Jayson And Mira Calton
Jayson And Mira Calton
Jonathan: Hey everybody, Jonathan Bailor back with another bonus SANE show, and we are joined show veterans and dear friends, Jayson and Mira Calton. Jayson and Mira, how are you doing today?
Jayson: Doing great Jonathan, how are you?
Calton: Fantastic to be back.
Jonathan: To be back on the show, and it is exciting because today, we are going to talk about, and I’m just going to come out and say it because it is the context for our conversation, folks have known for a while that you guys are the micronutrient champions, and most recently though, you guys released a fat called SKINNYFat. This begs the question, the question I always get asked when people see things like this, and I am curious to get your guys’ thoughts on it is — all right, and actually, I had this experience on last year’s low-carb cruise, where people were talking about Dave Asprey’s bulletproof coffee, I literally had someone walk up to me and say, “All right, so my plan to get healthy is I’m going to take my existing diet that I’m currently eating and I’m just going to supplement 700 calories of MCT oil into that diet, like I am just going to add 700 calories of healthy fat into that diet and I’m going to lose weight, right?”
Calton: Oh goodness no!
Jayson: I could understand how it might work. So we call it SKINNYFat because it was a fun play on words, so the idea is that you can eat fat, particularly good fat, and you can get skinny. So fat does not make you fat, but if fat is taken or eaten in the wrong combinations, it can make you fat. Now the interesting thing about SKINNYFat, because like you mentioned, the majority of the fat in SKINNYFat is MCT, now do not make a mistake, SKINNYFat is not just MCT oil, and there are some problems with MCT oil and we can discuss them in the show, but the reason we didn’t want to make it straight MCT is because people can get stomach upset and of course MCT stands for medium-chain triglycerides, medium-chain triglycerides are digested differently than regular fats or fats that contain something called long chains, so long chains make the body secrete bile acid and that bile acid then breaks down that fat and we use that bile acid to absorb fat-soluble vitamins and so, because we are the micronutrient people like you said, we were looking for an oil that would help our people absorb the fat-soluble vitamins from their salads and from their smoothies and from anything they were doing. They fact that it has medium-chain triglycerides protects them from storage of body fat, but here is how it works. So, you take in this fat, right? And you get all these MCTs going and the body uses those MCTs immediately, first thing as energy, but if you are taking them in with a much of carbohydrates, it is going to make it so that those carbohydrates — if you do not need any more energy, if those MCTs have delivered all the energy that your body needs, then the body turns those carbohydrates into fat, so fat and carbs, not a great idea together.
Jonathan: I appreciate you highlighting this, because this is really what I wanted to help people understand, because not only with SKINNYFat, but with just coconut oil and olive oil and all the talk of fat being healthy, and especially with MCT oil being shown in isocaloric studies, if you substitute fats with MCTs, you do burn fat, but the key there is if you substitute. Meaning if you were to take 500 calories of hydrogenated oils and swap in 500 calories of coconut oil, that would be good, but that is not the same as just saying, “I am going to dump a liter of SKINNYFat into my morning coffee and just drink that and expect myself to lose weight,” right?
Calton: No and I hear that all over the place, I spend more time on Facebook than I probably should, but I get so aggravated because I hear people just saying, “Well that is what I’m going to do, I am going to have my bulletproof coffee or I am going to have more coconut oil,” and they are like, “I am going to make it with my baked potato, and I am going to drench it with any fat I can find clumped in there, and then I am going to put some honey on it,” and they are literally making these carb bombs also with fat bombs and I am like, you cannot just load it all up — you are going to have to choose a fuel source and you have to decide what your body is going to burn, you have to let it burn something, so thank you for bringing that up actually, because that is —
Jayson: It is a great point.
