(Breather) “Plants cannot run away, or bite or claw their way to freedom. Plants want to survive and reproduce, and therefore, they developed a variety of toxins to protect themselves from being eaten.”

This insightful quote comes from Dr. Paul Saladino, author of The Carnivore Code, who has talked about the amazing, wide-ranging benefits of the carnivore diet in previous B.Rad episodes. In fact, his insightful newsletter was the inspiration behind this episode!

If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, then you have probably heard about my own personal journey with carnivore (and carnivore-ish), and the incredible results I experienced from making the switch. While I personally did not come to carnivore as a solution for serious issues, like an autoimmune-related condition, committing to a mostly plant-free lifestyle (and if you want to see how many delicious plants are still actually considered OK on carnivore, check out the Carnivore Scores Chart here) has changed my perspective on a lot of things about my health in hindsight. Now, that’s not to say I was unhealthy by any means. But going carnivore and being able to see the way that has greatly impacted my health has made me realize now that I had gotten used to a normal that maybe wasn’t as optimal as I thought. 

In this episode, you’ll learn what foods to avoid like the plague, which practice is a great way to get hormesis, how fasting affects inflammation recovery, and which plant foods are the least harmful to the body. You’ll also learn about the staples of Paul’s incredibly healthy diet, and the foods Dr. Cate Shanahan refers to as “the Four Pillars of Health.”

TIMESTAMPS:

The number one thing you want to remove from your diet is refined vegetable oils. [03:54]

When you are looking at meat, make sure you get grass fed instead of animals raised on corn and soy. [08:03]

Plants vary in their toxicity levels for individuals. Maybe focusing on nice “healthy vegetables” is a problem for your digestion. [10:24]

The organ meats support the same organs in the human when eaten. [14:13]

You are encouraged to experiment with your own diet, to see how different things affect your health. [21:58]

Fasting is one of the greatest ways to get hormesis, which is a brief stressor that delivers a net positive benefit. [26:15]

Brad talks about the great athletic feats of Dude Spellings running rim to rim in Grand Canyon while fasting as well as Zach Bitter’s hundred-mile run. They found that fasting reduced their recovery inflammation. [29:41]

Humans are omnivores. The ancestors ate vegetables but in very small amounts. Plants are merely survival food. [33:00]

The main things to avoid are the most offensive or most potentially toxic plant foods, nuts, seeds, legumes, grains, and leaves. [34:29]

Some plant foods that are less offensive are sweet fruits in season (very important), honey, squashes, avocados, olives, and white rice, and cucumbers without skin and seeds. [36:01]

Brad’s list of survival foods includes 80% or higher dark chocolate, avocados, sweet potatoes, even corn tortillas, honey, and occasionally buttered popcorn, and even more foods that will surprise you. [38:48]

Saladino’s diet consists of bone broth, organ meats, and a lot of fat.  [43:26]

Dr. Cate Shanahan recommends fruits and vegetables, fermented foods and organ meats, and meat on the bone.  [46:54]

LINKS:

• Brad’s Shopping page
• Brad Kearns.com
• The Carnivore Code
• Brad and Cate Shanahan talk about seed oils
• Paul Saladino’s newsletter
• Robb Wolf
• Dr. Casey Means podcast
• How to Avoid Cancer
• Paleo Medcina Clinic
• Two Meals a Day
• Carnivore Cooking for Cool Dudes
• Brad’s Macadamia Masterpiece
• Carnivore Score Chart
• Deep Nutrition
• Ancestral Supplements
• US Wellness Meats
• Akinosie Chocolates

LISTEN:

