Diet is always a hot topic in the Paleo and ancestral health community. There are diehard advocates on every side. Today I talk with Robb Wolf about his new book Wired to Eat. We explore how his approach to diet has evolved beyond just choosing the right mix of carbs, fats and protein and why a personalized approach is the key to understanding weight loss. 

In this episode we discuss:



The focus of Wired to Eat



The Paleo diet 3.0



Is it really about the food?



Why the concept of “cheating” is harmful



How stress impacts your weight



The right tool for the job: why personalization is key

Show notes:



Wired to Eat: Turn Off Cravings, Rewire Your Appetite for Weight Loss, and Determine the Foods That Work for You by Robb Wolf  [Note: The book has now been released, but readers of ChrisKresser.com can still get the bonus materials mentioned below by emailing the receipt of their purchase of Wired to Eat to wired2eat@gmail.com by March 27th.]

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Chris Kresser: Hey, everybody, Chris Kresser here. Welcome to another episode of Revolution Health Radio. In this episode, I'm excited to welcome back Robb Wolf, a good friend and colleague. For those of you who don’t know who Rob is (I can't imagine there are that many of you listening to this podcast), but he is a former research biochemist, health expert, and author of New York Times bestseller The Paleo Solution and the eagerly anticipated Wired to Eat, which is his most recent book that we’re going to be discussing today. He has been a review editor for the Journal of Nutrition and Metabolism and Journal of Evolutionary Health. He serves on the board of directors at a specialty health medical clinic in Reno, Nevada, and is a consultant for the Naval Special Warfare Resilience Program. Rob is also a former California State Powerlifting Champion and holds the rank of blue belt in Brazilian jiu jitsu. He lives in Reno, Nevada, with his wife, Nicki, and his daughters, Zoe and Segan.

I'm really looking forward to this show because I think Robb is one of the smartest people in the room when it comes to these topics, and if you’ve been around the Paleo Primal Movement for any length of time, you’ll know that Rob has done more to advance these concepts into the mainstream than pretty much anybody else. His most recent book is a deep dive into the mechanisms that lead to overeating and that govern food intake in general, and it goes far beyond protein, carbs, and fat and calorie intake.

So, without further ado, let’s hear from Robb Wolf.

Chris: Robb Wolf, welcome back.

Robb: It has been a while. You’ve been busy. You’ve been busy.

Chris: I saw you two days ago, but it has been awhile on the podcast.

Robb: You’ve had a lot going, not much grass grows under your feet.

Chris: I've had a few things going on but you have as well. You released The Paleo Solution in 2010, and I don’t think you’ve just been sitting on your hands since then, have you?

Robb: Not completely, no.

Chris: Well, you had a couple of kids along the way.

Robb: A couple of kids, permaculture farm, a 90-pound Rhodesian ridgeback, which was almost the end of my and Nicki’s relationship—yeah, we’ve had some fun stuff.

Chris: I think you’ve also been doing a little bit, squeezing in a little bit of work in between those major life events.

Robb: A little bit. I joined a medical clinic here in Reno several years ago. I'm on the board of directors and those folks did a two-year pilot study with the Reno Police, Reno Fire Department, where they found folks at high risk for type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease and that they’ve put these folks on a Paleo-type diet, got them to modify their sleep and exercises as best they could, and based off the changes in their blood work and their health risk assessment, it’s estimated that the pilot study alone saved the city of Reno about $22 million, with a 33:1 return on investment.

Chris: Whoa.

Robb: Yeah, I was pretty impressed with that. I was like, “Ah, this evolutionary medicine stuff, there might be something to it.” So, I've been fiddling with that. You know this back story. I've been looking at some opportunities to scale this and hopefully take it to the masses, and that has proven to be more challenging to I thought. But amidst all that process, I've learned a lot and it kind of lit a fire under me to write a second book, which is Wired to Eat. Which looks pretty deeply at the neuroregulation of appetite and it still is very much steeped in this ancestral health/evolutionary biology template. But (and you did this in your book—you really tried not to have a one-size-fits-all approach) I may have made the disastrous decision of trying to do something that wasn’t a black-and-white, all-or-nothing recommendation.