Calton: It is a really, really good point. You should not just add it in, you have to add your oils wisely, so that when I say that we like using a lot of SKINNYFat, what I mean by that is that rather than using a different salad dressing made up of either the disgusting canola or corn oil that see — soybean oil that you see, genetically-modified seed oils that you see in the grocery store, I decided that I would make ours from SKINNYFat, so I am not just adding extra SKINNYFat in, I am just taking a bad product and making it by something that can be healthy. Like mayonnaise is another good example; you can add mayonnaise as long as you understand that you are now just going to use this oil instead of the other one.
Jonathan: I really appreciate that replacement paradigm, because as you said, it is so easy for people to just — [05:00] they can start to see fat almost as they see a multivitamin; just add this as a supplement and that is really not what we are going after and I think another distinction that would be really useful to talk with you guys about is — so people hear coconut oil and they are like, “All right here is what I am going to do, I am going to Costco and I am going to buy the two pound drum of coconut oil and I am just going to take two tablespoons of coconut oil per day,” but what about coconut? We are big fans of whole foods. There seems to be this emphasis on oils but not so much emphasis on eating olives, for example, rather than olive oil, what are your thoughts on whole food sources of fat as contrasted with oils?
Jayson: Whole foods are different, so when you are started to bring up coconut for example, olives are a good example too,2 but with coconut you are also bringing in, if you are eating the whole food, that is great as long as you are allowing carbohydrates into your overall macronutrient profile. Some first things first, you have to know what you are doing. Are you an eighty-twenty type of low-carb dieter? Are you a Mediterranean dieter going like a forty-thirty-thirty ratio? Are you a low-fat dieter where you may be taking in twenty to thirty percent fat? Are you —
Calton: Always being conscious of what you are eating [inaudible 06:10]
Jayson: So yeah, if you are a person who is going to be taking, let’s say, twenty to thirty percent of your diet as fat, and then you are going to have thirty to forty percent in carbohydrates and whatever else is left there in protein, sure, coconut by itself is great. It is going give the fat, it is going to give you the MCTs, it is going to give you the carbohydrates, it is going to give you the fiber; it is a whole food source. But if we are a eighty-twenty dieter in ketogenic dieting, then what are we doing? We cannot eat the coconut because it has too many carbs, so in order to get those beneficial antibacterial, antiviral, kind of fat burning, brain-boosting, metabolism-boosting effects, then the oil would be better kind of in both cases with the olive as well as with the coconut. But obviously Mira and I have always prided ourselves as food-first people, and so we always want you to get the highest micronutrient-rich foods you can based on your dietary profile and just kind of switch things around from there.
Jonathan: Got you, and again, that is a really important distinction for people is to say, “What is your goal?” If you are going for a ketogetic diet where you are sub-fifty grams of carbohydrates and you just need calories, you are not — protein is not a source of energy right?
Jayson: Right.
Jonathan: And you have said I am not going to get it from carbs, so you are only going to get it from fats, and you have to then focus on concentrated sources of fat, but I think there might be quite a few people out there that are intentionally increasing their fat intake without intentionally decreasing their carbohydrate intake at the same time.
Calton: Right, one or the other, you just have to make a choice, and that is what we see with a lot of the recipes right now, and that is why I am so happy that you are bringing this point up. In terms of eating the whole coconut, absolutely, I would love, if you are not counting your carbohydrates, eat the whole coconut. For us, it is very much the same way we look at juicing. You know what? If you are going to take the juice of thirty apples in one glass, or you could actually eat an apple, and eating the apple is going to give you a lot more of, you know, [inaudible 08:02] you are going to get more of the fiber, you are not going to get nearly as many calories as the glass of juice, it is the same thing as eating the whole coconut, if it fits into your protocol, then absolutely. You are going to get all the benefits from the meat, from the fiber, from the fat that is naturally in it; all of those great things.
Jayson: Plus, if you crack it open, you are going to get some exercise too. It is not exactly easy!