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B.rad Podcast

Brad (1m 38s): Okay. Listeners get ready for more, more, more insights about the extremely compelling and increasingly popular carnivore diet or carnivore ish diet or as Mark Sisson coined at one of his recent blog posts, Carna flex. Whew! Okay. Anyway, this show is inspired by a great newsletter from Paul. Saladino. One of the de facto leaders of the carnivore movement. He’s got the Fundamental Health Podcast, he’s got The Carnivores Code. He’s been a wonderful guest on this podcast. He is a straight shooter. He backs it up with incredible scientific reference and knowledge base. So I’m really paying attention to everything that he’s saying and testing it out in my personal life with my dietary practices. Brad (2m 24s): And I think that’s gotta be the end all as opposed to this intellectual exercise of listening to the debating experts and someone trying to conclude what’s right for you is go out and test things. But I love Paul’s starting point where he’s talking about if you’re already kicking ass, we’re talking about moving from kicking ass at level seven to level nine. We’re compelled to constantly be on a quest for peak performance. I was just mentioning this on another podcast I did with Mikki Williden, where I became accustomed to a certain normal. That was pretty darn good in comparison to the pathetic average lazy ass unhealthy modern citizen. Brad (3m 4s): But for me, I got used to a normal that maybe wasn’t that optimal and I can reference years past in recent times, feeling much worse and much less fit than I am now. Thanks to dietary revisions, as well as revising my exercise program. My workouts. I’ve talked about this on the show where I’ve toned down the degree of difficulty of my most intense sprint workouts to great benefit to where I can recover faster, do more of them and not engage in that routine muscle soreness, that muscle damage that basically puts improvement on hold while you’re trying to recover from an overly stressful workout. So this whole deal here with dietary experimentation, and I guess pursuing what would be called a niche or an extreme diet is about discovering, going from level seven to level nine. Brad (3m 54s): So let’s do a nice tight overview. These are a blend of quotes from Paul’s email newsletter, as well as my color commentary. And he starts out really wonderfully inspired by Dr. Cate Shanahan, the world’s number one crusader against the refined industrial seed oils. And Paul was bringing that to center stage saying, this is the number one thing that you want to remove from your diet, whatever, put carnivore aside for a moment or vegan plant-based or wherever you’re headed. We have to get rid of these seed oils, no exceptions avoid them like the plague search YouTube for Brad Kearns, Cate Shanahan seed oils. And you’ll see a nice 15 minute interview. Brad (4m 34s): I think sometimes watching it visually is really powerful because Kate really impresses the point. And you’ll be convinced that you got to get rid of this stuff and be ruthless about your elimination of vegetable oils. Pretty easy to do in the home, right? You’re going to throw away immediately throw away all the cooking oils, canola, corn, soybean, sunflower, safflower, all the boxed and packaged and frozen crap that contains seed oils in the ingredient list. Oh my gosh. I used to indulge in Ben and Jerry’s once in a while, maybe a decade or more ago. And if you look on some of their products, these hippie trippy cool laid back, Vermont guys are pumping vegetable seed oils into the ice cream container. Brad (5m 16s): Ah, disgraceful. Also, we have to be really vigilant when we’re out dining at restaurants because most of restaurant meals, of course at fast food, but also at medium to fine dining we’ll routinely cook your meal in these seed oils unless you request otherwise. So the seed oils are toxic immediately upon ingestion, and they’re integrated into your cell membranes because they resemble healthy cells. So the body’s confused when you ingest this chemically produced artificial agent. What happens when they, the seed oils get integrated into healthy fat cells is the fat cells become dysfunctional. So they’re difficult to burn off of your body if have cellulite. Brad (5m 58s): That seemed to be stubbornly attached, even though you’re working out and perhaps losing weight. That’s one reason is because you have dysfunctional fat cells and you really have to detox and get this stuff out carefully. Over time. Cate is so strong on this that she says that consuming industrial seed oil is literally no different than consuming a bottle of radiation. And there’s an interesting study that Cate sided on one of our interviews, where if you smoke a cigarette, you experience an immediate disturbance in healthy cardiovascular function. Your arteries become less supple. Everything starts to work less efficiently, and it lasts for about eight hours. Brad (6m 41s): Yes, cigarettes are bad news, but guess what? The study in question, I think it was a healthy young college subjects, a single dose of French fries, maybe going for a medium set of fries results in a 24 hour disturbance to healthy cardiovascular function. This is not a recommendation to switch from French fries to smoking cigarettes, but it’s a pretty shocking insight. What happens is your nitric oxide levels go down immediately. That’s the thing that makes your artery smooth and supple. And you basically are recovering from about a dose of poison. The other huge thing about seed oils is that they compromise your ability to burn body fat. Brad (7m 25s): Therefore, if you’re trying to, let’s say restrict dietary carbohydrates, get rid of that processed junk, that sugar, those excess grains, and become a fat burner. If you’re not good at fat burning and you start cutting carbs out of your diet, guess what might happen? That’s right. You’re going to struggle, suffer. You’re going to experience an intense appetite for quick energy carbs because you can’t burn body fat. So you’re disconnected from all those wonderful benefits that we tout and extol and all the books and all the primal, paleo and keto commentary. So that’s number one is getting rid of those seed oils. Thank you, Paul, for emphasizing that and thank you Cate for doing so for so many years. So back to the Saladino email’s a list of things to do. Brad (8m 7s): You’re getting rid of that, that junk. And then you’re emphasizing meat and organ meats from well raised grass fed and grass-finished animals instead of animals raised on corn and soy. And I think here emphasizing this point of getting the clean meat, rather than indiscriminately saying, I’m switching over to a meat based diet. We can resolve the, the controversy, the confusion, the disputes between the plant-based vegan, vegetarian dogma, and the crazy carnivore insights. So it is indeed we all agree that it’s