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Primal Foundations Podcast
Welcome to the Primal Foundations Podcast! We will dive into what I believe are the 4 essential foundations you need to live a healthy lifestyle.
Strength , Nutrition , Movement , and Recovery.
Get ready to dive into discussions that will guide you on your transformative journey to unlocking your path to optimal health.
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Primal Foundations Podcast
Episode 35: Dirty Keto with Vinnie Tortorich
Fitness enthusiasts, prepare to be inspired! Vinnie Tortorich, a renowned fitness expert, joins us for an unforgettable conversation about his relentless commitment to health despite battling leukemia. Vinnie's story of logging 365 hours of cardio each year, while navigating personal health challenges, is nothing short of extraordinary. He shares invaluable insights about the common pitfalls in fitness journeys, particularly the impact of misinformation on health and nutrition, and stresses the importance of consistency even on the toughest days.
Our discussion doesn't stop at exercise; we delve into the complexities of dietary choices and their profound effects on metabolic health. We candidly explore the temptations that challenge us all—yes, even French fries—and share strategies to stay on track with health goals, drawing from personal experiences including battles with cancer and ketogenic lifestyles.
Vinnie gives the listeners a sneak peek into his newly released documentary "Dirty Keto". Click the link below to rent or purchase the documentary.
Connect with Vinnie:
https://www.instagram.com/vinnietortorich/
https://nsng.vinnietortorich.com/product/intro-to-nsng/
https://www.amazon.com/Dirty-Keto-Vinnie-Tortorich/dp/B0CXXCXZ7P
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Instagram: @Tony_PrimalFoundations
Website: Primalfoundations.com
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Welcome to the Primal Foundations podcast. I'm your host, tony Pascola. We will dive into what I believe are the four central foundations you need for a healthy lifestyle Strength, nutrition, movement and recovery. Get ready to unlock your path to optimal health and enjoy the episode.
Speaker 2:You can't ask a WAP to do an evening podcast without having an espresso.
Speaker 1:My man. That goes, Vinny Tortorich. Welcome back to the Primal Foundations podcast.
Speaker 2:Tony man, thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure to chat with you and you know I'm always honored that people like yourself will actually have an old guy like me on.
Speaker 1:You know you are a fan favorite. I always I get people that ask me after your episode came out, episode 13. They're like, hey, when's Vinny coming back? I'm like I got to get him back on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I tell people. People always go oh, would you come back on again? I don't want to bother you. It's like it's not a bother this. Come back on again.
Speaker 1:I don't want to bother you.
Speaker 2:It's like it's not a bother. This is what I do, Right? So I'm not, you're not bothering me. I like talking. I like talking to people. I've done one thing for 40 years and, uh, I think I know a thing or two and it's good. It's good. You know, before I die, I want to get it all out there, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean you've been doing it a long time. I always say you're the, you're the OG of fitness. You've been, you've been doing a doing a long time and cause you're 61, 62, 61.
Speaker 2:I'm going to be 62 in a couple of months.
Speaker 1:Yeah, wow. And look, you're looking, you're looking. Good brother.
Speaker 2:I appreciate hearing that I'm a little red right now because it was hot as hell today and I was out. I was just out on a nine mile walk and it's one of those days where it's like 93 degrees here with 98 humidity and I just walked in from that, jumped in the shower. It's like shit, tony.
Speaker 2:I'm supposed to be on tony's show and took a quick shower and I'm looking at my face in the camera now it's like, oh my god I got a lot of sun today, um, but I had just enough time to make my espresso and sit down and do this that's actually one of the the most commented things that people have talked to me about.
Speaker 1:Your episode was that you do the 365 hours of cardio in a year and you like kind of track it in a log.
Speaker 2:You're still, you're still doing that yeah, uh, this year I'm a, I'm a little down, um, I'm well over pace. I'm probably 20 hours ahead of pace. I usually end up with 440 or so hours, so it's always way more than the 365, but I'm not on that kind of crazy pace this year. Mainly and and I'm sure we'll talk about in a minute my leukemia came back. So you know that put a damper on numbers high and I wasn't feeling well before that. So you know days when I would do like two hours of aerobics. I would get to an hour and just go oh, screw it, I'm good, you know, and I would just stop it early. But yeah, I'm coming around. You know everything, even though I'm not out of the wood yet.
Speaker 2:On the leukemia, I'm back in the gym and the gym that's behind me Also, the gym. I go to the gym in town again. But I did exercise right through chemo Some days. It wasn't very pretty or very much, or, you know, my energy levels were zapped, but it was important for me to try to move around every day because chemo is a motherfucker. Can I curse in your podcast?
Speaker 1:Fuck yeah, Vinny.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, fucking, go for it, dude. Um, cancer sucks, everybody knows, knows that. And if cancer doesn't suck enough, chemo doubly sucks, you know, and my thing is, if I could get on my rowing machine and just go real easy and just move my body and or get on my um, my spinner, and move my body a couple of days it was still nice and cool. It was springtime I would just walk around the neighborhood, you know, as much as I could, and sometimes that's all the exercise I can do. So I was counting that as aerobics, even though I was barely getting into zone two on most of it, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean that's so. I tell that to some of my clients. It's like it just got to get there. You get there, you move around, you're going to. As long as you get to the gym you're going to do something, you're not just going to go in the door and walk around. So even if you do the stepper, you do whatever, but you're moving, that's a win, even if you cause you didn't feel like doing it and you force yourself to do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the couple things that I wanted to talk about today, kind of the first thing and overarching kind of concept, and just we could take any direction that you want to take it and go from there. But there's, you have a lot of clients. So you have, you have clients that you know are that trying to lose the pesky 20 pounds, and you have clients that need to lose hundreds of pounds and everything in between hundreds of pounds and everything in between. You know what, just by seeing all of those different people, what, what's the most problematic issues for people? You know in your, in your professional opinion, that is causing harm to people's health.
Speaker 2:The most problematic? Well, basically, the lie. You know. Now we have more lies than ever.