Chris: Nine steps to weight loss in five minutes with no effort at all, the groundbreaking new approach.

Robb: Yeah.

Robb Wolf explains why you shouldn’t use the word “cheat” when you diet

The focus of Wired to Eat

Chris: You're a total geek like I am, and whenever we get together, we like to nerd out and talk about all the research behind this stuff. You’ve done a really deep dive into kind of like the next level, looking at the mechanisms behind food intake and weight regulation, body fat mass, and not just using the same Paleo evolutionary kind of template, but going deeper to look at what is this big mismatch between our genes and our biology and our current food environment really all about. And how is that driving the epidemic of obesity and metabolic disease? For people who have already read The Paleo Solution, which I think is just about everyone listening to this podcast probably, what’s different about Wired to Eat, your most recent book?

Robb: That’s a super-good question, good lead in. The big differences that—somewhat indirectly, I talked about this whole discordance idea within The Paleo Solution. We talk about the observations of preindustrial societies and how despite a really aggressive medical presence, like these folks are remarkably healthy, generally free of Western degenerative diseases. I think it’s really interesting, powerful stuff, but it’s maybe a bit far afield for many people, and still we see stuff devolve almost immediately into these macronutrient wars and folks really getting out in the weeds.

And so in reading and thinking about this stuff, I started getting this into—and I'm really backing up a little bit, there was a paper a couple of years ago that was looking at brain evolution, and one of its catchy taglines was “the omnivore's real dilemma,” and it made this really strong case about the fundamental kind of forces that forged not just our genetics in the way that we seek out food, but any organism that moves to obtain nutrients, that there’s this basic need to get more than what you spend on the acquisition of trying to get nutrition, basic calories and also vital nutrients and whatnot. This idea really struck me because I'm like, okay, if we’re wired on a really fundamental level to need to eat more and move less to make that equation work—because we can make a super simple accounting. If you spend more money than you make, you're going to end up bankrupt at some point. From an energetics perspective, if you live out in a natural environment and you consistently burn more calories than what you consume, we’re going to have a serious problem.

Wild animals, if they find some food, make a kill, and they don’t consult their Fitbit and say, “Oh man, so I just ate 600 calories, so I need to walk or jog or jumping jack for x number of minutes to burn this off.” Typically, it gets some food and then it goes and lays down and rests. This is the only way that that free-living scenario works. Whereas with humans, because of technology and because of culture, we’ve created these massive surpluses in energy, basically in the form of food, but also convenience measures, and so in a way, you could argue that we’ve pushed that optimum forwarding strategy idea to this mega and ultimate winning scenario. It’s like, “Okay, we can burn one calorie a day trying to obtain food.” We literally click Amazon and then AmazonFresh delivers food to your door and then you pop it in the microwave and you're good. We’re so good now at gaming that system that we have been developing chronic degenerative diseases for quite some time—type 2 diabetes, neurodegenerative diseases.

And so this perspective on the neuroregulation of appetite, for me, it’s really almost like cutting the Gordian Knot. Is it about carbs? Is it about fat? Well, maybe. Let’s consider the context, but really let’s look at what governs the neuroregulation of appetite, what allows us to, in a free-living scenario—not being locked in a metabolic ward, but in a free-living scenario—to spontaneously eat in a way that doesn’t make us metabolically broke and then sticks us in an early grave. So that’s really the big difference between Wired to Eat and The Paleo Solution. Both of them are super-steeped in this evolutionary biology framework, but in Wired to Eat I'm really looking first at that neuroregulation of appetite story because when you start then unpacking that piece, then carbohydrates take on a certain context. It’s like, oh, cellular carbohydrates from beans and even properly prepared grains and ...

Chris: Don’t say beans, or grains! You’re cut.

Robb: I know I'm cut. I'm no longer getting the Cordain inheritance package.

Chris: Paleo foul.

Robb: But you know these things react to our physiology, and perhaps more importantly, they alter the neuroregulation of appetite and they alter our gut microbiome in very different ways than refined flours or added sugars. Everything from sleep to stress,