cruel to the animals. It’s unhealthy for the planet. And it’s unhealthy for humans to consume animals raised in the concentrated animal, feeding operations, the KFO, or feed lot animal. Brad (8m 54s): Now then we have to make a distinction between finding this sustainably raised animal and disconnecting from the dogma that you are a pathetic immoral creature because you’re consuming another animal. And if we have to compare, for example, the destruction, the overall destruction to humanity caused by eating the burger patty inside the McDonald’s or the, the bun and the soda and the French fries, because the, the latter are driving this global epidemic disease of metabolic syndrome and costing trillions of dollars of economic progress. Because we have to take care of a lot of sick people that are having an incredibly compromised quality of life. Brad (9m 42s): So let’s pick on the bun, the soda and the French fries and the meat. That’s a personal and moral decision. But if you want to get the big picture realized, some of the research that Paul has talked about on the show is Robb Wolf is doing a great job here too, at The Healthy Rebellion, talking about these sustainable farming, where the animals that are raised properly grassfed animals can actually have a carbon sequestering effect. In other words, a net positive to the problem of carbon emissions on the planet. The exact opposite of what the vegan vegetarian dogma is talking about in general, talking about eating any kind of animal. Okay. So on Paul’s newsletter, he had some points going down. Brad (10m 23s): Number one was avoid seed oils. Number two was to eat the sustainably raised clean animals. And then number three, if you’ve chosen to include carbs, find ancestrally consumed low toxicity plants, and low toxicity would be individual based here, right? So if there, if a plant is toxic to you or certain plants not toxic, nothing happens, you feel fine, then you would get a pass, but there are categories of plants that tend to higher toxicity levels, and then others that tend to be more friendly. So I’m also thinking in the back of my mind about this argument of trying to go from level seven to level nine, and I’m all about that. Brad (11m 6s): And this experience of drifting away from a, a high plant intake diet to a largely animal-based diet with less plant intake is interesting because I didn’t report any adverse health effects from eating my wonderful, beautiful salad every day, and going to the trouble of sourcing a whole bunch of whole variety of plants and putting up these huge stir fry meals that I basically prepared in the name of health most every day. But guess what? When I had this plant heavy diet with the daily salad and the huge stir fries, I had all kinds of digestive and elimination relevance. Brad (11m 47s): Okay. So I thought this was normal quote unquote, or I guess level seven. This would be a frequent bloating, gas, transient, abdominal pain, and all kinds of irregularities with my elimination patterns. In other words, leaky pipes for my entire life indirect association with running or difficult workouts. And I always blamed it on the workouts that leaky pipes, but it doesn’t happen anymore. Now that I’ve eliminated this massive intake or this substantial intake of assorted and varied colorful plants in the name of health, the green smoothie goes on that list too. And I think devoted listeners have heard me talk about this a lot where I reliably experienced a bloated stomach for several hours after preparing the super-duper maximum nutrition green smoothie, where I was stuffing down a raw frozen kale, celery, spinach beets, blended it up with a bunch of protein and other cool stuff, and then getting a balloon stomach for a few hours and thinking that was in the name of health until I second guessed myself, same with my pan fried red cabbage was like my favorite thing to pan fry. Brad (12m 57s): And now I realized that was directly associated with leaky pipes and gas. And it was a tough thing for me to digest. So here’s the thing. I was pursuing health optimization, right? So I thought the salad was about the epitome of the healthiest meal you could get with all those different colors and different ingredients in there. Of course, I also had meat and healthy oils and nuts and seeds and things that cross the board that are delivering all these nutritional benefits. But guess what? It’s pretty much undisputed. It’s hard to make an argument against a powerhouse salad paling in comparison in terms of a direct nutritional profile calorie for calorie. Brad (13m 42s): Oh, however you want to do it. It pales in comparison to the true superfoods of the planet, such as you see on the carnivores scores chart. So the grass fed liver, bone broth, pastured eggs, wild caught salmon, the other oily cold water fish in the smash family that sardines mackerel, anchovies, salmon, and herring, the shellfish, especially oysters. And just reviewing that chart and looking where salad would fall objectively speaking. Boy, does that give you a cause for reflection? Okay. Let’s go back to some quoting from Paul’s newsletter quote, pretty easy so far, right? We’re going from meat, organs, low toxicity plants. Brad (14m 22s): And why should you be careful with plants as your carbohydrate choice? Because plants exist on a spectrum of toxicity. They are not necessarily our friends, unlike animals, plants cannot run away or bite or claw their way to freedom. Plants want to survive and reproduce also. And therefore they developed a variety of toxins to protect themselves from being eaten end quote. Now the first couple of times I heard this, it sounded kind of goofy, right? Like one of those flawed logic insights like you see on Game Changers when they show the extremely muscular ox and they say, ah, look, how many muscles this ox has? Brad (15m 2s): Do you think it’s eating meat? No, it’s eating grass all day. And then drawing a flawed analogy to what the human dietary choices to be, or, or kind of the commentary that Dr. Josh Axe gave me during our interview when he said that the light supports like concept a, which is the long-time ancestral tradition of consuming the, the, the animal organ and nourishing the health of the corresponding organ in the human. And this is scientifically validated because when you consume liver or you consume kidney or heart, you’re getting the same nutrients that support healthy heart function in your own body. So for example, animal heart, you can buy the beef heart at the butcher online it’s high in coenzyme Q 10, which is the super nutrient that you’ve often heard supports healthy heart function. Brad (15m 49s): So like support like in terms of organ for organ is strongly scientifically validated, but Dr. Axe was bringing it into the plant food kingdom saying that a plant food that resembles that visually resembles an organ is going to nourish the health of that