Brad: Forget The Diet Wars! Focus On "Perform, Recover" - Get Over Yourself Podcast with Brad Kearns

I have had it with the stupid diet wars, so it’s time for a rant and an episode highlighting the big-picture perspective of leading a healthy, active, energetic lifestyle and the benefits of focusing on “perform, recover, perform, recover”—my new mantra, which should supersede all the arguing and nitpicking we do about the particulars of plant-based vs animal-based diets, etc.

This show was inspired by my friend sending me an innocent email reporting the results of a Stanford study that’s been getting a lot of headlines lately about identical twins who were each fed a different diet for eight weeks (one vegan, one animal based). I talk about the study in this show, including who funded the study in the first place (would you be shocked to learn it was a plant-based company?!), the importance of looking beyond headlines when it comes to health, and big picture insights that will help you navigate to the healthiest, most nutritious diet, and keep you on the path to longevity and disease prevention.

TIMESTAMPS:

Brad is discussing the confusion over diet research and points out that maintaining your fitness, your functional muscle strength and your cardiovascular fitness is the most important intervention for longevity. [02:14]

Brad’s mantra is to perform, recover, perform, recover. At the top of his nutrition list is elimination of processed foods. [09:15]

There are many studies of micronutrient different foods helping you compare and contrast all the nutrient values of plant-based vs. animal-based foods. [14:13]

If you consume less junk food, you will live longer. [17:11]

How does one know if his energy system is out of balance? One of the main symptoms is the spare tire. [23:15]

Brad has changed the routine he adapted earlier where he was delaying breakfast. If you are not in energy toxicity, your blood work is okay, you have a satisfactory body composition, and are trying to live a healthy, active, energetic life, there is no rationale to engage in fasting or restrictive eating strategies. [32:06]

Fasting is stressful but there are profound autophagy benefits as well. The brain burns about 20% of all our daily calories. [37:51]

Move more. Eat more. What exactly is a calorie that we are obsessing about? [46:56]

When you over-exert yourself, you get yourself into big trouble by kicking in very powerful compensation forces compelling you to overeat. [53:22]

Human health and life expectancy have declined since the advent of civilization. [01:04:33]

Sensitive people react to plant toxins and suffer from assorted autoimmune and inflammatory responses to those. [01:05:30]

Brad has mentioned before how he always made green smoothies in the morning until he realized he reacted to the toxins in the vegetables. [01:13:07]

If you are not eating leafy greens, how are you getting fiber? [01:21:28]

Generally speaking, you are not getting enough protein when you are on a plant-based diet. [01:23:55]

When talking about red meat versus chicken, fish, pork, and other sources of animal-based proteins, you need to understand where and how those animals are raised. [01:34:30]

If you want to argue about the moral aspect of consuming animals, look at the statistics of cattle versus fish, chicken, turkeys, and others animals. [01:37:54]

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B.Rad Podcast:

Brad (00:00:00):
Welcome to the B.rad podcast, where we explore ways to pursue peak performance with passion throughout life without taking ourselves too seriously. I’m Brad Kearns, New York Times bestselling author, former number three world-ranked professional triathlete and Guinness World Record Masters athlete. I connect with experts in diet, fitness, and personal growth, and deliver short breather shows where you get simple, actionable tips to improve your life right away. Let’s explore beyond the hype, hacks, shortcuts, and sciencey talk to laugh, have fun and appreciate the journey. It’s time to B.rad.

Brad (00:00:38):
When you talk about potato chips or ice cream being around 5% protein each, we are going to pound those things because what we really want,

Brad (00:00:48):
Well, I’ve about had it with the stupid diet wars, so it’s time for a rant. And what I want to do is help you focus on the big picture of leading a healthy, active, energetic lifestyle, perform and recover. My new mantra is going to supersede the nitpicking in all the arguing we do about the particulars of plant-based versus animal-based and all that stuff. So, here we go. And this rant. This show was inspired by my friend sending me an innocent email reporting the results of a Stanford study that’s getting a lot of headline coverage lately, where they worked with identical twins. So they have the same genetic makeup, great subjects for all kinds of studies, and they fed them plant-based diet versus meat-based diet, and are touting the results superior with the plant-based group for an eight-week stint. And, uh, predictably so the astute independent observers, folks like Mike Mutzel at High Intensity Health on YouTube, a highly respected resource, took this stuff apart and showed the, uh, the, the folly of checking on headline conclusions and propaganda from the study organizers who were funded by plant-based sources.

Brad (00:02:14):
And so, uh, we see this happening when we’re rolling up our sleeves and deep into this mix, which most people aren’t, but the people that are seeing the diet wars play out every day. It’s pretty frustrating because the, uh, average person who’s living a busy life trying to do what’s right, trying to take advice from respected resources, easily gets confused. So this is my goal here is to look at some big picture insights that will help you navigate to the healthiest, most nutritious diet and keep you on the path to longevity, disease prevention and so forth. So my mantra, as you’ve heard from listening to the show for the rest of my life, is perform, recover, perform, recover. This is scientifically validated as the most sure path to longevity. That is maintaining your fitness, your functional muscle strength, your cardiovascular fitness.

Brad (00:03:14):
This is the single best intervention ever discovered for longevity. And that’s a quote from Dr. Peter Attia and his number one bestselling book, outlive. Interestingly, Attia used to think it was diet and diet was the way to optimize the best tool in the toolbox. And now it’s widely regarded with emerging research that you just have to stay fit, and that’s gonna be your, uh, number one intervention. So how do we perform and recover? We want to fuel ourselves with natural, nutritious foods that allow us to leave a healthy, active, energetic lifestyle. So we’re talking about, um, things that can possibly get in the way of that are the extreme dietary practices that we could call restrictive diets where you have extended fasting, you have a systematic restriction of a single macronutrient like carbohydrates in the realm of the ketogenic lifestyle, or you have the systematic restriction of, for example, the most nutritious foods on earth that have fueled human evolution for 2 million years.

Brad (00:04:19):
When we’re talking about the whole food plant-based style diet, restricting animal foods and all these kind of things are going to get in the way of performing and recovering. So that’s my big picture insight. And I’m not talking about, hey, everything in moderation. I can’t stand when I hear that as a comeback against the restrictive diets because I think we all owe it to ourselves to be extremely diligent and devoted and not moderate in our quest to eat a healthy, natural, nutritious diet because we’re bombarded with so much garbage in the markets and in the restaurants. And so it’s not a case where moderation is going to be a good strategy, because if you follow everything in moderation and strive for average health and average values on your blood test reports, you are by definition heading to accelerated aging demise, pain and suffering due to all the lifestyle related diseases that are predominant these days, especially the increasing rates of cognitive decline that are, uh, becoming further tied to diet and lifestyle.

Brad (00:05:25):
So I don’t want any part of that. My goal is to perform and recover for years to come and make it up to 123, breaking the record, the current record of the longest live human is 122. It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3 <laugh>. Okay? So again, this is not an opinion from a fit guy who thinks fitness is so important, like the guy hanging around the gym telling you, you should come there seven days a week for an hour and a half like he or she. It is a longevity strategy. And guess what? It does not take hours and hours of devotion to leave to achieve excellent fitness. It just takes a sensible strategy where you’re mixing in, uh, the primal style approach of increasing all forms of general, everyday comfortably paced movement that includes carefully structured cardiovascular workouts at the right heart rate, regular resistance exercise where you put your muscles under resistance load.

Brad (00:06:23):
This, of course, can mean with weight. It can mean with body weight, it can mean with stretch tubes. It’s adaptable and scalable to anybody at any fitness level. My mother at age 86 who’s listening to the show in between her workouts with her personal trainer and her own regimen with safe, body weight style exercises, she’s not loading up big plates like my son might be, on the, on the hex bar. But everyone can bring in resistance training as a centerpiece of their fitness experience and a critical component of their lifestyle. Oh, gosh, what a hassle. You, you mean we really have to go and lift weights or do something that brings resistance, correct? Because now we have neutralized all the organic resistance opportunities we’ve had throughout, uh, human life because everything’s comfortable, convenient, and taking care of us, and taking care of us, taking care for us.

Brad (00:07:23):
Now, we don’t have to even hardly lift the groceries from the, the car into the kitchen ’cause they get delivered to the front door and on and on with all the examples where we can be completely inactive and not put our body under any type of resistance load. So we have increased forms of general everyday movement. We have the mandatory, uh, putting your body under resistance load on a regular basis. And then the third big pillar of primal fitness is to sprint once in a while to deliver explosive, brief all out efforts that give you the best return on investment of any fitness activity. And even many of the most devoted fitness enthusiasts that you see in the gym every day for an hour and a half, or out there on the roads running their 40 miles a week or pedaling their bicycle like crazy, they’re missing out on that key fundamental aspect of being fit and delaying aging gracefully.

Brad (00:08:18):
And that is to perform explosive brief activity. Of course, sprinting on flat ground is the best and gives you the most return on investment for things like bone density, uh, and for fat reduction. However, if many people are not quite adapted to that, you can do low or no impact sprinting, such as pedaling a bicycle or running up incline like staircase or doing sprinting on, uh, rowing machine or any, any other cardio machine. Okay? So, perform, recover, that’s my mantra, because that gives me the best payoff and is also enjoyable. And it’s certainly going to stack up nicely against the extreme fasting meditating monk who is not doing much fitness activity, but is also pursuing that record of 123. And I will go toe to toe with that theoretical person and have much more fun and enjoyment from leading that healthy, active energetic lifestyle.

Brad (00:09:15):
Rather than trying to fast for as long as possible, eat as few calories as I can in the name of longevity, I’m gonna talk about how much how ridiculous that is shortly. So, perform, recover, perform, recover. Go ahead, borrow that mantra for yourself. Let’s, let’s spread it around. So when we talk about diet, my first and foremost objective is a total elimination of processed foods. And why talk about anything else related to diet if this is not your foundation and you are not incredibly and intensely and strictly devoted to this goal, and by that I mean reading labels, asking questions at the restaurant, and ridding your home environment of anything that has the, uh, most offensive processed ingredients in there. And in Two Meals a Day, Mark Sisson and I talk about the big three toxic modern foods, which are refined grains, sugars and industrial seed oils.

