#243 What to Eat Before Carbs and Why High Protein All the Time Is Bad - Joel Greene

Joel Greene (0:00)

Balance isn't just a good idea.

It's absolutely essential. It's based on what's most true about the body. It's based on how things actually work and that you will imbalance systems in the body through imbalanced inputs. I don't care if they're healthy or not. You're going to create long-term imbalances.

Siim Land (0:13)

Welcome to the Siim Land Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land and our guest today is Joel Greene. Joel is the author of The Immunity Code and a pioneer of many of the ideas in the nutrition space. He's the founder of Veep Nutrition Systems and has worked with companies like Quest Nutrition. This episode is brought to you by the Metabolic Autophagy Master Class.

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Joel, welcome back to the show.

Joel Greene (0:59)

Yeah, thank you. Thank you for having me back.

Siim Land (1:01)

Yeah, it's we had our first talk maybe, yeah, like a year ago before this craziness started and, yeah, it was a really good podcast. So maybe can you give like a brief overview as well about your backstory and like reintroduce yourself to people?

Joel Greene (1:20)

So I generally just consider myself like basically a consumer. That's kind of how I think of myself. And I've been consuming solutions for health and deadness and biohacking for a very long time, going back to really like the 80s.

And so all that led me to a path where I was not making a living from fitness or anything like that, but I was running a company.

And this was for me, like my late 30s. And running this company, I came into this period of my life where I started the company when it was like kind of a startup and then we went, we grew pretty fast. We grew to like a $25 million run rate, like just in a couple of years.

And I was, so my body fat was like about 5% when that started and then it was like 30% by the end of that. And it led me down this path where I, for me, realized that a lot of the advice that we as consumers get just didn't really translate very well into like, you know, having a job and a real life, family and kids and all that stuff. And it set me down this path of trying to figure out, well, what would work? And so from that, I had created a nutrition software and then it was a commercial software though. So instead of offering it to consumers, it was offered to like hospitals and, you know, the YMCA and big companies and things like that. And so it was sort of an interesting period. This was for me, 2009 through like, you know, into like the late, late, late 2019, where using this software, we had several, several thousand people at any given time using it.

And there was a kind of a way that I would implement protocols. I would find protocols in research, I would implement them. And then I was able to harvest data, I was able to see like what worked and what didn't work because I had thousands of people using things all at once. So I could kind of, you know, put in a new protocol. And if it worked, great, I could kind of see why it worked. It's a lot of trial and error, was able to harvest data pretty quickly from that. And along the way, what happened was, I kind of kind of knew some people kind of on an inside track that led to doing some consulting with other companies. One of them was Quest and I kind of had, based on the data that I've been harvesting, a bunch of ideas about body fat and immune centric mechanisms and adipose. And people would ask me these questions and I would get into like these very long explanations. And finally, I was like, okay, well, I just should write a book. So I wrote a book and then here we are. That's kind of me.

Siim Land (4:13)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's data can give you like a lot of information for sure. Like, you know, that's what that's how like Facebook is based on or like how they built their own entire business. And if you get to know people's data and especially like behavioral data, like most people don't know about how many calories are they eating and they don't know how often they eat, they just, you know, kind of passing through life without really paying attention to those things. And if you have them give them like some sort of this valuable information about their health habits, then that can be a pretty transformative for a lot of people.