Jayson and Mira Calton: Optimizing Micronutrients

JONATHAN: Hey, everyone Jonathan Bailor back – and I am excited – I’m always excited, but I’m really excited about today’s session because when thinking about taking it a level deeper than calories, which we go to, right, that’s just obsolete. For awhile there people did take it a level deeper, they went down to macronutrients or figuring out if high protein, low protein, high fat, low fat, carbohydrate restriction, but then there were these two people who were like, no way, that is not enough. I want to go even deeper. I want to go into micronutrients. These are vitamins and minerals and you’ll learn way more about it today, but, let’s just put it this way. If you thought calories weren’t where it’s at, which they’re not, and then you moved on to futzing with macronutrientscertainly can be very, very helpful, but just wait until you learn what understanding and being sufficient in micronutrients can do for your health and longevity and pronunciation abilities. So, joining us today are my personal friends Jayson and Mira Calton, just absolutely fabulous people, they have a huge number of letters behind their name, but I don’t want to rest on that. I’ll let them speak for themselves because when you hear the wisdom that comes from them, you’ll just be overwhelmed like I was. They just released this brilliant book, “Naked Calories” and I love it and they are here to talk with us about micronutrients, health longevity and just how awesome they are. Jayson and Mira, welcome.

MIRA: Thank you so much Jonathan —

JAYSON: It’s great to be here.

MIRA: Absolutely excited to be able to talk to everybody about our little love of micronutrients.

JAYSON: Yeah.

JONATHAN: So, let’s just get right into it, Jayson and Mira, there is so much attention paid to calories, and then if people aren’t worried about calories, they’re worried about whether they’re low carb or high carb or low fat or high fat and when we spent some time together on this year’s low carb cruise, you guys just said, you dropped so many truth bombs – it’s really about micronutrients and getting those from the right sources, but you could be eating low carb or high protein all day and if you’re not getting your micronutrients you’re not going to be healthy and fit.

JAYSON: Yeah, that’s exactly — you hit the nail on the head. So, we really start to take a look at nutrition from a different perspective. Of course, there’s the macronutrient perspective, like you said, carbs, fats, proteins, how many of them should we eat, what ratio should we have and what dietary philosophy are we overall going to adhere to and build throughout our lifetime, but all those things matter, but they’re kind of on this side of our coin. We really want to look on the other side of the coin. We want to look at the micronutrients.

Micronutrients are like you said, are those things like vitamins, minerals, and fatty acids, things that are found in our foods, but if we’re deficient in them, like if you were deficient in calcium and magnesium and Vitamin K and Vitamin D, you’re likely going to get osteoporosis. It doesn’t matter if you’re a vegan or carnivore or what that macronutrient ratio is, if those essential micronutrients sufficiency isn’t met, then we’re going to open up ourselves up for all kinds of health conditions, from headaches to poor sleep patterns, to low energy and even diseases as well, like cancer, Diabetes, hypertension, and what we’re going to talk about today is how that micronutrient deficiency has been linked to overweight obesity. Of course overweight obesity is a huge pandemic we’ve been facing across the world, specifically and especially here in America – and we tried everything, haven’t we? I mean you turn on the TV and you’re going to see everything from stomach zappers to aerobic classes to the something —

MIRA: Hopefully no one’s buying those things.

JAYSON: Every single thing in this country to try to lose weight and what has happened? We haven’t lost any weight. In fact, our weight is continuously gone up, up, up. And so one of the areas that we had seen kind of like the elephant in the room to us because this is our field of expertise is why isn’t anybody looking at the studies that have been done linking very specifically deficiencies in specific micronutrients with being overweight or obese. In fact, we believe that micronutrient deficiency is a key puzzle piece in eventually eradicating this health condition.

JONATHAN: I cannot wait to dig into those specific studies and I just want to really highlight and emphasize what you said because so often, in addition to not successfully losing weight on a national scale, for individuals who are successfully able to lose weight, like let’s say people in the fitness or really let’s call it advanced physique world – if you look at the way they eat it’s really against so macronutrient and calorie focused and it’s great to eat for example, a chicken breast – that’s useful, but why not eat clams? Because like clams also provide you with protein, but you get way more micronutrients so I so celebrate you guys bringing the attention here because it – you’ve got to eat calories for energy, you’ve got to get it from some source. Macronutrients, but there’s a vast under appreciation for the – chicken is great, but if you’re interested in micronutrients you’ll probably look at some other options, right?

MIRA: Absolutely. It’s the whole bang for the bite is what we like to say.

JONATHAN: Yep.

MIRA: Like what do you actually – what are you eating in the first place because you need the energy, yes, which is of course obviously we all know that, but it’s also what is the food delivering to your body? What micronutrients, what vitamins and minerals are in every single bite? So we like to call those rich foods, things that are really micronutrient dense or micronutrient rich and we like to tell people to look for the majority of things coming from micronutrient rich foods because that will supply you with enough of these vitamins and minerals to not only keep you healthy, but also to allow you to lose further weight or start your weight loss product. One thing that people don’t realize is when they go on these diets, they restrict the foods that they’re eating –

JONATHAN: Yeah.

MIRA: And they keep restricting them down so they only have like four or five things that they’re eating. So, you’re also only getting four or five sets of vitamins and minerals and we talk about all the time, don’t lose a pant size to gain a heart attack. They keep getting deficient in these vitamins and minerals and they’re opening themselves up for other probably more serious illnesses and diseases to take place later on. Even if they do get thin.