Brad (00:10:15):
And of course, all the packaged process frozen crap that’s made with these agents. I can’t emphasize this point enough, and there is no need to talk further about dietary strategy if you allow these things to leak into your scene even once in a while. No, it’s not okay to grab a couple Oreo cookies on your road trip and call it just an, uh, everything in moderation if you want to indulge and enjoy yourself and celebrate the festive occasions of life with indulgent foods. Make excellent choices and drive across town to get the most delicious handmade ice cream made with all natural ingredients rather than adding Ben and Jerry’s to your shopping list. There’s a huge difference here. I’m not saying that you must never again have another slice of cheesecake or apple pie that grandma makes with, you know, delicious <laugh>, vanilla ice cream, scooped on top, but the crap that we buy in the store versus the handmade made with love and care and kindness, and the people that are putting out quality indulgent products, those brands that you can trust and respect, uh, but mostly finding, you know, those opportunities.

Brad (00:11:24):
Like I talked so much about dark chocolate, you have to navigate the marketplace and stay away from the mass produced Hershey’s and Nestle’s crunches and go to the bean to bar artisan chocolate makers so that you can actually eat something that’s healthy, nutritious, and sustainable. And so, even with indulgent treats, I’m not saying you need to skip those to leave a long healthy life, but you can make much, much better choices than the processed garbage. That’s why I’m gonna come out strong and say a total elimination of processed foods and junky foods, especially the sweets and treats that you can do so much better on if you navigate around and make it a special occasion and an enjoyment where you’re knowing that the <laugh>, the pie maker and the ice cream maker is, is giving you, uh, something that you can, uh, feel comfortable eating once in a while.

Brad (00:12:15):
Of course, not a dietary centerpiece, but I love how Jay Feldman, uh, got to talking about this subject and mentioning ice cream saying that, look, what’s an ice cream? It’s cream and sugar. Both of those things are easily digested by the human body. Sugar is burned in the cell for energy. But that’s a big difference from navigating in the store and looking at what’s inside these mass produced ice cream products with all the chemicals and things that disturb your metabolism and disturb your health. Much different than having a natural nutritious scoop of cream and sugar. It’s not gonna, I shouldn’t say nutritious, but at least it’s natural and it’s easily processed by the body, even though it lacks, nutritional density. So that brings me to the next one. So first, I want to have a total elimination of junk foods and make good choices, even if I’m gonna indulge.

Brad (00:13:03):
Secondly, I strive for maximum dietary nutrient density with easy-to-digest foods. So everything I choose is contemplated in the amount of nutrient density that it’s giving me. That’s why I’m not going to strive for a grain-based diet or even a plant-based diet, because these foods are nutrient deficient in comparison to the true super foods of the planet that are mostly in the animal-based category. Oysters, salmon eggs, organ meats, liver, uh, grass fed beef, uh, and on down the list of the Carnivore Score Food Ranking Chart that you can download for free PDF printed out it’s beautiful, colorful, well designed. Put it on your refrigerator and navigate toward the most nutritious foods, the pasture-raised eggs, the grass-fed beef, the oily cold water fish. That’s where you’re going to get maximum dietary nutrient density. What a concept nourishing the body. And if you disagree or don’t like some of the foods I mentioned, we’re not talking about opinion here either.

Brad (00:14:13):
We’re talking about if you do a laboratory micronutrient analysis of different foods, like you can Google, liver versus kale, and you get many of these charts where they’re comparing kale, the plant superstar versus liver, the animal based superstar food, and there’s no comparison. The animal foods are vastly more nutrient dense. And, this is how we evolved to become humans over the last 2 million years. It was access to nutrient dense foods that helped fuel the explosive growth of the human brain in comparison to when we branched away from our ape cousins. So today, the gorilla spends 11 hours a day chewing roots shoots, and leaves to fuel that tiny little brain to get enough nutrition from that diet, uh, versus what the human is doing at the top of the food chain. So that’s my little quip against the obsession with plant-based eating thinking that is putting you into a nutrient-dense diet.

Brad (00:15:13):
Now, could it be in comparison to a junk food diet? So someone who was eating breakfast turnovers from Jack in the Box and the Happy Meals from McDonald’s and living off that kind of garbage, and then switching over after they went to the commune and had lentil soup and brown rice for a week and had an awakening and explosion of health. Of course, any departure from a disastrous trashy diet of processed foods is gonna be great. So whatever it takes to extricate from that disastrous path, that’s gonna be a win for you. But then when I state that I’m striving for maximum dietary nutrient density, I am going to make choices that emphasize the things like I mentioned that are ranked on my chart: the eggs, the grass-fed beef, the oily cold water fish, and of course, the most easy to digest plant foods.

Brad (00:16:07):
So that was part of the sentence again, maximum dietary nutrient density with easy-to-digest foods. And that’s a nod to the animal-based movement that’s been very successful with people discovering that the plant foods with the highest levels of natural toxins or antinutrients can cause problems in sensitive people. So the most easy-to-digest plant foods are, of course things like raw honey I go to the plant category supplementing the animal-based diet. Okay. And finally, the third bullet here is that I’m striving for maximum cellular energy status at all times to enable me to perform and recover to my best. So when we have tools and tricks and techniques like extended fasting or restricting carbs, havng a tiime-restricted eating pattern every day. These are tools that will get us away from the unfettered access to indulgent foods.

Brad (00:17:11):
That represents the big problem in modern life where we’re consuming too many calories, storing too many calories, and burning too few. However, I’m striving for performance and recovery. I’m not concerned with my deficiency in movement or nor consuming too many, uh, nutrient deficient calories that are easily stored as fat. So when I go for maximum cellular energy status, I’m trying to fuel an active energetic lifestyle, thereby de-emphasizing things like fasting and carb restriction, because that’s not going to serve those goals. So look, this is where we get to kind of a fork in the road, and we hear a lot of people talking about the wonderful benefits of calorie restriction for longevity. And when you hear people going off on that aggressively, they are a few or several years behind the emerging science. There’s a lot of studies with rats, laboratory rats showing that if you cut their calories, they live longer, they live significantly longer.

Brad (00:18:14):
But the problem with that as explained in detail by Jay Feldman during our four podcast interviews, please go back and listen to those, is that what we’re basically doing is we’re feeding them rat chow laboratory Rat Chow, which is processed junk food for the rat. And so if you consume less junk food, you will live longer, and that will actually be incredibly true for the human as well. So most people that are stuck in this, uh, pattern of excess, if they reduce their caloric intake, they’re immediately in 30 days time, they’re gonna have massive improvements in all the blood risk factors that their doctors said they were concerned about. So indeed, cutting calories is a wonderful path to longevity if you are eating nasty processed calories. But if you are an active, energetic person, and you think that somehow reigning in your portions of these natural, nutritious foods is going to contribute to longevity, that has never been proven in humans.

Brad (00:19:17):
And in fact, the opposite has been shown. When you talk about the Minnesota starvation experiment, the very prominent study that was performed with consci conscientious objectors to I believe it was World War ii, I said Vietnam before, and that was corrected. So this was back many decades ago where these, uh, subjects who did not want to go to war agreed to basically donate their bodies to science and make a contribution to the US government in lieu of, uh, getting the, the guns and the, uh, the marching going. And so they starved these poor guys for an extended period. Ansel Keys was involved in this study, interestingly, who was a controversial figure later for, um, presenting cherry picking data, arguing against the consumption of saturated fat. But anyway, these guys’ health just was torched, uh, in a relatively short time where they became, uh, emaciated weak.

Brad (00:20:14):
They started to have mental health issues where they were just obsessed with food and, uh, in a bad mood, bad attitude. And there’s been some interesting research coming out lately. I’ve heard some great podcast interviews on the subject where these poor guys essentially suffered for the rest of their lives for decades later, after extricating from this brutal experiment whereby some of the children are relating how their father was never, uh, you know, an arm’s length away from food the rest of his life. And he was obsessed with food, and he ate too much routinely for the rest of his life and all kinds of negative fallout from the Minnesota starvation experiment. But consuming fewer calories is just going to trigger an assortment of compensatory mechanisms where you will slow down critical health critical functions of the body.

Brad (00:21:09):
Dr. Herman Pontzer”s, quote, “reproduction repair, growth and locomotion are a zero sum game.” And so if you, don’t get sufficient calories, you are going to turn down these important dials, so you’re gonna feel a little more sluggish and less energetic. If you do work out you’re going to turn down your reproductive drive so your libido will drop. You’re going to have delayed recovery, repair and suppressed immune function. I’m talking about over the long term. We know that if you fast for 24 hours, you get a boost in immune function, and it’s a great way to fight an acute illness. But we’re talking about the systematic reduction of calories over a lifetime does not provoke longevity in humans. We are not bears who hibernate in the winter it consuming fewer calories to survive the winter, right? We’re not the sea elegance creature, AKA, the nematode where is often touted in calorie restriction studies where this little creature can, uh, extend lifespan by an incredible 60% by reducing energy intake, however, they essentially go into hibernation.

Brad (00:22:20):
So, again, the comparison is a healthy, active, energetic human being, the person with the best prospects for longevity, and also enjoying life along the way. Also important when I make that compare and contrast to the monk who lives on brown rice rental, lentil soup, and 20 hours a day of fasting, and the other two hours of meditating, versus the person who’s out there competing in the masters tracks division and throwing down some impressive times in the hundred or the 400 even all the way up to a hundred years old at, I had a nice breather show, and, uh, put some attention on social media to the guy who ran the Penn Relays in 2023. Uh, Lester Wright is his name, 100 years old, and he lined up in the starting blocks to race the a hundred meters at the Penn Relays, relays to the cheers of the 40,000 people in the stands.

