Tim: Hey gang. This is Tim Skwiat, along with my partner in crime, Shawn Wells. And today we have a very special guest joining us on the BioTrust Radio podcast, Mr. Jeremy Hendon. Jeremy and his wife, Louise, run Keto Summit and Paleo Flourish, and we’re excited to talk to Jeremy today about a topic that’s held dear to our audience—keto. And I’m sure we’ll get into some other things as well, but we’re really going to dive headfirst into keto. So, Jeremy thanks so much for joining us today. We really appreciate you taking time out of your day and joining us across the pond all the way over there in Portugal. If you don’t mind to take a minute to introduce yourself to the BioTrust Radio crowd, and tell us a little bit about yourself.

Jeremy: Yeah, absolutely. So I’ll jump back a little. We’re talking about health and I know, obviously, your tribe is into health. I grew up in Georgia. I was pretty much always fat, I think from time I was four or five. I don’t remember a time not being fat. Although, I’m 39 now, and when I think back, when I was a kid, which wasn’t that long ago. I don’t feel that old. Well as a kid, there weren’t that many obese kids around. There weren’t even that many fat kids in my class, so just being 10 to 15 pounds overweight, I was the fat kid. And so, you know, it always bothered me. I joke, but the whole reason I got into health is because it bothered me for so long.

I went to college. I lost 45 pounds my freshman year. It didn’t do it in a bad way. I didn’t do it the healthiest way. I actually went low fats. Like I said, I’m a little older, and back then this was just the beginning of the internet and there were no podcasts. There were no podcasts, there were no summits, nothing. It was just what you could get your hands on, in physical terms. So I went low fat and start running 45 miles a week and it worked well. But, I was 18 and of course, that all worked.

Tim: It all worked.

Jeremy: Yeah, yeah, most things work when you’re 18. Not later. But then, after that I couldn’t keep running that much. I actually got some injuries and tendonitis and some things. So, long story short, I bounced around for a long time. I actually found low-carb for the first time in 2002. I remember because I remember where I was in terms of my education and everything. I was actually in law school and doing my PhD. I got really into low carb. It worked really well for me. I really liked. I found it a lot easier, which is kind of a prelude to getting into keto. But then I went paleo, so I’ve been paleo since around 2006. Which, of course—you and I have talk about this—I don’t find it mutually exclusive.

Shawn: Right, agreed.

Jeremy: It worked really well for me. More recently, over the past three years or so, my wife and I have gotten into keto, off and on, more or less, and we ran the Keto Summit with our friend Chris Kelly, who’s amazing. So that’s kind of my back story. We actually, at one point we founded a low‑carb grain-free cereal company, where we manufactured cereal and granola. We don’t own or operate that anymore, but we’ve always kind of been—well, not always. We were lawyers before. But for a while now we’ve been into the kick where a lot of people, and so my mom has been pre-diabetic for a long time. My father-in-law, my wife’s father, has been diabetic for a long time.

And when we first started that food company, and with all of our current stuff like Paleo Flourish and Keto Summit. A lot of the reason we do it is to make things easier for people because, personally, I know it wasn’t easy for me with weight loss. It’s never been easy for my mom or for my father-in-law, with controlling their health. My wife’s had other issues, some autoimmune conditions, we also do some autoimmune stuff. So, it’s never been easy for us or for certain people we know, like our family and so we’ve wanted to make it easier for other people in various ways, and that’s really what we’re focused on right now.

Shawn: Nice.

Tim: Yeah, that’s awesome, Jeremy. And you mentioned “easier” several times in there and I highlighted them for different reasons. First, when you talked about low carb being easier for you and it was maybe more effective for you. I thought that was interesting because there’s all these diet debates about what’s better; low fat, low carb, such-and-such. And it’s probably what’s easier for you to stick to, to some extent. Maybe there is an optimal one, but if you can’t stick with it then it’s not really that great for you, right?

So, I think the fact that you do trial and error and you found some things that worked well for you is an important point to tease out of that. And then what I love is that—and this is something about what I love about what you and Louise do—is that you’re creating these tools for people to use to make things easier. So, can you go into some of those tools that you’re creating? Whether it is meal plans, or you’ve used this word “tribe,” which Shawn and I love.