Speaker 2:Back in my day, when I was in Hollywood working with people who only needed to lose five pounds and keep it off or look ripped for a part, you know, I would see the lies on television, you know, because we only had television back then, right? So it was like, hey, you can look like Jared just by eating Subway sandwiches. Look, I used to have these pants on and look how skinny I am now. Or, you know, join Weight Watchers and lose 10 pounds in the first month. Or if you looked at a magazine, it was, you know, great abs by Tuesday of next week. You know, you know rock hard abs by Wednesday. You know all this kind of crap, right, and it was all just lies. And and guys like myself would be out there going, okay, these are lies. You can't do that. It doesn't work that way. You know that. You've been in the business for a while. So first you have to diffuse the client from listening to those lies. Well, now we have a little something called YouTube where everyone and their cousin is a trainer. I think it's comical and he's a great kid. He probably listens to this podcast. Well, no, this is not my podcast. He probably doesn't know who you are, but I think he listens to my podcast. Hopefully he'll never hear this Great kid started showing up at the gym maybe a year ago, very enthusiastic about working out.
Speaker 2:He's like a little energizer, bunny right, and he's always, you know, hitting me for information. I don't mind talking and telling him whatever he wants to hear after my workout. It's like listen, I'll take you for coffee, we'll do whatever. Just let me hammer it here for a bit, pal. You know, I noticed the other day he's giving advice to other people and he came over and he told me he goes yeah, I'm a trainer now. Okay, you didn't know anything five minutes ago, but now you're a trainer and you know he's not really giving him correct information. I hear what goes on, right, I can hear what he's telling people in the gym. I think my God. But you see, it's not up to me to go correct that or to, you know, dash his hopes of being a trainer. Maybe nothing else worked out in his life and if anyone's dumb enough to use this kid, well, that's their fault, right? I'm not there to police anyone. I wish I can, I wish I was the trainer police, but I'm not.
Speaker 2:But I see things that are wrong all the time, and I heard a guy the other day, some big bonehead steroid head guy, and he was online explaining you know, mtor and how mTOR. It's like he didn't get anything right. By the way, I don't really understand mTOR and how it affects your body. Most doctors you go walk in and ask the smartest doctor. You know he won't know anything. But this steroid head guy had all kinds of mtor information and he was handing it out right, and it's like you're making you know. They just find a big fancy word and they just lean on it and do it. It drives me crazy in a way. In another way I just laugh about it. But I guess the reason it drives me crazy is because people are out there listening to these jackasses, right, and that bothers me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, youtube, university now, and everybody's going online and I mean we have social media, instagram, the new Twitter, x, whatever it is and where everybody's getting the information and it's hard. It's hard because you're just a regular Joe Schmo, like I'm 35. I'm going to be 36. Like I'm right now. In the past few years I'm like I think I kind of got it right. I'm still learning, I know, because there's always something new coming out. You know, I was years ago. I was a big, big vegan. I was two years of vegan. Forks over knives came out. That was I'm doing this all wrong. I got to ditch the animal protein, I got to have the veggies and that messed me up. And then I had to crawl back to getting into really good health, kind of crawling out of the hole, and it took me a few years to get back to feeling really good and putting muscle on and keeping my weight down. But there's just you're right, it's a lot of different lies or it's a lot of information and you don't even know where to go.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, whenever you see like game changes or forks over knives or what the health or any of these things people will, they'll change their life overnight and go oh my God. They said eating dairy is bad and eating one I think in Game Changers that was the one. No wait, maybe it was Game Changers. What the health. They found a vegan doctor that said that dairy was racist. It's in the movie, I'm not making that up. Eating dairy was racist. Is it because most of it is white? I was trying to follow, to follow along. See, you probably don't even remember that, right that I I didn't.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what's the health? I actually, I just started seeing some things on it and I just decided not to watch.
Speaker 2:I should have just watched it through, but um, yeah, it's all yeah, it's all just crazy what they're saying in these movies, and I remember when I came out with my first documentary, everyone was like they were going hey, you need to do what they do. And it's like what do you mean? It's like they're very effective at telling lies and getting people hooked in. It's like no, no, no, no, no, enough with the lies. I think politics do that too.
Speaker 2:The right lies a lot and the left lies a lot, and it's like whichever lies you want to believe, who that's who you go with. I always ask me why I'm not political. It's like ah, that's for other people. You know, I don't care who you are. Uh, if you're on the left, everyone on the right thinks you're lying. If you're on the right, everyone on the left thinks you're lying, right. It's the same with food. It's the same with meat eaters versus vegans, and they're wrong. No, you're wrong, no, you're wrong. And when you're a guy like me and you go, okay, let's just look at the facts and see who you know. I always try to find the common ground. I don't know if we talked about this last time. I'll go, okay. What is what do vegans and say, carnivores like a Sean Baker? What do they both have in common? Can you think of anything they have in common?
Speaker 1:I. So I think when I hear vegans and, like Anthony Chafee and a baker, I think the biggest thing is getting down to getting rid of the highly processed, highly palatable fake food and getting to the basics of eating real things.
Speaker 2:You're absolutely correct. You know the one thing that the true vegans, you know the ones that are not the Michael Greggers or the Clappers or the McDougals who are just lying through their teeth, the ones that will say eat whole vegetables you know, stay away from animal protein.
Speaker 2:eat whole foods. They're absolutely correct, eat whole foods. You go talk to Anthony Chafee, you talk to and I'm friends with both of these guys Sean Baker, and they'll say, yeah, whole foods. So, okay, we agree on something Now.
Speaker 2:And, by the way, most meat eaters will actually say to you, just to give them a little more credit hey, listen, eating some cruciferous vegetables are not so bad for you. Some of them are like, the vegetables are trying to kill you. You know, and say, okay, and let's calm down there. You know, but I don't think vegetables are out there trying to kill us. Broccoli has never killed it. You've never gone to a doctor and the doctor's like you're dying from emphysema, you ate too much broccoli, right?
Speaker 2:So I think there's common ground where the meat eaters will say, yeah, if you want some meat jewelry, you know, some broccoli, some cauliflower, some asparagus next to your meat, that's fine, right, have a salad with it, have a potato, they don't care, right, they don't care right. But the vegans are like no, no, no, just vegetables, no meat. But they're close to a common ground besides that, right, whole foods. So maybe we can find something in there to get everyone to get on the same page. I could be completely wrong. Maybe I'm too much of a pollyanna and I think that this stuff could happen and it never will.