Brad (00:23:15):
Super awesome. So anyway, fasting, keto, and other such health boosting interventions are to help one escape from unfettered access to indulgent foods combined with insufficient daily movement. They work, they’re awesome, they health benefits are all true. I take back nothing that Mark Sisson and I have written in all our books where we’re talking in detail about how to embark upon the ketogenic diet, such as the New York Times Bestseller of the Keto Reset Diet. Thank God we had the foresight to present the ketogenic experience as a six week program to hone metabolic flexibility rather than a lifestyle of systematically restricting natural, nutritious carbohydrates in the name of health. But if you are stuck in a pattern of, we call it energy toxicity, that wonderful term, coined and distributed by Dr. Layne Norton. And what he means is too much energy storage and not enough energy burning the essence of modern life.

Brad (00:24:18):
And, um, how do you know if you’re stuck in this pattern? The most, uh, obvious and visible manifestation that your energy system is outta balance and you’re into toxicity, is a spare tire, the accumulation of visceral fat around the midsection of your body. And this is a special and distinct type of fat that’s different from subcutaneous fat. That’s the fat that collects underneath the skin in all the problem areas as they’re called, your thighs, your butt, uh, your, your flabby arms, what have you, your thick ankles that you, uh, can’t stand to look down at. Uh, but that fat around the midsection is extremely health destructive in comparison to the subcutaneous fat, which is essentially benign. It’s not metabolically active, so it doesn’t cause a lot of problems, even if you don’t like looking at it. The belly fat is the clearly the number one battle to fight if you want to age gracefully, uh, maximize longevity and minimize disease, because when you have this accumulation of fat, which essentially it’s fat, collecting around the organs in the midsection, especially the liver, and the lining of the intestines, uh, it’s kind of a firm fat.

Brad (00:25:40):
So when you see the, uh, the most extreme dudes walking around with, uh, beer guts that are just, uh, rock solid, that’s when we know we have a serious metabolic problem in the, uh, form of visceral fat. So it’s fighting the belly fat battle as the most visible proxy to doing everything right where your insides are looking good, too. Visceral fat, or it’s also called belly fat, abdominal fat. It’s classified as its separate organ in the body because of its ability to secrete chemicals into the bloodstream. Inflammatory cytokines, they’re called. These chemicals wreak havoc on health, for example, they can aromatize testosterone into estrogen. They convert whatever testosterone that you still have that is coursing through your bloodstream. The visceral fat will secrete these chemicals that will prompt aromatization where testosterone gets converted into estrogen. Guess what happens when you produce too much estrogen and not enough testosterone?

Brad (00:26:49):
That’s right. You have a tendency to accumulate more visceral fat and lose muscle mass. So if you get a little bit of a spare tire, which is so common in the, as we go through the decades, right? The teenager has the six pack, uh, the frat boy who’s still hanging on at age 27, 28 and drinking a lot of beer, all of a sudden the six pack turns into, um, a little punch. And then we have a checkpoint at age 37, age 47, age 57, and it’s absolutely commonplace and normal and routine to add a little bit more spare tire as we go through the decades of life. And it’s not a normal consequence of aging at all. It’s a sign of metabolic dysfunction. So to fight this visceral fat battle and keep that, keep that spare tire at bay is going to be the best way to, uh, age gracefully and preserve your vitality through the years.

Brad (00:27:50):
Because if you have a little bit of spare tire and you have a little bit of a aromatization going on, then you’re going to accelerate aging and be less likely to preserve and maintain lean muscle mass, and more likely that the spare tire turns into a bigger stair spare tire because of the chemical imbalances and the effects of these inflammatory cytokines. So, escaping energy toxicity means cleaning up your act by any means necessary, especially when it comes to diet, right? You can use any tip, trick or technique to get that visceral fat off your body. Especially things like keto, going plant-based, going animal-based, going strict carnivore going time restricted, feeding, uh, going, uh, extended fasting, whatever tips and tricks you have following these, uh, regimented diets, like the, the Atkins diet, the Scarsdale diet, this diet, that diet, South Beach diet, whatever you wanna do, two meals a day.

Brad (00:28:54):
Anything that keeps you away from that unfettered and undisciplined access to indulgent foods and gets fat off your body, that’s gonna be great. And guess what the good news is about the spare tire, because it’s metabolically active, the same reason that it wreaks havoc on the body, uh, secreting these inflammatory cytokines, it is also the easiest and quickest fat to lose. So when you start making positive lifestyle interventions, like, doing more exercise, cutting back processed foods and so forth, the visceral fat is going to come off easily. That’s such great news. It seems so inspiring and encouraging that you can get your act together and start cleaning up the metabolic dysfunction really, really quickly. So in a matter of weeks, you can get big results when you correct course here. So by any means necessary. First and best suggestion is to start walking around more, of course, getting to the gym and doing some workouts.

Brad (00:29:53):
Sprint up a hill once in a while, or get on that bicycle instead of pedaling and watching TV for 45 minutes. Do a series of short sprints and get that metabolism going and prompting the reduction of excess visceral fat, um, combined with whatever dietary intervention you decide is gonna work for you. And the reason keto and fasting have been so popular is because they’re convenient and easy to adhere to, especially when in the realm of keto, you’re eating all these, uh, savory satisfying foods. When you have a high protein diet, it’s also extremely effective because protein is highly satiating, uh, but it’s not going to be stored as excess body fat, like junk food is. So you can have a delicious omelet for breakfast and a steak for dinner, and a hamburger with avocado and melted cheese and bacon for lunch, and feel completely satisfied and still be able to drop excess body fat because you are getting your caloric needs and your protein needs met, but you’re cutting back on all the fluff that’s caused you to, uh, pick up a spare tire in the last 2, 3, 4 decades, right?

Brad (00:31:06):
So, um, that’s, that’s the deal. There is correct course and get rid of that spare tire by any means necessary. And the intense exercise carefully conducted so it’s not grueling and too strenuous. And in that chronic cardio or chronic, uh, chronic gym goer realm where because you’re burning too much energy during the workouts, you’re going to have a tendency to over-consume calories, especially quick energy processed foods because you’re so exhausted and depleted from your workout pattern. So the trick is to move more gently, walking around as the centerpiece and all other forms of general everyday movement, yoga class, Pilates, things like that, things that are, uh, within your capabilities and under the radar in terms of not exhausting you. So you’re gonna be more active, you’re gonna make better food choices, and especially eliminating processed foods, and you can correct that spare tire accumulation quickly.

Brad (00:32:06):
Now, let’s talk about if you’re not in energy toxicity. If you don’t have a spare tire, your blood work is okay. Your body composition is relatively satisfactory, and you’re trying to live a healthy, active, energetic lifestyle. I don’t see any rationale to engage in fasting or restrictive eating strategies of any kind. And I’ve been emphasizing this point a lot aggressively lately on the podcast because I’ve been rethinking, uh, many of the strategies that have been the centerpiece of my, uh, diet experience for many years. Uh, particularly not going outta my way to sit down and have breakfast in the morning, but rather waiting until midday and thinking that I was banking a bunch of health benefits by fasting until midday most every day, or to be to be accurate, just nibbling on dark chocolate was my, uh, typical pattern in the morning hours.

Brad (00:32:59):
And it also saves the time, allows me to be productive. I do my workouts, I flip up the laptop, I go to town, and then, uh, when it’s time, I’ll make a nice, delicious, nutritious meal. But those fasting periods when I’m striving to perform and recover is my number one goal, are not contributing to that goal. I don’t need to fast to deal with energy toxicity. So instead, my big correction of course here in recent times is to go out of my way to prepare, uh, nutritious calories in the morning. And I have that big bowl of fresh fruit that I talk about on YouTube, on social media, and the big B.rad Super fuel high protein smoothie. And that’s what I do. Uh, as soon as I finish my, uh, morning exercise routine, I will go and get nutritious calories into my body in the name of performing and recovering.

Brad (00:33:53):
And instead of the choice to fast in the name of health, I don’t see the rationale, especially when I said restrictive eating strategy. So the idea of me minding my portion sizes or deliberately restricting my calories in the name of health is not going to, um, align with the goal of performing and recovering. So, again, I’m talking about specifically the consumption of nutritious calories. Not saying that I’m deserve to drive across town to the healthy ice cream store seven days a week, that’s unnecessary and would probably lead to, um, accumulating a little bit of excess body fat if I tried right. But Dr. Tommy Wood made the greatest suggestion. He told me this many years ago, I think it’s mentioned on one of our podcast interviews, but he said that he counsels his healthy, active, energetic clients to consume as many nutritious calories as they can until they add a pound of body fat.

Brad (00:34:53):
That’s when you know you’re at optimal and you dial back a little bit, and then you carry on. So, you want to optimize your health and your energy and your performance and your recovery by consuming the maximum amount of nutritious calories rather than the minimum. I got into this a little bit with Mark Sisson because he’s conveyed that idea of caloric efficiency. And it turns out that they both mean the same thing when Mark Sisson says, what’s the least amount of calories I can consume and remain active, healthy, energetic, keep my muscle mass, keep my performance? So it’s this caloric sweet spot where you’re consuming, uh, entirely, nutritious calories. You’re, you’re eliminating the processed foods, and you’re going for maximum dietary nutrient density. And then guess what? You don’t have to play around with these calorie counting apps or sweat this aspect of your lifestyle because your appetite and your satiety mechanisms will guide you beautifully to the optimal amount of calories you need to feel healthy and to perform and recover optimally.

Brad (00:35:59):
It’s very difficult. I’d say it’s impossible to over-consume, eggs, steak, grassed beef, uh, protein smoothies, and the like, because you’ll be, uh, full and satisfied, and your brain will tell you when it’s time to eat and how much it wants to eat when you’re talking about nutritious calories. Now, as many books and experts can talk about for hours and hours, when we throw down those nutrient deficient, processed, and especially indulgent foods, they trick our brain into over consuming them because of their nutrient deficiency. So that’s why you pound an entire pint of Ben and Jerry’s. The spoon keeps going deeper and deeper. It’s a futile attempt to obtain the nutritious calories that your brain and the appetite mechanisms in your brain, uh, realize what you need. The protein leverage theory, very popular, presented by Dr.

