Karsten Mueller attributes his glowing good health primarily to nutrition. (Chip Scheuer)
It’s 2pm on a Thursday at Santa Cruz’s Main Beach. Cigarette butts, a crushed soda cup and a stack of empty pizza boxes litter the ground around the Beach Street benches facing the volleyball courts, where an audience of vagrants watches what may just be the healthiest man alive preparing to serve.
Standing with one foot forward and one arm holding the volleyball out, Karsten Mueller looks like he might have been plucked from the Bodies exhibition—the one that featured athletic human bodies stripped down to mere muscles, bones and blood vessels. Every sinew is visible as he winds up, one arm arcing back, tossing the ball in the air and sending it with the heel of his palm sailing over the net to land just inside the court.
“It’s sort of my siesta, but instead of taking a nap I go out and play for a couple of hours every day,” Mueller says of his midday playtime. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays it’s soccer at Depot Park; on Tuesdays and Thursdays it’s Main Beach for a date with a group of volleyball enthusiasts.
The other seven men and one woman playing today favor beach volleyball because it’s free and low-impact. “My knees are still like when I was 20,” exclaims John Stevenson, Mueller’s doubles partner.
“It’s also the hippest sport there is,” chimes in a 62-year-old in an “Old Guys Rule” hat.
Mueller likes volleyball because it’s a full body workout. His physique, though, he attributes 80 percent to nutrition. After the game, he sits cross-legged in the sand and talks in a soft voice about his health philosophy. He traces it back to when he was a 19-year-old partying and waiting tables in Southern California’s Hacienda Heights.
“I got what I thought was a cold. That turned into a flu, and when it didn’t go away I got a little concerned, so I went to see the family doctor,” Mueller says. The doctor didn’t know exactly what it was, but he called it “chronic fatigue syndrome” and told Mueller it could go away in two weeks or take as long as two years.
From then on, “I promised myself I would just take care of my body and I wouldn’t take it for granted,” Mueller says. “At that point I started reading books and trying different things. I stopped drinking. I instinctively started eating more vegetables and high–quality proteins.”
Now in his early forties, Mueller has spent the intervening decades earning a PhD in environmental sciences while combing through books and studies and trying out different regimens in a tireless quest to improve his health.
These days he plays outside, rides a bike everywhere and practices a variation on the paleo, or primal, diet, eating the foods our distant ancestors might have. Fruits and vegetables, roots and nuts, wild fish, grass-fed and pasture-raised meats are all fair game; grains, beans, most dairy, sugar and processed oils are prohibited.
Over time friends and acquaintances began coming to Mueller with their health questions. “People kept asking me these questions, so I started by giving free advice,” Mueller says. “I’ve been trying all these things and I know what works and what doesn’t.”
Mueller began offering health and wellness coaching. Then he started writing his advice down, collecting and cataloging it for a website, GreenElixer.com, that he says will be up and running by the end of the month.
Back in December, Denise Garcia hired Mueller for a grocery store consultation. Together they walked through Staff of Life as he explained which things were good and which things were bad. She speaks of Mueller with an acolyte’s enthusiasm.
“Oh, I’m obsessed!” Garcia says of the shakes Mueller taught her to make, involving nuts that have been soaked for several hours. Now, Garcia says, “I have a green shake every morning and it takes me up, pretty much, through the whole day.”
Mueller talked with Garcia about purposeful eating. “Eating because it gives you energy, and it gives you strength in the physical activities you like to do. I’m a surfer and I do aerial ribbon dancing,” she says. “Once I was connecting the foods I was eating with the way I was feeling, then it was just natural to start eating pretty much the paleo way.”
In the month since they went shopping together, Garcia says she’s lost 8 pounds.
Mueller and I decide to meet at New Leaf Market on Pacific Avenue for a grocery tour like the one he gives clients. In the meantime, he is going to wrap up his siesta with a little dojo-tae kwon do-tai kenpo hybrid that he calls his “bastardized martial arts workout.”
Fresh Meat
As we make our way around the perimeter of New Leaf an hour later, Mueller points out items that he typically stocks up on. “The rule of thumb here is—do your homework—as far as we can tell, what were humans eating for hundreds of thousands of years?” he says.
Mueller says two shifts have fundamentally altered the way humans eat. First was the agricultural revolution, when humans settled down and began cultivating grains and other crops. The second was just in the last few decades. “We started eating vegetable oil and feeding our animals corn and soy—things they didn’t evolve eating.
“Those were fundamental changes in our diet, and guess what’s been happening since then?” Mueller asks. “People are fatter than ever. Cancer is more common than ever, heart disease.”
If we want to eat like our ancestors, Mueller says, we ought to be filling our shopping carts with leafy greens, high–quality meats, natural eggs and sources of probiotics like kefir and kombucha. And, he adds, “There are key things we should not be eating—like sugar and grains and vegetable oils.”
In front of the refrigerated meat case, Mueller points out the meats he typically eats. “I like organic, free-range chicken. I like wild fish, sardines, lamb occasionally, grass-fed beef, free-range turkey. Sometimes I’ll do buffalo; occasionally I’ll do shrimp or raw oysters.”
The key is the modifiers: “grass-fed,” “pasture-raised,” “organic,” “raw,” “wild,” “consciously-raised.” They are buzzwords for a reason—Mueller says they are significant enough to change the way our bodies process a given meat.
“Beef from a feedlot is a fundamentally different food than grass-fed, free-range beef,” he explains. “Grass-fed beef is much more nutritious, it’s higher in vitamins and minerals; it has the right kinds of fats. Fats that are actually healthy for us—omega-3s.”
