E30: A Better Way with Dr. John Jaquish

Today’s guest is Dr. John Jaquish, an author and inventor who has spent years researching and developing improved approaches to health. He invented the world’s most effective bone density building medical technology, OsteoStrong. His latest invention, X3bar.com , uses variable resistance to develop muscle faster than conventional weight lifting, all with the lowest risk of joint injury.

Full Transcript

Natalia Earle: Hi, everyone. Welcome to buckleUp! Podcast. I’m Natalia Earle, and I’m a certified business and life coach that loves talking to people. I’m fascinated by humans and how our brain works. What is it that makes a decision good or bad, and how does that decision ultimately shape our path and destiny? Everyone loves to talk about success, but what about the flip side? How about adversity? Failure is such a big and often necessary part of life, and it’s simply unavoidable. So I invite you to join me on this inspiring, honest, unpolished interview show with breathtakingly real conversations that go deep on setbacks and hardships that are part of the puzzle that ultimately lead to growth, the discovery of inner greatness, and what makes us resilient. Grab your helmet and buckle up, people. It’s going to be a bumpy ride, but what a ride it will be.

Natalia Earle: Today I sat down with Dr. John Jaquish, who has spent years researching and developing improved approaches to health. He’s the inventor of the most effective bone density building medical technology, which is now partnered with Tony Robbins and OsteoStrong for rapid clinic deployment. Dr. J is an inventor of X3 Bar, a technology that is proven to develop muscle much faster than conventional weightlifting, all with the lowest risk of joint injury. His methods are used in training the world’s most elite athletes and associations, such as the entire Miami Heat organization, various NFL and NBA players, as well as Olympians. Dr. Jaquish has been called the Tony Stark of the fitness industry by the Chicago Tribune, has been featured on many of the top health podcasts. He speaks at scientific conferences all over the world, is an editor of multiple medical journals, and is a research professor at Rushmore University.

Natalia Earle: Well, hello, Dr. John Jaquish. Thank you so much for being here with us today.

Dr. John Jaquish: Thanks for having me.

Natalia Earle: So tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you arrive at the place where you are today?

Dr. John Jaquish: I developed a medical device a little over 10 years ago, and that was to treat my mother’s osteoporosis. It was totally family-motivated. I wasn’t planning on starting a business at the time, but she was diagnosed with osteoporosis. I wanted to help her. My approach was very unorthodox. I did my PhD right after I developed the medical device. Did all the learning, the background research, to the first sort of test if the theory would be correct. And then I went ahead and prototyped the device and tested it on my mother, reversed her osteoporosis in 18 months. Then I went for my Ph.D. and the funny thing is, my professors all told me I would have talked myself out of it if I had done my Ph.D. first, which I thought was funny.

Natalia Earle: That’s interesting.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. So when I meet medical doctors and they look at OsteoStrong… And now it’s called OsteoStrong and there are like 155 clinics in nine different countries. Now they’re starting to get it because they see how big the business is. But I think they just realize that “Okay, other physicians have signed off on this,” so they’re okay with it. But when it was new, a lot of them just said, “You can’t put force through a bone and force it to grow,” but that’s how we grow bone as children, high-impact. I’ve never met a physician that I couldn’t talk into prescribing it for their patients, but sometimes it just took a little bit of time to get them to absorb the material.

Dr. John Jaquish: And also in the defense of every physician out there, physicians look at a lot of stupid stuff that their patients bring in all day long, like superfoods. There’s only one, it’s steak. There’s nothing else. The concept is that there’s some food out there that’s going to give you super health. It’s animal protein, I guess. But other than that, I would argue most things that we call food are not food at all, or they’re a poor substitute for food. There’s just a lot of garbage information out there, and doctors have to filter through all this.

Dr. John Jaquish: And some of the myths in nutrition and fitness, they believe it because they were taught the wrong thing. Here’s one: vitamin recommendations were based on expert opinion more than 70 years ago. That’s the weakest form of medical evidence, expert opinion. People ask me, “What vitamins do you make sure you get?” And I’m like, “None, zero.” Vitamin D is important, but my body makes its vitamin D, I go outside. And the rest comes through my nutrition. I eat organ meats, and then everything else is just meat. I don’t eat fruits. I don’t eat vegetables, anything. So those kinds of things that physicians aren’t even up to speed on that sort of… Some of them are, like obviously The Carnivore Diet is written by Dr. Shawn Baker, and I highly recommend that book. But anyway, getting the physicians on board was a bit of a challenge. But once I got them to understand some of the literature, I didn’t have any problems.