Jonathan: Absolutely, you will put some work in. So there are two really good distinctions so far, I just want to summarize for our viewers and listeners. First is that any time that we talk about any kind of oil, be it SKINNYFat oil, oil in general, first of all, we are talking about things like coconut oil, MCT oil, these healthy fats, as replacements for hydrogenated nonsense, not as yes, you should increase your caloric intake by 800 calories per day from fat, no one is saying that. The second distinction is if the whole food fits into your lifestyle, which, correct me if I am wrong Jayson or Mira, but unless you are on a ketogenic diet, I would think that almost all whole food sources of fat – coconut, cocoa, eggs, chia flax, avocados – they are going to fit in. So unless you are on a therapeutic, hardcore ketogenic diet, they are going to fit in. So again, if you are not on that, you should not just be like, “Blah, blah, blah.” That is not going to turn out well.
Calton: No, it is to replace other oils in most recipes, so what we have done is we started really slowly. So we are making salad dressing recipes, we are showing people how to use them in protein shakes, and one of the reasons right now is people are not necessarily adding any source of good fat into their protein shakes. And we are seeing that as a big problem because they are not able to really absorb it, and they are not satiated for a long enough period of time. So if you want — if that is one of your goals and you like taking a protein shake in the morning, make sure to take like a teaspoon or tablespoon of something like SKINNYFat, because in studies, it will keep you satiated all the way through till lunch, so —
Jayson: Yeah, that is really where those studies came from; they highlight the aspect of getting that protein for breakfast, but in all reality, you want the protein [10:00] and a little bit of fat. So like an egg, that is a perfect food for breakfast, but if you are one of these people who want to have a protein shake, then a tablespoon of SKINNYFat going in that protein, that is great because that fat will be used as your energy source, like you said. It will have a protein spearing effect; you do not want to just have protein because protein is a poor energy source. You have got to convert that protein to carbs, and then that carbs to fat, and this is all just a big mess. So it is great to have the protein, a little bit of a fat source, it will keep you satisfied all day, and that is really what I think what people were missing out on in that protein shake. Also we just, like you said, we want you to get rid — what we cannot express enough, get rid of those genetically modified oils. And how do we do that? That was the big thing. We said, “Do not buy that salad dressing. Do not buy that cooking oil.”
Calton: We look in [inaudible – 10:51] and we could not find any out there. There was no good salad dressings, so that is one of the reasons.
Jayson: So we said, “Well, if we can’t find one, then we are going to have to make one.” And we are probably going to go into production of salad dressings down the line here, but we wanted to give people the raw ingredients that they could use, that SKINNYFat, and they can make any salad dressing they want. And the reason we did it is, there is nothing wrong with coconut oil just in and of itself, except for it tastes like coconuts.
Calton: And it clumps in everything.
Jonathan: Yeah, it clumps!
Jayson: [cross-talk] It does not make a great Italian coconut dressing [inaudible – 11:20], right? You cannot make a great pesto with coconut oil. So the great thing about SKINNYFat is it really takes on whatever flavor of the dish that you are going to combine it with. And of course, we have SKINNYFat Olive, too. Now let’s talk a little bit about that. We love olive oil. Olive oil has been shown to have a lot of health benefits, but there are a couple problems with olive oil. First of all, it is high in omega-6, so it has got right around 10,000 milligrams, yes, ten-to-one ratio of omega-6 to omega-3, and we like to keep that ratio closer to three-to-one to a one-to-one. And the real problem is, how do you catch up? So if you are using olive oil on everything, you are getting all that omega-6, maybe you are getting 10,000 milligrams a day of omega-6 and you want to get that omega-3 ratio up again, you have to now take a lot of fish oil pills, and it gets worse with some of these oils. Some of these oils have up to 57,000 milligrams, like with safflower oil or grapeseed oil. So you see, you will never catch up, you will never bring that ratio back. So we wanted to make sure — so what we did is, we took SKINNYFat, which is MCT and coconut, and we added in organic extra-virgin olive oil.
Calton: And we checked: it is real olive oil.
