. I think we can live very healthily a nutritious life without touching grains. I’m not saying that nobody should eat grains, but I’m saying that we eat too many of them, and that they’re not really necessary in the diet.
That said, we don’t forbid things like that in the Smart Fat Progam, but we really urge people to stay away from the wheat and the grains and to the extent that you want things like that, to stick with the occasional serving of sweet potato, quinoa—which isn’t really a grain, but kind of functions like a grain. It eats like a grain, it tastes like a grain, it cooks like a grain. It’s really a seed, but who cares—and things like that, sweet potato and quinoa and the occasional serving of brown rice in small quantities.
We are big proselytizers for beans and legumes which are kind of a mixed food. It’s carbs and proteins together, but loads of fiber.
One of the big myths and the thing that makes me apoplectic about American Dietetic Association information is that they keep telling us and they have brainwashed us into thinking that you need breads and cereals because they’re great fiber sources.
Folks, read the label and tell me, please write to me, [email protected], if you find one box of cereal that has more than 3 grams of fiber per serving. And you’d have to look hard to find that. Most of them have one to two. Most breads have one to two grams with all the sugar and wheat that you have to go and consume in order to get that one or two grams. Those are not good sources of fiber.
An avocado has 8 grams, 8 to 11 grams of fiber. A serving of beans is 11 to 17 grams of fiber. Those are the fiber-heavy weights. It’s not these breads and pasta and cereal stuff. That’s just propaganda that’s been sold to you by the American Dietetic Association. Run the other way when you hear that.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Well, that’s what I really like about your book. You’re a proponent of vegetables and beans and things like that.
Jonny Bowden: Absolutely!
Wendy Myers: I think that’s something that when I’ve done low carb diets or attempted them in the early days when I was experimenting, that just did not intuitively make sense to me. I have rejected the diets because of that. But it makes so much more sense. Thank you for clarifying that.
Jonny Bowden: Sure! And let me be clear also. I have said for my entire 25-year career, I think from the very first day I had a public platform, I’ve said, “Nothing, no diet, no program is everybody. There is no such thing as the perfect diet. There’s only the perfect fit between eating plan or eating pattern and the person.” Some people do okay with dairy. Some people can eat grains—not a lot, maybe some consequences, but for some, really not that many. And the same thing with beans. The Paleo people are very anti-beans because of the lectins. Well, we only think about 10% of people are affected by lectins. Beans are a great source of antioxidants and fiber.
You’ve always got to figure out what works for you. But I’ll tell you what doesn’t work for anybody, and that’s a huge sugar diet.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, absolutely. A lot of people are allergic to sugar and have a sensitivity to it.
Jonny Bowden: Mm-hmmm…
Wendy Myers: So, you’re very fittingly doing a summit called The Truth about Fat Summit. So what can people expect when they join your summit?
Jonny Bowden: The Truth about Fat Loss, yeah. This is a labor of love for me. I worked on it for a year. I have interviewed at this point 38, maybe 39, most of them world-class experts—David Perlmutter, the author of Grain Brain, William Davies, the author of Wheat Belly, Barry Sears, the author of The Zone, Ann Louise Gittleman, the author of The Fat Flush Plan, Kris Kresser, the Paleo guy, Pedram Shojai who just wrote The Urban Monk, a magnificent book, Donna Gates with the Body Ecology Diet and so many more people who talk about the psychology. We had Mark David at the Institute of the Psychology of Eating.
And the subjects that came up—I know a lot about this stuff, but I learned so much from these experts. It was just overwhelming. The role of the microbiome and how it really affects not only digestion and mental states and depression and how the bacteria in the gut can actually predispose to extract every calorie you eat and stored as fat or burn up calories.
We all know people who can look at a Ben & Jerry’s and they gain 5 lbs. and other people seem to be able to eat anything. Well, some of that is related to the microbiome. We find out stuff about that in the summit.
So, it has just been a wealth of information on everything from juicing to detox. We have one of the big detoxification experts, Dr. Dan Kalish who talked about different ways to impact toxins and why toxins actually do have an effect on weight and metabolism.
So, it’s just so filled with this great information. I’m so proud of it. One of the things also about it is that you don’t really have to listen to all 39 speakers. I’m a big believer of—it’s like a library. Go to the books that interest you, sample thing, see what this guy really talks about or if this woman really resonates with you.
I’m thinking now back to Dr. Tammy whose whole subject was how we don’t look enough at testosterone levels in women and what an important factor that can be not only for weight and burning body fat, but also, for well-being and libido. Sarah Gottfried talked about hormonal balance in women.
It’s really just so filled with wonderful information. I’m really so proud of it. And I hope everybody comes in. As you know, all summits are free online for a whole week—in my case, April 25th to May 2nd. And of course, you can sign up. I’m sure you’ll have the link on your site, and also, at my site, JonnyBowden.com. You can sign up. It’s free. Just register for it. It’s got all kinds of really good things—raffled gifts and purchase gifts and registration gifts.
And remember, you don’t have to purchase it. You can listen to it for free.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, that’s what I love about summits. You can get the information that you need. But if you want, you can buy it and it’s just a wealth of information.