Dr. John Jaquish: And then of course, how you found me is through my other product, X3bar.com . When researching OsteoStrong, I discovered something that should have been obvious but wasn’t because nobody ran my exact test in my clinical trial and what different positions people are capable of generating force in. When you go to do a pushup, it’s very difficult when your nose is against the ground, but when you extend your arms out, it becomes very easy. The difference between those positions is sevenfold. You’re actually seven times stronger when your arm is almost at full extension than when the ground is close to your body.

Dr. John Jaquish: So why would we ever train with a static weight if we know this? Now, of course, nobody really knew it. I kind of forgive everybody for not doing something different, but when you understand that, there’s only one conclusion you can come to, and that’s: weightlifting is a terrible way to stimulate muscle growth. And we have such variability incapacity to create force, then we ought to be stimulating growth or fatiguing a muscle in the same manner. We need to change the weight as we move, which is what forced me to write the book Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time: So Is Cardio, and There’s a Better Way to Have the Body You Want. And you just finished that book.

Natalia Earle: Yes. I loved it. It truly blew me away. And I love the one sentence that you have in there is, “Mind is like a parachute. It doesn’t work unless it’s open.” When I was observing all this newly learned information from you, I was truly blown away because I’m a runner. I’m not a long-distance runner, but I truly do enjoy running, doing a little bit of cardio. And I was always told, “Oh, that’s so great, and it’s going to help you with the weight loss.” And then more and more, I read your research, more and more I was like, “Well, my joints hurt. My knees bother me.” And everything was coming true, my understanding and reading through your research. And same as you say that weightlifting is a waste of time. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. The book, it’s an attention-grabbing title, but I won’t waste my time lifting weights, and I’m stronger than most people. I’m leaner than most people. I’m more muscular than most people. And I don’t lift weights. I don’t risk joint injury ever. I have a better way of doing it. I work out about 10 minutes a day, six times a week, and I work out at home. In fact that wine barrel, right back there, right behind me?

Natalia Earle: Uh-huh (affirmative). Yes.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s where I keep the X3. It’s just in my living room. And you could put it in a drawer, but I want it easily accessible. I don’t even want to have to open a drawer because I have so many people coming over that want to see it and want to check it out. I entertain a lot, probably too much. I have a really easy lifestyle compared to how fit I am.

Dr. John Jaquish: Most people who are fit, have to eat like six meals a day and they have to be timed exactly correctly. Their workout is two hours a day, six days a week, so they got to go to the gym. It’s like a whole nother job, between food preparation and exercise. And these are top-level athletes. And it’s just not that difficult. They’re doing a lot of things they don’t need to do. A lot of the things they’re doing are counterproductive.

Dr. John Jaquish: Never letting your intestines rest is a huge problem, and it makes a lot of things inefficient in the body. Whereas I eat one meal a day. So do I spend a lot of time with meal preparation? Not really. I pretty much eat every meal at a restaurant. I spend no time. I shouldn’t say easy. The workout I do is not easy. Yes, it’s 10 minutes. It is the hardest workout you’ll ever do, but I find most people are not lazy. Most people just don’t have the time.

Natalia Earle: Right. Or don’t know what to do.

Dr. John Jaquish: Or don’t know what to do.

Natalia Earle: For example, for me, I didn’t go to the gym because I would get intimidated. I didn’t know my way around it. And then a couple of times that I’ve gone, I’ve hurt myself. It was very hard for me to get in there. Ordered your X3, I’ve been using it. This is my second week. And I love it. I call it idiot-proof. Like everybody can do it, follow instructions.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yes, as long as you follow the instructions. It’s not idiot-proof, because there are plenty of idiots who decide to edit the program.

Natalia Earle: Why?

Dr. John Jaquish: They decide they’re going to add in something extra and they’re going to get extra results. And because they don’t understand the science, usually they end up doing much worse because they’re causing over-training or maybe some other problem, or a joint problem or something like that. Yeah. I don’t know what it is that empowers people to think they’re physiology experts. Probably because most of the articles written out there are written by very simple people who don’t know what they don’t know. But that’s big.

Dr. John Jaquish: The academic community knows what they don’t know. There’s a lot of things I don’t know. People are like, “Oh, you think you know the answer to everything.” No, I don’t. But I know the answers to the questions that you have. I got a lot of really important information that can optimize your training and take you to a completely different level. Coincidentally, athletes have noticed there are 17 NFL players that I have taken far beyond when they entered the league.

