Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1701 - Rhonda Patrick
Uploaded: 2021-08-25T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1701 - Rhonda Patrick' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-08-25. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1701 - Rhonda Patrick' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-08-25. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1701 - Rhonda Patrick

Joe Rogan podcast check it out the Joe Rogan experience trained by day Joe Rogan
podcast by
night all day all right what's happening Rhonda hey very good to see you good
to see you it's been
a year it has been it's been quite a while yeah and you were just telling me
that you're 13 days
into keto I am how you feeling well let's start off with well why did I even
want to do keto why now I
mean like this has been how many years that it's been trendy it's been like
lots of benefits and
it's like why did I start trying it out now well um I've noticed that when I am
in a fasted state
so when I'm in ketosis when I'm you know burning fatty acids and making keto
bodies and using them
this energy I'm like on top of my mental game so I've been doing like when I
have any sort of like
podcast interviews I'm doing or whatever you know I'm always trying to do them
fast like I'm fasted
right now um and so I thought to myself like is this something that could be
mimicked by a ketogenic
diet like it's very noticeable for me where I can stay focused um I have more
endurance so like I
don't like you know crap out like like more mental endurance mental endurance
sorry yeah more more
mental endurance so um so I decided to try it out and I I recently had a neuroscientist
on the podcast
dr. mark madston have you heard of him no he's like legendary I mean he's
probably one of the most
cited neuroscientists but he's most well known for his intermittent fasting
studies like the five two
intermittent fasting stuff came out of his lab um he's also sort of the father
of hormesis and like
like why you know humans sort of adapted to be in a stressful environment and
how you know all these
stress response pathways that happen you know as a response to that are
beneficial but anyways
so he was um talking about like when you're in a fasted state when you haven't
eaten
how your nervous system has sort of evolved to become like more focused more
alert and that's adaptive
because if you can't find food you have to be like alert in order to like eat
or else you'll die
so um so he's talking about like one of the main things that happens is this
metabolic switch
what is what he calls but um so you do switch from burning glucose you know as
a source of energy to
basically you know fatty acids are immobilized from your adipose tissue and go
to your liver and you
start to like oxidize them use them from energy and then you make something
called ketone bodies as
as a byproduct beta-hydroxybutyrate acetoacetate and um most people think about
these well this is an
alternative source of energy across the blood-brain barrier it you know is
easily used by um you know
neurons and and other cells as well but it's it's actually an energetically
favorable source of energy
so it actually requires energy to use glucose as energy to make energy from
glucose requires energy
but beta-hydroxybutyrate that doesn't happen like it goes into the mitochondrion
and it's used without
that energy requirement so you can imagine how that works like that you use
energy to use glucose yeah
so glucose gets broken down into something called pyruvate and pyruvate so it
takes energy to do that
and then pyruvate has to be transported into the mitochondria through a like
active transport mechanism
and that requires energy to do that once it gets into the pyruvate gets into
the mitochondria it's then used
through what's called the tca cycle to make energy um acetyl so beta-hydroxybutyrate
gets converted into
acetyl-coa and beta-hydroxybutyrate can just go in without like this active
transport mechanism
so you're not requiring that energy to transport it in does that make sense so
you're making energy
but you're not using as much energy to make that energy so um that's kind of
like what you know most
people are thinking about is this this sort of metabolic switch that happens
and you can imagine
most people never do that like i i typically i was you know doing i do a lot of
time restricted eating
where i'll eat my food anywhere between eight to ten hours and then i'm fasting
anywhere between like 14
to 16 hours a day and in order to actually go into this metabolic switch you
have to deplete all of
your glycogen levels in your liver and muscle um and that usually takes
anywhere between 13 to 36 hours
depending on the person's carbohydrate intake on their physical activity and so
um you know most
people never get that metabolic switch most people are just constantly burning
using glucose and then
when you're doing that any fat that you're taking in gets stored as triglycerides
and adipose tissue
so they're always in this like fat storage state instead of a fat burning state
right and so um
because most people are eating three meals a day and plus snacks uh you just
you never get there so um
with the with the you know my you know anywhere between 14 to 16 hours so i
typically was doing i'd
notice that like i was really mentally sharp and so as i extended that out a
little bit it was like really
clear to me that like not eating was like good for my brain in terms of like
like i felt smarter i felt
like focus more it was it was noticeable like like a nootropic effect right and
so um one of the other
things that's probably less well known about beta hydroxybutyrate which is one
of the major circulating
ketones you do make when you're in ketosis is that it is actually a signaling
molecule and this was shown
by dr eric verdin he's uh he runs the bucks buck institute for aging in nevato
california um he showed
back when he was at ucsf that beta hydroxybutyrate activates like many
different genes one of them
including brain-derived neurotropic factor bdnf which i know we've talked about
before on the podcast
but that's something that is critical for you know forming new synapses and for