Shawn: Yeah.

Tim: The social support that you provide, like the Keto Summit. These tools that you guys have created to make things easier, because you and I have also thrown that word “willpower” around before and we can’t always rely on that because it’s somewhat of a limited resource, right?

Jeremy: You can try.

Tim: Yeah, yeah.

Jeremy: We’ve all tried in some area of our life and found out that it doesn’t always work. Yeah, absolutely. Before I even answer the question about tools though, I mean for us it’s a mindset to the way that we approach everything, and it’s what we sort of call prioritized focus. So, this gets talked about a lot by entrepreneurs and other people in certain corporate environments, but I feel like it doesn’t get talked about enough when it comes to nutrition and health. So, take for instance—and I actually get some pushback on this and I understand why—but even within the paleo world or within the general health world, there is this huge push for organic food. And I’m not opposed to organic food at all. I don’t like eating pesticides any more than the next person. However, it’s not something that we actually push a lot because we don’t feel like it’s going to make the biggest difference.

We don’t feel like it should be to focus or the priority of a lot of people who are coming to us and reading our articles or buying our products because a lot of these people are overweight. That’s often one of the main things people want to do is lose weight. And then from a health perspective, a lot of people want to do things like reduce their blood pressure or just get their blood work much better, or reduce their cholesterol, or things like that. And realistically, eating organic is not the first or best way to do that, right?

Tim: Right.

Jeremy: Say you’re like my mom, pre-diabetic, or my father-in-law, diabetic. So, my father-in-law’s diabetic, but he hasn’t been on insulin now for many years, or any medication because we got him to go low-carb with high quality foods. And within a very short time, his blood sugar now, his resting blood sugar is down around—I can’t remember exactly—I think it’s around 125. It’s still not perfect but, I mean, he was starting from much higher.

Tim: Right.

Jeremy: So really, when we talk about easy, yeah, it’s tools that make it easier for people, but it’s also just a matter of focus. Of getting people to focus on the things are going to move the needle the most. Because I joke with the organic think. You can eat organic crackers and junk food all day long and you’re still going to be unhealthy. But if I can get you to just—even if you’re buying non‑organic broccoli and non-organic fruits, and non-organic meats, it’s going to be way better. It’s going to make more of a difference in your everyday life than eating organic junk food. It’s just it’s easier to go out and still buy the packaged junk food, and so I understand that. But we like to help people prioritize in that way, if that makes sense?

Tim: Absolutely, that makes complete sense to me. I think that’s a really good example. We get focused on the minutia sometimes. Or like you said, just taking stock of where you’re at and really looking at the entire body of nutrition work and what’s that one first step that you can take to really improve. That kind of reminds me of a book, “The Power of Less” by Leo Babauta.

Jeremy: Right.

Tim: And it just talks about one habit at a time. Just like you said, having that list of priorities and just focusing on one at a time. Another thing that you had brought up, that Shawn and I talked about before quite often, is paleo and keto are not mutually exclusive. So, can you elaborate on that just a little bit more of what you mean by that because we would agree with you?

Shawn: Yeah.

Jeremy: Even getting away from the terms for a moment. We’re very blunt about this. I feel like the baseline for every human should be we should be eating unprocessed foods.

Shawn: Right. Right.

Jeremy: I mean, [laughs] this should be the baseline. No matter what diet you’re thinking of going on, you should be starting from the baseline of you’re not going to eat anything that comes out of a box or a bag. You’re not going to eat anything that’s majorly processed. So, let’s start from there. And maybe some people disagree whether or not grains fall into that category for us, since we’re fairly paleo. We don’t eat many grains. But even if you were eating what most people consider unprocessed grains, like whole wheat, you’re still going to be much better off if that’s the only “processed food” you’re eating. So just as a starting basis we like to get there.