Dr. John Jaquish: Usually when somebody enters the league, they know they can’t get injured, so they stop taking training risks. At any moment, they could lose their contract. That’s something a lot of people don’t know about the NFL. It’s pretty rough. Like if you get injured while lifting weights, you’re off the team and you don’t get paid anymore. You might have a $40 million contract, but in your $40 million contracts, you get paid so much per game. So the allocation is sort of like in that term of the contract, it’s divided by how many games are in that term. You can’t show up to a game, you don’t get the money. It’s a rough industry. But they know that when they use X3, they’re at a much lower risk of injury. And they’re continuing to get stronger and injury-proof themselves because there’s a big component of X3 that strengthens tendons and ligaments. It will reduce the chances of injury.

Natalia Earle: Right. And a lot of times I’ve personally noticed that too, and you speak about this in your book as well, is when people see someone that’s in an amazing shape, looks incredible, they’re like, “Oh, fitness is a scam. Either they’re born that way or they’re taking steroids.” It came up so many times when I was talking about X3 with other people that, “Oh, he looks like they are taking steroids,” or so-and-so.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. Well, that’s why I love… So the NFL and the NBA, they’ve been great. The entire Miami Heat has replaced their strength training program with X3. And they even endorsed the book. You can read their endorsement right on the back.

Natalia Earle: I’m in Miami, so they’re going to love to hear this.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. And guess which team had the least injuries last year?

Natalia Earle: Miami.

Dr. John Jaquish: Miami, yeah. Right. It’s working for the people who apply it. I love working with professional athletes because, number one, everybody knows their coaches are not idiots. They’re not going to waste an athlete’s time. Millions and millions of dollars are on the line with these guys. So they’re going to make the best decisions, and the best decision is X3. It’s a huge credibility boost for the company and the product.

Dr. John Jaquish: People get to see that the athletes themselves, because it’s not just teams, it’s individual athletes, like some Olympians, some bodybuilders. They want to use X3 because they get better results and there’s less chance of injury. Oh, and an absolute fraction of the time, you get more stimulus. So I get out of 10 minutes what most people get out of two hours in the gym, and they’re hurting themselves and I’m not. So I don’t know why everyone wouldn’t work out like this, hence, Weightlifting Is a Waste of Time. That’s how I got the title. People were like, “Oh, are you ever going to lift again?” Why? Why would I do that? I just proved it’s stupid. And when you understand variable resistance, which is what X3 applies to the highest degree ever seen, you wouldn’t. It wouldn’t make sense to lift weights.

Natalia Earle: And what I love about it is for the beginners, just like me, that someone that’s not used to working out every day or spending hours at the gym. You wake up, it’s four times a week, in the beginning, 10 minutes a day. Anybody can do it.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, you spend as much time brushing your teeth. You wouldn’t skip that.

Natalia Earle: Exactly. And after five weeks, you go up to six days a week. But in those five weeks, I’m sure you already see the change in your body.

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh, yeah.

Natalia Earle: So now you’re already motivated. You’re seeing changes. And of course, adding those extra two days, you don’t even think about it. You’re just going to go for it.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. It’s already a habit.

Natalia Earle: Exactly. And what I love about it as well is that you can travel with it. And when I was reading about how much thought you’ve put into the design of a bar and the plate, it doesn’t get rusty. It lasts forever. It helps you with your wrists because I have bad wrists. So everything that I was reading about this, I was like, “I’ve been waiting for this all my life.”

Dr. John Jaquish: A lot of things that were considered. Like I shut down a lot of knockoffs because anything successful gets knockoffs. But I have patents in 37 different countries. I have over 300 patents on it. I shut down one that was making really low quality like the thing would fall apart if you used it correctly. But most people, get the knockoff product. They never see the proper training material. They don’t even really know what they’re doing. So are they going to hurt themselves? Probably not, but they’re not going to get any results either. But it’s amazing to me how the knockoffs didn’t do it right, so they’re just not going to give people the results, or they’re just giving terrible recommendations.

Dr. John Jaquish: One good example is a lot of people like a wide grip bench press, so you put your hand out wide to grab the bar. Well, the reason they think that that’s good is that they can lift more weight doing that. Why? They can lift more weight because you’re cheating yourself. It’s a shorter distance to go. So the same thing with squats and deadlifts, when you spread your legs way out, it’s a shorter distance to go. But it’s also damaging to the shoulder joint in a chest press and the hip joint in squats and deadlifts. People will damage their joints so they can pretend they can lift more weight than they really can.