Jayson: Yeah, it is real olive oil; we sourced it directly from Spain, and we added it in. And because MCT oil is a flavor enhancer, it tastes just like olive oil but with eighty-five percent less omega-6, and that is the big kicker. That is what we want to see, and that is what we want to try to achieve, at least with our patients and our clients. We try to keep those omega-6 to omega-3 ratios right in line.
Jonathan: Very, very helpful. And I want to go back to the satiety point earlier, because I thought that was a really great thing to dig into, and especially with your micronutrient focus as well. Tying back to our stories of inappropriate usage of oil earlier where individuals might say, “All I am going to have today to eat is 700 calories of oil mixed with a beverage, and I am going too fast.” You are not getting any micronutrients if you do that. And have you ever seen people who literally, because they are taking in so many calories from fat, they are so satiated that they are now not able to — it is like, “I am full, so I am not going to eat micronutrient-rich foods.” Have you seen anyone have that problem?
Calton: Well, everybody in a lot of these groups are actually saying, “I am not hungry anymore, I was keto-adapted, I am not hungry anymore.”
Jayson: Yeah.
Calton: And you are just sitting there going, “Well, it is not okay to be not hungry.” I mean, your body tells you are hungry because you are supposed to find foods that are supposed to fill you with vitamins or minerals in order for you to be healthy. So that is a really big problem now. One thing that we are telling people is to put nutrients directly into their protein shakes. If you are going to do a shake that is just a high-fat protein shake, put your nutrients right into it, that way at least you are guaranteed twice a day to be having that. That is not an excuse for not eating. I am not giving anyone that right not to be eating micronutrient-rich foods, but at least it is kind of, with a lot of these people, at least getting them caught up. We tell them that basically yes, you are going to lose a whole lot of pants sizes, perhaps, by doing this, but you are going to get sick in a different way. You are going to become deficient, and that deficiency will cause a different disease.
Jayson: Yeah, you know, with this intermittent fasting and fasting in general, I think it has been around for thousands of years, people have seen so many benefits from fasting and just kind of detoxifying, and it is becoming popular again. Remember, and of course if you do not know, if you are listening to this and you do not know, we create what we call micronutrient-sufficiencies, the foundation of optimal health. So, meaning that if you are not micronutrient-sufficient, optimal health is impossible. Period, across the board. So if you are going on a fast [15:00] and you are not getting these micronutrients like you were talking about, Jonathan, then this is just going to create a micronutrient deficiency that over time, you are going to have to pay the piper. You always pay the piper. So the way that we would like to see people do this is like what Mira said: if you are going to do a fast, make it a liquid fast. If you want to use fat as your fuel source, which is a good idea, I guess, because ketogenic dieting works well using fat as a fuel source. There are a few problems. First of all, I do not think it works very well going long period of time –
Calton: It is not sustainable.
Jayson: I think it puts you in a state of starvation, and I think what I have seen happen with my clients is that when they come out of that state, yeah, they are not hungry during that time, and also they are not getting enough of the micronutrients. If you add nutrients into it, that will be better, certainly, and we recommend everybody to do that. But when you come out of that fasting state, the body tends to store whatever you eat next as body fat and that is because it is starving. The body just — they do not know that you are playing some game or read some book, it knows that we did not have food for sixteen hours, and so what we are going to do with it is we are going to convert that into body fat, so we are going to have all that much more stored energy for the next time that this happens. And the more you do that, I think you are playing a game of Russian roulette with that, if you fast too long.
Jonathan: I agree, and I think it is, in some ways, oils, there are a very powerful tool, because it is a huge amount of calories that can be very satiating, but with no micronutrients at all. And we can tend to — people talk about meal frequency and yadda, yadda, yadda; but as you said, I really thing the foundation of a long-term healthy lifestyle is, you have to be able to eat enough nutrient-rich whole foods that you are going to be micronutrient-efficient, and if you are only eating actual food one meal a day, that is — or you are going to get horrible digestive problems from the eight servings of vegetables you are trying to eat in one sitting.
Calton: Yeah.
Jayson: Right.
