0:00:00.0 Announcer: The advice and informational content does not necessarily represent the views of Mother's Market and Kitchen, Mother's recommends consulting your health professional for your personal medical condition.

0:00:11.1 Kimberly King: Hello, I'm Kimberly King, and welcome to the mother's market podcast, a show dedicated to the Truth, Beauty and Goodness of the human condition. On today's episode, since it's the beginning of the new year, and many of us are considering lifestyle changes that usually includes dieting, so today we discuss the primal lifestyle diet and the latest trends in health.

0:00:33.6 KK: But first up, Mark Sisson is a New York Times best-selling author, media personality and ex-endurance athletes, who founded the Primal Kitchen brand in 2015. He's been educating the world on nutrition and the benefits of fat and protein for the last decade via his blog, marksdailyapple.com. With a launch of the Primal Kitchen market delivers on his mission to create uncompromisingly delicious condiments, sauces, cooking oils, collagen and peptides and pantry staples that are made with fat we love and clean ingredients and contain no dairy, gluten, grain, refined sugar or soy. As Mark would say, "Eat like your life depends on it" because it does.

0:01:11.7 KK: And Morgan Buehler, the president and a co-founder of Primal Kitchen with Morgan's energetic leadership and innovative mindset. Primal Kitchen launched the world's first avocado oil, mayonnaise and salad dressing, collagen, protein bars and other industry leading products. Prior to Primal Kitchen, she ran marketing for Kavita and manage brands within PepsiCo growth ventures portfolio for a boutique advertising agency. She spent her post-college years as a [0:01:38.3] ____ accountant. I love that, by the way, nomadic adventure in South America, and a wanna be Yogi in Hawaii. When Morgan is not tirelessly working to make our food system a better place, you can find her surfing or wandering the farmers markets of Southern California. Wow, love it. We welcome both of you to the Mother's Market podcast. Thanks so much. How are you?

0:01:58.5 Mark Sisson: I'm great, I'm in Miami beach, and living the dream in the middle of winter where it's 77 degrees out. And it's like summer camp every day, so thanks for asking.

[chuckle]

0:02:09.8 KK: Yeah, good for you. Well, why don't you fill our audience a little bit on your mission and your work before we get to today's show topic.

0:02:19.1 MS: Well, the mission initially emanated from this sort of epiphany I had 30 years ago that so much of my own health, even as an endurance athlete, was dictated by the types of foods that I ate, and I realized that I couldn't just be an engine that was burning any kind of fuel, I had to be putting the right kind of fuel in my body, so I started a research project that's ongoing, and it's been, again, over 30 years now, where I was looking at ways in which we could enhance not just human performance from a racing elite athlete point of view, but just from the average citizen, like how could the average citizen achieve a strong, lean, fit, happy, healthy, productive body and always be upbeat and positive and have all the energy they wanted. And was there a way that we could do that through altering the way our genes rebuild, renew, regenerate, recreate us on a daily basis, and it turns out that so much of that was based on how we ate and the foods that we choose to eat. So I came across all this information like a treasure trove of information, and it was so empowering to me and my friends that I thought I'd start a blog, and I would basically take the learnings that I was getting from the research I was doing and put it out there for people to read.

0:03:49.1 MS: So the initial mission statement was to change the lives of 10 million people by giving them access to information that would allow them to take back control of their own health and not be put on that roller coaster, treadmill assembly line that we call the US Medical System. So the original goal was to affect the lives of 10 million people, and it turns out about four or five years into that, I feel like we'd already, we already kinda hit that number, so I had to add a zero to it, so then the mission became to change the way a 100 million people eat, and then that sort of became the underlying mission for the creation of Primal Kitchen and the products that we have that are there to enhance the eating experience, to make healthy eating fun and exciting and enjoyable and probably most of all sustainable over a lifetime.

0:04:43.0 KK: That's amazing, I love it. And we're big fans of your blog, and so we'll talk about that in a little bit, but today we're talking about healthy foods and living the primal lifestyle, and so Mark and Morgan, Morgan, we're gonna let you get in on this too. Morgan, what is the Primal Blueprint, all about?