Dr. John Jaquish: Now in a contest, the objective is to lift the most weight possible. So if they allow you to spread your legs way out or take a wide grip, will you do it? Sure. But just because you do it in a contest, doesn’t mean you’re training to do that. It doesn’t mean the way that the athlete got strong was by doing a s***ty bench press or a awful squat that’s hurting your joints. No, they train with their feet closer together and their arms closer together. That’s going to stimulate growth, so when you do a chest press, you put your arm out in front of you. You want your elbow closer to the midline of your body than you want further away because that’s what contracts the pectoral more. A lot of people just see the product and the program that goes along with it. And because they don’t understand science, they go to copy it and they go, “Well, I’m going to make it better. I’ll make the bar longer.” No, you just made it less effective.

Natalia Earle: Right. That makes sense. And you also have a different approach to stretching. Do you recommend stretching at the end of the exercise instead of at the beginning of the exercise?

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, and there’s 20 years of research on this. If you stretch before you work out, you just shut your muscles off. The reason people stretch before a workout is they’ve been told to stretch before a workout.

Natalia Earle: Exactly. Including myself.

Dr. John Jaquish: So what you should do if you’re going to lift something heavy, or people are like, “I do martial arts and I need to stretch before my…” whatever, practice or training or performance or whatever you call it. Well, you should perform movements at a slower speed, in which you’re dynamically moving the body, not just sitting there and doing a static stretch, because you shut muscles off when you do that. It was really funny. People got so upset, but then a lot of strength coaches came in and they’re like, “Oh yeah, I’ve been trying to teach people that for 20 years.”

Natalia Earle: Yeah. And it’s so hard to change someone’s mind.

Dr. John Jaquish: The most unfortunate part of this is that it’s very obvious that people want to believe that what they’ve always believed is correct. You can make better political examples out of this. People want the news that they want to believe in, even if it’s falsified. I mean, this is like the story of CNN, right? They find the angry people that are upset about certain things, and then they feed them what they want to hear. But I don’t take a lot of political positions, a waste of time. The narrative that they’re trying to push is their motivation. The reality has nothing to do with it, and that’s apparently what people want to see.

Dr. John Jaquish: So when people have been stretching for the last 20 years and doing worse because of it, but not knowing that. And then when they hear stretching is not what you want to do, instead of deciding to learn something, they’re angry. And they’re like, “No, you’re wrong.” And I’m like, “Look, I’m showing you research that somebody else did.” I didn’t do it, but I follow science, so I would never stretch. And I’ve known this for 20 years and I think I’m doing a little bit better than most. Maybe check it out. Maybe read the research instead of getting upset about it. But just like all those political issues, people want the answer they want, not the right answer.

Natalia Earle: Right. And it’s scary that’s how we are today. It’s very concerning.

Dr. John Jaquish: The majority of the population just wants the answer that they want to believe in. And there’s a great meme out there. It shows Ralphie Wiggum from the Simpsons, a cartoon character. He says, “I’m a researcher,” and he’s typing into Google, “What I want to believe is true.”

Natalia Earle: So true.

Dr. John Jaquish: Great.

Natalia Earle: The Googlers.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s how people do research. Their “research” is, “Trump is a crook.” Do you know?

Natalia Earle: Yes.

Dr. John Jaquish: And then they find articles that say that, and then they’re like, “See.” Right. That’s not research. That’s just…

Natalia Earle: Your statement or opinion, yes.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, that’s just your opinion that you want to reinforce by somebody else’s opinion, which also is not reinforcing anything. Like no data says the former president committed a crime, otherwise, he’d be in jail.

Natalia Earle: For sure. But people are so angry, they don’t want to hear it.

Dr. John Jaquish: No.

Natalia Earle: Nobody’s hearing anybody right now. Everybody’s just yelling.

Dr. John Jaquish: No, no.

Natalia Earle: So talk to me about the importance of the diet. You touched on it earlier, at the beginning of the interview, but from what I understand, you eat once a day and you eat a lot of animal products.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. I eat one meal a day. And most of what I eat, almost everything I eat, is just red meat.

Natalia Earle: And now you have the majority of people screaming, “Veganism is the way to be. Don’t eat animals. It’s bad for you. It gives you this cancer and that cancer and colon cancer.”