And then, yeah, it’s one of these things. We have a lot of people who come to us say on our paleo website or our paleo articles or anything or keto ones. They’ll ask us the question coming from other side, “I thought these were different diets,” or “Is paleo compatible with keto because I’m paleo and I want to go keto?” or “Is keto compatible with paleo because I want to go paleo, but I want to stay keto?” And my answer is always paleo, for us, is just the framework of eating real foods. For me, paleo has always been cutting out the junk. That is cutting out the processed foods that are going to generally cause inflammation in various ways, and eating foods that are more nutritious, that are higher nutrient density, have more micronutrients, more vitamins and minerals. And so that generally includes seafoods, meats, vegetables, fruits. Just per amount that you eat, they’ve got a lot more vitamins and minerals. So, that’s the base for us. And then if you want to do keto in that way, well, you just cut out some of the foods that would otherwise have a little more sugar in them, like most of the fruits and some of the sweet potatoes. And you do that for a while, however long you want to stay keto. And we do it. That’s what Louise and I do.

I can’t say we’re paleo 100% of the time. I wish we could, but I don’t want to pretend. I mean, we’ll be very strict for two or three months at a time and then we might have a couple weeks where we’re not as strict. But we tend to stay paleo throughout our life. And when we want to, for whatever reason, say drop a little bit of weight or if we want to just feel different or just do it for no reason at all, then we’ll go keto for a month or two. We’ll still be eating a paleo diet, but we’ll just cut out the fruits, we’ll cut out sweet potatoes, we’ll cut out whatever else might give us more keto. That’s our take on it.

Shawn: Yeah. I have a question for you along those lines. I was looking at someone’s Instagram yesterday and it was a pro-vegan thing and they were bashing keto because keto’s all meat and meat’s so unhealthy, and all this. I’m thinking more big-picture. I’m very similar to how you eat. That keto is really macronutrient ratios and keto is whatever promotes ketones. And how you execute that can be very different.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Shawn: Someone can have artificial sweeteners or not artificial sweeteners. They can have processed foods or not processed foods. Like you were saying, like paleo, they can have intermittent fasting or not have intermittent fasting, they get up dairy or not have dairy. You could be vegan and be keto. It’s not easy,  but it’s possible.

Jeremy: No, it’s not easy.

Shawn: It’s possible. It’s very possible to do.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Shawn: I mean, yes, you’re limiting a ton of foods, but I feel like people kind of stereotyped what keto is. Like it’s just bacon and mayonnaise or something, and what are your–?

Jeremy: Bacon and cheese are the things that come up all the time.

Shawn: Right. So, what are your thoughts on that and kind of like there’s a very narrow window, like to your point, about what keto is. And I think maybe as we go into the future, keto will get, hopefully, a broader mindset of how you can execute it, and they can really fit a variety of diets.

Jeremy: Yeah. And before we were recording here, Tim and I—especially over email—we were chatting about the fact that Louise and I view keto as a tool. And as one of these tools, it is like you’re saying, something that you can use in a variety of contexts. But to your point, specifically, I feel like it goes wrong both ways. Let me explain what I mean by both ways. That is you get people on kind of the vegan/vegetarian side who complain about keto being too much meat. They still don’t really understand that, like you said, keto is really just about getting your body into a state that is called ketosis, which generally means greater than 0.3 or 0.5 millimoles of ketones, which are naturally produced in your body, in your blood. And technically, you could even do that exogenously, that is by supplementing with ketones, but not really part of the keto diet.

So it’s just about getting yourself in that state. And yeah, you could do that as vegan, right? You could just eat coconut oil and avocados and vegetables cooked in coconut oil all day, and you would get into ketosis. Or you can even just fast and get into ketosis. And then on the other side, people who are either paleo or who are keto and go into it, they sort of mistake it, too, that they need to eat all this meat, and I am not opposed to meat in any way. At the same time, I’m very pro-vegetable, too. I mean, if there’s anything that mainstream nutrition got right for a long time, vegetables are very healthy for us.

Tim: Right.

Jeremy: It’s very good to eat cauliflower and broccoli, and spinach, and kale, and everything else. These are generally very good foods for us. So, it’s not surprising that somebody on the vegan or vegetarian side would see it that way because when you look at Instagram feeds, for most celebrities and people posting keto foods, when you look at Pinterest boards of keto foods, what is it? It’s bacon, it’s cheese, it’s a bunch of meat. And I understand because it’s sort of easy and most people honestly don’t like eating vegetables that much. I grew up in the south, so I remember, I used to go to my grandmother’s house and my god, I love my grandmother, but she could not cook vegetables. They were terrible. No wonder that my mom didn’t like vegetables and I didn’t vegetables. I think most people just haven’t had good vegetables.