Brad (00:36:56):
Ted Naiman beautifully in our podcast interview proposes that because protein is, is so desperately the most prominent, uh, need in the diet, that we will consume junk food, uh, it, it in, you know, in excess because we’re trying to get our protein needs met. So when you talk about potato chips or ice cream being around 5% protein each, we are going to pound those things because what we really want is that steak or those plate of eggs or those things that truly nourish and satisfy the body. So, if you’re not in energy toxicity, you don’t need to engage in restrictive dietary strategies or fasting, eat as much nutritious food as you can. Of course, adding a pound of body fat because you’ve been so diligent to eat, uh, huge omelets and big steaks and, uh, protein smoothies and bowls of fresh fruit, that’s when you know, hey, you’re doing good, you’re looking good.

Brad (00:37:51):
And you can easily just go by your natural appetite to optimize caloric intake. Um, why is this, uh, my, uh, recalibration here lately? If I were to skip breakfast or systematically restrict carbs or total calories or eating time windows in the name of hormesis or autophagy, I’d be piling more stress onto an already stressful life. Indeed, prompting a stress response in the body is the mechanism by which the benefits of restrictive dietary strategies are attained. So when you fast, you kick in, fight or flight mechanisms that bring you the health benefits of fasting. <laugh> not often talked about, right? Fasting is stressful, burning off excess body fat is actually a survival instinct, right? Your body thinks that it’s going to die because you’re restricting calories. So it’s pulling stored energy off your body and burning it. By most accounts, this is a great thing in modern times because we carry around too much excess body fat, but we can’t forget that the ketogenic eating pattern, the extended fasting, the time restrictive eating, they trigger fight or flight mechanisms, uh, as the way to access the health benefits.

Brad (00:39:09):
And we’ve talked about how ketone manufacturing in the liver sends to the brain, a superior energy source in place of glucose. Because we’re not getting the dietary carbohydrates we need to fuel the ravenous brain caloric needs. The brain burns around 20% of all our daily calories. And so, when we cut carbs, we have to kick over into ketone burning, and it’s a really elegant, beautiful process in the liver. The liver starts manufacturing these ketone bodies as a byproduct of fat metabolism in the liver. And those are prioritized for use by the brain. They have tremendous anti-inflammatory and immune boosting properties and protein sparing properties. And it’s all fantastic news that you can read about in detail in the Keto Reset Diet and many other books. But it is a stress mechanism. Now, we have to get out the notebook paper and create a stress scoreboard.

Brad (00:40:06):
Maybe draw a line down the middle of the paper, and on one side of the paper, write your stress factors in daily life. And by stress, I mean stimulus. So I’m not talking about negative things like mean boss, bad traffic in the morning commute. I’m talking about all forms of stimulus. So your workouts go on there. Of course, your emotional and personal stressors that are negative go on there. But even positive things go on there like, Hey, traveling on a jet airplane across time zones to go on vacation and do a gnarly hike in Hawaii to high altitude. It’s all stressors. And on the other side, we have ways to rest recovery, rejuvenate, and repair from stress orders, things like sleep, things like downtime, things like eating nutritious foods and digesting and assimilating those nutrients.

Brad (00:40:57):
And so we do not want to get out of balance on that stress scoreboard. So if you are a high performing fitness enthusiasts, you’re going and doing your CrossFit workouts, and then you’re trying to adhere to a ketogenic diet as well, you can tip that stress score scoreboard easily outta balance to a chronic overstimulation of the fight or flight response, and all the destructive health consequences that follow. So that’s my rationale for getting up, even though I’m not hungry, not starving, I don’t desperately need to have my giant bowl of food or my protein smoothie or my huge load of eggs. And this morning from the farmer’s market yesterday, beautiful, uh, sourdough bread pan fried with extra virgin first cold press, olive oil, and three or four eggs, oh my gosh, absolutely delicious, sliced avocado on top. I’m going outta my way to do this because I want to give my body the nourishment it needs to perform and recover.

Brad (00:41:56):
So get that spare tire handled by moving more, doing more exercise and eliminating processed foods, and then start looking for the most nutritious foods. And, uh, realizing that an active, energetic lifestyle is your path to longevity. Speaking of autophagy as sort of a devil’s advocate point here, but the benefits of fasting are tremendous. And the autophagy, which is the natural cellular internal detoxification process that we hear a lot, experts touting that fasting triggers this wonderful, uh, dietary renewal effect. And so for sure it’s all true and the body works really efficiently, most efficiently in a fasted state, that’s when our immune function is best. That’s when our anti-inflammatory processes are best. That’s when we clean up damaged cellular material so that it does not cause problems, especially in the arteries in the case of heart disease, and many other examples like that.

Brad (00:43:00):
And so this autophagy is a wonderful health benefit but as Mike Mutzel reveals in a tremendous video where he talked about this concept in detail, the amazing profound autophagy benefits occur after a period of 48 hours of fasting. The organs actually are able to shed damaged and inflame cellular material, and they actually shrink in size with this renewal effect where you truly get an anti-aging benefit from fasting for 48 hours. And as Mutzel cites research, precisely and extensively, he goes on to say that the similar autophagy benefits are observed after you perform a vigorous workout of one hour in the gym, and then he hits the punchline, which is, I don’t know about you, but which one would you prefer starving for 48 hours, or going to the gym and slamming a workout and getting a similar autophagy benefit.

Brad (00:43:58):
So I think, it’s time to recalibrate a bit when we’ve been bombarded with all these magical, amazing miracle benefits of fasting or consuming one meal a day, or going on a time restrictive eating pattern and trying to go from 16, eight to 20 and four. 16, and eight means 16 hours fasting, and then eight hour eating window, and oh, even more points on the scoreboard. If you can tighten that up sometimes and fast for 20 hours and eat only between the hours of four and 8:00 PM and all that stuff, yes, you are getting health benefits from comparison to energy toxicity. However, you are triggering stress response to survive during those 16 hours that you’re not eating during those 20 hours that you’re not eating. And for most of us, we’re not sitting on meditation cushions or walking slowly through the forest. We are trying to perform and have extreme cognitive demand, and also other forms of fight or flight stimulation, the chronic stressors in modern life, especially interacting with that mobile device nonstop while we’re driving in rush hour traffic and dealing with mean bosses and girlfriends and all the rest.

Brad (00:45:13):
So, keep fasting keto time restricted feeding in perspective, especially if you are an active, energetic person who enjoys working out and has that devotion to an athletic lifestyle, they are, um, uh, potentially at odds with each other, and you may perform, recover, and thrive much better when you go for the nutritious calories rather than the fasting. So I’m saying, you know, let’s recalibrate a bit. When we hear, uh, researchers like Valter Longo and David Sinclair say that, Hey, if you can just get a good, good at fasting, uh, that’s gonna be your, your key to longevity. I don’t know, I’m gonna challenge that. I mean, David Sinclair, I made fun of him on my Instagram, many months ago because he’s, uh, going on and on about all these, uh, benefits and his wonderful research about fasting and time restricted eating and autophagy.

Brad (00:46:10):
And then he also mentions in this feature article that he struggles with low testosterone and doesn’t really like to exercise. WTF. This is a guy we’re taking longevity advice from. And he’s got his own issues. And it’s not just about skipping food, but again, a lot of good works. I don’t want to just trash these guys, uh, because they are talking to a population that is immersed in the disastrous pattern of energy toxicity. So if you do go and do Valter Longo’s five-day fasting mimicking diet where he wants you eating 700 calories a day, and it’s like fasting because it’s so few calories, and here’s all the results and here’s all the benefits you get in your blood work. All true, all awesome, all beautiful contribution to mankind.

Brad (00:46:56):
But I’m just coming at this problem from another path that I’m going to argue is superior, and that is the perform, recover pathway, move more, eat more, is another way to describe it. I think James Hall sent me that on email. It’s brilliant. So are you on the move more, eat more camp? Yes, that’s right. More of the good stuff, not the junk food. Speaking of measuring calories, we have to remind, how ridiculous this notion is, because first of all, protein calories should not be counted as calories in the realm that we describe calories as energy, going into the body and, and being burned because they’re not burned for fuel. They’re the building blocks of life, and they’re, uh, not going to lead to fat storage, nor are they gonna be burned at your next workout. So protein calories should be off the table, even when you consume a whole bunch of protein. We’ve heard about how they get converted into sugar, and that’s not, um, it’s not a cut and dried notion like we often thought it was.

Brad (00:48:07):
Um, and the only, the only time that protein calories are gonna be converted into sugar is on a demand driven basis. That means when we desperately need sugar, we haven’t eaten as many carbs as we need to survive, then we will break down amino acids and convert them into glucose through a process called glucose neogenesis, which you guessed it is part of the stress response. So, it’s something that we do to survive when we are starving and still need to walk nine more miles to track the antelope or find some more tubers and berries and, uh, beehives. So, gluconeogenesis is something that we don’t need to, um, tap into frequently because it’s just gonna overload our stress scoreboard. So that’s the first point about calories. Second is, a lot of these estimates that we see on the box are, um, not literally what happens to that energy source in the body.

Brad (00:49:08):
So some calories are burned more easily and efficiently than others, and some calories muck up our body’s ability to burn energy internally. So if you look at a Twinkie, what’s a Twinkie? 210 calories? I don’t know, I’m guessing, versus a bowl of fresh fruit. We have a big difference. And then versus, um, some eggs, a high protein food. There’s a huge disparity of what happens when that stuff goes down the pipeline to the extent that the number on the label, uh, is entirely irrelevant. And then, finally, you know what a cavalry is. It’s a estimate of the energy required to heat a liter of water by one degree Celsius. That’s what we’re, obsessing about, um, with our daily diet and, and looking at our scoreboard and our apps. So it’s just a scientific estimate of how much energy that might provide in the body.