Speaker 1:The dogma's there. I talk about it all the time on here. The dogma's there and I just had a few people on. Previously. Matt Lawrence was on it was the last podcast and he's animal-based. He started a carnivore for health issues he those autoimmune issues and then he started incorporating some fruit and a little honey and he's doing more of the paul saladino style and it works for him. You know he's. It works for him and he's he doesn't have these issues flaring up that used to. And some people they food is the who make food thy medicine and they completely get rid of all carbohydrates because of a health issue. But some people they don't have a health issue. They could eat meat, they could have fruit and they could have vegetables and feel completely fine.
Speaker 2:Well, going back to your original question, the difference between someone losing 20 pounds or maybe 200 pounds, right.
Speaker 2:Mm-hmm. Well, the 20-pound person, once they get their diet under control, if they had occasional sugars or grains mostly just simple sugars, like a honey or some kind of dessert I don't know candy bar, chocolate or whatever. They're not metabolically broken for the most part. They don't have fatty liver disease, they don't have type 2 diabetes, they don't have sleep apnea. I could go down the cornucopia of problems that people who are 200 pounds overweight will have, right. So if those people wanted to follow kind of a Paul Saladino yeah, you want some manuka honey, knock yourself out. You know that's fine, I could do that People go. Well, you're lean and mean, why don't you do it?
Speaker 2:It's like well, I beat cancer once before and I was able to keep it away for 17 years before I had to go back on chemo again. That's worth it for me to stay strict, keto, right. And that's the same reason why when I work with these people like I was just talking to him on my thing, king, scott King and some of these people who have lost Scott King, I think, has lost 300, some odd pounds with me now you know they're still metabolically broken, right, they can't mess around. They have to stay pretty strict and I have a lot of people who are 250, 350 down right. Those people still, they punched their card a long time ago. They're always going to be metabolically broken. They have to pay attention and I know the hell they're going through because I live in that hell right Of not having the ice cream or not enjoying the wine or some of the things that a 62-year-old WAP should be doing. So I just stay away from it and people go well, you never have ice cream, maybe twice a year, but it's not like a cheat meal or a cheat day or once a week.
Speaker 2:Do I ever have wine? Yes, when I'm in Europe. My sister-in-law is wealthy and she has some good wine and when I see her. So I have a rule when I see my sister-in-law I can have wine. Why? Because I see her maybe once a year. Sometimes I skip a year between seeing her. So when I see my sister-in-law, if she's pulling out $150 bottle of wine, you can bet I'm going to have some of it. Right, that's not the issue. For the rest of my life I'm in dietary ketosis. I can't have wine every day, or even once or twice a week. It doesn't work that way for me the French fry, right?
Speaker 1:Or a potato chip. You want to have one, you can't. I mean, some people have the willpower. I know I don't have that willpower. I got to get that away from me. Even with fruit, things like that. If it's berries I might buy that, If the farmer's market buys some berries. I'm more carnivore than anything, but I say like I'm 90%, and then I'll have every once in a while something little barrier too. But if I buy a big package like I gotta be careful cause I'll eat it in one sitting, I just can't help. That's why I don't order French fries. That's why I don't have potato chips. I'll eat the whole freaking thing.
Speaker 2:It's funny, you should mention it. I was in um, I was in Chamonix, um, because we did two climbs we climbed Grand Paradiso in Italy and then I was back in Chamonix to climb Mont Blanc maybe 2018, 2019, right before the pandemic. And you know, my buddy was carnivore and you know, when you're in Chamonix it's easy to get hamburgers really nice, juicy, thick hamburgers and they'll bring it to you without the bun. But no matter how many times you tell them not to bring french fries, the french fries show and and there's a, there's a, you know, a language barrier to some degree. So the french fries would always show up. And we went to the same place every day and they had these golden, beautiful fries and my buddy, who's strict carnivore, um, he wised me every day when I got done with, and these hamburgers were almost a half a pound each. We would have two of them each.
Speaker 2:Right at the end of it, I would eat one fry and he, he, he took note of that and he goes dude, how do you do that? It's like what he goes. You just how do you do that? I was like what he goes. You just do the one you bite into. One fry. I was like number one. I know it's loaded with seed oils and it's a carbohydrate. And notice, I wait until the end of my meal and I'll taste it, or I won't taste it, but I would never do it at the beginning because you'll keep going back to those fries. I know I will.
Speaker 2:And at the end of the meal there's a cup of coffee there. For some reason, once I start drinking coffee I'm done eating, right. And when I did bite into it, it wasn't even chomping down the whole fry. I was like, let me see what they got here, let me just taste it. And that was that. But he saw that and he was like I can't even do that. He couldn't touch him because he would. He would just damage that whole plate of fries, right? So I'm the same way with sugar. If there's sugar, I can't touch it because if I even taste it, I want it all. I'm like a heroin addict. Right, I need more fries. I can take them to leave them.
Speaker 1:What's what's the old saying that? Not the old saying I? What's what's the old saying that? Uh, not the old saying. I guess it's kind of true, uh and people have mentioned this multiple times that sugar is harder to kick than a cocaine habit you know, you know it's funny.
Speaker 2:I I was um, I'm gonna name drop here I was with my buddy, dr drew. I don't know if I was doing his show or he was doing my show, but I was like Drew, who I think is actually Jewish, but I called him Drew, not Drew. I just read a report where sugar operates on the frontal cortex. Now, by the way, I don't know what the hell I'm talking about, right, I just read this thing the frontal cortex. I just read this thing the frontal cortex. They see, where sugar lights up the brain, almost identical to amphetamines and cocaine and all this stuff. And Drew goes in because he's an addiction medicine specialist. He goes, well, not exactly, because, well, cocaine does this and heroin does that. And even though the sugar lights up the frontal cortex cortex, it doesn't do it in the same way. And he went on for like three minutes, you know, dressing me down, and when he was done I said yeah, but here's the difference we're not giving cocaine and heroin to kids at birthday parties and telling them it's okay, right, you know, this does light up the brain.