corresponding organ. So a walnut looks like a brain, and so walnuts are good for brain function. Celery stock looks like a bone. So consuming celery is good for bone health. He said, tomatoes have four chambers just as the human heart has four chambers. So tomatoes are good for your heart. Now that one seems like some flawed logic or some intuitive leaps of faith. Brad (16m 30s): And indeed, when I challenged him on it, he said, if you don’t believe in creationism, you’re not going to like my answer. So you gotta be careful. I just kind of thought of mentioning that as an aside, when Dr. Saladino is talking about how plants can’t run away or, or bite their way to freedom, but guess what? This is a literal truth. It’s, it’s clear that plants manufacture a variety of toxins. And the reason they do so is to ward off predators, to ward off the garden pests, or what have you that will consume the plant and render it extinct. So even though it sounds a little fun and games on the surface, this is the real deal. Brad (17m 11s): And the reason that we consider plants to be widely considered to be fabulously healthy, nutrient dense high antioxidant foods is because when we consume these plant toxins, we prompt an internal antioxidant response in the body. And that is the reason that plants are healthy. It’s not that we’re biting into a broccoli, swallowing it and getting a dose of antioxidants bursting into our bloodstream. It’s that we’re mounting an antioxidant defense response to the consumption of these plant poisons. And that’s a very important point to understand that I honestly was shocked to learn to fully appreciate because I always kind of glossed over that chemical reaction chain, thinking that if you eat a handful of blueberries, you’re just dosing with antioxidants. Brad (18m 3s): So brilliant scientist, Rhonda Patrick has great content on YouTube where she’s talking in detailed scientific study reference for a different dietary and health habits, sleep nutrition. She’s got a whole a show about the amazing sulforaphane agent in broccoli that is this antioxidant powerhouse. They were, I believe ranking broccoli seeds as the most high antioxidant food you could get, but what’s happening is you’re poisoning your, your liver and your liver is fighting back strong. It’s going, coming on strong by, for example, manufacturing high levels of the potent quote unquote super antioxidant that we make internally called glutathione. Brad (18m 46s): So if we go down through the plant kingdom and we look up all the great antioxidant benefits and nutritional benefits of things like acai berries and macadamia nuts and dark chocolate and olive oil, we have the wonderful antioxidants, polyphenols, flavanoids. These are all poisons toxins. Okay. So just to get our heads clear, and here’s the interesting argument that Dr. Paul makes that plants come with a package insert of side effects. You know what the package insert is this is the written material that you get with your prescription medication. So you open up the little bag, there’s the bottle of pills. Brad (19m 28s): And they fine print. The package insert says may cause vomiting, bloating, dizziness, nausea, right? So all prescription drugs, of course, come with profound side effects and the same is true for consuming plants. And so if you have some sensitivities to where these plant toxins might overwhelm your immune response and trigger an auto-immune response or trigger an inflammatory response, most probably, or most likely because you have a dysfunctional gut health, you have leaky gut syndrome. And so unwanted agents drift into the bloodstream and your body mounts, an auto immune response against those wonderful agents that you just ingested antioxidants, polyphenols, flavanoids, the lycopene in the tomatoes and pomegranates that help protect against prostate cancer, all that kind of stuff. Brad (20m 19s): It could overwhelm you. Now, if you have excellent gut health and you don’t have particular individual sensitivities to certain foods, of course they can deliver the touted benefits that we’ve read for our entire life. So your broccoli, your Brussels sprouts, your leafy greens, your devoted consumption of nuts and seeds. All this stuff can boost your health, or it can take you down. And when we’re talking about going from level seven to level nine, we might want investigate even on a step-by-step basis, whether or not this purported benefits were accruing, all those, or they’re setting us back a bit. And when I talk about my, my salads and my stir fries and causing the leaky pipes and the digestive discomfort, who knows what it was causing in other areas of the body, in a subclinical level. Brad (21m 9s): Mark Sisson and their very first book, Primal Blueprint, he talks about how at the age of 40, he was experiencing arthritis in the hands that was affecting his golf game and smashing his dreams of preparing for the PGA senior tour. Just kidding on the latter part, but dead serious on the first part of the sentence that he was suffering from a significant arthritic condition, even as a young healthy guy. And as soon as he ditched grains, all these lifelong digestive disturbances went away, the arthritis subsided, and there’s hundreds of thousands, maybe even now we’re up to a million now of people who have entered the ancestral health world and experienced amazing health breakthroughs, not only from, you know, ditching grains, sugars, refined vegetable oils for the most part, but also going a little bit further investigating even further. Brad (21m 57s): So we can all agree like gluten is the most common and problematic lectin. That’s a form of poison that’s contained in lectins or a group of toxins, gluten being a form of lectin that’s found in modern day wheat product, right? So we can all nod our heads and validate how a gluten intolerance gluten sensitivity is widely suffered from. We all know what it’s like to have a peanut, Oh, no, someone with a peanut allergy and how serious that can be same with allergies to casein, protein and dairy products, but what’s not as obvious are the oxalates in your wonderful spinach salad that you’ve eaten your entire life and can cause some minor disturbances as part of the package insert of side effects. Brad (22m 44s): I really enjoyed Dr. Casey Means take care during our podcast interview, where she talked about the concept of redundant pathways. The term means that you can get a similar health benefit in different ways. Dr. Casey, go back and listen to her show. She’s the co-founder of Levels Health, which is continuous glucose monitor technology and app gets you on the highest level of self quantification, checking how various lifestyle habits affect your blood glucose in real time. So this redundant pathway concept, let’s give a nice quote here from Dr. Casey, for example, we can encourage autophagy, which is that helpful process of cleaning up old cells and