JONATHAN: And getting the most bang for your bite is that’s such a brilliant point, is especially as we get more hormonally healthy and we re-regulate our appetite centers, we will naturally have less cravings and it will be easy for us, we will spontaneously reduce our caloric intake, spontaneous reduction in caloric intake has been shown, study after study as we dial the quality of our diet up, but if we’re eating less, it’s even more important that we’re eating nutrient dense foods right? Because like if you get a lap band surgery and you’re eating 400 calories a day of Doritos, you’re even worse off, right?

MIRA: Right.

JAYSON: For sure. This is –

MIRA: And you can’t absorb your micronutrients anymore because you had surgery so.

JAYSON: Well, if you’ve got a lap band surgery you’ve got gastric bypass, you have to be on a supplement for the rest of your life. It doesn’t mean you’re going to absorb that supplement and we can talk about that later, but yeah, the less calories that you eat overall obviously you’re going to be getting the less micronutrients even if you were focusing on micronutrient rich foods, like we talk about in our other book, “Rich Food Poor Food.” We show you how to find the most micronutrient rich foods in the grocery store, but the idea is we have a three step approach that we talk about in “Naked Calories” food first, and we’re like you, we’re food first people, we want to get people to either make horizontal swaps like you talked about, like looking at clams, a higher –

MIRA: Nutrient dense protein –

JAYSON: Maybe a higher micronutrient dense protein over chicken or just learning how to pick the best chicken, understand the difference between the pasture raised organically raised chicken that’s not been fed GMO corn and soy and hasn’t been cooped up inside some kind of dark room for its entire life and one that’s been out in the field pecking dirt and bugs and getting sunlight, so you don’t necessarily have to change your foods, although I think it’s a good idea to like you said —

MIRA: Skip the Doritos –

JAYSON: Yeah, break outside — your typical spectrum of foods, but you definitely want to get as many micronutrients in as you can and that’s really the key when it comes down to how are we going to prevent these health conditions and these diseases because ultimately that’s what we want, isn’t it? We want two-fold whenever we do anything. We want to get in great shape, we want a great physical appearance on the outside, but just in equally important or maybe more important is — are we healthy on the inside?

JONATHAN: Yep.

JAYSON: So, that’s what we want.

MIRA: And they reflect each other.

JAYSON: They do. They do, they often reflect. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes you look at somebody and you’re like wow, look how thin, healthy they look, but it turns out they’ve got arterial plaque or they’ve got depression or they’re on three different medications, so what we want to do is we want to give you that holistic lifestyle where these micronutrients are not only going to help to reduce stress in your life, they’re going to help to reduce the cortisone levels that could store body fat, but they’re also going to make it so you don’t have the diseases later on and they’re going to help you burn fat faster and that’s really the big key that these micronutrients actually have been shown with the same amount of energy exerted, same amount of exercise, they burn more calories. Again, we’re not talking about calories being the end-all, but when it comes to burning fat, if we could burn 25 more calories with the same amount of effort —

MIRA: Percent more —

JAYSON: Twenty-Five percent more calories, then that’s a key and there’s one micronutrient we’ll talk about later, that does that.

JONATHAN: Brilliant. Well, I’m super excited to get into those specific micronutrients and deficiencies, but one point I wanted to make sure we hit on because I think it’s easy for folks to hear this, get really excited and then go get 60,000 percent Vitamin C tomorrow. So, when we talk about micronutrients is more always better?

MIRA: No.

JAYSON: No way.

MIRA: No, it’s more about having – you don’t want to have too much of one because it can compete with another. You want to make sure just to have – to be getting enough of all of them across the board, but mega-dosing is not our thing, more is not better, there is a very specific amounts that you need for educating yourself about what you need and the best forms of them and how to take them so they’re actually absorbed, that’s what really matters. It’s not about just throwing it in there and saying, hey, I’ve got tons in there, hopefully, it’s going to work.

JAYSON: Yeah.

JONATHAN: And this seems like maybe one area where the mainstream media kind of hit on some truth because we know they struggle with the truth sometimes, but when for example, they say eat the rainbow, or because if you’re someone like me, I fell into this trap a couple of years ago, where I was like oh, kale is really good for you, I’m going to eat ten servings of kale a day and it sounds like it would be much better off saying, okay, get your serving of kale, but then eat some other stuff too.

JAYSON: Yeah.

MIRA: Yeah, we actually have in “Rich Food Poor Food” we have the whole spectrum of color and we said you’re painting your own masterpiece everyday.

JAYSON: Right.

MIRA: So, every single day you’d want the fullest palate of color to work from. So, we say, have your really rich beta carotene yellow orange foods. You want to have your chlorophyll greens coming in. You want to have all the different colors so you get all the vital nutrients and that you’re getting the broadest spectrum of micronutrients in your food every single day.

JAYSON: Yeah.

JONATHAN: Last question is for selfish reasons. Before we get into the study is we also hear so much in the news this idea of two things, organic versus non-organic, and I want to know what the role has in micronutrients and then also cooking versus not cooking. Can we cover both of those?

JAYSON: Yeah, so the organic versus the non-organic. First of all we like local foods. Local food again where we take everything from that micronutrient perspective, so we want that, whatever food it is to have as many micronutrients as it can have so we don’t have it picked prematurely so if it’s local, it was picked, it’s been picked right, that’s imperative –

MIRA: The longer your food travels to get to you the more micronutrients are lost from three elements, the air, the heat and the lights.

JAYSON: Correct.

JONATHAN: Right.

JAYSON: So, that’s going to be first and foremost. Then on top of that it would be great if it was organic, just so it doesn’t have pesticides, because remember, pesticides are a toxin and your micronutrients are your de-modifiers so more of those toxins you put in the faster you’re going to burn through your micronutrients so we don’t want to –

MIRA: They may have more – it’s kind of tricky, because while the local will have definitely have more micronutrients in them if they’re not organic, they’re going to use more of your micronutrient bank account to get them cleaned, to get those toxins out of your body. So, it’s twofold.

