Health and nutrition expert, Robb Wolf, returns to the program this week to discuss the findings contained in his new book Wired To Eat.
As human animals, our genetic programming pushes us to optimize caloric intake while minimizing the effort expended. The food industry knows this, and has for decades been developing "foods" scientifically engineered to appeal to that evolutionary drive. The result? An explosion in obesity, chronic health conditions like diabetes, and a society shamed by itself.
Robb's guidance revolves around working with, not against, our primal wiring. Eating more, but of the fuel our body truly needs, is much better than merely eating less of the processed gunk sold to us in most aisles of the grocery store.
But — and this is key — not all of us are wired to eat the same foods. There is a remarkable amount of variety at the individual level, so understanding which foods work best for you is extremely important. Fortunately, it's relatively straightforward to identify which foods these are, and to design your own customized nutrition menu for a future of better health:
I really think that there is enormous value in the general kind of ancestral health template. Get appropriate amount of sunlight on your person, and you sleep in accordance with the daylight cycle. Get community, move, and feed your gut microbiome; eat largely whole unprocessed foods. That general starting point, I think, is very difficult to improve on. If you just wanted like a very simple 30,000 foot level kind of elevator pitch deal.
But then beyond that, the granularity gets really complex. It really calls into question the notion that you can have any type of a one size fits all recommendation.
This is a real big challenge for me in talking to the greater nutrition world, Because people love getting into quasi-religious camps. If you suggest that some people may do well on the high-carb, Some people may do well on low-carb, Some people may do well with legumes and others not; whichever camp that really buys into the particular thing that you may be saying another group may not do well with just freak out. They have no capacity to look on that other side of the fence and realize that other people may do fine on something that you individually do not do so well with.
I do really well on a quite low-carb, oftentimes ketogenic diet. But not everybody does. It was a long learning process for me to come to that reality.
Click the play button below to listen to Chris' interview with Robb Wolf (47m:51s).
by uncletommy