proteins through increased sear two in gene expression, this increased gene expression can be activated by a number of different mechanisms, including hyperthermia, taking a sauna, calorie deprivation, such as fasting, cold thermogenesis, exercise, optimize circadian rhythms, and intake of plant polyphenols. Brad (23m 51s): So while some of you might want to go take an ice bath, Oh my gosh. Imagine that. Another person might choose to up their quercetin and resveratrol intake through plant foods end quote. So Dr. Casey chooses to live her life eating in a ketogenic vegan pattern, and she’s acknowledged that she’s tested and refined her eating patterns over time. Very carefully to be sure that her diet is a winner rather than a chronic stressor. So you’re strongly encouraged to do the same with your own food choices, including perhaps a period of extreme restriction to kind of get you to a sensible baseline where you can do some problem solving and some adding and subtracting and seeing how things affect your health. Brad (24m 38s): And the probably the most valid baseline is to eat in a carnivore pattern. Perhaps they strict carnivore experiment for 30 days if you’re suffering from autoimmune or inflammatory conditions. So even Dr. Casey, who’s on the opposite end of the spectrum being a vegan, she supports the carnivore rationale by observing that the antioxidant boost we get from broccoli and berries can also be had by the cold plunge. And Dr. Paul has some good video content where he talks about the concept of environmental hormesis versus dietary hormesis. So the word hormesis implies a, a brief positive, brief stressor that delivers a net positive benefit, a hormetic stressor. Brad (25m 24s): So it’s the Goldilocks just enough, right? So a sauna is a great example of a hormetic stressor. A sprint workout, or a weight training workout, where you’re putting your body under resistance load in an appropriate way, not destroying yourself, but doing a nice session where you challenge yourself through exercise as a hormetic stressor. So it was the cold plunge. And so is consuming these plant toxins and mounting a desirable or an optimal antioxidant defense response. So you can get dietary hormesis and or environmental hormesis. So you look at Dr. Paul and his Instagram, and he’s going into the cold bath and talking about all the different ways for environmental hormesis, to the extent that maybe you can put dietary hormesis aside and prioritize the other stuff. Brad (26m 14s): So speaking of hormesis, fasting is one of the greatest, right? It’s pretty much undisputed that the antioxidant immune boosting and cellular repair response to fasting is vastly more powerful than anything you can get from the greatest super food, acai bowl, fresh freshly squeezed wheat grass, and super juice smoothie, right? So for me, this is really a relief because I’ve been on this quest to help optimize and diet optimize my whole adult life. But knowing that a starting point of skipping a meal is going to beat anything, you can concoct the greatest and most colorful salad of all time, the best super nutrition, $9 super juice at the, the local healthy organic juice bar, knowing that the merely not eating is going to help you fight cancer better, prevent cancer, better boost immune function, get a nice antioxidant boost from fasting, slow down the aging process, all that great stuff. Brad (27m 19s): That should be a way to help you sleep better at night. You don’t have to stress about it. And skipping meals is going to be a nice hormetic stressor. Just as a quick aside there, I mentioned the other ones, right? So if you’re doing a sprint workout, taking a cold plunge and fasting and going into sauna and believe me, I’ve done all four of those on a single day. It’s possible that you can overload on the hormesis on the hormetic stressors and then turn into a stressful event. Obviously, if I were to go in my chest freezer or go in Lake Tahoe here in the winter time with 42 degree Fahrenheit, current water temperature, I go in there for, I don’t know, four or five or six minutes. Brad (28m 2s): If I were to go in for 20 minutes, I would be in deep trouble if not dead. So that would make the hormetic stressor adverse, right? So overdoing it. And just, that was just my personal insight that sometimes if I’m too aggressive with fasting, sprint workouts, cold plunge, sauna, it could be too much. And I probably should go down and sit down and have a nice meal, but fasting beats any super food, good takeaway there. And boy, the power of this, I think we’re just scratching the surface, especially when it comes to enhanced athletic performance. And who knows maybe someday fighting cancer through a fasting protocol or a ketogenic eating protocol. They’re already doing great stuff over there at the paleo, the paleo Paleo Medicina Clinic in Hungary. Brad (28m 48s): Cate Shanahan talked about that on our interview. I believe the title was How to Avoid Cancer. It’s on YouTube, it’s on the podcast channel. And she said, she said, if she got a diagnosis of cancer tomorrow, horrors tragedy, what would she do? And she said, I’d watch it for awhile. That’s exactly what she said. In other words, don’t perform these aggressive invasive treatments that a throw off all manner of healthy function when you get chemo and radiation, but she just monitor it for a while. Keep an eye on that cancer growing in your body. Can you do it? I don’t know, man. I’d have to take a deep breath, but I would be extremely enthusiastic about heading over to cutting edge treatments like this place. Brad (29m 29s): That’s doing great work in Hungary, the Paleo Medecina Clinic. We’ll put the link in the show notes if you’re interested and remind me in case, I forget if I get cancer 10 years from now what I said on the show. Okay, thanks. Appreciate it. And listeners, but anyway, scratching the surface, not only in healing and medicine, but also in athletic performance. Remember my anecdote from Dude Spellings. We related this in the recent book, Two Meals a Day. Think I’ve talked about it on the podcast, but he was doing an experimental super-duper ketogenic fat fueled athletic effort of doing the epic rim to rim, to rim crossing in the great Grand Canyon. Brad (30m 9s): So you go from the south rim down to the bottom, up to the north rim, I assume, touch the ranger station high five, and then go back down to the bottom and back out. A lot of people do it as a camping scene. They camp out on the north rim, go back the next day, like sensible humans. But Dude in his crew were doing it like the runners, they ultra endurance thing. So they did the whole thing in 13 hours. It’s about 50, 50 miles with like 12,000 or more. No, it must be 25,000 feet of vertical. And he tried to do the whole thing fasting. And all he consumed was some coconut butter at one point, got to the finish line and his supporters there had showed up