Laird Hamilton, Bill Romanowski & friends discuss the Bulletproof Diet
LAIRD HAMILTON Laird was born in an experimental salt-water sphere which explains his love of the ocean. He is one of the most famous big-wave surfers in the world, and has dedicated his life to wellness and health, having co-invented tow-in surfing and founded several other nutrition companies. He is married to former professional volleyball player Gabrielle Reece and splits his time between homes in Malibu and Maui. In April Laird made news when he rescued a family from the floods near his home in Hawaii.
BILL ROMANOWSKI Bill is one of the most decorated NFL players in history, having won 4 Super Bowl Championships (while playing in 5) with the San Francisco 49ers, Philadelphia Eagles, Denver Broncos, and Oakland Raiders. He lives every day with the intent of living forever.
DR. TONI VARELA California State Licensed Naturopathic Medical Doctor Dr. Toni Varella has a passion for integrative & functional medicine. Toni focuses on holistic improvement by uncovering the root causes of ill health through a broad spectrum of innovative & highly specialized diagnostic tools, natural therapies, and medicines.
DR. BARBARA PERSONS Barbara is a San Francisco-based plastic surgeon who herself is a horrific accident survivor, having been nearly killed by a drunk driver. That recovery introduced her to wellness and health, and when she’s not flying her plane or at work, she’s a staunch advocate for wellness.
ANTHONY ALMADA Anthony is an IP and evidence-driven nutrition industry executive, entrepreneur, brand co-creator/disrupter.
BILL ROMANOWSKI
I think before the Bulletproof Diet even came out Laird Hamilton was giving me coffee with butter and so he’s the one in my mind who started it.
LAIRD HAMILTON
Well, I always like to say there’s nothing new. It’s a new application of an old idea and I think if you look at a lot of things that we do in our diet naturally, we’ve abused them, but in their original concept they were actually meant to have some function in it. The first time I ever started talking about ghee and espresso is with Paul Chek a few years ago, before anyone had heard of a Bulletproof Diet. The one thing I appreciate about what the Bulletproof Diet did for me was it brought my awareness back to coconuts. I have a good relationship with coconuts, being from Hawaii, and just the miracles that coconut milk, coconut water and then now of course coconut oil have, and so that’s where I give the bulletproof concept that credit, bringing my awareness back to coconut oil and just how powerful that is.
ROMO
What do you think it does for you? This is something you do every morning, right?
LAIRD
Absolutely. Well, for me, I feel like it really affects my brain, my mental clarity, I noticed that and in my appetite. I feel like if I start my day with a sufficient amount of fat and then of course I love caffeine, I feel like the fat and the caffeine relationship just makes the caffeine time released. It’s like a time release effect so you don’t get the big crash, and then I definitely get some mental clarity and focus with all those fats. You know, I have a superfood line (Laird’s Superfood) that, as you know, we’re using red palm oil and coconut oil and butters, and other fats. I really believe you need to use these elements, these supplements, in their whole food form. There is something about the concentration levels when it’s in whole food, the way it’s meant to be, that way your body knows how to use it in that way. I kind of gravitate towards trying to use any kind of supplement as close to the original state as you can, if you can pull it off.
DR. BARBARA PERSONS
Absolutely. How long have you been following this diet plan? I mean this living plan?
LAIRD
My focus on excessive levels of fat has been for a couple of years now. I’m probably three or four years into it. I’ve been on paleo before there was paleo, like I said, and Paul Chek was a big influence of mine and you know he had a saying that if it wasn’t here 10,000 years ago, don’t eat it. If you can’t pronounce it, don’t eat it. That the three White Devils are white flour, white sugar, and white milk. I think dairy gets a bad rap because we’ve abused it. When you look at raw milk and other dairy products there’s a certain nutritional value that those things have when they have the enzymes in it. But you know we’ve just destroyed our food to the point where they just don’t have the nutrient density they used to. We have to start getting a little bit more creative in finding other exotic foods that have high mineral density.
