Get ready to have your mind blown with an in-depth exploration into one of the most intriguing dietary strategies we’ve heard about in many years: the carnivore diet.

Yes, the strategy is legit, and Dr. Saladino makes one of the most compelling and scientifically supported arguments imaginable. This show moves at lightning speed and will slap you in the face with direct challenges to your long-standing beliefs about colorful, high antioxidant vegetables being the centerpiece of a healthy diet. If you are from the vegan/vegetarian world, watch out because the pillars of your belief system are going to get shattered. What if agriculture was no better than feedlot animals for the carbon footprint on the environment? What if even the most hardcore vegan still actually consumes plenty of animal matter, especially from the soil? What if broccoli and kale offered little or no health benefits, aside from being hormetic stressors – a brief exposure to toxins prompting an antioxidant defense response? And, it follows, that eating them every day can lead to chronic inflammatory and autoimmune conditions – part of the chronic stressors that are destroying human health today?  

Essentially, Dr. Saladino is proposing that our devotion to eating colorful plants promotes chronic inflammation, which is especially destructive to the brain. For those who avoid animal products on moral, ethical or sustainability high ground, your high ground just got a flood warning. Watch Dr. Paul get into the mix with vegan advocate Rich Roll on the Minimalist Podcast! Dr. Paul Saladino is a classically trained psychiatrist and functional medicine practitioner obsessed with getting to the source of chronic health problems instead of just treating the symptoms. He has noted incredibly rapid and dramatic improvements in psychiatric conditions from carnivore diet interventions.  

Dr. Saladino takes us through the compelling arguments against eating plants and in favor of a carnivore focus in an impassioned but logical manner, and ends with instructions for how to go about carnivore the right way. This diet is not about the old-time bodybuilder strategy of slamming steaks and hamburgers every day. Overall, our dietary emphasis on lean animal muscle meats these days is not nearly as effective as a nose-to-tail strategy. Here are some favorite foods and important checkpoints to hit when you try carnivore:  

• Nose to tail meat, with liver being the #1 most nutrient-dense food to emphasize. Also, transition the many other organ meats into your dietary centerpiece.  
• Extra fats: Cooking with animal fats will deliver those essential fat–soluble vitamins like A, D, E and K. 
• Connective tissue: Delivers collagen, glycosaminoglycans, and other nutritious agents that are not found in muscle meat. 
• Organ meat. 
• Calcium: Eggshells or supplemental bone meal. 
• Iodine: Great sources are pastured eggs and Dr. Paul’s favorite, salmon roe. 

This is a good time to plug the premier show sponsor Ancestral Supplements, as they encapsulate the 100% pasture raised/grass–fed organ meats sourced from New Zealand, free from any additives or impurities. Ancestral Supplements allows you to obtain nose-to-tail nutrition, even if you haven’t been doing a perfect job cooking up your liver, brains, and kidneys recently. Get started with their Beef Organs that might possibly blow doors off a whole cabinet full of synthetic vitamin supplements. Also check out Tania Tesckhe’s The Bordeaux Kitchen, a masterpiece on French food, wine, and culture. You’ll get many beautiful recipes and an intensive education for how to get organ meats back into central dietary position. 

Dr. Paul also advocates for going all-in with the experiment so you can really assess how any inflammation, gut microbiome conditions, and cognitive conditions might improve from the carnivore diet. After listening to Dr. Saladino’s great interview on Ben Greenfield Fitness, he took up residence in my head every day and every meal for six weeks. I started trending more and more to carnivore, as did my primal and keto sidekick Brian McAndrew (we are working on two cookbooks just for cool dudes like us, coming in winter 2019-2020.) I told my friends privately I was pretty much following a C&C diet (carnivore and chocolate). Every time I consumed something from the plant world, I felt a negative emotional charge—a sense of uneasiness like I was doing something counter to my health instead of supporting my health! Dang son, the carnivore done got hold of my mind! 

After this interview with Dr. Paul, I am convinced that it’s certainly worth the experiment to avoid plant antigens completely for a reasonable length of time such as 30 days, and see how you feel. Dr. Saladino said you can start adding foods back into the mix as your experiment continues. Whether you are like me: free from major inflammatory or autoimmune complaints at this time and just interested in living a better life, or someone who has some issues going on right now that can potentially benefit from dietary intervention, this show will give you plenty of confidence and guidance to try something that could deliver a breakthrough.  The success stories are piling up – check out meatheals.com for the profound impact the carnivore diet has had on sufferers of autoimmunity, inflammation, and all manner of cognitive and mood disorders. If holding onto fixed beliefs is more important than pursuing higher levels of health, go ahead and dismiss carnivore. I know I did when Danny Vega first uttered the term to me in August of 2017. Dr. Paul says “Live a Radical Life” and adopt a “Beginner’s Mindset” when exposed to new information. Ready for some fun? Enjoy the show! 

TIMESTAMPS:

The carnivore diet movement challenges almost every single long held belief. In medicine.  [07:30]

The plant agriculture is essentially even more damaging in terms of greenhouse gases than animal agriculture.  [11:14]

You put blood and bone from animals into the soil to add organic nutrients to the soil. [13:51]

Saladino says it’s wrong that, as Vegans imagine, that plant based diets are saving the planet. [15:25]

The argument about being kind to animals  in order to be a good steward of the environment vs. vegetables are bad for you is blurred. [17:03]

Here is a good mind experiment: What would be the optimal thing for a human to eat?  [21:21]

How much Omega 3 should we be getting? [25:30]

There is genetic individuality.  [28:44]

Getting away from the standard American diet as a starting point is beneficial [32:41]

Is broccoli good for us or bad for us? [36:22]

You’re eating the plants for macronutrients, not for micronutrients. [44:03]

The essence of it here is that we’re eating something that creates a stress response in the body. [45:27]

One can only eat so many calories in a day. [49:29]

Plants are using us with fruit. [52:49]

Plants are really not that beneficial. You’re not doing yourself any benefit by eating them. [56:30]

Functional medicine is root cause medicine. It asks “why?” [01:03:57]

How dramatic was his transition to carnivore diet? [01:12:25]

What about the caution we hear about excessive protein? [01:14:25]

Restricting protein is a bad idea for all kinds of things. I would argue for longevity from the standpoint of muscular health, bone health, we know that lean muscle mass is correlated with longevity and robustness. [01:21:25]

Nose to tail consumption is eating the whole animal like our ancestors did.  [01:27:28]

LINKS:

• Rich Roll
• Fundamental Health Podcast
• Paul Saladino, M.D.
• Dr. Paul Saladino Fundamental Health YouTube Channel
• Ben Greenfield podcast
• Caldwell Esselstyn, M.D.
• Joe Rogan podcast with Jordan Peterson
• Steven Gundry
• Phinney and Volek

QUOTES:

• “If we look at overall health, there’s no evidence that fruits and vegetables are beneficial and people are going, then why the heck am I eating, them?”

LISTEN:

Get Over Yourself Podcast

Brad: 00:00:00 Welcome to the get over yourself podcast. This is author and athlete, Brad Kearns, discovering ways to be healthy, fit and happy in hectic, high stress modern life. So let’s slow down and take a deep breath. Take a cold plunge and expertly balanced that competitive intensity with an appreciation of the journey. That’s the theme of the show. Here we go

Brad: 00:03:00 Hey listeners, have I got a show for you with Dr. Paul Saladino leading voice in the Carnivore Diet Movement and Oh my goodness, this guy, he’s been in my head for about six weeks straight since I first heard him talk at length about the rationale and benefits of the carnivore diet with Ben Greenfield every single day. This guy, I can’t get him out of my mind. He’s haunting me, tormenting me, and now he’s on my show explaining for us with an incredibly compelling and scientifically validated argument that may be just maybe plants, fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds really not only aren’t good for us, but might be bad for us. He calls them survival foods. Of course, humans had been hunter gatherers for eons and that’s the foundational premise of the ancestral health movement, but maybe it was by obligation because we weren’t successful with our hunting.

Brad: 00:05:17 So of course we had to go find other sources of food. Look how much manipulation we have to do to make sure these foods aren’t toxic when we soak and sprout and ferment and cook the vegetable foods of the earth. So this stuff, we’ll throw some of your fixed beliefs on your ear and force you to think critically and remained open minded. Paul calls it a thought experiment and starting with the beginner’s mind, applying the beginner’s mind to this critical thinking exercise. I think it’s a wonderful exercise for any one of us. Even if we’re really deep down into our fixed beliefs, it’s great to question and challenge them at times and heads up for the Vegan plant based listener. Paul shoots straight and he goes at it and he talks about his debate that he had with Vegan advocate Rich Roll recently on the Minimalist podcast.

Brad: 00:06:10 So you gotta go listen to that and also listen to Paul’s new podcast called Fundamental Health. But whether you’re suffering or complaining with a health condition right now, or you’re someone like me who wants to go from level seven or level eight and level nine level 10 and I don’t even know if there is a level nine level 10 because I’ve been eating a certain way my whole life or I’ve been doing things a certain way. So expanding the mind, dreaming of new possibilities and doing some experimentation. I think this is a compelling thought provoking journey into the world of carnivores. Eating nose to tail animal foods. Who better than Dr. Paul Saladino, he’s trained as a classically trained MD in psychiatry. He’s a functional medicine specialist and he’s such a cool guy. We connected immediately, so kind and open and generous with his time. He’s in route from a move from the Pacific northwest down to San Diego to catch some more waves and joy, some warmer water, open up his functional medicine practice. What a privilege to go deep into one of the most intriguing dietary premises we have heard about in a long time. Dr. Paul Salad. Dino, here we go.

Brad: 00:07:23 Dr. Paul, thank you for spending time with me.

Paul: 00:07:27 Glad to be here man. Of course. My pleasure.

Brad: 00:07:29 I am so excited because you’ve been in my head every single day for about five weeks now. Uh, I, you know, I pulled the Ben Greenfield, you guys talk for a long time, got deep into it and I realized that this whole, uh, carnivore diet, let’s say is an exercise in keeping an open mind and thinking critically because we dismiss things out of hand. And Danny Veiga told me about the carnivore diet about two and a half years ago. He says, yeah, I’m just eating. Everything I eat is from a cow for 30 days. And I’m taking my blood and it looks great. And I kind of scoffed at the notion because it was, you’re getting hit with something that’s away from your, a fixed belief systems. And so now, thanks to the world of podcasts and the Internet, we can be absorbing all these new ideas. And then, uh, what’s, what’s our starting point? And just before we hit record, you were talking about how you got into debate with a Rich Roll and they did a show about it. So that’s my, that’s my lead and I want to hear how that went. And what do you think about maintaining an open mind and thinking critically?