Calton: Now that is another reason that we actually created this, because one of the reasons I got advanced osteoporosis was the fact that I used to be low fat, and I would sit down to tons of vegetables. I would like nothing more than a big salad, and I would put the big salad in front of me and I would not put anything on it. And I would think that that was going to help me out in a lot of ways, but the whole thing is, I did not put any fat on to absorb a lot of the micronutrients. And so, therefore, I still became deficient. So one reason I created this, that we created this, actually, is so that we can say to a lot of people out there that might be fat-feared, fear fat –
Jonathan: Lipo-phobic?
Calton: There you go. We just want to say to them, like, you can still have it, it does not have to be scary. And it can be something you can add that does not necessarily restore body fat, but it is still going to allow you that micronutrient nutrition to actually help your body.
Jonathan: I think this is really, really helpful; the three key points for listeners to keep in mind — and actually, even before we get to that summary, I just want to encourage our listeners and our viewers to — especially the three of us, we are about whole foods, we are about micronutrients, we are about sustainability. So if you find yourself in a world where your nutrients — we always talked about, it is an insurance policy. You take it on top of stuff. This primarily, unless you are on a therapeutic ketogenic diet and that is very — not a lot of people do that correctly, let’s put it that way, then this is what you would use, you would substitute for garbage oils. So it is a substitution. So if you find yourself doing nothing but drinking oil and taking nutrients packets, you are not on the right path; you have got to start with whole foods and use these as prescribed, for lack of better terms, which is — I want to clarify not only for these products, but for other product out there, because I have seen a lot of people take a few missteps with those products.
Jayson: Yeah.
Calton: Oh absolutely, we hear it more and more now, and we believe one-hundred percent what you said. This is not — just so you know, we do not just sit there and drink it all day. We love our food, we keep a garden, we go to the market, we do all that sort of stuff. We believe in food first, that is why the first step is rich food and are buck-naked calories, that is food first.
Jayson: Yeah, I mean, we know how much fat we want to have each day. We know where we are. We know our ratios of fat to carbohydrates from proteins, depending on what diet we are following, and we measure that. So if we need to get more fat in, yeah, we will add more SKINNYFat to that, because we know it is a good, saturated fat, a good fat for us, and we will raise it up to that level. We do not just start pouring it in, and people should realize that fat and carbs are kind of like this; it is like a teeter-totter: more carbs, less fat, more fat, less carbs. They are both an energy source. The body cannot use them both at the same time, so you are going to have to pick one. And if you are putting tons and tons of carbs, you need a certain amount of fat, do not forget that fat is essential. That is why we tend to kind of lean toward [cross-talk] using more fat than carbs, but if you are putting more carbs in, you should bring that fat level down to maybe ten, twenty percent. And I like to keep fat at at least twenty percent.
Calton: If you see a recipe that looks like this, with them both way up there, really high, do not make it. That is not going to be good for you in the long run. That is a recipe [20:00] for gaining weight, and it is a recipe for just not being healthy. There is adding things in for flavor, but it is not necessary.
Jayson: Yeah.
Jonathan: I dig it. Well the one last thing I want to cover is where I think actually using oils of all sorts, excuse me, not of all sorts; healthy oils, goodness sakes! We are going to have to cut that part out. The healthy types is — traditionally, endurance athletes have thought that they have to just pound sugar and pound starch, and that is the only way they can get concentrated sources of energy. Well, I think the three of us are here to tell you that there are many other healthier forms of concentrated energy out there for you.
Jayson: Right.
Calton: And one of the studies that we have on our website with MCT is that we just talk about it actually preserves muscle at the same time as allowing your body to move faster, longer, keep that endurance up, and it is actually more preserving than the sugar in terms of your muscle.