0:05:02.7 Morgan Buehler: Well, Mark's probably better to answer the Primal Blueprint, but I can give you my cliff notes version, I do a good cliff notes version of Mark's whole life story because we've told it together so many times, but the Primal Blueprint..., Mark what would you say? It's an all-encompassing, a list of rules for getting the most out of life, so I think people that are attracted to the primal mission are people who want the most out of every area of their life, and a lot of that starts with health. So Mark's provided a blueprint, if you will, for feeling your best so you can show up in the best way possible in every area of your life.

0:05:40.6 MS: Yeah. The blueprint is... It's a template that calls on evolution and modern genetic science to figure out the term they use these days is hacks, but ways in which we can achieve optimal health through not just diet, diet is certainly a large part of that, but also sleep optimization, sun exposure, play, using your brain, things like that, a complete lifestyle that gets us to the point... Look, our tag line is "Live awesome," and that's really what we're after. So really, the Primal Blueprint is a template for living your life in a way that is enjoyable, that allows you to get the most amount of contentment, fulfillment, excitement, satisfaction out of every possible moment, mostly through understanding how it is that your body reacts and how it responds over time.

0:06:34.4 KK: Yeah. I love that. It's live awesome, but you also... You know, you get one chance. Your life depends on it, can eat like it. Because it does, your life, you only get one chance. So knowing that early on and then being able to just implement that. And it's true, those hacks are those templates. That's what you're providing, if you are... That blueprint? What are the benefits of physical and mental of primal living? And I also love that you include sleep, people don't give that enough attention, I think, but yeah, all in encompassing. So, the benefits of physically and mentally primaly living.

0:07:12.7 MS: Yeah, I mean more energy throughout the day, better mental clarity, better sleep, a trending toward an ideal body composition, maintaining muscle mass, and in some cases, actually improving your performance over time, especially if you start this at a later age, some people think when they're 55 or 60, that well, you know... Their days of improving are over and all they can do is stem in decline, and what we find is that people who start on the primal blueprint at that age, can look forward to another decade or two of constant improvement. So, there's certainly a risk reduction in the risk for certain diseases, almost all lifestyle disease or a risk, reduction of risk for heart disease, cancer, diabetes, things like that, those have been proven through the types of lifestyle that we're espousing here. Yeah, across the board, there's like no, there are no bad reasons that you would want to engage in the Primal Movement, they're all good.

0:08:19.0 KK: So, I think you also, you answered a question, and that is, it's really never too late, you can get to learn, you can figure out and make some really amazing changes, no matter how old you are... Is that kind of what your Primal Blueprint is?

0:08:31.1 MS: 100%. When I say 55 or 60, but we have people 75, 85, who begun after a lifetime of... I won't say making the wrong choices, but probably making choices that didn't serve them as well as they might have. Who've started again as Septuagenarian or Octogenarian, and start getting tremendous gains in muscle mass and mobility, mental acuity, all pretty much all aspects of what we would say defines a quality life.

0:09:00.5 KK: Great! And what are some of the myths around ancestral eating? This is interesting to me as well, that you'd like to debunk ancestral eating, first of all, What is that? Does that mean... Does it run in your family? Or...

0:09:14.0 MS: That's a good... No, The Ancestral Health Movement calls upon anthropology, human history and genetics.

0:09:27.0 KK: Genetics!

0:09:28.1 MS: To look at how we evolved as humans over say a 2.5 million year period of time, from the earliest humans to where we are today, and the recognition that the... That our DNA, that our Genes today are just sort of a manifestation of all of the people who survived the rigors of a hostile environment and ate real food for millions of years. And what we're encountering now is this notion that because our Genes expect us to be hunter-gatherers, it's only been 10000 years since we were hunter-gatherers across the world as people, and that's not enough time for our genome to sufficiently adapt to these new foods that we're creating all the time. And so there's a mismatch with our Genes and the types of foods that we're buying on the store shelves, these processed foods, these industrial seed oils, these sugar added, again, packaged, ready-to-eat foods.