JAYSON: Yeah, and of course you know we have our list with the fab 14 and the terrible 20 shows the 20 foods that you should buy organically because of high pesticide residue and potentially genetic modification and which 14 foods you don’t really have to because they’ve been shown to have low pesticides and they’re never genetically modified.

MIRA: We’re making that available to all your people.

JAYSON: Yeah.

JONATHAN: Well thank you. And then cooking and non-cooking.

MIRA: Yes.

JONATHAN: What’s the deal here?

MIRA: Cooking ruins your food. No. Lightly cook for longer periods has the least amount of depletion. You never want to just boil something in water. Unless you’re making soup and you’re drinking the water because that’s really where the micronutrients will end up. It’s going to end up in the broth and not in the vegetable itself. So light steaming and you also want to put some butter on top of it because you need the fat in order to absorb the fat soluble micronutrients. So, really don’t overcook things. Eating some things raw every single day is fabulous, we do recommend having a salad, but you also don’t want to eat some things raw. You don’t want to have raw cruciferous vegetables.

JAYSON: No, you actually want to cook those.

MIRA: You want to cook those.

JAYSON: That’s the exception to the rule. You need to break down that fiber in order for the body to absorb the micronutrients in that. So, you would never want to eat that raw, you’re not going to absorb nutrients –

MIRA: That’s why broccoli and your cauliflower.

JAYSON: Yeah, any of the cruciferous vegetables. And Mira made a good point. If you’re going to get those micronutrients go into the water so make that into a soup or use it for a sauce, also a lid on top of it when you’re cooking because those micronutrients will go out through the steam as well.

JONATHAN: One more – is there anything else regarding food preparation such as we hear with garlic –

MIRA: Yep –

JONATHAN: Like eating a clove of garlic is not the same and in fact, it’s not like you can eat 10 cloves of garlic, it doesn’t matter, unless it’s broken into pieces or mashed – you aren’t getting anything. Are there other things like that?

MIRA: We have a bunch of (Inaudible 00:14:10) not on the garlic thing, yes, you have to chop it, but you always want to chop it at least 15 minutes before you put it into something to cook and you always never want to leave it cooking for more than 15 minutes because it actually gets rid of it, it’s called allicin is actually the sulfur or compound that actually has all those great aspects for cold healing –

JAYSON: Yep.

MIRA: And for anti-auto – what is antiviral and all those great things that’s called allicin. And so you want to make sure you don’t overcook it or else all that benefit is gone. And colds are reduced 60 percent when you have garlic twice a day and people who actually have garlic actually have one day faster recovery even if they do catch a cold. So, there’s some pretty great studies about what garlic can do.

JAYSON: I don’t know that I can think of off the top of my head any other things that need to be prepared in advance. One of the big things is don’t prepare too far in advance any of your foods. A lot of times people chop up so you’re going to have a fruit thing, a fruit platter, so three days ahead, let’s get it all chopped up now and stick it in the refrigerator and it’s being exposed to the air and to the light and so keep everything whole and to the very last minute and prepare fresh at that time, if you can.

JONATHAN: Well, I love, I love all of this motivation around micronutrients because what we’re going to dig into next are studies showing that if we don’t keep our micronutrients top of mind, I don’t care how many calories we cut and how many hours we spend on the treadmill we may not be serving ourselves as best as we could, right?

JAYSON: Absolutely.

MIRA: Absolutely. There’s definite links and I guess our studies started with one major study that made us start to look at was there a link in the first place, so we did a big study.

JAYSON: So, yeah, okay, so let’s talk about the big study and this is the one that kind of got us interested in really looking at this and how it compares with overweight obesity specifically. Of course, those who know us know that we first started working with Mira, with her advanced osteoporosis and how we reversed that in two years, using our micronutrient method, but when we started to look at obesity, I started to notice when I was working with my private clients over 15 years in private practice that when I would prescribe to them a micronutrient regime, they would do much, much better in the body fat and specifically the body fat burning aspect and muscle building aspect of their overall training. They wouldn’t go into catabolism, they wouldn’t break down their muscle as much, and what they were losing on the scale would actually be body fat rather than body weight or muscle, which is what typically people lose when they lose weight, so this study was published in 2007 in the Journal, Economics and Human Biology and revealed that when they looked at micronutrient deficient individuals, they found that those individuals had an 80.8 percent higher chance of being overweight or obese than non-deficient individuals. I mean this is a huge thing. Now, this may seem like not great news, because almost everybody is micronutrient deficient according to the FDA.

MIRA: Ninety-nine percent according to the USDA and FDA are deficient in at least one vitamin or mineral.

JAYSON: So we’ve got, we’re all walking around with some micronutrient deficiencies which is probably one of the big reasons why we start to see such a huge rise in the obesity epidemic no matter with all the diets and with all the pills and all the gimmicks, but if you turn that on its head wouldn’t it stand to reason then if we’re micronutrient sufficient and you have an 80.8 percent greater likelihood of not being overweight or obese and that’s really the take home message.

MIRA: That should be on the news. I don’t understand why no one’s talking about that like they have some huge links to being – if we could just say, it just become sufficient and your chances of not becoming overweight or obese go up 80.8 percent, that’s huge.

JAYSON: That doesn’t mean you’re going to be fit and perfect and your ultimate self, you still have to exercise and you still have to eat –

MIRA: Eat well –

JAYSON: And you have to do all this, but look what it does to your overall chances. It brings your chances so low of being overweight or obese. That puts you at a real good fighting position then to put all the other information on top of that and say, okay, now I’m going to put on my nutritional philosophy, my whatever your diet philosophy is and all my bonuses and all my knowledge about exercise and all my knowledge about just everything else on top of it to create this kind of really optimal self or optimal lifestyle.