Brad (00:50:08):
But again, the disparity between a plate of eggs, a bowl of fruit or a processed food like a Twinkie is so tremendous that it doesn’t even, it’s not even worth counting. This is why processed foods, especially seed oils inhibit the body’s ability to burn energy internally via the production of endotoxin. It’s called lipopolysaccharide, an internally manufactured poison that is released in the digestive tract when you consume processed foods. So 100 calories of fresh fruit versus 100 calories of fruit and loops have a totally different energy consequence in the body. One is likely to be burned and one is very likely to be stored. And also disturb the body’s ability to burn stored energy such as body fat. Uh, so the seed oils, Dr. Cate Shanahan talks about this in detail on our podcast episodes. They are integrated into healthy cells because they resemble the membrane of the cells, uh, made with saturated fat.

Brad (00:51:15):
And so you get these chemically altered fats that are integrated into your cells and very difficult to burn off. Cellulite is an example where the body has difficulty getting rid of these chemically altered fats that get attached to your body because they’re poisonous and they’re toxic. And so what does the body do? It sends them into storage so that they don’t wreak havoc in the bloodstream. So when you consume processed foods, they are much more likely to be stored as fat and then become very difficult to burn off, to burn out of those fat stores, uh, because of their toxic and unnatural properties. So, um, when we’re measuring food calories and we’re comparing two tablespoons of canola oil to the fat that’s contained in an egg yolk or in ground beef, we’re just, um, heading down the wrong path in pursuit of, I guess the ultimate goal of counting calories is to manage your body weight, but we’re, we’re so off track these days that it’s not even worth discussing.

Brad (00:52:22):
It’s mainly worth focusing on eliminating processed foods and eating to your heart’s content of natural nutritious foods that bring you energy. Oh, measuring workout calories and guessing daily caloric expenditure are also a joke because of all the compensation theory mechanisms inv olved. We measure workout calories as a wild guess as well. So when you are punching in those numbers into your smartwatch or the app at the gym, it’s just, making wild guesses really. And also, um, when you get fitter, guess what? You become more calorically efficient. So when Eluid Kipchoge goes for a 10-mile run, he’s burning much fewer calories than the average recreational runner because he’s so incredibly efficient. It’s not that much trouble for him to go and slam out a 10-miler, even at a, at a high rate of speed. And so, um, does that make his run less valuable than someone who’s burning a whole bunch of calories during that 10 miles?

Brad (00:53:22):
Of course not. And then secondly, when you overexert yourself, in the manner of chronic cardio, you get yourself into big trouble because you will kick in very powerful compensation forces compelling you to overeat because the workout was too exhausting and depleting. Remember that quote I mentioned earlier from Dr. Herman Pon and his book Burn, also a former podcast guest. You can listen to our two interviews. Reproduction, repair, growth, and locomotion are a zero sum game. The most extreme example, when you borrow from one, to excess and you have to turn down, the other are the elite female athletes who get down to really low body fat levels and experience amenorrhea. That’s the cessation of menstruation. So their reproductive fitness is shut off because they are locomoting to excess reproduction. Repair, growth, and locomotion are a zero sum game, so they’re gonna suffer from prolonged recovery times.

Brad (00:54:25):
In the male example, a diminished libido is gonna be turning down your reproductive drive because you are locomoting to the extreme, and you’re going to be more lazy throughout the day and burn fewer calories at rest because of your overly stressful exercise patterns. So, uh, counting up and pedaling faster so you can burn more calories through the machine readout is completely nonsensical. It’s a matter of building your fitness, um, with a sensible mix of the right kinds of workouts that don’t, uh, exhaust and deplete you, but just allow you to get more and more efficient and therefore your body composition responding accordingly. The genetic signaling for the building and maintaining of lean muscle mass and the reducing of excess body fat, especially visceral fat. First one to go. So as we’re still going through this was a lot of from an email I sent to my friend Martin after he sent me the results of the Stanford study.

Brad (00:55:31):
So we had this contention and these obnoxious conclusions by the researchers at Stanford saying like it reveals that a plant-based plant-based, griping and ranting here for a moment. First, as I said before, anyone who goes clean as opposed to typical standard modern diet will get tremendously improved. Health comes health outcomes for sure. I had Rip Esselstyn on my show before. You can listen to our lively discussion. He’s an old friend of mine and former cohort on the professional triathlon circuit. Super healthy, energetic, enthusiastic guy, bestselling author in the plant-based space. He does wonderful retreats with this whole family involved, and they get people to embrace, Rip’s plant strong lifestyle. So he has done a tremendous body of work in his career getting, he started, rose to prominence decades ago when he got his fellow firefighters in Austin, Texas to, uh, stop eating that greasy junkie, processed food, and he was making his kale salads and his wonderful sweet potato bakes and eating natural nutritious food.

Brad (00:56:51):
And they all had tremendous health improvements, uh, departing from extreme energy toxicity to better metabolic profiles. Um, we strongly disagree on all the, uh, uh, aspects related to the inclusion of animal products into the diet. But guess what we have in common is more important than these, uh, distinctions. Uh, we don’t eat crappy processed food. So I’ve been slamming meat and eggs for many, many decades my whole life, right? Rips has warned his followers that, you better not eat all this saturated fat, or it’ll clog up and cause a heart attack. And on his Ted talk, he’s talking about the saturated fat from your morning egg breakfast clogging the arteries in your penis so you can’t get an erection, and all on and on. So I went and had a coronary artery calcium scan, and my score was zero.

Brad (00:57:48):
In other words, there’s no accumulation of plaque in my arteries, and so I’m doing pretty good, and the meat and eggs have not resulted in any adverse effects to my cardiovascular system. Dr. Brandeis did a scan down there, and there was no plaque buildup either. So I get a clean score of zero, and you know what? I’m gonna bet, Rip probably has a zero score as well, because he’s eating entirely natural nutritious foods, and he’s excluding some nutritious foods that potentially can cause problems in many people, especially those least genetically fortunate to adapt to a vegan style diet. So some people are gonna get torched and have receding gums and hair loss and all kinds of deficiencies, and some people are going to rise to prominent spots writing books and doing podcasts.

Brad (00:58:40):
Rich Rule is another example. Overstressed, overworked corporate lawyer, uh, turned around his life, wrote a bestselling book, uh, went and did an Ironman every day on different islands of Hawaii, and became the, the Plant-based rockstar, uh, producing his wonderful podcast and totally devoted to this plant-based lifestyle. Good for him. He’s cleaned up from ordering fast food into the office at 8:30 PM and working till 1130. But I’m still going to, um, want us to keep this in perspective that anyone who goes clean will get a massive improvement in health outcome from the starting point of energy toxicity. Then we also have to remember, uh, evolutionary biology and all the great leaders who have made this their life’s work. That it’s undisputed that humans have evolved on a nutrient dense animal based diet for 2 million years. The leading evolutionary biologists assert that access to nutritious foods, catching the fish as we evolved.

Brad (00:59:40):
I mean migrated along the coastlines of the earth when humans spread across the globe starting 60,000 years ago. And of course, before that, we did really well, uh, with access to marine life, and then catching the big game and small game on land. This is what allowed the brain to become <laugh> smart and highly functional, and branch away from our dumber ape cousins. This is an assertion of evolutionary biology, not someone touting a modern dietary strategy as superior to, uh, the nextdoor neighbor’s dietary strategy. So it’s part of our, uh, uh, our, our DNA and our evolution to where we are today is that we are, uh, we evolved as, as omnivores. That’s undisputed also, but I do appreciate the point advanced by, um, carnivore leaders like Dr. Shawn Baker, even though he does it in his beautiful wise guy strategy.

Brad (01:00:37):
He claims that we were obligatory omnivores or as a safety factor. We became omnivores when we didn’t have access to, uh, the most, uh, nutritious foods which were the animal takedowns. Um, so, um, Paul Saladino talks about this a lot. Went and spent time with the Hadza in Tanzania and watched them, uh, prioritize animal foods, but have that fallback if they needed it. And Shawn Baker’s famous one liner where he said, look, if our ancestors were able to take down a woolly mammoth, we’re talking about 3 million calories of nutrient dense, delicious foods that would feed the clan for many weeks or months. And so they wouldn’t be so inclined to go hiking around for hours, looking for more tubers. And so when we were, uh, when we succeeded, um, we, we, uh, proceeded on our path to the top of the food chain.

Brad (01:01:32):
And when we were unable to succeed, then we were figuring out how to dig up tubers and find beehives and the wild berries during the, uh, time of the year that they were ripening. Okay? So, um, this is, this is the essence of human evolution, is that access to nutrient-dense animal foods, and then that follows that plant-based, is a high risk diet. That’s simply what it is. It’s high risk. Try it out if you want. It’s certainly better than a processed foods diet. Those with the, the proper genetic attributes can do, okay? Others will become highly deficient and depleted. Um, why don’t you, you go Google the chart for liver versus kale, and you can see in an unbiased, factual manner the micronutrient profile of something like liver arguably the most nutrient-dense food on the planet, um, knowing that the liver is the control tower for the dispersion of nutrients in the body.

Brad (01:02:40):
So it’s the storage center for all the macronutrients that you need to survive and thrive, and nothing else comes close in terms of nutrient density. An egg would be right up there as the essential life force, right? The egg is everything an organism needs to be born. And so it turns out to be a very nutritious food. So we cannot really compare, it would be a, a blowout if we, uh, pitted egg versus oatmeal in the nutrition battle if we compared a steak to a salad or a nice cut of wild caught salmon to lentil soup. So we have to get that straight in our heads as we get hit with this very, expertly dispersed vegan propaganda. Um, it just, it doesn’t add up in a scientific realm. And so I don’t wanna be someone with an agenda pounding you over the head that the Brad Kearns diet is superior.