Speaker 2:And we're them it's okay, right, you know this does light up the brain. And we're saying it's perfectly fine. As parents, we're giving it as a reward. It's a birthday. Johnny's birthday is today let's all have a big reward session of eating cake and ice cream, right, and if you ever go to one of those birthday parties I don't know if you have kids yet, tony, but they're running around, screaming, everyone's, and then all of a sudden they all their faces turn red and purple and they they all get cranky and they crying and they want to go home and because the sugar high goes down, they're, they're crashed out, right. It's horrible what we do to kids, but you know we do it.
Speaker 1:I see it Well, my main gig is I this is all on the side my main kids. I'm a PE teacher and I teach fifth through 12th grade, so I have the whole gambit and I see and I see them and I see what they eat on the side. And the big thing is we do reward kids. At our school and most other schools they reward kids with treats, candy for doing a good job. You're going to get this, you're going to get a roll of Smarties for this math equation because you're smart, and that's what we do. And we do that with the teachers, the parents, the co-workers. You know, teacher appreciation week. What are we getting? We're getting, oh, you're going to love this.
Speaker 1:It says say it with sweets. So the, all the parents get together and they give all the, they, everybody buys a bunch of sweets and they have a room and you get a box and you can go around and grab sweets. So you say it with sweets. Is that's like the thank you to the teachers. And I'm like everybody's like you going down there, you're going to get some sweets. I'm like dude, if they say with steaks, I'll be down there, but if they ain't saying with steaks, I'm not there because I'll eat the whole thing. But that's where we're at. We reward our children, we reward adults, we reward people with these you know, sugary treats, because we think that's the expectation, but in reality that's just sending a really bad message.
Speaker 2:You know, if you did say it with cigars, right're, right, that's horrible, but why not? You know, is a cigar less harmful than all the candy and sweets and everything else? Let's just do say it with. And they were with tony, you're out of your mind, it's like. Well, everyone else is out of their mind, tony.
Speaker 2:When I, when I was a kid going through school, we would eat lunch at noontime, right, and I was a football player. So you know, we had the trays where it was just sectioned off. There was a protein, there was some kind of greens and some kind of starch on the plate and a dinner roll, right. But the football players had to get more than that. We used to just all sit together and we'd tell the other students whatever, you're not eating, just when you're going up to throw yourself, just shovel it into our thing so that we can get some nutrition here. So we would all eat whatever. No one else wanted, right, the starches, whatever. Because we went and had another three hours of school after that lunch. Then we dressed up for football. We were on the field by 3.30 because school didn't let out until 3. We didn't have cupcakes or muffins or a mom coming out with treats or anything and punch. We went from 3.30 to 6.30, three hours of football practice hammering away.
Speaker 2:I don't know if you ever played football. It was a pretty tough sport. And then after practice we would go back and shower at school and by the time I got home it was, I don't know, 6.30, quarter of seven. I hadn't eaten a bite of food since noontime that day and we all survived, right. We're all lean and mean and hell. I went to college on a D1 football scholarship, so obviously you can do it. And there was a let's see Butch. That's a good scholarship. There was at least two other guys on my team that had D1 scholarships, right, and none of us had a mom out there with muffins or cupcakes or ding-dongs or whatever the hell they bring to kids at practice. And we all did just fine.
Speaker 2:And no power bars. Back then Power bar wasn't invented. Yet we're talking about the late 70s. I remember the first time I saw power bar about 1980, 35, there was a new sport that kind of took hold called triathlon. Triathlon did not exist before that.
Speaker 2:It started out of, you know, two Marines trying to test themselves to see who was the stronger Marine. So I think one was a really good swimmer and the other one was a really good runner. So they came up with okay, we're going to both swim X amount of miles, like 2.1 miles, and then we're going to run a marathon. So each person and they said, okay, let's pick a sport that neither one of us is really good at. So they picked cycling as the third sport. That's how triathlon got started, and I think they were stationed in Hawaii and that's how the whole thing got started. And I think they were stationed in hawaii and that's how the whole thing got started right.
Speaker 2:So we I remember in 85 I was done with football and we we started doing these triathlons in new orleans and it wasn't very long before things like power bars came along and they were really kind of gummy and gooey. At first they they didn't really have the formula down pat. But what we figured out was when we were on the bike during the triathlons, we can actually take this power bar and just let it sit over the top bar of our bicycles and just kind of wrap them up. So when we were riding and they were nasty because the top bar of your bicycle is nasty, we'd just rip them off and eat them and it was like, yeah, it caught some of the sweat, you know. So I'm getting some of the salt back in me and that's the way we did triathlons in the early days. So thanks for reminding me of power bars.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, you know I've gone off on a tangent. We didn't have all of these things and nobody was fat. We didn't have all of these things and nobody was fat, no one had an eating disorder, nothing. Everybody was lean and mean. We didn't need all the extra sugar, right? And these parents the kid goes kick a soccer ball for 20 minutes and say, oh, my kid needs to carb up, they need Powerade and Gatorade. And I was like, no, they need nothing. Give them water and if you want to give them salt and be done, that's all you need.
Speaker 1:Yeah, everybody, cause I coach wrestling for a long time and the big thing with those kids and I I really just put the kibosh on Gatorade. I'm like and again, I know they got to rehydrate after they weigh in, and some kids a little bit more than others, which and I usually tell them like a half a Gatorade if you really want, but like nothing, no more than that, water it down something. I'm like you don't need all that, you don't need the sugar, it's just, and I just feel like it's just a scam because they don't feel they can perform unless they drink Gatorade and it. And it sounds stupid when I say it out loud, but it's the truth. I loud, but it's the truth.
Speaker 2:I got to have this power aid or this Gatorade or whatever aid or power bar and we get hooked. I hate to go against you here, but they actually do need it because their blood sugar goes down, since they're sugar burners. Their blood sugar goes down and they need something to hike it up right before they get on that mat. So in their case, they need it, unless they're fat adapted and they know how to hike it up right before they get on that mat. So in their case, they need it, unless they're fat adapted and they know how to use protein and fat for energy. They probably need that just to wake their ass up.
Speaker 1:One? Yeah, maybe, but not gunning them down like they're water, Like that's the problem.