Jonny Bowden: I always buy. I bought Mark Hyman’s summit. He had all these things. But you hear the same speakers with a different interviewer, and there’s a different focus, there’s a different energy between the speaker and the person interviewing them. I’ve got information under the same speakers. I wanted to listen to what they said on his summit, and it was different than what they said on mine—some overlap. But really, when you’re talking about people of this quality, you can’t really get enough of them. That’s how I look at it.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, they’re a wealth of information. I know during this podcast, I just love picking expert’s brains.
Wendy Myers: So, I have a question I like to ask every guest.
Jonny Bowden: Sure!
Wendy Myers: What do you think is the most pressing health issue in the world today?
Jonny Bowden: Wow! The most pressing health issue in the world today. You caught me off guard with that, so you’re going to get my top of the head answer without giving it a lot of thought. I’m going to say energy. And I’ll tell you why I’m going to say energy.
Virtually, every—I mean, I’m trying to pick what the biggest thing. Is it diabetes? Is it obesity? Is it heart disease? Is it Alzheimer’s? And one of the things I found—and the people who listen to the summit will find out—is how these things all have a similar core. Even Alzheimer’s, we’re now calling ‘type III diabetes’. These things have very similar roots.
So, I’m trying to pick which disease is going to explode. It’s probably very hard to do. And then, we get into toxins and GMO’s and climate change. I mean, it could be anything.
But the one thing that I think is a constant is that when people don’t have any energy, they feel crummy. If you can’t manage your energy, you’re probably not managing your health. So, almost anything that’s a health issue is going to show up in your personal energy. If you’re not sleeping enough, you ain’t going to be energetic. If you’re not eating right, you’re not going to be energetic. If your hormones are out-of-whack, you’re not going to have much energy.
It’s one of the things that people come to me the most often with. I have columns on cleaning eating. I’ve been asked for Doc Column. I do lots of questions and answers on Facebook and stuff. And I think I probably get this once a day. “I’m so tired. I’m so fatigued. What can I do to get my energy back?”
But look at a 2-year old, you think they have problems with energy? You can’t even keep—if you talk to any new parent who’s got an infant around, they can’t even keep up with them. They never go to sleep. They’re bundles of energy. Well, that’s how we came out of the box, folks.
So, what happened? I always think of it as like a goldfish bowl. It starts out all clear. You see the fish. And they excrete in there, nobody cleans the water. It’s muddy and everything runs slower. Well, that’s what’s happening with our energy.
So, I see energy as a wonderful metric by which we can judge almost all the other health issues that we’re talking about here. So I think the crisis of energy is probably where I’d go with that answer.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I hundred percent agree with you. Every client coming to me is exhausted. That’s why I created my Limitless Energy e-guide. That is the crux. When you are tired, that is the first sign something is wrong and that you need to be proactive. Fix it before it gets worse.
Jonny Bowden: And we talked earlier about how I got into this. I told you I used to be a musician. I used to wake up at 11, coffee, cigarettes, the whole aspirin and all of that stuff.
I’ve been eating this way (or a variation of this way) and I began exercising at age 38. And now, my next birthday, I’m going to be 70. So, comparing myself now to what I was like 35 years ago when I just—I wake up now without an alarm clock. I set the alarm clock for 6:15 just in case, but I never need it because I’m up. I’m on the tennis court at 7:30 every morning. I play between two and three hours a day every single day—and sometimes, I play twice a day. I have passion for my partner, Michelle. We have a passionate relationship.
I’m not saying this to brag. I’m saying this because everybody tells me this doesn’t happen for them. So I want you to know it’s possible. Libido, same as when I was 30 if not better. Energy, I think nobody ever accused of being low energy. I wake up without an alarm. I’m alive and enthusiastic about the day. And I know that this has to do with living this way and eating this way and following these lifestyle changes that can be made.
So, I know the rewards of this. I know the difference because I used to be very, very different than this. And I know on the other side, a lot of people who are listening to this that are in their 30s or their 40s, “Nah, I’ll take a pill to work,” I can tell you, I can promise you that things will be really, really better if you live the way you will learn how to live from Wendy’s show, from my summit, from all the wonderful resources that the audience is probably exposed to. Take this advice because it really, really—I’m here to tell you, it really makes a difference.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. And everyone, go get Jonny’s books, Smart Fat. It’s a wealth of information, education and experience. You won’t regret it.
Wendy Myers: So Jonny, thank you so much for coming on the show. Tell the listeners where they can find you and your book.
Jonny Bowden: JonnyBowden.com. There’s no H in Jonny. So, it’s J-O-N-N-Y B-O-W-D-E-N dot-com. I’m @JonnyBowden on Twitter, DrJonnyBowden on Facebook. And I have an Amazon page.
And actually, I’m very flattered to say that if you just put my first name, J-O-N-N-Y, and the word ‘nutritionist’ into Google, you don’t even need my last name.
Wendy Myers: That is impressive.
Jonny Bowden: Thank you.
Wendy Myers: Well, Jonny, thanks for coming on the show.
Everyone, if you want to learn about me and my version of Paleo, the Modern Paleo Diet—they have lots of healthy fats in there too—go to myersdetox.com. You can follow me on Facebook and Twitter at WendyMyers110. I’m on YouTube at WendyMyers. I’m also on Instagram, Pinterest, et cetera. It’s the same address, WendyMyers110.
If you liked what you heard on this show, please give a podcast review on iTunes. Thank you so much for listening to the Live to 110 Podcast.
Jonny Bowden: Thanks, Wendy.