Paul: 00:08:33 Oh, I love it. And this is probably one of the things that I appreciate most about a carnivore diet or just about medicine in general, is that, you know, I’m finishing my residency here in the next week. So I went to medical school for four years, went through residency for four years. And I think it will come as no surprise to most people that within standard Westernized Medicine, I’m an MD, I’m classically trained. There’s not a whole lot of critical thinking. There’s a lot of really smart people who know how to deal with like really complicated problems, but mostly what we do is we generate algorithms and then we follow algorithms and there’s not a whole lot of critical thinking and I love the carnivore diet. I love the idea or the path that it’s led me on for this last year. It’s just been like just long held paradigm after long-held paradigm just falling away. Whether it’s plants are good for you, fiber is good for you, polyphenols are good for you. Meet is going to cause cancer. Ldl is good for you. I mean

Speaker 7: 00:09:30 this, this dietary movement challenges almost every single long held belief into medicine and tap. I believe it’s really Facebook him. So many ideas of Western medicine is challenging. That’s a cool, and it’s even show Jane environmental things,

Speaker 6: 00:10:10 you know? I mean, like you were saying, I just went on the minimalist, it’s going to be out in June with rich roll and we had a bit of a debate and discussion and you know, I, I will say that I really felt like I was able to disabuse him of many of these, these notions. I mean, he’s a great guy. I respect him greatly. He was under the impression, and I don’t know that he would admit that he has changed his mind at this point, but he was under the impression that a Vegan diet was better for the environment. And I had to really take issue with that and say, no, you just can’t say that. That is not true. We can dig into it here if you want. But I mean there was just something that people were posting the other day. Why did I go capacitors in Georgia had a third party come out and certify them and look at their, their carbon emissions and the carbon cycling and with their, you know, agriculture with their grass fed raising of cattle.

Speaker 6: 00:10:56 They are carbon negative of, they’re like somebody with solar panels on their house that’s generating power. You know, they’re like, they’re carbon negative with room and in agriculture. So to say that a plant based agricultural system is in any way better for the planet is just false. And many of the other notions around plants being good for you or animals being bad for you just fall away. When we look at the data and when we look at people eating this diet, it’s incredible. And it, and it, you know, I think, and then we start to step back and say, well, what other beliefs do I have that need to get, you know, dropped away. And I love this idea of like beginner’s mind and just losing the conditioning. And most people when they hear about a carnivore diet, they just, they say, that’s crazy. Like you did. Like I did, like almost everybody did. And then it’s so cool when we realize, wait a minute, maybe this is actually a very viable way of eating for humans. It’s really cool. So beginner’s mind, uh, when we have the, uh, the, the plant base, the Vegan mindset is a protecting the environment, the disastrous

Speaker 5: 00:11:54 impact of the, the feed lot operations. So maybe there’s a distinction between sustainably raised animals and uh, the, the, the uh, agriculture houses. Uh, but that, that’s, that’s a huge pillar that they’re standing on. And so now you’re saying that, uh, I guess, well we have the wheat fields and the mechanized farming that are cranking out your, uh, your sprouted bread, those are causing some damage.

Speaker 7: 00:12:19 Okay.

Speaker 6: 00:12:20 Oh, absolutely. If you look at the greenhouse gas emissions, I mean the planet agriculture is essentially even more damaging in terms of greenhouse gases than animal agriculture. And you know, rich or vegans might counter and say, well, much of that plant agriculture is going to feed the cows. And I would say, ah, no, 85%, you know, of a cow’s life is on pasture. They’re not in feed lots from the time they’re born. And so I don’t believe that most of the agriculture is going to feed cows. But you know what we know is the plant based agriculture generates quite a bit of greenhouse gas in general. And if we’re talking about loss of animal life, which I think is kind of one of these Vegan, you know, ethical arguments, there are so many bike hills or animals that are killed in the harvesting process. And I mean animal agriculture and plant agriculture are intimately connected. They cannot be separated if people who are eating a plant based diet, imagine that there, those plants are grown in soil that does not have animals in it. They’re wrong. I mean the way you get healthy soil is you put animal bones and animal carcasses into the soil or animal manure. So you put blood and bone from animals into the soil and that is what returns organic nutrients to the soil, the phosphorous to grow crops. And so mono crop agriculture is slowly, well, rapidly eroding the topsoil.

Speaker 7: 00:13:36 How’s my observation in this world? We are reasoning

Speaker 6: 00:13:50 expiration date. You know, I heard someone say, I think it was her who said that, you know, we lost all of our topsoil in 1950 we should have been. That should have been the end of all ag are agriculture then and we figured out this NPK fertilizer, we’re adding back sort of exogenous fake phosphorous to the soil, but animals do that in the natural way. Animal Agriculture adds back the phosphorous. That’s back to the organic material to the soil in the way that we should be doing it and it creates much more healthy soils and that is where we get our nutrients. Right now we are living on borrowed time because of monocrop agriculture. If we are not returning nutrients to the soil with ruminants, we are doomed. We are doomed because we will not be able to continue to grow healthy plants in that monocrop soil.

Speaker 6: 00:14:32 So yeah, the idea that animal agriculture is a bad thing or is contributing more greenhouse gas or a large amount of greenhouse gas is just false. If you look at EPA an f a o numbers, you know these are nonbiased sources. It was funny in the podcast, rich kind of scoffed, he said, Oh, the EPA, and I was like the EPA care, you know what the EPA is not a cattle lobby. Like what is your problem with this? But you know, animal agriculture is like 3.7% of greenhouse gas emissions and plant agriculture is like 4.5% of greenhouse gas emissions. So they’re the greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture or make up about 10% or a little less. The majority of greenhouse gas emissions are from, um, are from technology and industry and things that we all cherish and drive our cars. And, you know, we need to figure out how do we mitigate that.

Speaker 6: 00:15:19 And you know, we need to eat something. And it’s just a crazy notion that animal agriculture is really bad. And yes, the vegans will, I shouldn’t say that just the Vegans, but people will point to environmental consequences of feed lot agriculture. And I agree. I think that ideally all animals would be grazed and grass fed from the minute they’re, you know, the other their entire life. But I think that if we’re only feed lotting animals for 15% of their life, we have to think like, well that’s not as big a contributor as many people would argue it is. I mean it’s not probably the best way to do it, but um, and it certainly uses up greenhouse gases in a way that’s not negative like white oak pastures is with grazing. But to imagine, I mean it during the podcast, which was like, oh ruminants or the third greatest contributor to greenhouse gases on the planet.

Speaker 6: 00:16:05 And I was like, no, that’s wrong. You’re wrong. You’re just wrong. Like, and I think that’s what many vegans imagine or plant based advocates imagine is like we are saving the planet. And it’s just, this goes back to the idea like you aren’t, you’re killing the planet with your monocrop agriculture. If we got rid of all the ruminants, you know, the global change and greenhouse gases would be 0.39% down 0.39. It would be insignificant in the U S it would be like 2% less greenhouse gases. If we got rid of all the ruminants and our ag, our agriculture, our ecosystems would collapse and we would all die. It doesn’t sound good. It doesn’t sound like a good thing, especially when we know that animals are so nutritious for humans and they really represent the op, like the optimal nutrition. Like you can’t even compare the bioavailability of animal foods, the bioavailability, the nutrient density of things in animal foods versus plant foods. There is no comparison.

Speaker 5: 00:17:02 Yeah. And I think when we, when we try to take a stand and live by a certain moral compass and, and draw these lines, it turns out that a lot of these lines are becoming arbitrary. Whereby, uh, I remember back in the day when South Africa was getting the heat for their apartheid regime. And so we were told to divest from any company who did business in South Africa or any mutual fund. And then it turns out, well, like, uh, let’s see, just about every company has some sort of connection to South Africa. And similarly, if you want to have that moral stand that you shouldn’t kill another animal, um, you forgot about the mice that are getting into their rototillers of the wheat bread that you’re eating. And so then every, all the lines are blurred. And then we get spit out the other side going, well, what should I do? I want to, I want to be kind to animals and be a good steward of the environment.

Speaker 4: 00:17:50 And that’s the main Vegan, a talking point or the, the, um, you know, the, the rationale for eating this way. So if that’s, um, if that’s put aside for a moment, I think you talk very well on opening up a can of worms there. Now we got to go to the health aspects of trying to, trying to avoid cancer pain and suffering and demise. Uh, what’s the best way we can eat? And we’d been told for so long that um, this, this very diet with all these beautiful fruits and vegetables and colorful high antioxidant things, it’s almost indisputed. All the other stuff is in deep dispute about whether you should have made or not. Uh, but now, now we’re calling into question that the foundation of the colorful diet, that’s what, what would you say Paul is at 99 point something percent of all health experts are going to say, well at least we can agree on vegetables and fruits.

Speaker 6: 00:18:41 That’s exactly true. It’s so funny. You know, I did a debate with Layne Norton on Mark Bell’s power project and you know, he said, you know, he said, just wait, somebody’s gonna say vegetables are bad for you. And I thought, yeah, that’s exactly what I’m saying. And I think I’ve heard other people say that, whether it’s Mark Hyman who I also respect but disagree with or you know, Chris Master John or any of these other people, you know, they will say, yeah, everybody agrees vegetables are good for you. And we can all agree that the more fruits and vegetables you eat, the better. I, this is what I think is so fascinating. It’s like, well, let’s pull the rug out from under that too because um, let’s just do a thought experiment here. And I think this thought experiment may at first seem a little bit controversial, but I promise you it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s leading us somewhere. So if we think about this, if you are a human,

Speaker 7: 00:19:32 what would be the best tool for it?

Speaker 4: 00:20:05 Uh, I’m losing your man. Dang. Yup. Uh, it was to say no. Yeah, I turned the video off because that was losing the audio there. Oh, Dang. Um

Speaker 7: 00:20:21 hmm.

Speaker 4: 00:20:23 I sometimes, sometimes it’s better with the video off, so maybe I’ll try that. Yeah. You want me to turn my video off? Yeah, I’m okay. Just, we’re just going to, is this just going to be audio? Yeah, just going to be audio. I was just doing it though so we could talk and see each other. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I can turn mine off too. You looking good up there in Seattle, man. Okay. There’s picture. Yeah, that too. Um, so say that a mind experiment thing over and, and hopefully we won’t have,

Speaker 5: 00:20:48 I mean start over from there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. So no worries. Just sound actually sounds better. So I think something happened, we were doing good.

Speaker 6: 00:20:56 Yeah. I think that there’s this idea that sometimes with the video and can just get pixelated with Skype. And um, I apologize if my Wifi is not the best. I mean, it’s a strong signal, but who knows. So if we think about, I love this thought experiment, and at first it may sound controversial and crazy, but just bear with me and I think it’ll make sense to people. There’s this idea that, let’s just ask the question as a human, let’s just think about this with a beginner’s mind. What would be the optimal thing for a human to eat? If we were to eat this food, we would know. We would get every single food, every single nutrient we could ever need. What would be the best thing if we could eat one thing? People kind of scratch their heads. And I mean, my response is it would be eating other humans.

Speaker 7: 00:21:39 And of course nobody’s going to eat other humans. But you go to the [inaudible]

Speaker 6: 00:21:46 junk yard and you look for Honda civic parts. You know, if you’re gonna make a Ferrari, you gotta use for our reports. And the reason I use this as an illustration, and perhaps it’s too hot for TV, is that

Speaker 6: 00:21:57 the idea here is that if you were to eat another human, you would clearly be getting everything you need. Like if it’s not in a human being, you don’t need it. And so if we look at, well, what’s the next best thing for a human to eat? And I am in no way, shape or form suggesting that humans should eat each other. That’s not a good thing. Although I think throughout human history it has happened. What is the next best thing? Is it a piece of Broccoli or is it a mammal that looks a heck of a lot more like a human physiologically, biochemically then a piece of Broccoli and it’s obviously mammals. It’s obviously animals, right? Animals are constructed in the same way as humans biochemically. We are essentially 99.99% the same. We do the same biochemistry, we do the same cellular respiration. We have muscles that work in the same way. We have bones that are built on the same matrix. We have organs that are the same. We have a heart, we have a liver, we have a pancreas, we have a spleen, animals have phase one and phase two detoxification. So eating an animal,

Speaker 7: 00:22:56 okay

Speaker 6: 00:22:56 is clearly the way for humans to get everything they need. And if it’s not in an animal, why would we imagine that we need it? Because that animal is essentially the same as a human. Does this make sense? Is this too crazy?