Speaker 2:You know, more is better. That's what athletes do.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:If a half a Gatorade Coach, if a half a Gatorade Coach. Tony said a half a Gatorade is what I need. I better have two and a half. Oh man.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they. I mean, but you're right. And also there's there's no, unless there's like the it's newer now. I mean I look at like a Zach better who's run like the hundred indoor on a ketogenic diet. There's a lot of athletes that are changing over to a ketogenic diet. Like if I'm looking back, when I was in high school there was I couldn't fathom like being a fat adapted athlete, like I didn't make any sense to me. I just because that's all I knew high carb, high carb, high carb.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, my back in my day too. Um, I remember we, you know, after, when school let out at three on football game nights, we would all go to someone's house usually my house or some, or gus's mom or one of them and um, they would do big giant pasta feeds and we would all just go gobble down pasta at four o'clock. Games were at seven. And then I'll never forget, right after we ate everyone was like, oh, I gotta fucking, I gotta get a nap in, right, the pasta would just knock you down, so we would all just crash. It looked like you know, jonestown, guyana. You probably don't know what that reference is, but no, you ever hear the term drinking, you know. Yeah, he drank the kool-aid, drank the kool-aid? Yeah, you know what that reference is, but no, you ever hear the term drinking. You know, yeah, he drank the Kool-Aid.
Speaker 1:Drink the Kool-Aid yeah.
Speaker 2:You know where that term comes from?
Speaker 1:Isn't that from like a cult or something?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was in Jonestown. There was a guy named Jim Jones and, uh, he, he took a bunch of Americans, separated them from their family, you know, by putting them in the cult, and they all went to Guyana and to a place called Jonestown, guyana. It was out in the middle of the jungle and whenever the American government figured out, oh wait, these people were stolen from their families and the family started asking questions. And, senator and all this, they all went out on an airplane. Jim Jones knew they were coming and told all of his people to drink the kool-aid. And they drank the purple kool-aid which was full of cyanide, and they all killed themselves. So when they got there, they found dead people all over this.
Speaker 2:It was very, very sad. So that's where the term drink the kool-aid comes from. But but we looked like Jonestown, guyana. Back in those days, everybody would eat a big thing of pasta and it's like, oh shit, I need to lay down right here and, of course, an hour and a half later we'd wake up and go play a football game, right. But that's the way it was, right, everybody was trying to carve up it was the exact opposite of what we needed.
Speaker 1:Now going into. We were talking about the food we were talking about. You know different aspects of you know different bars, different food lies and all that. This, this new doc that you're coming out with and I love the title, by the way dirty keto, right. What was some of the kind of rationale of like I got to get this out here?
Speaker 2:I, I do consults with people. You know the four mentioned. You know people who are several hundred pounds overweight and you know, sometimes I would have people 100 pounds down, they still have another 150 to go. You would go, wow, 100 pounds, that's really good, yeah. But when you, when you lose 100 pounds and you still weigh, you know know, 300, right, and you're not there yet, and it's like they would stop losing weight, a lot of times and whenever I'm interviewing these people, it's like you're still eating complete keto, right, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it take me through your diet.
Speaker 2:And then I started hearing these terms, and this was all years ago. Well, I'm eating keto bread. Now I'm like, what do you mean keto? You know that's an oxymoron, that's the same thing as keto bread. And they went, no, no, they have keto bread. It's literally has got two grams of carbohydrates. And I was like what's it made of? And they were like, well, it was made of, let me check, it was made of wheat and tapioca. So there you go, boss, there's not that much, you know, wheat in there, it's mostly tapioca. I'm like, well, tapioca, that's still. That's 100% carbohydrate, that's a starch, right. And I would say, really, they're telling you two grams of total carbs. Yes, sir, and I would say okay, take your phone, take a picture of the ingredients and the nutrition facts and the front of the package, and sure enough, I was seeing on the back these things are made of nothing but starch, but on the front it said like two or four grams of carbohydrates. I was like, well, that's weird. And then I started to realize it started saying the words net carb. I was like, wait a minute, that's different. What's a net? It's like net carbs. I've been in this game forever. I don't know what a net carb is. I should know what a net carb is. I've been doing this for 40 years.
Speaker 2:It was a term that Big Food just made out of whole cloth. It was a term that Big Food just made out of whole cloth, where they said somehow, magically, if you subtract fiber from the total carbohydrates, then you can say the net carbs. So if something was 20 grams of carbohydrates but there were 15 grams of fiber, you can say net carbs of five grams. Your liver didn't know that. They just made that up on a package just to fool people.
Speaker 2:And they started doing the same thing with sugars. Right, it's like well, if you have real sugar but then you put X amount, then you don't have to. You know, you can have a plus or minus or 2%. So they would put like five or six different sugars in there and put a very small amount, so each one can be wrong by 2%. So if you have five sugars in there, that's another 10% you can be wrong, right. And then, on top of that, if they put like erythritol, they subtracted that from the total for net sugars, right?
Speaker 2:All this stuff is going on and it's all just made up out of whole cloth by major corporations, cloth by major corporations. And I said well, wait, is the FDA around that? Are they doing this? No, no, fda has nothing to do with this. The government is not sticking their nose in it, it's just the companies that came up with this terminology and there's no one that's regulating this.
Speaker 2:And then I started seeing another term, you know keto certified. So, oh well, that's, that's gotta be a government agency. No, no government agency whatsoever. It was a group of people, and if you watch the documentary, it was a group of people who just decided to buy the label keto certified. And if you're, if you want, if you're a big company. You want to buy it from them, they charge you. Whatever they charge, I don't know, I can't remember A couple thousand dollars and you can stamp keto certified on anything. Tony, if you wanted to sell a bowl of sugar and put keto certified on it, they'll sell it to you and the people. You think it's a group of scientists that came up with that.
