Modern Life Is a Disease — Here’s How to Opt Out | Robb Wolf

**Jesse Chappus** (0:00)
Coming up on today's show.

**Robb Wolf** (0:02)
We live in an environment that is completely at odds with the way that our genetics are wired. We don't move enough, we don't get enough sun on our skin. The diets that we're eating are completely mismatched with our physiology. We are designed to do as little work as possible while garnering as much nutrition out of our environment as we possibly can. And now our environment, I can order any food I want with virtually almost no effort. There are some articles where the junk food manufacturers have really been hit pretty hard. Because the GLPs, people are just eating less junk food. What do we need to do to engineer these foods to be even more hyper palatable to override the effects of the GLPs? The bulk of the research on intermittent fasting and longevity was really misleading, even like three-day fasting. People's sleep goes to absolute hell. Our catecholamines elevate, our adrenaline, our cortisol elevate. People who get adequate but not excessive daily sunlight, they experience a decrease in all-cause mortality that's as large in magnitude as the difference between a pack-a-day smoker and non-smoker. There's great studies that 90-year-olds who exercise, strength train, keep themselves in shape, can have the physical capacity of a sedentary 40-year-old. People go on and on about the blue zones. It's got fuck all to do with the diet. It's got everything to do with the community they have and the lifestyle they have.

**Jesse Chappus** (1:24)
Robb, you were one of the people years back that helped bring the paleo movement to the mainstream. When you look back at that time, what core values and principles have changed and what ones have stuck?

**Robb Wolf** (1:37)
Oh man, that's a good question.
I think the things that have stuck is that my main motivation was just giving people a choice, hopefully. When I was so sick with ulcerative colitis, the options given me were a bowel resection and immunosuppressant drugs, and that was it. I was far enough down the path. I was looking at entering medical school and I was far enough down that path that I knew that those were awful options. Like if you have to do it, you do it, many people have done it and they go on to live lives that are just fine.
There's a lot of collateral damage with both of those approaches. When I was able to really get a handle on this complex of like ulcerative colitis, probably got six different autoimmune conditions, and was able to get reasonably healthy with this paleo low-carb intervention and thinking about circadian biology and photo exposure and all these things that we kind of nest under ancestral health now. I was like, well, shit, man, every single day, I worked part-time at the Fred Hutch Cancer Research Center doing lipid metabolism research, doing extracting lipids out of red blood cells. So I was doing some basic science. And then the other part-time job was at Whole Foods in the nutrition department. And every day, people came through there that I obviously had systemic inflammatory issues, arthritic issues and stuff. And I was pretty sure that there was a way to help them. And I actually ended up referring them to Michael and Mary Ede's book, Protein Power Life Plan, which was and still is, in my opinion, one of the best books ever written in that space. It's absolutely amazing. It just ticks so many boxes. But I just had this almost neurotic need to try to help as many people as I could. And this got really doubled down upon when I moved to Chico, California to open what was then the fourth CrossFit affiliate gym. I met my wife and her mother had just died three months prior to this at the age of 50, and I'm 54 now.
She had died from rheumatoid arthritis complications. And at this point, this was still 2003, 2004, very early days. And I had personally worked with probably 100, 150 people that were able to basically get everything from multiple sclerosis to rheumatoid arthritis into some state of remission or at least dramatically better position. So I just felt neurotic about the need to get this information out to people. So it's like, hey, try it for 30 days, see how you look, feel and perform. And then if the juice is worth the squeeze, keep doing it. If it's not, then maybe there's something else that you could do. So I'm still pretty neurotic about hoping and helping people to get an option away from just standard of care. I think that maybe something that has changed, there's so much latitude within that ancestral health model. Maybe it's high carb, maybe it's low carb, maybe it's low FODMAP, maybe it's not. Some people do wonderfully with super high fiber. Other people do horribly with high fiber, you know? So I think the thing that has occurred to me over time is we have to somehow get a general heuristic out to people that's valuable and understandable, but then we have to respect that there is massive individual differences within that, you know? And I think that it's really easy when you turn something like diet into a heuristic, it becomes a religion, and then people codify it in this one particular way, and it leaves no room for the people at the edges. And you kind of see that even, you know, like the carnivore scene, it for me became very similar to the vegan scene, and that there was like one way to do it, even though there were like a hundred different camps, and each one of the camps had their singular way to do it. But those folks oftentimes will get cranky at people who use carnivore to improve their health, and then they find that they can reintroduce some foods. And it's almost like instead of celebrating that success, they get angry at them. You know, and you see it over in vegan land too where people are like, yeah, I started this, but then I really felt like I need to reintroduce some fish or some red meat or something. And instead of celebrating that they found success and they are overall healthier, like they get vilified and demonized because they found their own path through it. So I think I have really softened my, it has to be this way, it has to be that way. I see this need for getting a general message out, but then being able to customize it for the individual.