Dr. John Jaquish: No. All fraudulent research. None of that’s true. If you decide to eat all vegetables, truly all vegetables, imagine there’s no such thing as processed foods, you will die very quickly because you can’t get enough calories in your body to live if you’re just eating fruits and vegetables. The nutrients aren’t dense enough. You can eat leaves all day long or plants, potatoes, whatever. You cannot get enough calories to keep from dying. You’ll just wither away to nothing. But a lot of companies are funding research that favors vegans, so they’re trying to prove that veganism is healthy. And these companies are General Mills, General Foods, Nabisco, Nestle. Why are they doing it? Because they know vegans, since they’re not dropping dead, we know they’re not eating kale. So what are they eating? They’re eating cookies and cake.

Dr. John Jaquish: Part of the reason there’s an emotional tie with these people to their nutrition is that they get to eat junk food all the time. They’re 24/7 junk food. And I mean, is that fun? I guess if you have the self-control of a two-year-old, maybe. That’s really what they’re eating. They’re reading highly processed foods. And will that keep them alive? Yeah, from a calorie perspective, but all kinds of chronic cellular inflammatories are going into their bodies. Oxalates, every plant has oxalates, which is a low-grade poison. Now I think like a deer has something like… This is just from memory. It’s a huge magnitude factor. It’s like they have 10,000 times the tolerance to oxalates than we do. It doesn’t bother them. They can eat plants, but we get bothered by them. We get things like irritable bowel syndrome or Crohn’s disease from these chronic inflammatories that we’re ingesting.

Dr. John Jaquish: Vegetable oils are total garbage. I mean, that’s a perfect example. You’re refining vegetables and turning them into polyunsaturated fats. Like canola oil, absolutely toxic to humans. We should not be consuming such things. How popular is margarine now? But people quit buying it when they realized it was hurting more people than helping, but why? We never learned why. And it’s because these oils and these vegetables are completely toxic to us. If the vegetable oil is toxic and we know that, and products have gone away as a result, well then doesn’t that kind of disprove the idea that vegetables have the most nutrients and we ought to be eating the most of those? And right now the Western diet is 70% plant-based.

Natalia Earle: And we’re so sick.

Dr. John Jaquish: We’re fatter and sicker than ever. Is going 80% plant-based or 90% or a hundred percent plant-based going to make us better? I don’t think so. And I got plenty of evidence, which I put in the book, to show that that’s not the way to go.

Dr. John Jaquish: Do I want to be nice to animals? Sure. Seven billion animals are destroyed every year because of vegetable farming. Vegans aren’t saving anything. Just because the squirrels and the birds had to be poisoned by the tens of thousands to grow lettuce, that doesn’t absolve somebody of responsibility. And they want to say, “Well, I just don’t want to hurt anything.” Too bad. Any species that is taking resources from another species, and in this case, it’s land. We’re taking land away from nature. The natural habitat was eating there.

Dr. John Jaquish: So when the birds come back to the forest they used to eat all the seeds at, and now it’s a cornfield, they go, “Great. We’ll eat the corn.” Well, it turns out there are little buckets of seeds that are above the corn that they’ll eat before they get to the corn, but those are poisoned. The birds will drop dead by the tens of thousands. No matter what, any species that’s taken resources from another species is taking life. There are limited resources everywhere, and if you’ve got an expanding population, you’re destroying life. That’s just the way the world works. So it’s just very naive to… Here’s another thing. In California, people like driving electric cars like they’re saving the world, and they talk about that endlessly. But the power that goes into their plug-in car is from a coal-burning power plant. They didn’t save anything. Now you live in France and all the power is nuclear, then yes, you have no carbon footprint. That’s great. But only in France where they have only nuclear power.

Natalia Earle: Why do you think, in your opinion, this information is so controlled? Why do they want us to be these vegans… As you said, I think because of the products that we end up buying, but sometimes I say like, “Why do they hate us so much?” We’re humans.

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, part of it is that the people making decisions in our country, Congress, they’re not physicians or scientists. Ocasio-Cortez was a bartender before she got elected to Congress. Does that mean she’s a nutrition expert?

Natalia Earle: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Probably quite the opposite. She was feeding people alcohol. And this has been a problem with all kinds of things. Some things have been made illegal by Congress, pharmaceuticals that would help people live longer and better lives, that was just made illegal because Congress wanted to say, “Oh, we’re protecting your children,” but it ad nothing to do with it. It just had to do with a talking point, a buzzword, that they wanted to market, one time. Now here’s another thing. Hydroxychloroquine was made illegal. Right?