DR. TONI VARELA
I love what you’re saying about palm oil. I haven’t heard anyone use that. I’d like to know why you added that into the mix.
LAIRD
Well that’s red palm oil. I would call it an experiential thing that I’ve been doing called XPT (XPTLife.com) where we take people through a kind of lifestyle health and wellness and fitness thing and we talk about your instincts and your ability to be your own greatest doctor. When you’re in a healthy enough state to really sense what food does to you, you start to have an idea of what’s good for you and what’s not. Immediately when I tried red palm oil it did something to me, something about it was like, wow. And then I learned that it has 200 times the beta carotene of a carrot and it has all these other minerals and vitamin E and all this other great stuff and I’m like oh yeah, but I knew it all already. I just didn’t have the science. And I think when people are healthy enough and they give their bodies enough of a chance to really work for them that you start to intuitively know when this stuff’s great for you-- when it’s healthy for you. We had an ability a long time ago to know what plants should be eaten and what we needed for our body. We knew to eat this flower because that thing has this thing that my body needs. Since the abuse of food, we’ve kind of lost that. We’ve lost that skill to know intuitively, hey, I need that. But when you start to give your body enough of a break and stay away from all the crap designed to attract your taste buds, you get that intuition back because it’s in there. It’s just kind of down deep.
ROMO
It’s about consuming more fat in your diet, less protein, and a lot less carbs and basically trying to turn your body into utilizing more fat as energy throughout the day, and by doing that you get more sustained energy and you get health benefits like you sleep better and all those things. Dr. Toni Varela has been working with me for a couple years and this is something she knows a lot about. She also knows the founder of the Bulletproof Diet. How did you get introduced to the Bulletproof Diet, Toni?
TONI
My girlfriend is the PR rep for the Bulletproof Diet in L.A. and she basically spreads all of the great love and lifestyle that Bulletproof promotes throughout the nation and internationally. We were just in Mexico making Bulletproof coffee.
ROMO
So basically, for people who don’t know what it is, it starts out with breakfast Bulletproof coffee with butter and MCT oil added to it. And I’ve had it with Laird, you know, probably 25 times. How do you feel about the diet as a doctor, as a naturopath, and what kind of benefits do your patients get from it?
TONI
What I like about it is that it takes the roots of a paleo diet, the nutrient dense foods, while still being mindful of the toxins that are in our modern world. If you’re going to eat fruit choose organic. Limit the starches because of mold toxins and basically do grass-fed products, whether it’s the fats that you choose from Ghee or just grass-fed-raised butter, as well as other proteins.
BARBARA
I love what you just said, and I particularly love it that this is all science. I’m a biochemistry major before I went into medicine and surgery and at first when I was reading and teasing out the Bulletproof Diet, I was asking questions like Why grass-fed and not grain-fed? What are we talking about with these toxins? Is this some ephemeral thing or real? And as you tease through this diet, it makes sense. It makes sense from a naturopathic sense and also all the way right down to hard biochemistry, the ketones, the glycolysis, and ATP and all that. The science is solid.
ROMO
Probably the best thing about the Bulletproof Diet is you eliminate sugar and you eliminate starches.
TONI
They’re highly inflammatory.
ROMO
So you take those two things away from our society and we would be a leaner society, we’d be a healthier society and we would live longer. Probably most of the things you deal with on a daily basis have to do with inflammation. So how does the sugar and starches affect your body?
TONI
They end up increasing your insulin hormone. And if you’re not utilizing all that energy that you’re getting from grains, things like that, then you’re going to end up storing all of that fat.
ROMO
You’re not processing it. So bottom line is you’ve got to be either a high performance athlete or somebody that really works out a lot to be able to utilize all those carbohydrates.
BARBARA
Yeah, and it’s a fast burn. So you run through it quickly and then feel tired and then you need more so you keep feeding your body this bad stuff as Laird is calling it, the three White Devils.