0:10:31.6 MS: And so the ancestral health movement says, Well, okay, how can we kinda go back to it, you know... Go back to eating the way our bodies expect us to eat and give our genes the input that our genes expect of us so that they can manifest a body that burns fat instead of storing fat, a body that builds muscle, instead of having the muscle waste away, a body that makes strong bones instead of brittle bones and osteoporosis, a body that is always upbeat and looking forward to the next event rather than moody, depressed and sad. All of these things are within our control, and it turns out the ancestral health movement looks at again what was it about our ancestor's diets that worked for them that we don't have today?

0:11:14.0 MS: So, now one of the Myths would be, people would say, Well, look at the fruit today, none of that fruit today existed in the form that it did 50000 years ago, let alone 100 years ago, and you could say, Well that's pretty much true, the fruits are grown to be much more bigger and more higher in sugar content, but they're still natural. They still come from the ground, they're still better for us than say, a processed frozen fruit-pop or something like that, and the same goes for some of the vegetables, people would say, Well, there's issues with certain people have with nightshades, for instance, tomatoes and eggplants and things like that. Well, they're natural, they come from the ground, and some people might have a problem with them, but most people do not, and most people would say our genes are prepared, our bodies have made the enzymes and all of the machinery necessary to not just consume and live on these foods, but to thrive on them over time. Versus feeding ourselves a Waffle for breakfast with orange juice, that's all sugar, a bagel snack in the middle of morning, that's all carbohydrate, a fast food lunch that's got some industrially processed fats in it, some soybean oil, some stuff like that.

0:12:43.7 MS: So when we talk about the ancestral health movement, we're... I don't wanna get too deep in the weeds about... Well, our ancestors would never have eaten that or our ancestors are like, that didn't even exist. So how can you even use that as a measuring stick or template. So you have to be kind of just understand how the body works and be smart about it and not get too deep into the dogmatic aspects of a way of eating, just use that way of eating as a template. People said, for instance, when I first introduced the Primal blueprint and I was allowing dairy 'cause I like cheese. And if people say, wait a minute, our ancestors didn't... They didn't go out and milk wild animals. Well, it really doesn't matter. Milk is natural, comes from animals, it's an animal product, and there's no reason that we shouldn't be drinking milk or eating milk-based products, but it was sort of a... It was a dogmatic no-no for a long time within the Paleo movement. So I just try to be as well as pragmatic and as inclusive as possible about as many foods that if a food is not giving me issues, then I'm gonna find all the ways that I should include it in my diet.

0:14:07.3 KK: I would love to find out. You know, I like cheese as well, and yeah, the dairy as I'm getting older, I know it's not agreeing with my system so much. So I know you have all kinds of alternatives. And in a moment, I do wanna ask you about what a sample day looks like for you for breakfast, lunch and dinner? What are those meals look like? And we'll get to that, but what are some of the things about... You just talked about the Paleo diet, keto and Primal movements that you wish more people knew?

0:14:40.1 MS: I mean, I think the main thing is that there's no right way to do this. There are all sorts of ways in which people can experiment. And so each of these ways you just mentioned has its own sort of set of nuanced benefits that if you undertake it, you could have some fun experimenting with how you feel or how your body... You perform in exercise. They're all legitimate ways of eating and as this, by the way, to a certain extent being a vegetarian, I mean there are lots of vegetarians who do a very good job of assembling a diet. So I think the main thing I want people to understand is there's no right way to do this, and all I've done in my entire career is just do the research and trying to educate people on the benefits of trying to eat this way for, say, 30 days, and doing what we call an experiment of one and seeing how you feel and making the adjustments after that.

0:15:49.3 KK: Yeah, and I think that's... I think just removing some things that may... We don't know, I guess everybody, as you're saying, everybody's different, so I like that, that 30-day window where you kinda test it on yourself.

0:16:02.3 MB: And I'll just add a lot of people think you have to be like a huge meat eater to follow any of these diets, so I think Mark touched a little bit on the vegetarian side of things, and Mark's approach to keto is like inclusive in the same sense that his approach to Paleo is, but a lot more vegetables are encouraged and some people are like, "Oh, I don't like meat that much, I could never be Paleo or keto," but that's like really not a problem, right? Mark.

