Episode #23

Nora Gedgaudas

Getting The Right Nutrients To Thrive, Increasing Food Quality, and How We Evolved To Eat

023: Getting The Right Nutrients To Thrive, Increasing Food Quality, and How We Evolved To Eat - Nora Gedgaudas
If we’re trying to eat what’s natural for us to eat, we also need to pay attention to whether what we’re consuming was fed something that was natural to it. Click To Tweet

Nora Gedgaudas has been in the nutrition field for decades.

At the start of her career, she followed the mainstream low-fat nutrition dogma taught in school at the time, until one summer her views were completely challenged. She realized she had lost 25 pounds in the course of a summer when the only things she did was eat fatty foods and observe wild wolves near the Arctic.

During this research trip, she only had access to butter, nut butter, meats like salami, cheese, and virtually no veggies — which, to her surprise, she didn’t miss at all.

This fat-fueled effortless weight loss made her do a double take on the “fat makes you fat” nutritional outlook of the time, and after some research she came to one conclusion: We should be eating more like our ancestors.

Instead of going the ketogenic or paleo route, she arrived at her own fat-based eating style and called it “primalgenic” — which is focused on eating high-quality nourishing foods according to how we evolved to eat and process nutrients.

Nora realized that nutrients are not just nutrients — their absorbability, interactions with other micronutrients in foods, and the quality of the food sources directly affect how well our bodies can use those nutrients to stay healthy.

For example, getting your protein and fat from processed cheeses and deli meats doesn’t have the same effects on your health as choosing grass-fed beef and butter.

Up to 6%, under optimal circumstances, of plant-based omega 3 may convert to EPA, and chances are none of that will convert to DHA at all. Click To Tweet

Getting the right nutrients from high-quality foods in the adequate amounts can be challenging, but it’s fundamental for optimizing your health in the ketogenic diet. Without food quality, keto isn’t healthy.

That’s why today Nora is sitting down with me to explain how you can get the right nutrients from the right food sources.

Nora is a board-certified nutritional consultant, neurofeedback specialist, best-selling, author, speaker, researcher, and expert in primal eating. She’s done extensive research on how the human body has evolved to eat and knows exactly how we can make our diets more nourishing.

In this episode, we go over:

  • Why high-quality real food is the foundation for thriving on a ketogenic diet
  • How to find high-quality foods
  • Why the health of the animals you eat affect your own health
  • 100% grass-fed vs grain-finished cows
  • Why choosing high-quality meats is good for our planet
  • Why micronutrients from supplements will never be as healthy micronutrients from foods
  • Why meat-derived micronutrients are superior to plant-derived micronutrients
  • Why carrots aren’t actually high in vitamin A
  • Why seeds like chia and flaxseed aren’t good sources of omega 3s
  • The two types of omega 3s our brains need the most
  • Why animal foods are the best sources of essential omega 3s
  • How our digestive tract has evolved to efficiently process fats and protein, not carbs
  • Why some animals can thrive on high-carb diets, but humans can’t
  • The connection between physical health and mental health
  • What neurofeedback is and how it can help you perform better
  • Neurofeedback vs meditation
  • What “primalgenic” means
  • How you can use a ketogenic diet for overall health optimization, not just weight loss
  • The multiple health benefits of running on ketones
  • Should you do keto cycling or continue indefinitely?
  • Metabolic flexibility and how long it takes you to get back in ketosis after you fall out of it
  • Why the current marketplace makes it hard to stay optimally healthy — and what to do about it

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