Natalia Earle: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Because the president said that the future is bright. We have hydroxychloroquine, it’s very effective for a pandemic. And he was right, and he didn’t make that up. He heard that from other physicians who were advising him. And because he recommended it, the governor of Michigan made the entire drug illegal. Well, people with Lyme’s disease need that to live. Many of them almost died because they couldn’t get the drug they had been taking for years, which is fairly harmless. A lot of decision-making when it comes to health, nutrition, medicine are not being made by people who are knowledgeable enough to make that decision.

Natalia Earle: It’s more political.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right. It became a political decision.

Natalia Earle: Correct.

Dr. John Jaquish: I guess they wanted to make the president look bad, but they almost killed people in the process. And of course, nobody was held responsible for this. It was just sort of like, “Oh, okay, we’ll make it legal again.” People in Nevada also. It was the same story in Nevada. So the governor of Nevada and the governor of Michigan, they almost killed their people for political motivation. Wow. It doesn’t make you feel good about your elected officials. People need to think a lot harder and unemotionally. You should probably elect somebody smart instead of somebody who emotionally pleases you.

Dr. John Jaquish: Now, the other reason is there’s a lot more money in vegetable farming than there is in meat production. From farm to a butcher shop or grocery store, a piece of meat has a 12% margin that has to be divided between distributors and everybody in the middle. Everybody’s making a very small amount of money on 12%.

Natalia Earle: Makes sense.

Dr. John Jaquish: Now, a cookie has a 70% margin. And I got that off a website recently. That’s for people who own a small business and sell cookies. That’s not Nabisco’s price because these are people who are buying ingredients at retail, but Nabisco doesn’t buy ingredients at retail.

Natalia Earle: Wow.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. So 70% instead of 12. Now I read somewhere and I couldn’t find a backup to this. I don’t know how true it is. I always warn people I didn’t get this from a reputable source because everything in the book is backed up by actual research. So this wasn’t backed by actual research, somebody said, some article said that there’s a 600% margin in a box of Triscuits. So that starts to make sense. They can afford to fund more studies and guess what? Triscuits are vegan. It’s a wheat grain that it’s made of, and a bunch of other chemicals, but majority wheat grain, which wheat grain is cheaper than topsoil. Cheaper than dirt, their raw materials to make their products. Very often you just have to look at where the money’s going, and the money’s going to them. They can buy more lobbyists and they can buy more research. But that’s why meat has a bad name because it’s just easier for them to do business lying to people and telling them that having nothing but carbohydrates is good for them.

Natalia Earle: Is the meat supposed to be grass-fed, grass-finished? What are your thoughts on that?

Dr. John Jaquish: I would always prefer it to be grass-fed, but that’s not all the meat that’s out there. We need to fix a lot of our farming. Like a lot of industrial farming and feedlots, they’re not treating animals great. A better piece of meat always comes from a field. Also, there are different types of grass. You’ve seen farmers till a field, right?

Natalia Earle: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr. John Jaquish: Where they kind of grind up the soil and replant it.

Natalia Earle: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah, people should never do that. Now I mean, for certain vegetables, you kind of have to, the way they’re planted, but for grass, you want the roots to go down eight feet. And when a cow bites off that grass on top, in several days, that grass grows another foot tall because it’s got an eight-foot rootstock. This is the most sustainable nutrition and sustainable farming. Grass-fed beef on land that has old rootstock underneath their grass because the grass just completely replenishes itself immediately and the cows can keep on eating. And cows can multiply limitlessly. That’s the most sustainable thing.

Dr. John Jaquish: There’s a great article. I think it was in, I want to say, Entrepreneur, talks about how eating the grass-fed steak is the most vegan thing you can do because it’s the least amount of life taking. Vegetable farming teight-footo kill 7 billion animals a year, which coincidentally is almost the same amount of chickens that are destroyed per year. But there are only 120 million cows because a cow’s got 500 pounds of meat in it. So if you want to reduce the amount of life of animals taken, then cows are the best thing because one cow can feed a small town in a night.

Natalia Earle: And do you recommend fasting for a couple of days a month? Like completely not eating anything for 48 to 72 hours.

Dr. John Jaquish: I love 72-hour fasts. They’re great fasts. I’ve done five-day water fast where all I have is water. I’ve done a five-day dry fast, where I have had no food and no water for five straight days. Yeah. Big fan of fasting, I find it very difficult for people to do it. A lot of people talk about it, very few people go and do it. The biggest problem with nutrition is, the CEO of OsteoStrong told me this, says, “The best diet is the diet people will follow.” He says, “So you can talk about fasting and only eating meat, but I come across people all the time that are like, ‘Gosh, I’m depressed. I’ve been overweight for years. I don’t know what to do, but I don’t want to change my diet.’” And it’s like, “Okay, so you’re obese and you became obese because of the way you eat, but you’re unwilling to change that. Why would you think that would work? Because it’s not going to work, ever.”