0:16:25.4 MS: Exactly, yeah. Yeah, it doesn't have to be a meat-centric diet.

0:16:30.9 KK: So that actually leads me to my next question. And this trending carnivore diet. What do you think about that? Is that safe?

0:16:37.2 MS: Well, I think it's safe for almost everybody to do for a period of time. The issue for me remains to be seen, is it sustainable for a lifetime? But I know people who have been doing it for years who are getting amazing results. And I really don't see a reason not to do it. So if you ask if it's safe, it's absolutely safe. Is it safe to do all in for several years? I can't answer that question. But virtually everyone I've known who has engaged in the carnivore diet went to that diet because they'd either stalled in their other approaches their other ways of eating, or they were just miserable and were having all sorts of health issues. And pretty much across the board, people who have gone to this carnivore way of eating have experienced benefits. It sometimes are like almost too good to be true when you hear them, when you hear the testimonials. So I'm more carnivore now than I've ever been as a result of the research that I've done, as a result of listening to some of my friends in that arena, like Shawn Baker and Paul Saladino, who are the leading physicians in that arena. So it's absolutely safe, and I think it's worth trying if you're someone who has failed that other diets or has issues that have not resolved like certain issues like gastric issues or skin issues that haven't resolved with other diets, it would be worth trying.

0:18:17.1 KK: Okay, that sounds good. I'm gonna try that one next. This is great information. We have to take a quick break. Don't go away. We will be right back with Mark and Morgan, stay with us.

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0:18:28.4 Announcer: Welcome back to the Mother's Market podcast. And we wanna remind you that if you missed any portion of today's show, you can find us on iTunes by searching Mother's Market or download the show from our website, www.mothersmarket.com, click the link for podcast and listen to past shows. Plus download our Healthy Recipes and money savings coupons, all available at www.mothersmarket.com.

0:18:49.7 KK: And now back to our interview with health experts Mark Sisson and Morgan Buehler, and we're talking about healthy foods and living the Primal lifestyle. So Mark, are there any health trends or movements that are popular right now that you wish people knew more about?

0:19:04.3 MS: Well, the one that I'm actually writing a book on, and it's coming out... I've written a book, it's coming out in March. The book is called Two Meals A Day, and it's really basically based on the notion of intermittent fasting and all of the research done on what we call time-restricted eating windows, but the notion underlying all of it is that we eat too much food, literally all of us in this country eat too much food, and the fact that some of us can get away with it and not gain weight or not exhibit overtly health issues doesn't mean it's not bad for us. So the challenge is to find a way in which to convince people that it's okay to eat less food provided you don't get hungry. That's the big issue. Hunger ruins everything. But there are ways in which we can optimize our health, get more out of life, have more energy, get sick far less often by cutting back, not horribly, but cutting back on the amount of food we eat. And the best way to do that is just eating Two Meals A Day instead of three. And the main reason for that is so much of what happens in to the body that's positive, so much of the repair, the regeneration, the good stuff happens when we're not eating, so the more time you can go without eating... Literally, it's almost counter-intuitive, the better it is for your body.

0:20:43.5 KK: You kind of flip the script on that. And now that you said that out loud and people have been talking about intermittent fasting, but why... And you just really stated it, it's happening, it's repairing your body when you're not eating.

0:20:56.2 MS: Yes, yeah.

0:20:57.1 KK: And so what do those meals look like when you, if you say Two Meals A Day, is there... Obviously is there a time difference in there, and what would those... An example of those meals... What would you say?

0:21:06.9 MS: Yeah. So ideally, what I do and what a lot of people who do this now, it's really become kind of a cult is I'll get up in the morning, I'll have a cup of coffee, which I don't count as a meal, and I'll get to work and I'll do some work, and then I'll go to the gym and I'll do a workout, I'll come back and I'll do some more work, and I have my first meal at about 1:30 in the afternoon, and it's typically... Like today, I had a piece of salmon and a Greek salad. And then in the afternoon, I might have a handful of macadamia nuts or something, actually where I went today, just to be truthful, they give you a Greek yogurt, a wonderful Greek yogurt, but it's too much food for me to eat at lunch, the salmon and the salad, and so I bring the yogurt home and then I might snack on that little bit in the afternoon. And then tonight I'll go to a restaurant with a friend of mine and I'll order a steak and some grilled vegetables and a glass of wine, and that's my day. That's my... It's my food day, there's no dessert in there, I'm not saying you can't have dessert, but I'm suggesting that every day I go without eating dessert that serve me better.