to meet the running group with a nice big box of steaming hot pizzas. Brad (30m 53s): But instead Dude decided to retire to his tent and fast for another 10 hours overnight in the interest of speeding up recovery. Because we know when you’re in that fasted state, you have better cell repair, you have better immune function and better inflammation control. And he says, he woke up the next morning and he was less stiff and sore than on his previous crossing when he was 13 years younger. He did this one when he was 49. So that’s a, a nice young, healthy guy at age 36. And they also went quicker in the most recent crossing. So that is a glimpse to the future of athletic performance and recovery. Brad (31m 34s): Same with Zach Bitter, the world record holder in the a hundred mile run, he threw down a six hour and 40 minute performance. I believe it was 2019 or 2020. And for reference point, that is a sub three hour marathon back to back to back to back mind blowing. And he uses the carnivores ish ketogenic eating pattern, especially when he’s in training to kind of monitor or reduce that inflammation. And he notices, for example, the day after a long run, he wakes up and his ankles are less sore and stiff because his diet is less inflammatory and more nutrient dense. He’s got a great podcast, Human Performance Outliers I’ve been on there. Brad (32m 17s): You can listen to our show and check out some of his other content there, especially if you’re into that ultra endurance training scene. So more quoting from Paul. He says, look, our ancestors did eat plants. Of course were omnivores, but only when meat and organs were scarce. And it was as a survival mechanism or the plants were consumed in very small quantities as medicine end quote, Hey, this is a pretty wild insight. It kind of throws the, the basic assumption, the blanket assumption that humans are omnivores and meant to eat all this different stuff. It kind of puts that at calls that into question, and that’s a fundamental assumption of anthropology and genetic science, right? Brad (33m 0s): So it’s, it’s assured that we’re omnivores. We know that there’s no disputing that that’s unlike your wonderful pet, your dog, which descends from the wolf and the dog is a true carnivore. So your dog should be eating only animals and very minimal plants, if any. And none of that nasty kibble, especially in the kind of kibble that contains grains. Anyway, back to humans, this contention advanced by Dr. Saladino and also Dr. Sean Baker, that plants are merely survival foods rather than a basis of the human diet and that they might’ve been only consumed or mainly consumed when hunting wasn’t successful kind of trips you out a little bit. Brad (33m 43s): I love Sean Baker’s at the quote. We use this in the promo material for the incredible book, Carnivore Cooking for Cool Dudes, check it out on Amazon. You will laugh and you will get some great meals too. He said, look, if our ancestral clan was able to take down a wooly mammoth, they would have 3 million calories at their disposal that would feed everyone for weeks or maybe months without having to go look for a scrub around for hunting and gathering plant foods. So it’s also without dispute that the animal foods are vastly more nutrient dense than the plant foods in that category. You know, we’ve been hit with these insights that carrots and the orange and yellow family have a lot of beta carotene, which is great for your eyesight. Brad (34m 29s): But as Paul points out converting that beta carotene into the usable form of vitamin A that’s really good for the eyes requires a complex chain of chemical reactions. It’s 21 times more complex to convert the beta carotene into a usable form of vitamin A as it would be by comparison to have a slice of liver that has extremely high amounts of vitamin a in its fully formed and usable form because it’s coming from an animal source rather than a plant source. The term for that is retinol. So you have beta carotene precursor for vitamin A and then you have retinol the fully formed vitamin A. Liver has 700% of the RDA for vitamin A. Brad (35m 13s): That would be a lot of carrots to, to be equivalent. So here’s Dr. Paul’s list. If you’re interested in trying out this carnivore ish experiment. The main things to avoid in order of these are the most offensive or the most potentially toxic plant foods, nuts, seeds, legumes, grains, and leaves. That would be kale, spinach, Swiss, chard, et cetera. Dang, son, where does that leave? Brad’s Macadamia Masterpiece. I’m promoting a beautiful nut butter blend product. Well, guess what? I eat sensible amounts. I don’t live on this stuff and whatever I do eat, and I have eaten, I would say, larger quantities when I was in that experimental phase and the kitchen and slam and that stuff every day, but I would report zero adverse effects. Brad (36m 1s): So that’s my rationale for enjoying this sensible treat of Brad’s Macadamia Masterpiece. And guess what? It’s a nine ounce jar, small jar, and it sells for 16 or 17 bucks because of the premium ingredients inside the coconut butter, the macadamia nut butter. So this would be a decadent treat, well chosen at times. And one spoonful is going to sustain you for a four hour hike. I promised Mia Moore andI have experimented many times. So if you are sensitive to nuts, then you don’t want to eat those. And you take that top five list of things to avoid. That’s certainly a good starting point for the first 30 days. And then here are some plant foods that are less offensive. Brad (36m 42s): So as Paul lists them one through five sweet fruit in season, the berries and things like that, and in season is an important point. I really appreciate Dr. David Perlmutter bestselling author one of the leaders in the space recommending that we don’t consume any fruit in the winter months because it’s counter to our ancestral experience where we would go long periods of time without having anything ripe to consume in that category. Number two on Paul’s list is honey. And he’s been touting this with more enthusiasm lately, and he’s been testing with his continuous glucose monitor. And I believe he came out of a, he spun out of a period of at least 18 months of extremely strict carnivores. Brad (37m 24s): So he did not consume any plant food, hardly any carbs whatsoever. And he realized like some other people have contended over time. I know Robb Wolf talked about this on the Joe Rogan podcast that you can get what’s called metabolic insulin resistance from adhering to a strict, low carbohydrate diet for a long period of time. So you’re producing so little insulin because you’re not consuming carbs, that your body becomes a little bit desensitized to the insulin signaling. And it’s good to kind of do a tune-up now and then in other words, dose yourself with carbohydrates now and then, so your body remembers what to do with them and keeps those muscles flexed. Does