DEVAN: What’s up guys? Welcome to another episode of the Mindset Cafe podcast. It’s your host, Devan Gonzalez. And today we got a special guest for you. We got Martin Pytela. He is a functional medicine expert, really focusing on metabolic-type coaching. And he has had over 1200 clients since 2011. And he has some online courses and stuff that we’re going to dig into. But I thought he would be an amazing guest for you guys because this is the Mindset Cafe where we work on mindset and personal development. So Martin, thank you so much for coming on today.

MARTIN: It’s a pleasure. Thanks.

DEVAN: So let’s dive into it a little bit. How did you get involved in the medicinal space and what led to your entrepreneurial start?

MARTIN: Yeah, I actually started out with computer Science and business administration. I had a pretty fun career in information technology and all that, but I ended up getting quite ill because of mercury toxicity in my body. I picked it up in a dentist’s office by just innocently saying, okay, well help me get my teeth right. And I had no idea that they were going to use mercury amalgam fillings. Turns out that mercury is super toxic, and my genetics are such that I don’t detoxify too well, and so I ended up just breaking down in a bad way. And so all of a sudden there I am, quite sick, like my back started to go bad and periodontal disease and allergies and you name it like it was awful, awful, awful. And so I went to the professionals, orthopedic surgeon to help me with my plantar fasciitis and a chiropractor to help me with my bad back, and a naturopath to help me with my allergies. They all went after the symptoms. They only treated the symptoms they never asked, and what’s the cause of this? And I’m in business consulting. We always do that. It’s when you come to a business and you see something that’s a problem. Then you say, well, what is causing the problem? You don’t just say, well, let’s just paint over it. But that’s what happens in the world of medicine. So that’s how I got into it. This was like in the 1980’s before the internet. So I just read a lot of books, there’s a bunch of them on my shelf still, and figured it out. It was that medicine, unlike many other things, does not ask the fundamental question, what is the root cause here? Functional medicine does. But the insurance covered, the Rockefeller Carnegie Medicine that’s ruling the mainstream, they don’t. So that’s that’s how I got here.

DEVAN: No, I mean, that’s awesome. I mean, I do agree with you to an extent on the medical space themselves, like they do ask what the symptoms are and then they come to a conclusion after hearing the symptoms and it’s like, okay, well you have this symptom. So this is what you’re going to take versus like okay, well what led to that symptom. So I completely agree on that. What do you feel like is a generic or typical root cause for let’s say majority of people’s illnesses or diseases?

MARTIN: Yeah. Just to illustrate, your headache is not caused by a deficiency of Tylenol. Your breast cancer is not caused by a deficiency in Tamoxifen. Just isn’t. So in general, you have two kinds of problems. One, you may have a genetic problem, if you are born with a club foot, you got a club foot. The other thing is physical assaults. Like if you get a bullet in your chest, well, you have to go to an emergency room if they can get you there in time and put you back together. Car accidents, falls, all of that. Broken limbs from skiing and other incidents. That’s physical stuff. For that, I’m super grateful to have surgeons that have trained on a lot of badly mangled people, mostly in wars. The other stuff, the chronic degenerative disease that’s associated with aging, that’s primarily lifestyle. That’s what you put in your nose, your mouth. And so it’s the water you drink, the air you breathe, the food you eat, the cosmetics you put on, the stuff you live around, surround yourself with. The plastics and the volatile organic compounds and all of that. That will come into your body and interact with it. And that is the primary driver for all of that stuff other than injuries.

MARTIN: So you think it really comes down to like the root cause of nutrition?

MARTIN: Well, it’s one of them, right? Toxic water. Toxic food. Toxic. Well, I see it this way. Toxicity, malnutrition, stagnation and unresolved trauma, which would inhibit, toxicity, is the industrial age. I mean, so many conveniences. Right? And yet, with a price, if you surround yourself with formaldehyde, it’s going to toxify you. If you eat food that has been grown with glyphosate, it will kill off the microbiome living inside of you and give you trouble. So there are all these consequences of what we eat and how we produce it.

DEVAN: You said something earlier that, obviously a headache isn’t a deficiency in Tylenol, which I completely agree with that. But then you said, breast cancer isn’t a deficiency in Tamoxifen, right? And so would you, those are two like ends of the spectrum. People get headaches all the time. But breast cancer is something people believe is genetic. Are you saying that it isn’t genetic?

MARTIN: Yeah. So it has been proven beyond doubt that cancer is a metabolic disease. However, the mainstream refuses to follow that. They keep on insisting that it’s a genetic problem. It’s not. It’s an epigenetic problem. Epigenetics is the branch where you are actually understanding how your personal genetics interact with the environment. Your life as you know it. And cancer as such is actually when the cells that normally use the method of respiration for generating energy switch to fermentation for generating energy, which is a very different process, but they’re reversible.