JONATHAN: And it seems like well that number is so high that I imagine some viewers may think that’s too good to be true, but actually it’s too obvious to be false, right because all we’re talking about is, like if you don’t give your car oil, you probably have a 90 percent higher chance of it breaking down, right?

MIRA: Exactly.

JONATHAN: Like systems have things they need and vitamins and minerals are essential so if you don’t have that which you need to not be sick, chances are you’re going to get sick.

JAYSON: Right.

MIRA: Right.

JAYSON: I wish people would just – I mean I say it again – Jonathan, we need people to understand this. When you don’t get the essential things your body needs, you will break down and break down in human terms means these lifestyle and health conditions. It’s not chance, that if you’re not sufficient you’re going to get these things, so why are we talking about anything else, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt you, why are we even talking about anything else, why aren’t we starting with micronutrient sufficiency and building from there and this is what we’ve been doing backwards all along.

MIRA: Yeah, when people start a diet, I mean we really want them to understand this should be the first thing you do. Look at your micronutrients and then build up to macronutrients and then build up to your workout program and everything else you want to do because unless you get these things down here, it’s going to be a real problem later.

Just food cravings alone, we can talk about a little bit of food cravings if you want. Food cravings is just one example of micronutrient deficiencies we can have it in the diet and then causing you to be obese. A lot of elderly people have a zinc deficiency and zinc deficiency makes it so that you can’t taste your food. You’ll notice if you ever see a lot of elderly people going grocery shopping or something they always buying a lot of candies, always buying a lot of the same exact things, because they have intense flavors. So, that’s just one micronutrient that has been linked to overeating, animals who have zinc deficiencies in studies, will actually eat more of the same foods just to try to get flavor out of it.

JAYSON: Right. So, does that make sense? If you’ve got an elderly person and you notice that they’re starting to put on weight, this is going to be a major thing.

MIRA: See if they can taste their food.

JAYSON: Right. If they can’t taste the food they just want to keep putting it in and that taste receptor is also sending signals to the brain and it’s sending signals to specific micronutrients coming in so we’re just like one big kind of computer receptor system. If our bodies first visualize see color, we start to say oh, my gosh, that color tells me that there’s specific micronutrients in those foods that I need to survive, that’s why fruit, you go to a fruit and vegetable stand, it’s full of color. It’s no – it’s no —

MIRA: That’s why they make the candy the same color.

JAYSON: So, they’ll go into a candy store, what does it look like? It looks like fruits and vegetables. So it attracts us and then of course when we eat that sugar, we become addicted to it. I mean we know that there’s studies out of the University of Bordeaux, studies –

MIRA: France.

JAYSON: In France, studied sugar and they found that it’s more addictive than cocaine, more addictive, I mean I can’t think of anything much more addictive than cocaine, but sugar is one of them and when we eat the sugar, and it blocks our ability to absorb two very vital micronutrients when we’re talking about cravings, food cravings, specifically, calcium and magnesium.

So, calcium and magnesium are really at the epicenter of food cravings. A lot of people think it’s just poor discipline, I’ve tried and I’ve tried and I eat, I ate a certain way and I followed this diet and I get everything right and I lost 50 lbs. and look, everybody around me is telling me how great I did and my family is giving me positive reinforcement, my coworkers are and I bought a whole new wardrobe and I feel great and I look in the mirror and I’m the person I’ve always wanted to be so why do you ultimately pick up that Big Mac again? Why are you ultimately chowing down on donuts again and why do you regain the weight? If we can answer that question, we can get to the basis of really ultimately we don’t have a weight loss issue in America, we have a weight regain issue in America. And so we’re gaining that weight back again because of the deficiencies in calcium and magnesium because when we’re deficient in these things it makes us crave sugar and salt.

MIRA: The (Inaudible 00:22:08) Research Center actually did some studies on this and they basically found that whenever you get a deficiency in either the salts, either calcium or magnesium it’s the beginning of these food cravings. They did a lot of studies with animals and saltand stuff like that, but they did it with humans and they found that basically what happens is you crave something that’s really sweet because you have this magnesium deficiency and then you eat that something that’s sweet that has sugar in it and you’re deficiency gets even worse because it lacks magnesium from getting into your body. So, it does keep bringing down your sufficiency level. When I had advanced osteoporosis my thing was literally sweetish-fish and if you live in New York City, you know that there’s these candy stores down every single street, you can’t even go a block. And I used to go in and always grab something sweet and like now it’s so crystal clear to me. I was getting this and I was feeding the deficiency which was just further robbing my bones and that’s really true of salty things as well.

JAYSON: Yeah, when you eat a salty food or have that salt craving that you can’t — and some people are really two groups of individuals. They’re either a salty or a sweet and me I’d much rather have salty foods. Mira was a sweetaholic. She was a sugarholic.

JONATHAN: She’s a sweetie. Just say it, she’s a sweetie.

MIRA: Thanks honey.

JAYSON: It makes a lot of sense now. When we eat a salty snack, that salt goes in and it robs the calcium from your bones. It pulls the calcium out of your bones, brings it into the bloodstream, tricks your body into thinking that the calcium deficiency is over, but of course it also blocks the body’s ability to absorb more calcium and it just becomes a vicious cycle. Bottom line, get rid of those two deficiencies and of course when you look at your typical multi-vitamin, Jonathan, what are you going to find? Go pick one out of your medicine cabinet. Anybody watching right now, I guarantee your multi-vitamin does not have 600 milligrams of calcium and 400 milligrams of magnesium like it should.