0:22:16.9 MS: Yes, I have sweets on occasion, I'm not that draconian about it, but I don't overdo a big piece of cheesecake, I have a couple of bites... That's it. So there are ways in which we can experience the best parts of food the best taste of food, and then recognize that that's all we need, we don't need to finish what's on the plate or we don't need to..., we don't need to make breakfast the most important meal of the day, when you... There's some work to be done to get to this point, you have to train your body how to burn fat efficiently and easily when you're not eating, we call this metabolic flexibility. Its the ability to derive energy from any substrate available, whether it's glucose in your bloodstream, carbohydrate on your plate of food, glycogen stored in your muscles, fat on your store on your body, fat on your plate of food, ketones made by your liver, there's all these energy substrates we have access to, and if we can train the body to use them, in the most efficient way possible, then we never run out of energy, we literally... We always have a great amount of energy to get us through the day.

0:23:25.3 MS: We are able to build muscle, we're able to maintain that muscle mass, we have high energy levels, we sleep better, we don't get sick that often, if ever, COVID, notwithstanding. But we talk about COVID and the fact that this is a... COVID is a pretty much very, very tie linked to your metabolism, and if you have taken the steps to do the things to become metabolically flexible and improve your vitamin D levels and maintain a good blood sugar. It's quite likely that your experience with COVID will be minimum, for instance.

0:24:05.1 KK: You led me to my next question, and that is about, what does that role of healthy eating play with COVID and changing the way we view public health? I had COVID back in July, and I literally didn't even know I had it until I tested positive. And I feel fortunate, but talk to me about your COVID experience.

0:24:26.1 MS: I got it over Thanksgiving and I was in a closed car with somebody who had COVID, who I didn't know at the time, but tested positive the next day, so I knew I was gonna... If I was gonna get it, I was gonna get it soon, and so I self-quarantined and it was like the easiest summer cold, I ever had. It lasted two days, I did lose smell and taste for about seven days. That was weird. But no other symptoms, no... I feel like I've been training my whole life for this for COVID, and I feel really pretty strongly that if the attention that governments are putting on wearing masks and social distancing, if the attention had been placed on eating better, on cutting back on sugar, on getting outside and getting Vitamin D... Or on supplementing vitamin D, that we would have not had the huge numbers that we're currently experiencing with COVID. In my mind, it was never a viral issue so much as it was an immune system issue.

0:25:23.8 KK: Literally, I wish you were there. Really talking to the people that could make a difference there, and you are obviously, but that's huge. That's a headline right there. And I think, Morgan, we talked about it, you made me laugh because you said you did lose your sense of smell as well briefly.

0:25:38.9 MB: Yeah, I had COVID a few weeks before Mark actually. And yeah, I lost my sense of smell as well. I believe they've tied the loss of sense of smell and taste with a zinc deficiency, correct me if I'm wrong. I do believe there's some... I don't know if that's been fully proven out, but yeah, that's why... We both took... Mark and I both took zinc and Coricidin which I think is pretty well known now but the Coricidin is supposed to help with zinc absorption, and my sense of smell came back maybe like five days later, but yeah I was...

0:26:08.7 MS: I was definitely down in the zinc for sure. And my... Like I said, it was about six or seven days for me. And the scary thing is I have friends who got COVID back in April and still don't have their taste back, and that's really...

0:26:23.6 KK: Really? Wow. And so have you told them to bulk up on the zinc?

0:26:27.7 MS: Yeah, yeah. But some of these people just... They just don't listen, Kim.

0:26:31.1 KK: [laughter] Unlike...

0:26:32.5 MB: I've been reading something that's called oil training to get their sense of smell back. I've been reading about this, you can do this training after you've [0:26:41.8] ____. You smell different scents a few times a day and apparently that can help regrow your sense of smell.