Shawn: Yeah.

Jeremy: And then I met my wife and I started eating with her parents, who are from China, and they cooked a bunch of stir fries and vegetables in other ways that were delicious. And it was like, “Oh my god,” vegetables can be great. So now, we eat a lot of vegetables. I actually think we don’t even still eat enough. So, I think it goes wrong in both ways because people misunderstand what has to happen, like you were saying.

Tim: Thanks for elaborating on that, Jeremy, because I think it’s important. And one other thing that you had mentioned before, too, that I thought was really enlightening and something that Shawn has talked about before is that you use keto as a tool. And like you said, you might use it for two or three months, and because you’ve done it before maybe you can go into it and do that. You’re adapted to it. We’ve kind of talked about how someone early on stick to it for three months very strictly, and so on and so forth.

But that term that’s come up that I’ve heard you use and that Shawn and I have used regularly is “metabolic flexibility.” And there’s significance to your ability to go from a ketogenic diet to a “normal diet” where you’re consuming a bit more carbohydrates.

So, I love that you talked about using it as a tool from that standpoint. And that metabolic flexibility is an important term, or that we think is important, that I know you mentioned. And I’ve heard you talk about how that’s important to develop that capacity and to train that capacity, and how the average person who relies heavily to get immediate energy, these sugar burners so to speak, that hunger that you feel within a couple of hours after a meal, we shouldn’t have that if we are metabolically flexible. We should be able to switch into our body stores.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Tim: So, just a lot of good things that seem to come up for me. Do you want to elaborate on anything there?

Jeremy: Well, if nothing else, even apart from that the health aspect of it, it’s just darn annoying to be metabolically inflexible.

Tim: Right.

Shawn: Yeah.

Jeremy: I mean, actually it’s also—and I’m going to annoy some people by this—but it’s annoying to be around people who are metabolic inflexible.

Tim: [laughs] I agree with you.

Jeremy: I’ll have some friends come over or something and we’ll be doing something or driving somewhere and they’re like, “Oh my god, we really need to eat.” I’m like, “All right, let’s just wait. Let’s just like go and do this or finish this.” They’re like, “Oh no, I’m hungry. I’m getting moody.” I’m like, “Deal with it.” I understand where people are coming from. I’m not completely unsympathetic to that sort of plight, but it’s not, to me, a good way to live, to always need to eat all the time or else you’re going to feel tired and you’re going to feel moody and you’re going to feel grumpy. I just think it’s a much better way to live to not feel like you always need food. To eat when you want to eat or when you get hungry and then if you don’t want to eat or if you’re busy, or just want to do something else, then let’s not worry about it.

Tim: Yeah, definitely. It’s kind of funny how the pendulum has swung from “you have to eat every two to three hours,” which actually trains your hunger hormones to expect the food.

Shawn: Yeah.

Tim: To now, it’s okay to not eat, to skip meals, to fast, and possibly even beneficial.

Jeremy: You know, a lot of the hypothesis of where that theory came from—and some people claim they know where it came from. But realistically, when you start researching, we don’t actually know where the hypothesis came from to eat every couple hours—but one of the best arguments for where it came from is that it came from the bodybuilding community.

Tim: Right.

Jeremy: Because it originates around the same time that bodybuilders were starting to eat this much. And the whole reason that they started needing eat that much, every two or three hours at that time, and even still, is because when they’re bulking they actually can’t get enough calories in a meal and then wait five hours. They need to eat every two to three hours just to get enough calories to bulk up.

Tim: Right.

Jeremy: So, it’s funny because then it became this big thing in bodybuilding, and then it seemed to just move over to mainstream somehow as being a healthy thing to do. None of the research has ever borne that out. That’s ridiculous.

Tim: No, I haven’t seen that.

Shawn: Well, you’re talking about paleo and I’ve spoken about this, that I don’t know what they were eating 100,000 years ago. There’s certain tribes that they’ve shown are actually cannibals, so we’re not going to emulate that. But I’ll say that I do know that we weren’t having rBGh, rBST, antibiotics, pesticides, artificial colors, artificial sweeteners, all the GMOs. All this stuff is kind of new in our food supply and it seems like now there’s a lot of names. Kind of like with keto, there’s been like Atkins and South Beach and a million different kind of things that are similar, at least. But now there’s like Whole30, there’s Ancestral, Paleo, Primal, whatever. What are your thoughts on all that, all the kind of chaos and noise there?