MIRA: And if you’re talking liquid chances are there’s sugar in there, which is just insane to do that to somebody. Additionally, another thing is, this is on a sidenote, another thing about sugar is it also blocks Vitamin C from getting into receptor sites, which is why every single January after that holiday season, the number one thing that hits is the cold and flu season –

JAYSON: Yep.

MIRA: And that’s because everyone’s been eating sugary treats. So, if you normally get that New Year cold, then you should probably try to cut back on the sweets during the holiday season this year and watch that you have a much better likelihood of not getting it.

JONATHAN: So many truth bombs in there, Jayson and Mira and one that I really want to highlight because again when we’ve been so brainwashed with the calories, calories, calories, one, we’ve heard and it’s somewhat true that one of the reason that sugar is bad for us is it’s empty calories, but what you guys have exposed –

JAYSON: Naked calories.

JONATHAN: Naked calories, yes, yes, naked — what you’ve exposed here is hugely powerful when we eat these processed garbage foods, not only are we not getting micronutrients, but these foods they’re almost negative nutrition if I’m understanding properly. They’re not just giving us not what we need, they are ripping whatever we have left of what we do need — away. It’s almost like the counterpoint to healthy foods. It negates them in a way.

MIRA: Right. We call these everyday micronutrient depletors. Depletors is a word we made up obviously, but we call it every day micronutrient depletors or EMDs and these are the things that over time, we call them the stealth little thieves and what they do is they’re robbing you of the micronutrients that you do have in your body and sugar is one of them, so it continuously lowers your micronutrient bank account as we put it and sugar is one, high fructose corn syrup is one –

JAYSON: That’s just in general.

MIRA: That’s just in general –

JAYSON: These foods actually –

MIRA: Exercise –

JAYSON: They need micronutrients in order to be metabolized. So, they don’t bring any with them, that’s the thing. So, you’ve got your crystalline white sugar, which by the way now is coming from genetically modified sugar beets, 55 percent of the time in processed foods –

MIRA: Which have been proven, now GMOs are proven to actually cause weight gain as well –

JAYSON: But then your body can’t do anything with them because they don’t have micronutrients. Micronutrients help with the metabolism so then they have to use yours. The more sugar you eat – like you said, you start burning through your micronutrients faster so they become an anti-nutrient actually – it’s like a black hole. They actually suck nutrition out of you and they aren’t bringing anything good in.

MIRA: They have like 12 to 15 of them in the book of all these EMDs that we have located that appear in either foods or things you do to yourself, due to lifestyle. They’re robbing you after you do the addition to what you’re actually taking in, these are the subtractions, right, that nobody looks at very often.

JONATHAN: Brilliant. Well, we now understand that we’ve got to have these essential micronutrients to be properly functioning and certainly if we’re not it’s non-negotiable we’re going to get sick and break down. We figured out ways now that much of what the American population is eating is not only micronutrient poor, but is micronutrient negative for lack of better terms. Tell me some more about some of the most specific and shocking studies around if you’re deficiency in this micronutrient, like this will predictably happen.

MIRA: Vitamin D — and Vitamin D they’re calling it the skinny vitamin after all. There’s a lot of good studies about Vitamin D and if you think about it, I mean a lot of people think they’ve become thinner in the summer because it’s bathing suit season or something. If you’ve ever noticed, lay in the sun for a while. You’re going to notice that you aren’t so hungry anymore and that’s because deficiency in Vitamin D actually makes it so that your leptin isn’t working. Now, leptin is going to tell you that you’re full so you’re laying out in the sun and all of a sudden you feel fine and you don’t need food, but the minute winter rolls around and we’re not getting the Vitamin D, all of a sudden we keep getting that we always feel hungry and we need more food to snack on and that’s Vitamin D’s power.

JAYSON: Yeah.

MIRA: Vitamin D, women tested, I mean if there’s no other reason to take a supplement, women who are Vitamin D deficient are on average 16 —

JAYSON: 16.3 pounds.

MIRA: 16.3 pounds heavier. So ladies, get the Vitamin D, lose the 16 pounds. It’s a clear indicator in studies.

JAYSON: That same study showed that not only was Vitamin D deficiency that 16.3 pounds difference which is big enough for anybody, but it also slowed the growth of fat cells, it reduced the leptin and it also reduced the number of fat cells. This is another thing people don’t realize. They go get liposuction, and they suck out all these fat cells. What the doctors didn’t tell them is that your fat cells really can grow to any size that it wants, so you may not have two million fat cells anymore, but your fat cell can grow to as big as you want so you can gain all the weight back with even reduced number of cells.

You don’t want a lot of fact cells, but when you are Vitamin D sufficient, you’ll also have less fat cells too, so all your fat cells can grow bigger and obviously the less fat cells you have ultimately is better.

JONATHAN: I love that we’re again raising people’s consciousness about micronutrients and I want to protect folks, because I can see we’re not the only people right? There are food edible product manufacturersout there who are using micronutrients for various purposes, right? You pick up this sugary yogurt thing which is just garbage and it’s like a good source of Vitamin D and then I’m like I remember what Jayson and Mira said, if I eat this yogurt which is a good source of Vitamin D I’m going to lose 16 pounds, right?

MIRA: We’re not selling that guys. Don’t get confused about that, that’s not what we’re saying. We’re saying that in our perfect world we’d say about 2,000 IU Vitamin D and your yogurt isn’t going to have that. It doesn’t mean yogurt’s not a bad snack. Yogurt’s a really high in protein and protein and fat satiate, so we’ll say yogurt’s great for that reason. We also, just on yogurt if you really want to know, we don’t want you to get one that’s not organic because we don’t want the synthetic growth hormones, which are also leading to obesity. So we want to make sure that you’re watching out for that as well and getting organic yogurt.