Speaker 2:Nope, it was. I found everyone. The attorneys made me take their names out, but I got to say what they did for a living. One was a music exec, one was a cage fighter, one was a Hollywood, I don't know like an agent. It was just different people who got together and bought this title and was selling this right. The truth is strange as it's fiction. This is really what goes on and that's the new documentary. It's not out there yet, but that's the new documentary is being blocked by someone. It should have been out already, by the way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's, it's so crazy. I mean I feel like and kind of taking a step back, because because people that go into a keto or a ketogenic diet, right, the main aspect of that is lower the carbohydrates a little bit, higher fat and moderate protein. That's like the general sense, right. But then you little, the industry, dips their toe into this and then it becomes a whole thing. It's just a slim fast thing all over again. It's the catalogs thing all over again. I just feel like this is just the vicious cycle that we keep going through.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they're going to keep figuring out how to lie to you and, like I said, no one is. They're not being checked by anyone. It's just lies. And we get sold the lies. And look, you know I tell the story and I love Robin Switzer to death. You know she, she has KetoCon and now they're trying to rebrand it and call it something else.
Speaker 1:Hack your health.
Speaker 2:Hack your health, which I wish you would have asked me before she came out with that stupid title. But no one ever asked me anything, that's.
Speaker 2:I just sit over here and do nothing. They would have all these people selling hock in their wares and they're putting allulose and monk fruit and erythritol and everything and calling it keto, and I mean, people would just shit their guts out if they ate any of this stuff and I sit there and go. Okay, you're trying to do a good thing, I get it. You need to sell some of these booths, but you're selling it to people to push products that I don't agree with.
Speaker 2:And whenever they don't invite me anymore but when I used to go there, I would walk up on stage and six 800 people would come, fill up those stands to listen to me give a speech, and the first thing I would say is hey, when you leave here, don't go eat any of that crap at any of those booths. None of it is good, right? It's like come on, we're here to try to help you. I'm trying to, you know, stop an epidemic from, or a pandemic from happening, and they're driving an infected monkey to the airport, you know. So I don't know how we're going to fix this problem, but everybody seems to be in it.
Speaker 1:I went this year for the first time and because when I originally wanted to go it was KetoCon and now it's Hack your Health and me and a few others. You know the carnivore spaces, some of the food addiction. Those panels got filled up real quick. There was tons of people there, but you, you'll notice, like dr ken berry's not there, sally norton's not there, you're not there, like those those types of things is like all right, like we got him. We can't just pick and choose who we want to be if they don't align with. You know what we're hawking today and we talked about it too, and that's another thing I want to get into with you is, you know, what we're hawking today and we talked about it too, and that's another thing I want to get into with you is you know?
Speaker 1:I just saw, Sean show up this year. Was he there? Sean Baker was there. Yeah, sean Baker.
Speaker 2:I remember people were showing me people that were there. I didn't recognize most of it and it was like all these new people and these young guys and I'm like I don't know any of these people.
Speaker 1:The big ones. The big ones were like Ben Greenfields what's his name? Anthony Chafee he had steak and butter girl. You had Dr Kiltz and then man, I can't remember his name now. Ben Gazi was there too as well, and those were like the big ones and some other people kind of in the space as well. Some some pretty good, some book releases, but the big thing we noticed and when you're going around the booths it's a lot of like red light therapy and sauna, cold plunge and I think that stuff is it's like.
Speaker 1:It's okay, you can utilize it for X, Y and Z, but we're getting to this hack, okay, we're getting away from doing the work that needs to be done, and that's why I didn't. I didn't like it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you and I are exactly the same. You know someone here and I won't say the name of the place, but someone there where I live, listens to the podcast and found out where I got my haircut, you know, or something, and said, hey, give Vinny a free. You know, I walked in to get my haircut and this old barber's going, hey, here's a card. And I'm like what, yeah, here's a card. The woman says she knows, listen to your husband, the podcast, I don't know. So I'm like all right. So I call him up and I was like, hey, there's a card here, thank you guys for listening to the show. I said, yeah, we own a spa and we want to give you a free session at the spa. And I was like, well, okay, what do you offer? And I was hoping they said massage, but they didn't have massage there, right, the one thing they had that I liked was a sauna, right. So I was like, oh, I'll come in and get a sauna. I'm really pretty, that's very kind, but please let me pay for it. And they was like, no, no, no, super nice husband and wife. But they had the red light thing, they had the cryo, and when I got there they gave me the, I was like, oh, you got to try the cryo. You got to.
Speaker 2:I didn't feel any different from you know, I did all of it. First I sat in the sauna for like a half an hour. Usually when I sit in the sauna it's for like 20 minutes, 25 minutes. I had to stay like 45 minutes in the sauna because it was an infrared, which means infrared means it's a sauna that doesn't get hot enough. You know I'm used to getting in really hot saunas. So I was like, oh, this is kind of bullshit. Louisiana is hotter than this, and you know I'm going through that. And then they were like you got to get in the cryo machine and it goes to like a million degrees and I'm like I don't know about this. It didn't do anything. I'm like I don't know what I'm doing here. And red lights Now we got red lights. I'm like, man, if people come in and spend their good, hard, their money on this, it's BS. I'm sorry, it's BS.
Speaker 1:Walk outside. You can go outside and get some sunlight for free.
Speaker 2:Exactly so. I don't really know what I was supposed to be getting out of that. There you go. What's that that? I didn't mean to go off on a tangent, but there you have it nah, I, I always quote um brett jones.
Speaker 1:He's a strong first uh master instructor and he's their their school of education director, is with the school of strength and he always he came into my podcast and he's always said this and it's a great quote when people ask him him about recovery, what's your recovery method? What's your, how do you recover? And he's like proper programming. He's like proper programming. I don't need like we have this whole industry of recovery tools and methods. He goes proper programming. He's like if you don't program properly and you can't train the next day, something's wrong. Like you should be able to. You know train. Yeah, I feel a little sore here and there, but we don't need cold plunge all these whatever. Like it's too much. Um, but going into this hack piece and kind of get your take on it it's spelled weird, but I think I got the name is we go V and Ozempic?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:We go v and ozempic. Yeah, we go v and ozempic. So what, what's kind of your take on this whole? This is another thing that's popped up that's very popular um for people um, the glp ones.
Speaker 2:Uh, you know we're gonna look back on this period and go, what the fuck were we doing? Um, not good at all. Um, this is not my opinion. I've gotten this from doctors, you know, um dr ben bickman, who's a friend of mine, who's been studying this for a long time. He said as much both in my documentary and in the movie.