that make sense? Right. Brad (38m 4s): So Paul is going for his doses of honey, especially as he pursues athletic goals and needs to replenish glycogen. So third on the list, squashes, avocados, or olives again, if you can tolerate them, but these are the low toxin type of plants. Also suggesting that it’s okay to consume white rice because they has white rice has really minimal toxins. A lot of people want to include that in their diet have to cook it in a pressure cooker cause that’ll neutralize whatever the leftover toxins are in there and then cucumbers without the skin and seeds. Okay. So there’s a list of stuff that you can throw in. Brad (38m 46s): I also did that recent podcast, What’s Brad’s Diet like These Days, and I enlisted painstakingly all the different stuff that’s leaking into my diet that’s in the plant kingdom or the indulgence list. And so I get well more than that top five list, but I have had some periods of time where you could say we’re strict carnivore just to monitor and realize that things like my own nut butter weren’t problematic, and then other stuff making into the picture. Maybe I’ll quickly hit those bullet points again, in case you didn’t listen to the other show. Yes. Here’s a quick list of some of my survival foods. Number one on the list, tons of 80% or higher dark chocolate. Brad (39m 28s): I’m loving the Akinosie 88 percent bar these days. And yeah, I can hit that stuff pretty hard. I also enjoy eating lots of avocados. One of the least objectionable plants are, as you notice on the list and also sweet potatoes, I’ll put those in my oxtail stew a once in a while, get some sweet potato fries from the local pub because they’re so fantastic even though they’re probably cooked an oil. Bad deal and then maybe eating the sweet potato roasted in the oven. We’ll go for a lot of squash in the winter time when it’s ripe. I also like to use canned sun dried tomatoes in a whole bunch of different recipes. I don’t know. They just seem to work with eggs or steak, whatever. I’m also kind of drifting in more of these little baby corn tortillas. Brad (40m 11s): They’re like the, a street taco size corn tortillas. And I’ll fry those up in olive oil or butter. Get them a little crispy and delicious with eggs or even steak inside. I’ve been hitting some raw honey with the actual honeycomb because of Paul’s enthusiasm and trying that especially cause I want to recover from my high intensity workouts as smoothly as possible, especially in my age group. And so sometimes I’m thinking that increased carbohydrate intake in the aftermath of these high intensity workouts can help me can benefit me, can make it less of a stressor, right? Once in a while, some popcorn with heavy butter and heavy olive oil on there, I’m a master at making it heavy salt too, but really trying, as you heard from my podcast titled the Fatty Popcorn Boy saga, trying to keep this in the treat category rather than a daily mindless habit. Brad (41m 9s): I had some cheesecake on my birthday. I talked about, I made this paleo pumpkin pie. You can see the ingredients, the recipe on my Instagram. I found this vanilla yogurt called St. oit. Delicious. And usually I get plain yogurt without flavor, but this has a nice soft taste of vanilla, not too sweet. Sometimes I’ll make a protein smoothie. The base is coconut milk and I’ll even throw some frozen bananas in there and throw a bunch of other powders and cool supplements. I use creatine, glutamine, collagen and some electrolyte mix. If I’m hungry, when I go shopping, sometimes in my bag will find its way to those sesame blue chips or those red hot blue chips and then a tub of guacamole. Brad (41m 52s): And I’ll hit that. So that’s a rare occasion. I would say. I’m not a frequent shopper for the blue corn chips, but yeah, darn those are pretty good. Especially when you don’t eat them that much. You really appreciate them. And I’ll cook a little bit of veggies sometimes as a meal accoutrements. So the onions might be in the pan if I’m cooking steak or certain other recipe, or if someone serves me something Mia Moore’s really good at making asparagus. So I’m not going out of my way to be an asparagus eater anymore, but if it’s served on my plate, of course I’ll eat it. And I don’t have huge adverse effects from occasional plant intake, but maybe a different story when I was pounding the stir fries every single day. Brad (42m 34s): But I’m definitely on that game of consuming zero fruit in the winter. And then in the summer, if I can find some great berries at the farmer’s market, I’m just exclusive and selective because I don’t want these things to just be automatic default. Again, I’m trying to adhere to the Carnivores Score Chart and focus on the most nutrient dense foods like the frozen liver liver cubes that I will slice up. I’ll follow the liver just enough to slice it. I’ll make these little cubes and then I’ll put them back in a glass container in the freezer. And so I can grab a handful of frozen liver cubes, salt them heavily. And those are the kinds of things that will be go to, I wouldn’t call it a snack cause they used to try to do it around mealtime and only ate two meals a day. Brad (43m 16s): Right. Right. But that’s kind of replacing the absent-minded consumption of blue corn chips because they’re always in the house. Right.? Okay. So that was my list. And Paul gave you his top five lists of fruit. I mean, carbs that you can add in if you desire. And then he gave a little more detail on his newsletter about what his eating patterns are. He’s eating two meals a day. Hey, I heard there was a great book by the same name. He goes for breakfast in the morning and then another meal in the late afternoon, but pretty darn early in the day for most people’s liking. But he’s going for trying to go level seven and level nine. Brad (43m 57s): Bone broth is in the scene. He makes it himself. 