Jeremy: Well, it’s funny. Dallas and Melissa Hartwig, who came up with Whole30, and just awesomely nice people by the way. They’re just fantastic. People don’t realize that actually came from their book, “It Starts with Food.” They came up with concept but then it became popularized to their book. And the whole point is that it’s paleo. They made it paleo. And they’re very explicit about it being paleo. They were friends with Rob and everybody else.

So there is there’s a lot of chaos. There are a lot of things you said there. Just sort of in order. You kind of jump back. You’re like, “Oh, I don’t know. We don’t know exactly what people ate.” It’s true, we don’t know exactly people ate a 100,000, a million, 2‑1/2 million years ago. From what we do know, depending on if you’re closer or further away from the equator, your diet diverged a lot. Closer to the equator is much higher in carbs, much higher in plant matter. Closer to the Arctic Circle is you’re much higher in animal matter and much higher in fats. Those are more outliers. It’s probably likely that we were much higher in plant matter and some carbs. But like you said, when it comes down to it, paleo, the current iteration came around with Loren Cordain, and there were people before him in the 70s.

But it came around, Loren Cordain and Robb Wolf, both studied microbiology and experimental. And biology, what people often forget if you’re not a biologist—which I’m not—but biology starts with an evolutionary approach. When I say starts with an evolutionary approach, it’s actually exactly what I mean. It doesn’t mean it ends with an evolutionary approach. It means that in biology you look back to hypothesize about what was happening biologically from an evolutionary standpoint, because that’s how organisms survive, thrive, and then go on to reproduce. And you say okay how does that fit in, what hypotheses does that give us, and what can we learn from that, and experiment and test with? And paleo, in particular, as it got more and more popular in the mainstream, like you said there, there was a lot of chaos around it.

But the way it started with Loren Cordain and Robb Wolf and Mark Sisson, is that they took it as a starting point and said exactly what you said, hey look, we know that we weren’t eating all this junk food before. And we also know other things. We also know that we were moving more on average. The average hunter‑gatherer walked many more steps a day. We know that we were sleeping when it got dark and waking up when it got light, so that our circadian rhythm was set. We know that we had various differences in our microbiome, particularly because we didn’t have antibiotics and we didn’t have antibacterial soaps and things in our life. So, there are all of these differences that changed. And we take those as starting points to start looking and say, okay, well how might that have supported health for 2-1/2 million years of human evolution, and what does it mean now, or what might it mean now in terms of our health?

Some of the obvious things that we can look at are, let’s take an extreme example. If you’re eating a superbly unhealthy diet where you’re just snacking on Cheetos all day long and maybe your dinner is a pizza. And you do this for many years and you’re not getting pretty much any vegetables or any good meats, particularly no seafood and no organ meats or anything like that that’s high nutrients, then you’re going to develop some micronutrient deficiencies. You’re going to be deficient in some vitamins and minerals.

And the fact of the matter is that when we look at it from a paleo approach and evolutionarily, we evolved as humans to need various micronutrients, right? We evolved to need vitamin D and vitamin A, and we evolved to need zinc and potassium. And if you’re not getting these things, then it’s going to cause problems and we know the things these things are called, like scurvy, right, if you’re not getting any meat or any fruit? People think it was just the oranges that they ended up taking on the ships across the Atlantic, but in truth you can get vitamin C from a variety of places. Just none of those things were being taken on the ships. But it’s obvious to people that if you have that much of a mismatch, things go wrong. What’s not obvious to people is that if you have smaller mismatches over time, then things start to add up and things that you did in your 20s and 30s start to add up over time.

So this is kind of roundabout way of answering your question about all the chaos that’s going on both in paleo and keto. And for me, it’s a matter of not looking at the root reasons that we’re thinking about these things to begin with. And for Louise and I, there are actually sort of two different reasons. The Paleo piece of it is really like I said, a human foundational issue. We need to be getting enough nutrients and we need to be making sure that we’re avoiding too many things that are going to cause some sort of inflammation. Everybody thinks just what they call toxins, although the cliché is that the first rule of pharmacology is “the dose makes the poison,” right? So everything is toxic to some level. But the point is, when we add up all these things, if you’re not sleeping at night and then you’re too stressed out because you feel like you’re always going to lose your job or whatever, and then also you’re eating bad. But all of these things are going to add up, and that’s kind of the paleo piece.