JAYSON: Just on that note, yogurt is actually the number one food shown, number one weight loss food, I think when Harvard did their study it was the food that when eaten –

MIRA: Every day –

JAYSON: Every day it made people lose the most weight. Now, again, if you’re not a dairy person that’s fine, but yogurt is coming to the top of the heap when it comes to diet foods.

JONATHAN: When, how do we, Jayson and Mira, how do we protect ourselves from this, let’s call it negative micronutrient ad campaign where there is a big difference between the various yogurts, right, and it’s very easy for me as Kraft or Unilever to buy a little bit of synthetic X, Vitamin QXJ and just dump into garbage, so the back of the cereal box is an excellent source of all these vitamins and minerals, but dissolving a vitamin pill in a can of Coke doesn’t seem to make it healthy, how do we actually determine if something is a good source of micronutrients?

MIRA: Well, it’s probably not packaged.

JONATHAN: There you go.

MIRA: Don’t buy the box, the bag or the bottle. Those are going to be good giveaways. The less processed something is, the less of the micronutrients will be ruined in the process. So, that’s a good giveaway. Adding them in is just not the same thing. First of all, they’re not necessarily in the right ratios. Is someone doing that to basically try to make it what we call misinformation and marketing –

JAYSON: Yeah, when they process the food, they’ve taken out those micronutrients so they want it fortified, but they’re not fortifying correctly, often times they’ll say, well if a little bit is good, more is better, let’s just get it in there so we can put it on the box side and – and I don’t want to call out a brand, but everybody knows the cereal brand that you’re supposed to have 100 percent of all these vitamins and that works really good, it’s just like a vitamin pill. And vitamin pills really have a major flaw as well. Fortification is just that. A lot of people say well I don’t supplement. Well, you do if you eat rice or cereal or bread or anything else that’s been fortified because –

MIRA: You’re already supplementing.

JAYSON: They know that if your micronutrient deficient we’re going to have more and more of these diseases, so what they’ve said is wait a minute. You processed so much of the micronutrients and the nutrition out of this food, you’ve got to put something back. That’s not the way you want to get your micronutrients. You want to try to get it from the best what we call the rich food, the most natural food and when we say a food first, we’re not saying processed food first. A little processed food here and there we understand people are busy, but you want to try to get your micronutrients from natural whole foods first. If you’re going to supplement then know what it is and how you’re supposed to supplement. Vitamins and minerals cannot be just thrown into one big bag and just swallowed in a pill. It doesn’t work like that. There’s no food with every single vitamin and mineral in it. Food as innate wisdom, certain vitamins and certain minerals in specific foods so that your body can utilize them and absorb them properly. So, why would we think throwing everything into one pill or into one processed box works, I don’t know, but it’s not working and you definitely can’t count on that, those micronutrients as adding to your sufficiency level.

MIRA: Also, yeah and just be careful also with these Vitamin waters and stuff like that, people think that they’re getting them. First of all, you’re getting a handful of them that were randomly chosen because they’re going to give you focus or energy or purple gives you calm or whatever, but I mean those types of things micronutrients when they’re left in water, can combine to create soluble salts and do other nasty things inside that bottle so we’re not big believers in that either.

JAYSON: Yeah.

JONATHAN: Jayson and Mira, I know you have so many studies to share with us that I’m sorry, but you guys are so interesting that I’m coming up with all of these questions, I can’t resist. So, another question – so we’ve talked about calories, again missed the point, so then we get down more into macros and get into micros, is there a level below or next to micros such as these phytochemicals or some of the – is there another class of stuff below the surface, for example, I know a wonderful nutritional researcher who I respect very much, who is not a vegan, but he mentions very openly and honestly that there is an entire class of things we need that are only found in plants.

MIRA: Yeah.

JONATHAN: And are there, are there other things besides micronutrients which are way below the surface, but are essential to optimal health?

JAYSON: Well, they still can be considered a micronutrient because we need the micro quantities –

JONATHAN: Oh, okay.

MIRA: It’s just not an essential.

JAYSON: But whether or not we’ve termed them essential yet, yet being the operative word there so you so many things, there’s so many different micronutrients that we don’t even know about. We’re just discovering in food and that’s plant based and animal based foods, we are just in our infancy when we’re really dealing with the micronutrients. Remember micronutrients were really, the vitamins were only discovered 100 years ago — 100 years ago. The first multivitamin was only 70 years ago, there’s a chance your grandparents saw this birth of this whole idea so supplemental science or just micronutrient science in general is new and absolutely, it wouldn’t be a parallel it would just be part of that whole micronutrient concept and eventually we may label those as essential as well, and definitely there are more essential micronutrients to be discovered.

MIRA: Yeah, I mean look Alpha Lipoic acid isn’t essential so it’s classified as essential, however, in studies basically Alpha Lipoic acid – what is the word for Alpha Lipoic acid?

JAYSON: It regenerates all the other antioxidants so knowing when any antioxidant vitamin or mineral goes through its, it works on a free radical and donates it electrons, it kind of becomes useless and, but Alpha Lipoic acid comes in and recharges that antioxidant and makes it so it can work again, so this is a really important antioxidant to have.

MIRA: The cool thing about that one is it works both in water and in fat, so it’s water soluble and fat soluble and then the other cool thing about it is in studies when rats are given Alpha Lipoic acid they just naturally ate less. They just chose to eat less. One supplement they just decided they were going to eat less and secondary, work out more, which is the weird thing they had the little rat running,they could go in circles if they chose to. They were given the same exact foods to choose from as the ones that weren’t given Alpha Lipoic acid, and the rats randomly chose to run around more and to eat less. Wouldn’t that be cool if you just decided like I’m just going to be more energetic and I’m also not going to want food as much? I mean that’s how powerful these little things are.