Brad (01:03:38):
But I do want to keep us steeped in evolutionary biology and also, laboratory micronutrient analysis, right? If you want to argue that, uh, kale is a healthier food, then liver, you’re going to have to take a few punches. When we look at the chart, it’s as simple as that. Uh, the plant-based eater is systematically eliminating the foods that fueled human evolution for 2 million years. UCLA’s Dr. Jared Diamond Pulitzer Prize winner, credentialed scientists, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, and other bestselling books, says, quote, “agriculture is the worst mistake in the history of humanity.” That’s because it led to warfare and all the modern problems that were non-existent when we were a hunter gatherer humans for most of our evolution. Since the advent of civilization. And Mark Sisson and I talk about this at length in the Primal Blueprint, so I encourage you to go and grab that book.

Brad (01:04:33):
The latest version is so robust, and it’s a complete coverage of how to live a ancestral inspired, primal style lifestyle and the 10 laws of the Primal Blueprint. But anyway, human health and life expectancy have declined since the advent of civilization. The hunter gatherer diet is vastly superior to the Egyptians growing their wheat, and the Americans growing their corn and the Asians growing their rice. These are still the dietary staples today, because it’s the only way that we can feed 8 billion people. But if you look at the hunter gatherer diet and the complete list of foods they ate, which we recite over and over in the Primal Blueprint, it’s meat, fish, foul eggs, vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds. And oh, yeah, they also ate insects. So that’s the hunter gatherer diet, and you put that in comparison to the grain-based diet of modern humanity.

Brad (01:05:30):
The nutritional density is vastly superior. That’s why life expectancy dropped for many reasons. But one of ’em was nutrient deficiencies. And the anthropologists can see signs of nutrient deficiencies in the skeletons, uh, from a civilized time that did not exist, before that in the hunter gatherers. It’s also time to mention the great popularity of the animal based the carnivore movement which is centerpiece on the idea that sensitive people react to plant toxins and suffer from assorted autoimmune and inflammatory responses to these natural plant toxins. And these natural plant toxins, they’re called antinutrients or antigens, are part of what part of what’s contained in the plant as a defense to ward off predators. So it’s the plant’s way of surviving in the traditional realm of evolution. But these plants are poisonous.

Brad (01:06:32):
And we are all familiar with the examples of people with a gluten allergy or a peanut allergy. You might argue that all humans have an allergy or an adverse response to modern day heavily processed and heavily, genetically engineered wheat products with this, uh, gluten that can cause extreme sensitivity, extreme problems. And the most sensitive people, like celiac disease or the gluten intolerant, and those who consume peanuts, will have that immediate reaction. When we consume spicy food and our eyes water or our nose starts dripping. These are because we are being poisoned by the mild, but still poisonous aspects of these plants. And the most defensive categories, or the most high risk categories are roots, seeds, stems, and leaves. These are the most defensible parts of the plants when, especially if they’re consumed in raw form, like your raw kale smoothie, you are going to get a huge dose of plant poisons.

Brad (01:07:33):
Now, here’s the thing that I didn’t really understand and had to learn in recent years, I’m, I’m kind of embarrassed to realize I didn’t know this, these basics of botany and human biology, but the antioxidant benefits of many plant superfoods are actually due to ingesting their natural poisons and then prompting the liver to mount an internal antioxidant defense response. So the liver makes these wonderfully super powerful, internally produced antioxidants, by the name of glutathione. They call it the super antioxidant, and also SOD, that’s superoxide dismutase, and also catalyze. So the liver releases an antioxidant defense response to neutralize the adverse effects of ingesting these poisons. So what we get is we prompt a defense response, we fine tune our immune response by consuming poison. It’s like the pirate in the Princess Bride, Wesley, remember when he, um, became, he, he took a little bit of poison every day for years, so that he was immune to poison.

Brad (01:08:39):
And so when they had the contest to drink the cup fill of poison, he would win whatever cup it was, and the other guy would die ’cause he poisoned both cups <laugh>. Okay? So, um, we are dosing up with a tiny bit of poison and getting a net overall health benefit from the antioxidant defense response. But it’s not that this kale, these leaves of kale are filled with antioxidants that we chomp down and swallow. They’re filled with poison that we chomp down. The liver goes, oh darn, we’re getting poisoned. I better bust out, uh, the big, uh, the big, the big guns, glutathione, SOD, and catalase to, to fight this. So that’s the net positive antioxidant response from eating, quote, antioxidant-rich foods. Uh, but that is a key factor. Paul Saladino talks about this in more detail during our interview. It’s not that you’re wolfing down antioxidant molecules that work magic in your body, whoof.

Brad (01:09:45):
Okay? So, that’s all great. A a net positive health response is, you know, it’s gonna, it’s gonna boost your health and all that unless your system becomes mildly or significantly overwhelmed. And those most poisonous categories consumed in raw form, that’s the stuff that is very likely to cause a problem in many, many people. If you experience gas, bloating, transient digestive pain or irregularities with your elimination, then this is very likely, the result of consuming plant toxins and perhaps years and decades of doing so. So, sometimes we can wear out our defenses because the effects of stress are cumulative. Jay Feldman has two great articles on his website called Is Hormesis Even Healthy Part One, and Hormesis, part two. We will link to those in the show notes. But, if you have a kale smoothie every day for 24 years straight, that kale smoothie, where at first it prompted a nice antioxidant defense response with a minimal adverse effects, if you keep dosing your body with this stuff, it could wear out your defenses and lead to really disastrous effects.

Brad (01:11:12):
And we see that with lactose intolerance where the kid might be, might have been raised on a glass of milk every day, and then they turn, in my case, I believe I was19 in college, and I started to have extreme stomach pains after doing hard runs on the cross country and track teams. And I have to lie down for like an hour, two hours or three hours with my stomach burning in pain. And I didn’t know why, because I’d been chugging milk my whole life, but my lactose tolerance wore out, around the age of adulthood. And I became, severely lactose intolerant because I was chugging too much milk and those enzymes, I stopped producing them. A lot of people stopped producing them after their babies and after they’re weaned.

Brad (01:11:57):
But most of the world is lactose intolerant and a small portion of the world. Those of Scandinavian ancestry are 90% lactose tolerant because of their ancestral diet. And being from the herding cultures, they preserve that, ability to , produce the enzymes that help digest lactose, namely lactase. So, you are vulnerable for eating this stuff over the long term and perhaps even the short term. This is why we cook soak sprout and ferment plants for centuries, for thousands of years in order to make them digestible. So humans know how to prepare foods well to neutralize these plant toxins. So if you consume a floppy overcooked stock of broccoli, the cooking, the heavily cooking is going to neutralize most of those plant toxins as opposed to, remember, they used to have those hor d’oeuvre trays where you could eat raw broccoli or raw cauliflower, and that is a real recipe to get dosed with some heavy poisons.

Brad (01:13:07):
Same with, as I’ve mentioned before, for a very short period of time, maybe a few months, I was inspired to prepare this super nutrition green smoothie every morning, thanks to Dr. Rhonda Patrick’s viral YouTube video talking about the amazing health benefits of sulforaphane, which is so rich in broccoli especially. And then, throwing down, demonstrating in her smoothie how she would pump in there raw celery, raw carrots, raw spinach, raw kale. And I said, wow, okay, I’m gonna make myself a green smoothie every day in the name of health. And what happened was, excuse me, I <laugh>, I my stomach exploded out and protruded for around four hours every day after I drank the green smoothie. And it was quite disturbing, but for some reason, I remained committed to the process. I don’t know, I rationalized it, whatever.

Brad (01:13:57):
But pretty soon it became pretty reliable that I was reacting to this incredibly concentrated dose of plant toxins in raw form and high volume, right? ’cause I’m blending everything down to drink and liquid, way more produce than I would eat even at you know, numerous meals. And, mostly, you know, if they’re esteemed and fried and, uh, cooked upright, uh, much less plant toxicity problem. Um, and finally, I was talking to my super health conscious friend, Christopher Smith, former podcast guest speed golf king. And he was also inspired by me to try the green smoothie for a while and reported the same thing with, uh, repeated stomach distress. And he said, you know, it’s so healthy, it, it, it must be worth it. And that got me stopping in my tracks. ’cause I’m like, if something’s truly healthy, it’s not going to bloat my stomach out and have my stomach sensitive to the touch for three to four hours after consuming the drink.

Brad (01:15:00):
And that’s when I started to investigate further, was right around that time that Paul Saladino got with Ben Greenfield and did an epic podcast interview in May of 2019. And that caused me to make a fundamental shift in my belief system about the rationale and the desperate need to consume a lot of green plant material in the name of health. This is especially important to reflect upon because we can get these same positive antioxidant defense responses via what’s called redundant pathways. My podcast with Dr. Casey Means, who happens to be a vegan ketogenic enthusiast. And so we don’t see eye to eye on a lot of the stuff I’ve talked about to date in this show. But she talked about redundant pathways, and it was a beautiful concept because she chooses to make, super healthy dietary choices and supplement accordingly to make it work for her.

Brad (01:15:54):
But when we talk about redundant pathways, when you do a cold plunge, you are getting a similar shock to the system that prompts an antioxidant defense response. Same with the sprint workout. You’re getting a tremendous autophagy process in the hours after the sprint workout as you would if you were fasting for an extended period. So, cold plunge trading a cold plunge, the green smoothie for a cold plunge leaves me at a net positive antioxidant, anti-inflammatory immune immune boosting benefit without the side effects of the plant poisons. I know it’s a heavy thing to reflect upon, but I’m starting to make the case or, uh, present a rationale. Uh, why do we need to risk the potential side effects of the plant-based superfoods of the planet when we can get them from cold plunging, sprinting, many other things, sauna exposure, which is also, again, a stressor where you’re in the sauna for the appropriate amount of time, right?