To some degree, actually to a larger degree, I love with a lot of people are doing. JJ Virgin, her diets are effectively paleo. They’re a little different, but they’re pretty much paleo. Melissa and Dallas are pretty much paleo. Like so many people have their own diets and they call them paleo, which is great because they reach different people in different ways. At the same time, I do think at some point there has to be some understanding that these are not all different diets. Maybe they have small differences between them, but underlying them all is the fact that they’re getting out most of the foods that are highly inflammatory and they’re adding in more of the foods that are more nutrient dense.

And then, very quickly, on the other hand with keto—for us, we probably weren’t in ketosis all that much, evolutionarily. Like if you look outside of certain peoples who lived in very cold climates, we’re probably only in ketosis when we were hungry and not able to find food for a couple days, or in certain climates where you had to eat a lot more meat and fats. But nonetheless, ketosis is natural, like you said. To be metabolically flexible enough to be in ketosis very quickly is very natural.

And then also, ketosis is a great tool for a lot of the ways we’ve broken our body. So particularly for people who have any sort of insulin resistance, have any sort of blood sugar issues, what is that? It just means your body can’t handle sugar. So any sort of sugar you’re putting in your body is a problem because you don’t have the ability to actually metabolize it and use it properly. So, ketosis is not just something that is evolutionary in terms of our ability to do it, but it’s a tool for starting to heal some of the damage that’s often done to our body.

I’m sorry, I rambled a lot there, but it is something that I feel sort of strongly about. There is a lot of noise out there and part of what we try to do is we really like for people to sort of understand just the really important factors underlying how they can think about these things and use them in their lives.

Tim: Yeah, I think that’s a profound response, Jeremy.

Shawn: Really interesting response.

Tim: Thank you for working through all that. I do think because I like that word you guys use, “noise,” because I think part of our duty in our positions that were in is to filter, help people filter through all that. And like you said before, Jeremy, prioritize our focus. And part of that noise, too, and we’ve seen this with the paleo community as it becomes more popular, there’s greater marketing interest in building foods that qualify as paleo. We might call them paleo junk foods or that got paleo-fied. I’m starting to see that with keto, too, I think, to some degree.

Shawn:   Yeah, yeah.

Tim:        So, one of the things that we’ve talked about offline, Jeremy, is kind of how these keto “junk foods” could be holding you back from seeing the results that that we’d want to see. Shawn I have talked about that to some degree with different sugar alcohols and how instead of counting net carbs, you just need to really focus on a strict total carb count. But can you give us some perspective on that evolution of keto junk foods now, that may be following in the shadow of the paleo junk foods and how that could be holding people back from realizing those benefits.

Jeremy: You know, one of the funny things when I hear that, too, is it kind of comes from my friend Dr. Tommy Wood, who is one of the smartest minds on microbiology and everything like that. We joked because I was asking questions. We run a program called “The Keto40,” which has been super popular and people have gotten great results from it. It’s a 40-day program, but we also give them Q&As. And some of the Q&As we do with Dr. Tommy Wood. It’s funny because a lot of people still have a lot of fear of fats. That’s not the funny part, but they’ll ask Tommy, the effective questions would be, “How much fat is too much fat? Am I eating too much fat?” Because when people first go keto it’s a real concern that they’re eating too much fat. The other ancillary question that is, “Should I be afraid of fat?” And Tommy’s answer is “No,” he’s like, “You don’t need to be afraid of fat.” Is higher fact correlated with higher cholesterol? Sure. But is it also correlated with less death response? Yeah, generally.