Speaker 2:You know, taking Ozempic, the GLP-1, it's much milder than Wegovy. Wegovy is just a much stronger version of Ozempic. Right, it's more GLP-1. So basically, to put it mildly, the way they work is they slow down everything in your stomach and your digestive tract, down everything in your stomach and your digestive tract, so everything moves to the liver slower, right? So people who are taking this stuff mostly feel slightly nauseous all day long or feel like they can't eat. So that's how it works.
Speaker 2:But there's other stuff metabolically that's happening. They're finding now people like to give you an example if you lose a hundred pounds. If you lose a hundred pounds, you know the good, old-fashioned way. Naturally you're going to probably lose 20 to 25% muscle with it, right? So if you lose a hundred pounds, 20 pounds of that would be muscle. If you do it with the GLP-1,. At first they were saying 40 pounds could be muscle. Now they're saying upwards of 60 pounds of that. So 60% of it could be muscle and, as you know from being a PE teacher, losing muscle is not a good thing. You weaken the body, you weaken just everything the soft tissue and then the bones and everything else and before you know it you're breaking bones. So there's that.
Speaker 2:The other thing I hear from actual patients of Wegovy is and I asked Ben Bickman about this I said they say when they belch or burp it smells like roadkill. What's going on there? And he goes oh, that's because with Wegovy so much of the GLP-1, it slows the digestive tract down so much the food just sits in the stomach for days and days and it just gets putrid. So it becomes like roadkill. It smells like garbage and people on that will start burping up what smells like a nasty trash can or road killer and I couldn't imagine going through that. I feel so bad for those people. So that's my take on it. I don't have a dog in the fight. I have a family member that's on. One of them I can't remember which one. She was probably over 500 pounds and wouldn't listen to anything else. So she's lost some weight and she's able to walk again. I'm happy for her, but I'm not sure that she's going down the right path and the muscle deterioration is scary, especially if you're getting older and you're using this to lose the weight.
Speaker 1:But it's just a tradeoff. To me it's not a good one Going into kind of take a step back to the ketogenic diet a little bit, diet, a little bit. One thing I wanted to talk about was you know again, the pesky 20 pounds not only like physically look better but also feel better as well. But the keto diet has been used for multiple different, you know, health issues. Can you kind of talk about some of the health issues that this diet has helped with some of these symptoms?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know. Otto Warburg back in the early 1900s was curing cancer, or keeping cancer at bay, on ketogenic diets, eating mostly fat. The number one protocol for epilepsy in the early 1900s was ketogenic diet. I showed that in my first movie, fatty Documentary.
Speaker 2:Famously, jim Abrams pretty famous Hollywood producer His son, charlie, was having tons of seizures, grand mal seizures every day and the kid was like 18 months old and they basically wanted to do a lobotomy on this kid. And then Jim found the ketogenic diet and the doctor said we're not gonna put him on that. And then Jim found the ketogenic diet and the doctor said we're not going to put him on that, we're going to do the surgery. And Jim was like over my dead body. So he took his kid and flew him somewhere else I don't know if it was Cleveland Clinic or Mayo Clinic, I can't remember which one and found a doctor that put the kid on the ketogenic diet. The kid remained on that diet for four years. The seizures stopped within a week or two weeks, maybe, I don't want to exaggerate and then after the kid turned five or six, they took him off of the ketogenic diet and the seizures never came back. Charlie's now a school teacher in LA and he's got a golf handicap of I think three or four, you know, living a normal life in his thirties.
Speaker 2:But so we know that. You know it's helped with cancer. We know that it's helped with epilepsy. People like Dr Mary Newport and others are figuring out that it works with people that have Alzheimer's disease. You know, keeping them on a very low carbohydrate diet, very high medium chain triglycerides like coconut oil and palm oil. Also, dr Georgia Eag of Harvard, who is a clinical psychiatrist she's an MD, just like Mary Newport has written books on it. You should have her on your podcast. She has a new book out there. It's amazing what they're doing people that have ADD and ADHD and suicidal tendencies and everything else with this diet. So it helps everyone everywhere. I know it sounds like I have a hammer and everything becomes a nail. It's not that, but there are a lot of things where, if you cut out processed carbohydrates, you can change a lot of health issues.
Speaker 1:And I know we talked a little bit earlier about this and I want this kind of hits home for me too. In 2007, you had some health issues that aroused cancer and kind of coming out of your treatment. The doctor kind of said some things to you about sugars. Can you kind of talk about that a little bit?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I had leukemia and I went through chemo and everything back in 07. And when I was living in Hollywood at the time was when I was still working with celebrities and when I was coming through cancer and coming out the other end it looks like they had knocked it into remission. They told me my cancer would be back within five years. They told me my cancer would be back within five years. So remission for me was a chronic stage of cancer where they said it's going to grow back in five years and then we'll bring you back in again and we'll do it all again, right? Well, going on chemo every five years did not sound like fun to me.
Speaker 2:Right, chemo sucks. So all of my Hollywood clients started saying hey, you need to juice every day. You know, eat a thousand vegetables every day. Because it's Hollywood, you need to have kimchi and kombucha. And one person said I should have upwards of eight ounces of wheatgrass a day and I was like eight ounces, I have one ounce once and I burped it for a month. You know, I couldn't. I couldn't imagine having eight ounces a day, much less have to pay for that, right, because it's like a buck and a half an ounce or something. So, you know, I was like I don't know if I can afford eight ounces of that a day. So on one of my last visits to my oncologist I said, um, hey, is there any truth behind juicing? And you know, wheatgrass and kombucha and all I said, all this bullshit. She was like no, that's all. Just, you know heresy, there's no truth behind any of it.
Speaker 2:And I said, is there anything I can do at all to maybe if I could go six years, one extra year before I'm back on chemo? Is there any protocol I can take? And she knew the reason I got into this doctor was because she knew one of my fancy clients, one of my celebrity clients. She goes hey, my friend tells me you do this whole no sugars, no grains protocol. That's how you keep Hollywood thin. I said, yes, that's my trick. Yeah, she goes. Yeah, do that. I said, come again. She was like go low carb, just cut out all sugars and, for the most part, any kind of grain. And I said well, that's exactly what I tell my clients to do. That's how I'll keep them lean for the red carpet. And she was like, yeah, if you do that, you can, you know. And I said well, are you serious? And she was like, yeah, she goes.