Speaker 5: 00:23:10 Oh it makes sense. But I’m also wondering like is somewhat, is someone capable of countering this and saying you’re crazy. It’s the Broccoli that we need. Is there, is there a possible counter to this?

Speaker 6: 00:23:21 Well I think that you know, if you extend the sort of thought experiment further we say you know, just look at the bio availability. Just bioavailability

Speaker 7: 00:23:32 of nutrients in animal foods versus planned for now for animals like humans that are and smart, I would argue condiments eating from the same operating system allows us to get programming that’s much more compatible with ours. Whether we’re talking about came out here versus non e minor, whether we’re talking about nice cinema versus nicotine of gas. These are animal versus plant forms, whether we’re talking about retinal vitamins, Dha, EPA and Dha, EPA, which are the forms of a bank of three assets that our brains actually used versus Ara, which is Alpha linolenic acid. And so like if you look at the nutrients, plant based nutrients are like a completely different operating system. They are their PC and we are

Speaker 6: 00:24:32 Mac and then obviously you can see my bias there. It’s like the nutrients are in the same form that humans need because they, they’re making essentially something that is very similar to a human. They’re making an animal. It’s just like a human, it’s the same thing essentially. In terms of biochemistry, of course it looks a little different, but if you look at the biochemistry, our genetics are so equivalent, so all the nutrients are so much more bio available on animals. There’s no question. It is very, very hard to get the nutrients we need from plants. And you know, plant based advocates would say you can get the Omega three you need from Alpha linolenic acid, theoretically maybe. But in practice it doesn’t work well because people don’t convert to EPA, Dha, EPA and Dha very well. The omega six fatty acids in our diet can inhibit the enzymatic system which uses the same cascade. And so

Speaker 7: 00:25:23 people in plant based sites usually don’t get enough of EPA, EPA, DPA.

Speaker 5: 00:25:29 So this sciency discussion of converting the, the oils is um, is paramount to human health because there’s few things more important than Omega threes. Right? Paul? Paul.

Speaker 8: 00:25:40 Yeah. I mean the Omega threes are important and I think we don’t know how much we should be getting of them. Many people believe that it was our increased access to Omega threes, like EPA, Dha, and DPA that allowed our brains grow big. And that’s just a theory. It may have also been increased access to, to fat calories. But you know, this idea of Omega threes really mirrors what I was just talking about. The, the concept that if you compare the bioavailability of plant foods versus animal foods, there’s no comparison. There’s just no comparison. And why, why are we surprised at this? You know, animal foods are from the same operating as humans. Animals, biochemistry looks just like ours. And so whether we’re talking about Niacin or other B vitamins or vitamin A or Omega threes or um, other nutrients, you know, it’s, it’s very similar when we’re getting it from animals and we can use it so much more easily then it is when we get it from, if we’re trying to get omega threes from plans, we’re stuck with getting Alpha linolenic acid, which is very poorly converted to EPA and DPA and Dha.

Speaker 8: 00:26:51 And I am saying DPA, many people haven’t heard of that. Omega three and often it’s not even in Omega three supplements, but it’s an Omega three that’s in a lot of animal based foods in is very important for humans as well. Perhaps it’s an argument to actually eat whole foods as opposed to a fish oil supplement. I would certainly argue you to that extent, but ala has to be converted to those Omega threes. And the conversion is a series of desaturation is and along gaze enzymes that are also used by the omega six family of fatty acids. And so if we are getting too much omega six or not genetically gifted with uh, Delta 60 saturates or a long gaze enzymes, which work well, we are going to be very poor at converting ala to be usable. Omega three fatty acids. So just an illustration that plan foods, they don’t really work that well with humans.

Speaker 8: 00:27:43 And if you eat an animal nose to tail, you’re going to get everything you need. But you know, if you eat broccoli nose to tail, there’s not even such a thing. Bronco doesn’t have a nose for it to help because it doesn’t look like a human and you’re just, you’re going to be so deficient in so many different nutrients. So if you’re trying to construct a diet that’s plant based, you have to work incredibly hard to get all the nutrients that you’re going to have to make a human function well. And even if you’re doing that and you are the best plant based eater on the planet and you’re getting everything you could possibly need, you’re going to have to take supplements because you can’t get any p 12 and there’s essentially only one source of zinc and the plant based kingdom, etc. Etc. But all the nutrients that you’re getting or the majority of them are in forums that are inferior to animals and you’re just not going to be able to absorb them as well. You know, iron is another good example. It’s just he, Myron is so much more absorbable from animals. So animal foods are clearly the source of the most bioavailable nutrients for humans. It’s not even a question versus plants.

Speaker 5: 00:28:43 Now, would there be some individual variation with the genetically, a fortunate person who’s standing on the top of the mountain, pounding their chest, saying how awesome it is to live a plant based lifestyle? Are these the fortunate few where this really is working better for them than the next person who’s gums start to recede and their hair starts to fall out when they, when they go into plant based? Yes, I think there is genetic

Speaker 8: 00:29:08 individuality. And you know, one of the things I’ve said before is that plant based foods are survival foods and it does appear clear that there are some of them

Speaker 5: 00:29:16 people in the, the, these uh, these talking points are so elegant man. I mean it’s kind of um, there, there might be some people crying right now to hear that, but it makes so much sense that you know, a survival foods and important term and when you’re trying to survive and you haven’t killed an animal for awhile, that’s great. Go, go pick your berries and uh, pulled your 2% of the ground. But to put them in that category, that’s where we start to the mind

Speaker 8: 00:29:41 here and um, go on, go on the survival foods. Yeah, I mean client based foods or survival foods. Then it gets back to this idea of humans as what I would are you are facultative carnivores and that’s just this concept that rather than being obligate carnivores, which are animals like lions and tigers that must eat, must eat animals all the time and cannot eat plants. And our circumstances. We since probably since we evolved, evolved from herbivorous animals, primates, we have this sort of neat little trick in our back pocket. If we’re not hunting well enough and we’re not killing animals, we can eat some plans but we probably shouldn’t be eating plants long term. They’re really just survival foods. They’re clearly second order foods and if you look at indigenous cultures, they’ll say this repeatedly that they only eat plants when there isn’t any quote unquote real food around.

Speaker 8: 00:30:30 And so my strong concern with the plant based movement is that plant based leaders, people that are eating a lot of their diet from plant sources, even you know, people in the functional medicine community who are adopting highly plant based diets. You’re making the majority of your diet survival food. Why would you not just make the majority of your diet the most optimal food for humans, which is pretty clearly animals. And we can get into the arguments that people make for plant based eating or even, you know, I’m never a seating in a moment, but clearly there are examples of people who do better and worse or plant foods. Rich roll is a good example. You know, he appears to be thriving. I’m not sure what kind of supplements he’s on. Um, and I suspect that he’s on more supplements than than he admits to.

Speaker 8: 00:31:15 But you know, if you have certain genetics perhaps you can live longer, you can do okay on plant foods, but if you just get back to like where we’re coming from with this discussion, I would strongly argue that rich roll and people that appear to be doing okay on plan foods would do so much better on animal foods. And that’s the experiment that’s not ever done right. There are, there are, well I guess it has been done actually. There are tons of people now who are well known vegans who gone carnivore and I think this is just such a funny thing and it probably speaks to the passion of these people. They, they’re Vegan and then they go straight carnivore. You know, there’s great examples of this well known vegans who were saying I was getting super sick and it takes years to see the sickness kind of set in and then they go and eat animal foods and they feel so much better.

Speaker 8: 00:32:01 And so I would, that’s the experiment that a lot of these people who are doing vegan diets and saying they are thriving, thriving, have not done, you know, rich role has never done a carnivore diet. He looks back to his history and says, um, you know, I was an out of shape lawyer and I was, but he was eating standard American diet. So we have to be careful what ex, what, you know, what experiment we’re looking at here. Standard American diet to a Vegan Diet. Sure. People might see some benefit. They might lose some weight, but show me the person that’s done Vegan, the carnivore and feels worse, you know, or carnivore to Vegan and feels better

Speaker 5: 00:32:39 like, well, never do that. Also just to, just to back up, you know, I, I did a podcast with my old friend, rip Esselstyn who was a professional triathlete. We raced together for a long time and we’re, we’re very, very good buddies and we catch up with each other and we, we talked diet cause he’s the bestselling author of the engine two Diet and advocating for the plant strong lifestyle. And his father, Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn and the Cleveland Clinic is reversed heart disease through dietary intervention with the plant based Diet. So they have their statistics, they have their wonderful success stories. Uh, Esselstyn was first working with these patients that were so far down the line with heart disease. They were called the walking dead and he, uh, put him on a strict plant based with almost no fat and their pipes got all cleaned out and they walked out of the hospital.

Speaker 5: 00:33:25 So, you know, the, the passion and the, um, you know, the conviction that people have for departing from the standard American dietary centerpiece, you’re going to succeed in any direction. You’re going to succeed wildly when you stopped going to a jack in a box. And Seven, 11 slurpee. And I think that’s kind of a, when you’re, when you’re bouncing these comparisons back and forth, we have to realize like the context at all times to be able to even verbalize an argument. Uh, you know, the departing from a horrible starting point and making progress is fantastic and they all deserve accolades for saving people’s lives in the, in the plant based community. Uh, but then at a certain point, like my followup question to you is like, um, I, I feel fine after eating Broccoli. I’m not highly reactive, right? And so I’m, I’m making this choice to eat this food, uh, because I think it’s good for me and it’s going to extend my life and has nutritional benefits and no downsides. But then I have to ask myself, well, what is, what is good and what, what is potentially great? I don’t know. So you know, the, the, the rationale for making an experiment of 30 days carnivore. Now, hopefully it’s starting to heat up with, with all the listeners going, well, and this guy sounded a little crazy, but what, what do you have to lose if you’re going toward the proven nutrient dense foods of the planet?

Speaker 8: 00:34:51 I mean, I would agree with you there. Let’s back up a minute and talk about the Esselstyn’s. I think that it’s a, it’s a very interesting thing that they’ve done and it’s very valuable intervention, but we should not conflate that with the idea that it was the plants that did it. Right. Um, I think that it’s pretty clear that removing oxidized Omega six and seed oils can be incredibly healing for people. So to imagine that it was the strict Vegan Diet that was healing is perhaps a misinterpretation and we don’t know exactly what did it and the fact that they could reverse atherosclerosis with that intervention is intriguing. And I think we need to say, okay, there’s something there that’s valuable. And I would argue that it was probably what they excluded rather than what they put in. And if you look at those people long term, I would suspect that they are going to get further illness.

Speaker 8: 00:35:40 And that’s what we see in plant. These communities. People develop autoimmunity, people developed depression, people develop nutrient deficiencies. So in the short term, a plant based diet that removes artificial processed foods can be very helpful for people. But then in the long term it’s not sustainable and that’s where the real problem occurs, right? People Think, oh this is great, I lost a lot of weight. Well yeah, you lost a lot of weight because you’re calorically restricting. And we know that people who lose weight are going to improve their metabolic markers, but wouldn’t you want to lose weight and restricts, you know, calories or um, you know, improve your metabolic markers on foods that are more nutritive that you can be on long term. So I think that one of the main problems I have a plant based eating is sustainability and long term activation of the immune system and nutrient deficiencies.