ROMO
Meat. This is all about grass-fed, hormone-free meat. You know that’s not that easy. How do you know that it’s grass-fed, hormone-free?
TONI
You would have to go right into communication with the farmers that raise them. And now there’s even a grass-finished, instead of a grass-fed, which is feeding with grain until the last six months and then putting them on grass and call it a day. Then they put that out there as grass-fed, but they’re not the same. So yes, it can be difficult.
ROMO
So I’m a big turkey guy. I’m a big chicken guy and a little bit of pork, but those aren’t prevalent in the Bulletproof Diet. Why is that?
TONI
Again, a lot of those are grain-fed, and they are leaner in fat so you’re not getting the nutrition density that you are in cow products or those wild meats.
BARBARA
And the concept is that in eating mostly chicken and poultry you are getting all the toxins, which include pesticides and many other things that are known to cause illness.
TONI
And lectins.
ROMO
I’m big on organic fruits and vegetables and I’m going to say this because I just read it in the book The Disease Delusion by Jeffrey Bland, is why organic vegetables are healthier for you. And it was really simple, but it was fascinating. If you use pesticides the actual plant itself does not have to work as hard to survive molds, bugs, things like that. It doesn’t have to create all these phytonutrients inside. So that right there was like a light went off inside me because I really didn’t believe that organic was better for you.
BARBARA
A friend of mine was a dairy farmer and talked about the magnitude of what you have to go through to be certified organic. It really means the land can’t have any pesticides, the whole area, anything coming in cannot have any of those chemicals and that is really important.
TONI
And the reason why people are so concerned nowadays is because these toxins are getting into our system and causing weight gain, inflammation, and they’re hormone-disruptive. So you’re not getting those fat-metabolizing hormones.
ROMO
Let’s bring in my go-to guy, Dr. Anthony Almada, who’s got a Master’s in nutrition and exercise from UC Berkeley. There’s no better person to reach out to. So what do you think about the Bulletproof Diet Anthony?
DR. ANTHONY ALMADA
Well, I know it’s taken a lot of people’s interest and it has a very strong viral spread. If I look back on all the different diets that I’ve seen over the past four decades, the diets that have risen to the top, that have lasted for a while, are appealing because of the dramatic novelty compared to other diets. It’s an extension of a low-carb or an Atkins or ketogenic diet with some modifications. It has some very dramatically different departures from other types of diets and you’ve got a NY Times best-selling book. And lastly, it’s received a lot of demand, interest and trial. So it’s a very intriguing diet to examine and discuss.
BARBARA
What do you think are the most important good things about it, and what might you change?
ANTHONY
Well, I think for a sedentary person any reduction in your carb intake for most people can have a mild or dramatic change in terms of how they feel, and or how they look. And I think it’s important to call out the word sedentary or not intensively physically active-- we’ll put athletes aside. One of the things that the Bulletproof Diet resembles is the so-called low FODMAP diet, and relates to certain carbs that are in foods, even in an avocado, that some people can’t digest and absorb very well. We know from a number of studies that about one third of the population cannot absorb fructose and fructose is a concern in the Bulletproof Diet. If you eat honey, which is about 50% fructose, or if you have agave syrup, even if it’s organic and non-GMO, it’s like high fructose corn syrup, it’s got 60% fructose. A good part of the population does not absorb it well. So if it doesn’t get absorbed it goes down and hangs out in the lower bowel, creates gas, draws water and bloating, a lot of symptoms that people equate with a gluten diet or wheat, and it may not be wheat or gluten.
TONI
How do you feel about the use of coffee, because some people find it a neurotoxin, you know, given the amounts that are drunk in this diet? Do you find that it’s packed full of antioxidants as purported or do you find that the mold exposure could be problematic if people aren’t consuming necessarily the Bulletproof brand?
ROMO
I’ll add to that. It’s funny about the caffeine. How much caffeine are they taking in?
TONI
Yeah. How does it compare to Red Bull?