DEVAN: So that’s that’s very interesting. It’s definitely an interesting approach. I think if I’m understanding it right, it’s similar to someone that’s lactose intolerant and someone that’s not right? It’s your genes and your genetics play a role in your environment, in your nutrition, in all those different things. But it’s not necessarily like just because of your genetics, you’re born with it. Am I getting that right?

MARTIN: Yeah. It’s the interaction of the two, right? Like, if you’re a turtle, there’s no way you’re going to jump.

DEVAN: Okay.

MARTIN: If you’re born with a weak constitution, you’re going to have to live a life that’s more careful than somebody who’s born with a strong constitution. Like you have guys who are naturally strong and resilient. You probably see them. At school, there’s always 1 or 2, maybe more now, kids who are just a target for bullying. They’re just something with them. They end up being called nerds or weird or whatever, and it’s their genetics. They are in that box. They cannot really step out of it. They have to live with that and learn to work with it. So likewise, there are other modifications in the genetic picture. So some of us are more likely to get, for example, myself, I have a less efficient detox pathway. I’m a poor Methylator. Methylation is a method by which the liver will neutralize toxic things so that they can be eliminated. So I have to live with that, that I don’t detox as well as somebody else might.

DEVAN: That’s interesting. So, in your opinion, is there, if it’s been proven and stuff, just staying on the cancer topic for one more second before I want to get into some other stuff, too. But is there a solution or a remedy for things, let’s say, like cancer or are some underlying causes still yet to be developed with even a functional solution?

MARTIN: Right, right. Well, so there’s this researcher, his name is Doctor Thomas Seyfried, and he put out a video on YouTube back in 2008 where he is illustrating his research, where he says, I took the nucleus of a cancerous cell and put it into a healthy cell, and the cell stayed healthy. Therefore, it’s not the nucleus that, which is the genetics, that when you move it into a healthy cell, you don’t make it cancerous. But it’s the other way around, it’s when you move the nucleus of a healthy cell into a cancerous cell, it still stays cancerous. So that confirms the theory that the problem is metabolic.

DEVAN: Okay.

MARTIN: And in general, what that means is that cancer, and that has been also documented is an obligate glucose metabolizer, meaning this, a cancer cell can only convert glucose into its feed. It cannot convert fat, lipid into its feed. So a healthy normal cell will exist by living on fat. Cancer cells cannot do that. Therefore, you can have a person who’s got, let’s just say, breast cancer. We talked about that. If they switch to a diet that’s super low in starch, which is the source of glucose, but feed themselves fat, they will survive, but the cancer cells will start going away. They will start shutting down, because. I’ll give you a metaphor. You have a rat problem behind your restaurant. The medical approach would be okay, well, let’s just start shooting the things. Well, rats come out mostly at night, so you’ll shoot, you’ll be shooting in low light. You’ll shoot all kinds of things. Never mind just the rats. And the second thing you will do is you will lay poisoned food for the rats to die. Rat poison. Well, if the rat dies and then the eagle comes and finds it and eats that rat. The eagle dies because the rat was poisoned, right? The unintended consequences of putting poison in the system.

DEVAN: Right.

MARTIN: The solution. Look in the garbage can behind the restaurant. It’s full of rat food. Get rid of it, rats move away.

DEVAN: Interesting.

MARTIN: So with cancer, if you take away the source of what causes cancer, it just goes away. If, on the other hand, you use the chemical approach, you burn it, you shoot it, you cut it, but you don’t change the inputs. Five years later you say, oh, it just all came back. No, it never went away.

DEVAN: Interesting.

MARTIN: So that’s that’s the functional approach. Looking for the source, right? Looking for the reason, the root cause of the problem.

DEVAN: So, I mean, it’s interesting because I actually heard someone else talk about this, and this is why I was kind of asking you a little bit more about it. Do you know who Gary Brecka is?

MARTIN: I’m not familiar. No.

DEVAN: So he’s a little bit bigger. The only reason I know his name is he’s a little bit bigger in the social media space. And he really dives into the functional medicine and the functional approach, I should say. And he had a talk where he said that cancer is essentially diabetes, a third type of diabetes. And it’s like a different classification of diabetes. And this is why. And then he basically goes into like a whole glucose breakdown and stuff.

MARTIN: Yeah. Well we definitely share the concept of the cancer cell is converting starch. Well, starch is converted into glucose automatically using enzymes and then the glucose is consumed by the cancerous cell to create lactic acid and other short chain fatty acids. What we could speculate on is that the body, in its wisdom, is actually needing more of short chain fatty acids, and is converting glucose into fatty acids to perhaps fulfill another need. And so if we fed the body a whole bunch of short chain fatty acids, we might actually fulfill the need that the cancer cell is trying to fulfill.

DEVAN: Interesting.

MARTIN: Yeah.