Speaker 8: 00:36:21 So that’s the thing that I don’t think the SL signs ever did was what do we, what happens when we follow these people long term, I think like 85% of people don’t stay on a Vegan diet long term because it’s just not sustainable. The body eventually rebels and goes, hey, like great, you cut out the processed foods, you cut out the Omega three, excuse me, the Omega six oxidized oils, fantastic. That might be a real key to what’s causing atherosclerosis. And if you stay on that plant based Diet long term, you’re probably going to crash and burn. And so with regard to what you were saying about the Broccoli, we should just talk about Broccoli because I think Broccoli is a wonderful illustration of this concept. Like you said that you were eating the Broccoli because you want imagined it was good for you and two thought it wasn’t bad for you.

Speaker 8: 00:37:06 Well, I would challenge both of those notions that, that the idea that the idea that Broccoli is good for us and not bad for us, I guess those are kind of the same idea. Uh, those are, those are not really built on solid foundations that if we really dig into it, what we’ll see is that’s the whole side of the equation that we haven’t even talked about this concept that like plants are not wanting to get eaten. And almost invariably if you look at vegetables, there are anti nutrients and toxins and those vegetables. So let’s just look at Broccoli as an illustration here because it was something that everyone champions. Now Broccoli is the flowering part of an ancestral mustard plants. So they’re all in the BRASSICA family. People may have heard that. And why have we been told that Broccoli is good for us?

Speaker 8: 00:37:56 Well, I don’t even really know, but I would suspect that people would say, well, it’s got fiber. Okay, we can talk about fiber. And then they’ll say, well, it’s got this thing called Sulforaphane, which I’ve heard is good for me. Rhonda. Patrick talks about sulforaphane and so it’s beneficial for me. And then they might say, oh, it’s got antioxidants. And I, Sulforaphane is essentially the quote unquote in an oxidant. And people want to talk about with Broccoli. So the whole family of Broccoli is the BRASSICA family. And so for roofing is part of this family of compounds called isothiocyanates. So where does this come from? Where does this notion that isothiocyanates are good for us come from? It’s a series of experiments that were done where in people worked had broccoli sprouts or Broccoli sprout extract, which out sulforaphane or other isothiocyanates in it. And in a controlled experiment they were able to see that DNA damage was lower in those people.

Speaker 8: 00:38:51 Okay. So that’s just this sort of controlled experiment. And that’s true. If you give someone so forth Athene you can show in cell culture or in the human that the DNA damage is lower. So let’s explore why this happens. This happens because of a process called hormesis. And hormesis is a process where a small amount of a toxin may be good for us. Now in this case, Sulforaphane is clearly a toxin and I don’t think people realize this so forth. Athene isothiocyanates are toxic molecules. These are planned to fence molecules. And I’ll show you why in a second when we ingest. So forth mean it doesn’t have any unique role in the human body. It doesn’t do anything in our biochemistry. Our Body detoxifies. It immediately threw the NRF two pathway and it does a few other things in the body that are damaging and we’ll talk about those.

Speaker 8: 00:39:39 But it’s this process of detoxification, of sulforaphane through the NRF two pathway that generates an increase in the enzymes in our body that make glutathione. And then gludethyon moves through our body acting as an endogenous antioxidant. And that’s what improves DNA damage. However, this effect of Sulforaphane is not unique. We can generate glutathione on our own and we can achieve optimal antioxidant status without any so sulforaphane. There are studies that I’ve noted in my Instagram and another podcast about cold water swimmers in Berlin. If you have cold exposure, if you have heat exposure, if you exercise, all of these are hormetic that are not molecular were medics and their environmental hermetics, and these are part of what I would call living a radical life. So if you do these things, you can increase your glutathione normally and you can achieve optimal antioxidant status without these exogenous plant molecules pushing up your glutathione.

Speaker 8: 00:40:32 Well at this point somebody might say, well why wouldn’t I do both? And here’s the rub. Here’s the most important part and this goes back to what we were saying with different operating systems is that even though so for a fee as an illustration of this concept is doing some good things in your body, potentially by increasing glutathione it’s also doing damaging things and this is what no one ever focuses on in the research because the research will only focus on the DNA damage. It will not focus on the fact that so forth vein while a circulates in your body also competes with iodine at the level of the thyroid and can induce hypothyroidism. So you are hurting your thyroid by taking sulforaphane and so forth. And because it’s a known oxidants also causes oxidation of lipids in membranes in your body creating the same compounds that oxidize omega six fatty acids can cause in your body, namely four h n e and Aqualina which have been shown to be correlated with things like atherosclerosis.

Speaker 8: 00:41:27 So we have to remember that isothiocyanates like sulforaphane are oxidants. They are not antioxidants. If we are getting a benefit from them, we are only getting a benefit because they increase our endogenous antioxidant system and I would argue strongly that that effect is not unique and that there are collaterally damaging things on the backend. Iodine oxidation of other fatty acids, potentially other negative things with our genetics. This whole family of isothiocyanates which also includes molecules like aloe isothiocyanate have been found to also damage DNA directly. They cause DNA breaks. This is called class to genesis. And why are we not surprised? Because Broccoli is not an animal, probably doesn’t look like a human. Broccoli doesn’t make so for thing for humans to eat it, it makes so for to discourage animals from eating it. This is what we’re not thinking about. We have to just think about this with the beginner’s mind.

Speaker 8: 00:42:21 Like Broccoli doesn’t want to get eaten. I’ve joked about this on my Instagram. Kale doesn’t love you back. It’s trying to hurt you because you’re killing it. And if we just back up one more step and look at, so for 14 as a prolactin molecule, the molecule sulforaphane or allyl isothiocyanate do not exist in the plant because they are so pro oxidant they would kill the plan. They would create free radicals in the plant. So what the plant does is it stores those molecules in safe precursor forms. And we see this in plants repeatedly. These precursor molecules that combine with an enzyme. In this case, the precursor molecule is Glucoraphanin. The enzyme it combines with is my roast in ace. And those two only get to gather when an animal chews Broccoli. So if an animal chews Broccoli, then so forth and gets made in the plant says, oh, I’m going to get you animal.

Speaker 8: 00:43:13 You’re eating me. I’m going to create this toxic compound. I’m dead, but I’m going to discourage you from eating my friends. Right? That’s what the plant is doing. We see the same thing with cassava and the processes that Linda Marin, which is the precursor in cassava, combines with linen marinades when the route is chewed and you get hydro cyanic acid, which is hugely tossing toxic. It’s a sign antigenic glycoside and people are familiar with cassava. They’ll know that it’s a root that’s been used repeatedly and they have to detoxify the heck out of it. Humans spend so much time detoxifying cassava because it’s frankly toxic. And we see this pattern with plant foods throughout human evolution. If we are going to be plant foods, our ancestors have always gone to great lengths to detoxify them and that’s because their survival foods, right? Like we can’t eat them easily.

Speaker 8: 00:44:01 So its oaking to nuts. Uh, so mentation look at egg corns, soaking fermentation. Yeah. And if you look at what’s been done with Brassica vegetables, they’ve traditionally been fermented into Sauerkraut and Kimchi and all these other things. Well what does that to the fermentation process degrades the glucose scintillates it to grades the isothiocyanates. So that is what we’re, that’s what our ancestors were doing. They were saying, hey, if we’re gonna eat cabbage, we’re going to get rid of these toxic things. Because clearly we know there are talks of things. And so in the end you’re left with essentially much, right? You’re like, okay, you’re just at that point, you’re eating the plants for macro nutrients, not for micronutrients. Because you know, people should not imagine that they’re getting any antioxidants or any of these isothiocyanates from fermented foods like Kimchi or Sauerkraut, because those have all been detoxified, right?

Speaker 8: 00:44:56 But people don’t realize this. Basically when you’re eating sauerkraut and Kimchi, you’re just getting mush. You’re getting macronutrients. You might be getting some carbohydrates, right? But you’re not getting any of the nutrients that people imagine they’re getting. And we can talk about the probiotics, and that’s a whole different story. But that’s what our ancestors did. They fermented beans. And this is when they were like, hey, we have hunted the animals to extinction. We can’t get animals. We better figure out how to eat these plants. Well, you better detoxify the heck out of them because they’re not good for you. So, hopefully that example with Broccoli kind of helps illustrate what’s going on here.

Speaker 5: 00:45:26 And I’m supposing that we can go down the line now with our wonderful pomegranates and blueberries and have a similar story of these being a sort of hormetic stressors to the body. And for those of us who are getting a little glazed over with the, uh, with the, uh, the scientific dives, I mean, the, the essence of it here is that we’re eating something that, uh, creates a stress response in the body. It’s not a terrible long term one where we’re going to get sick, but that brief, uh, natural hormetic stressor we know from, you know, primal living, just like jumping in the cold water and getting out, you get a hormone boost, you get an apparently an antioxidant boost or a boosted the internal manufacturing of antioxidants because you’ve eaten a plant poison. Is that sort of, uh, uh, a layman summary of what you just talked about?

Speaker 8: 00:46:13 Yes, you can get a hormetic boost from eating the plant poison. But remember, the other thing that people don’t talk about that those plant poisons will, they’ll get us in the end. You know, you may get a hormetic boost in terms of glutosiome, but if you look carefully and we can talk about resveratrol, we can talk about curcumin, we can talk about any compound that you want to talk about. If you look in the human body, it’s doing something else bad somewhere else because it’s not from our operating system, right? It’s like people want to focus on the good thing because they want to sell supplements or because they want to pretend that there are these magical molecules that are gonna make us live longer. And in fact, they’re just not from our operating system. Why do you need something from a plant? Look at an animal.

Speaker 8: 00:46:53 It’s just like you. Everything you need to be out. The animal is in that animal. And if you try and eat things from plants, they’re just going to hurt you in the end. You may get a little glutosiome, but it’s going to have other negative effects that you can’t avoid. So I would argue they’re all net negative and check this out. If you look at studies that have been done with fruit and vegetables, I love these that are actual fruit and vegetable intervention studies that have been done and when they’re ranging in length from four to 10 weeks. What they did in these studies, there’s about five of them, they took people and they divided them into two groups and one group ate a bunch of fruits and vegetables on the order of like a number of pounds, then a week and the other group had zero or a very small amount of fruits and vegetables.

Speaker 8: 00:47:35 Like they had groups of people who ate no fruit and vegetables for 10 weeks. Right. And they had another group that was eating five to six pounds of fruit and vegetables per week. Right. A huge amount and included in that fruits and vegetables where things like apples and oranges and brassica vegetables, Jerusalem artichokes and Broccoli, all the things we’ve been told are very beneficial. They outline which fruits and vegetables they want people to meet and at the end of four weeks or at the end of 10 weeks they looked at oxidative stress, DNA damage, the markers of Lipid peroxidation and what do you think they found? No difference, no difference. So the idea and in one study they found worsening, right? There’s an incredible study that I can give you the title of it if people want to read it or they found a worsening of oxidative stress parameters when people ate flavonoid rich vegetables and in the other studies they found no difference suggesting the notion that the fruits and vegetable oils are benefiting you or from an oxidative stress or DNA damage.

Speaker 8: 00:48:33 Long term has never been supported by an interventional study with fruit and vegetables. This is mind blowing, right? You can take the sulforaphane and you can look at it in cell culture or you can just look at DNA damaged short term, but when they do the interventional studies, there’s no benefit. Why are we eating them? And then the other thing is, even in these studies, they’re not even looking at the way that the vegetables can be negative. They’re just looking at the things that they thought were going to show benefit because these are the people they wanted to say, hey, look, eating fruits and vegetables improves DNA damage and improves your oxidative stress markers. Lo and behold, they couldn’t show that it didn’t change it and people will say, well, it didn’t make it worse. Well, there is one study that shows that it was worse. And then I would argue that they didn’t look at the right outcomes. They also didn’t look at thyroid function. You know, they didn’t look at overall iodine levels. There are so many metrics that we can look at it for a human, but if we look at overall health, there’s no evidence that fruits and vegetables are beneficial and people are going, then why the heck am I eating, man? I don’t know.

