Optimising Nutrition Podcast Marty Kendall

I had a great time talking to fellow Optimiser Debra Cleveland about her journey through the Data-Driven Fasting Challenges and Masterclasses.

During our live Q&As, Debra was always full of enthusiasm, inspiration, and positive energy as she learned to nourish her body instead of depriving it.

This stuck out to me, and I wanted to chat with her to hear more about her ride through health and to see if she had any learnings and insights to share.

We discussed:


Why is taking care of your body and your health a priority for you?
How did you stumble across DDF and the Optimising Nutrition Masterclass?
What did you find unique about the process?
I see you had some significant changes in your blood glucose and made the DDF leader board. What did you learn from tracking your blood glucose?
What did you learn from tracking your macro and micronutrients in the masterclass?
What tips would you give for someone just starting out?

It’s been fascinating watching Sidi’s journey progress since initially taking part in our Data-Driven Fasting Challenge and then hopping into the Nutritional Optimisation Masterclass.  Sidi has shed an incredible 20kg (44 lbs) in just five months.  She has also lost 15% body fat and reduced her waist to height ratio from 0.61 to a very healthy 0.49!

After getting the ball rolling with Data-Driven Fasting, Sidi powered on to dial in her macronutrients and micronutrients with her local cuisine in Kenya and Cyprus, achieving an incredible 100% Optimal Nutrient Score.

Sidi’s journey has developed quite a following amongst her friends, family, and workmates in Kenya.  In fact, her progress has since inspired many people close to her to follow in her footsteps.

We love seeing people optimise their nutrition to suit their goals while applying different personal and cultural contexts to their food availability, selection, and preparation.

I’ve received numerous requests from community members to learn more about Sidi and her inspiring story and decided to invite her as a guest on the podcast.  I had to have her on for a chat to learn more about her journey and any tips or tricks she had for others embarking on similar journeys towards nutritional optimisation.

Chris Kelly is the founder of Nourish Balance Thrive. Building on his experience as a programmer for hedge funds and large internet companies, he has done amazing things in the health space.

After experiencing his own health transformation, he launched Nourish Balance Thrive to help high-calibre athletes optimise their health and performance.

After regularly running expensive tests on his clients for years, he figured he could do things his way to save time and money. So he eventually developed BloodSmart.ai, a software that uses inexpensive blood tests from doctor visits to highlight potential issues. Rather than performing thousands of dollars worth of extra tests to find an obscure issue, BloodSmart.ai says, ‘you look like someone with X’.

‘X’ can include various conditions, from heavy metal toxicity to hormone imbalances and nutrient deficiencies. The client can then order targeted tests or address their health situation as if they had ‘condition X’. While a condition might not be validated using the blood test, this can give users the hindsight to address their symptoms with early diet and lifestyle changes.  BloodSmart.ai is an extremely impressive and intelligent application of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in health.

Chris was one of the early members of the Optimising Nutrition Facebook Group, a hive mind of learning. I’ve enjoyed following his learning journey on his Nourish Balance Thrive Podcast and being a part of his Keto Summit back when keto was all the rage.

During Chris’s time on the podcast, it was also interesting to discuss the Four Quadrant Model view of health management. We often start with the most complex ‘hacks’ to manage our biology’s ‘source code’. Sometimes this is necessary. However, we often get the most significant benefits from simple things, like optimising nutrition, managing stress and relationships, and prioritising sunlight, movement, and sleep that align with our evolutionary biology.

I’m excited about the potential applications of  BloodSmart.ai. This program allows users to take their standard blood tests and use them to identify nutrient deficiencies. From there, you can manage them with real food rather than resorting to supplements and use Nutrient Optimiser to stay back in Quadrant 1.

I hope you love this chat with Chris, who I believe is one of the smartest and wisest people in this health space.

You can also listen to my chat with Chris on his Nourish Balance Thrive Podcast discussing our latest research on nutrient density.

Chris has a fascinating background.  After studying economics, business and psychology at Stanford and Harvard, he worked as a trader Ray Dalio at Bridgewater Capital, the world’s biggest hedge fund (now with $150b under management), to a private investor, author, father, athlete and biohacker.

Like me, Chris believes in the numbers!

After a couple of rounds of Data-Driven Fasting, he’s been trying to get his Silicon Valley biohacker buddies to try it to optimise their health.