Dr. John Jaquish: Another common one is, “Well, I can’t give up my pizza.” It’s like, “All right, well, then you’re going to die young.” Now I’m talking about people who are obese. The occasional piece of pizza… Like if I have a piece of pizza, is that going to hurt me? No, but also I’m not going to have one every day. I probably have a piece of pizza just for social reasons maybe once every other year. I don’t think it’s that great anyway.

Natalia Earle: Because you’re on the West Coast. You need to come to the East Coast.

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh no. I lived in Chicago for a couple of years, so Chicago deep dish was a big deal. I tried it. One thing that helps is I view those things as entertainment, not food.

Natalia Earle: Yes.

Dr. John Jaquish: I tell people, “Look, I know you don’t want to give up your pizza like you invented the thing or something.” I think it’s so weird how people call it, “I can’t give up my pizza.”

Natalia Earle: The attachment of it, right? The attachment.

Dr. John Jaquish: It’s a part of your body? What does that even mean? It’s a statement of how screwed up people are when they look at their nutrition. But so I say, “Okay, what I want you to do is start viewing these things as not food. Anything that you do that isn’t animal protein, you have to see it as just entertainment.” If you watch an action film or comedy, did you get any smarter? No. Did it entertain you? Okay. So that’s got some lifestyle value to it, I guess. But you also have to know that when you’re consuming something like that, it’s a setback. Every time you have a crummy meal, like a pizza, it’s a setback to you. How many setbacks do you want?

Natalia Earle: Right.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s just a couple more days you’re not going to get to your goal and you can put off your goals for your whole life, or you can just not eat the pizza.

Natalia Earle: Exactly. But it’s amazing once you understand, like you talk about it in your book, that all you need to survive your body, your physical body, needs protein and fats. You don’t need those carbohydrates. You don’t need sugar.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s right. There’s no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. You don’t need carbohydrates at all. Now I can make a case for carbohydrates, with muscle hydration. I do a little bit of carbohydrates right before a workout. I take glucose tablets, because I want exactly that. I don’t want any fructose. Fructose just gets stored as fat. It’s useless to the body, like fruit, useless. There’s a reason it tastes like candy because it’s just candy. And when does fruit bloom? When do we have fruit? At the end of the hot season, typically, wherever you live. Now, because we have shipped all over the world and we have gas ripening. They put nitrogen gas with containers of food so that they ripen in a shipping container coming from Honduras or wherever we have fruit year-round. That shouldn’t happen.

Dr. John Jaquish: This is what a bear does. A bear gives itself type two diabetes every year, because at the end of the warm season before they go into hibernation, they do nothing but eat berries and honey. Why do they do that? They get fat. Type two diabetes, I don’t see as a dysfunction of the human body. It’s a function of the human body. It is to help you get as fat as possible so that you can survive the winter because that’s when we have fruit available, at the end of the hot season. Bears do it so they can hibernate all winter. They don’t do anything. They just sit in a hole and wait for months while they’re living off their body fat. So they’re fasting for months and months and months, but they have the body fat to live off. And then when they emerge, when spring comes, all they do is chase after animals because they’re lean now. And they’re fast. You can maybe outrun a bear in the fall. You can’t in the spring.

Natalia Earle: Incredible.

Dr. John Jaquish: They’re fast. Yeah. They’re lighter. They’re stronger. It’s a thing that they do, and I think it’s so fascinating. Well, animal models, animals have different biochemistry than humans. So are they the best comparison? No, but it’s a great example of how an animal uses type two diabetes to live. Of course, their diabetes goes away in the spring. Well, as soon as they start hibernating.

Natalia Earle: So tell me a little bit about testosterone and then I’ll let you go.

Dr. John Jaquish: Okay.

Natalia Earle: Because I could talk to you for hours. You’re fascinating.

Dr. John Jaquish: Thanks.

Natalia Earle: But the importance of testosterone.