0:26:49.6 KK: Like a muscle to train or something... The smelling muscle. [chuckle]

0:26:53.4 MS: I do think that's a wake-up call with this pandemic this year. Is that people really need to be paying closer attention to their health in general, and certainly to the dietary part of that. I know for a fact that just by eliminating sugar, you're gonna shore up your immune system significantly.

0:27:12.5 KK: That's huge. And I know with the COVID, they keep talking about diabetic, if you're overweight, if you're compromised and all of that, but that all does lead right back to health and what you're putting in your bodies for the most part. So I love that you explained that, I'm glad you guys are both feeling better. So let's talk a little bit... Morgan, this one's for you. How important is the organic destination on a product?

0:27:38.5 MB: I think it's very important. You mean for the consumer?

0:27:42.4 KK: Yeah.

0:27:42.5 MB: Yeah, I think it's definitely one little piece of the puzzle and one big piece of the puzzle. We're huge fans of getting any product we make certified organic, if possible. I think there's benefits for our soil, for our water supply, environmental benefits beyond just your own personal consumption of organic products. We don't have organic certification, all of our products because we use avocado oil and avocado oil wasn't something that was easy to come by certified organic. We priced it out when we launched five years ago, six years ago, and it was literally 30 times the price of conventional avocado oil. So we're hoping as the supply chain becomes more mature, we'll be able to source organic avocados as well... Avocado oil.

0:28:33.1 KK: What should... When you talked about certified, what should consumers look for, for the certifications?

0:28:38.9 MB: Yeah. There's no shortage of certifications nowadays, is there? [chuckle] It's crazy. We're seeing a lot of the specialty diet certifications pop-ups, so a Whole 30, Keto, Paleo-approved and then there's other interesting ones, like we just had the eggs that we're purchasing for our mayonnaise certified humane, so that's a huge one beyond just some of the cage-free.

0:29:04.6 KK: So what changes can be made to make healthy eating more accessible? We're talking about these certifications and you're in-stores, you're online. What else can you talk about with being more accessible?

0:29:18.1 MB: I think for us, a big kind of light bulb moment was we launched this mayonnaise made with avocado oil. Mayonnaise was a really boring category before we entered. It was this $2 billion Bohemic category that no one had disrupted, and we brought this awesome healthy fat to the category and then all this innovation kind of trickled out behind us, if you will. Which is awesome because the more products that are on the market made with avocado oil, even if they're made by our competitors, the better. So as soon as we launched mayonnaise with avocado oil, a bunch of other people followed suit, we launched salad dressings with avocado oil, same thing, and I think anything... I think as our place in the industry, if we can kind of spark that change, that starts a trend and grows from there. That's just a huge win for everyone because the more people eating mayonnaise made with avocado oil, we believe the healthier the world is. So getting rid of some of those highly processed industrial seed oils in the diet. So I think some of these trendy little small niche things that blow up have a really powerful ability to pull more people into the diet, and avocado oil is a very niche product but like I talked about earlier, hopefully that becomes more commoditized, prices come down and we can really make a change universally but...

0:30:38.5 KK: Yeah, you guys are leaders, right?

0:30:41.4 MB: Yeah.

0:30:43.3 KK: Yeah. I love how you started the trend, so just get in line. [chuckle] Primal Kitchen collagen peptides. I really wanna ask you about this or just that really... I've been seeing a lot about collagen peptides. So what are... Extremely popular right now. What role do they play in a healthy diet?

0:31:00.5 MS: So I've said for probably the last 10 years, that I think collagen might even be like the fourth macronutrient. We have fat, protein and carbohydrate. Collagen is a form of protein but you can't really... You couldn't live on just collagen alone. And yet collagen as a raw material, as an ingredient is the most prevalent form of protein in the human body. It's tendons and ligaments, and fascia and cartilage, and connective tissue, and skin and hair. Collagen is throughout the body. And collagen used to be an integral part of our diet 100 years ago, 200 years ago because we would eat the full animal, nose to tail or we'd boil the carcass down and make a stock, some kind of a vegetable stock or let me say a collagen stock.