Speaker 5: 00:49:28 Oh, we just got one of our sound byte quotes, right? This is really, uh, uh, hopefully people aren’t, uh, dropping off the line, you know, like on a live show. Okay. Line seven is open now, but if you’re still with us, if you’re still listening now and tripping out like I am a, it also occurs to me, Paul, that there’s an opportunity cost to reflect upon here whereby I can only eat so many calories per day, right? I don’t, I don’t want to blow up like a violet Beauregard in, in chocolate factory. So if I’m going to, uh, use my budget wisely for the amount of nutrition I want to get into my body, uh, anything outside of the incredible nutrient density of the animal foods is going to have an opportunity costs, even if it’s a net neutral, like a, someone wants to argue back, uh, when you’re down the street and, and shopping at the store that, um, there’s a benefit from having these fresh blueberries, a boy, and then you’re starting to load your plate up with vegetables. As we’ve been taught to, I’m pretty soon, we’re eating less of the salmon eggs and the pastured eggs and all the great things that we know have the most concentrated sources of nutrition.

Speaker 8: 00:50:42 I completely agree with you. And it’s so interesting even creating a carnivore diet with a nose to tail, eating all the organs and eating, you know, not just the muscle may to the animal. You think like, wow, I’m pretty full. You know, I eat two meals a day. And if you look at what you’re getting, eating nose to tail with an animal, like I’m getting an incredible array of nutrients. And I think you’re totally right. I think that if we start replacing that with less dense foods or less bioavailable nutrients from those foods, we’re really doing ourselves a disservice. And the more plants we put in our diet, we’re just taking up space and we’re not getting the nutrients we need. And that affects health long term and it affects health long term because we’re not getting the nutrients we need. And because of these anti nutrients and plants.

Speaker 8: 00:51:23 And one of the most radical ideas of a carnivore diet is that these anti nutrients and plants go beyond these so called antioxidants, which are actually planned pesticides doesn’t extend and things like elections and oxalate which are directly damaging humans. And I would argue that plant foods are probably one of the major causes of autoimmunity. So not only are we decreasing our overall nutrient density, we are creating immunogenicity in our diet or triggering the immune system. And I think it’s important here because you’ve talked about blueberries a few times to make the distinction between fruit and vegetables. So let’s just talk about plants in general. So we could make a pretty fairly accurate statement to say that the most toxic part of a plant, the seeds, and that includes seeds, nuts, grains, and legumes. And so even people on Paleo diets might be surprised and say, oh, I thought seeds and nuts were good for me. Well, no, they’re actually still seeds, just like grains and legumes. And those are highly defended. If you look at the amount of sulforaphane precursors in Broccoli, where do you think it’s the highest

Speaker 5: 00:52:27 broccoli seeds? The stuff that, uh, Ben Greenfield had in his freezer and said that the key low of the very most precious, uh, Broccoli seeds being the, you know, the, the powerhouse is the absolute worst thing you can eat of the plant. And why wouldn’t it be write a plant doesn’t want you to eat at seed. You’re killing its babies. And it’s, when you say I’m protective, you’re talking about the plants, defense, defense mechanisms that are going to be offensive to the human consuming it.

Speaker 8: 00:52:58 Yes. Or other animals consuming it. And so there’s a few pieces to kind of discuss here, but yeah and so then the next most defendant part of a plant as a sprout and then you get into like the roots and the stems and leaves and those are not quite as defendant but they’re still defended and then the least defended part of a plan as a fruit because generally the plant, I would argue with fruit, the plant is using us. The plants have outsmarted us because plants and animals have been co evolving for millions of years. Plans want the fruit to get eaten until they generally don’t make the fruit directly toxic. But that’s a very different distinction to make for making the fruit directly toxic to making the fruit beneficial for humans. So the plants are going to put a whole bunch of sugar in the fruit, and I would argue this as sort of like plant pornography.

Speaker 8: 00:53:43 The plants are using us, they’re making a very sweet, seductive, attractive thing that doesn’t really give us any longterm benefits. There’s no good longterm relationship there. You know, like this is not a good partnership. This is not an a longterm relationship. This is just a fling with you in the plan. Then you say, oh, that fruit is really good, but it just leaves you in the morning. Right? There’s no long lasting benefits from the fruit. The plant is using us. Plants are using us with fruit and people would say, I can hear all of the arguments coming back at me right now. So I tried to address them in my own mind. You know, people say, what about all the polyphenols and fruit? And I would say, remember, think about the studies that I was just telling you guys about. You know, when we look at the studies looking at DNA damage and oxidative stress, we don’t see any benefit.

Speaker 8: 00:54:30 There’s no clear evidence that any of those polyphenols and fruit are doing anything for us. And again, why are we not surprised? That’s the plant operating system. The plant is not giving you polyphenols to make your life better. The plan is putting the polyphenols in there as pigments. It’s a plant pigment. It’s not a human pigment. It doesn’t participate in our biochemistry. And I think this is the thing that most people don’t understand is that plant molecules do not participate uniquely in human biochemistry. There’s no widget in the human cog and wheel system that’s like, oh, I need a plant molecule there. No, it’s all animal macules. Right? Like there’s nothing, if you’d like. Imagine the inside of a watch with all the gears and levers. That’s how our biochemistry looks. There’s no part of that biochemistry that we are creating that needs a plant molecule zero because it’s not the same operating system.

Speaker 8: 00:55:17 There’s no part of a Mac probate of a Mac program that says, oh, I need this driver from a PC. You know? Oh, can you please install the IBM driver? You know, you don’t open your Mac. And it says, oh, please install your windows driver. Now, like that doesn’t happen. That’s not how it works. And generally when you install the windows driver, it’s going to mess up your computer just like all these plant molecules are just going to run a muck in our bodies and create that negative. So for people to imagine that blueberries are so beneficial, it’s like, look, I fear that we’ve been sold a bill of goods here. We need to actually look at the data and say, hey, they may taste good and if you want to eat them, they’re probably not the worst thing on the planet. But are they really benefiting you?

Speaker 8: 00:55:56 Probably not. I would argue no. And if we think about fructose and insulin resistance Leptin mechanisms in the brain, I think you can make a strong argument that if you eat too many, you’re just going to have a problem. And then you look at fruits and seeds and even things like blackberries, very high in oxalates, well I should say moderately high in oxalates, which we know are these sort of like two carbon molecules that can form crystals. And we can go down the oxalate rabbit hole. But even some of the things that we hold dear berries, blackberries, oh, they’re like the best thing in the world full of oxalates. You know, it’s really scary.

Speaker 5: 00:56:29 Oh, mercy. So if you’re, uh, calling into question the, uh, the micronutrient benefit of eating these things, then we’re just getting the calories, the macros. So, um, the, the urgent desperate human need to have a handful of blueberries to get a bunch of fructose calories is obviously, well, maybe not, obviously for everyone listening, but you know, for those of us in the ancestral community that are awakened to the idea that we don’t need sugar to survive, uh, then we have, I guess the only rationale left is to say that I absolutely love the delicious flavor of these fruits and vegetables that are in my diet. Uh, but now after listening to this show, we have to acknowledge that we’re eating these, uh, basically for, um, uh, for indulgence rather than, uh, in the name of longevity. And that’s what’s been tripping me out for the last five weeks.

Speaker 5: 00:57:21 Paul is every time I, I consume anything that’s from the, from the plant kingdom, uh, I’m, I’m getting like an emotional charge here, feeling guilty rather than patting myself on the back. And it’s, um, boy, I, you’re making a convincing case. And I, I think, uh, some of these things people are going to have to catapult to, like, it’s, it’s virtually indisputed I guess some people can come back in other ways, but, um, we know that we can get the operating machinery from, from animals. That’s, that’s undisputed. And then we have to decide, um, should we, should we only eat them? And so that’s kind of, um, I guess the primal Paleo ancestral enthusiasts that’s listening has already convinced in the importance and the benefits of eating animal foods. I gets the next step down the road is to, uh, become convinced that we need to sacrifice these other ones. Even, even if we do like the, the, the Broccolis slathered in the butter and the blueberries in the summertime.

Speaker 8: 00:58:19 And I think you bring up a great point here that we’ve touched on a little bit and I’ll remind people that plants are survival foods. That means that we probably would have eaten them at some point in our evolution. So if people enjoy them, that’s totally fine to eat them. Just don’t imagine that they’re really doing you any good and that’s okay. We can eat for indulgence, like life is about enjoying things. But then for the subset of people who aren’t where they want to be, who aren’t kicking as much bought as they want to kick kick or who are sick or have auto immune disease, I think that that’s, especially where things like a carnivore diet are very interesting because it’s like, wait a minute, I might like the Broccoli slathered in butter and my, you know, the part of me is like, you probably just like the butter, you know, you probably don’t, I bet you were just, you could just eat that butter without the Broccoli.

Speaker 8: 00:59:03 You know, your mom doesn’t have to know, but you can just eat the butter on a steak and it’s better for you. But you know, I think that I’ve seen this in my practice and this is what we’ve seen, Carter, where communities is that people who are not getting better, people who have nagging issues, whether it’s Gi, whether it’s autoimmune, whether it’s a psychological or psychiatric, whether it’s sleep, whether it’s libido, whether it’s energy. You got to start asking yourself, could this be related to plants? And then people have to make this quality of life determination for themselves and say, what’s more important? You know, do I want to eat blueberries and Broccoli or do I want to see if I feel better without plants in my diet? And that’s an individual thing. It is not my role to tell people how they’re going to eat.

Speaker 8: 00:59:39 It’s just my role to offer the idea that these plants are really not that beneficial. You’re not doing yourself any benefit by eating them. So if they’re causing problems for people, how do you will feel better when they cut them out? You know? And that’s, that’s, that’s the, that’s the neat thing about this is just an option for people who are really sick or really want to optimize. That’s kind of was talking about before with like rich roll or other plant based guys. It’s like, how good do you want to be? You know, do you know how good you could be? Do you know how good you could feel? Do you know how good you could perform in every area of your life? And then we will have to say like, you know what? That’s amazing. Maybe they’ll do it and I’ll do a carnivore diet and they say, I felt amazing, but you know what?

Speaker 8: 01:00:14 I want to have some blueberries with my daughter. That’s awesome. Do that. It’s totally fine. It’s not going to kill you, you know? But people are really sick with autoimmune disease are inflamatory disease. I just want people to know like, hey, the plants can be causing this. The plants can cause this and give people another option to get better. And I’ve heard this time and time again in my own practice that like people will say the carnivore diet was thus single best intervention I ever did. It was the most powerful thing, especially for people with inflammatory bowel disease or GI issues, constant gas, bloating, diarrhea, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. The removal of fiber is often so healing for people. It’s incredible. It’s just a good intervention people to know about. If people are already doing awesome in their life, why change? Don’t change. You know, listen to this podcast.