Speaker 2:Most cancers are closed cells and I didn't really understand what she was talking about. She goes you know they're not really getting, they're not getting oxygen from the oxygen you're taking in. You know that most of them are closed cells, especially leukemia. And she goes but carbohydrates are made of carbon hydrogen and oxygen, so they're getting the hydrogen and the oxygen from the carbohydrate. That's how it propagates. So if you just starve it of what it needs to grow, you might get a sixth or seventh year out of it, because I doubt it, but you can give it a shot. Well, the upshot is is I didn't go six years and I didn't go seven years, I didn't even go 10 years, I went 17 years before my cancer returned and, as you know we talked about I, just went on chemo again after going over three times as long as it's for me, I would go right 17 years.
Speaker 2:And when I went back on chemo it was a lot easier for me. I didn't have they put me on these prophylactic drugs and within I was supposed to be on it for four months. They took me off after a week. My blood started coming back immediately. You know I was before I mentioned beginning of the show. I was riding a bike indoors and my rowing machine indoors. Right, I was doing things indoors.
Speaker 2:I'm still weak as hell, right, but I'm not on any prophylactic drugs, I'm not on anything. And they cleared me. My white blood cell counts have come up. They said if you have to fly, you're cleared to be able to go out in public again and be in an airport. My neutrophils are back. All of the things that matter that can cause infection and kill you is back, right. The other thing that's not back is my red blood cells and my hematocrit levels are still low. So literally I look like I could do a thousand push-ups, but when I get to five is it's like. It's like I'm on the number 50, right, I can't get another one up, um, but the red blood cells will come back soon enough and I'll be fine yeah, you're, you're, you're a tough dude, vinny, I'll tell you what.
Speaker 1:But 2000, like that's back in 2007. You know what I'm saying Like that to me, that that doctor kind of knew what was up, or you don't hear that very often. I was telling you earlier my dad, my dad and my stepfather. They both had. My dad was a smoker, big smoker, but he had ocpd, um and but he had four valves done or three. It was a triple quadruple, some uh bypass. And my stepdad is like the same, like they had three valves done.
Speaker 1:And my dad was doing keto before that. He actually lost a ton of weight doing the real keto. But then he got back onto the treats and he goes oh, I'm having this ice cream bar Cause it's keto. It's exactly what you were talking about. And I just saw the weight coming back on Cause he did. He was biking, he was losing weight, he stopped smoking, uh, and then he just gained it all back because he had all the treats.
Speaker 1:And then after his surgery they put him back what he's eating. He's eating oatmeal, had all the treats and then after his surgery they put him back what he's eating. He's eating oatmeal, orange juice in the morning, um, everything was very high carb, no fat. They didn't want him to have any fat. And I was telling him, like dad, like I don't think this is the right thing. I know you want to do what your doctors say, but I think it's okay to have some fat in that diet. He's like no, some of my doctors don't tell me, but you're eating the same stuff that got you into this in the first place, and so what are we doing? But that's why I love that you're putting this stuff out and making and again, you said it before, like you know this, people don't make documentaries to make money. You're doing this because of the passion and sharing the information and I think that's awesome. So you know, thanks for putting this stuff up, because I think more people need to see it.
Speaker 2:No, look, I appreciate hearing that because it's a labor of love. You don't get rich in documentaries. As a matter of fact, you can end up losing money by putting a documentary out, so it's truly a labor of love to get that information out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, you got and again we're, you're. You're one of the one of the people in the space that are combating the Forks Over Knives, the game changers, all of all of these things that we see that are just pushing a certain agenda and not giving. I feel like you always give two sides to the argument and you give people chances to, you know, like beyond impossible, right? You're giving people chances to, you know, like beyond impossible, right? You're giving people chances to comment and get on on it. They're choosing not to, that's on them, but you're at least offering that to them and people are getting different views, um, and given people the information that could just decide from themselves. But, yeah, it's, it's, I love, I love the all the work that you're doing. What anything else coming up for you? Um, or just kind of kicking back right now.
Speaker 2:I'm never kicking back. I'm always working on something. Uh, I have an idea for another documentary but it would be a couple of years because I would have to fly around with the crew and go interview all these people. It would be be difficult. But I have a great idea and I really want to do it. But I'm going to have to crowdfund it or something, or unless enough money comes back from this documentary. But I just know where I would have to go. I would have to fly around a lot to get a lot of interviews to make it work. But yeah, I'm always. I have my vitamin company and my coffee company and you know NSNG foods and it all. Just, uh, you know I'm just doing it all every day.
Speaker 1:I love it. Man You're trying to be, I gotta make t-shirts. I want to be like Vinny.
Speaker 2:That's what my teacher was going to start saying that is not a good t-shirt, that's a great, I'll get you. When you were in Tulane all jacked up, yeah, I used to look like something back then. I look at that now and say God, I didn't realize I had it. I was such a nerd. I wish I knew I had it going on.
Speaker 1:You still got it. You still got it. But, vinny, it's always a pleasure to have you on. I'm looking forward to the release of Dirty Keto. Where can people find you to connect with you?
Speaker 2:You can go right to VinnyTortorichcom. I know that doesn't roll off the tongue, but you'll see my name in the notes here with this podcast. You can go to VinnyTortorichcom and check me out. We have a podcast. We've been doing it for 11 or 12 years. We got over 2,500 episodes. So if you're listening to one and you don't like it, just flip to the next one. You have 2,500 chances to like me or hate me. Some people will tell me and we see it in the comments. They go. I really hated this guy the first time and I don't know. I listened to him again and he starts to grow on me. So listen to me twice because apparently I've grown people and that's that.
Speaker 1:I'm telling you, everybody goes hey, when's that Vinny guy coming back?
Speaker 2:Oh, please, I'm sure you got more interesting people than me to have on this show. No, no, no.
Speaker 1:But thanks again for coming on and thanks for everybody listening to the Primal Foundations podcast. Thank you all for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe, like and share. See you all next time on the Primal Foundations podcast.