So there are many reasons not to be afraid of it. But at the same time, and this goes toward you point to keto junk foods people often think of keto junk foods just as the packaged foods that have, like you said, a lot of sugar alcohols in them in the supermarket or something. But his response to that question is you also don’t need to put two cups of coconut oil in all of your drinks. [laughs]

I’m not saying to be afraid of fat, but you don’t need to add as much fat as possible to everything. For instance, coconut oil, as great as it is, it’s very stable. It doesn’t get oxidized very easily, so it’s great in that way. Very healthy in general. Same for olive oil, avocado oil. These are all great fats in terms of their stability, the fact that they’re fairly non-inflammatory. But does that mean they’re nutritious? No, of course not. They’re the refined oils. That’s what they are.

So, if you’re just dumping a lot of those things in, that actually becomes effectively a keto junk food, right? I’m not saying I’ve never made or eaten fat bombs, right? I mean, who doesn’t like 100% chocolate and put in some coconut oil and stuff. I’ve eaten it. It’s great. It’s delicious.

Tim: Right.

Jeremy:  So, I’m not saying I’ve never done any of this. But at the same time it’s one of these things where you kind of have to stop and think, especially if you’re buying something in a store. If it looks like a junk food that you ate that was non-keto, it’s probably a junk food that’s keto. And yeah, is it definitively going to hold you back? No, I mean, it’s kind of a case-by-case scenario, not just with the food but with the person. I mean, if you’re way more active, like an athlete.

If you’re exercising four hours a day, it’s probably is not going to make as much difference. You’re going to have way more metabolic flexibility because you’re exercising more. Just a variety of things going into it. But at the same time, is it helping you to be eating these things? No. Like you said, there’s so much out there floating around.

And I understand. I mean, it’s business to some degree and I get it, and I like this. I like the markets. But at the same time, people have got to start looking at what they’re buying. Not just from a one-word perspective; whether it’s “keto” or “paleo” or anything like that. But you’ve actually got to start looking at it and saying okay, does this have not that many other toxic ingredients? Am I not going to overeat this, if you’re trying to lose weight?

Tim: Right.

Jeremy: And is it nutritious? Does it actually have some things in it that are not just not bad for me but that are actually good for me?

Tim: Yeah.

Shawn: Yeah, that’s it.

Tim: That’s a really good summation there. I think one final thing, just to come back to Jeremy, this is my first question about the tools that people can utilize to help them.

Jeremy: You mean the question I didn’t answer yet?

Tim: Yeah, well it’s a perfect way to sum things up because like you just mentioned, the Keto40 that you guys have. Because keto’s different for a lot of people and they need some structure and some tools, and they need support. As popular as it is now and is more common as it is for people to be doing, it’s a pretty significant divergence, and the focus is very prioritized. This is the number of carbs you get every day. However, just because the rule is black and white doesn’t mean that it’s easy. So, can you just talk about a couple of the tools that you guys have available that you think could help people?

Jeremy: I’ll actually run three or four, because as you were talking I was thinking of four things. The first one is not like a specific tool, but if they look at our website. And ours is not the only one. I could mention other ones too. I can even send you links. But our website has tons of free recipes and free content on it.

Tim: Right.

Jeremy: And ours is also a paleo version of keto, which in my mind is definitively the way to go. It’s not that we think dairy is this absolute terrible thing, but people just eat way too much cheese and it starts causing problems. So, just as a tool for most people, it’s much better to do keto the way we do it. People get a lot better results, feel a lot better, have a lot less inflammatory issues. And a lot of people in dairy have a lot of sinus issues or other forms of inflammation, like arthritis or joint pain. So, that’s the first tool is just look at the free stuff we’ve got. There are other good people on our niche. Like our friend Kate does really good stuff, our friend Maria Emmerich does really good stuff. So there are a lot of other good tools out there.

Keto40 is amazing. I’ll say that’s the second tool. We did that with our friend Kate Bay Jaramillo, and it’s amazing. Partially because she’s amazing, but partially what you just mentioned. People need the support. So, it’s got full meal plans, full recipes that people love. People rave about these. And not everybody follows the meal plans exactly because your life differs a little bit and so not everybody wants to follow them exactly. But people love that. It’s got daily videos and daily emails. It’s got the support there. It’s got the accountability of other people going through it with you. And so that works really well, and the results people have gotten out of there, you know, it’s not a 100%.

Tim: Sure.

Jeremy: It’s not that people 100% of time get amazing results. I don’t know the stats right now, but like 60 or 70% of the people who go through the Keto40 get really good results. Not just weight loss, but feeling a lot better. So there’s that.