Speaker 8: 01:00:59 Share it with your friends, but don’t change a thing if you’re doing, if you’re living the life you want, but if you want to be better or something is nagging or you know, someone that’s sick and isn’t finding improvement or they’re seeing a functional medicine doctor and they’re on 35 supplements, which I would argue is the worst thing ever. You know, you got to know there’s hope. There’s other things out there and I think this is why the carnival or moving is so powerful, especially from my perspective because it offers this really basic kind of reset for people. Just go back to their most basic optimal primal foods and start there and see how you feel and then you can add foods back in if you want. Or if they make you sick, don’t add them back in, but you got your health pack or you made a really important step toward that.

Speaker 8: 01:01:37 That’s the option. It gives us such a powerful lever to pull. Like if we just know, and I, I’m writing a book and I talk about this in the book, if we just know what’s written in the operator’s manual, if we know what’s written in the user manual, it says, Hey, your basic diet is eating animals nose to tail. If all else goes wrong, just do that and see how you feel. Like that’s the first sentence of the user manual in the chapter that says, what the heck do I eat? That’s the first sentence. And people can return to that and say, Hey, I’m so confused about food. I’m sick. I’m not doing better. I’m eating Paleo. I meeting primal, I mean in Quito I still feel Shitty, you know? There you go, there’s your answer. And you see it time and time again. People with like Lupus or rheumatoid or fibromyalgia or you know, really bad psoriasis and they’re not getting better Keto, Paleo. It’s like, hey, maybe the plants are triggering that and I’m not really doing anything beneficial for you, so you can get rid of them.

Speaker 5: 01:02:26 Well, I don’t know about you, but I don’t know anybody in that category who is super awesome and have, I think there’s, I think there’s three categories. They’re either sick, suffering, complaining, right? You’ve got excess body fat, you’ve got some autoimmune, you know, something’s just not quite right or you have a desire to further optimize. And so I’m, I’m kind of speaking for that, uh, this group here where, um, I want to be the best I can be. And if you tell me that this is how I should eat the rest of my life, to guarantee that I’m going to live to 123 and break world records in the years ahead, I will do to fully comply, uh, without regard to, um, you know, losing my enjoyment of the, uh, the, the, the weekly slice of cake or whatever you’re telling me do eliminate. And then I guess the third category is the, uh, the stubborn closed minded individual who thinks that they’re awesome and optimized.

Speaker 5: 01:03:20 I mean, you know, Lebron James is going on podcasts and telling the world that he has egg whites in the morning and it’s like, wait a second, you and all your handlers and all this science and research out there and you’re still touting egg whites, shows that even the greatest on the planet, uh, you know, have potential for a beginner’s mind and trying to make progress here. So this is why I’m so excited to get down this line here and I think we should talk about this fascinating connection between your, your professional practice in psychiatry and the, the dietary intervention.

Speaker 8: 01:03:56 Yeah. So, like I said in the beginning, I’m a traditionally trained MD. I’m just in the last week of my four year residency in psychiatry.

Speaker 5: 01:04:06 Congratulations Dr Sophie. No,

Speaker 8: 01:04:08 thank you. Thank you. I’m moving to San Diego to surf and do functional medicine and functional medicine for people that aren’t familiar. I imagine mostly everyone is familiar with this term. It’s just rude. Cosmedicine so I don’t even think of myself as a psychiatrist, but I have an interest in mental health and I think that we should, because mental health affects a huge number of people on the planet. And I think that what we’re seeing now, if you look at the numbers, the morbidity, the Depression and anxiety leads to more suffering than anything else on the planet now. And those are who numbers that it’s the number one cause of morbidity and mortality, morbidity on the planet, depression and anxiety more than heart disease more than cancer. So the loss of productivity and I would argue to loss of human enjoyment and the, the burden of human suffering from depression and anxiety are the biggest, uh, thing on the planet.

Speaker 8: 01:04:57 And so we’re clearly doing something wrong. And one of the reasons I went into psychiatry was because it was human and I enjoyed the human connection with people and the narrative. And the other reason was because it’s totally messed up. It’s a bad antiquated paradigm. And I wanted to be a part of changing that for people. And one of the paradigms in psychiatry that I think really needs to change is this idea that you have a neurotransmitter deficiency causing anxiety or depression. That paradigm is completely wrong. And I think what we’re beginning to see now very clearly is that in fact, it’s inflammation in the brain. For most people with psychiatric illness, it’s brain inflammation, psychiatrists, our brain rheumatologists, you know, I’m a brain rheumatologist. I treat auto immunity and inflammation in the brain, but most psychiatrists don’t think of, right? That’s what they don’t imagine.

Speaker 8: 01:05:44 They don’t realize, well, you’ve got an autoimmune disease in your brain. You’ve got inflammation in your brain, and that looks like cytokines that looks like macrophages being activated that looks like chronic inflammatory on this in your brain. And that’s why it’s so hard to function. That’s why your brain feels broken. That’s why it feels like your brain is on fire and you’re irritable, you don’t sleep, you have bad libido. And these are things because your brain is inflamed, just like your skin can be inflamed with psoriasis or Eczema or your joints can be inflamed with rheumatoid arthritis or your, you know, your face can get a rash with Lupus or you can get other, you know, autoimmune inflammatory illnesses in your body. That’s what your brain is doing. And depression and anxiety for the majority of cases. The caveat there is that for some people they go through very stressful phases of their life and they may have what’s called an exogenous depression, meaning they’re just super stressed.

Speaker 8: 01:06:35 We know that can be a psychiatric thing, but for a lot of people, they actually have an autoimmune inflammatory on this in the brain. And then the question from a functional medicine perspective becomes why, what is causing the auto immunity? And this is what I love about functional medicine. And what I really sat into me about mainstream medicine is that mainstream medicine doesn’t ask why it asks what. And you know it’s just going to name a disease and what we love to name diseases in mainstream medicine and names, diseases and then it says, oh, I have a pill for that. It doesn’t say why because you’re not going to have a pill for the y or it’s much harder to ask the why question and so when you start to ask why, why has rheumatoid arthritis captaining, why is autoimmune hepatitis happening? Why is psoriasis happening?

Speaker 8: 01:07:22 Why is x map? I think, why is auto immune depression happening? Why is, you know, why is the brain of fleet well then we start to have to think about the mechanisms of auto immunity and I would argue that plants are at the root of that. In many cases there are other things that can trigger it, but I think that plant antigens are one of the main culprits here and this involves plant pesticides and lectins and the idea that lectins are these carbohydrate binding proteins that can come in our bodies and trigger immunologic reactions. They look like bacteria and we see this, we, we know there are examples of this. This is the idea with gluten, right? It’s a type of plant molecule that triggers our immune system and our immune system goes bonkers and causes rashes and causes so much immunologic activation in the gut, the little fingers in the small intestine regress and you get a gut that’s smooth instead of finger like I and then your small intestine doesn’t work and you don’t absorb anything.

Speaker 8: 01:08:22 But that is a plan molecule triggering autoimmunity. And it’s the prototypical example of what’s going on here. And I think this is what we’re going to discover. And one of the major things that’s incredible about about a carnivore diet that if you can remove these plant triggers, you can potentially ameliorate reverse, make quiescent this auto immunity. You know, you can remove the actual inciting factors and people with brain inflammation get better. And so what do we see? If you look on meat, heels.com one of the biggest categories, if not the biggest category of people sharing their personal stories where the carnivore diet, meals.com is sort of repository for personal stories of people is depression and anxiety has mental health. And I think that anyone who tries a carnivore diet will notice benefits of mental health. Even if you didn’t think that you had depression or anxiety.

Speaker 8: 01:09:14 This was the first thing that I noticed within three days, and I did not have depression or anxiety that I knew of within three days I was a happier person. I was more clear headed person. People might say, oh, it’s the ketones. Well, I was actually doing honey for the first week of my carnivore diet because I didn’t want to conflate ketogenesis with actual removal of plants and plant toxins. And I found benefits even when I wasn’t in Ketosis. And I appreciate Ketosis and I’m in Ketosis all the time now and my carnivore diet. But in the beginning, I’ve heard this time and time again, people find these incredible mental benefits and as the perspective from the perspective of a psychiatrist, I will tell you that psychiatric medications or treatments in psychiatry are a bismal. It’s not for lack of good hearted people are intelligent people.

Speaker 8: 01:09:57 It’s just that our paradigm is completely wrong. And I have seen people improve the anxiety in ways that I’ve never thought possible in psychiatry when they removed plants and remove the triggers. And they correct this from an autoimmune lens. So I think for people with psychiatric illness, this is an incredibly powerful tool. And even for people who don’t know that their brain isn’t functioning optimally or they’re not as happy as they could be, just a little more irritable than normal. This is what I call the, um, the, are you going to yell at somebody in traffic test, you know, and you get, you get much stronger, you get emotionally resilient or that was my experience. And I’ve heard other people echo it as well. Like I’m much less likely to yell at somebody in traffic. Now go ahead. It’s just my n of one experience, but we see it all the time.

Speaker 4: 01:10:39 Well, I mean, going back to the, uh, the gut function as well as your brain function. What’s normal? What’s, we have no idea because maybe our entire lives we’ve operated from, um, you know, suboptimal dietary habits, putting us at level six, and that’s where we’ve existed. And we don’t know any better and we don’t know what level seven or eight or nine is be you say in three days you can have the w what mechanisms are changing to that extent that it’s affecting your mood and all those so quickly?

Speaker 8: 01:11:15 I think it probably has to do with the immune system in the gut, you know, and we know that the immune system is connected with the gut through the, you know, in the laminate appropriate all the god is that all the immune system is there or most of it is there and it’s, you know, the immune system gets activated and elaborate cytokines and those can cross the blood brain barrier. And so whatever’s happening with the immune system outside of the brain, it’s transmitted to the immune system in the brain. And so I think that the plant, the hypothesis would be that the plant molecules can trigger the immune system there. They can trigger leaky gut, they can trigger release, absolve Mulan, which opens up the tight junctions and the molecules get in, the immune system gets all activated and all up in a tizzy and immune system gets activated and send cytokines across the brain.

Speaker 8: 01:11:56 The brain, macrophages get all messed up and they get angry. And so it’s potentially related to some of these molecules in plants. And it’s different for every person. You know, one thing my trigger, someone else might not trigger another person. But yeah, we don’t even know we can. I think when you function at level seven all the time, you don’t even know what level eight days. And then you get to level eight and you’re like, this is amazing. Like underneath level nine and you’re like, oh, this is great. It’s such a new thing. You never knew it though.

Speaker 5: 01:12:24 So where did you come from when you first started the carnivore experiment? Were you eating it in a certain, a Paleo type alignment or what did you cut out and what was the, how dramatic was the transition?

Speaker 8: 01:12:38 Oh, it was pretty dramatic. So, but you know, I’ve been thinking about food and nutrition for a long time. For the last 12 to 13 years, I pretty much meeting exclusively organic Paleo, uh, often autoimmune Paleo because I had eczema that wouldn’t resolve. And I thought, Huh, it’s something in here I’m going to try. Maybe it’s histamine or maybe it’s this or maybe it’s that. And so I kind of knew there was something still going on. I was like, this Eczema is bothering me. I am not in an ideal place. I feel like I’m eating a perfect diet. Um, and I was not totally where I want it to be in terms of my skin. And little did I know I wasn’t where I wanted it to be in terms of emotional resilience either. So I heard about the carnivore diet when Jared, uh, Jordan Peterson was talking about it on Joe Rogan.

