Episode 52: The First Diet With Sean Bissell




The Ancestral RDs Podcast show

Summary: Thanks for joining us for episode 52 of The Ancestral RD podcast. If you want to keep up with our podcasts, subscribe in iTunes and never miss an episode! Remember, please send us your question if you'd like us to answer it on the show! Today we are interviewing Sean Bissell whose unique nutrition perspective sheds light on what foods are compatible with human biochemistry from an evolutionary perspective. Sean Bissell is the author of The First Diet. He’s also a dad to two boys, a husband, and a nutrition nut who lives in the Seattle area. At age 20, Sean began having debilitating headaches. Doctors discovered after giving Sean a CAT scan that he had significant plaque buildup in the arteries leading to his brain. But the doctors did not have any solutions to solve this problem. Sean obsessively researched the condition and found that the plaque was a result of specific substances in his diet. He took steps to reverse the damage and after changing his diet, his headaches stopped. That success triggered a lifelong dedication to the study of health to help himself, his boys, his wife, and anyone who’s interested to thrive. Are you confused about what a healthy diet is these days? With the overload of conflicting information about which foods are healthy and which are not, popular strict diets, and confusing studies, the act of eating can turn into a stressful situation. After his own health scare, Sean began researching and cooking his way to health. His book The First Diet provides a refreshing way to approach nutrition offering guidelines to help you determine your individualized approach to eating. Today Sean shares what he learned about nutrition that is biochemically compatible with human physiology and what the first human diet would have looked like. Listen to our discussion of easy to understand explanations about controversial foods such as carbohydrates, fats, and sugar to support metabolism and start peeling back the haze of confusion surrounding eating. Equally as important, you may be surprised to learn that diet is not the most important determinant of health! Here are some of the questions we discussed with Sean: What happened as far as what your diet was, and then what diet you changed to help reverse that damage in your brain? How long were you on the low carb, Paleo diet, and what was your experience with that diet? What’s your opinion about sugar and a high carb diet? Why do you recommend not only people eating a high carb diet, but also not being afraid to have sugar in their diet? One of the things that you mentioned in the book is that people who are anti carbs tend to talk about de novo lipogenesis as being a reason that carbs are bad, that you can turn carbs into fat, and any time you over eat on carbs it’s going to get turned into fat. Is that totally true? Is the problem with sugar just that it’s always combined with fat? Or do you think there’s any problem with eating sugar at all? What kind of problems have you seen in people that are doing an inappropriately low carb diet? Can you tell our audience a little bit about how eating a high carb diet affects the metabolism? How did you come up with the recommended limits for fat, and what’s the reason for keeping fat at those levels? Is there a specific reason that you think avoiding omega 6 and omega 3 fats is a good way to go for the average person? Tell our audience a little bit about your philosophy about diet and how you came to the conclusion that diet is not as important as a lot of people make it out to be? Links Discussed: The First Diet WildFoods.co - Use the code WILDRD for a free gift! TRANSCRIPT Laura: Hey, everyone. Laura Schoenfeld here and unlike usual, Kelsey Marksteiner is not with us today. She’s actually on somewhat a vacation/retreat to California for a health retreat that she’s working at. So today instead of talking with Kelsey to a guest,