Brad (01:17:05):
I’m not in my 200 degree sauna for three hours destroying my immune system and getting an acute illness, probably if I were in there that long, I might have to go to the hospital after, right? Same with the cold plunge. I’m in for a couple minutes, not 27 minutes and 38 degree water, or I’d be in big, big trouble. I’d overwhelm my defenses. And instead of getting a net positive response i’d, i’d, I’d trash my, uh, uh, immune and, and metabolic function, same with years and decades of, uh, following, um, by following the rules and following, uh, what you’re supposed to do, a plant-based diet where you have your green smoothie every morning and these things that are, uh, slowly and mildly poisoning you. So that’s my rationale for stepping away from, you know, a lot of these foods that used to be the, uh, centerpiece of my diet.

Brad (01:17:55):
In fact, since May, 2019, I have not had a bite of salad. I’ve stared at a couple salads since then and looked down at the plate, the bowl and said, um, what is the rationale for consuming this? These are not the most nutrient dense foods on the planet. The omelet, the grass-fed beef, the pasture raised eggs, the bowl of fresh fruit are vastly superior. And so I, I, I look at it and I completely lose my appetite for it. Same with stir fried vegetables. The only ones I’ve eaten in four years are to be polite as part of if someone cooked them for me or fine dining. I’m sure I’ll have a bite of asparagus just for the taste and the texture and the desire for gourmet dining. But they’re no longer a centerpiece of my diet, because when I compare and contrast to a big old, uh, plate of, uh, ground beef and eggs and fruit, and the things that actually taste great and are the nutritional powerhouses for the human, there’s, there’s no comparison.

Brad (01:18:56):
And my rationale is fading away. By the way, um, I will also avoid the very common side effects of a high plant intake diet or a plant-based diet, which would be gas, bloating, digestive pain, and elimination irregularities, not to mention in the extremely sensitive people autoimmune and inflammatory responses. Now, the gas, bloating, digestive pain, elimination irregularities are so common that I think most of us consider these to be normal. And over the course of a year, we’re gonna have bouts with occasional this, that, and the other thing, or maybe even frequent bouts with feeling gassy or bloated after a meal. Let’s take a look at your dietary choices and see if we can consider this to be abnormal and try to navigate away from that. So, when it comes to plants, we have to compare, contrast the roots, seeds, stems and leaves, categories with fruit.

Brad (01:19:51):
Fruit is the least defensible part of the plant is designed at, intended to be eaten in the evolutionary model. So the fruit wants to give you this final offering of the berry so that it will be consumed. And literally, in terms of botany, this is not just goofy stuff on a podcast, the fruit wants the animal to go poop out those seeds elsewhere so that the plant can survive and reproduce <laugh>, uh, pretty wild stuff. Um, in contrast, when you pull out, um, the, the broccoli from the ground or the leaves of kale, you are taking away, you’re, you’re terminating the plant’s life. And that’s why there’s more poisons contained in the origination of the plant, the root, the seed, the stem, or the leaves. So seed, right, than a lot of things go in the seed category. All the grains and seeds that go in that category. That’s the life force of the plant.

Brad (01:20:47):
So that is the most concentrated source of plant toxins. Fruit also has to, happens to have, um, uh, tremendous nutritional value too. So when we’re talking about fruit and raw honey, those are the superstars of an animal-based diet with appropriate amounts of carbohydrates. And the starchy tubers, things like sweet potatoes have, uh, minimal plant toxins, maximum nutritional value. So you start to navigate to not just the list of most, uh, nutritious plant foods where you see the ones that are also the most poisonous, but the ones that are easy to digest and still have nutrient density. Okay.

Brad (01:21:28):
What about fiber, Brad? You’re not eating all those leafy greens anymore. Meat and fruit focused diet has plenty of fiber. And a modern grain-based diet, in many cases, has vastly excessive amounts of fiber that can cause nutrient deficiency and depletion of vital micronutrients, because, again, fibers, uh, grabbing onto things and, uh, making ’em pass through your body.

Brad (01:21:58):
There’s a book called Fiber Menace by Konstantin Monastyrsky, who goes into great detail. This is his life’s work, trying to convince us that we eat way, way too much fiber, and we need to rethink this and realize that the, you know, the, the hunter gatherer diet had plenty of fiber, obviously, to help us thrive and evolve. And if you, um, scrutinize what most humans really ate over, over the time of our evolution, it wasn’t big old salads, okay? It was taking down the animal and eating the entire animal, nose to tail and all that. So, what’s the rationale then? If you absolutely love your salad or your steamed broccoli, your pasta, whatever it is, then that is the rationale to consume it. But it’s not for the goal of a diet, of maximum nutrient density and easy to digest.

Brad (01:22:59):
And if you do argue that the salad is so incredibly delicious, or you’re steamed broccoli, or your pasta, or your rice, or the things that you love and you can’t do without your bread, go ahead and try to eat those things plain and then come back and argue to me just how indispensable it is to have pasta as a centerpiece of your diet. A plain bowl of pasta, no butter, no olive oil allowed, no marinara, no Alfredo,. The same with steam up some broccoli in the pan and then put it on your plate. No butter allowed, no, no flavoring, no salt, no pepper. And basically, you might come to the realization that it’s the stuff that we put on our salads and our steamed vegetables and our grain-based meals that make them taste great, not the inherent deliciousness of grains and most plants.

Brad (01:23:55):
Okay. So why is plant-based so successful, and why is it so equated hand in hand with the ultimate form of woke, green conscious, sustainable, and health boosting lifestyle? Um, well, it is based on, uh, numerous sound principles, and then a whole ton of mixed in. So, the urgency of escaping from a processed food diet leads directly to this notion that, look, if you just eat things that, uh, come outta the ground or grow off trees, uh, you’re gonna be so much better. So, uh, we jump from Carl’s Junior Drive-through line to a whole food plant-based diet, featuring brown rice, lentil soup, salad, oatmeal, and all these wonderful things that have been colored to, uh, perceive to be someone who’s more enlightened about health. It also, uh, helps their case that the modern, uh, mechanized farming industrialization of our food supply is pretty nasty.

Brad (01:24:59):
So, you can go tour an egg or a chicken factory, or see how the pigs are confined and mistreated. Um, the inhumane nature of how we process animals, they’re called cafo, concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, uh, will possibly turn you, uh, toward a whole food plant-based solution, if you get to know, uh, and get down and dirty with the details. Um, same for the, uh, tremendous concern that we have with polluted oceans and also, uh, unhealthy, farming strategies with fish. So the most commonly eaten fish are farmed salmon and farmed shrimp. And in many cases, they are in confinement. Their conditions are filthy. Their pellet diet is, uh, in, in the case of the salmon, uh, is inferior. Um, they have, uh, pink colored food so that they will come out pink, whereby the wild salmon is pink because of all the plankton and the nutritious food that they find, uh, in real life.

Brad (01:26:03):
So, uh, it’s kind of fake food, and it’s really objectionable, and it does have a harmful impact on the environment. But then if you wanna go over to the explosion in popularity of fake meat made with all kinds of chemicals, uh, with a highly objectionable pea protein, and even seed oils contained in these, uh, uh, burgers and fake meats, uh, Mark Sisson calls it the worst food crime ever perpetuated on humanity. So it’s possibly, you know, uh, the biggest joke and the most disgraceful attempt at trying to improve your health. And I see it on restaurant menus all the time. The Beyond Burger, where it’s made from, whatever, whatever, and you’re thinking that is a healthier choice than, uh, consuming an actual burger. I’m gonna have to argue that you’re sorely mistaken, and all you need to do is grab the product at the store and read the label.

Brad (01:26:59):
Industrial seed oils is, uh, pretty much indisputed to be the most objectionable food that we can consume is directly implicated in all kinds of, uh, cancer inflammatory conditions, insulin resistance, obesity, type two diabetes, and that’s right there on the label of your fake burger. Furthermore, when we’re talking about where this plant-based food is coming from, it’s not much more impressive than the industrialized animal feeding operations. So, uh, we talk about monocrop agriculture to depleting the soil, polluting the earth. And these wheat, corn, and soy fields are equally damaging to greenhouse gas emissions. Believe I heard this on a couple Saladino shows with experts, and my former podcast guest, Robb Wolf, talking about his book, Sacred Cow. We’ll give you a detailed education on the ruse that consuming a, a grain-based diet and modern agriculture is, uh, any better than, uh, consuming a meat-based diet.

Brad (01:28:05):
I mean, they’re, they’re both, terrible, let me put it that way, instead of comparing them. But I think the greenhouse gas emission cystic was similar, like each of ’em contribute. Agriculture contributes to 5%, and animal feeding contributes to 5% of the problem. And of course, the vast majority of the problem is from, uh, industry, uh, coal plants and so forth. Um, furthermore, if you want to object on a, uh, a moral or philosophical ground to consuming animals, um, it’s important to realize, and again, I’m just sharing information, so I don’t want to hurt your feelings here. I didn’t make this up, but it’s an interesting thing to reflect upon that I’ve heard from many other experts. You’re killing a lot of moles, rats, insects, baby bunnies and whatever else went into the rototillers when they were plowing that field to make your whole wheat bread or to make your kale leaves and whatnot.

Brad (01:28:57):
So, um, then if you wanna stand behind, uh, plant-based as your cloak of superiority, um, don’t get me started on all the vegan approved crap that’s in the processed food category. So we have vegan this, vegan that vegan energy bars, vegan potato chips, um, and a lot of garbage that’s going to prompt the release of endotoxin from the bloodstream and interfere with your body’s ability to burn energy internally. So you can get really, really unhealthy by systematically eliminating the most nutritious, and in many cases, most calorie-dense and most satiating foods on the planet, um, especially when it comes to protein. So this is, without dispute. Um, our number one, dietary need is for protein for survival. We can live without any carbohydrates, as a lot of keto proponents will inform us. We can survive, might not be optimal, but we can survive without any carbohydrates and humans our ancestors have done.