ANTHONY
Okay let’s use Red Bull as a benchmark or as a measuring stick. One can of Red Bull has 80 milligrams of caffeine. Now the thing that they always say, they and Five Hour Energy for example, is that it’s comparable to “one cup of coffee.” But who’s making that cup and what size is that cup? So we know from work that was done about a decade ago from the University of Florida medical school where they went to a Starbucks six days in a row, to the exact same Starbucks, and they got a grande, 16 ounces. They analyzed it for caffeine content and found it ranged from 250 milligrams to 520 milligrams! When you get your cup of coffee, the caffeine is an unknown dose that changes every day and I’ll bet you that the Bulletproof brand does not control and monitor the caffeine content in every single serving as brewed for directions. I spoke to a company from the UK, they claim to have developed a method to standardize the caffeine content in every single serving. And I said, Well, that’s interesting, because if you can do that, if you can control how much of a naturally occurring ingredient like caffeine is in each batch of coffee, with changes in rain and sun and Juan Valdez picking on the afternoon one day and the morning the other day, then what you have done is a biological miracle. What we find is that many so-called natural coffee sources in drinks, foods, supplements, they actually spike it with synthetic caffeine to give you the desired dose and no one has ever tested for that. I am working with an attorney who will be leading the first class-action lawsuit that will prove that many very big brands are using synthetic caffeine to make their natural caffeine content claim. It’s a very, very interesting situation. So the good question is how much caffeine is in there? I don’t know? Depending on the temperature of the water and how long you brew it, you’re going to get a different drug-like effect.
ROMO
So basically what you’re saying is you approve more of a Red Bull because you at least know exactly what your caffeine level is. How do you think this diet would be for a high performance athlete?
ANTHONY
Being a scientist I’ve been involved in a bunch of university research studies, I have to ask the question: Have there been any studies that use the Bulletproof Diet, compared to another diet-- equal calories and equal protein-- to show the performance benefit? No, it’s all anecdotal. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t work, but there is no independent third-party proof that it’s better. And we know from a number of studies including the most recent one that was done at the National Institutes of Health, that people do not report accurately what they eat and they typically underreport. And if you have a chance to be in a diet study where they give you the meals and you go home, you know it’s so easy to cheat, even unintentionally, or go off the diet, and we know that when you put people into a place where they are living and you see everything they eat and you measure everything that comes out of the body and you measure everything they leave on the plate. So right now I would say from an evidence perspective there is no evidence to support this. I bet there are some people that as athletes would thrive on that diet and others would notice no difference and others would have a very, very undesirable effect on the diet. It doesn’t fit everyone.
TONI
I think that was interesting that we just say that Red Bull is better than coffee possibly?
I also wanted to talk a little bit more about Dave Asprey, the founder of the Bulletproof…basically lifestyle, not just diet, and where he came from. Basically he had a mold overgrowth and it went undiagnosed so what he went out to do was to find a healthy high-immune-supportive nutrient-dense diet that was low in toxins so that he could improve on an optimal basis. So that was partly how he came up with coffee and finding low mold exposed beans, however now people are saying it really doesn’t matter how much mold is influenced in the bean because you’re roasting it off. So there’s a controversy there that people might want to look into. Granted the whole lifestyle and diet is great on a holistic level to create that awareness in your own life, to have a nutrient dense diet, to go organic, to be aware of these toxins in the environment.
ROMO
I gotta admit this he basically took the paleo diet, added coffee with butter and rebranded it as “bulletproof.” It’s fascinating. It’s a great marketing play and everybody loves it.
BARBARA
I think the additional interesting thing combing through his book twice is that he also set out to figure out which additives and things his body tolerated- the nightshades for example, and taught us that you can you can try chicken, or organic chicken, and see how your body handles it. It’s an individual basis.
ROMO
I am a human guinea pig. I have tried almost everything out there. I’ll try it for a while and if I feel something I’ll usually stay with it. But if I don’t feel something a lot of times there has to be science behind it for me to stick with it.
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