Dr. John Jaquish: Well, I mean, that’s the hormone that’s going to help you grow muscle. But most people don’t understand that it’s the receptor sites that need to be open within the muscles first before you can even use the testosterone. And there’s only one way to activate receptor sites, and that is very, very heavy lifting. Now what I did with X3 is… And this is just another point of reference as to why X3 was so needed, why the strongest level of variable resistance needed to be created, and what it’s just motivated me to invent it, was that there’s no getting away from heavy. People that lift light. They’re just wasting their time. You will never get anything out of lifting something that is not heavy to you. You’re just going through the motions. Are you creating blood flow? Yeah. I mean, is that beneficial? Sort of. But you’re not going to grow any muscle from there. You’re not going to make your body any harder from that. You’re not going to burn a lot of fat.

Dr. John Jaquish: The whole, “I’m burning calories,” thing, that whole model doesn’t work because it denies hormones in the body. The hormones are much more important. So triggering the right hormonal responses… And there’s a huge chapter in the book on hormonal responses of the body. You’ve got to get the body to trigger the response. And it does so by hormones, not by calorie manipulation. So when it comes to testosterone, it’s all about heavy. Well, X3 strategically allows you to go heavier than you ever could wita weight. And that had a lot to do with the motivation of just getting heavy loads on the body. So when I do a chest press, I’m holding 550 pounds at the top, 300 pounds in the middle, and a hundred pounds at the bottom. And so I go and do repetitions and keep hitting that over 500 pounds until I can’t anymore. Well, that’s getting receptor sites to open. And so I use the testosterone much better than most people because I’m just putting huge, tremendous forces through every muscle.

Natalia Earle: Yes. And even me, using the lightest band, I think it starts from 50 to a hundred pounds. I could never lift that with regular weight.

Dr. John Jaquish: No. Right, right. So the same thing’s happening to you that’s happening to me. It’s just, I’ve been doing it a lot longer. I’m going to use heavier weight, but it’s the same thing happening in your biochemistry that’s happening in my biochemistry.

Natalia Earle: So it’s also very important for females for that reason, for bone density.

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh, yeah.

Natalia Earle: I mean, I’m 41. So I know I need to start thinking about bone densities and overall health to prolong whatever we have left. But I am so excited to use it and to see where it gets me physically and I’m documenting it. I took some pictures. So hopefully I can follow up with you in 90 days.

Dr. John Jaquish: Great. Love it.

Natalia Earle: Where can the listeners find you?

Dr. John Jaquish: So I created a landing page because my last name is kind of difficult to spell for some people. It’s just doctorj.com, D-O-C-T-O-R, the letter J.com. There are links to my Instagram, YouTube, Facebook. I suggest following me on Instagram. I do the most there. I just like the platform better.

Natalia Earle: Well, and your book also can be purchased on Amazon. It’s a wonderful book that I…

Dr. John Jaquish: Yep. Or it’s on doctorj.com. Yeah, right here.

Natalia Earle: Excellent. Truly enjoyed it. It’s a wonderful read. I read it in two days. I was blown away. I couldn’t stop.

Dr. John Jaquish: Great.

Natalia Earle: Because of everything that I was taught, you shut down my nervous system, but in a good way. In a good way.

Dr. John Jaquish: Yeah. So I was at a 4th of July party yesterday and people were asking me all sorts of health questions and yeah, I ruined a lot of things for a lot of people.

Natalia Earle: That’s wonderful.

Dr. John Jaquish: They’re like, “Well, cranberries are good. Right?” And I’m like, “Define good. What’s good about them?” “Well, antioxidants.” “Well, you only need antioxidants if you’re oxidized. So what poisons are you eating where you need antioxidants?” And they’re like, “Huh? Wait a minute. An antioxidant is to get something that’s toxic out of your body?” “Yes.” They didn’t know that. That’s not something that people think about.

Natalia Earle: For sure.

Dr. John Jaquish: But think of the word antioxidants. Why are you oxidizing? Well, because the rest of the stuff you’re eating is garbage. It’s sugar, and so you’re in constant inflammation. That’s why you need antioxidants. Or you’re like me and you don’t eat any of that stuff, so you don’t need an antioxidant.

Natalia Earle: Amazing, amazing. I can’t wait to try all of it. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us.

Dr. John Jaquish: Thanks for having me.

Natalia Earle: Thank you so much for taking this ride and spending part of your day with me. I hope you enjoyed listening to this episode And it inspired or impacted you in any way and if you got anything helpful out of it, don’t forget to subscribe. It would mean so much to me if you left a quick review and shared this podcast with others on your social media platforms. And of course, don’t forget to tag us. Stay true to yourselves, friends. Until next time, foreign language.