JONATHAN: It really makes me so happy because it is a great example of how our bodies are not broken, right? We don’t need to feel these constant cravings for food and we don’t need – if we are eating too much and exercising too little, that’s not some moral failing, that is a symptom of these underlying dysfunctions and deficiencies and it’s not about just eating less and exercising more, it’s about correcting those problems so that we just accidentally move the right amount and eat the right amount. Is that on the right track?

JAYSON: It’s absolutely on the right track and I think if we understood that as scientists, we start to realize that these individuals are not lazy or they’re not individuals who are undisciplined. If we start to look at micronutrients deficiency as being that thing that’s causing them to crave the food, even when they are logically, I mean these are very smart individuals. They know that eating 8 or 10,000 calories a day is going to make them overweight or obese, it’s going to shut them into this box that they don’t want to be in and they’re trying to get around that, but what their body is really doing, they’re just more in tune with their body telling them, hey you need to eat more food or you’re never going to reach your micronutrient sufficiency level. We need that. That goes back to our ancestors to be able to fertile to be able to reproduce, to be able to live. If you’re not getting enough of those micronutrients that’s going to be — some people as such a strong signal to go eat more food that that’s when they start overeating and overeating and of course today in America, we buy into that. We create these all you can eat buffets, we add sugar, we add salt, we add MSG, we add every single thing we can possibly think of to make them addictive to food, to make it so that they can’t stop eating that, so then they’re getting too full. They’re getting the craving from their mind, that physiological message that’s saying, you need to eat more or we’re really going to have a problem here and then you’ve got all these other chemicals saying, you’re going to eat more because you’re now addicted to this food.

MIRA: Got ya —

So, the food manufacturers are using this to their advantage and guess who’s stuck in the middle? We as Americans who are getting wrong messages every which way, we’re now sad, we’re now like I’m so undisciplined and I can’t do it and do I really want to try another diet, I failed four to five times, I don’t want to go back into work and say I’m on another diet, people are like, oh, again, you’re just going to gain the weight back again — if you are one of those people, I want you to think about micronutrient deficiency and what we’ve been talking about today because you are not undisciplined, you are not lazy, you are not unintelligent, you simply have, your body is simply telling you that you need more food and if you get rid of those micronutrient deficiencies you will be able to control your food cravings. I guarantee that. I’ve seen it with thousands and thousands of clients.

MIRA: It’s telling you that like you said you need more food, but what it’s really telling you is you need more micronutrients from your food.

JAYSON: Right.

MIRA: But you notice with a lot of these people is they’re eating a lot and we see it’s junk. But they’re eating a lot of junk. And so they’re starving. You see them getting bigger and bigger and yet they’re starving and we just want people to understand that whatever weight you are, your body is probably starving on the inside and needs these things in order to regulate your hormones, in order to make you understand that you’re full. You can’t even hear it right now because you’ve starved yourself with these vitamins and minerals.

JAYSON: Michael Pollan said I’ll just do a quote from him and give him a –

MIRA: Shout out —

JAYSON: Shout out — he in defense of food he writes, a diet based on quantity rather than quality is ushered in a new creature on to the world stage. The human being who manages to be both overfed and undernourished, two characteristics seldom found in the body in the long natural history of our species and again, I couldn’t have said it better. We literally are undernourished even though we’re eating so many calories that we’re walking around obese. If we’re going to change that equation, we have to start with the universal truth that micronutrient sufficiency is the foundation of optimal health. If we create a sufficient state, the cravings will go away, we’ll eat less food, we’ll have more energy, our muscles will function better, our metabolism will function correctly and then we can build a great — a healthy lifestyle on top of that no matter what kind of dietary philosophy you follow. Great, if you want to be a plant based person, that’s great. If you want to be a Paleo that’s great too, but we all have a universal truth. We need to be sufficient in our essential micronutrients. We do that and then we build a foundation that’s really going to stand the test of time.

MIRA: And in our studies which we go over a lot in the book, we actually go through each one of these dietary philosophies and we show the likelihood of them being deficient in various specific micronutrients. There wasn’t one that did better than the other. I mean like the vegans had specific micronutrients wrong with them, the low carb did, the Paleo did, the Primal did, and all across the board everyone was deficient when following these types of diets. So, it really is one of those things that just because you think you’re eating great, it doesn’t mean that we’re not talking to you.

JONATHAN: Jayson this is utterly amazing and I want to give our listeners the vast tool set that you’ve provided because I think we’ve opened everyone’s eyes in this time together and gotten them excited, and we’ve already mentioned your most recent book here, “Naked Calories.” What other resources can and as you mentioned it’s always food first, we’re just beginning to understand this arena, but we’re smart people, science has been busy over the past 60 years, what scientific advancements can we take advantage of to help address this problem?

MIRA: Well, first of all we are food first, “Rich Food Poor Food” this is the book we wrote because everyone asked us what foods have a lot of vitamins and minerals, so we highly suggest that you have trouble going grocery shopping, if you’re wondering what foods to eat, that’s this book.

JAYSON: Yeah and as far as advancements go, I mean supplemental science is really coming forward. Our three steps just quickly are food first, switch to rich, eat rich foods, foods that are rich in micronutrients, two, really identify your lifestyle habits that may be depleting micronutrients. We’re not saying to change all of them, but be aware so you can understand what your likelihood of being sufficient or deficient is and we have a sufficiency quiz that people can take for free too on the website, so they can see where they may be falling on the spectrum of sufficiency and deficiency and it’s free.

