Jeff Krasno
speaker
350 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Jeff Krasno’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yeah, absolutely. Well, first of all, Drew, thanks for having me. You are just such a great friend and you platform so many amazing people. And I'm very grateful to be here. So, yeah, listen, for hundreds of thousands of years, Homo sapiens, and even beyond that for millions of years, hominids have evolved in relationship to their environment. You know, to be alive is to be in relationship.
And so we've evolved these adaptive mechanisms in relation to what I sometimes call paleolithic stress. But since the Industrial Revolution, in the West primarily, but really accelerating in the last 70 years, at every turn, we've engineered our society for comfort, for convenience, for ease. And it's my thesis that chronic ease is actually leading to chronic dis-ease.
We are essentially using our culture to hijack our biology, and that is leading to all sorts of detrimental downstream impacts. And I can unpack just some of those mechanisms.
In modern times, we have a negative association with stress and totally justifiably, right? Because in the modern age, stress is chronic. And chronic stress, as you well know, leads to imbalances in the human organism and by extension, disease. But stress at its core is actually an adaptive response to our environment. So I live up in the hills of Los Angeles.
I'm apt to go for a hike generally before I have a podcast, for example, to clear my head. And every once in a while on that little serpentine path, I'll run into like a rattlesnake or a coyote, right? And I have a very, very natural adaptive response to stress. I see the rattlesnake on the path. What happens, right? I have a bottom-up response. My heart rate and my respiratory rate increase.
My liver secretes just the right amount of glucose to center my extremities to fight or flee. My pupils dilate. The aperture of my attention becomes super, super tight. I become... self-obsessed and distrust the world. And that's all for good reason, because that serves my biological imperative to survive. And of course, we inherited this mechanism from our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
The problem in modern society is the rattlesnake never leaves the path for so many people. So we're in this chronic state of agitation.
now on the path in laurel canyon above my house what happens after the rattlesnake looks at me and says i don't think jeff will be on the specials menu today right and he slithers back off into the tall grasses well i return to homeostasis right my heart rate and my respiratory rate decrease the aperture my attention opens back up i become more creative and i trust the world again
And that is a total natural response, right? I return to the middle. I return to homeostasis. The signature of modernity is that we never find the middle again. We never return to homeostasis. So when you're driving here and you're in traffic and you're looking around and you're seeing people are stressed out, that's because they're in a state of chronic stress.
And we know just like hormonally, for example, that chronic stress is going to lead to all sorts of different kinds of disease. So chronic stress, again, adaptively activates the liver, for example, to secrete glucose into the bloodstream. That is totally adaptive, but you don't want high levels of glucose in your bloodstream all of the time, right?
Because that leads to prediabetes and diabetes and insulin resistance. You don't want high levels of cortisol also because it degrades immune function. It actually lowers the production of certain kinds of innate immune cells like neutrophils and macrophages, et cetera. It also degrades gut function over time.
It creates dysbiosis and eventually intestinal permeability, which leads to chronic inflammation, et cetera. So this is the problem in the modern age is chronic stress. And I feel like I'm sort of a PR agent now for stress because stress doesn't have to be chronic. If you learn how to manage it, if you learn how to emotionally regulate, then in many cases, You can manage stress.
And in some cases, stress can actually be your friend and confer beneficial results.
Part of the research of this book was just intellectual curiosity, but the other part was really necessity. I was diagnosed with a chronic disease in 2019. And I was very, very overweight. I was 210 pounds. So I lost about 50 to 60 pounds with a lot of research and end of one experimentation, et cetera. So fasting and intermittent fasting was a big one for me.
And in the early days, I was candidly pretty fundamentalist about it because I needed to be because... my fasting blood sugar was 125 milligrams per deciliter. So I was on the very, very top of the pre-diabetic range at the very bottom of the diabetic range. And I was having crazy spikes, you know, up to, you know, 250 milligrams, 300 milligrams per deciliter postprandially.
And so this is why now I wear this little disc on my triceps called a continuous glucose monitor. So fasting was one of the key protocols that I developed for me really early on. And it makes total sense because if you ask yourself the basic question, and this could be applied to all of these adversity memetics, how did I evolve, right? Well, I evolved having to endure periods of calorie scarcity.
My body was engineered to become a little fat in the late summer or the early fall. Why? Because it knew... that the paucity of winter was just around the corner. But of course, in most of the modern West now, winter never really comes from a food perspective. There's always a surfeit of shelf-stable, nutrient-deficient calories that we can call up in the palm of our hand.
By the end of this podcast, we could have a whole array of foods here, right, in and out of season. So I really had to examine this and say, listen, I need to balance my consumption of food with some degree of restriction. Because part of nature's plan is to balance abundance with some degree of scarcity. But now in an era of very little scarcity, we have to self-impose this protocol.
So this is what fasting was for me. For me, I adopted a very simple 16-8 protocol because I found that there was the most data around that. And that's simply just consolidating my consumption of food in an eight-hour window. For me, that was more or less between 10.30 and 6.30.
I've subsequently played with that window a little bit, but I saw very, very significant results pretty quickly from that protocol. Time-restricted eating doesn't mean you're necessarily calorie-restricting because you could eat 10 pints of Chubby Hubby in an eight-hour window, right?
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