0:32:02.0 MS: And then for the longest time, so we were always getting collagen in our diet, and it was supporting the turnover in health of our tendons and ligaments and muscles and fascia and connective tissue. And even in the '70s and '80s, as we stopped eating so much of the nether parts... The other parts of the animal, we stopped eating animals nose, to tail, where all the good source of collagen were, we still got jello. We ate jello and that was gelatin, and that's a form of collagen, so even... Kids even got enough in their diet. Well starting about 20 years ago with people thinking... I guess they stopped eating so much jello, and they were only buying a choice cuts of meat, we ended up a whole generation of people that never got any collagen in their diet and we started to see a lot of injuries, a lot of things with tendons and ligaments and connective tissue that were disrupting certainly among athletes but also among just regular people.

0:33:02.5 MS: And in my case, about six or seven years ago, I got a severe case of Achilles tendinosis, and I was told I was gonna need surgery to fix it and it was never gonna be the same, and I just... I went back to the drawing board, I did the research, and I'm like, "You know what? I have only been eating prime cuts of meat. I haven't been eating any form of gelatin, I need to start supplementing with collagen." And I started taking 30 or 40 grams of collagen a day for like four months, and I literally... I literally fixed the issue that I had with my Achilles because I was finally giving my body the raw material it needed in the absence of that raw material, the body goes to plan B. Which is like, "Okay, if we don't have the raw material to build back the collagen, let's see, we can make scar tissue or we can fake it by calcifying it, but what we'd really like to do is just repair it with the actual raw material and ingredient that's required to do the best possible job.

0:33:58.1 MS: So I was so blown away by the research I did into collagen supplementation, and then recognized that this is really a nutrient that when I say it's a Fourth macronutrient, you can't get collagen from eating a prime rib or rib-eye or chicken. You can get some from chicken skin, for instance, or salmon skin, 'cause those are good sources. But I'll take you back 20 years ago when everybody was just eating skinless chicken breasts... Right?

0:34:26.8 KK: Right.

0:34:27.6 MS: So we had a whole generation of people that just got no collagen at all, but collagen is... It's integral in supporting strong bones, in healthy skin, hair and nails, cartilage, ligaments, tendons, fascia... All that stuff that sort of holds us together. So I was so convinced that collagen was like this really important nutrient that we were missing, that I decided to make a supplement. There's one thing that came up... That arose in the last five or six years, and that's bone broth, right?

0:35:00.6 KK: Oh, yeah.

0:35:00.8 MS: So bone broth has become big. Well, bone broth... The popularity of bone broth is directly tied to the fact that it's a source of collagen. People drink bone broth for its gelatin/collagen peptides. And I'm not a person who's gonna drink collagen on a 90 degree day in the middle of the afternoon in Miami. No, a hot cup of bone broth just doesn't do it for me, but a cold glass of a collagen supplement would do the trick.

0:35:32.9 KK: Wow, that's really interesting that you really healed yourself, and I would imagine that people would be running out right now to go get that collagen supplement.

0:35:40.9 MS: So just caveat, I can't say that I healed myself, but I haven't had Achilles issue for six years since I started doing this.

0:35:53.8 KK: Wow. I'm sold.

0:35:54.6 MS: Read between the lines. Yeah.

0:35:56.4 KK: Yeah. I hear you loud and clear. Tell me a little bit about the Primal Kitchen, and how you focus on something called, 'Fats we love' and most people are skeptical of the benefits of healthy fats, but can you speak more about that?

0:36:12.6 MS: Yeah. Look, all of the foods that we eat exist on a spectrum. Some are really, really bad for you, some of them are really, really good for you, and probably the one that's most misunderstood are fats. So fats exist on a spectrum of the worst, which are the trans-fats, the ones that have been altered so horribly in the laboratory and in the production facilities, known to be increasing risk for cancer and heart disease. And then we have some of the polyunsaturated fats, some of which are beneficial in small amounts, omega-3 fats for instance, are beneficial in certain amounts. Omega-6 are beneficial in certain amounts, but if you get too much of them then it becomes problematic. At the other end of the spectrum, you have monounsaturated fats, which most physicians now recognize as heart healthy and beneficial, and you wanna get as many of those within reason in your diet as possible.