The third thing is to supplement properly and really and truly I kind of talked a little bit about it earlier, but supplements as they’re manufactured today on the overall specifically multi-vitamins, is really kind of the same way that the first multi-vitamins were formulated, they’re just thrown together, so real quickly, we created something called the ABCs of optimal supplementation guidelines and this can be, you can apply this to any supplement you’re buying any multi-vitamin. First and foremost, A-absorption, if it doesn’t disintegrate, you can’t absorb it, right? So, 51 percent of the vitamins that were tested on store shelves didn’t disintegrate when consumer reports did their studies.

MIRA: They are a waste of money.

JAYSON: They are a waste of money. You may want to be looking for something in a powdered form so you don’t have to worry about disintegration, two beneficial quantities. We talked about earlier. Your multi-vitamin probably doesn’t have 600 milligrams of calcium or 400 milligrams of magnesium like it should have, 600 instead of 1,000 of calcium because your body can only absorb 600 at a time. So, we call that beneficial quantities. If you’re supplementing, make sure you’re getting the amount of supplement that you need. We’re not mega dose believers, we believe in 100 percent RDI so that –

MIRA: On top of your food.

JAYSON: When you add that to the overall good food diet, then you start to create, you reach that optimal zone, right? So, we don’t want too much, so beneficial quantities, that’s the B. C-this is the game changer. Competition. Micronutrient competition. Science is known now for years that certain vitamins and minerals compete for receptor sites inside the gastrointestinal tract, well, multi-vitamin manufacturers haven’t really done much about that, have they? They said here it all is, throw it together and most —

MIRA: Good luck to you.

JAYSON: And a lot of people will say that what you’re really getting there is expensive urine and we’d be on that side as well, so one of the things we did and we’re very proud of and that we actually used the scientific research to get a patent for, is we looked at what science knew already about what specific micronutrients competed with each other for absorption and utilization and we mapped those out and then we separated them into two unique formulas in our product, Nutreince, which is our multi-vitamin and we manufacturer the multi-vitamin because there wasn’t anything else out there that we could take or we could recommend that was doing this kind of science in the U.S.

MIRA: I think it was at 85 percent at all the vitamins and minerals in average when competed.

JAYSON: Eighty-Five percent?

MIRA: Eighty-Five percent. When we started looking at that, which we did because I had my osteoporosis and we were trying to reverse it for me, we’re like well, we can’t, I can’t take a multi-vitamin that’s not going to reverse my bone disease, so we started to look at that and we mapped out all the competitions and Nutreince is what we came up with.

JAYSON: Right. And lastly synergy is very important that you know what micronutrients are synergistic, like people might have heard if you’re taking calcium you want to take Vitamin D with it to help the absorption or if you’re taking calcium you want to make sure you’ve got Vitamin K 2, to get that calcium out of the arteries and into the bones, so again your multi-vitamins are not going to have K-2 most likely and if it does it probably won’t have M K-4, and MK-7, so you want to make sure that the person –

MIRA: There’s a lot to learn about.

JAYSON: Who’s manufacturing your multi-vitamin knows a thing or two about micronutrients and so this is some of the stuff that we’ve put in to the formulation. We’re very proud of it and if people are looking for a new multi-vitamin maybe you want to at least check it out.

JONATHAN: Absolutely. Jayson and Mira, I’ll give the shout out. I have taken multi-vitamins my entire life and I notice that they all gave me fluorescent yellow urine and I never really noticed a difference and my wife and I have been enjoying Nutreince here for months now. You don’t get the fluorescent urine, definite impact on energy. I’ve been a big fan and let’s leave our listeners because you know I’m personally a fan of your guys’ work. I love micronutrients and I think it’s great. I think you guys are innovators in this arena, so let’s give very clear, three steps, so I would Step One is go to caltonnutrition.com, because a bunch —

MIRA: C-A-L-T-O-N, because everybody gets that wrong.

JONATHAN: So, caltonnutrition.com, we’ve got the free quiz up there, what would Step Two be?

JAYSON: Well, Step Two is for you take that quiz so, go to the site, take the quiz, so that quiz is there, also —

MIRA: Read the books.

JAYSON: Read the books, yeah, I mean follow those three steps, those three steps to micronutrient deficiency is so simple, we outline in the book. The book is full color, can you see that Jonathan, can you hold that up I mean it’s full color, it’s easy to read, it’s not scientific on the inside it’s high gloss pages, so don’t be afraid of all the science. Yeah, it’s fun —

MIRA: And then to supplement because you’re going to find out when you read it, is that chances are Step One and Two, those two things, the quiz and the book, you’re going to find out is you’re probably one of the 99 percent. In all honesty, chances are that you’re going to fall in that range and that you could be a better you simply by supplementing.

JONATHAN: I love it.

JAYSON: And so if people do want to try nutrients we’d be happy to extend a $10 coupon to them from you, Jonathan, Smarter Science of Slim, so you can maybe put that coupon code up there for people as well if they want to try it.

JONATHAN: So, absolutely and it’s just so empowering. I really appreciate you bringing this back to the science, bringing this back to that which we — I mean this isn’t even debatable. This is just truths that are being ignored, so Jayson and Mira Calton, thank you so much for joining us today. This is absolutely transformational information.

MIRA: Thank you so much.

JAYSON: Our pleasure.

MIRA: For putting this altogether. We appreciate it so much.

JAYSON: Yeah, thanks Jonathan.

JONATHAN: Thank you. Well, listeners, I hope you enjoyed this wonderful information as much as I did and please remember, this week and every week after, eat smarter, exercise smarter and live better. We’ll chat with you soon.