Jayson: Yeah, I mean, you know I was first introduced to MCT way back in the eighties; a guy named John Parrillo kind of made it popular in the bodybuilding world. And for many years, many of my clients, including myself, were trying to figure out ways how to build muscles without taking steroids. So this is an area now where this is not — we are not talking about the average person, so I do not want anybody to be confused. But if you are an individual out there and you are saying, “How can I — I exercise day in and day out, I am consistently going up in weights, I am doing everything I can. I am eating as many calories as I can, and I can still not gain muscle.” I can tell you that utilizing MCT or utilizing something like SKINNYFat is an excellent way, and really the only way, that you can get those calorie levels up to that where you are probably going to need to to really cause your body to gain that muscle. And so, if you are a person who is going to need 3,000 calories a day, 4,000 calories a day, 5,000 calories a day; if you are one of these racers, these endurance athletes, that are burning through that and you are figuring, “How in the world? I cannot eat enough food!” MCT oil or SKINNYFat oil is an excellent way for you to add those calories in, and you are going to burn them. What we do not want is the secretary or the bus driver or whoever else [cross-talk] pouring it in their coffee or putting it on their food thinking they are going to get thin. That does not work like that.
Jonathan: And I can definitely empathize with what you just said because I think most folks know my story back when I was just, I was super-skinny and I could not get any bigger, and I would literally pound — this was before I knew about MCT oil and things like that. I would pound shots of olive oil, because it was the only way I could get up to 6,000 calories per day. That caused some distress, obviously my omega-3 to 6 ratio was a little bit off, and eating coconut oil, which is solid, is kind of disgusting. So having a liquid option available if you are trying to gain weight or are — I just, for example, was working with someone who was recovering from cancer and was having hard time putting weight on their body, those types of things. Super-good asset. So all this said, SKINNYFat, good stuff; what is next for you guys?
Jayson: Well, we –
Calton: Protein just launched. So that is –
Jayson: Yeah, we just launched a new protein powder, so that is out big thing.
Calton: That is our next baby.
Jayson: We have been looking for a protein for six years. I have been in the whole bodybuilding world for many, many years, so protein is kind of a staple for me and for Mira, both. And we wanted to have a protein that was organic. We wanted to have a protein that was [cross-talk] not GMO project verified, obviously grass-fed, pasture-raised. We wanted to have a protein that was –
Calton: Single-ingredient.
Jayson: Single-ingredient by Jersey cows with A2 casing. We wanted a protein that tasted like an isolate, but we wanted it to be a concentrate. We wanted to have [cross-talk] –
Calton: We did not want them processing, the acid processing and everything else.
Jayson: So we finally found one, long story short, made here right in the USA called IN.POWER. It is, like Mira said, single-ingredient, tastes like an isolate, got all the benefits of the concentrate.
Calton: And then after that, we are going to hunker down and write another book.
Jonathan: Boom!
Jayson: Yeah.
Calton: So, yeah. Everyone has been asking us, “You have a lot of theory books out and you told us how to go grocery shopping, but how exactly do I work this into a plan?” So yeah, we are actually writing a plan; a twenty-eight day plan that will be coming out in April next year.
Jayson: It will be called The Micronutrient Miracle: Twenty-Eight Day Plan, so look for it.
Calton: Sticking with the micronutrients.
Jayson: Yeah.
Jonathan: Beautiful, and that is very exuding, it is exuding and exciting because I am just so overwhelmed with joy after hearing about that. So, the name of the book again?
Jayson: The Micronutrient Miracle: Twenty-Eight Day Plan.
Jonathan: Love it, love it. Well, Jayson and Mira, it is always a pleasure to chat with you and I really appreciate it, again. It would be very easy to just be like, “Drink SKINNYFat!” And that is not the message we are giving, so I so appreciate that, and I hope you guys have a wonderful rest of your week.
Jayson: Well thank you Jonathan.
Calton: Oh, absolutely, thank you so much for having us again.
Jayson: Thanks for having us.
Jonathan: Thank you, and listeners and viewers, I hope you enjoyed the show as much as I did. And please remember this week and every week after: eat smarter, exercise smarter, and live better. We will chat with you soon.