0:37:14.8 MS: And then at the other end, there's saturated fats, which have been grossly maligned by the health industry for the last 40 or 50 years, and yet it turns out saturated fats are not that bad for us. Yeah, we should probably watch the intake and not go overboard on it, but we shouldn't just try to avoid saturated fats on principal alone. So we look for what we call the healthy fats, the ones that we find are sort of in that sweet spot of, they taste good, and they're beneficial. And avocado oil was one area that was just really, really of interest to us, it was probably the highest on the scale of all of the benefits you could get from an oil. Probably the highest of all is our extra virgin avocado oil. And then olive oil. Of course, we're, you know, we do an olive oil now because we're big fans of olive oil. And we're always looking for, you know, what the next, sort of healthy oil that we can incorporate into our products might be.

0:38:19.5 KK: That's great. So this also leads me to another question. So for Morgan, what is the one food everyone should include in their diet supplement?

0:38:29.9 MB: Oh, that's a tough, diet so [0:38:31.4] ____ individual, but for me, I would say salmon. I think salmon is just such a great, with Mark, it's like, it's a joke whenever we go out to eat. It's like, if there's some salad with salmon in it, or some salmon dish, that's what I always order. I think that's a, that's my safe one.

0:38:47.4 KK: That's your go-to.

0:38:48.7 MB: Yeah.

0:38:48.9 KK: Okay. And so what let's talk about the big trends coming to healthy eating, in your opinion.

0:38:53.5 MB: Yeah, this is interesting, I think...

0:38:54.4 KK: Salmon.

0:38:55.0 MB: Look about, look at this from like a micro and a macro perspective. So we're seeing like, you know, as you mentioned, the carnivore diet, obviously, like plant-based and vegan is like, still hugely trending right now. But I think one thing we've seen in the data recently is that people are kind of shying away from the restrictive diets. So you know, we're fatigued. It's like, we've been at home, we're stressed out...

0:39:14.8 KK: Right.

0:39:15.6 MB: It's January, but like, it's COVID January, right. And right, something to make me feel good and have an easy win without having to like totally, you know, appal over all my life. So, and actually, interestingly enough, we just got consumer data from Primal Kitchen, last weekend. We were over-indexing in folks who are on like the carnivorous, Super Meat forward diet, and also folks who are on a plant-based diet. So that kind of just goes to show you what's happening in the marketplace right now. Right, like people are, you know, finding our products. We have vegan offerings, we have you know, stuff that's targeted more towards the Paleo consumer, and both of those things are trending. And then I'm just always a big fan of the trend of vegetables. I like the things that I don't think are going anywhere. Mark and I are not fans at all of the Frankenfood Fake Meat Movement. So [chuckle] if I was a betting woman, I would bet against soy protein isolate for the long term. But I think, you know, real ingredients like added cauliflower, and stuff like... So those are, they're not the sexiest trends. But I think a movement away from the restrictive diets and towards just more of these real food veggie added ingredients. I think that's where we are headed, in the short term.

0:40:29.0 KK: I'm going to have to the try that. I love that and anything to spice up COVID in January.

0:40:33.5 MB: Yeah, right. [chuckle]

0:40:34.3 KK: And then make a good twist. Yeah. Well, this is been so fascinating, interesting, and congratulations and keep up the great healthy work that you're doing. We appreciate your time and some great advice and we really appreciate your knowledge and we look forward to having you on again. But in the meantime, you can get more information on the website, which is PrimalKitchen.com. And thanks again. We look forward to your next visit. We really appreciate it.

0:40:56.8 MS: Thanks for having us.

0:40:57.6 MB: Thank you so much.

0:40:58.8 KK: Thank you.

0:41:04.9 KK: If you want to learn more health information, check out www.mothersmarket.com get delicious recipes and health guidelines to keep your body in great shape. Thanks for listening to the Mother's Market podcast and for shopping at the Mother's Market.

0:41:19.0 Announcer: The advice and informational content does not necessarily represent the views of the Mother's Market and Kitchen. Mother's recommend consulting your health professional for your personal medical condition.

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