learning in memory i mean
there's it's there's all sorts of things that it does but beta hydroxybutyrate's
activating that
like it's not just something that's being used as energy like it's like
changing gene expression
um so so that got me really interested it's like wow this is something that
like could be
possibly also activating bdnf maybe that's partly why i mean it's a hypothesis
but you know it seems
it seems like something that people could test and seems kind of you know it
makes sense right
um and so uh so that was something that was like wow what if i could do so i so
i asked dr mattson i
was like what you know there's lots of you know differences between being in a
fasted induced ketosis
and a ketogenic diet but there's also a lot of similarities and the
similarities are one you're
making lots of beta hydroxybutyrate if you do the ketogenic diet right we can
talk about that but um
and so i was like wow maybe and then the other thing that's that overlaps
between the two is that
you produce a lot of gaba gaba is the the neurotransmitter that's typically
more of an inhibitory
type of neurotransmitter um i'm sure uh dr dom d'agosti has talked about this i
think i even
remember him talking about it before um that the gaba is increased on both you
know ketogenic diet
and when you're in like a fasting induced ketosis and gaba is um you know it
kind of has an anxiolytic
effect so like helps calm you a little bit but also seems to affect and this is
what you know some
researchers think the reason why a ketogenic diet is so beneficial for like
drug resistant epilepsy is
through gaba because it quiets down the neurons that have been excited through
glutamate so like
right now we're like having an intellectual discussion and we're like engaged
intellectually
engaged and so glutamate's being fired right and um it can do a lot of damage
like glutamate having
this like constant electrical activity like very stimulating you need something
like if you didn't
have gaba you'd fry your brain like without it like with too much glutamate so
it can cause
something called excitotoxicity and so gaba kind of counters that and um so
anyways some of the things
that i'm noticing now that i've been on day 12 or 13 um for one it's been
incredibly hard so i've been
measuring my ketone my beta hydroxybutyrate levels um daily sometimes more than
you know once a day of
course and to be in like mild ketosis you know like like legitimately mild ketosis
like i think you know
you want to be somewhere between like 0.9 0.9 and um like 1.2 i mean that's
like mild or moderate mild to
moderate and i can't tell you how difficult it's been for me to first get to
that point uh it took several
days and it's like i think people probably like 90 to 98 of people that are
think they're doing a
ketogenic diet they're not because really i think so yes because it's not just
enough to do carb
restriction and like you need a lot of fat like you need especially in the
beginning like if your body
like me so i've always you know for the most part my diet has been what you
would call paleo-ish you know
i would you know like i would have my protein and vegetables and i i generally
speaking avoid avoid
like the refined stuff refined carbohydrates refined sugars right um but i do
eat vegetables which are
carbohydrates and i also eat some fruits um and so my body's used to like
metabolizing the glucose and
doing that whole pathway you know we were talking about like from carbohydrates
and the fat that i'm
getting mostly probably is being being stored honestly as triglycerides but um
it takes a while for your
body to switch to that and um i was surprised how long because i thought well i
don't need all that
refined stuff so it should be easy it's just a little like it has been a huge
challenge and you read about
all these foods that are like okay vegetables that are keto friendly you know
like cauliflower or brussels
sprouts or a little bit of spinach or like i will eat like just a little bit of
sauteed spinach and it'll
take me for i will be in like 1.2 millimolar and it'll take me down to like 0.7
um you know so it'll kick
me out just a little bit of something and if i'm not eating enough fat like i
can't even like get so i
finally was able to now like doing like butter in my coffee and i'm just like
trying to get like
olive oil on everything and mct oil on my coffee and just like lots and lots of
fat when i started
doing that i was able to get up to like 2.2 millimolar which is like good ketosis
and um and
then like i you know like i came here traveling is really hard i ordered you
know i ordered some like
i had a steak and then it was some kind of cauliflower mash with like cheese
and bacon and
that kicked me down to like 0.4 like i was so upset check my so it's just the
cauliflower
just the carbohydrate and the lack of not having as much oil i think like so
like i have the protein
so you can convert so the thing like there are what's called glucogenic amino
acids and um
those can be converted into glucose your body has a way you you need you need
glucose like you can't like
your red blood cells don't have mitochondria the only source of energy they can
use is from glucose
your brain you know your astrocytes in their supporting cells in your brain are
mostly glycolytic
they mostly use glucose you need you need glucose so your body has mechanisms
to make it you know you're
you can make it from these gluconeogenic amino acids which are in protein or
you can make it from
glycerol which is like the background of a triglyceride but you know i think
once you become adapted and this is something that i know like dr d'agostino
has talked about a lot
where he's got more of like a modified ketogenic diet but he's been in it for
like years you know
he's like yeah done a ketogenic diet for like years and like he can eat
something that it's like a lot
more like you could have the protein and and the and the like keto friendly
carbohydrates like the leafy
greens you know that are not like super carb and it won't kick him out yeah he
seems because he's
like adapted but you know you read all these recipes like i'm going online i'm
trying t