Brad (01:29:58):
So, um, for a long time, especially in winter or in climates where there are no carbohydrates available. There’s studies of the Inuit before they were polluted by western dietary influences. Now they have hohos in their, uh, little corner market, but they lived on, um, high fat animal products, uh, almost exclusively in the traditional Inuit sense. And so, um, the same with fat. We have essential fatty acids from the diet, but we can, um, mostly get those from the foods that fueled human evolution and survive. Uh, but we don’t need, uh, a whole bunch of different fats, but we do desperately need protein, and we need to get an average of an appropriate amount to survive. So they have RDA of protein recommended daily allowance, and that’s the survival quote. And it’s really low, I think it’s like 0.3 grams per pound, where the protein experts and those promoting healthy, active energetic lifestyle are more recommending somewhere around one gram per pound of body weight.

Brad (01:30:57):
Some people say one gram per pound of lean body mass, or one gram per pound of ideal body weight if you’re obese and need to lose a lot of extra weight. But we need a lot of protein to thrive. And if we don’t, we will become depleted in a variety of ways. Chris Kresser talks about what happens when you have a protein deficient diet. You will experience intense cravings for high protein foods, and you will become emaciated and feel terrible really quickly. So protein is king in the diet, again, undisputed. And now, if you go to the whole food plant-based strategy, knowing that protein is king, you have to all of a sudden fight a royal battle. And you’re several minutes behind the leaders out of the starting gate because you are systematically eliminating the vast majority of the high protein foods and the most assimilated protein foods.

Brad (01:31:54):
So when we have complete animal proteins, they’re called complete ’cause. They contain all nine essential amino acids versus the piecemeal protein sources in a whole food plant-based diet, where you’re probably familiar with, um, the benefits of combining rice and beans, because together they can form a complete protein and you can pick and choose and mix and match and strive to get your protein needs met. You can go buy a plant-based protein at the store, incredibly popular in the protein supplement category. And it’s absolutely shocking because these are so inferior in terms of their bioavailability. And again, this is a score that is calculated with laboratory food science. So it’s not disputed when someone says, oh, protein, uh, is, is, uh, just as good as whey protein. Well, it’s not, you might prefer it because of your belief system and your values and whatever, but it’s vastly more difficult to do assimilate, and it has lower levels of the essential amino acids, and it is much more highly processed than something like whey, which is a natural byproduct of making cheese in the cow.

Brad (01:33:00):
And so there’s no processing necessary, versus trying to extract protein from a plant that doesn’t naturally yield a high amount of protein. So we have hemp or pea or soy or things like that. We’re talking about way more processing involved, oftentimes with high temperatures and even chemicals needed to get this end product that’s vastly inferior, but is driven by market demand, where someone’s asking for a plant-based protein, someone markets it effectively, and now they’re up there on the shelves along with the supplements that are derived from a true protein source. So if you’re going whole food plant-based, vegan style eating, you’re gonna have a real royal battle getting enough protein. And, uh, you’re also gonna have a high propensity to depart over to nutrient deficient processed foods to get enough energy to make it through the day. So if you start your day with your oatmeal, then you have brown rice and lentil soup and a salad, and you’re going along just fine.

Brad (01:34:03):
I’m gonna sneak into your pantry and I’m gonna find those Oreos that you chow down at 10 o’clock at night because you simply didn’t give yourself enough nutritious calories to eat, and your brain and your satiety mechanisms and all these things are screwed up because of your vastly restrictive diet in comparison to human evolution, and it’s gonna come with some problems. Same goes for people who engage in extended fasting and trying to stick to this 16/8 pattern or the 20/4 pattern.

Brad (01:34:30):
Now a side note, talking about, red meat versus chicken, fish, pork, and other sources of animal-based proteins. t’s important to note, ’cause we often get this backwards, especially in the plant-based ish person who is allowing animal foods to come into the picture. But a lot of times, especially, there’s the female profile, the typecast, where they’re saying, I eat chicken and fish, but of course I don’t eat red meat.

Brad (01:35:02):
Oh, good for you, you’re so healthy. Well, let it be known that red meat is by far a superior nutritional choice, more sustainable with less animal cruelty than chicken and fish and pork. Chicken and pigs in particular are raised in really brutal circumstances. They’re fed all kinds of hormones, pesticides, and antibiotics to keep them alive in these cramped, filthy conditions. You might have heard about the chicken farms where they keep the lights on 24 7 because the chicken can’t sleep unless it’s dark. And so the chickens gross cycle is vastly accelerated through the use of hormones. They’re so confined that a lot of times they live their lives stationary because they have so much joint and muscle pain due to the adverse dietary practices. And so they just sit there, they fatten up, they live a short life, and then they’re slaughtered brutally.

Brad (01:35:52):
Same with the pigs. There’s all kinds of bad stuff you can, uh, learn about and read about. Cattle on the other hand, all cattle is spending 80% of their lifestyle, their, their lifespan on the open range, uh, grass fed. And so that term grass-fed is bantered about regularly. And what we really are wanting to talk about is a hundred percent grass-fed cattle is quite, um, quite rare and, uh, allotted as the best choice. Um, Rob Wolf says, it’s not much different in nutritional profile than a a conventionally raised cattle, and that’s because 80% of their life, all the cows are out there chowing on the grass. Only then in the case of the feed, a lot, they’re sent into the feed a lot. They fatten up dramatically in the last six months of their life, uh, by getting stuff full of grain and, um, whatever other stuff they’re, they’re feeding them, and then they’re ready for, uh, for slaughter.

Brad (01:36:46):
Uh, however, the grain based diet that the modern industrialized animal consumes, uh, the cattle fare much better and deliver a more appealing end product than the chicken and the pork who really suffer from their grain-based, uh, species inappropriate diet. So cattle and other ruminant animals, uh, other red meat, uh, they’re, they’re called ruminant because they have four stomachs and four chambers of the stomach, and they can process this, uh, this grain feed and yield an end product that’s high in saturated fat and low in the polyunsaturated fat that is contained in the grain that the human doesn’t really want to eat. In contrast, a monogastric animal, like a chicken, a Turkey or pig, will eat this soy and corn feed that we feed the industrial animal, and they will yield an end product where their tissue is high in polyunsaturated fatty acids, which the human does not want to eat.

Brad (01:37:54):
The human’s also a monogastric animal and will suffer from this, uh, inferior fatty acid profile in the conventionally raised animal. So if you’re going to eat chicken or pork or turkey, go out of your way to find only a pasture raised, or it’s called heritage breed. When it comes to pork and pasture raised, when it comes to Turkey or chicken, you wanna stay away desperately, stay away from feedlot animals, and of course, with cattle, it would be the best choice to get something that wasn’t part of the, um, uh, industrial process. So a hundred percent grass- fed cow, or when it comes to the alternative sources of red meat like lamb and bison and venison and all that exotic stuff, these are largely out of that realm because they’re not as popular as cattle. And so the buffalo slash bison are entirely a hundred percent grass fed and sustainable, uh, harvested much more humanely and a fantastic choice if you’re looking at that sustainability aspect of the, of the big picture.

Brad (01:39:02):
Here’s some, uh, further details from, uh, the late Dr. Al Denberg who wrote a wonderful book. And, um, he wanted to explain why, uh, chickens and pigs, um, are objectionable with their diet. These, these soy and corn products are high in linoleic fatty acid. Um, this accumulates in the meat, skin, fat, and organs of the chicken and pork. When you consume these animals, the excess linoleic acid accumulates in your body, specifically in your fat cells. Now, back to that legitimate and, uh, highly respected concern about, uh, animal cruelty and morality and sustainability. Another vote in favor of cattle. When you think about the <laugh>, the overall impact humans will eat one cow at a rate of about once an eight and a half years. So if you were sitting down and calculating the amount of red meat you could, you could consume a cow you would be on the same cow for eight and a half years.

Brad (01:40:14):
In comparison, a chicken is so small. Humans eat a chicken at an average of one chicken every two weeks. This is from a website called Vegetarian Calculator. The average overall consumption in your lifetime. So if you wanna talk about the morality of sacrificing animals for your health and nutrition, if you extend it out to your entire life, you’re going to eat, the average meat eater, I guess this is, is going to eat at a rate of 11 cows in a lifetime, 27 pigs, 2,400 chickens, 80 turkeys, 30 sheep, and 4,500 fish. So if you wanna be sustainable and minimize your moral, uh, objections, uh, the cow is the the obvious choice. Uh, you’re gonna sacrifice one cow every eight and a half years, uh, to support your own life versus thousands of chickens in your lifetime. Um, and again, the, the best choice would be to step away from the feedlot and go for the buffalo.

Brad (01:41:14):
The bison, the lamb, 99.9% of all lamb is grass fed. And in terms of buffalo, uh, my work with Wild Idea Buffalo,, you can look at their website for more information. They describe how around 60,000 buffalo are harvested humanely every year in the USA versus two and a half million cattle are harvested in these giant feed lots. So, then not to tease the type cast the the girly girl, but you hear this a lot where people are moving away from red meat and I just eat chicken and fish in the name of Healthy Green Living Sustainability. And I’m sorry, but you have it bass backwards. So if you want to be sustainable and minimize your moral objections, go for the cattle, go for the red meat, or particularly, uh, go for the bison and the lamb.

Brad (01:42:01):
Okay, I think we, um, have enough spewing here to set you straight. Hopefully you appreciated it. Can get a little better perspective on all the whole food plant-based, um, commentary and marketing messaging that’s out there. Um, and also the importance of emphasizing this big picture of your overall life stress score, striving to lead that healthy, active, energetic lifestyle, emphasizing the most nutrient dense, easy to digest foods to support that activity. Uh, perform, recover, perform, recover. Thank you for listening, watching. Look forward to hearing your comments, uh, reading your comments as always. podcast@bradventures.com.

Brad (01:42:50):
Thank you so much for listening to the B.rad Podcast. We appreciate all feedback and suggestions. Email, podcast@bradventures.com and visit brad kearns.com to download five free eBooks and learn some great long cuts to a longer life. How to optimize testosterone naturally, become a dark chocolate connoisseur and transition to a barefoot and minimalist shoe lifestyle.

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