We also have meal plans. You know, I never understood meal plans because I never used meal plans and it wasn’t something that I would seek out. So we didn’t do meal plans for a long time. But more and more I’ve come to understand why they actually serve people. And that is because even if you’re not using them exactly, it gives you inspiration and it gives you recipes. But more than that, it gives you a structure and a framework and a lot of people need that. Which is part of what the Keto40 does, but if you didn’t want to do the Keto40 for whatever reason, the meal plans give you that sort of structure to sort of stick to. They allow you to cook some things ahead of time and to plan at a time and not to be always thinking about what am I going to eat tonight; especially when you’re tired or when you’re busy or you’re stressed or your kid got sick during the night. You know, all sorts of things that can cause problems.

Tim: Right.

Jeremy: So I’ll stop there. I mean, that’s three. I was going to say four. But those three tools have helped a lot of people. And even if you don’t look at hours. Join something where you get some accountability, you get some structure if you want to do this because it is hard at times. And you don’t need to succeed the first time, but it’s nice to get those results and to see that you can do it and then to have that in your tool kit, and to keep making results and progress.

Tim: That’s awesome, Jeremy. In fact, it reminds me of our friend Craig Ballantyne, “Pillars of Transformation.” You’ve got planning and preparation. You’ve got support and accountability, and you’ve got the deadline—40 days. A thing would be incentive, but obviously if you’re investing in those things your incentive is some kind of weight loss or something like that. So, that’s awesome and we’ll link to those things in the show notes because I think that those would be great resources for people that are following along.

Shawn: Yeah, well I think the final thing we need to ask you is how are all the ways that people listening can follow you?

Jeremy: Yeah, I mean, we have our website. So, we have ketosummit.com. If people are looking for the paleo stuff, we have Paleo Flourish. If people have autoimmune conditions, we have a website Healing Autoimmune. And we didn’t talk at all about that, but that is different. It’s harder but it’s important if you’ve got autoimmune conditions because your body is just slightly broken in a different way and it’s got to be fixed. And I’ve got my own website. I don’t publish a ton on there. But it’s a little different. It’s not health as much at JeremyHendon.com. But it’s where people could find me to reach out specifically for other things.

Tim: Awesome, Jeremy. I do have one final question and it’s just a question that I picked up from another interviewer. Basically, Jeremy, if you could advise people to do one thing every day, what would that be?

Shawn: But it doesn’t have keto or paleo.

Tim: My thing is to throw people under the bus like that.

Jeremy: Yeah, you should do that every day. My thing would be to play, and play can mean so many things for so many people. But we’ve lost so much play in our lives and not only is it healthy, but I just feel like we’re so serious. Well, play can be serious, too. In fact, I think it should be serious. But I feel like you should find a way to play every day, whether it’s just going out and throwing a Frisbee or playing with your dog, or playing with the kids, if you have kids or grandkids. Or however it is, just find whatever is your play and do it every day, because as humans we need that play, physiologically and mentally, and it’s one of the things that can make a huge difference in lives.

Tim: That’s awesome.

Shawn: That is a great one. I fully agree. The true elation that comes with play, I think all of us can remember back in elementary school, looking at the clock with great anticipation—

Tim: Recess.

Shawn: Or when recess would finally come and just sprinting out the door. And it’s just the greatest feeling in the world and we should chase that feeling. We shouldn’t just discard that as something for children.

Tim: One tangent on it. We have a 21-month-old daughter and she’s just so raw. Like I just want to learn how to bottle that up and just never let it be exposed. But that’s exactly what you’re talking about. That’s a perfect example to me and it just puts a huge smile on my face. So, I appreciate you sharing that, Jeremy.

Shawn: Yeah.

Jeremy: Absolutely.

Shawn: Great interview. We really appreciate this. This was phenomenal. I think our BioTrust Radio followers will get a lot out of this. We really appreciate it.

Tim: Yeah, thanks a ton, Jeremy.

Jeremy: I had a blast and I appreciate it. Great chatting with you guys.

Shawn: Yeah, all right. Well, we’ll do it again. Well, thank you and we’re signing off for BioTrust Radio.

Tim: Take care, guys.