DEVAN: So with your with your courses and stuff that you teach online, is it going into finding a lot of the root causes for people. Are you trying to spread the word of the functional approach of medicine.

MARTIN: Right. Well, both. The method really is this. Once you understand how your genetics interact with your food, you will not be hesitating about how you should be eating. Like, if you know that carbs make you more acidic, and being more acidic means that you’re impatient, short tempered, worried, anxious, angry. Those are the characteristics of a mindset caused by acidity. Whereas if you switch, the overly alkaline problem is procrastination, despondence, depression. Those are things associated with over alkalinity, so you can go one way or the other. And the levers we have is carbs on one side and fats and proteins on the other side. And you can adjust your diet to figure out what’s better for you. So if you are tending to be swinging back and forth between. This used to be called bipolar. Overly acidic, anxiety riddled and then manic. Just overly confident for no good reason. And you can be swinging back and forth. And that’s swinging between acidity and alkalinity. And we can control that with what you put on your plate, what you put on your fork. So once you understand it, it’s almost like learning to drive a bulldozer. There are a bunch of levers. It’s a little different than a car, but there’s this the blade up, blade down and swing left, swing right. Go back. Whatever. Right? All the different levers.

Once you understand it, it’s like having a manual to your body. You don’t have to wonder, well, what’s going to happen when I have three drinks? This is a really interesting thing. Alcohol is a carbohydrate. And so when you see a cocktail party, one group of people is going to be getting louder and louder and more argumentative. Those are the oxidizers. If they keep drinking, they end up picking a fight with each other. The other group, the autonomics, they start getting more emotional. They start oversharing. They’ll be saying things that they wish they hadn’t said. Stuff like that. And then if they keep drinking, they’ll just fall asleep. So that’s the two main groups. And so once you understand it, as an owner of the body, you can control your outcomes. Instead of just being wondering, why am I so hungry angry, hangry? Well, you’re hangry because you are either a probably a fast oxidizer. No, no, I said it badly. You’re probably a sympathetic dominant. That would be, we have these four names, sympathetic, parasympathetic, slow oxidizer, fast oxidizer. And you would belong to one of the four corners. And you can swing in and out of it depending on how you feed yourself.

DEVAN: Now is there a form of, like a test or something that someone can do to get that initial? Like, this is where I am and this is what my body needs essentially.

MARTIN: Yeah. So you can tease it out, figure it out on yourself or by yourself, by checking what happens when you do something. Or you can take the test. We have an online quiz. It’s called Advanced Metabolic Typing Test. You can just do it. It’s about 120 multiple choice questions. And it answers this, how you metabolize. And it also answers how you gain weight or lose weight based on your endocrine dominance.

DEVAN: Interesting.

MARTIN: Which is also interesting because so many people are lost as to why one person loses weight on the, I don’t know, X diet. Keto diet is awesome for the thyroid dominant to get slim and it puts weight on the adrenal dominant. Go figure.

DEVAN: Right. I think a lot of those like the nutrition quote unquote fads where, you know, the carnivore diet and all these things that are coming out in social media online, not saying that they’re bad or that they’re good. It’s not one case fits all, right? It might be really well for one person because of not only their genetics but because of their lifestyle. Right?

MARTIN: Yeah, precisely. A mix of the genetics versus the inputs.

DEVAN: So I think that’s where people get kind of confused and saying that, someone is going to gain weight off of it or lose weight off of it. It’s hard. Sometimes you just have to try it out. If it doesn’t work, then switch it up.

MARTIN: Okay. Yeah, that’s one way. The other way is to do the test, and you’ll know ahead.

DEVAN: Right. Right. So, now kind of changing gears a little bit. I know one of your things is that eating healthy is basically an art. Can you go into that a little bit?

MARTIN: Mhm. Okay. Well living in the industrial age, we are now faced by professionals who design foods that are designed for us to want more because they want to sell you more of what they make. So they make it addictive. It’s practically food porn. And we need to figure out how to control that, how to understand our genetics and adapt our diet to match the genetics. Because if your ancestors lived in the tropics, then you probably are easily going to be a vegetarian and have lots of fruit in your diet without any trouble. But if your ancestors were meat eaters like Norwegians or Cherokee, you will not do well on a farmer diet.

DEVAN: Interesting.

MARTIN: So for some people, pizza is like Kryptonite. It’s just very addictive. And it leads to bad outcomes. And you see that, the rates of obesity and diabetes and high blood pressure and all of that, that’s just increasing. Mainly because the willpower is no match to the addiction that these things can create.

DEVAN: Do you think that and I feel like I know your answer on this one, but do you think that when people say that they’re addicted to something, whether it is food, whether it is smoking or alcohol, that an addiction is genetic or, because a lot of people say you have an addictive gene in your family. Right? And for me, I personally don’t think that something like addiction can be genetic. Some things are addictive in my opinion, but your willpower and your mindset to be addicted to it is a huge aspect, at least in my opinion.