As a data-driven engineer who’s dabbled in trading, I thought it would be fun to chat with Chris about how we can manage our psychology and biology with data.  How can we tame our lizard brain to avoid self-sabotage that is often caused by our self-doubt in any area, including nutrition?

It was fascinating to hear how Data-Driven Fasting helped his brain find peace and calm around food and nutrition.  Having peace that your body will get food exactly when it needs it is a nice change from the anxiety that popular extended fasting methods can often cause.

Paul Burgess has been a great mate, supporter, and mentor throughout my journey to quantitatively define optimal nutrition.

When he first invited me on his podcast, I put him off. I felt I still had more work to do before promoting what we were doing at Optimising Nutrition (and also felt a strong sense of imposter syndrome).

I’ve now had the privilege of being a guest on his podcast three times. So it was an honour to finally return the favour and have him on the Optimising Nutrition Podcast.

Paul has experience in just about every form of tracking, hacking, testing, and biohacking from his four decades of experience in the health space. His podcast is a constant flow of deep dives into the latest testing and functional medicine trends to manage complex issues.

While he’s recently become a massive advocate for Data-Driven Fasting, he’s also mellowed.  He has become more passionate about encouraging people to do simple things that work first before diving into rabbit holes of tracking and hacking that often cause plenty of stress and anxiety (not to mention expense!). Likewise, worrying about the latest test, tracker, or supplement is a waste of time if you don’t have your nutrition, sleep, stress, and activity dialled in.

Once you get the basics sorted, most people find they don’t need to waste their time, money, and limited headspace on new-fangled fancy stuff!

It was fantastic to talk with Paul about what he considers the ‘big rocks’ that most people struggle to get in place and pursue what makes you happy.

It was an honour to chat with Mark Schatzker about his new book, The End of Craving: Recovering the Lost Wisdom of Eating Well. I’ve been a MASSIVE fan of his work since reading The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor.

Many diet authors blame the obesity epidemic on a single smoking gun (e.g. carbs, fat, tasty food etc.). However, Mark wades through the complicated situation in a fascinating narrative that gives a sense of wonder and mystery to the complex interplay between appetite, flavour, taste, wanting, and liking.

Once you have a deeper understanding of how food manufacturers have exploited our neurobiology, you will understand why it’s so important to seek out food that naturally tastes great because it contains the nutrients your body requires. Conversely, if your body doesn’t trust that the smell, flavour, and texture of your food aligns with the nutrients and energy it provides, your appetite will become risk-averse and seek out more food, just in case.

One of the narrative threads in The End of Craving discusses the differences in how the US and Italy individually addressed the Pellagra epidemic in the 1930s, a condition resulting from a lack of dietary vitamin B3 from a diet too rich in corn and fat.

The U.S. decided they would address the issue with science by fortifying their foods with synthetic versions of the nutrients they were missing.  Meanwhile, the Italians saw food as a cure, not the cause, and encouraged their people to keep rabbits for cheap meat and drink cloudy wine containing yeast that provides B vitamins.

Today, the areas in the U.S. that once were called the ‘Pellagra belt’ now make up ‘the obesity belt’.  In contrast, Italians are some of the leanest people in the world and are famous for having some of the most sumptuous edibles on the planet.

Mark also draws attention to experiments in the 1960s where pig farmers realised they could grow pork more quickly without their livestock getting sick by keeping them indoors and feeding the diet high in corn fortified with B vitamins. As a result, the pigs would chow down on more fortified grains and achieve historically unprecedented growth rates.

Shortly after this discovery, food manufacturers ramped up the fortification of breakfast cereals and other processed foods for humans.  Initially, this looked like fortification benefited the public.  However, it’s now evident that we’re more likely to continue to chow down on highly processed foods without stopping and negating cravings for foods that naturally contain nutrients.

I read The End of Craving while analysing an amassed 125,761 days of macronutrient and micronutrient data from 34,519 people who have used Nutrient Optimiser to fine-tune their nutrition. It was fascinating that we crave foods that contain more of these nutrients in the amounts found in nature. However, once levels of select nutrients like B1, B3, iron, and folate exceed natural levels from supplementation or fortification, we seem to simply eat more processed foods without getting all the other nutrients we require!

I hope you love this chat with Mark, and I highly recommend his books to understand the beautiful complexity of modern nutrition.