Mueller and other proponents of primal eating contend that grass-fed, free-range beef has a better balance of omega-3 (good fat) to omega-6 (bad fat) content.
He also believes there is a certain karmic payback to digesting food from animals that were not treated humanely. “On feedlots and we feed them corn and soy,” Mueller says, “It’s not that those animals want to eat that stuff or evolved eating that stuff. It makes a less healthy, less happy animal.”
Omega-3s are essential, Mueller says, but we don’t have to get them from supplements. Quality meats are one good source; eggs are another. Don’t be fooled though, Mueller warns, by eggs advertised as fortified with omega-3 fats.
“Omega-3 fatty acids are inherently unstable. They go rancid extremely rapidly and easily. What makes them go rancid? Heat, air and light,” he says. “They are feeding these ‘omega-3’ hens corn and soy and then throwing some rancid flax seeds in there.”
A better choice in Mueller’s opinion would be eggs from pasture-raised hens (available at Staff of Life for $8 a dozen and the farmer’s markets for $5–7.50) that choose the bugs and seeds they eat naturally.
Mueller is also a proponent of probiotics, the preparation of which he calls “a lost art.” He makes his own kefir, ferments his own kraut and likes the kombucha on tap at New Leaf.
“Probiotics are like the second brain of our body—our gut,” he says. “They do so many amazing things for our bodies, from creating vitamins and nutrients that we don’t synthesize on our own to enhancing our immune function to helping us digest our food better. Probiotics are the bomb.”
There is one other thing Mueller does to maximize the amount of enzymes from the meat he eats. “I cook it at a low temperature and make it as rare as possible,” he says. “It’s well-documented that when you cook food or pasteurize milk you’re changing the fats, you’re destroying vitamins, you’re destroying nutrients, you’re fundamentally changing the proteins in ways that make them foreign to your body.”
There’s another upside to minimalist cooking: “I like that I’m not using as much energy to cook the food, and I’m not destroying enzymes.” This is what Mueller calls a win-win. Less energy consumed: win. Healthier food: win. The same with riding a bike—a win-win-win: good for the body, good for the environment, good for the wallet.
It may seem like a lot of rules, but Mueller says eating the paleo way isn’t hard. “I love it. It’s not a hassle. This isn’t some diet.” He says the last word with the slightest hint of disdain. “It’s more like, ‘Wow, I want to put amazing food in my body because I love feeling great and I love that the meat that I buy, the animals were treated humanely, and the environment benefits [are better] compared to feedlot animals.’”
Sir Mix-a-Lot
“These are the superfood goddesses,” Mueller says of the housemates we find in the kitchen of the home he designed himself. (Did I mention he teaches classes in green building at UCSC and San Jose State?) The open kitchen occupies one side of an expansive, sparsely furnished room that looks out on a vegetable garden built in concentric circles around a fire pit.
One corner of the kitchen is crowded with racks holding cardboard boxes filled with tinctures and nutritional supplements. On the stove, two clear teapots bubble away. In one, berries bob on the surface of a purple translucent liquid that smells like spiced cider. The other is tinged pink with something floating in it. (When I inquire, his housemate says cryptically, “That one is a longer story,” and leaves it at that).
“For breakfast, typically, I have four pasture–raised eggs, raw, just cracked in a glass,” Mueller says. “I’ll have that with some raw leafy greens. Every day it changes—maybe a lovely organic cucumber, maybe some red leaf lettuce.”
Tonight, like most nights for the past two years, Mueller will have a quart-size green shake for dinner. He pulls out an old Vitamix blender and snacks on a piece of chicken cooked so rare it almost translucent while he explains the shake to me.
Tonight’s shake will consist of 1/2 cup of raw hazelnuts (soaked eight hours, which Mueller says makes them more digestible), 1/2 cup of chia seeds (sometimes he’ll use flax), organic shredded coconut, avocado from his neighbor’s farm and carrot tops.
He pauses to take a big swig of homemade kefir. “Pretty damn good,” he mutters, and puts it back in the fridge.
At one point, shake-making seems to devolve into a kind of alchemy. “I’m going to put a little of this green stuff in there…did I put maca in already?” No. “All right, let’s put a little maca in there for fun,” he says. (Days later, I’ll learn maca is a supplement derived from a Peruvian root and prized for its ability to improve virility and sperm production.) Then he adds a little of something else: “It’s like some frou-frou-sprouted-protein-vegan-whatever.”
That is followed by a little splash of the supplement Vitamineral Green, a splash of vanilla for flavor, a dash of cinnamon for flavor (“and it also has anti-inflammatory properties,” he adds), some turmeric for its health benefits and four dates that he says will balance the bitterness of the kale.
Mueller says he switches up the nuts and greens, but for the most part the ingredients of the shake remain pretty consistent. He pours some water into the Vitamix and finally adds the greens: some fennel and several thick, wrinkly leaves of dino kale.
“You’ve got protein, you’ve got greens, you’ve got omega-3s in there.” He presses a button and the Vitamix rumbles to life and grinds and whirls for about a minute and a half. When it’s finished, he pours a little into a cup and hands it to me.
It’s not the most delicious thing I’ve ever tasted. The texture is a little stringy, the avocado oil coats the inside of my mouth and the chia seeds are a tad chewy. The flavor of the hazelnuts is strong enough, though, that if you closed your eyes you could pretend it was a thick, lukewarm hazelnut latte.
Mueller tastes it. It’s not exactly to his satisfaction. “It’ll blend a little better when the chia seeds are soaked,” he says, and looks thoughtful for a moment. “Hmm. Yeah, it could use a banana, but it’s not bad.”
Always room for improvement in his tireless pursuit of health.
