#994 - Dom D'Agostino

Joe Rogan (0:08)

Boom, and we're live.

How are you, Dom? Welcome to the show.

Dom D'Agostino (0:11)

Yeah, I'm doing great, Joe.

Joe Rogan (0:11)

Pull this sucker right up close.

Dom D'Agostino (0:13)

Okay.

Joe Rogan (0:14)

I know you've done the podcast before. You did Tim Ferriss' podcast. I heard you on that.

Dom D'Agostino (0:18)

Yeah, like three of them, I think I did. I'm going for three.

Joe Rogan (0:22)

Three, really?

Dom D'Agostino (0:22)

I think so, yeah.

Joe Rogan (0:23)

Oh, I need to listen to the other two, then.

What is this wine you brought me, man? This is crazy.

Dom D'Agostino (0:27)

That is...

Joe Rogan (0:28)

Do you think I'm a drunk? Is this what this is?

Dom D'Agostino (0:30)

Maybe the Dry Farm Wines guys think that.

Joe Rogan (0:34)

This is a giant magnum. I'd have to have a party.

Dom D'Agostino (0:38)

It's a wine that's pretty legit in regards to if you want to stay on a ketogenic diet.

And I tested this in my office, actually, and just found that to be, it's non-glycemic, for one thing, which means it doesn't impact, the sugar content is so low, there's not an elevation in blood glucose, and I can stay in ketosis on this wine. If I do one glass, two or three, three starts to kick me out, but two glasses of wine, you can completely stay in ketosis.

Joe Rogan (1:08)

Interesting, most glasses, most wine, will kick you out of ketosis?

Dom D'Agostino (1:14)

Yeah, I mean, it's highly dependent on, like a Merlot, a dry wine typically doesn't, but a sweeter wine.

Most of it, yeah, most of the time, yeah. White wines tend to kick me out more, and of course something like a sweet wine will kick you out.

Joe Rogan (1:30)

Like a Riesling or something like that, really sweet wine.

Dom D'Agostino (1:32)

Sangria, you know, that'll kick you out very fast. That's just sugar. Yeah, and even beer does, even though it's supposed to be low carb, beer tends to kick me out.

Joe Rogan (1:39)

Really?

Dom D'Agostino (1:40)

Make a little ultra, maybe one, you know, one or two, but other than that, yeah. I mean, I get that question a lot, so it actually got me interested into studying this, so I can answer some of the questions with some level of knowledge.

And after testing these wines, and I came to the conclusion, yeah, you can drink two glasses of wine a day on a strict ketogenic diet, and I mean, this is important for people that are doing it to manage their health long-term. Right.

Joe Rogan (2:12)

Especially people with actual health issues where ketogenic diet benefits them, like epileptic.

Dom D'Agostino (2:19)

Absolutely, like when I got into this, it was pediatric epilepsy, like in 2007 or eight, and now the applications are expanding a dozen or more. So we hold a conference, a metabolic therapeutics conference, where top-tier people in academia and from Johns Hopkins, they were probably one of the spearheaded ketogenic diet application clinically, and top-tier scientists from Yale and Harvard and other places present here. And it's, I think the application was like 11 or 12 applications for the ketogenic diet where there's good peer-reviewed research to support the efficacy as a metabolic-based therapy for a number of, everything from polycystic ovary syndrome to acne to rare, even genetic disorders like Angelman syndrome is something that we're studying. What is that? It's a genetic disorder where a housekeeping gene is mutated and it results in seizures and motor function impairment and the ketogenic diet is remarkably effective.

It's really drug-resistant seizures that these kids have. And even in the presence of a persistent molecular pathology, a genetic pathology, the ketogenic diet, through altering metabolism with the ketogenic diet, you can largely silence the pathology and the motor function impairments associated with this disease. And that's amazing to me, that you have a disease that is persistently there due to a genetic mutation, and you can largely silence the symptoms, the seizures.

Joe Rogan (3:56)

In the interest of addressing people that are probably on the ground floor, and I feel like there's very few people today that don't understand what a ketogenic diet is, but just in case, for people who don't know, there are people that use carbohydrates mainly for fuel, and then there's the ketogenic diet, which makes your body run on fats and ketones. So, try to explain that to people, like how this came about, how people started researching this, and how you got involved.

Dom D'Agostino (4:27)

Okay, I mean, this goes back, if not centuries, like millennia, dating back to the time of Hippocrates when it was observed that fasting was a quote unquote cure for seizures. And with the observation, yeah, so fasting puts you into fasting ketosis, right?