Speaker 8: 01:13:22 And I thought that is really cool because he talked about it from a psychiatric perspective and he admitted that he’s not a nutritionist and he just mentioned it to Joe and he talked about it from his daughter’s perspective who had really bad auto immune disease. And quickly what resonated me was this idea that autoimmune disease is really hard to treat in medicine. And I think it’s at the root of most of what we treat is autoimmune. And so I thought anything that can help auto immunity is something that I’m interested in. And I thought I’m going to try that. And of course the first notion was, that’s crazy. We need plants because they have unique molecules. I was indoctrinated. And then the more I thought about it, the more I looked into what I thought, wait a minute, maybe we don’t. And then, then it began, you know, this year long journey and I read, you know, hundreds and thousands of, well not hundreds of thousands but hundreds of papers that you help me understand like, wait a minute, we’re thinking incorrectly about these polyphenols and these unique plant nutrients and we don’t need them and they don’t benefit us. And some people, there are other things in plants that can cause real issues.

Speaker 5: 01:14:23 Whew. This, the smoke is, uh, the smoke is clearing here, man. You’ve hit us with some life changing insights. Can we hit some like one off, uh, points here, like some of the common objections and just uh, cover through some of this Paul? Sure. I guess one of them is, um, you know, we, we, we’ve talked about the carbs and the excessive carbs are a highly objectionable, that’s the, you know, the foundational story of the ancestral health movement. Um, but then when we get to protein, uh, we’ve been taught to kind of monitor that intake so that we don’t get into the excessive protein consumption beyond like one gram per pound of lean mass or the, you know, the widely, widely touted a guidelines. And if we do, so then we’re into this situation of excess protein intake, stimulating the growth factors in the bloodstream and causing a accelerated cell division and cancer risk and so forth. Uh, so if you’re in the carnivore pattern, it sounds like you’re going to default into much higher protein intake than, uh, than, than you, than you previously were, were eating when you were trying to throw in all the, uh, all the, uh, the plant foods.

Speaker 8: 01:15:37 Yeah. This discussion is very interesting and it’s a little complicated, so I’ll try and clarify it for people. So what were, what people are worried about, whether it’s Valter Longo or Steven Gundry? I’m who I’ve disagreed with both publicly and I’m actually going to be on Steven Gundry podcast later this week. So I’ll get the direct opportunity to, uh, discuss some of his issues and debate him on that. But, um, you know, the idea generally centers around mtor mammalian target of rapamycin and the concerns expressed are that animal protein is going to trigger mtor and that excess activation of Avatar is going to lead to excess anabolic sort of, uh, excess, uh, triggering of anabolic pathways in the human body and potentially cancer. Well, there are a couple of things to note here. Context is very important. Are we eating protein in the absence of carbohydrates or are we eating protein with carbon hydrates?

Speaker 8: 01:16:38 So that is the first background context because the response of the human body in terms of insulin and in terms of, yeah, GF one growth hormone to protein in the context of carbohydrates is very different when we’re not eating carbohydrates. And I will just back up for one moment and tell people that if we are truly interested in modulating m, tor and IGF one, guess what is a much bigger trigger to those than protein? It’s insulin, it’s carbohydrates until we have to eat something. And that’s what these pundits are not telling us. They’re saying limit protein. Well, they’re not telling you to eat fat all day. That’s for sure. So they’re telling you to eat carbohydrates. The problem with that is that if you look at studies, carbohydrates triggerm tour much more than protein. So this is absurd. It is absurd that we’re thinking that that we should be limiting protein and pushing insulin.

Speaker 8: 01:17:37 Insulin is a valuable hormone that we use at different times in our life, but insulin will trigger m work much more than protein, specifically Loosing. There have been studies that compared the triggering of m Tor with Lucene and insulin, right? And what we find is that if you eat leucine, if you eat protein, you’re going to trigger an tour for about 30 to 45 minutes and then it turns off, if you eat something that triggers insulin can be carbohydrates, you’re going to trigger m tour for three to four hours and you’re going to trigger an tour in a different way and it’s going to be triggered more robustly. So I think that this is the main point that people are missing here is that if you want to modulate insulin, if you want to modulate m tour, don’t eat carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are going to spike insulin regardless of what diet you’re.

Speaker 8: 01:18:31 And so the reason I put all of this in the context is that protein only has a strong insulinogenic response when it’s eaten in the setting of a mixed diet when you’re eating carbohydrates with it. So if you eat carbohydrates with protein, yeah, that’s going to trigger insulin. But if you eat, if you eat protein without carbohydrates, doesn’t have the same insulin. Angelica fact, this has been shown repeated. So if people are really worried about longevity overactivation of growth hormone over activation of Mtor, they should be worrying about insulin, not protein. Protein is very valuable for humans and the idea that there’s an upper level of protein for humans is just false. There’s never been evidence to show that excess protein is damaging to the kidneys, are damaging to the human body in any way. There were a series of experiments done on rats and mice in the 1960s that showed that Mathiasson overfeeding was bad for longevity.

Speaker 8: 01:19:23 Well, the thing that the researchers missed and then the following researchers a few years later figured out was that it wasn’t that the Mathenia it was bad. It was that they were imbalancing the Mathiasson, even glacier glycine ratio, and that that was the issue because when they fed them mice, glycine, to balance them Athenian and their diets, they had a longevity effect. Right? So they saw when you fed glycine in mice or rats to balance the 2% Mathenia their diets, the rats live longer. So it wasn’t that [inaudible] was making them live shorter. It was that they were in balancing them and glycine ratio. People will always point to these studies and it’s really important that we really kind of nail these guys to the wall and say, are you talking about human study? Are you talking about a mouse study one? Was it done? Are you talking about Matthias, you or feeding? What are you talking about? Because from everything I’ve seen, the culprit is insulin. And not that you can’t ever have insulin and not that insulin is in the beneficial hormone, but overactivation of insulin hyperinsulinemia especially insulin resistance, which has many mechanisms underlying it. These are the problem with cancer and Toro or activation, not proteins. That’s a very, very important point to make.

Speaker 5: 01:20:25 Well, I guess the Kido a party line is that of course we’re controlling that carbon taken, minimizing the insulin production, but also wanting to keep protein and check in order to, uh, I guess not interrupt the potential for ketone production and high end levels of blood key tones.

Speaker 8: 01:20:44 Right. And I disagree with that as well.

Speaker 5: 01:20:46 Well, Dr. Paul going into town, everybody and I’m a disruptor man descriptor you got up through. Yeah. I mean I kinda class really a rich whole ritual driving home from that debate whether he thinks he won and kicked your ass or whatever, whatever the scorekeepers are and all the people listening, you still got the conversation going, which is a beautiful thing. And um, I really appreciate how you’re, you’re, you’re free speaking. Uh, everything that’s, that’s coming up. It’s just, it’s just a real, uh, a mind expanding, uh, experience here.

Speaker 8: 01:21:23 Yeah. I mean, I even told rich after the podcast, Hey, I’d love to collaborate. We’ll see if he actually wants to do that. I suspect he doesn’t, but we’ll see. But that podcast is going to be out in June with the minimalist. But yeah, I mean the idea that that too much protein is going to kick you out of Ketosis is something that’s been debated now as well. And I think that, you know, on my podcast, which is fundamental health with Paul Saladino MD, we can link to that and I’ll tell you about that. But I’m going to be interviewing dom D’agostino later this summer. But you know, I think that, I think that people chase ketones too much. And I think the idea that a ketone level of one versus a ketone level of 0.2, um, I think that the idea that we can assign relative value to those is a little bit incorrect.

Speaker 8: 01:22:06 Like, because we know there’s individual physiology in terms of how we make ketones. And if you look at blood ketone levels, they can be very different between people. And it’s pretty interesting. You know, some people I work with they can’t get their ketones about 0.3 and you’re going to tell me that person just isn’t going to making ketones like no, it’s something else going on. We’re either using the ketones to make, you know, we’re taking them down the mevalonate pathway and we’re making cholesterol with them, which is a good thing. Or something is going on with those people that can’t make the same levels of ketones. So I think we get too tied up chasing ketone levels and I think if people are in Ketosis, it’s a switch or either in ketosis or you’re not and eating a lot of protein is not going to flip flip the ketones switch off. Then may lower your ketone levels a little bit, but it’s not going to switch the switch. The switch, the, it’s not going to flick the switch. Aha.

Speaker 5: 01:22:59 Right. Well, I I strongly agree with that. Cause when I was doing the research with mark system, we were working on the Quito reset die, which was one of the first Quito books. And we didn’t know nothing about this. So we had the beginner’s mind going and I’m, here I am, you know, fasting, restricting my carbohydrates like I never have before in my life. Doing my ambitious workouts, pricking my finger after an 18 hour fast and not many carbs before that. And getting low numbers and then having to figure out like, what’s wrong with me? How come I can’t go on the inner on social media and put up, you know, these high values and you know, learning about ketone flux from Doctor Cate Shanahan where you’re making whatever level of ketones you need to supply your brain with fuel at that time. And if you, if you get more efficient as an organism, you might show lower ketone numbers because you’re, you’re not wasting them. And, uh, you know, in a panic from uh, not having access to let’s say your muscles not being able to burn fat while, and then you get further down the road and uh, the numbers are less and less meaningful of anything.

Speaker 8: 01:24:02 And this is, this is, this is what I think is true as well, that we shouldn’t case chase ketone numbers that, that it’s a switch, right? If you look at the physiology, in order to make ketones, you have to have, you know, insulin low fatty, a fatty acid lipase is high, you do Beta oxidation. And that physiology does not change if you eat protein, if you eat more protein, you may do a little more gluconeogenesis. You may get some glucose or ketones may go down, but the underlying ketone switch does not change. And so you’re still in ketosis. Your ketone numbers may be lower. But the problem here people run into, in the Keto community is that protein is very valuable for human. It’s not the only micronutrient or macronutrient, but it’s very valuable macronutrient. And if we look at animals, a lot of the micronutrients in animals are found in the muscle meat.

Speaker 8: 01:24:51 And if we just eat the fat, we’re only getting the fat soluble micronutrients. We need to be getting fat soluble and water soluble micronutrients. So a lot of people on ketogenic diets find that they lose muscle mass because they’re restricting protein too much. So I think it’s important to eat a lot of protein. And then also to kind of, you know, to also add into your diet healthy animal fats. And I would argue, you know, like actually animal fat tallow, things like that, or what we’re gonna get these fat soluble nutrients. So you need to use both. And restricting protein is a bad idea for all kinds of things. I would argue for longevity from the standpoint of muscular health, bone health, we know that lean muscle mass is correlated with longevity and robustness as people age. If we limit protein, you know as we age we’re going to become sarcopenia, we’re going to lose muscle mass, we’re going to generate more fat mass, we’re going to become frail, we’re getting to hip fractures and we’re dead. So protein is super important as we age. It’s so important.

Speaker 5: 01:25:46 Well it also occurs to me if you’re eating plenty of protein in a carnivore pattern and you’re trying to lead a healthy active lifestyle and get barreled down at trestles are black speech or wherever you’re putting the effort in. And I put a lot of effort into my surfing cause I’m kinda crappy catching the wave. So it’s mostly like a paddling exercise out there. A lot of calories are burned, but it occurs to me that you’re going to engage gluconeogenesis in a, in a beautifully elegant manner to continually restock glycogen because you’re eating plenty of protein. Does that make, does that make sense? There?