MARTIN: You know, the truth is that there is such a thing as a genetic. I don’t know what you will, there’s a name for it, but I can’t think of it right now. But it’s the sort of passionate attachment to things. Some people have this, like if you put a scale from 1 to 10, some people are three. They don’t care. Take it or leave it. Some people are a nine. You start it and you can’t let go of it. There are people who become addicted and there are the addictive personality. And they will be addictive to food, to sex, to music. I don’t know, anything. And you name it, any one thing, they’ll have this, there’s this brain transmitter, dopamine, which will either be highly stimulative or not. So, yeah, don’t look down your nose on some people who just can’t handle it. Like, for some people, you try it once and you’re addicted. For another person, yeah, I can take it. I can leave it, I don’t care. And in food I would say there are two types. One person will live to eat. Foodie. Loves it. Just talks all day long about the next meal he’s going to come up and the other he just eats to live. Couldn’t care less. “Oh, yeah. Okay, I’ll have the same thing again.”

DEVAN: So I mean that that kind of goes against what you were saying earlier though then because something like addiction, were it an action, is now being formed down to a genetic trait, essentially. Right. A personality type, a genetic trait and something like cancer and all other things always have a root cause and that can be eliminated. For example, I have alcoholism in my family line and there’s been other addictions in my family line. But at the same time some people can kick it. Some people say they can’t. And at the end of the day, it’s the root cause of addiction essentially is there’s something. Right. And you mentioned earlier past trauma, whatever it is. But you’re using the addiction to cope with that one thing. Being addicted to something is a choice. And it’s not like you’re handcuffed to that one thing. Right.

MARTIN: Yeah. Well, and it’s both. It’s a continuum. Some people will have a much harder time getting off of it than others. I promise you that for some people, it’s harder to quit.

DEVAN: Right. No, I don’t have,

MARTIN: They still have to get their act together, or else they die by it.

DEVAN: No. Yeah, I agree with that. I’m not saying that it’s impossible or someone can’t get off of it or it’s going to be easy for everyone, but at the same time, like it is something that just because you have that genetic trait in your family line, it doesn’t mean you’re going to be locked in on that one thing or anything if you choose not to. Right. Because there’s the underlying cause kind of going back to what you were saying earlier, and if you can figure out what the underlying cause is.

MARTIN: Well, specifically carbs, whether it’s sugar or flour, as in pizza or just a generic word for it, or alcohol are harder for certain types, it really is. I promise you that baked goods are more addictive than cocaine. Like it’s harder to give up donuts than cocaine.

DEVAN: Do you think that’s because it’s a lot easier to get donuts than it is to get cocaine?

MARTIN: No no no no no. The chemistry in the brain, the chemistry in the brain makes it more addictive.

DEVAN: Interesting.

MARTIN: Yeah.

MARTIN: So, where can people learn more about themselves? I know you have some online courses and stuff like that, but how can someone start to learn about eating cleaner or eating for their body type or for their genetic code and connect with you?

MARTIN: Well, the method we use is called Metabolic Typing. You can find it on our website. The website is Life Enthusiast. Life-enthusiast.com so if you search the word metabolic you’ll find it. There are many podcasts and blog posts and articles and we have health coaches available. So when you present and say I want help, help me figure out why I have X, I don’t know, blood pressure and diabetes, we can start discussing understanding why that is and what you can do differently on the food side so that your body supports itself better.

DEVAN: No. It’s awesome. I’ll definitely put the link. If you guys are listening, I’ll put the link into the podcast description. And if you’re watching this on YouTube then it’ll be in the YouTube description. Now, Martin, before we go, I do want to ask one question that I ask everybody. Right. So just to clarify, this is not a tombstone, you know? Like a tombstone writing this is your legacy wall, right? Someone walks past it. It is your one piece of knowledge that you’ve got to, that you’ve learned, or that you’ve basically developed over your years and your experience that you want to leave for younger generations to come.

MARTIN: Mm. Okay. I’m more an integrator than a researcher. So in that sense, I’m able to understand things in a broad perspective. And I would be saying things like: It’s not what happens, it’s what you do in response. Learn to respond and figure out how root causes are affecting your outcomes. So it’s the anti-victim personality, right? Nobody has the right to remain a victim. That’s a choice. You can actually change both your future and your past.

DEVAN: I like that. That’s awesome. And that’s something I really do align with as well. Anything that happens to you or anything that you do or any emotion that you do feel, there’s always time to evaluate why that made you feel that way, why that happened. And again, you can always change your future starting today. So, Martin, I want to thank you so much for coming on today. Guys, make sure you guys share this with a friend. And like always, we appreciate you guys. We love y’all. And we’ll see you on the next one. Thank you Martin.

MARTIN: Thanks Devan.