170 grams of protein for a athletic human weighing, 170 pounds. So one gram per pound of total body weight. And that’s a little bit higher than the long standing recommendations of people. But guess what? Now the, the door is opening where people are second guessing these veiled warnings about, Oh, consuming too much protein can be bad. And now, especially for the healthy, active athletic population, you could see these recommendations going up, Paul, going a gram per pound of total body weight. A lot of times you hear protein recommendations calculated on lean body mass. So you’d have to take off a 15 or 12 or 20% of the total and that’s quite a bit lower. Brad (44m 43s): So he’s going gram per pound, also consuming two to three ounces of raw organ meat. And of course the precious supplements that he makes and also Ancestral Supplements is putting out to so many interested consumers, a lot of fat in the diet, 80 to 110 grams of fat. And then in small amounts consuming that honey also dates. And I believe that’s mainly for improving insulin sensitivity and recovering from strenuous exercise. Okay. So in conclusion, we’re talking about going from level seven to level nine and enhancing the nutrient density of your diet, especially if you are interested in dropping excess body fat. Brad (45m 27s): I think the carnivore experiment is worth a go because what’s going to happen is you’re going to be incredibly satiated because everything you eating has a good amount of nutrient density and very high satiety, right? It’s known that protein has a even higher satiety level than fat. So if you’re eating these animal foods like an egg. That’s high in protein, high in fat, you’re going to feel fantastic. Tell me about any time that you’ve overdosed on eggs and felt terrible after, in comparison to overdosing on popcorn or chips or ice cream. Okay. So you’re getting all automatically this extremely high satiety diet, it’s going to be automatically low in carbohydrate and you’re going to start kickstarting, turbocharging, your burning of stored body fat. Brad (46m 13s): So I love that aspect besides the plant toxicity concerns. Even if it report nothing, no problem. You can eat anything. You have an iron stomach. A lot of people are interested in dropping excess body fat. And I believe this is the easiest and best way to do it. That’s why I think it’s going to continue to explode in popularity. Hopefully it doesn’t get distorted like the keto scene where people are misinterpreting and misappropriating the spirit of the ketogenic diet because of the popularity, I guess. So doing it right and going for that weight loss goal is a big deal. And so is the, the nutrient intensity, the nutrient density of your diet and trying to up your game there. Brad (46m 53s): I remember when I was heartbroken and stunned that years into eating in the primal pattern and ditching all the bad stuff out of my diet and having my, my steaks and my eggs and plenty of vegetables and fruit and all that great stuff. And then being exposed to the work of Dr. Cate Shanahan in her bestselling book, Deep Nutrition, where she’s talking about these four pillars of human ancestral nutrition and the four categories were fresh foods. So your fruits, your vegetables, second was fermented foods. So that category of sauerkraut, kimchi, yogurt, kombucha, the third pillar was organ meats. Brad (47m 34s): And the fourth one was meat on the bone. So you can get your collagen and your glycosaminoglycans and things that are not found in any other foods or very little. And I realized that I was basically striking out on three of the four categories. Of course I was eating a lot of fresh foods, very little fermented foods, maybe once in a while, I’d have some yogurt or a kombucha, hardly any organ meats at all. And then meat on the bone, you know, once in a while you have a ribeye, but mostly I’m eating steaks and hamburgers and chicken and turkey. So this work of Cate inspired me to up my game and go looking for foods in those other categories. And especially in recent times, thanks to the really extreme guys like Saladino and Brian “Liver King “Johnson, the founder of Ancestral Supplements. Brad (48m 23s): They’ve inspired me to up my liver game in particular, in my overall organ meat consumption. So I’m making these wonderful oxtail stews finding that that’s the tail of the cow it’s called oxtail. You can find it at a good butcher and ordering up things like heart and kidney from US Wellness Meats. Sometimes I find tongue at the butcher Whole Foods once in a while. And if you put that thing in a crock pot and cook it for eight hours, Oh my gosh, it’s delicious. The meat just peels off and you have yourself, a nice base for a taco. Bone broth again, is that really special dietary category. Brad (49m 3s): That’s really hard to address with other foods because you’re getting that connective tissue in a good bone broth, right, to be distinguished from the cartons of what should be called chicken or beef stock rather than the proper bone broth, which is gelatinous when it’s cold. And then it heats up into liquid. There’s so many good purveyors. You can find in the quality markets. I like Bonafide Provisions, because they make all these exotic flavors like tomato flavored, bone broth, and they make it out of chicken and beef. And you can find some other good brands out there as well, or make it your own by buying the joint material, the knuckles from the butcher and going on a 48 hour simmer on the crock pot. And I also like the great suggestion from Matt Whitmore of Fitter Food.Check him out on Instagram. Brad (49m 48s): He’s a fitness machine, as well as a dietary expert with his wife. Keris Marsden. He told me to drop a few egg yolks into my morning mug of bone broth. And boy, is that a food? Okay. There’s a nice summary of enhancing the nutrient density of your diet, keeping an open mind and thinking critically about this carnivore movement and maybe partaking in some experimental time, especially to determine your sensitivity to plant toxins and overall to focus on enhanced nutrient density of the diet, drop some excess body fat while you’re at it. Please print out my carnivores scores chart. That was a great project with Kate Cressinger, put it on your fridge and try to go for the most nutrient dense foods on the planet as your dietary emphasis. Brad (50m 35s): Thank you so much for listening. Send some comments we’d love to hear from you podcast@bradventures.com. Share this show with others, right? Most podcast players, you can push a little button up there to share a link and your friends who are out of the loop can join in and up their overall game from level seven to level nine and beyond. Thanks for that. Listening. Thank you for listening to the show. So I love sharing the experience with you and greatly appreciate your support please. Email podcast@bradventures.com with feedback, suggestions, and questions for the QA shows, subscribe to our email list of Brad kearns.com for a weekly blast about the published episodes and a wonderful buy monthly newsletter edition with informative articles and practical tips for all aspects of healthy living. Brad (51m 28s): You can also download several awesome free eBooks when you subscribe to the email list. And if you could go to the trouble to leave a five or five star review with Apple podcasts or wherever else, you listen to the shows that would be super, incredibly awesome. It helps raise the profile of the B.Rad podcast and attract new listeners. And did you know that you can share a show with a friend or loved one by just hitting a few buttons in your player and firing off a text message? My awesome podcast player called overcast allows you to actually record a soundbite excerpt from the episode you’re listening to and fire it off with a quick text message. Thank you so much. Brad (52m 8s): Spread the word, and remember Be Rad!

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