Speaker 8: 01:26:21 It does. And if you look at the study by Phinney and Volek called the faster study, when they took athletes on ketogenic diets and they had them fat adapted for I think it was 12 weeks, they looked at the amount of glycogen storage and replenishment in their muscles. And it was equivalent to mixed diet athletes. So athletes who were eating carbohydrates. So after 12 weeks of a ketogenic diet, these athletes who are doing endurance exercise, we’re storing and making and using glycogen at the same level as people who are on mixed diets. So it’s like, wait a minute. Like the idea that we completely eliminate glycogen from our muscles is false. We don’t have no glycogen. There’s an annotation phase, but once you’re adapted, once you’re fat adapted, you will have glycogen in your muscles and you will store that and use it and replenish it just like somebody would, who’s on a mixed carbohydrate diet except you’re doing it with much more efficient fatty acid oxidation in addition. And I would argue you’re doing it in a much more potentially insulin sensitive manner. Um, and that you are avoiding the negative things that can come with those carbohydrates.

Speaker 5: 01:27:27 Oh, right. You’re never ever overdoing it like you are when you slam your hot fudge Sundae after your 50 mile bike ride and then lay around on the couch and eat more calories than you burned on the 50 mile bike ride. So it’s, it’s a beautiful thing. And the faster steady was, you know, blowing the lid off the, the previous paradigm of how we should feel ourselves as athletes. So Paul, I, I, I’ve been with you a while here. I know you’re a busy guy trying to, trying to change the world. So if you’re, if we’re, if we’re now convinced that it would be at least worth trying for a few weeks, um, can you help us with some, some go to foods and like a, a simple, I mean the nose to tail, you’ve mentioned that a few times. We haven’t really hit that too hard, but that’s so important not to just go and eat a hamburger every day for 30 days. Uh, so to be, to be sensible about this and to cover some of these bases, uh, what are some of your favorite highlight foods? Oh, and then also does, does honey count as a carnivores? So we can like put that in our coffee still are, where do we stand with it?

Speaker 8: 01:28:27 That one, well then you have to think of coffee counts as a carnivore and that’s where I’ll lose a lot of people, but we’ll talk about that.

Speaker 5: 01:28:34 No, never touch that stuff. It’s nasty. We don’t need coffee. It’s the number one most abused drug in the world. Right?

Speaker 8: 01:28:40 It is. It is. Um, so on my Instagram I collaborated with the guy and I made my own sort of nose to tail pyramid for carnivore, which people can refer to and will be helpful. But the idea with nose to tail eating is, you know, just imagine the way your ancestors would have eaten an animal. They’re going to eat the whole animal. And so we try to recreate that in the carnivore world and think, or at least those of us in the carnival world that are trying to eat nose to tail, we try to imagine like what are the different compartments of the animal because we know that if we need an animal nose to tail, we’re going to get all the nutrients we need. And so from my background as a physician for my interest in nutrition, I think like where are the different nutrients in the animal?

Speaker 8: 01:29:16 Muscle meat is valuable, but it’s not the only thing we need to eat. We also need to eat Oregon’s and I think the liver is the best Oregon for people to eat. So if we’re doing it very simply, we’re eating muscle meat or eating liver and we’re making sure to get enough fat because if you just eat lean muscle meat, you’re not getting enough fat in your diet. So the fat to protein macro is valuable. So we’re going to do liver, we’re going to do some fatty meats plus extra fat, and then we’re also need to get some connective tissue, which means eating the tendons on the stakes or supplementing with like a collagenous type of supplement. It’s important to get a source of iodine, whether that’s egg yolks, whether that’s a salmon roe, whether that’s um, you know, brain or other pieces of the animal.

Speaker 8: 01:29:59 And then it’s important to get our fatty acids from somewhere. So either bone marrow or brain or salmon roe and people are like brain, I’m not eating brains. You don’t have to be praying. But bone marrow, salmon, Roe, and then it’s important to get a calcium serves, which is either a show or a bones and not boom, uh, not bone broth because of calcium doesn’t really come out, but a very well sourced actual bone meal. If you look at other carnivores, they all eat bones. We have bones to our dogs, we have bones to lions and we need calcium. And so this is the thing that people often miss. And that may sound complex, but I’ll just break it down for people at a basic level. It’s meat, it’s fat, it’s connected tissue, it’s Oregon’s and it’s um, and it’s calcium and you just think you’re eating the whole animal nose to tail.

Speaker 8: 01:30:41 And a lot of those foods are things we’re not used to eating. But you know, that’s the way in my opinion, that you want to construct a nose to tell carnivore diet. And so for me, and this is just my, how I do it, and I get up in the morning and I will start with um, sort of the fatty foods first before I eat the muscle meat. And I’ll have some egg yolks. I don’t eat the whites because the egg whites have avid in and I don’t, that binds by a 10. So I don’t want egg whites. So I’ll just eat egg yolks in the morning. I had these really good duck egg yolks that I like and then I’ll eat some liver and then I’ll eat some fat. I’ve been able to get sort of grass fed beef trimmings and I just start with the actual fat of the animal and then I’ll eat the muscle.

Speaker 8: 01:31:21 Neat. And that’s my breakfast. Then I’ll maybe, you know, and I usually twice a day and I do time restricted eating, sort of trying to eat in like a six hour window or something. And that’s just how I do it. My dinner looks kind of the same. I’m trying to get those same things I might throw in some Salmon Roe. Um, and then I’ll get in the evening, I’ll do some calcium, whether from bone meal or eggshells. That’s pretty much how I eat. And people might say that sounds boring or that sounds different. But again, I would say think about the beginner’s mind here. I think about like you’re hunting an animal, what is it gonna look like when you’re eating it? Um, and that’s, that’s the way it looks. And so it’s, it’s great. I think a challenge is all these notions of using food as entertainment and challenges, all these notions of, you know, really, you know, wanting tons of variety when in fact it’s not doing anything for us. So that’s, that’s kind of how I eat. People don’t need to eat in that way. There’s a lot of people who do knows to tell Carter war diets in different ways, but it’s much more than just muscle meat.

Speaker 4: 01:32:15 Dr. Paul Salah, Dino, the fundamental health podcast. We’ve got to jump over there and listen to that and just get all over this train. I, you know, I’m gonna look back with pride and say that I spoke to you in 2019 and all the listeners to this show will say the same because this thing is about to blow up. You’re doing some incredible work. I thank you so much. It’s great to connect with you. Uh, so we can, we can listen for the podcast. It’s, it’s launched now and tell us where else we can connect with you.

Speaker 8: 01:32:43 Yeah, it’s on iTunes. I’ve got three episodes out now. Um, I just released an episode today with Dave Feldman and we talked about cholesterol and super cool. I really love that episode because lipids are so interesting. So it’s fundamental health with Paul Saladino MD. It’s on iTunes and stitcher and all the outlets. I’ve also got a youtube channel, which is Paul Saladino MDE and most of my stuff can be found on my website, which is Paul Saladino, md.com. I’ve got a newsletter which people can sign up for there and then there are links to my Instagram and Twitter, which are Paul Salad, dino MD on Instagram and MD Saladino on Twitter. Follow me all those places if you want to get here by the kind of stuff I’m doing

Speaker 4: 01:33:21 a lot going on. Keep it up man. Make sure you make some time to surf and good luck with your relocation to San Diego. We look forward to following you. Thank you.

Speaker 8: 01:33:31 Oh thank you. It’s been a pleasure. I love talking about this stuff.

Speaker 4: 01:33:36 Dah Dah, Dah, Dah Dah. Thank you for listening to the show. We would love your feedback. It get over yourself. podcast@gmail.com and we would also love if you could leave a rating and a review on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. I know it’s a hassle. You have to go to desktop iTunes, click on the tab that says ratings and reviews, and then click to rate the show anywhere from five to five stars, and it really helps spread the word so more people can find the show and get over themselves because they need to. Thanks for doing it.

Speaker 4: 01:34:15 I can’t believe it, but this crazy notion called the carnivore diet is here to stay. It’s building momentum. It’s gaining a lot of scientific legitimacy and incredible anecdotal success stories. My mind’s blown. The argument seems to make incredible sense and whatever you think about it, or if you’re going to go try something new, like the carnivore diet, you have to do these things right? It’s just like Quito. When you say, that sounds cool, I’m gonna go Quito and you’re not well prepared. You’re just going to screw up and you’re going to pump out a lot of stress hormones to make the glucose that your glucose addicted brain needs. So if you’re going to try carnivore, same thing you gotta do, right? That’s why I make custom commercials for you about this issue. Is it almost heaven sauna to go get a good sweat, sweat out the toxins in your brain because it’s exploding from being challenged to call into question your fixed and rigid belief systems.

Speaker 4: 01:35:18 Oh, okay, that’s fine. But actually we should talk about ancestral supplements. They are the New Zealand sourced nose to tail organ meats, things like grass fed beef, grass fed, liver, heart, kidney, pancreas, spleen, and more. They bottle up the bounty that our ancestors faced at upon when they brought down their animal today. What do we do? We take the muscle meats only. That’s just a source of protein. It’s not the nutrient dense parts of the animal. So if you’re going to go into this carnivore thing and eat a bunch of steaks, you’re going to get nutrient deficient. Just like a Vegan. Whoops, did I just say that? Well, we are talking about carnivore after all, so if you’re going to do it, do it right source the most sustainable and nutritious foods you can find the grass fed beef and the pasture raised eggs and throw in some of those salmon eggs and oily cold water, high Omega Three Fish.

Speaker 4: 01:36:17 But when you’re talking about supplementing, go to ancestral supplements.com and read their compelling story. This is this stuff that the modern world has left out. We’re not inclined to go sit down and have a dinner, have a brain and eyeballs and even liver. The number one most nutrient dense foods on the planet by many sources is widely disregarded. I know I have because I don’t really like the taste of it that much, but you know what? When I blend it up with some high quality wog, you ground beef, the liver tastes just fine and I have liver back into my diet, but to make sure to guarantee that’s what a supplement is all about is you go to it every day so you’re going to get your grass fed liver and your grass fed beef organs. That’s a blended product that has a whole bunch of stuff in there, and you’re gonna dramatically elevate the nutrient density of your diet.

Speaker 4: 01:37:11 You’re going to get the Collagen and the glycosaminoglycans that you get from connective tissue such as eating bone broth or eating meat on the bone. So now you’re getting a full spectrum, responsibly sourced carnivores style diet. You can get a proper experiment where you can go do some before and after blood work. You can see how your sleep habits improve your energy, your athletic performance, your cognitive performance, but do it right. Go to ancestral supplements.com get an extensive education about what? Eating, nose to tail and the health nutritional benefits of these organ meats. They talk about everything there. It’s wonderful. This is also what the great work of the Weston a price foundation and doctor Cate Shanahan, deep nutrition book you are getting in deep now with everything you need to succeed. When you try something like carnival or email, these folks, they walk their talk, they’re the real deal, and they will help you get started.

Speaker 4: 01:38:09 And so we’ll lie because if you type in the Code Kerns, k, e, a, r, n. S, you get 10% off, I think forever. If not, just tell them I promised it on the commercial and you’re good to go. Ancestral supplements.com doing the carnivore diet, right? I got to say, I’ve been on this stuff pretty hardcore for about six months and I feel good, not magically good, like some hype, stir a placebo promoter, but just good. I’m sleeping better, perform better, recover better. Mainly the absence of these crash and burn periods, which I attribute to minor nutritional deficiencies, and I think I’m just covering more bases. That’s what supplementing is all about. Thank you for listening. Try it out. Try the carnivore diet out. Try the supplements out anyway. Even if you’re not ready to step into the carnivore world, you’re ready to elevate the nutritional quality of your diet, no matter who you are. Much better than a synthetic vitamin supplement. Go over to ancestral supplements.com and get started and don’t forget the 10% discount using the code Kearns.

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